First American Art Magazine No. 28, Fall 2020

ANCESTRAL, HISTORICAL & LIVING ARTS by INDIGENOUS PEOPLES of the AMERICAS

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

NO. 28, FALL 2020

DISPLAY UNTIL JANUARY 6, 2021

SOUTHWEST GLASS ARTISTS

BILL GLASS JR.

CONTEMPORARY NATIVE ART BIENNIAL

JEAN LAMARR

VIRTUAL INDIAN MARKET WINNERS

SHELLEY NIRO

ANCIENT TEOTIHUACÁN

VIRGIL ORTIZ

PHOTOGRAPHY BY VANCEFOX.COM

Stewart Indian School operated as a federal boarding school for Great Basin Native children from 1890 to 1980.

In January 2020, a new museum opened to interpret the history of the school through the stories and experiences of Stewart alumni. The museum features a permanent exhibition space, a storytelling room, a research room where families can learn about their relatives who attended Stewart, a classroom space for educational activities and public programs, and the Wa-Pai-Shone Gallery, operated by the Great Basin Native Artists.

NOW OPEN Hours are 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., Monday – Friday Closed weekends and on state and federal holidays

Visit soon!

STEWART INDIAN SCHOOL CULTURAL CENTER & MUSEUM 1 Jacobsen Way Carson City, Nevada (775) 687-7608 www.stewartindianschool.com

WICIHITOWAK: TO HELP ONE ANOTHER. WICIHITOWAK: TO HELP ONE ANOTHER.

BETWEEN ARTISTS, ARTISANS, INDIGENOUS BETWEEN ARTISTS, ARTISANS, INDIGENOUS COMMUNITY CHARITIES AND THE BACA. COMMUNITY CHARITIES AND THE BACA.

NOW ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS. FORM AVAILABLE ONLINE NOW ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS. FORM AVAILABLE ONLINE

Beading, Ally & Megan, Turtle Bay Art Studio, Kahnawà:ke

AN ONLINE INDIGENOUS MARKETPLACE AN ONLINE INDIGENOUS MARKETPLACE AND A MUTUAL FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN AND A MUTUAL FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN

Beading, Ally & Megan, Turtle Bay Art Studio, Kahnawà:ke

wicihitowak.art wicihitowak.art

The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art and the School of Visual Arts at the University of Oklahoma are pleased to invite you to

The Mellon Foundation Lecture and Symposium in Native American Art November 6 – November 7 *All events will take place via Zoom.

Join us Friday, November 6 at 6 p.m. for artist, curator, and critic Andrea Carlson’s (Grand Portage Band Ojibwe) presentation on new perspectives in Native American and Indigenous art history. The symposium continues on Saturday, November 7 with presentations scheduled throughout the day.

To register or for inquiries, please contact OU School of Visual Arts or Alicia Harris at aliciaharris@ou.edu.

The University of Oklahoma is an equal opportunity institution. www.ou.edu/eoo Andrea Carlson, Anti-Retro, 2018, 33.5 x 47.75 inches edition 20, screen print ©Andrea Carlson, Image courtesy of the artist and Highpoint Editions

Meaningful textiles that elevate beauty and treasured culture, inspired by our Southeast heritage.

MahotaTextiles.com | 309 W. Muskogee Ave Sulphur, OK | info@mahotatextiles.com

issue no. 28, fall 2020

FEATURES Paragons of the Virtual: 2020 SWAIA Virtual Indian Market Winners

By RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo)

DEPARTMENTS 16

Prairie Dog Glass: The Rise of 22 Southwest Native Glass Art

By Cathy Short (Citizen Potawatomi) BACA 2020—Contemporary 30 Native Art Biennial/Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone, Fifth Edition: Honoring Kinship

By Lori Beavis, PhD (Michi Saagiig Anishinaabe) Ancient Teotihuacán: A Painted City

By Cynthia A. Conides, PhD

44

Bill Glass Jr.: Cherokee Nation Ceramic Artist & Sculptor

By Candice Byrd (Osage/ Quapaw/Cherokee Nation)

44

Jean LaMarr: Northern Paiute/Pit River Printmaker & Mixed-Media Artist

By Jean Merz-Edwards

50

Shelley Niro: Mohawk Photographer & Filmmaker

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

56

Virgil Ortiz: Cochiti Ceramic Sculptor & Fashion Designer

By Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa)

62

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Seven Directions: Brittany Britton (Hupa)

12

Collections: Krannert Art Museum

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

68

Native Sounds 84

By Thollem Art+Literature: 86 Beth Piatote (Colville Nez Perce)

By Tiffany Midge (Standing Rock Lakota) Artwork by Mikailah Thompson (Nez Perce)

36

ARTIST PROFILES

Recent Developments

REVIEWS

50

Exhibition Review

72

Exhibition Report

74

76

Book Reviews

IN MEMORIAM Joan Hill (Muscogee/Cherokee, 1930–2020)

By Daniel McCoy Jr. (Muscogee/Potawatomi)

Nakotah LaRance (Hopi/ 92 Assiniboine/Tewa/Navajo, 1989–2020)

By RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo) 56

Model: Leslie Elkins (Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo).

Ben Davidson (Haida, 1976–2020) 93

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Sadie Marks (Hopi, 1948–2020) 94

By Jennifer Juan (Tohono O'odham) and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Molly Neptune Parker 95 (Passamaquoddy, 1939–2020)

By Frances Soctomah (Passamaquoddy)

cover Tahu, Leader of the Blind Archers, receives incoming messages from Translator of the location of the Survivorships; she signals the Aeronauts to aid in rounding up the surviving Puebloans for transport to an undisclosed location.

Costume design and photo: Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo).

91

62

Juanita Pahdopony-Mithlo (Comanche, 1947–2020) By heather ahtone, PhD (Choctaw/Chickasaw)

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issue no. 28, fall 2020 Artist-in-Residence Program | Fine Print Studio & Gallery | Non-Profit

ISSN 2333-5548 (Print) • ISSN 2333-5556 (Online) Publishing Editor: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Literary Editor: Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD (Euro-Canadian) Marketing Director: Barbara Harjo (Cherokee descent) Copy Editors: Rosa Cays (Chicana), Jo Ann Reece Proofreaders: Staci Golar, Travis D. Day, Jo Ann Reece, and Angela C. Villa (Chicana) Layout & Design: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Social Media: Staci Golar, Michelle J. Lanteri, America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), MaryAnn Parker (Kiowa), Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho), and Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa)

Regional Representatives Great Basin: Melissa Melero-Moose (Northern Paiute/Modoc) Great Plains: Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho) Northeast: Kelly Church (Odawa/Ojibwe/Potawatomi) Northwest: Miranda Belarde-Lewis, PhD (Zuni/Tlingit) Southeast: Michole Eldred (Catawba/Eastern Cherokee) Southwest: Holly Coonsis (Zuni) and RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo)

Editorial Advisory Board heather ahtone, PhD (Choctaw/Chickasaw) Roy Boney Jr. (Cherokee Nation) James T. Bialac, JD Cliff Fragua (Jemez Pueblo) Teri Greeves (Kiowa) Emily Haozous, PhD, RN (Chiricahua Fort Sill Apache) Linda Lomahaftewa, Hon. DHum (Hopi/Choctaw) Jami Powell, PhD (Osage Nation) Mary Jo Watson, PhD (Seminole) India Rael Young, PhD

Advertising Representative Barbara Harjo (Cherokee descent), barbara@firstamericanartmagazine.com International distribution is by Disticor Magazine Distribution Services.

First American Art Magazine, LLC, is not responsible for the content of any article or for the statements of any advertiser. First American Art Magazine welcomes queries about editorial submissions. The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts, photographs, or artwork.

Copyright ©2020–21 by First American Art Magazine, LLC. Cover and contents are fully protected by copyright and may not be reproduced in whole or part by any method without written permission, except those specific images listed with Creative Commons licenses. Any errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. First American Art Magazine® is registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office.

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R AV E N C H ACO N For Zitkála Šá Series (For Carmina Escobar) For Zitkála Šá Series (For Laura Ortman) Each composition in the Zitkála Šá Series is dedicated to an Indigenous female musician.

Two images from a series of thirteen hand-printed lithographs, editions of 20 11 x 8.5 inches each, published at crow’s Shadow Press.

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EDITOR'S GREETING

T

HIS MONOTYPE PRINT

by Juanita Pahdopony-Mithlo (Comanche, 1947–2020) hangs in the First American Art Magazine office, as a reminder of why this publication exists. We need to mark our times and share our knowledge. Juanita, who walked on this summer, did both.

I met Juanita in the 1990s when she was teaching at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma in Chickasha.

My father hoped she would be able to take over the American Indian studies program there when he retired, but the school had other ideas. Instead, Juanita served her own community as the dean and interim president of the Comanche Nation College. heather ahtone shares more of Juanita’s incredible accomplishments in her memorial piece on page 96. While Juanita was best known for her writing skills and her advocacy for fellow Indigenous authors through the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, I first knew her as a visual artist. heather, Tony Tiger, and I were able to co-curate her artwork in H2OK: Native Response to Water Issues in Oklahoma. I invited her to participate in Savages and Princesses: The Persistence of Native American Stereotypes, which is now a traveling exhibition featuring Juanita’s humorous sendups on a painful subject. Currently on view at the Seminole Nation Museum in Wewoka, Oklahoma, the show will continue traveling coast to coast through 2024.

Juanita was a contributing writer to FAAM. Last issue when an emerging Comanche photographer, Ben Norberto III, approached us about publishing his photo essay on the annual Comanche Homecoming, Juanita readily agreed to write the accompanying text and shared her poem “Dirty Dancing in Sultan Park” which was perfect for the piece.

She praised Ben for his photography and encouraged him to continue photographing their shared community.

Previously she tackled the challenge of critiquing Indigenous exhibitions, such as Enter the Matrix: Indigenous Printmakers

above Juanita Pahdopony-Mithlo (Comanche, 1947–2020), Now is the time to write our own histories…, 1996, monotype on paper, 10½ × 14 in.

with her friend Eva Williams, Chase Kahwinhut Earles: Ancestral Caddo Pottery, and Re-Riding History: From the Southern Plains to the Matanzas Bay. With every project she was involved in, she made new connections and enduring friendships.

A consummate storyteller, Juanita often received stories from her dreams, as her husband Henry Mithlo told me. She kept many of us rapt by her accounts of an orphaned calf from the couple’s herd.

She bottle-fed Little Red Bull by hand, and Henry says he’s doing fine and still comes when called for chin scratches.

Last summer Juanita and I both participated in a contentious meeting.

I felt horrible for snapping at her and called her that evening to apologize. She told me she thought nothing of it and just knew I was passionate about the subject.

Her kindness, patience, and generosity touched me and served to remind me to emulate her more moving forward. Too often, through a scarcity mentality, the art world or academia encourages people to fight over crumbs. Juanita was one of our leaders who saw the big picture and who freely lifted up her fellow writers, artists, and teachers—knowing that the scarcity of opportunities is an illusion.

Juanita showed up. She brought friends with her to meetings, artist talks,

parties, and gatherings of all types, as she naturally strengthened our communities.

Fred Fodder, her nephew, said: “Juanita loved writing and the arts. She basically devoted her life to it.” Always generous in sharing her knowledge of Comanche culture and history with her fellow Comanches, Juanita’s writings will live on. A new book of Juanita’s poetry is in the works at That Painted Horse Press, so we have that to look forward to.

Yesterday, I visited with Henry Mithlo on the phone while I was walking my dog in a large field. While talking to Henry, I spied a bill, which turned out to be a $100 bill. I asked him if his family had chosen a cause to donate to in Juanita’s memory. Henry said that donations can be made to the Museum of the Great Plains in Lawton, Oklahoma. Juanita had served on that museum’s board. They can be reached at info@discovermgp.org. So, of course, I’m sending them my unexpected windfall.

Thank you, Juanita, for your generosity. These are dark times, filled with sorrow and loss. We can take inspiration from Juanita and share our blessings with some of her humor and wisdom, and together we can strive to make these times a little brighter. —America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) FALL 2020 | 7

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS MUSEUMS The METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART in New York hired its first associate curator of Native American art, Patricia Marroquin Norby, PhD (Purépecha/ Chicana). Previously she was the assistant director and senior executive curator at the National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center in New York and the director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies in Chicago. She earned her doctoral degree in American studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and her MFA degree at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Norby’s hiring marks the first time in the Met’s 150-year history that a fulltime staff member will curate Native American art.

The AUTRY MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN WEST in Los Angeles hired Stephen Aron as its new president

and CEO. Aron recently served as a history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and previously served as the Autry Museum’s founding executive director. Aron earned his doctoral and master’s degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. He replaces W. Richard West Jr. (Southern Cheyenne), who is retiring; however, West will assist the museum in its transition through June 2021.

Jonathan Batkin retired as director of the WHEELWRIGHT MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN in Santa Fe in April 2020. In recognition of his 30 years serving as director, the board named him director emeritus. Jean Higgins, who has served as assistant to the director for the past five years, is the museum’s new interim director. Previously Higgins served as executive assistant at Costco Whole and earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Maine, Orono.

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Isleta Pueblo’s new cultural center, YONAN AN CULTURAL COMPLEX in Isleta Village, New Mexico, has hired Cassy Smith as its archivist. Smith and her colleagues in the pueblo’s department of cultural preservation will create “History from the Land,” a multimedia experiential collaboration with Isleta elders and youth.

The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community (SMSC) has funded a full-time, year-long fellowship at the MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ART (Mia) in Minnesota for 2020 and 2021. The tribe has funded part-time fellowships in the past; however, to help Indigenous curators gain experience, they launched the full-time fellowship this year. The fellow will work with Jill Ahlberg Yohe, Mia’s associate curator of Native American art, to study all aspects of professional curation firsthand.

STEWART INDIAN SCHOOL CULTURAL CENTER AND MUSEUM reopened in Carson City, Nevada, in August, after being closed down due to COVID-19 following their initial opening in January. The museum will showcase the history of the Stewart Indian School (operating from 1890 to 1980), and also celebrate local Native cultures still thriving today. The cultural center will sell Great Basin artworks in the Wa-PaiShone Gallery, operated by the Great Basin Native Artists collective and curated by Melissa Melero-Moose (Northern Paiute/Modoc).

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gave the HEARD MUSEUM in Phoenix, Arizona, a $500,000 grant to build on its fellowship program established in 2017. The expanded program will train and support three nine-month fellowships annually for five years. These fellows can engage with any Native-made works in the museum’s permanent collection and will work with Native artists, museum staff, conservators, and other specialists.

ORGANIZATIONS The CANADA COUNCIL FOR ARTS in Gatineau, Quebec, appointed Jesse Wente (Serpent River Ojibwe) as its new chairperson. Wente, a broadcast journalist and University of Toronto alumnus, is the first Indigenous person to fill this position.

The Yale Union donated the Yale Union building and its land in Portland, Oregon, to the NATIVE ARTS AND CULTURES FOUNDATION (NACF). The Yale Union will dissolve its organization in 2021. Currently based in Vancouver, Washington, NACF is a nonprofit that funds Native American, including Native Hawaiian, visual, performing, media, and literary arts throughout the United States. The donated building will become the Center for Native Arts and Cultures, which will be the organization’s new national headquarters.

ART SHOWS The Cherokee Heritage Center in Park Hill, Oklahoma, held its 49th annual, intertribal TRAIL OF TEARS ART SHOW while the museum was closed to the public due to COVID-19. The art was installed, photographed, livestreamed, and recorded for remote public viewing. Jerry Sutton (Cherokee Nation) won the grand prize. Classification winners were James Andrew Smith (Cherokee Nation), painting; Joey Study (Keetoowah Cherokee), sculpture; Lisa Forrest (Cherokee Nation), basketry; Troy Jackson (Cherokee Nation), pottery; Candessa Tehee (Keetoowah Cherokee), jewelry; DeAnn McDaniel (Cherokee Nation), graphics; Norma Howard (Choctaw/Chickasaw), miniatures; Ron Mitchell (Cherokee Nation), Trail of Tears theme; and Joey Study (Keetoowah Cherokee), emerging artists.

Jennifer Thiessen (Cherokee Nation) won the grand prize of the annual CHEROKEE HOMECOMING ART SHOW, a juried exhibition open to members of the three Cherokee tribes at the Cherokee Heritage Center. Classification winners, who are

Coe Center Art inspires, energizes, and challenges.

ABOVE Detail of the winged attendant figures.

Photo: Marc Davis (CC By 2.0) OPPOSITE Unknown Tiwanaku artists, Gate of the Sun, ca. 500–800 CE, hard-carved andesite. Photo: M. H. Water.

Find hope in the creativity that surrounds us.

Experience the Coe Visit us virtually…

Being together while being apart. coeartscenter.org

Artist Unknown (Ojibwe), Child’s Leggings, c. 1880. NA1028.

Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts

Coe Center 1590 B Pacheco Street, Santa Fe, NM 87505 info@coeartscenter.org • 505.983.6372

FALL 2020 | 9

Stephen Mopope (Qued Koi) Mother and Child, James T. Bialac Collection, 2010

A project curated by students from a Native American Art and Museum Histories Seminar and supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Between 1927 and 1929, six Kiowa artists created many paintings of Kiowa culture at the University of Oklahoma.

Spencer Asah, James Auchiah, Jack Hokeah, Stephen Mopope, Lois Smoky, and Monroe Tsa-toke make up what is now referred to as the Kiowa Six. This exhibit explores the ways in which they acted as strong agents of Kiowa cultural preservation during and after their residencies at OU.

OCT. 1, 2020 – JAN. 17, 2021 Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art University of Oklahoma 555 Elm Ave., Norman, OK 73019-3003 fjjma.ou.edu | @fjjma | Admission is always free!

For accommodations, please call Visitor Services at (405) 325-4938.

The University of Oklahoma is an equal opportunity institution. www.ou.edu/eoo

all Cherokee, were Noel Grayson, traditional arts; Jennie Wilson, pottery; Vicki Coppedge, basketry; Robin Stockton, visual arts; Ernie Lee Poindexter, sculpture; Carolyn Pallett, beadwork; Candessa Tehee, textiles; and Toneh Chuleewah, jewelry. Ray Commiato won the Emerging Artist Award, and Keli Gonzales won the Bill Rabbit Legacy Award.

ART MARKETS The Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA) held the VIRTUAL INDIAN MARKET, in lieu of its annual Santa Fe Indian Market. Glenda McKay (Ingalik Athabascan) won Best of Show with $10,000 in prize money.

Classification winners were Farrell Pacheco (Santo Domingo Pueblo), jewelry; Shirley Brauker, PhD (Little River Odawa), pottery; Everton Tsosie (Navajo), 2D–Paintings/Drawings/ Gr aph i c s / Photo g r aphy ; R on a l d Honyumptewa (Hopi), Pueblo wooden

carvings; Ira Lujan (Taos Pueblo), sculpture; Glenda McKay, diverse arts; Lola Cody (Navajo), textiles; Bill Mendoza (Oglala/Sicangu Lakota), beadwork/ quillwork; TobyMae Patricio (Acoma), youth; and Theresa Secord (Penobscot), basketry.

VIM featured four special awards.

Shirley Brauker won the Solidarity in Our Current Times Award, Christal Ratt (Algonquin) won the Elaborate Face Mask Award, Beverly Bear King Moran (Standing Rock Lakota) won the Executive Director’s Award: Honoring Your Mother and Father, and Aydrian James Day (Ho-Chunk/L akota/ Anishinaabe) won the People’s Choice Award.

The RED EARTH FESTIVAL, held at the Citizen Potawatomi Nation’s Grand Casino and Hotel in Shawnee, Oklahoma, was one of the few in-person art markets held since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. Glass artist Lauretta NewbyCoker (Choctaw) won the Grand Award,

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while Linda Kukuk (Choctaw) won the President’s Award, and Yonavea Hawkins (Caddo/Delaware) won the Kathleen Everett Upshaw Award. Division award winners were Nelda Schrupp (Nakota), cultural items; Jon Tiger (Muscogee), drawings/graphics/photography; Stuart Sampson (Citizen Potawatomi), diversified artwork; Ray “Duck” Garcia (San Felipe Pueblo), contemporary jewelry; Abraham Begay (Navajo), traditional jewelry; Michael McCullough (Choctaw), painting, oil/acrylic; Jon Tiger, painting, water-based; and Monica Lovato (San Felipe/Kewa Pueblo), pottery/sculpture.

SCHOOLS Art advocate, collector, and philanthropist Michael Audain, OC, OBC, donated 3 million Canadian dollars to the UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (UBC) in Victoria to create the Audain Chair in Historical Indigenous Art. This new position researches artworks, particularly from

the Northwest Coast during the 18th to early 20th centuries, as part of the UBC’s department of art history, visual art, and theory. Audain earned a master’s degree and two bachelor’s degrees from UBC in the 1960s.

PUBLIC ART The Port of Portland and the Regional Arts and Culture Council selected RYAN! Feddersen (Okanogan/Arrow Lakes) to create Inhabitance, a public art installation to be permanently installed in Concourse B of the PORTLAND INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT in Oregon. Her installation will celebrate humans’ relationship to the local Pacific Northwest biome.

AWARDS & HONORS Author Marcie Rendon (White Earth Ojibwe) is the first Native American woman to receive the $50,000 MCKNIGHT FOUNDATION DISTINGUISHED ARTIST AWARD. Last year, the McKnight Foundation gave painter Jim Denomie (Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe) the prestigious award for Minnesota-based artists.

The Ford Foundation and Hallie Ford Foundation named Natalie Ball (Klamath/Modoc) as one of its three 2020 HALLIE FORD FELLOWS. The fellowship includes a $35,000 gift and recognizes artists based in Oregon.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) named Karen Ann Hoffman (Oneida Nation) and Wayne Valliere (Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe) as two of its 2020 NATIONAL HERITAGE FELLOWS, the nation’s highest honor in the folk art. Each fellow receives a stipend of $25,000 in recognition of their artistic achievements. The artists both hail from central Wisconsin. The NEA recognized Hoffman for her raised beadwork and Valliere for his birchbark canoe-making.

The Ontario Arts Council gave its 2020 INDIGENOUS ARTS AWARD to Mary Anne Barkhouse (Kwakwaka'wakw).

First given in 2012, the Ontario Arts Council Indigenous Arts Award recognizes Indigenous artists and arts professionals in Ontario and includes an honorarium of 10,000 Canadian dollars.

Iowa’s governor and the Iowa Commission on the Status of Women inducted Mary Elizabeth Young Bear (Meskwaki) into the IOWA WOMEN’S HALL OF FAME, in recognition of her leadership, activism, and work as an artist, educator, cultural historian, and art conservator.

The DC-based Textile Society of America bestowed its BRANDFORD/ELLIOTT AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN FIBER to Melissa Cody (Navajo), a weaver from Arizona.

The society wrote in its press release that the award recognizes an “outstanding emerging fiber artist whose work reflects a willingness to take creative risks.”

FALL 2020 | 11

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

BRITTANY BRITTON A Hupa Curator Shares Her Top Seven List

A

N ENROLLED MEMBER OF THE HOOPA VALLEY TRIBE, Brittany Britton lives in Humboldt County, California. She grew up on the Hoopa Reservation and earned her bachelor of art degree in studio arts from Humboldt State University (HSU) in Arcata. Later she moved north to Portland to complete a master of fine arts degree in craft from the Oregon College of Art and Craft. In recent years, she fell into work caring for cultural items like basketry and other regalia from California’s northwest coast.

Britton is also a visual artist utilizing ancestral and contemporary materials and practices in her work around memory and identity. In an artist's statement she wrote, “I am interested in the ideas surrounding place, of home, and of soul. I am continuing to delve into the depths of the post-apocalyptic world.”

She is the incoming gallery director at HSU to the Reese Bullen Gallery and the Goudi'ni Native American Arts Gallery, the only Indigenous-focused gallery in the California State University system. She is excited about her upcoming work in linking the greater community back to the campus.

Art and Activism in California that just closed at the Crocker Museum of Art in Sacramento. I love how he challenges himself with scale and space in his carving work. He is a mentor within our arts community and is integral in passing on arts to the next emerging generation.

To see Bob’s work online, check out: www2.humboldt.edu/third/ exhibitions/2003/benson.html DOWNRIVER: LYN RISLING

above, top Brittany Britton (Hupa), One Hundred Eleven Mask, performance documentation. Image courtesy of the author. above, bottom Robert Benson (Tsnungwe), Woodpecker Bowl, 2017, oil paint on manzanita wood, private collection. Image courtesy of the author. opposite Lyn Risling (Yurok/ Karuk/Hupa), Uumkun Kári Ôok Ninay (They Are Still Among Us), 2015, acrylic on canvas, 20 × 16 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

UPRIVER: BOB BENSON BOB IS A TSNUNGWE ARTIST working across media in watercolor to woodcarving projects. Previously he taught fine art at the College of the Redwoods in Eureka, California, from the 1980s through early 2000s.

His work, alongside that of Lyn Risling (Yurok/Karuk/Hupa) and Brian Tripp (Karuk), has been featured in the When I Remember I See Red: American Indian

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WHEN I THINK OF CALIFORNIA NATIVE ARTISTS, I immediately think of Lyn. She is the sort of person whose kindness shines through her work and when meeting her. Lyn’s artwork has been featured in numerous exhibitions, publications, language curriculum, and more. Entwined within her studio work is cultural resiliency and survivance through transmitting Karuk, Yurok, Hupa, and other Northwest California Indigenous cultural knowledge and language.

Lyn’s work can be seen in a series of children’s books, Coyote At The Big Time:

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

A California Indian 123 (2013), A Is For Acorn: A California Indian ABC (2015), and Native California Flash Cards: For Culture and Language Learning (2020), all available through Heyday Books. I grew up learning the Hupa language with over-photocopied sheets of bingo cards with her artwork on them. These new books and tools reintroduce a new generation of children to her artwork. lynrisling.com NORTH: THE RICK BARTOW PROJECT BASED IN WIYOT ANCESTRAL TERRITORY, Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre in Blue Lake, California, has partnered with the Wiyot Tribe to create a theatrical spectacle based on the artist Rick Bartow’s life. I am blessed to be a part of this project as exhibition curator. I recall going to Froelick Gallery in Portland every few weeks to peek in the back at Rick’s work in storage to feel a bit more at home in a city I didn’t know.

Rick’s life story of (re)connecting with his Wiyot culture, attaining success as a Pacific Northwest artist, and various struggles throughout his life was set to be staged this past June. Shifts due to the pandemic mean we have to wait until June 2021 for the premier of Things You Know But Cannot Explain theatrical production. In the meantime, Native and non-Native collaborators are still working away

FALL 2020 | 13

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

on the production while sheltering in place. The forthcoming exhibition of Rick Bartow’s work accompanying the production will bring his work home to Wiyot homelands at the Goudi'ni Native American Arts Gallery at Humboldt State University. thebartowproject.com CENTER: BRIAN TRIPP BRIAN D. TRIPP, also known as BDT (Karuk), has been in the background of my life for as long as I can remember.

His artwork, like Lyn Risling’s, appears on flyers, curriculum, and more throughout California. BDT’s work is a pillar in the look and feel of California Native Arts as a field. Brian’s career spans six decades and doesn’t look like it is slowing. He works in mixed media of found materials, mirrors, reflectors, driftwood—anything he can get his hands on.

Brian is one of a group of artists participating in the California Indian Artist Legacy documentation project launched this fall of 2020. His studio documentation, ephemera, film, photographs and more will be stored in an archive alongside other California Native artists. The work is being done by Native archivists, artists, and community members to preserve our artistic history for future generations. Some of his work can be seen at: kadist.org/people/brian-tripp

EAST: BEAD THIS IN YOUR STYLE CHALLENGE LIKE ALL GOOD THINGS, I found this on Instagram after following numerous beading accounts and falling in love with folks’ work. @ beadthisinyourstyle is a monthly challenge by Nalakwsis, a Cree artist from Whapmagoostui, Quebec. The intent is for beaders to do the challenge piece to interpret and create in their own styles within the month and that the work not be for sale. The account hosts guest artists for the challenge design every other month, and shares beaders' projects throughout the month with #beadthisinyourstylechallenge. The

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above Brian Tripp and Jasper Tripp (both Karuk), I Know Which Way the Wind Blows, 1997, mural, Clarion Alley, San Francisco. Photos: Franco Folini (CC BY-SA 2.0). above, bottom The Native Mural Project at the Eureka Street Art Festival, Eureka, California.

Image courtesy of the author.

project is also beginner friendly (which is a plus for me) and for pro-beaders it provides a chance to let go, have fun, and make something that is not their sale work.

Instagram: @BeadThisInYourStyle SOUTH: INDIGENOUS WOMEN HIKE ANOTHER INSTAGRAM PAGE I FOLLOW, Indigenous Women Hike (IWH), drops some great knowledge about the histories and misinformation around National Parks, the idea of wilderness, outdoor industry heroes, and more.

Jolie Varela (Tule River Yokut/Bishop Paiute), IWH founder, advocates for Indigenous existence, our languages, and our stories to be present in National Park Services tours and more. Her work reclaims our outdoor spaces and getting the Outdoor Industry to really look at their values and what they represent. Jolie works primarily within Payahuunadü (the place where water flows), homelands of Paiute and Shoshone peoples.

Instagram @IndigenousWomenHike

A gallery featuring traditional and contemporary fine art

by Native American artists

WEST: EUREKA STREET ART FESTIVAL’S NATIVE MURAL PROJECT FOR THE PAST THREE YEARS the city of Eureka, California, has slowly covered every available wall space in artwork throughout the city. This year focused on the Henderson Center neighborhood, and looked a little different with less crowds watching artists at work due to the pandemic. Four invited artists Alme Allen (Karuk), Carl Avery (Yurok), Melitta Jackson (Yurok), and Julian Lang (Karuk) covered the wall of the American Cancer Society Discovery Shop.

Alme Allen is known for his graphic design work and carving of customary redwood stools and casting them in concrete. Carl Avery is a fast painter known for his graffiti and airbrush/pin-striping style who has been in demand for numerous murals in recent years. Melitta Jackson, an emerging artist and HSU alumna, works across media of drawing, painting, regalia making, and more. Julian Lang is an anchor in the Northwest California artist community doing language revitalization work when not working in his studio.

Having all four of these artists in the same space sharing their work was foundational to increasing Indigenous visibility in our rural community. This project was a collaboration of the Eureka Street Art Festival organizers and the Native Cultures Fund through Humboldt Area Foundation to ensure diversity of representation in the festival. eurekastreetartfestival.com/ copy-of-native-mural-project

A Cold Winter’s Return

by Raymond Nordwall (Pawnee/Ojibwe/Cherokee)

c @wyld.gallery f @wyld.gallery > ray@wyld.gallery v 512 657 6583

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PARAGONS OF THE VIRTUAL 2020 SWAIA Virtual Indian Market Winners No crowds, no convention center, no problem: Indian Market artists adapt and excel with a pandemic-proof format.

By RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo)

G

O OD NEWS TRAVELS FAST, esp e ci a l ly w hen shooting through the internet via various social media platforms to artists anxiously awaiting word of their placement in a juried competition.

Case in point: SWAIA’s formal announcement of its Virtual Indian Market award winners during the Virtual Awards Show held on Saturday, August 15.

The virtual market, which hosted 450 participants, was organized in lieu of this year’s Santa Fe Indian Market (held in the downtown plaza each August since 1922) due to the coronavirus pandemic.

All artists who were accepted into Indian Market, including those on the waiting list, were eligible to submit images of their work. From those images, judges selected the top five contenders in each of the ten classifications. Those pieces of art were delivered to Santa Fe for in-person, socially distanced judging, with three judges assigned to each classification.

The finalists competed for the top prize of $2,500 in their respective classifications, and then for the Virtual Grand Award of $10,000, along the lines of Best of Show in the typical, physical market.

The highest honors went to Glenda McKay for Harpoon Head with Sheath (and Emergency Whistle), which combines cultural and natural materials including walrus tusk, whale baleen, sea otter fur, smoked moose hide, and a fossilized seal tooth.

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Here, accompanied by brief descriptions of the award-winning work and a few words from each of the artists, we offer an encore presentation of the Virtual Indian Market ribbon takers and a virtual tip of the hat to their skill and focus during these times!

Virtual Grand Award and Classification VI. Diverse Arts Glenda McKay (Ingalik Athabascan) Harpoon Head with Sheath (and Emergency Whistle) In the hands of Glenda McKay, Alaska Native materials are combined to create one-of-a-kind, heirloom-quality treasures, including the virtual market’s top ribbon winner, Harpoon Head with Sheath. Decorated with a single, beaded flower and fringed with shimmering, cut-glass beads, the small but splendid pouch is a luxurious rendering of a customary, utilitarian, everyday item.

I was so surprised when I won the award for diverse arts, but I never imagined I would win such a prestigious award as the Virtual Grand at the Virtual Indian Market, part of the largest Indian art market in the world. What an honor and a privilege. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and all the uncertainty, SWAIA put together a whole new future for Indian art markets. I would like to thank SWAIA staff, volunteers, and donors for all their hard work in putting together the virtual market. What a challenge. Bravo!

—Glenda McKay

Classification I. Jewelry Farrell Pacheco (Santo Domingo Pueblo) The Daughters of Mother Earth Farrell Pacheco’s strikingly beautiful heishe necklace, strung with beads made by hand from shell, turquoise, and jet, honors the natural gems of the land and sea, as well as the artistic legacy of his Ancestral Pueblo ancestors. This award marks Pacheco’s second Indian Market blue-ribbon win in three years.

All images courtesy of SWAIA, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

This award means a lot to me and my family because my wife [Rey] and I are full-time jewelry makers. It means that with all our hard work and taking our time with each piece, we can go a long way. This award is a huge honor to my people and to the elders who have encouraged the young to continue the trade we Santo Domingo are known for. Being full-time artists has allowed us to be full-time parents to our daughters and to be able to make a living. Many of us artists rely on the income we gain during the annual Indian Market. The virtual market was a good recourse for us since all our annual shows have been canceled. We would never have considered a web page since internet is scarce on the reservation, but it was an eye-opening experience. The Virtual Indian Market was a way to continue to show the world our culture and traditions through art.

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Classification III. 2D—Paintings/ Drawings/Graphics/Photography Everton Tsosie (Navajo) The Last of the Pure Neo-Expressionism, abstraction, and color are key elements in Everton Tsosie’s prize painting, which also employs the strong, graphic aesthetics of Indigenous symbolism. The lone, off-centered figure is surrounded by a generous expanse of color-saturated space fraught with kinetic energy and filled with endless possibilities for interpretation.

This award is everything to me! To be able to change my life in every aspect and come out the winner really hit home for me. As a Native man, I have an entrance, and that’s key. Let’s dance!

The virtual market was important because, let’s face it, we are in the 21st century, and there is a technological advantage. We as Indian people aren’t going to sit around. Let’s rise to the challenge and do back flips online!

It’s learning and adapting that really defines our sense of livelihood as artists, and now we are able to share virtually. We’re still living and breathing as Indian people, even online.

—Everton Tsosie

Classification II. Pottery Shirley Brauker, PhD (Little River Odawa) Missing Sisters The work of Shirley Brauker exudes a sense of stillness and commands personal reflection from the viewer. The powerful depiction of lost and missing Indigenous women that decorates her winning piece of pottery is no exception.

This vase carries the songs of those who can no longer sing, so it is up to us to listen.

Being presented an award from SWAIA is an acknowledgment that lets me know my work is valued and appreciated by this prestigious arts community. Creativity is my energy, the vehicle that I use to travel this path in life, and the light that burns inside me. I am grateful and humbled to have been placed alongside the incredible artists represented in the virtual market.

—Shirley Brauker, PhD

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Classification IV. Pueblo Wooden Carvings Ronald Honyumptewa (Hopi) The Message from a Butterfly Woodcarver Ronald Honyumptewa transforms the unyielding cottonwood tree root into fluid action in each of his portrayals of the various Hopi katsinam.

Highlighting their remarkably lifelike qualities with rich and thoroughly imbued color and intricate details, the forms are animated and energized. The butterfly resting on the fingertips of this ribbon winner seems ready to take flight at any moment.

I am honored and humbled to receive this prestigious award. It has always been a dream of mine, for my katsina carvings to be recognized by SWAIA. The dances, songs, stories, and the world of the katsina have always been and always will be a part of my life. My passion for carving the katsina continues to evolve with each piece.

—Ronald Honyumptewa

Classification V. Sculpture Ira Lujan (Taos Pueblo) Parrot Glass artist Ira Lujan took inspiration for Parrot from classic Pueblo pottery forms and decorative motifs.

When viewed in certain light or from particular angles, the matte finish of the sculpture can resemble that of wood, clay, or even bronze. The tiny macaw perched atop the lidded vessel is a sweet and colorful homage to this special bird, whose feathers have been part of Pueblo art and culture for thousands of years.

This is an award for glass, which is really not considered a traditional medium by Native American art standards. I’m proud of the fact that people are recognizing glass. It means that it’s being accepted and is in the beginning stages of becoming a traditional art medium in Native America. So much of our history is passed down orally, so we have to tell stories or create art [to preserve that history]. The Virtual Indian Market was definitely space-age, but it gave us another outlet to tell our stories.

—Ira Lujan

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Classification VIII. Beadwork/Quillwork Bill Mendoza (Oglala/Sicangu Lakota) Elk Medicine—Teachings of Lakotah Love and Commitment Beadwork and quillwork are among the most emblematic Native art forms. Unique to North America, porcupine quillwork is particularly difficult to master. Working small scale or in miniature, as did Bill Mendoza when creating Elk Medicine, the level of skill required increases significantly. Working with the natural curvatures of a piece of horn to reveal a graceful silhouette of an elk, Mendoza then adorned this lovable creature with beaded and quilled accessories.

My art, as a healing force, has never meant so much to me than at this point in my life, and to have my work recognized

by SWAIA is an achievement that until now I have only dreamed about. I couldn’t be more grateful and proud to be among the phenomenal artists who participated in this historic Virtual Indian Market. This opportunity has been one of only a few for me to showcase my work, as well as maintain vital income that has been difficult to come by as a working artist.

—Bill Mendoza

Classification VII. Textiles Lola Cody (Navajo) Two Grey Hills Navajo Rug Lola S. Cody created her eye-dazzling entry from wool she harvested from her own sheep. Loomed from hand-carded, hand-spun, undyed yarn, Navajo Rug, like all Two Grey Hills weavings, displays complex, geometric patterns in the creamy whites, tans, browns, and greys that are synonymous with the style.

I am honored to have my work, as well as my sheep, recognized by SWAIA. —Lola Cody

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Classification IX. Youth: TobyMae Patricio (Acoma) Hunting Canteen Hand-built from hand-gathered and hand-processed clay, Hunting Canteen would be an exceptional example of Acoma pottery by an artist of any age.

Bear in mind that TobyMae Patricio is still a teenager, so it is easy to imagine that her path as an artist is already well defined and waiting. Hunting Canteen is both an achievement of technical skill and a testament to this young artist’s creative vision and hard work in bringing it to fruition.

Wow, this is unbelievable! Thank you to SWAIA for this award, and to all the judges for debating the youth artwork. This was my first year making and painting pottery, and my first year at Indian Market. I chose to make this special, hand-coiled, three-section water canteen that I named Hunting Canteen, because I wanted to challenge myself and make something different, while at the same time re-creating the work of the Acoma matriarchs who have passed on. I liked the design because it looked easy to paint, although there are many designs to choose from. I look forward to making and painting many more pots in the near future.

—TobyMae Patricio

Classification XI. Basketry Theresa Secord (Penobscot) 1920 Replica Woven Glove Box Drawing from a long heritage of matriarchal ancestry, Theresa Secord wove Glove Box as an homage to her great-grandmother and to the artistic legacy of her people. The delicate weave of the box is accented with a handle made from braided sweetgrass, whose fragrance envelopes the gloves contained within. Secord has been one of the artists championing the ancient art of ash and sweetgrass basketry in the 21st century.

I’m thrilled and honored that my work was selected as the best in basketry. I wove this piece using my great-grandmother’s wooden forms and tools, as a replica of a basket she made 100 years ago. As Maine celebrates its bicentennial this year, I wanted to remind people that our Wabanaki tribes have been weaving beauty since before statehood, using our ecological knowledge and practicing our cultural expressions as part of our own sovereignty. The Virtual Indian Market gave us a venue and a unique opportunity to continue to express our artistic beauty and important viewpoints in these very troubled times.

—Theresa Secord

Special Awards Additionally, four special awards were given based solely on digitally submitted images. The honors for Solidarity in Our Current Times Award went to Shirley Brauker, PhD (Little River Odawa); the Elaborate Face Mask Award went to Christal Ratt (Algonquin); and the Executive Director’s Award: Honoring Your Mother and Father went to Beverly Bear King Moran (Standing Rock Lakota). Ten-year-old Aydrian James Day (Ho-Chunk/Lakota/Anishinaabe) took the People’s Choice Award for Beautiful Floral Life.

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PRAIRIE DOG GLASS The Rise of Southwest Native Glass Art

By Cathy Short (Citizen Potawatomi)

J

ACKALOPE HAS BEEN an iconic shopping experience in Santa Fe since 1976, with an ever-changing variety of animals to observe and merchandise to buy—almost like an amusement park for home-and-garden shoppers. About 15 years ago, the owners began looking for an additional tenant where customers could watch artists at work and buy their art. Patrick Morrissey and Elodie Holmes, local glass artists, proposed building a glass studio near Jackalope’s existing prairie dog colony.

Although all of the animals, including the prairie dogs, disappeared over the years, Prairie Dog Glass has retained its name.

Morrissey and Holmes cofounded Prairie Dog Glass as part of their joint commitment to community education and service. Holmes, an award-winning glass artist, has had her own studio and art gallery, Liquid Light Glass, in the Baca Street Art District in Santa Fe since 1986.

Morrissey began working with glass at the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina in 1978 and earned a BFA and MFA from Southern Illinois University.

Over the years, Prairie Dog Glass has provided an extensive public hot shop, instruction, mentoring, glass supplies, glass art for sale, and the opportunity to view first-class glass artists at work.

above Prairie Dog Glass gaffers, from left to right: Ramson Lomatewama (Hopi), Tony Jojola (Isleta Pueblo), Patrick Morrissey, Robert "Spooner" Marcus (Ohkay Owingeh), Ira Lujan (Taos/Ohkay Owingeh), Carol Lujan (Diné), 2019.

Photo: Cathy Short (Citizen Potawatomi). All images, unless otherwise notes, courtesy of the author. opposite Robert “Spooner” Marcus, Cobalt Cosmic Blue, ca.

2010, blown and sand-carved glass, 18 × 14 in. Photo: Wendy McEahern Photography.

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Morrissey is the driving force behind everything that happens there. A skilled glassblower, he is an endless source of knowledge and technical expertise about the construction and operation of glass equipment. Unfailingly willing to help with whatever needs to be done, he is widely known for the mentorship and resources he provides.

Among those who depend on Prairie Dog Glass is a community of six Southwestern Native glass artists whose work is frequently seen in Santa Fe Indian Market, other art fairs, galleries, and fine art collections: Tony Jojola (Isleta), Ramson Lomatewama (Hopi), Carol Lujan, PhD (Diné), Ira Lujan (Taos/Ohkay Owingeh), Robert “Spooner” Marcus (Ohkay Owingeh), and Adrian Wall (Jemez). Prairie Dog Glass provides them a place to work and a base for collaboration and camaraderie. They are the first generation in a movement for a medium that has not been part of their historic cultures. Glass naturally lends itself to collaborations because of the complexity of the process of converting a blob of hot glass into a work of art. While other genres may lend themselves to solitary endeavors, glass artists are often involved in the work of others, which leads to connections rather than competition.

NATIVE GLASS ART’S ORIGINS IN THE SOUTHWEST THE FOUNDATION OF NATIVE GLASS ART is intrinsically tied to the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. In the 1970s it was the synergistic coming together of college president Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee Nation, 1916–2002) and Dale Chihuly, the foremost glass artist from the Northwest. New supported young Native artists exploring new art forms and believed they should be influenced by their cultural background but not be constrained by historic genres.

While Chihuly visited IAIA for only a short period, he provided the hot shop equipment and taught glassblowing for a semester. In return, he has been greatly influenced by Native American textile and basket designs in his own art.

In 1975 Tony Jojola became one of the first IAIA students to be attracted to working with glass under the guidance of Carl Ponca (Osage, 1938–2013) and Larry Ahvakana (Iñupiaq). Although Jojola was not the first Native artist to work at Prairie Dog Glass, his story is an important link to the American Studio Glass movement of the mid-20th century, in which objects were perceived as art in its purest form and began to intersect with the emerging

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Native art movement. The influence of the Studio Glass movement, with its emphasis on art for art's sake, can be seen in the individuality of Jojola’s work throughout his career.

From his earliest days as an artist, Jojola sought to create the impetus for Native expression in glass. Along with Kathy Kaperick, a close friend of Chihuly’s, Jojola began a glassblowing program in Taos, New Mexico, in the late 1990s. Chihuly provided tools and other supplies in support of the effort. Originally intended to be located on the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico where Jojola’s godfather was from, Taos Glass Arts and Education ended up as part of the Taos County Economic Development Corporation in the city of Taos where Native and non-Native youth could attend classes.

Spooner Marcus and Ira Lujan were soon part of the effort along with Jojola.

Taos Glass Arts and Education closed in 2005, about the same time Prairie Dog Glass was gearing up at Jackalope. This fortuitous timing ensured that a public glassblowing facility, including teaching and mentoring, remained available to Southwestern Native glass artists.

NATIVE GLASS TODAY T H E S OU T H W E ST A N D T H E PACIFIC NORTHWEST are the two major loci of Native glass. In both areas, the type of glass art being produced is significantly influenced by the cultural experiences of the artists. Among the Southwestern artists, historic forms of pottery, weaving, and other utilitarian items often influence the shapes, designs, and colors used, while woodcarving, basketry, and petroglyphs are more likely to inspire Northwest glass art.

With more than one hundred glass art studios in Washington state alone, the Pacific Northwest has a long history of glass. This greater availability of significant public facilities has contributed to the large number of Native glass artists in the region. However, collaborations between Native artists from the two areas are not uncommon and have contributed to cross-cultural understanding and outstanding glass art.

In the Southwest, the Prairie Dog Glass gaffers all say that the first time they saw glass being blown, they knew they wanted to work with it. They went to great lengths to make it happen. They also speak of the difficulties in getting younger tribal members interested in blowing glass. In part, it is the lack of opportunity. Glass hot shops are hard to develop and expensive to operate. Often there are none anywhere nearby. Without exposure, it is difficult to generate much interest, especially since aspects of glassblowing is simply dangerous. Working with molten glass near hot furnaces for hours at a time does not appeal to everyone nor does the necessity for collaboration when the pieces are large and complex.

The Prairie Dog Glass artists support a restart of the IAIA’s glass program, which would attract Native youth from around the country. Morrissey, Marcus, and Ira Lujan help with IAIA senior projects, demonstrate techniques, and teach courses at IAIA in hopes of generating interest. As Jojola puts it, “If you can put sparkles in a kid’s eyes, that is a good thing. They deserve it.” Jojola stresses what he learned as a student at IAIA: the importance of carrying culture forward with your art, regardless of genre.

A deeper look into the six Native artists and when they started to work at Prairie Dog Glass shows the range and maturity of glass art in the region.

ROBERT “SPOONER” MARCUS AFTER TAOS GLASS ARTS and Education closed, Marcus worked at Liquid Light Glass in Santa Fe where he met Morrissey for the first time. It took a while for Prairie Dog Glass to get up and running, but within a year or so, Marcus and Ira Lujan started to blow glass there.

Jojola followed them to Prairie Dog Glass not long after, and the three were working together again.

In addition to glass, Marcus works with molten metal and casts his own bronze. Having come from a family of potters, Marcus sees working with glass as a logical progression. He started as a production glassblower and says it took him a long time to understand what it

means to be a glass artist. Although glass is a demanding medium, Marcus cannot understand why everyone doesn’t want to do it. “Glass is very therapeutic for me, because I have to focus on what I want to get done,” he says. “When I am blowing glass, my sense of time goes away, and that allows me to be more creative.”

Marcus is as adept at glassblowing as he is at fusing and slumping glass, kiln-forming processes that use gravity and heat to cause sheets of glass to take the shape of a mold. The real joy for him is exploring new techniques and styles rather than reaching a predetermined goal. As a result, he has become looser and more fluid in his glasswork over time.

Marcus works in many different styles, although the influence of Pueblo pottery designs and his love of whimsy are often apparent in his glass art. He is known for his beautifully balanced glass shapes, later enhanced with artistic motifs related to his thoughts and feelings of the moment.

He believes that the evolution of artists' cultures should be reflected in their art.

above Robert "Spooner" Marcus (Ohkay Owingeh), Kiva Ladder, 2018, enamel blown and sand-carved glass, 13 × 8 in. Photo: Kitty Leaken. opposite Tony Jojola (Isleta) and Ira Lujan (Taos/Ohkay Owingeh) collaborating at Prairie Dog Glass, 2019. Photo: Cathy Short (Citizen Potawatomi).

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IRA LUJAN IN 2000 IRA LUJAN JOINED Marcus and Jojola at Taos Glass Arts and Education. Although he started by giving motion to glass with free-form art, he comes from a more sculptural approach, incorporating the cultural ideas and objects he grew up with into his glass art.

He considers his pieces as “scenes” out of his Taos and Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo cultures, with each piece telling a story that is both historic and living. He also works in ceramics, tin, and sheet metal.

In 1999 Lujan attended the grand opening of the Eugene Glass School in Oregon. “The smells and the glow of the colors reminded me of a past life, and I immediately wanted to work with glass,” he says. His move back to Taos coincided with Jojola’s opening of Taos Glass Arts and Education, where he apprenticed under Marcus. He also studied under Preston Singletary (Tlingit) at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington.

He started working at Liquid Light Glass when he returned to Santa Fe in 2006, and soon began working at Prairie Dog Glass.

In 2 0 0 7 t h e S out hwe s t e r n Association for Indian Arts awarded Lujan a fellowship, and he used those funds to build a mobile hot shop with the help of Marcus and Morrissey. The mobile hot shop is now at his home, although it is available for demonstrations and rental to other artists.

He believes that communities of artists, like the one at Prairie Dog Glass, make glassblowing different from other genres of Native art, in that everyone is taught teamwork and the need to work toward a common goal from the beginning. He continues to attend the Pilchuck Glass School when he can, bringing back new ideas and innovations to share with his Prairie Dog Glass community.

TONY JOJOLA AS A YOUTH, Tony Jojola worked with pottery and jewelry, but neither held the appeal of glass once he was exposed to it at IAIA. The unpredictability of glass, its constant element of chance, and its organic fluidity fascinated Jojola. In 1977 Pilchuck Glass School awarded Jojola a fellowship. He also worked with Dale 26 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Chihuly in the Seattle area and traveled to Italy to work with Venetian master glassblowers. The Studio Glass movement that was in full bloom when he started working with glass in the mid-1970s influenced his art, including his attention to proportion and design.

His Isleta cultural heritage is clearly incorporated in his glass art. He is known for using pottery forms and designs in his work, as well as animals, particularly bears, recasting classical designs in glass.

Vibrant, deep colors are his trademark.

Jojola adds old family silver stamps to some of his glass pieces, an influence of his grandfather who was a silversmith.

His grandfather was also a beekeeper and woodcarver and taught Jojola to be self-reliant and to work with his hands.

Among other glass artists, Jojola collaborated with ceramist Rosemary Lonewolf (Santa Clara Tewa) on a glass and clay art fence for the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, and on several sculptures for the Tohono O'odham Nation’s Desert Diamond Casino West Valley in Glendale, Arizona.

Jojola continually works to expose Native youth to glass art. He still remembers his attraction to the possibilities of glass while a student at IAIA. He strives to pass this sense of wonder and curiosity on to others to ensure a vital and lasting Native glass community. Jojola believes “our Native cultures are so rich in so many ways. Bringing our Native culture into our work is the key to the success of Native glass artists. The door is wide open for Native expression in glass.”

ADRIAN WALL WHILE A SUCCESSFUL SCULPTOR TODAY, Adrian Wall’s first obsession growing up was music. He plays Pueblo flute and guitar professionally and believes his music and visual art connect on an emotional level. Wall’s creative energy pushes him to keep learning rather than continuing to do the same thing.

Friends with Marcus, Lujan, and Morrissey, Wall credits them all as inspirational mentors. He first visited Prairie Dog Glass in 2008 when he was seeking help with an art piece he wanted to produce that required a piece of glass. The resulting collaborative effort with Marcus

helped him see ways that stone and glass can fit together.

Wall deliberately incorporated cultural elements into his art when he was younger, but began questioning the appropriateness of monetizing cultural aesthetics. As a result, Wall’s art has become more organic and abstract over time, still incorporating the beauty he finds in his Jemez, Ojibwe, and Seneca background.

Glass is the most challenging material Wall works with, which has changed his perspective about art over the last decade. While the possibilities are endless, so are the mysterious ways in which to achieve a certain effect or end result with glass. While much is possible, it is difficult to figure out how to make it happen. His goal is to combine all of the materials he works with in a way that is meaningful and artistically pleasing. Everything that

above Adrian Wall (Jemez), Chaco Sunset, 2017, cast glass, limestone and steel, 64 × 25 × 18 in., collection of Roberta Robinson. Photo: Adrian Wall. opposite, top Ira Lujan (Taos/ Ohkay Owingeh), Wedding Vase, 2018, blown, hot-sculpted and sand-carved glass, 12 × 6 in.

Photo: Ira Lujan. opposite, bottom Tony Jojola (Isleta), Mama, 2015, sculpted glass, 7½ × 5 × 9 in., collection of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, #59441. Photo: Kitty Leaken. Image courtesy Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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repair it and invited him to work at Prairie Dog Glass. Over time, Morrissey has introduced Lomatewama to techniques that have improved his equipment and efficiency.

Lomatewama can do much of his glassblowing with his hot shop, Hotevilla Glassworks, at his home on the Third Mesa, but depends on Prairie Dog Glass and his friends Marcus and Ira Lujan for help with larger and more complex projects.

L om at e w a m a s t re s s e s h ow expressing himself through a Hopi cultural lens has strengthened his glass art. His elders taught Lomatewama that the creation of art is part of the healing process in Hopi tribal practices. Known for his spirit figures and corn maidens, he draws inspiration from Hopi symbolic representations and history.

As part of his commitment to the education of Hopi youth, Lomatewama has taught classes in glassblowing and stained glass in Hopi and is a board member of Hopitutuqaiki, or the Hopi School, where Hopi cultural values inform the curriculum and teaching process.

He also teaches at the Idyllwild Arts Academy in Idyllwild, California, where he encourages students to view their glass art through their own cultural eyes.

CAROL LUJAN Wall produces tells a story, even if the piece is abstract and the story is coded and only clear to him as the artist.

RAMSON LOMATEWAMA above Ramson Lomatewama (Hopi), Spirit Figure, 2019, handsculpted glass, 9½ × 3 in. Photo: Kitty Leaken. opposite Carol Lujan (Diné) and Patrick Morrissey, Water Dancer, 2019, cut, fused, blown and rolled glass with glass stringers, 13¾ × 8½ × 8½ in.

Photo: Stephen Lang.

A H O P I E D U C AT O R , P O E T, JEWELER, AND KATSINA CARVER, Ramson Lomatewama lets all these roles influence his glass art. Fascinated first by stained glass, Lomatewama was later introduced to glassblowing at the Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York, in the late 1990s. In 2005, the School for Advanced Research (SAR) awarded Lomatewama a Rollin and Mary Ella King Fellowship to experiment with glassblowing. When the furnace he brought to SAR for his work failed the first week, Morrissey helped him

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AN ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY (ASU) emeritus associate professor who earned her doctoral degree in sociology, Carol Lujan helped develop ASU’s American Indian Studies Program. For more than two decades, Lujan has been an award-winning clay artist known for sculpting the human figure, masks, and horses. A 2013 Santa Fe clay workshop about making clay molds for glass fusing introduced her to glass art. The attraction was immediate.

Now Lujan works with fused glass, created by heating glass in a kiln rather than a furnace as is done with glassblowing. She began collaborating with Morrissey and Marcus at Prairie Dog Glass in 2018 to do “rollups” of her fused pieces to produce glass vases that could not be achieved by either blowing or fusing alone.

Lujan’s Diné culture and the Southwestern landscape inspire the vibrant colors of her opalescent and transparent glass. She cuts these sheets of glass into specific designs, including Navajo rug patterns, such as those seen in her grandmother’s weavings. Indigenous motifs can also be seen in her glass masks, bowls, and jewelry. Once the designs are complete, she heats the piece in a kiln to fuse the different glass pieces together. Her intricate designs often require multiple firings to reach the desired effect. She is especially attracted to the interplay between glass and light, and how light enhances the vibrancy and brilliance of glass.

Continually expanding her knowledge and glass-working skills through classes and workshops, Lujan’s glass art has grown larger and more detailed as she has diversified the types of glass, materials, and techniques she integrates into her work. She approaches working with glass as a continuous learning experience, not only the creative process but also the technical knowledge of glass.

The overall message Lujan strives to portray with her art is “the beauty, strength, endurance, humor, and sovereignty of American Indian nations and peoples.

Culture and life experiences are inseparable from what is expressed in my art.”

FUTURE OUTLOOK THESE SIX PRAIRIE DOG GLASS ARTISTS are stamping a trail in glass and generating purpose in their art with a positive outcome. As Lomatewama describes it, “Prairie Dog Glass is a dome of humanity, where social interaction, friendship, and a sense of community are as important as help with glass projects.” The artists each have their singular backgrounds and history, but they all support each other in glass art as well as in life. The ongoing collaborations among these Native artists are an important part of producing their complex glass art and advancing the medium through learning from each other. Prairie Dog Glass has helped to give these Native glass artists a voice. Where once galleries in Santa Fe featured glass art primarily from the Northwest, increasingly they feature glass art from the Southwest as well.

With a core group of three or four students and teachers working with glass at IAIA in the 1970s, there are now dozens of Native artists who are either exclusively involved in glass art or it is a significant part of their artistic output.

While a relatively new genre in Native art can be slow to catch on among artists and collectors, other hurdles must be overcome if a new generation of Native glass artists is to join the current cadre.

Exposure to glassblowing, availability of public space and equipment, and teachers and mentors are critical needs. Although some of the Prairie Dog Glass artists have limited capability for glassblowing where they live, the complexity and high cost of

glass hot shops is an impediment in most Native communities.

At Prairie Dog Glass, several glass artists share costs through teaching classes, reserving bench time, and the sale of glass products made on site.

Morrissey also allows artists to work for him in exchange for bench time to work on their own glass art. This arrangement allows for more creative work than a situation where one artist must cover all of the costs of a hot shop through just their own output. Motivating youth to take their culture forward with them in glass art and to approach it with a sense of awe and wonder remains a worthy challenge, one that all six Prairie Dog Glass artists are committed to.

Cathy Short (Citizen Potawatomi) is a photographer, textile artist, and museum consultant based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She owns Lizard Light Productions with her son, Christopher Short (Citizen Potawatomi).

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BACA 2020 Contemporary Native Art Biennial/Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone, Fifth Edition: Honoring Kinship

By Lori Beavis, PhD (Michi Saagiig Anishinaabe)

above Jack Theis (Anishinaabe/Métis), Class Photo, 2018–19, glass beads, smoked braintanned buckskin, 4 × 24 × 1/4 in. Photo: Mike Patton (Cree).

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S I SIT TO WRITE about the fifth Contemporary Native Art Biennial/Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA), I am musing on the trajectory of the 2020 multivenue exhibition, Kahwatsiretátie: Teionkwariwaienna Tekariwaiennawahkòntie/Honoring Kinship, taking place in a year in which we were confronted with the completely novel experiences of toilet paper panic buying, social distancing, lockdowns, quarantines, sanitizing our groceries, elbow-bump greetings, takeaway cocktails, and Zoom funerals. We also realized the importance of maintaining our relationships, whether through online meetups or through an open window. The

theme of the previous and fourth edition of the Contemporary Native Art Biennial (BACA), níchiwamiskwém | nimidet | my sister | ma sœur, curated by Niki Little (Oji-Cree) and Becca Taylor (Cree), was about women’s relationship building and kinship. Perhaps this was the year in which we needed to see Indigenous artists honoring kinship in its many complexities and see how Indigenous artists would carry the previous theme forward.

David Garneau (Métis) curated the fifth edition of BACA with the support of rudi aker (Wolastoqiyik) and Faye Mullen (Anishinaabe). The curatorial team began its work with the recognition that the exhibitions were taking place on the historic and unceded territory of the Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk people) but

1. David Garneau, “Text by curator David Garneau,” BACA 2020 | Honoring Kinship, 2020, web.

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acknowledged that Mullen, aker, and Garneau, and many of the artists, were not from the territory. For this reason they sought council with the stewards of this territory and began to build relationships.

They met, commissioned work from, and included Kanien'kehá:ka artists and other cultural workers in the exhibitions.

In total, the work of more than 50 artists was featured in five locations in Montreal (Tiohtià:ke, also Mooniyang). The curatorial intention, based on notions of kinship and interrelations, was to include artists who engage in intergenerational relations, align with ancestors both past and future, connect with nonhuman beings, and engage with folks looking for “home” in territories that are not homeland to their ancestors, friendships, and mentormentee affiliations, among others.

Drawn from across the country, the mix of emerging to established artists worked in many media: beads, wampum, fibers, hide, birchbark, sculpture, drawing, painting, ceramic, installations, video, performance, and photography, including bitumen prints, cyanotype, and digital.

The curators placed great emphasis on fiber works that included beadwork.

Garneau writes in his curatorial essay of the resurgence and accessibility of beadwork as an art form that has been repurposed to include engagement with contemporary experience: “Beading is a métissage, a mixing of materials and influences.” And beading occurs in nearly every culture. He continues, “Making by hand, using traditional techniques learned from watching and doing, creates a haptic connection with previous generations.”1

2020 BACA ARTISTS Judy Anderson (Cree) Cruz Anderson (Cree) Scott Benesiinaabandan (Obishikokaang Ojibwe) Rainer Wittenborn and Claus Biegert Catherine Blackburn (Dene) Katherine Boyer (Métis) Bob Boyer (Métis/Cree) Kaia’tanó:ron Dumoulin Bush (Kanien’kehá:ka) Warren Cariou (Métis) Hunter Cascagnette (Métis/Potawatomi) Hannah Claus (Kanien’kehá:ka Mohawk) Renée Condo (Mi’kmaq) Jon Corbett (Cree/Saulteaux/Métis) Ruth Cuthand (Plains Cree) Wally Dion (Saulteaux) Devonn Drossel (Métis) Marcy Friesen (Swampy Cree) Lucas Hale (Lenape/Potawatomi) Emma Hassencahl-Perley (Wolastoqiyik) Larissa Riss Kitchemonia (Saulteaux) Sharon Rose Kootenay (Métis/Cree) Owisokon Pauline Lahache (Mohawk) Tania Larsson (Gwich’in) Jason Edward Lewis (Hawaiian/Samoan/Cherokee) Kay Mayer (Ojibwe) Kevin McKenzie (Cree/Métis) Dylan Miner (Métis) Nadia Myre (Kitigan Zibi Algonquin) Margaret Orr (Cree/Inuk) Giniw Graham Paradis, (Michif/Wiisakodewin) Luke Parnell (Nisga'a/Haida) Sage Paul (Dene) Jobena Petonoquot (Algonquin) Sherry Farrell Racette (Métis/Timiskaming Algonquin) Diane Roberts (Garifuna) Sonia Robertson (Pekuakamiulnu) Máret Ánne Sara (Sámi) Niap, Nancy Saunders (Inuk) Skawennati (Mohawk) Marian Snow (Kahnawake Mohawk) Jack Theis (Anishinaabe/Métis) Ulivia Uviluk (Inuk) Flora Weistche (Cree) Corinna Wollf (Métis)

WEAVING CULTURAL IDENTITIES Efemeral Chief Janice George (Squamish) Angela George (Squamish/Tsleil-Waututh) Doaa Jamal Willard “Buddy” Joseph (Squamish) Krista Point (Musqueam) Ruth Scheuing Debra Sparrow (Musqueam) Robyn Sparrow (Musqueam) Mary Lou Trinkwon

The exhibition opened to the public on April 23 with a virtual ceremony livestreamed on Zoom and mostly closed on August 29, with the final segment closing on September 17. The exhibitions took place at four venues: Art Mûr, La Guilde, Pierre-François Ouellette arte contemporain (PFOAC), and the Stewart Hall Art Gallery—first as virtual exhibitions and then, as pandemic restrictions were lifted, the spaces were opened to the public.

The official opening in late April was, for many of us, the first time we had gathered together with other people after a month of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. How wonderful it was to come together with artists, colleagues, and friends to celebrate the opening of this eagerly awaited exhibition. Elders from Kahnawà:ke, who had guided and welcomed the BACA curatorial team as the stewards of the territory, presided over the ceremony. At the opening, Garneau, aker, and Mullen described the process of arriving at honoring kinship as the premise of the exhibition. Garneau spoke of reciprocity in the immediate instance of creating the exhibition but also the ongoing need to build contact between urban and reserve communities.

The comprehensive, online programming schedule spoke to the value of meeting people where they are.

The entire series of programming was online, and people were invited to watch, listen, and participate in real time. The programming included Screens Sensing, an evening showing of short films from Wapikoni Mobile with up-and-coming and established filmmakers. Beading workshops were offered: “Talkin’ bout beads—art and process” with Sherry Farrell Racette (Métis/ Timiskaming Algonquin) and Cathy Mattes (Michif), and a “Bead N Bitch: Open Beading Gathering” with Dayna Danger (Métis/ Saulteaux) and Nico Williams (Aamjiwnaang Ojibwe). Lindsay Dobbin (Kanien'kehá:ka Mohawk) led a “sound medicine walk” through the forest, where active listening informed the journey. In July was “Merging Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen with Agroforestry + Agriculture” with Valerie Gabriel of Tall Tree Learning Center and youth farmworkers, who held a collective talk on the integration into business structures of the Ohèn:ton Karihwatéhkwen, or Thanksgiving Address, which translates to “the words before all else.” They also addressed youth employment training in the agroforestry sector and community-supported agriculture.

There were livestreamed dance parties, artist videos, and a 2S42S INDIGIQUEERANTINE that celebrated the strength, brilliance, and ethos of Indigiqueer care. Curators made a concerted decision to place the exhibitions and programming in the context of social and racial justice as demonstrations were taking place across the world this past summer. Many of the talks focused on the need to hold space and nourish place-keeping for Black, Brown, 2Spirited, trans, nonbinary, and Indigiqueer community members.

ART MÛR I HAD THE CHANCE to visit each of the exhibition spaces as they opened to the public and attend online workshops and talks.

The first space to open was Art Mûr, where much of the fiber-based work was on display, beginning with work by Jobena Petonoquot (Algonquin). This emerging artist’s installation used beaded images to share family stories and histories of rebellion. Jack Theis (Anishinaabe/Métis) worked beaded, archival photographs FALL 2020 | 31

into mask shapes. Giniw Graham Paradis (Michif/Wiisakodewin) intricately beaded bandolier bags, and Devonn Drossel (Métis) beaded an antique apron titled ê-kiskisiyahkmiciwin: as we remember food (2020). The collaborative work by Judy Anderson (Plains Cree) connects her to her sons in This one brings me the most pride (2016–17) and to important women kin in F— ya, besties (2017–19).

I also found Skateboarding is Medicine (2020), an embellished skateboard by Lucas Hale (Lenape/ Potawatomi) and Child’s Ribbon Dress (2017–18), an acrylic painting

by Kaia’tanó:ron Dumoulin Bush (Kanien'kehá:ka Mohawk). Sherry Farrell Racette’s imagining of a Métis girl’s studio in the bush contextualizes the manner in which bead-based floral designs have been passed down through the generations but continue to evolve and change in contemporary art practices.

The upper floors at Art Mûr showcased Annie [we want to draw with you. we draw with you] (2017), an installation and video by Hannah Claus (Kanien'kehá:ka Mohawk) and Peter Morin (Tahltan).

Beaver Love, under ice (2020), by Hunter Cascagnette (Métis/Potawatomi), made of beaver pelts and a wooden ironing board, speaks to intimacy and intergenerational passing of knowledge. A black-and-white photograph by Scott Benesiinaabandan (Obishikokaang Ojibwe), unSacred:

Clown (2010), is of a seated figure clothed head to toe in tattered cloth. In Four Generations (2015), Jon Corbett (Cree/ Saulteaux/Métis) digitally generated spiral portraits that resemble beadwork that are fascinating to watch as the faces of past generations come in and out of focus on a 60-minute loop.

A basket and quillwork by Catherine Blackburn (Dene) are displayed on this floor, though not as striking as her beaded tongues referencing the loss of language included in the 2018 BACA. One slight quibble is perhaps a little too much space was given to the hockey gear, True line Junior (2019), created by Kevin McKenzie (Cree/Métis), but it was very positive to see Marion Snow’s (Kanien'kehá:ka Mohawk) Grandmother Dress (2020) included, as we don’t see enough work in Montreal by artists living and working in Kahnawake (despite the fact this territory is only 20 minutes away by car).

The two upper floors at Art Mûr housed two large, community-based projects, Weaving Cultural Identities: Threads Through Time (2018–20) and Diane Roberts (Garifuna) Hexsa’am/To Be Here Always: Six Questions (2019).

Weaving Cultural Identities, a project that came from the Vancouver Biennale, featured five large weavings by Musqueam artists Debra Sparrow, Krista Point, Mary Lou Trinkwon, and Robyn Sparrow, and Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh weavers

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Angela George, Chepximiya Siyam (Chief Janice George), and Skwetsimeltxw Willard “Buddy” Joseph, and non-Native weaver Ruth Scheuing. Based on a poem written by Muslim poet Efemeral with contributing work by Doaa Jamal, this work is a large woven textile with a jacquard border featuring the poem by Efemeral.

Diane Roberts and composer, sound designer, and video editor Troy Slocum created Hexsa’am/To Be Here Always: Six Questions (five photos printed on sticker paper overlaid by vinyl text, five digital audio tracks on loop, and one digital video on loop on a digital monitor) as an interwoven sound narrative in dialogue with the environment. Roberts worked with artists Siku Allooloo (Inuk/ Taíno), Nabidu Taylor (Dzawada’enuxw), Marianne Nicolson (Dzawada’enuxw), Althea Thauberger, and Lindsey Willie (Dzawada’enuxw). She asked them to answer six questions about art, identity, longevity, and their hopes for the future.

With this work situated next to Hunter Cascagnette’s installation and on the wall opposite of the weavings setting, all three works were in conversation with one another on sharing generational and community-held knowledges.

LA GUILDE LA GUILDE OPENED IN JUNE with a truncated version of the original plan.

Despite having fewer pieces, the work

by Ruth Cuthand, Marcy Friesen, Sage Paul, Sherry Racette and Riva Farrell Racette, Skawennati, and Ulivia Uviluk glowed in the sunny exhibition spaces.

Mohawk artist Skawennati’s wampum, among the first items seen in this exhibition, was luminous in its simplicity. Sage Paul sculpted Harnesses from rawhide, brass notions, and PVC and placed them on red mannequins. These pieces were fascinating to see as objects of wear and empowerment.

I appreciated Ruth Cuthand’s suspended beaded work, Boil Water Advisory, No. 7 (2016), which discussed the bacteria found in First Nation reserve water samples. This was a smaller version of the installation seen in its entirety at La Guilde in May 2019. In contrast to the larger and busier installation, this version was more striking and eerie; the beaded

bacteria suspended in the clear glass vessels felt more insidious.

In the main exhibition space was Sherry and Riva Farrell Racette’s Little Chickadee (2020), mixed-media work based on family photographs, somewhat eclipsed by the voiceover of Ulivia Uvilik’s (Inuk) four-minute film, Not Just a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Woman (2019). This powerful film short was fronted by the red Beaded Amauti (2019), a tiny beaded sculpture, powerful in its vibrancy in commemoration of the woman who might have worn it.

I appreciated the airy, lighted space of La Guilde, which gave the Indigenous artwork room to breathe. The spaciousness of the exhibition continued with work by Marcy Friesen (Swampy Cree) and Skawennati in the front windows.

These works transcended time from past days to the present and into the future.

Two works by Friesen, My Grandmother’s Garden—Nuuhkim Unihtaauchihchikan (2018), a stretched, floral-beaded caribou hide, and Muskrat Tears (2020), contrasted with the up-to-date florals and camouflage ribbon shirts and trousers worn by Skawennati’s protesters on mannequins

and in the adhesive digital prints fixed to the wall, Calico and Camouflage: Kateri, Activist, Avatar (2020) and Shane, Activist, Avatar (2020).

PIERRE-FRANÇOIS OUELLETTE ARTE CONTEMPORAIN THE NEXT SPACE TO OPEN was Pierre-François Ouellette arte contemporain (PFOAC) with work by Bob Boyer, Hannah Claus, Wally Dion, and Dylan Miner. To finally see Bob Boyer’s (Métis/ Cree) blanket statements in person was a bit like coming into the presence of a Star Being, as his strength and wisdom comes through this work. Work like A Smallpox Issue (1983) situates us within a contemporary Indigenous art history, with the first of the artist’s series of painted blankets. The work reminds the present of the past. In his use of the blankets as a problematic dialogue, Boyer brought together geometric design, personal symbols, and references to colonialism in Canada, as well as environmental and cultural destruction.

above Ruth Cuthand (Plains Cree), Boil Water Advisory, No. 7 (2016), glass beads, resin, found glassware, various sizes.

Installation view with Sage Paul (Dene). Photo: Mike Patten (Cree). opposite Devon Drossel (Métis), ê-kiskisiyahkmiciwin: as we remember food, 2020, seed beads, moose hide, antique cotton apron, 29 × 19 in. Photo: Mike Patton (Cree).

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above Bob Boyer (Métis/ Cree), A Smallpox Issue, 1983, blanket, oil, rawhide, 75 × 48 in., collection of the Saskatchewan Arts Board, 1984-01. Photo: Lori Beavis (Michi Saagiig Anishinaabe).

Hung on the wall in the next room, Hannah Claus’s triptych of red blankets, invaders (2019), and her trade is ceremony (2018) blanket series, are pinned in various patterns with headpins, silverplated ones in the red blankets and copper headpins in the dark grey blankets. Claus uses them to trace symbols of community and to honor the treaties between the original people and the newcomers/ invaders. Claus’s white land map prints, the route that ocicâhk preferred (2017), are a counterpoint to Wally Dion’s (Saulteaux) painted circuit boards. Dion’s Evening star, morning star (2019) is a cross between land mappings and star blanket quilts,

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and shows the artist appreciates how language, customary work by women (making and sewing), and communication come together through the circuit boards as a form of communication, while Claus is interested in the only surviving map drawn by an Indigenous guide. The 18th-century Cree guide, ocicâhk, drew his map with charred wood on birchbark. Claus’s version is a serigraph on laser-etched paper with mulberry paper chine-collé with copper backing. She highlights the negative spaces—lakes, rivers and mountains—of the original map with an overlay of the constellation of the seven dancers as an indication of the need for a new fire to begin.

In contrast, Dylan Miner’s (Métis) grid of small cyanotypes are as luminous as dark blues can be. This work embodies themes Miner returns to again and again in his practice: copper, hunting land rights, and treaties. He references the sacred and the profane, everyday realities in the need for respecting the treaty agreements and making certain that tribal people living on reserves have access to clean drinking water. Cyanotype was developed in 1842, the same year that the Treaty of La Pointe, signed in Michigan, ceded most of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to the United States. The number 176 (years since this treaty) circulates through this work.

The PFOAC exhibition hung together with cohesion that was lacking at Art Mûr, where with the exception of so much of the work being based on textile, fiber, or beading, the viewer sometimes had to wonder where the concept of kinship lay in the planning and proximity of placed works.

STEWART HALL ART GALLERY A NICE SENSE OF CONTINUITY ran between the last two exhibition spaces, with Miner’s work at PFOAC and in the final BACA gallery space, the Stewart Hall Art Gallery, with the placement of Miner’s work among artists who bring their kinship with the land and animals into their practice. Miner’s look back at her// ndaabanaabamaa (2018) at the Stewart Hall Art Gallery, again reflects the artist’s intimate relationship to the land, sky, and

4 page Keshi Ad Shalako pot FAAM .pdf

Great Lakes waters and the significance of nonlinear history to his way of being in the world.

The cyanotypes in the Stewart Hall Art Gallery hung near Warren Cariou’s (Métis) Petrography—Twelve Bitumen Photographs (2014–18). Cariou references the beauty of nature through the use of tar-sand bitumen as a photographic medium to represent oil extraction in the Athabasca Region. Like Miner’s cyanotypes, Cariou’s photography incorporates an antique, photographic method using exposure to sunlight. Cariou’s objective is to divert petroleum from its assigned use and instead direct it toward a new way of seeing. This is the theme of the work in this space; the artists show us images to create a new perspective or reveal knowledge that we should have. For example, the digital prints by Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara, Pile o’ Sápmi (2017) and Pile o’ Sápmi Supreme (2017), feature the heads and skulls of reindeer slaughtered by Norwegian authorities in violation of Indigenous rights. The first is a pile of heads placed in front of the Indre Finnmark District Court in February 2016. The second is a curtain of images of 400 bullet-ridden skulls that mimic two of the Sámi flags.

Placed in a separate room but conducting sound through the gallery space, Pekuakamiulnu artist Sonia Robertson’s waterscape installation work, Mishamishk (2018) is a video projected onto a stretched canvas encircled by beaver pelts tied with red ropes. At the opposite end of the gallery are six large, majestic paintings of caribou and the lands they cross, in all the seasons, by Cree/Inuk artist Margaret Orr. Finally, visual artist Rainer Wittenborn and writer Claus Biegert share their collaboration with the Cree of Eeyou Istchee, The James Bay Project (1979–80), a selection of 40-year-old photographs, drawings, and collages of The Nature, The People, and The Complex, the three themes of this installation. Cree Elders were interviewed before the construction of the northern Quebec hydroelectric project that ultimately flooded their territories. We know and remember these men. They are our kin. They are the grandfathers and great-grandfathers with whiskers and dangling cigarettes in their multilayered winter garb. We remember them, and we recognize that what we are seeing in these photographs is the knowledge they held of the land.

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CONCLUSION THE FIFTH BACA officially ended when the Stewart Hall exhibition closed in mid-September. The sprawling exhibition was uneven in places, but generally the work was strong.

Above all else, it is such a pleasure to see work by contemporary Indigenous artists in many different media come together in spaces not usually occupied in their entirety by such art practices. The exhibition, Kahwatsiretátie : Teionkwariwaienna Tekariwaiennawahkòntie/Honouring Kinship came together despite the lockdown and closures of 2020. In coming together, whether by crossing borders physically or digitally, we have proven that we are in a web of kinship with all our relations, and these bonds cut across the generations through time, memory, and territory.

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ANCIENT TEOTIHUACÁN A Painted City

By Cynthia A. Conides, PhD

T

HE ANCIENT CITY OF TEOTIHUACÁN (pronounced Tā-ō-tē-wä-kän) was one of the most densely populated, powerful, and influential centers in pre-Hispanic Mexico. Located in the northeastern part of the central Valley of Mexico, it is less than an hour drive from Mexico City. A UNESCO World Heritage site, Teotihuacán receives millions of visitors from all nations each year, enthusiastic explorers of the city’s civic and religious architecture, all built by hand and without metal tools, wheeled carts, or beasts of burden. The expansive north-south running Avenue of the Dead, bordered by temple platforms, compares to the “Main Street” of any modern city.

The Pyramid of the Sun, situated on the northeast side of the avenue, stands nearly 20 stories high and once held a temple structure at its summit. Today that very spot hosts scores of visitors who complete the arduous climb of 248 tall and narrow steps and triumphantly mark the occasion with group selfies. Teotihuacán was named by the Aztecs who arrived in the Valley of Mexico more than a thousand years after the city’s founding. The name translates as “the place where the gods were created.” Perhaps our current fascination with this ancient city derives from an innate understanding of the benefits, excitement, and daily challenges associated with living in urban spaces.

The early days of Teotihuacán began around 100 BCE as populations of people from across the valley, estimated at around 80,000, resettled in a place that would eventually grow to encompass eight square miles. During the first 150 years, the three largest pyramid structures were completed: the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, and the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. Their shapes echo the surrounding snowcapped, volcanic mountains. Teotihuacán sustained its population numbers throughout its 750-year existence in part with the influx of immigrants from all parts of Mesoamerica. 1 Like cities today, Teotihuacán was multicultural, and its

1. The region of Mesoamerica comprises the modern countries of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, western Honduras, Nicaragua, and northwestern Costa Rica.

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populace included Maya, Mixtec, and Zapotec residents. As many as 125,000 or more people lived and worked within an estimated 2,000 single-story apartment compounds, some palatial and spacious, others cramped and overcrowded. At its peak, Teotihuacán was the sixth largest city in the world.2 Archaeological remains show evidence of a sophisticated state, yet no physical remains of a ruler or rulers have been found. Material remains, such as imported obsidian, pottery, greenstone, and marine shells, are evidence of expansive trade networks. Teotihuacán’s collapse around 650 CE is believed to have been triggered by internal revolt. In the end, the residents of this “experiment in living”3 left a rich legacy of architecture and artistic products that strongly influenced the civilizations that succeeded them and captivate us to this day. Judging from the vast numbers and varieties of material remains, it is apparent that the majority of Teotihuacán’s citizenry participated in craft production at least part time. There are no written records that inform us of the history or details of life in the ancient city, but information can be gleaned in part from Teotihuacán’s artistic legacy.

In its heyday, Teotihuacán was a painted city. Surfaces of monumental

constructions glistened with pigments, and smooth plaster coatings sparkled with quartz sand. The structures as we know them today, mostly devoid of their painted surfaces, are appreciated by contemporary visitors for their size, design, and sculptural decoration, but not for their former colors.

Hundreds of murals that have survived from the walls of apartment compounds are only a fraction of what was produced. These colorful paintings offer a glimpse into religious rituals

2. René Millon, “The Place Where Time Began: An Archaeologist’s Interpretation of What Happened in Teotihuacan History,” in Teotihuacan: Art from the City of the Gods, ed. Kathleen Berrin and Esther Pasztory (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 17.

3. Esther Pasztory, Teotihuacan: An Experiment in Living (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997).

opposite Teotihuacán. The Avenue of the Dead and Pyramid of the Sun as viewed from the Pyramid of the Moon. The twomile-long north/south avenue extends from the Pyramid of the Moon to the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. Photo: Peter Andersen (CC BY 3.0). above, top Pyramid of the Moon from Pyramid of the Sun. Located at the north end of the Avenue of the Dead. Photo: Jarek Tuszyński (CC BY 4.0). above, bottom Mural fragment with elite male and maguey cactus leaves, 500–550 CE, fresco on wall fragment, 32¾ in. × 45¾ in., Central Mexico, collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund, 1963.252 (CC0).

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above Seated Figure with Butterfly Headdress, ca.

400–700 CE, ceramic with post-fire pigment, 4 × 4½ × 2½ in., Teotihuacán, collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Constance McCormick Fearing, AC1998.209.22 (CC BY 2.5).

Handmade and mold-impressed figurines were made by the millions in the ancient city, with many examples retaining original pigments. In paintings and in three-dimensional art, human figures display large headdresses with insignia proclaiming their social identities.

performed by people in lavish outfits and headdresses, depicted in processional symmetry. Also in these murals, deities are honored and revered for bringing sustaining rainfall and beneficence to humans. The creativity and craftsmanship of ancient artists that recorded clues to life in the ancient city are also present in small-scale paintings produced on portable ceramics.

Teotihuacán’s portable paintings grace the exterior walls of a special form of ceramic, a cylinder-shaped vessel with straight or curved sides, raised on three identical supports.4 The fragile paintings

are executed on a thin ground of white plaster or clay that is applied after the vessel is fired, then decorated with thin washes of mineral-rich pigments in green, yellow, and red, with charcoal for black outlining. These ceramic vessels are among the most highly decorated of all ceramics produced at Teotihuacán and offer glimpses into human activities and social organization. Like the lavishly dressed figures displayed in mural paintings, the painted ceramics are laden with emblems of social identity, achievement, and rank of the people of Teotihuacán.

Considering the variety of identities

4. Cynthia Conides, Made to Order: Painted Ceramics of Ancient Teotihuacan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), 125.

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represented in the portable paintings, it is appropriate to suggest that their owners used them to publicly display and affirm their social positions and affiliations.

Painted ceramics from Teotihuacán are held in museum collections worldwide. There are over 150 known examples, but they were certainly made in far greater numbers. Some are documented from archaeological excavations. It is noteworthy that some were found in burials of individuals of high or mid-level status; other vessels were found as part of group ceremonial activities. Some examples were even found discarded in trash. The decorated wares date mostly from 350 to 550 CE, a time when painted ceramics displayed expanded subjects and a greater variety of compositions and painting styles. Human-centered pictorial compositions and emblematic, styled, human regalia, especially headdresses, become popular themes. Over time, brightly painted ceramics gained in ceremonial importance among Teotihuacán’s citizenry. Affiliation and social status in the paintings are largely defined by oversize headdresses, which are also noted on small-scale, mold-impressed figurines.

Portable paintings typically display human subjects, often weighed down and obscured by lavish garments and feathered headdresses that can be deciphered for their political or social ranking.

Figures carry accoutrements, especially right, top Tripod Vessel with Temple atop a Shield and Crossed Darts, 400–650 CE, ceramic with stucco and post-fire pigment. 5¼ in. high, Teotihuacán, collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Constance McCormick Fearing, AC1998.209.13 (CC BY 2.5). right, bottom Tripod Vessel with Warrior, 400–650 CE, ceramic with stucco and post-fire pigment, 5¼ in high., Teotihuacán, collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Constance McCormick Fearing, AC1996.146.55 (CC BY 2.5).

A feathered headdress representing a coyote with bared fangs frames a masklike face.

Flanking objects include a shield and a staff held in outstretched arms. The lower portion of the figure is obscured by a feathered shield bearing a five-pointed star. Motifs including the serpent, bird, and coyote indicate martial associations of a member of one of several state-run military units, organized under the leadership of tasselheaddress individuals. The ceramic is a reused ware known as Thin Orange, made in Puebla and exported to Teotihuacán.

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above Vessel with Butterfly Headdress, 1–550 CE, ceramic with stucco and postfire pigment, 61/8 × 6¼ in., Teotihuacán, collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. James C. Gruener, 1990.231 (CC0).

Headdresses with distinctive butterfly insignia, including wings, feather-rimmed eyes, and a prominent proboscis are among the most common representations on painted ce ra m i c s . Th e l owe r t i e r contains a serpent’s mouth and may represent sub-ranking in the butterfly institution for the wearer.

shields and staffs, and wear other items that signify their special status such as ear spools, eye rings, necklaces, and bracelets made of greenstone. One of the highest ranking headdresses thus far identified at Teotihuacán is the tassel headdress, with three or five tassels displayed horizontally across the upper register of the headdress.

The numbers may indicate hierarchy within the rank. This headdress had strong political implications and played a role in Teotihuacán’s ruling bureaucracy.

Figures identified with this headdress represented leaders of military units. The

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association of the tassel headdress with architecture indicates a ceremonial as well as militaristic role for people identified by this insignia. On one ceramic, a shield with hand, considered a war emblem, is placed inside the doorway of a temple.

The combination of images suggests the headdress represented state-sanctioned ritual activities related to war.

For Teotihuacán’s citizenr y, headdresses were the ultimate indicators of status. Butterfly headdresses, which display rounded eyes, the curled proboscis, and wings of the creature at the

For Teotihuacán’s citizenry, headdresses were the ultimate indicators of status. very top tier, are ubiquitous on ceramic paintings but are not represented in extant murals. The close association with butterflies and water imagery suggest rituals that took place during the rainy season, a time when butterflies emerge from a state of dormancy from the hot, dry season.5 Important references to procurement activities and trade networks are also represented on eight known paintings of blowgun hunters. A blowgun is a single tube through which projectiles, such as darts, are propelled at a target by blowing through one end. The human figure is shown running, the weapon aimed at quetzal birds, their catches contained in a net bag. Both quetzal birds and cacao were procured from Veracruz by Teotihuacán in large quantities. Blowgun hunters often wear minimal clothing: a loincloth and sandals with a bared upper body are the norm. The bracelets, large circular earplugs, step-pattern face paint, and headdresses are indications that the hunters also had social status.

Quetzal birds inhabit the mountainous, tropical forests of Mexico and Guatemala, hundreds of miles away from Teotihuacán. The birds were prized among pre-Hispanic cultures for their three long, green tailfeathers. These are the feathers recurrently represented in the headdresses of prominent figures in Teotihuacán paintings. Flowering cacao trees, native to Veracruz and the source for cocoa beans and chocolate, alternate with the figures. Darts fill the spaces around the hunters and add an element of dynamic activity to this narrative scene. These paintings suggest that Teotihuacán had a strong economic connection to tropical regions outside of the Valley of Mexico for the acquisition of exotic feathers, used in

above Tripod Vessel with a Blowgunner Scene, 300–500 CE, ceramic with stucco and post-fire pigment, 6¼ in. high, Teotihuacán, collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Ethel and Julian Goldsmith, 1991.478 (CC0).

The blowgun hunter theme is unique to painted ceramics and represents a narrative painting style.

abundance among the city’s elites and for acquisition of luxury foodstuffs.

For the last 50 years, the story of painting at Teotihuacán has unfolded through the study of wall paintings. Until recently, less attention was given to the portable arts. Mural paintings, however, do not tell the entire story. The portable paintings on ceramics produced at Teotihuacán are valuable records of early artistic production, adding to our knowledge of life in the ancient city. They are rich resources for identifying some of the social, political, and economic activities

of Teotihuacán’s citizenry. Although the ancient artists remain anonymous, the paintings connect the modern observer to their creative processes and inform us about the social statuses and activities of urban people in the Western Hemisphere’s first great metropolis. Over time, as more examples of the delicate artworks come to light through archaeological excavations, more information will be revealed about the production, use, and meanings of these unique objects, which are remarkable for having survived for more than a millennium.

Cynthia A. Conides, PhD, associate professor of history and director of museum studies at the State University of New York Buffalo State College, is the author of Made to Order: Painted Ceramics of Ancient Teotihuacan (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018).

5. In Mexico, the rainy season generally runs from late May or June through October. The dry season, from November through April, is marked by very warm weather and little rain.

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Healing Spirit Dresses in Four Direction colors

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PROFILE

CHEROKEE NATION CERAMIC ARTIST & SCULPTOR

BILL GLASS JR.

By Candice Byrd (Osage/Quapaw/Cherokee Nation)

I

ASKED BILL if he preferred to be interviewed over the phone considering this time of quarantine and social distancing because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This is the kind of thing I’d prefer to do in person,” he replied. I weighed the risks as my imagination played a mental juggling trick.

We could be outside. He’s my elder.

It would be very easy to social distance.

The caseloads around the Cherokee communities of Locust Grove are rising.

It would just be us, but there’s been an outbreak linked to Kenwood mere miles away. I’ll be masked. There had been three recent deaths in that community alone in one week. My elder, family friend, the best friend of my late shell-carving teacher Knokovtee Scott (Cherokee Nation/ Muscogee, 1951–2019), and a leader in the Cherokee artist community asked me to come to see him.

“When is a good time for you?” I asked him.

WHEN HE MET ME OUTSIDE of his house, we both kept our distance, our feet firmly planted on the recently rain-softened earth. It was evident to me we were both struggling to keep from shaking hands. Bill does not look his age.

He’s 70. He’s a tall, identifiably Cherokee man, whom I’ve never seen without his signature driver cap on his head. He is dressed modestly in a summer button-up shirt, denim jeans, and a bandana around his neck.

“I was a late bloomer when it comes to studying formalized art,” Bill Glass Jr. begins. I am sitting at least ten feet away from Bill across a large cutting table that reminds me of my grandmother’s sewing table. My mask is on, and we are timidly

facing each other but not directly. His muscular potter’s forearms are crossed in front of his chest.

Bill and I know each other from our circle of mutual artist friends. I also took a class from his son, Demos, at Glass Studio, where Connie Glass, Bill’s wife, would fix an early supper for the students before they made their way back home.

Before that, Bill used to show at the same Native American art shows my maternal grandma, Ardina Moore, would show. It’s been more than a year since I visited Glass Studio, a two-man workshop in a dense, woody area that houses the apparatus, schematics, and variety of tools to create their large-scale collaboration pieces.

The Cherokee Nation designated Bill Glass Jr. of Locust Grove, Oklahoma, a Cherokee National Treasure in 2009. He is a full-time artist as well as an advocate for other artists. In the 40-plus years working

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as an artist, Bill’s award highlights include recognition as a Master Artist by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee in 1986; recognition as the Red Earth Honored One in 2012; Honored Elder Artist at the Tulsa Indian Art Festival in 2015; awards won at Santa Fe Indian Art Market, the Heard Museum Guild Fair, the Philbrook Indian Annual, and the Cherokee Art Market. He and Demos helped craft the terrazzo medallion pieces for the BOK Center in Tulsa.

Bill was born on March 15, 1950, at W. W. Hastings Indian Hospital in Tahlequah to Bill Glass Sr. and Ellen Jean Justice Glass. Bill Glass Jr. spent much of his childhood traveling with his family to the Southwest where his father (a former welding instructor at Haskell Institute, now Haskell Indian Nations University) was working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a student counselor and then

BILL GLASS JR.

back to northeastern Oklahoma in the summers to spend time with extended family.

In the early 1970s, a teen Bill Glass Jr. attended a two-man art exhibition featuring T. C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo, 1946–1978) and Sherman Chaddlesone (Kiowa, 1947–2013) at the Central State University museum in Edmond, Oklahoma. “I could see where they were coming from,” he says. He took notice of their colors, the impressive five-by-sixfoot canvases, the “looseness” of the lines and large brush strokes. His art teacher at Central State encouraged him to enroll at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, where Cannon and Chaddlesone had studied.

EARTHEN FOUNDATIONS “WHAT THEY EMPHASIZED at IAIA was that they wanted you to leave with some sort of style,” Bill recounts. “At the institute, they wanted you to research your own tribal history. They wanted you to work in things that related to your own culture.” For two years Bill explored different art forms at IAIA. “It was kind of loose there. You could take drawing, studio art. You could take ceramics all day if you wanted to. I took ceramics, drawing, design. I took sculpture under Allan Houser. My ceramics teacher was Ralph Pardington. He gave me a key to the studio so that I could go in and work at night on my own.”

At IAIA in Santa Fe, immersed in art galleries and murals featuring the iconography and the art forms of the Southwestern Indigenous peoples, the young Cherokee artist began to ask himself, What part can I play? Where is the Southeastern art? How do I fit into this big picture?

“What I thought was really cool was that you could learn just as much from your peers as you could from your teachers. Students shared with each other. We talked about what made good art.” When asked about which peers had

the greatest impact on his style, Bill said, “Mike Romero [Taos/Santa Clara Pueblo] and Mike Zillioux [Gila River Pima/ Cheyenne/Pawnee, 1952–2020] were both talented painters there at the time. We are lucky as Indian people because we can still have cultural retention through our art.”

Perpetuation of living cultures through art is a concept that deeply impacted the young Bill at IAIA in those two short years. Throughout his career, he would revisit this artistic philosophy and its application to Southeastern Woodland Mississippian art. In 1976 Bill demonstrated bowmaking at Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park in Georgia where a tour guide told him about the Lizella clay harvested from the area. The artist has worked almost exclusively with Lizella clay ever since.

above Cone Head, 1985, 14 in. high, clay, glazes, metal base, private collection. Photo: A. Meredith. opposite Bill Glass Jr. with The Discussion Revolves, 2017, clay, glazes, stainless steel, 31 × 31 × 3 in., Southeastern Art Show and Market best of show winner, Sulphur, Oklahoma. Image courtesy of the artist.

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PROFILE

As the director, Bill visited Cherokee country in northeastern Oklahoma and organized art classes in rural communities. “The strongest category of art was basketry,” he recalls. “I got to know most of them [basket makers], and I used them as instructors for my classes in different communities. Mary Foreman was the one I used the most. I sent Mildred Ketcher, Thelma Forrest, and Vivian McCullough to North Carolina to research the rivercane baskets.”

Bill always pushed for his instructors and his classes to research and explore working with the natural materials used in precontact and pre-statehood media. He organized leatherworking, silversmithing, and bow-making classes.

He recruited a former IAIA classmate and fellow scholar of Southeastern iconography, the jeweler and shell-carver Knokovtee Scott, to teach silversmithing for a Cherokee Nation venture called Cherokee Marketable Arts. By 1979, Bill decided to leave his job with the Cherokee Nation to become a full-time artist.

PUBLIC ART & LEGISLATION

A REVIVALIST above Sleeping Under Watchful Eyes, 2007, clay, glazes, 173/4 × 133/4 × 133/8 in. Both images courtesy of the artist. opposite Team Gadugi, public art installation at The Passage at Ross's Landing, 2005, including seven glazed ceramic disks, 72 in. diameter each, City of Chattanooga, Tennessee.

WHEN BILL FINISHED HIS DEGREE at IAIA, he returned to Tahlequah in 1975 and enrolled in Northeastern State University (NSU). He intended to finish his bachelor’s degree and teach art, but the transition from the IAIA’s flexible structure, which had allowed students to form their own artistic philosophies, was difficult.

“I couldn’t adjust to the university’s more rigid approach of learning art.” He left NSU after a semester to work as the arts and crafts director for the Cherokee Nation in 1976.

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WHEN I THINK OF BILL AND HIS ART, I think of how well he works with others. He is quick to share the credit and lift up his fellow Native artists. When I ask him about creating art in community, he says with amusement, “It’s a lot of good chuckles, and stories start to come out.

When I get to put together an art team, I like that.”

In 2004, the City of Chattanooga, Tennessee, commissioned Bill Glass Jr. to create a monumental public art piece for the Tennessee River Walkway known as the Passage at Ross’s Landing. The landing is named for John Ross, who served as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation from 1828 to 1866. Ross’s Landing is a historically significant place for Cherokee people since it is one of the sites where Cherokees embarked on the Trail of Tears.

More than a century and a half later, this Tennessee (ᏔᎾᏏ, Tanasi in Cherokee)

BILL GLASS JR.

community asked for Cherokee artists to make visible the lifeways and iconography of the precolonial Southeast once more.

Bill assembled a team of six people to complete the project, which took seven months. His team included metal shop manager, linguist, researcher, and designer Kenneth Foster (Cherokee Nation); ceramicist and sculptor Gary Allen (Cherokee Nation/Diné); designer and producer Robby McMurtry (Comanche descent); writer and designer Knokovtee Scott; sculptor Demos Glass; and head ceramic sculptor Bill himself.

Together, they formed Cherokee Artists Gadugi Inc. ᎦᏚᎩ, or gadugi, is a Cherokee word commonly translated as

“community” or “working together,” a fitting name for the group and the project.

The team sculpted seven stainless steel and glazed ceramic medallions measuring six feet in diameter to be placed along a river access walkway, which ends at a reflecting pool with a twelve-foot, stainless steel water spider in it. The installation at the Passage also includes several large metal cutouts of stickball players created by Robby McMurtry.

An excerpt from the team artist statement on the plaque reads, “It is our team’s honor and privilege to complete this circle begun by our ancestors so many years ago by bringing back to this area the vitality and visual strengths of our Cherokee forefathers’ artwork. Through

this art installation, we feel as though we are symbolically returning to our ancestral homeland.”

Bill tells me, “After we completed the job in Chattanooga, Chad Smith [then Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation] asked me, ‘How did they fund that?’ I told him, ‘They got donations and had a tax.

They got 1.5 percent on all motel fees and they support the arts with that. You should think about doing something like that for us. For the arts.’ He passed an act that states that all construction projects over $500,000, that 1 percent would go to the purchase of Cherokee art for the facility.

“What developed next was the issue of copyright ownership,” Bill continues, since many people at the time did not

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PROFILE

above The Healer, 2010, clay, glazes, stainless steel frame, 48 × 48 × 3½ in. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Raccoon Rattle, ca.

1992, clay, glazes, 11 × 4 in., private collection. Photo: A. Meredith.

understand that artists who sell an original artwork retain the copyright and rights to reproduce the work unless they specifically sell that as well. “Myself, along with a small group of other artists, got our tribal council to adopt another act that protects artist copyrights. I feel like the adoption of these two acts has helped and will continue to help Cherokee artists’ chances to survive now and on into the future by providing opportunity.”

For a while Bill paid a price for his active role in these events, but in 2010

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he won the Cherokee Art Market Best of Show award for The Healer, his glazed ceramic and steel piece, which Cherokee Nation Businesses purchased.

ART LEGACY “WHAT ARE THE PIECES or projects that you are most proud of? What sticks out?” I ask.

“One thing while I was back at the institute, the students invited a prestigious representative from the Bureau of Indian

BILL GLASS JR.

Affairs to attend a meeting at which they wanted to register some complaints,” Bill answers. “Some of us went to a sweat the night before. The leader of the sweat said, ‘Say what you feel. What’s in your heart, say it.’ I said, ‘We should get the alumni, teachers, and anybody related to the school and have an independent museum or a gallery for them. One not restricted by BIA guidelines. Take those funds created from sales and use that to support the student fees and cost.’

“I was just brainstorming. Several years later, I began to hear about an alumni museum. I’m proud of that.”

Perhaps the thing that makes Bill Glass Jr. swell with the most pride is talking about partnering with his son, Demos, to create massive public artwork.

This kind of pride comes from knowing that his art legacy, the boundaries he pushed, and the experimentation will carry on to the next generation.

“What’s extended my career is partnering with Demos,” says Bill. They started collaborating on projects in 2005 while they were working on the Passage in Chattanooga. “I added on to the studio, and it became Glass Studio. I got to scale up my work. My brain got to get bigger,” he observes with a hearty laugh. “Demos has been a real partner to me. We get to talk art. We get to critique each other. We split our collaborations 50-50.”

THE CHEROKEE NATIONAL HISTORY MUSEUM THE NEW CHEROKEE NATIONAL HISTORY MUSEUM in Tahlequah boasts one of Bill’s latest ambitious, collaborative installations. Bill managed another Cherokee art team with Demos Glass (sculptor), Mary Beth Timothy (painter), Dan Mink (graphic designer), and David Chaudoin (ceramic sculptor).

Migration from Turtle Island was unveiled at the museum’s grand opening on August 8, 2019. The installation spans three walls of the main stairwell. When I first experienced the piece in person, I took it all in at once and recognized its story—our Cherokee migration.

Twelve hand-painted, resin-cast canoes carrying precontact-era tattooed men and women, wearing shell accoutrements, are displayed along the first flight of stairs.

These canoes are from oral histories of a time when the Cherokees had more than seven clans. The walls become the vast ocean as the viewer follows the story to a landing where the majestic giant snake, the Uktena, stretches toward the ceiling in a swirl of dark colors signifying the

separation of the group in two by some mysterious cause. I paused when I looked up at the ceiling. Long, narrow, wooden canoes hang from metal fixtures at various angles that suggest capsizing. At the last flight of stairs, the seven remaining canoes represent the seven surviving clans of the Cherokee people today.

REFLECTIONS MY TIME WITH BILL transports me back to the past to the experimental times in the Native art communities and the golden age of the Native American art shows that once dappled across Oklahoma like the many tribes relocated here. It recalls memories of artist friends dearly held and gone too soon.

As our interview draws to a close, we speak optimistically of our hopes for the future, beyond the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond ourselves. When asked about how he wants onlookers of his art to feel and what he hopes they might take with them, Bill says he wants his audience to know that it is Cherokee art that reflects his own lived time and places. “It’s got to be good. It’s got to be dang good. I want them to stand back and marvel at it.”

BDGLASSSTUDIO.COM Candice Byrd (Quapaw/Osage/Cherokee Nation) is a theater maker living in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. She earned her MFA in performing arts from the Savannah College of Art and Design and her bachelor of science degree from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa.

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PROFILE

NORTHERN PAIUTE/PIT RIVER PRINTMAKER & MIXED-MEDIA ARTIST

JEAN LAMARR

By Jean Merz-Edwards

T

HE ROBUST CAREER OF C OMMUNIT Y ARTIST/ ACTIVIST Jean LaMarr began in fourth grade when a teacher asked her to create the school’s mural, Sir Francis Drake Christening the Indians. A watershed moment, painting the mural revealed LaMarr’s artistic talent, introduced her to the power of public art, and brought to the fore institutional misrepresentations of Native people. Since that fateful day in 1951, systemic racism and its foundational stereotypes remain the target of LaMarr’s art.

Methodology also took root with Sir Francis Drake Christening the Indians.

The irony of a Paiute/Pit River youth painting an historical Englishman widely known for plundering places such as the present-day Americas in the act of “christening the Indians” is clear. LaMarr states, “When the non-Indian people came here, they assumed there was no religion, no Christianity, no spirituality. If they did see Indians dancing, they thought it was evil. … In fourth grade our teacher was into telling her truth. She believed that bringing Christianity was part of Manifest Destiny to help these poor, pitiful savages.”

To resolve this incongruity between mainstream, historical narratives and the specific histories of Native Americans, LaMarr often engages a trickster’s approach by presenting difficult topics in a palatable way. For example, one might first be drawn to her depiction of an ornately dressed, anthropomorphic coyote due to its lovely aesthetics and humorous subject.

Upon closer examination, however, one recognizes that Ms. Coyote is Having Junípero Serra Over for Dinner (2015) contests the record of Junípero Serra as a Roman Catholic saint who founded the earliest missions of California.

Born and raised in Susanville,

California, LaMarr is a member of the Pit River Tribe and the Wada-Ticutta band of Northern Paiute. Later in life she returned to the Susanville Indian Rancheria with her husband, LeRoy “Spence” Spencer (Navajo, 1945–2015). The two met at Philco-Ford Technical Institute in Santa Clara, California, where LaMarr studied drafting in 1969 under the Indian Relocation Act. Recognizing her calling to higher education, she headed to San Jose in 1970.

Three years later, LaMarr earned an associate degree from San Jose City College and began studying art at the University of California, Berkeley. Already mobilized through participation in events like occupations at Alcatraz, Pit River, and Wounded Knee, LaMarr claimed her place as a community artist/activist when she graduated with her BFA from Berkeley in 1976.

Since then, teaching engagements throughout the West Coast have included places such as the San Francisco Art

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Institute, the University of Oregon, Eugene, and the California Department of Corrections. From 1987 through 1992, LaMarr worked as a professor of printmaking at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the following year she taught in Wanganui, New Zealand, as an international guest printmaker.

Today from her home base in Susanville on the rancheria, LaMarr continues as a powerful force for change.

Current projects include exhibitions with the Great Basin Native Artists (GBNA); recording oral histories from elders and working with the youth in her community; managing the Native American Graphic Workshop, a print shop that she founded in 1995; and creating a new installation in Berkeley to complement her 1995 mural series, The Ohlone Journey. She is also working on her retrospective, The Art of Jean LaMarr, which will be on view at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno from February 6 through August 8, 2021.

G B NA c o f o u n d e r M e l i s s a

JEAN LAMARR

above Some Kind of Buckaroo, 1990, screen print, 26 × 38 in., collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, The Robert S. and Dorothy J. Keyser Foundation Art of the Greater West Collection Fund. opposite Jean LaMarr in her studio. Photo: ©2020 Susan M. Mantle. All images courtesy of the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno.

Melero-Moose (Northern Paiute/Modoc) reflects on LaMarr’s career: “Jean is a treasure in our region as one of the few Indigenous artists who stood up to discrimination and inequality in her community and the art world. She and her generation of artists paved the way for me and all our Great Basin Native artists, so our journey has less obstacles to succeed.

I have been in awe of her and her work for so many years. She is a true hero.”

I had the honor and privilege to visit with Jean LaMarr to discuss her life and work as an artist.

Sagebrush fires are put out quickly, but the forest fires take a long time because it’s so dry. Every summer I wonder, When do we get clean air? When do we get to see a blue sky?

We will be able to see the sky and all kinds of shooting stars in August after the smoke clears. The stars seem so close.

When we are printing, we go outside and see them and the beautiful Milky Way.

JME: How are things these days in northeastern California?

JL: In 1995 I started it because I wanted to work with the community. At first there were boys and girls from the community—these kids are so talented. Then there were five Native California women each year for three years (a total of 15 women) called Weaving Contemporary Traditions. We did some shows together.

JL: It’s been pretty smoky here on the edge of the Great Basin because of lightning fires. We are on the eastern side of the Sierras and have beautiful mountains.

There’s not been a lot of snow this year.

JME: When did you found the Native American Graphic Workshop? How has it changed over the years?

The project produced three exhibitions that showed at American Indian Contemporary Arts in San Francisco.

After that, I worked with ten AfricanAmerican girls from San Francisco aged 10 to 14, and then Siberian Yakut men.

There was a language barrier, but they went to Santa Fe and sold out everything that they produced at the workshop.

I follow the needs of the community. We’ve had workshops for the Great Basin Native American Artists and for the elders. We have not been able to get together lately because of COVID. Things have slowed down around here. Soon I’ll start opening everything up again.

JME: As a community artist/activist, where do you find the greatest opportunity for expression in our politically turbulent climate?

JL: In the public with community art.

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PROFILE

Art should be for everybody to see, and people love murals. Even with COVID, the murals are open. In Susanville, there are murals for when tourists come through. [One of LaMarr’s murals, Our Ancestors, Our Future (1999), honors seven local Native American ancestors].

Having murals of Native American people shows that we are still here. There are a lot of non-Indians doing murals and interpreting, because they think there are not Indian artists around. Murals, sculptures, and installations about Native people need to be done by Native people. That’s what I did with the mural for the Ohlone people [in Berkeley].

JME: Would you talk a little about the Ohlone mural?

JL: The band I work with is the Muwekma Ohlone. I went and interviewed all the elders to find out what they wanted on the mural. They wanted the beginning of their life with the coyotes, the beginning when they first met a white man, all the people that are still alive and still being Indians of the Bay Area.

The whole mural is called The

Ohlone Journey (1995). There are four panels: Coyote Creation Story, European Entry into the Bay Area, Modern Life Transitions, and The Strong Walk Back to the Future. Modern Life Transitions is based on photographs of Ohlone people from the 1900s to the 2000s that I got from the families. It communicates the connection-continuance of those people who could have gone into the melting pot but continued speaking their language and telling their stories. They are starting to dance [again] … and having workshops [on] how to make their regalia. They run their tribal meetings in the Muwekma language, and I’m so proud of that.

In the fourth mural, The Strong Walk Back to the Future, I used the photos of the time. It shows Ohlone teenagers from 1995 walking into the future, because they realize how important it is to continue their culture. All Indian teenagers are strong leaders in the Ohlone tribe now.

The Ohlone Journey is by a children’s park, so a lot of kids come around there.

They like to see the coyote, the hunting birds, and the five little coyote boys.

It makes them interested; and when

they grow up, they start reading and learning what those images are about.

For non-Indian children, it’s a beginning to learn about Native Americans other than on television. That is where I learned about American Indians. The depictions were horrible there. We have a real stereotype that I’m trying to fight.

Now we are working on the next installation. There are different indigenous plants to the Bay Area around the mural.

There will be two meditation benches on the corner with salmon going upstream that represent the renewed acknowledgment that the Ohlone people are still here. They just put in the foundation for a grinding rock. I’m going to have an image of the Big Head Dancers inside the rock.1 There will be a petroglyph that is sandblasted into the rock. Then there will be a grinding area for grinding acorns. All high schools and those studying in fourth grade can come there. We are providing information to the school districts for their visits.

JME: Throughout your career, the themes of racism remain unapologetically a focus of your work. What

1. The Big Head dance, a men’s dance requiring elaborate headgear, is an expression of the Kuksu religion shared by many Central and Northern California tribes.—Ed.

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JEAN LAMARR

thoughts do you have about the recent attention systemic racism has gained?

JL: What took so long? Martin Luther King Jr. did this 40 years ago. I got into Berkeley because Third World College established their ethnic studies program, and Native Americans got funds to go to school. It’s more difficult now. We need to get more of our students into these higher institutions. While at San Jose Community College, I met some wonderful instructors, especially the art teachers. They had a big [American] Indian community in San Jose because of the relocation program. I was there on relocation to learn a trade. Many took welding, and I took drafting. The instructors said, “Jean, you’re so good at math, you can get through college.” I hadn’t thought about college at all before that, because it had not been presented to me.

Today we need more of our young people to get into school, to become the teachers, the writers, the artists of these beautiful creations. Be the creators rather

than the non-Indians doing it for us.

We need to do it ourselves. We have the ability.

JME: What is your hope for this time, and how is it showing up in your art?

JL: I try to be positive. I’m trying to expose all the negative and how we accept it as a norm.

JME: You have a coyote way of talking about difficult things …

JL: Yes. In Mixed Blessings[: New Art in a Multicultural America], Lucy Lippard talks about it. Sometimes I like to present it in a humorous way. Indian people have often survived because we make jokes about stuff. It makes us feel better. When someone dies, we talk about the funny things they used to do. Everybody is happy and laughing about what they used to do. We bring up positive things, but there is something painful underneath

above Going Back to the Rez, 1974, oil on canvas, 36 × 50 in., collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, The Robert S. and Dorothy J. Keyser Foundation Art of the Greater West Collection Fund. opposite The Ohlone Journey, 1995, mural located in Ohlone Park, Berkeley, California.

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not a man pretending to be a woman!

She’s a female coyote!” Everybody thinks there are only male coyotes. Well, how do they get there without a female? There must be a female coyote for the male to get there.

JME: Who have been the greatest inspirations of your career?

above Dolly Dingle, 1994, box assemblage, mixed media.

Image courtesy of the artist and the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno. opposite Washo Indian Woman w i t h Pa p o o s e, 1 9 9 4 , b ox assemblage, mixed media.

Image courtesy of the artist and the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno.

and that’s death. But we are still laughing.

Death is a part of life, and it should be. I don’t think our Creator made us to live forever … just for a little while. Ms. Coyote Is Having Junípero Serra Over for Dinner is an example of one of these works.

It’s an installation where Ms. Coyote has on furs, diamonds, rhinestones, and pearls. She’s got eyelashes, and high heels.

She’s wearing a belt with hanging guns and knives and bombs—different kinds of weapons. Also, on the belt I put barbed wire fence, which was bad for Indian people. It’s what was used to lock up and imprison us. These are all little statements about violence.

In front of her on the floor, a path leads up to a little wooden monk statue that I found in Santa Fe and looks just like Junípero Serra. She’s coming over for dinner to get him. She’s had it. Ms. Coyote is coming to town, and she is mad at Junípero Serra for what he has done to all the California Indians. I got the idea when I was with my family watching The Silence of the Lambs.

Some people think she’s a male coyote dressed as a woman. I say, “She’s

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JL: My grandmother, who made rugs out of fabric scraps; my mom who encouraged me and bought art supplies without my dad knowing, because he wanted me to go into the forest service or [work for] Bank of America; and my uncle Joe Ruiz, who would come over and draw. I was fascinated with his drawing because it was so good. And [Francisco] Goya, Joseph Zirker, Warrington Colescott.

I used to look at art history books.

Everything was pretty. Then I found work by Warrington Colescott that was aesthetically pleasing and political. I was so surprised to see someone in a history book who was political, because back then it was a taboo. I did a lot of research on him. I thought he was gone, because he was in a book, which usually means you are gone.

In the 1990s I was at a national art convention in Kansas City. While visiting a museum, a man was looking at a piece of art, and I was, too. We started chatting. I didn’t know who he was. We were saying what we liked and didn’t like about the work; what the artist did do and what maybe he should have done. The stranger said, “Do you want to go down there to see some Van Goghs?” I said, “Okay.” We were critiquing Van Goghs and then he introduced himself. Warrington Colescott. One of my idols. I thought I was going to fall through those fancy marble floors when he told me his name.

Also Chicano [and Mexican] artists.

[José Clemente] Orozco inspired me for his murals, and Raymond Patlan who I met at UC Berkeley. He was going there and introduced me to murals. He talked to me about how elitist Berkeley was because they didn’t want to show people how to do murals or screen printing. They had a separate area for Chicano studies where they did screen printing. I learned everything on the side while I was taking my other classes. I met Patricia Rodriguez. She

JEAN LAMARR

is another printmaker I really care about.

These Chicano artists taught me that art is for the community and is for everyone, not just for the elitists and wealthy museums. Art plays an important role as collecting history … collecting community history because when certain things go on, they will put murals up … just like the murals are going up now. They show current events, like with the mural of George Floyd [in Minneapolis]. Murals aren’t forever like the Michelangelo has to be forever. Community art can be changed; it can change with history.

JME: What is the greatest experience you have had as an artist?

JL: I’ve recorded elders for a long time. It’s important to do this because we are losing our elders. For so long our community was traumatized by the boarding schools.

My father would not talk about it, because he was told not to talk about it. His father was a major [cultural] consultant. I read about some of his stories. They were fantastic, and I wondered why our dad never told us anything like this. After he passed, I found all these recordings of my grandfather, Lyman LaMarr [Illmawi, 1890–1957] who had been a consultant. It was just amazing to me.

JME: You found recordings of your grandfather?

JL: Around 30 years ago an ethnologist contacted my cousin, Dr. [Darryl] Babe Wilson (Achumawi/Atsugewi 1939– 2014). He was Pit River and wrote and published a lot. The ethnologist found him through his work. Her house had burned down, and she barely saved these boxes full of research she had done. She came up here, Babe came up here, and we met at my sister’s house. We got to read the research and she gave all the records to Babe. Listening to my grandfather tell stories I had never heard inspired me.

I started interviewing people with cassette tapes, or whatever I could get, before video came out. I’ve recorded stories from the Ohlone community, the Pit River, the Paiute, and the Maidu.

These oral histories are so important to

communities. I went through Berkeley’s records, and they didn’t have oral histories, because at the time anthropologists figured they would take pictures of us for evidence—that we were the people living here before them and this is how we looked. Nothing about interviewing or talking to us.

I asked one of my grandmas about that. Alfred Kroeber photographed her. He’s the one who found Ishi [Yahi, ca. 1861–1916], so now he’s a famous anthropologist. She said he didn’t ask her anything. Somebody just wrote down her name. That was it. Not if she was married, if she had children, what her tribe was.

There was no name on the photograph either. It just said, Lassen County, native.

There are all these stories in the Indian community that we never hear.

These oral histories are so valuable, especially because they are sources of

information for our young people to learn about their historical leaders. Not George Washington. Not Abraham Lincoln. Let’s hear about our own warriors, our own leaders, our medicine women, and Indian doctors. I want our young people to be proud of where they came from and who their ancestors were. I want to build a historical society and come up with materials where kids could read about the local Indian until these stories get printed in regular books.

JME: What is your advice to artists starting their careers—particularly female?

JL: Let the negative go. It’s just like how rain gets on a bird’s back and just falls right off. That’s what you have to do. Resist that negative. That’s what birds do, and then they fly away.

GREATBASINNATIVEARTISTS.COM Jean Merz-Edwards, an art historian and author based in Salina, Kansas, earned her graduate certificate in women’s and gender studies and her master’s degree in art history from the University of Oklahoma.

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MOHAWK PHOTOGRAPHER & FILMMAKER

SHELLEY NIRO

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

B

ORN IN NIAGARA FALLS, New York, in 1954, Shelley Niro grew up on Six Nations of the Grand River reserve community in Southwestern Ontario. She is a member of the Turtle Clan of the Kanien'kehaka Nation and currently lives in Brantford, Ontario. In 1972 Niro received a diploma from Cambrian College in Sudbury, Ontario, and pursued a career in the arts. She graduated with honors from the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University) in Toronto with a fine arts degree in painting and sculpture in 1990, and soon after produced a body of photographs that captured her and her loved ones in situations that challenged stereotypes of Indigenous people. With iconic works such as The Rebel (1987), Mohawks in Beehives (1991), and The 500 Year Itch (1992), Niro took agency over representation and thus negated the colonial history of photography. Often funny but poignantly crafted, they also offer fierce counter-narratives to destructive images of Indigenous women and girls. In 1997 Niro received her MFA degree from the University of Western Ontario (now Western University) and soon began experimenting with different media, including film, painting, sculpture, beadwork, and installation.

That same year, the National Museum of American History named her a fellow.

Niro’s fascination with cinema, particularly the misconceptions of Indigenous people portrayed in Westerns, led Niro to write and direct several films. Her short film The Shirt (2003), a companion piece to her acclaimed photographic project that features artist Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (Navajo/Seminole/ Muscogee), showed at the Venice Biennale and the Sundance Film Festival.

Niro’s work resides in numerous public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Art Gallery of Hamilton. She has received several prestigious awards including the Scotiabank Photography Award, the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, the Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award, and an honorary doctorate from OCAD University. Niro is one of North America’s most important contemporary artists.

MRS: I’ve admired your work for a long time. What themes or subjects are you currently working with?

SN: I did a film a couple of years ago and I think I’m still recovering from that, because it took me so long to get it produced.

And, of course, the editing aspect of the film just seems to suck a lot of the energy out of you.

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I’ve been working on another film script. I’m working with three other people, and I don’t know if we’re at liberty to even talk about this project because we’re in the process of doing research and figuring out how we’re going to put it together. We’re coming up with a script about Pocahontas [Powhatan, ca. 1596–1617] and Joseph Brant [Mohawk, 1743–1807]. We thought, these two characters are so iconic in American history and they’re given a jokester persona about them. People don’t look at them seriously.

People don’t want to relate to them as being important figures.

They just sort of think, I can say whatever I want about these guys.

But we’re not out to say specifically Joseph Brant is a good guy, but instead have debates within the material. So maybe the conclusion will come off saying that he wasn’t such a great guy? At least we’re trying to poke around there and see what we come up with.

SHELLEY NIRO

above Mohawks in Beehives, 1991, hand-tinted black-and-white photograph, 8 × 10 in. All images courtesy of the artist. opposite Shelley Niro in her self-portrait, Abnormally Aboriginal, 2016, digital photograph, edition of 5, 20 × 24 in.

MRS: I believe you are one of the most important contemporary artists of our time. Your accomplishments and accolades are numerous. Why do you think your work resonates with audiences, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous?

SN: Hmm … I don’t know. I think there has to be a certain amount of satisfaction in the work. I’m hoping that when I’m making the work that I have … a level of “Wow, that’s my best work ever!” Then you send it out, and sometimes it doesn’t get any notice or response or anything like that, and I think, That was my best work! I don’t know, sometimes I think it’s a fluke that it gets some kind of recognition.

MRS: You live in the City of Brantford, and I work at Glenhyrst, the city’s regional public art gallery. Brantford

is adjacent to Six Nations of the Grand River, the largest reserve community in Canada and the site of your early years.

As part of your 1991 series, Mohawks in Beehives, you and your sisters dressed as alter egos and “invaded” downtown Brantford as an “exercise in liberation,” as a reclamation of colonial space.

Considering that high rents in major cities are pushing artists out to live in smaller, regional cities, is there potential now for more works that use these places as subject matter like you did nearly 30 years ago?

SN: I think there’s a lot of potential to do that. I certainly don’t want to say that artists should be doing this or artists should be doing that. I think it’s about an idea. For me at that particular time, we just thought, Let’s just go do this, and go have some fun in downtown Brantford. Let’s

get strangely looked at while we’re laughing our heads off in a restaurant. It’s like medicine. Sometimes there’s bad medicine, and sometimes there’s good medicine. It just so happened that that day it was good medicine for us. It was good timing.

MRS: What pulls you to photography?

SN: Well, the interest is mainly just taking photographs of your family and archiving your surroundings. I grew up on the reserve, so I was really poor. I didn’t have enough money to have a camera, take pictures, go and develop them, build this archive, so there was none of that. When I learned the skills of how to take film, put it in the camera, develop the film, and then you have an image in front of you, to me it was very much like magic. It’s like, “Wow, I can do this, too!” Just that feeling of being able to do it was amazing.

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Especially people of my age and from my generation—we came through that era where there were no images of Indian people.

Of course cameras have developed now and anybody can take a picture. If you have a cellphone you can record your own life on a daily basis. But it took me a long time to switch over from film to digital. It was a whole different learning curve for me. I started really enjoying digital. You can do a lot with cameras.

MRS: When Indigenous artists take up photography, is it an inherently political act?

SN: I think so. Especially people of my age and from my generation—we came through that era where there were no images of Indian people. There were commodities. The image was a commodity used in advertising or used to further the non-Native cause. So I think people who are my age are so sensitive to that, and it’s something that we use in a really constructive way. It’s appreciated; we don’t take it for granted. I don’t know if that’s political.

When you think of what Native people had

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to go through to get to now … it’s almost like the younger generation doesn’t think about it.

MRS: Family, close relationships, and love are fundamental threads that bind much of your work. Can love be a methodology? Is it a means of understanding?

SN: I think it is. I think love is so important. But it’s the word love [that] is a Western/European invention. I think it controls hearts, and it controls people. I’ve been thinking about pop music a lot and how it seems to be geared toward “Oh, my love that I will never have” or that it’s always chasing something. I don’t use the word love a lot, especially in my films.

One of the actors in my films pointed out that “this is a love story but you never use the word love in it.” I said, “Well, it’s a construct, and it’s something that I don’t want to adhere to.” I think it needs to be felt and more rooted in the community

SHELLEY NIRO

rather than putting a big stamp on it. I think it’s something that you have to work for and not romanticize. I do think about love a lot, but I don’t want it to be an easy thing to say, “Oh yeah, this is about love and this is about family love.”

MRS: It’s very finite.

SN: It’s a word that puts an umbrella over things. There’s so much more to it. I think love isn’t the best word to use when describing love.

MRS: Is there an aspect of your work that people consistently get wrong?

SN: Well, I’ve done humorous work that I really like to do. You can pull people in with humor, then you can give them the subtext about what the work is really about, and they’ll step back and go, “Oh, I didn’t see that coming.” But on the other hand, sometimes I do serious work, and people still think it’s funny. And it’s like, no, this isn’t funny. This is not meant to be funny, but you’re finding humor in it? So I find that on the disturbing side.

Maybe it’s my fault for using humor in the beginning to create a path to my work. But sometimes it’s like, well, that’s really not a funny piece. That kind of bothers me.

MRS: We can think of stand-up comedy by performers such as George Carlin or Richard Pryor as an art form that attempts to arrive at a sense of truth about the world. As you say, humor has been an integral part of your work for 30 years. To this end, you’ve been quoted as saying that your work contains “a strong sense of fun” but also that there is “something else going on.” I think that humor is so undervalued, especially in the gallery and museum system, where there is a lot of posturing and elitism.

Are you still interested in exploring humor today?

SN: Yes, I like humor a lot. It’s not something I can sit down and construct. “Okay, I’m going to be funny today.” [Laughs.]

It has to come to me from something.

It’ll ping off the side of my head and I’ll go, “I’m going to work on that.” It’s just being aware of the world and also seeing

what the world is trying to tell me at that moment, I think.

MRS: Do you see your films as an extension of your photography practice or something altogether separate?

SN: In film you have the picture, the composition. You have dialogue, which often you can interpret, and sometimes it can be poetry. You have the soundtrack, which adds a powerful element to those things. I think the actors are so important and they’re so great if you get the right

above Kissed by Lightning, 2009, film poster, drama, 89 minutes, directed by Shelley Niro, Turtle Night Productions, Canada. opposite The Rebel, 1982, handtinted photograph, 11 × 14 in.

Model: June Chiquita Doxtater (Mohawk), Niro's mother.

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about film as a rich collaboration that brings people together. I suspect others feel that many voices and interpretations can spoil the original vision of the director.

SN: It’s so rich because they’re all working toward the vision that I’ve written. I try not to take anybody for granted who’s working on films with me, because they’re also artists and interpreters of what they’re reading. It’s really amazing.

MRS: Though your work touches on the history of colonialism and its burdens, it is often framed as optimistic, positive, and hopeful for a future. I think of works such as The Rebel, your mother stretched out atop the trunk of your family car, and to some extent The Shirt, which features the cheeky punchline, “And all’s I get is this shirt.” Can you talk about your work and its relationship to positive perceptions of Indigenous people and communities?

above Th e S h i r t , 2 0 03 , film still, short, 5:55 minutes, directed by Shelley Niro, featuring Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (Navajo/Seminole/Muscogee). opposite The Incredible 25th Year of Mitzi Bearclaw, 2019, film poster, comedy, 94 minutes, directed by Shelley Niro.

actor saying those words. I really love film, but it takes me years to get a film made because of money and production and all that sort of thing. I think, well, if I was born rich and white, I could probably make more films, but I have to keep working on the films I’m working on and really try to squeeze as much as I can out of those elements. It’s one thing to be sitting and writing your script—I can write scripts forever because you’re creating your world around you—but once you start involving other people into the work it gets so rich.

MRS: It’s a different philosophy that you’re speaking about. You’re talking

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SN: I’ll go back to being a child in the ’50s and having watched all those Westerns and how it had such a detrimental effect on me and every other Indian kid who ever watched those things. We were born into a world where people hate you right off the bat. Like, “Look what those Indians are doing in those films!” You sort of drag that through your childhood and your adolescence. You have that on your head the whole time.

As an artist, you start to realize that you can change that a little bit. I can show that we’re not as monstrous as these films have been portraying us. And when you start meeting other artists who are also aware of that stuff and who also work toward trying to negate the stereotype, it’s an empowering moment. We think, We can do this. I’ve met a few artists who really work toward doing that.… The Rebel, for instance. Things just kind of come together in a day. That was really exciting, this kind of magical moment. I was visiting my mother and I said, “Let me take a picture of you.” She said, “Okay,” and just climbed on the back of that car and stretched out, and it was perfect.

SHELLEY NIRO

MRS: What is contemporary art by Indigenous artists moving toward?

What do you think the future will hold?

SN: Well, I’m always surprised by what the younger Indigenous artists are coming up with. They are so free and they’re so expressive and so giving of what they’re trying to do. It’s almost like they’re pure of thought. They are like, “I can do whatever I want!” and yes, you can. There’s a sense of humor in it as well, and I find it refreshing.

They’re probably working on the same issues the rest of us are working on, but they’ve gone down another path now.

MRS: I was trained to think that art as a form of discourse, of conversation, should provoke difficult discussion and debate. As such, it can make people uncomfortable or unsettled because it questions their values and beliefs. It would seem that this idea is transforming. Should art be safe or is it inherently dangerous?

SN: I think we’re all crossing that line.

MRS: Maybe it’s a question of political correctness. Should art defend its capacity to offend? Should it protect its ability to “cross the line”?

SN: I think so. I think of art as invention.

Of using a part of your brain that doesn’t get used that much. And you think, Oh, I have this thought today, and I’m going to pursue that. You put your thought out there and maybe someone else will see that and think, That’s a pretty good thought, and they’ll try another thing. I think it’s really healthy, you know? And the unhealthy stuff—it almost has to be championed. I’ve seen some unhealthy work, and it’s really challenged me to think, Would I want to see this? But I think it’s important to create the work anyways. It doesn’t have to be seen but it has to be made.

MRS: That’s an excellent point. I also wanted to ask you how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected your practice.

SN: I love COVID. [Laughs.] I’m pretty self-isolated anyway. I can’t go out and get a latte at Starbucks or anything like

that, you know? I’m living the same way I was living before. I felt like I was going to Toronto a lot. I haven’t been there since March. I kind of don’t miss it. In one way, I kind of like it, you know? I can work. Mind you, I’m not working as much as I’d like to, because I put the TV on in the morning, I watch the morning talk shows, and I have a cup of coffee. Then I think, I guess I should go to work now. Well, maybe I have another cup of coffee. I’m very relaxed, and I don’t mind it.

MRS: Do you have any upcoming projects or exhibitions?

SN: The Art Gallery of Hamilton is working on a retrospective exhibition.

We were getting together in January then COVID happened. I have a show coming up in Brandon, Manitoba, next year, so I’m working toward that. I just keep working regardless, if there’s exhibitions coming up or not.

SHELLEYNIRO.CA

Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD, is the curator and head of collections at Glenhyrst Art Gallery in Brantford, Ontario.

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COCHITI CERAMIC SCULPTOR & FASHION DESIGNER

VIRGIL ORTIZ

By Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa)

O

VER THE YEARS Virgil Ortiz has built an iconic company with aesthetics that carry through multiple endeavors including pottery, prints, home decor, and fashion design. Celebrities are among his customers and models, and major museums such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Paris’s Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, and the National Museum of the American Indian have collected his work. Recently he created a silver outfit based on his Aeronauts characters for singer Nona Hendryx. His company’s branding and his individual artwork frequently employ a black-and-white scheme with reoccurring visuals such as corsets, boots, PVC, and body painting. “I’m goth for life!” jokes the artist, now in his early 50s. With his consistently bold aesthetics and subject matter, Ortiz carved a space for himself in the Native art scene of the Southwest and the art world at large.

Though Ortiz is established as a master ceramicist, he stays curious and open to change. He balances his individual artistic pursuits with the creative direction of his brand. “Our team members wear many hats, but we’ve mastered thinking and functioning like one person. I used to do it all myself, but as the company grew, I could no longer do it alone. With regard to the traditional clay works, I create them myself from start to end.”

Much of Ortiz’s creations flow together from different projects remixed across media. Some pottery includes images from photographs; some T-shirts feature the patterns he paints on pottery.

“They all kind of mesh together and inspire ideas. I segue into many different types of media, so I am endlessly experimenting. These days, I’m going to YouTube college to figure out different techniques, mostly out of necessity. They eventually all fit together and work as one.”

The artist has recently delved into lithography while working with Gallery Hózhó in Albuquerque. “Earlier this year I spent a week at the Tamarind Institute, a leading lithography studio, and created three prints as part of my Revolt 1680/2180 series. These are my first works in this new medium. I’m really pleased at how they turned out.”

His confidence in his vision came from a childhood fascination with science fiction. “It all started a long time ago, in a Pueblo far, far away! Reminiscing about it all, the most transparent thoughts that come through are definitely loving sci-fi films and TV shows. I watched the first Star Wars film in a theater when I was seven. The film gave me the confidence to dream and create anything I could imagine.”

Often educational, Ortiz’s artwork is staunchly rooted in his culture. He descends from a notable line of Cochiti potters including Laurencita Herrera,

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his grandmother, and Seferina Ortiz, his mother. The two core themes that drive Ortiz’s work are, as he emailed to me, “1) Making sure that Cochiti clay work, which requires traditional methods and materials, continues and thrives for the next generation of potters; and 2) Educating the world about the 1680 Pueblo Revolt using my art.” In 1680 the Pueblos rose up in a coordinated resistance led by Po’pay against Spanish colonial rule. “Most people have not heard about the Pueblo Revolt, the first American Revolution,” says Ortiz. “It is not taught in our schools and it isn’t in our textbooks. It has been swept under the carpet because of the genocide that happened to our people. It is a history that has to be told.”

Ortiz’s screenplay, Revolt 1680/2180, shapes the world he is creating. “I've been working on my script for over two decades now. It keeps evolving as I work in different parts of the world, meet new folks, experiment with various art forms, and grow as

VIRGIL ORTIZ

above Tahu, Leader of the Blind Archers, 2013, digitally manipulated photograph, dimensions variable. opposite Virgil Ortiz with his pot Nature of the Beast, from the Taboo series, 2017, ceramic, 121/2 × 221/2 in. All images courtesy of the artist.

a person. I can tell you that the storyline is all based on the revolt happening simultaneously in two different time dimensions, 1680 and 2180. This allows me to tell our history with a sci-fi element/feature to it all. With each exhibition or collection unveiling, I release more details from the revolt saga.” This world features a wide cast of characters: The historic Po’pay, Tahu and her Blind Archers, Venutian Soldiers, Aeronauts, Rez Spine Watchmen, Runners, Spirit World Army, Castilians, Stargazers, and more.

A significant character in Revolt 1680/2180, Tahu, symbolizes women’s empowerment. “She’s the heroine of the movie script,” states Ortiz. She appears frequently in his work. In Tahu, Leader of the Blind Archers, a digitally manipulated black-and-white photograph, she stands in front of a barren forest. She is wrapped in a blanket with a bow and arrows on her back. A black shield covers her eyes, and eagle feathers adorn her hair. This particular image was shot at

Cochiti Canyon. “We had a forest fire, so everything was completely black, and it just looked spooky and very desolate and very dystopian—that was just [the view] from my truck driving on the road—but when you got closer and walked into the trees, even though they were all charred and black with no leaves, if you looked really close, they started to bud again.

So you see these high, little half-inch green leaves coming out, and buds. It all meant rebirth to me, and strength of the woman coming back into play, and how important it is, so it was the perfect background for it.” For another image from this set that uses the same shot of Tahu, Ortiz approached his sisters and nieces to participate and asked them to wear their feast day outfits. The Cochiti women and girls stand among the trees with Tahu, dressed in mantas, moccasins, shawls, and blankets, representing the Blind Archers.

Most were photographed in one session, with several family members added to the image later. “Some of my nieces were not

able to make it, so I photoshopped them into it. So it’s a combination of both, of reality and digital.”

Other characters in Ortiz’s world, the Venutian Soldiers, are “futuristic, herculean superheroes, over eight feet tall, who fight mainly at nighttime and possess extraordinary strength and magical powers,” who team up with “Tahu of the Blind Archers and her twin brother, Kootz of the Runners, after their Pueblo was destroyed by nuclear weapons during the first Castilian invasion.… They are forced to wear gas masks and oxygen tanks around their necks in order to survive.”1 In Odyssey of the Venutian Soldiers, Ortiz costumed and styled eight Venutian Soldiers for a photo and film shoot at the Paint Mines Interpretive Park in Calhan, Colorado. They are in predominantly black clothing and gas masks, and several hold staffs or spears, while one holds a flag with a “turkey track ” X, Ortiz’s trademark. They stand among cream-white rocks, echoed by white clouds in the blue sky. “Some

1. Virgil Ortiz, Venutian Soldiers exhibition catalogue (Santa Fe: Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, 2012).

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a b ov e Odyssey of the Venutian Soldiers, 2018, digital photograph, dimensions variable, location Paint Mines Interpretive Park in Calhan, Colorado. Attire designed by Virgil Ortiz. opposite Venutian Soldiers Quest from the 1680/2180 Pueblo Revolt series, 2020, Cochiti red clay, clay slip, wild spinach paint, 231/2 × 13 × 12 in.

of them were professors and some were students,” reveals Ortiz. “That was pretty cool, because, working at universities and doing residencies and workshops, it’s cool to be able to incorporate the people that I’m working with and the students.” The resulting video was recently shown in the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art’s exhibition, Indigenous Futurisms: Transcending Past/Present/Future. Odyssey is on view at the Montclair Art Museum through March 2021.

Venutian Soldiers Quest (2020) embodies ancestral Cochiti clay practices.

Made with Cochiti red clay, white and red clay slip, and wild spinach for the black paint, the piece exemplifies the graphic

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style of painting for which Ortiz is known and features a three-dimensional Venutian soldier emerging from one side of a blackhorned vessel. Two-dimensional Venutian soldiers flank the other side, painted from characters costumed and photographed

by Ortiz in a prior series. One is covered in a robe and the other wears a corset; both carry bows and arrows and wear gas masks. A looping motif with black spikes, Ortiz’s signature element, serves as a graphic detail in the piece. For Ortiz, this was an opportunity to play with three-dimensional forms joining into two-dimensional, painted surfaces. “I’ve done it before, but not on this scale—it’s a big piece.” The areas where 2D and 3D merge on the figure play with the eye; Ortiz notes how he painted the back of the jacket to make it look like it had an edge. The sculptural back foot also flows seamlessly into the painted back leg, and the figure holds a two-dimensional staff.

When asked his thoughts on COVID-19 given his post-apocalyptic themes, he sees parallels. “You know, the COVID-19 pandemic is eerily similar to the storyline behind my Venutian Soldiers—almost feels like a prediction that is becoming a reality. It’s really frightening to witness in real time. The masses are reliving, fighting for existence, as our people did. It is an awakening that we are all very much alike, more than anyone thought. I hope we can learn from our history. We are better together—align, protect, inform, and shape a new future.”

The pandemic prompted a major stylistic shift in Ortiz’s work, forcing him to add to his repertoire. In February, Ortiz was teaching at Arizona State University (ASU), working with a small group of senior ceramics students when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the studios. The students’ plans dramatically changed, and Ortiz, originally scheduled to teach for the entire semester, found himself with time on his hands. A friend connected Ortiz to the owners of the Reitz Ranch Center for Ceramic Arts, Sheryl Leigh-Davault and her husband Ted Davault. Ortiz and one of the ASU seniors, Andrew “Augusta” Smith, drove the two hours from Tempe to Reitz Ranch for residencies from March through June.

In a matter of days, Smith rewrote his senior thesis to use the ranch’s resources

VIRGIL ORTIZ

in collaboration with Ortiz, which he presented to his main ceramics teacher.

Ortiz explains, “The professor said, ‘Yeah, that sounds good. You can do it if you can pull it off.’ So he was able to, and we just got an Airbnb close to Reitz Ranch and created a whole body of work, and he passed with flying colors. It worked out for both of us.” While at the ranch, Ortiz also collaborated with two other ceramic artists, Heidi Kreitchet and Grayson Fair. “It has been an awesome ride to learn different techniques working with contemporary, high-fire clay,” says Ortiz. “The developments in my work are significant, from size to texture to atmospheric firings.… This experience has been a blessing: traveling for artist residencies, teaching, and meeting other clay creators. Working with Heidi, Augusta, and Grayson has been the best part of it all. The collaborations feel like we have been working together for ages, yet it has been just under a year. I’ve met students that inspire me and hopefully I have taught them something as well. I cannot wait to see what develops from more collaborations.”

The work of Don Reitz (1929–2014), the former owner of the ranch and a major Euro-American ceramicist, was a major influence on Ortiz’s latest pieces.

Don’s ceramics surrounded the house, the studio, and the kilns, able to withstand all kinds of weather conditions. Ortiz “could immediately feel his presence there” and he asked Don Reitz to guide him. His artworks, dramatically unlike Cochiti’s pottery, surprised Ortiz. “He had walls that were like five inches thick, and just very textured and cut. He really manhandled the clay,” Ortiz says, comparing Ritz’s creations to volcanic rocks.

In Cochiti, the pottery would typically be hand built, dried, sanded, meticulously painted, and then fired once outdoors in a specially made kiln, fueled by wood. If the piece has an air bubble, it will burst during the firing—there’s only one shot. Cochiti pottery uses a low-fire process with low-fire clay. At Reitz Ranch, raw clay pieces are first bisque-fired at 1800°F. Layers of glaze may be added through multiple firings for a final piece.

The process of soda firing in a gas kiln, which has Asian origins, can dramatically affect the look and feel of a piece as ashes

land on the pottery and create texture.

Ortiz focused on the form of his sculptures and allowed the firings to decorate them, diverging from his usual precise painting. With the high-fire process, temperatures can get up to 2300°F. It takes a team to fire pottery in one of the large wood kilns at the ranch. Together, they keep the fire going 24/7 for over a week.

“This is just a whole new education that I never expected, but I so love it now, and it just works really well to continue to tell the story. It looks like we just excavated all these pieces.… And it’s just fun, because now it fits into the storyline where the Aeronauts are coming back from the future to the present time to collect artifacts and designs and shards and taking them back to the future to store them, protect them, and keep them

safe until we get to that time, and so that our traditions of designs, or shapes, or anything that is in clay, stays alive in the future,” Ortiz explains.

Ortiz released a new series this August, The Revolt Chargers, created during the Reitz Ranch residency. He shared an excerpt from the new chapter: Chargers are armored secret passkeys to gain entrance to the Aeronauts Survivorship Armada Stargate. Those who possess the Chargers can find gates that are located throughout Earth’s lithosphere. Aeronauts Cuda and Steu originally owned the Chargers. They are highly coveted and protected, hiding in plain sight. The Aeronauts shared this primordial knowledge with the Watchmen, who are stationed around Earth’s realm surveying for any advances of the Castilian Army.

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above Talus, Recon of the South Realm Rez Spine Watchmen from The Revolt Chargers series, 2020, high-fire ceramic, 18½ × 9½ × 17 in. opposite Saasha, Recon of the East Realm Rez Spine Watchmen from The Revolt Chargers series, 2020, high-fire ceramic, 10½ × 9½ × 8 in..

The inspiration for the Rez Spine Watchmen’s patrol areas is cultural. “Of course it’s talking about the Native traditions—the four directions,” notes Ortiz.

The Revolt Chargers series departs from Ortiz’s typical black-and-white scheme with a wide array of shifting earth tones. Within the series are seven high-fired, atmospheric-fired plates called “Chargers,” representing the passkeys in Ortiz’s world and created in collaboration with Smith. Ortiz points out a particular piece, Omtua. “That’s a Tesuque name for an actual runner that was part of the actual revolt,” he says. The piece is roughly formed and etched and overlaid with pieces of clay. The overall effect is akin to stone. A small face representing a runner, a foot messenger in the Pueblo Revolt, accents the plate’s edge. Ashes fell on and fused to the piece, creating additional texture. “It looks like dirt just dropped on the face,” Ortiz observes.

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Ortiz introduces several new Watchmen in the form of a jar in the case of Ion, and six hand-built, sculpted busts and heads for Dorn, Rainor, Rayl, Saasha, Sy, and Talus. Ortiz has been sculpting faces lately, and he continues to amp up the realism with this series. The underlying goal is for the characters to potentially serve as models for movie prosthetics.

Rainor, Admiral of the East Realm Rez Spine Watchmen, a mottled grey-green sculpture with three tubes connecting to the head and tusks around the mouth, is one of his favorites. Ortiz stresses that Rainor and other pieces have details and a physicality that need to be experienced in person: “Everybody needs to hold them, feel the weight, touch them—the texture— and look really close, and see some parts in the crevices are super watery-looking, even though they look matte.” With Rainor, tiny crystals are embedded in the surface. “And it’s really hard to capture the real texture of it, because if you were to see any of these pieces in person, it looks like his nose is sweating. It looks like it’s moist. If you see when he’s looking left, the profile left, you can slightly see the reflection on his nose,” Ortiz explains.

Talus, Recon of the South Realm Rez Spine Watchman (2020) depicts a tusked, helmeted being. The high-gloss sculpture is colored an oily black with sections of cream and caramel “drips” moving down the piece, forming glass.

“I had no idea this goes down,” admits Ortiz. “But once you work with people that do this for a living and have studied this, they’re like, ‘Oh my God! You got the drips! It’s so juicy!’ They’re so excited. I’m like, ‘What the hell are you guys talking about?’ Then, ‘Ooh, now I get it.’” The most prominent aspect of the sculpture is the ridged helmet that, combined with the effect of the glaze, looks almost insectlike. A knob representing hair tied in a bun extends from the back of the head.

Ortiz made the bust in April 2019 during a workshop at ASU, where it was first bisque-fired then fired again after glazing at the Reitz Ranch. He wanted to sand the piece, as is customary in his process, but his colleagues told him to leave the marks where he worked the clay, as the texture would produce a more dramatic result.

The piece was covered with a dark glaze,

VIRGIL ORTIZ

then ashes were sprinkled directly on it, which created the cream areas.

Saasha, Recon of the East Realm Rez Spine Watchmen (2020), features a sandy-colored bust with a feminine face.

A long, dark scratch runs down her forehead, across her left eye, and down her chest. Ortiz’s “turkey track” mark etches her forehead. Tusks emerge from each side of her mouth with an additional horn on her right shoulder. A slab of clay rests against the left side of her face and neck. Melded to the top of Saasha’s head is a rounded shape with an opening and a triad of spines. This serves as a head crest, the inspiration for which Ortiz says is “basically updating what our women wear for feast day dances, and turning them into warriors as well.” She communicates telepathically from the future into the past with Po’pay and Tahu.

With this piece, Ortiz attempted to re-create an atmospheric firing in an electric kiln. “It came out pretty cool.

She reminded me of bread—like feast day bread,” he laughs. In a more serious tone, he explains the meaning behind his stylistic decisions. “The circular motions, the scrapes that I put on the headdress, are supposed to represent the universe and a black hole, basically, and then the little white speckles are stars and all—the galaxy,” Ortiz explains. “But within the tiny scratches, down the face or around her eyes, I put black slip in it.” She was fired three times to achieve her coloration, as the process of high-fire pottery allows for multiple firings and layers of glazing.

First was the bisque, then a matte black underglaze and a white outer glaze, “so once it got super-hot, then it blended it together, and just the reduction or smoke made it a tan color and black.”

One of the other watchmen, Dorn, Magnate of the East Realm Rez Spine Watchmen (2020), a glossy, olive-green bust with a masculine face and a headdress that echoes Saasha’s, shows how different processes produce different results. “If you look at Dorn, that piece is one of my favorite, favorite pieces, because that one came out of the soda fire, and it did its own thing, like it just completely transformed…. All the holes that I poked in it, all the texture I gave it, that’s just Don Reitz’s aesthetic coming through.…”

“Maybe in the movie these pieces could come alive from rock, from stone,” Ortiz considers. “I don’t know. There’s just so many options. That’s why it’s neverending, that’s why I keep saying that. It just keeps going and going!”

What’s next for Ortiz? “I thought I was going to get a little time off, but it’s actually amped up. We all have to move forward, given the circumstances,” says Ortiz. Several monumental pieces are waiting to be fired. “These are the largest pieces that I have attempted. I made some that are drying at ASU and more at Reitz Ranch. It will take at least six months to dry before we bisque them. They have internal structures for support so they have to dry slowly. We are planning to fire them in the Reitzagama [a specially

modified, oversized kiln]. I’m really excited for this!” He further shares his plans for winter 2020 to spring 2021.

“As soon as it’s safe to travel again, I look forward to a residency at the iconic Archie Bray in Montana to create a new body of work,” says Ortiz. Several exhibitions are in the works for 2021 and 2022.

Ortiz encourages a spirit of experimentation for Native creatives looking to push their art to the next level. “Learn as much as you can of any subject you want to pursue. The internet is a goldmine to figure anything out. Do not be intimidated by failing; these are our best teachers.

Focus, manifest, and never stop creating.”

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Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa) is a graphic designer, visual artist, writer, and photographer based in Santa Fe. FALL 2020 | 67

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COLLECTIONS

KRANNERT ART MUSEUM

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

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CARVED WOODEN BAR about eight inches long features two minuscule seated figures at either end, each holding a cup. Knotted strings made from alpaca hair are laced through tiny holes pierced on each side of the bar.

This khipu,1 in the collection of Krannert Art Museum (KAM) at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), is particularly rare because it is attached to a perishable wooden bar. Without a form of written language, these “talking knots” were a means of keeping records of harvests, demographics, and more.

The oldest known khipu dates to the 7th century; this one might be late 15th or early 16th century. Though created and used for more than 800 years, only a few hundred khipus survived the invasion of the Spanish, who burned thousands.

Krannert Art Museum’s Andean collection—about 700 objects—was a partial gift from chemist and amateur archaeologist Fred Olsen in 1967. To the present day its exhibition has been relegated to a dim gallery on the museum’s lower level, tragically underutilized and overlooked. Visitors encounter displays chronologically, moving through various cultures: Paracas, Moche, Nasca, Wari, Lambayeque, Ica, Chimú, Inca, and Chancay. A major reinstallation tentatively

scheduled to open in 2022 will upend this conventional narrative to center Native Andean stories and fraught histories.

KAM Senior Curator Allyson Purpura is co-curating the Andean reinstall with archaeologist Kasia Szremski, also UIUC’s associate director for the

Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, who specializes in Chancay culture. Together they have coordinated workshops with specialists from Peru and the United States to develop exhibition themes and frameworks.

Working collaboratively to incorporate

1. In a move to “de-Hispanicize” terminology, scholars have adopted spellings that more closely match Indigenous orthographies, e.g., khipu rather than quipu.

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COLLECTIONS

multiple perspectives moves away from hierarchical decision making and authoritarian narratives that privileges Europe and European methods. Purpura and Szremski describe their aims as decolonial and readily explain what this means: decentering the grand narratives of European history while emphasizing transcultural processes, relationships, systems of power, and local ways of knowing rather than rigid taxonomies and claims to objectivity.2 One of the first steps toward decentering Europe is revising common terminology. Krannert will no longer refer to this collection as “Pre-Columbian,” as this hinges centuries of historical events on the Spanish invasion. Further, it suggests Europeans brought civilization to the continent. Szremski pointed out that referring to the collection as “Ancient” is also problematic since many objects are contemporaneous with the European Renaissance, which is referred to by historians as the early modern era.

Openly addressing controversial provenance is another aspect of the new curatorial approach. Didactics rarely include information on histories of ownership and narratives about how objects came into collections, but the new iteration of this display will acknowledge the fact that many items were looted from graves before being sold to collectors.

Kasia Szremski explains, “Peru has cultural patrimony laws going back to the 19th century, so by those laws there could be questionable ownership.” However, the international treaty of United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that prohibits illicit transfer of cultural property was not signed until 1970, several years after KAM acquired this collection. Illegal smuggling of cultural heritage remains a problem today. Grant money awarded for KAM’s project includes funding for Purpura and Szremski to travel to Peru to speak with the Ministry of Culture and network with local scholars.

The future exhibition will be organized thematically rather than chronologically and by culture. Purpura

has proven her ability to curate complex, multinational cultural exchanges when she reinstalled KAM’s African gallery and especially in her recent exhibition, World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean (2017–18), co-curated with Prita Meier. Both of these major projects underscored sophisticated webs of cultural, religious, and political exchange and influence. Purpura is driven by “frustration with misrepresentations of art that is not European.”

The collection is somewhat idiosyncratic because Olsen selected objects that fit his preferred aesthetic, initially inspired by European modern art.

His son gifted him a book on Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879–1940), which explains

above Unknown Inca artist, Khipu, 1470–1532 CE, wood, cotton, alpaca wool, 123/16 × 81/4 × 21/2 in., North Coast, Peru, collection of the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, The Fred Olsen Collection, 1967-29-340.

All images, unless otherwise noted, courtesy of the Krannert Art Museum. opposite, top Unknown Chimú artist, Bracelet, 700–1470, seashells on cotton cord, 65/8 × 15/16 in. South Coast, Peru, collection of the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, The Fred Olsen Collection 1967-29-220. opposite, bottom Krannert Art Museum. Photo: Aries Liang (CC0).

2. Allyson Purpura and Kasia Szremski in discussion with the author, August 14, 2020. Many thanks to KAM’s assistant curator and publications specialist Kathryn Koca Polite for her assistance on this article.

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above, top Unknown Chancay artist, Pacay Tree Sculpture, ca.

1400–1570 CE, cotton, camelid wool, human hair, 297/8 × 211/4 in., Central Coast, Peru, collection of the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, The Fred Olsen Collection, 1967-29-309. above, bottom & left Unknown Nasca artist, Mantle, ca. 100 BCE, alpaca wool, cotton, 731/4 × 563/4 in., South Coast, Peru, collection of the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, The Fred Olsen Collection 1967-29-56.

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formal parallels with a range of modernist tendencies such as De Stijl, Bauhaus, Expressionism, or more recent art. One Nasca beaker features a rectangularshaped face with large eyes surrounded by fin-like appendages—remarkably similar to some of Klee’s fictitious characters.

Hundreds of patterns adorn textiles, ceramics, and jewelry: geometric designs, maze-like motifs, and irregular “allover” textures. Local ecosystems appear in the form of stylized animals including fish, cats, dogs, monkeys, llamas, and frogs.

Many species of birds are painted, woven, incised, and sculpted: ducks, swifts, and parrots. One exquisite bracelet, possibly Ica or Chimú, is made from three rows of iridescent seashell beads carved into pelican profiles.

A Chancay textile sculpture represents a pacay (Inga feuillei or ice-cream bean) tree, which provides shade and food in tropical climates.

This miniature version, nearly 30 inches tall, was made from cotton, camelid wool, and human hair. Birds sit on some branches and at the top, a doll holding a stick may be harvesting pacay or trying to catch the birds.

Two highlights of the older (ca. 1st century) Nasca collection are a painted drum and remarkably well-preserved mantle. The terracotta drum is beautifully decorated with three rows of swifts, which would migrate to the area before the crucial rainy season.

A chorus line of 140 unique hummingbirds dance along two edges of a burial mantle woven from cotton and alpaca wool and dyed a deep blue.

Hummingbirds symbolized the resurrection of the dead because they go into a coma-like state at night and awaken with the sun. The value of textiles in this region cannot be overstated. Textiles were used as currency, and weavers were buried with their tools. This Andean collection consists of nearly 160 textiles including bags, mantles, tunics, skirts, shawls, loincloths, headbands, dresses, slings, dolls, and decorative panels. Repeated geometric designs or animal motifs woven or painted onto the cloth signify various social and political roles.

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KAM’s collection of about 10,000 objects also includes work by contemporary Indigenous artists: 35 lithographs

by Fritz Scholder (Luiseño, 1937–2005), five works by Melanie Yazzie (Navajo), a sculpture and digital print by Sonny Assu (Ligwilda'xw), and Inuit prints.

A recent gift of nearly 60 ceramics strengthens the Southwest collection, and one of the newest acquisitions is Kay WalkingStick’s (Cherokee Nation) diptych painting, Loss (1989).

KAM hosted the first events of a new Native artists series just before the pandemic forced the world into lockdown. This brought several artists to campus: Naomi Bebo (Menominee/ Ho-Chunk) and Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe) in conversation with curator Candice Hopkins (Carcross/ Tagish) and Raven Chacon (Navajo), who interacted with students during a weeklong residency. A talk by Duane Slick (Meskwaki/Ho-Chunk) was postponed.

KAM director Jon Seydl and curator of modern and contemporary art Amy L. Powell hope Slick can return for a longer residency next year.

These initiatives are part of a much broader, campus-wide effort to promote nuanced, accurate, historical narratives about Indigenous people. After decades of protests and controversy over a racist mascot (officially retired in 2007), the university is finally in a position to move beyond this embarrassing legacy. The Native American House was established in 2002, followed three years later by a new American Indian Studies program. This year Krystiana Krupa became the inaugural campus NAGPRA officer. Though KAM holds nothing questionable under this law, other campus departments do.

UIUC recognizes 13 nations in its official land acknowledgment, a reflection of the cosmopolitan history of central Illinois.3 The land was ceded by multiple treaties between 1805 and 1819, and the university was founded in 1867.

The university had an art collection for decades before Krannert Art Museum opened in 1961. UIUC is known internationally as an important center for

research and innovation, and KAM was the first art museum in the United States to have a website in 1993. Fittingly, the entire Andean collection can be viewed online.

KAM.ILLINOIS.EDU

3. These are the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Piankashaw, Wea, Miami, Mascoutin, Odawa, Sauk, Meskwaki, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Chickasaw.

above, top Unknown Nasca artist, Ceremonial Drum, 100 BCE, earthenware with slip, 83/4 × 15 × 151/8 in., Central Coast, Peru, collection of the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, The Fred Olsen Collection, 1967-29-110. above, bottom Unknown Chimú artist, Ear Spools, 1000–1450 CE, feathers, adhesive, gourd, hide, 15/8 × 17/8 × 2 in., North Coast, Peru, collection of the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, The Fred Olsen Collection 1967-29-180.1/2.

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WEWOKA, OKLAHOMA

Mvskoke Voices: Contemporary Seminole and Muscogee Art Seminole Nation Museum

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FTER A DEL AY OF ITS OPENING due to COVID-19, Mvskoke Voices: Contemporary Seminole and Muscogee Art reopened on May 15 at the Seminole Nation Museum. This shared art invitational was a first-time collaboration between the Seminole Nation Museum and Red Earth Art Center. Mvskoke Voices features the works of seven prominent Oklahoma artists from the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and Muscogee (Creek) Nation: Enoch Kelly Haney (Seminole/Muscogee), Leslie Deer (Muscogee), Tillier Wesley (Muscogee, 1955–2006), Benjamin Harjo Jr. (Absentee Shawnee/Seminole), Tony Tiger (Muscogee/Sac & Fox/Seminole), Dana Tiger (Muscogee/Seminole/Cherokee), and Bobby C. Martin (Muscogee). The exhibition continued through August.

The history and connection between the Seminole and Muscogee Nations is long-standing. Originally a part of the Creek Confederacy, a diverse union of small tribes covering the southeastern United States, the Seminole separated from the Muscogee to form their own tribe in what is currently known as the state of Florida. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation stayed in the area of what are now the states of Alabama and Georgia. Both tribes were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma under the Indian Removal Act in the 1830s. Although both tribes have differences, they still share similarities today, most notably by speaking forms of the Muscogee (often spelled Mvskoke) language. These connections, derived from the past and continuing into the present, are showcased through individual artistry within the exhibition’s collective space.

Walking through the Seminole museum to the Mvskoke Voices exhibition, I thought about the history of my tribe, the Muscogee Nation, and the changes recently made in the landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court, McGirt v.

Oklahoma. I thought about how our voice as a nation was heard, and how fortunate I was to see this show, whose opening predates the court case that upholds our treaty rights. Entering the room housing the art that expressed the diverse “voices” of our nation made it very apparent that indigeneity lives in the future as much as it can still live with the past.

The gallery where the show took place is a rectangular room that had three walls painted the color of our Oklahoma red earth and one wall made of stacked local stonework broken only by vertical wood inlays and the open doorway. Wood columns line the center from floor to ceiling. All of the art was displayed in a mixed array and lined the room with a few three-dimensional pieces set in the

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above Tony Tiger (Muscogee/ Sac & Fox/Seminole), Time and Place: Egmont Key, Rock River, LA, to Wewoka, 2018, acrylic on panel, 48 × 36 in. Photo: Shelley Patrick (Muscogee).

…indigeneity lives in the future as much as it can still live with the past.

REVIEW

Bop, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 48˝x 36˝

RICK BARTOW Crow’s Instructions

FROELICK GALLERY Portland, OR 503.222.1142 middle area. The natural ambiance gave a feeling of comfort and familiarity. The artwork added life. Haney’s bronze bust, The Universal Man, and Deer’s designer fashion pieces on dress forms made it feel as if the room was already occupied, despite the fact that I was alone. It felt like I was visiting a home, church, or other gathering with people I already knew.

Throughout the gallery were scenes of Seminole and Muscogee life.

Stylized with bright colors, unique compositions, or produced with more modern than classical art techniques, many of the pieces depicted a celebration of life, even the imagery of or about those who have passed. An example was Wesley’s untitled watercolor, a portrait of a man with copper-colored skin tone, black hair, jewelry, and hair accessories enhanced by vibrant hues of blue, yellow, red, and purple. Harjo’s circle of life uses solid colors and stark edges of shapes to produce a seated figure, seemingly of flat form, until I noticed that folds of her shawl can be seen by altering the way I looked at the diamond shapes in

the pattern. Some of the most unique mixed-media paintings are by Tony Tiger.

Each of his paintings use human forms, repetitive and rearranged Southeastern designs, a multitude of colors, or a mix of all to make visually energetic works of art.

Realistic and impressionistic beginnings of life until the “journey home” are also portrayed. I decided to walk around, keeping the center of the room to my left, thinking of the times I have spent at Mvskoke stompgrounds dancing around the fire. The first artwork I came to, Nuyaka, Hvsossv-Hasaklatkv Mapohicet Aiden Jerome Tiger by Dana Tiger, was a painting of a young boy, Tiger’s grandson, standing in bright yellow-green grass at sunrise holding stickball sticks his size and wearing his patchwork breechcloth. The last artwork I viewed was a representation of a Muscogee grave house, our burial homes set over the graves of our people, made, in this case, from unconventional materials. Family photographs covered the patterned metal roof, and family names, cutouts in metal panels were set into the horizontal log walls, illuminated

from within. The installation was audibly surrounded by a recording of Muscogee hymns. Mekusape Fullvnna (Muscogee Gravehouse) is a collaborative piece by Bobby C. Martin and Tony Tiger that “represents the lives of our ancestors and a newfound way to live, survive, and thrive in a strange land that was not their own,” as stated on the accompanying placard.

Those sentiments—living, surviving, and thriving even now—encompassed the entirety of the exhibition.

Being a Muscogee artist myself and personally knowing or knowing of every artist who participated in this exhibition, I expected to feel comfort in their works.

However, I did not anticipate feeling like I was in the company of those represented in the scenes and forms around me, named and unnamed—as if we were all visiting together. At a time when many of us are having to maintain social distance from family and friends, Mvskoke Voices made me feel as if I had come home.

—Shelley Patrick (Muscogee) FALL 2020 | 73

REPORT

REPORT: TULSA

Re/Convening: Native Arts of Oklahoma ahha (Hardesty Arts Center)

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E/CONVENING: NATIVE ARTS OF OKLAHOMA, ran from July 3 to September 20, 2020, at ahha Tulsa (Hardesty Arts Center).

The juried exhibition showcased the work of 32 Native artists from or with ties to the state of Oklahoma to illustrate the significant role Oklahoma artists and art institutions have played in the development of Native arts, particularly since the 1930s. Re/Convening was curated by heather ahtone (Choctaw/Chickasaw) and funded by grants from Oklahoma Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

When Adrienne L alli Hills (Wyandotte) and the team at ahha conceived of the exhibition, they never could have predicted all that would befall the state and the nation by the time of its opening—and it was a lot. During the planning of the exhibition, Lalli Hills was named associate director of Studio School at Oklahoma Contemporary in Oklahoma City, and Amber Litwack, director of education and exhibitions at ahha, took over the project, making sure to maintain its original vision, a vision whose scope and meaning deepened as events unfolded before and during its opening.

The COVID-19 pandemic swept through the world in the spring, impacting arts events of all kinds. Tulsa’s shelter-in-place order began April 1.

In May, protests and rallies broke out across the nation, including in Tulsa, in response to the killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died in police custody in Minnesota. Amid the protests and the pandemic, US President Donald Trump arrived in Tulsa on June 20, one day after Juneteenth (a day commemorating the end of African-American slavery in the United States), for a controversial rally watched by media around the globe. Two weeks later, on July 3, one day before the United States patriotic holiday, ahha reopened for the first time since the

quarantine began in March with the now strikingly apt name Re/Convening.

Entering the light-filled, airy exhibition space, the scholar’s and curator’s statements were accompanied by a slideshow featuring photos of people and places from Oklahoma Native art history from the 1930s to the current time. Quotes taken from the Re/Convening artists’ statements were prominently displayed along the walls, most of them having to do with the purpose of art. An example is this quote

by Thlopthlocco Muscogee painter Johnny Diacon: “As an artist, I feel a responsibility to accurately depict our people as a record of who we are.” Who we are was being challenged in even more ways than usual when Re/Convening opened.

“As an artist, I feel a responsibility to accurately depict our people as a record of who we are.”

The art in Re/Convening reflected the diverse array of the artists’ tribal nations and ranged from representational and abstract paintings to digital art, installations, ceramics, weaving and embroidery. Scenes and textures of Indigenous life were depicted with humor, annoyance, joy, pain, and the many contradictory emotions inherent in being Native in Oklahoma.

As most people know, Oklahoma began as Indian Territory, a place where Indigenous people from across the United States were brought to be contained and assimilated throughout the 19th century.

Today, 38 sovereign nations are contained in what became the state of Oklahoma,1 despite the best efforts of statehood, the Dawes Act of 1887, and of course, the federal boarding school system, to dismantle all aspects of tribal governance and culture.

In her curator’s statement, ahtone writes, “Critical conversations take place every day in Oklahoma, addressing the well-being, the survivance, and the

cultural continuum of our Indigenous cultures. This conversation is evident within the body of works submitted to this juried exhibition. Themes emerged from within the work that address the complexity of being an Indigenous person in our state. Throughout all the images, the relationships that bind us also hold together the themes of politics, identity, and the cultural conversations.”

Artists in the exhibition ranged from self-taught to community- or family-mentored to formally educated in university art programs, or all three.

The three winning pieces, voted on by a committee of Oklahoma Native arts professionals, reflect the diversity of the works in Re/Convening. In first place, the work of Summer Zah (Jicarilla Apache/ Navajo/Choctaw), Should’ve Seen it in Color, is an installation consisting of a tent whose torn and hanging interior is woven from strips of faded, copied documents. Inside is a 1970s-style photo album featuring family photos as well as photo collages built on copies of historical photos of Indigenous people. In second place, Paul King’s (Choctaw) gouache, Okla Humma, features Choctaw veterans in dance regalia imposed over a page of the Choctaw dictionary that gives the definition of the Choctaw words that form the state’s name. Third-place award recipient Brian Waytula’s (Cherokee Nation) The Warrior recalls the 1979 cult classic movie, The Warriors, as a means of commenting on the 1970s American Indian Movement and other Indigenous activists. In the mixed-media piece, Canadian actor Eugene Brave Rock (Kainai) wears a vest with the Warriors logo on the back. His image is imposed over newspaper stories about the 1970s occupation of Wounded Knee as well as a red US flag upside down to indicate the distress call as it was (and still is) used by US Indigenous activists.

The exhibition’s forward energy and sense of hope for continued survival would already have been particularly empowering amid the pandemic, the protests, and the exhibition’s setting in downtown Tulsa, but one more historic event would transpire to impact Re/ Convening before it ended in September.

1. Thirty-eight federally recognized tribes are located within the boundaries of Oklahoma. Other tribes, some with their own internal governments such as the Yuchi and Natchez, are enrolled within larger tribes.—Ed.

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REPORT

On July 9, 2020, six days after the opening of Re/Convening, the US Supreme Court reached a decision in the McGirt v. Oklahoma case, which ruled that much of the eastern portion of the state of Oklahoma (including Tulsa) had never been disestablished as a reservation of what were formerly called the Five Civilized Tribes: Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw. Immediately, headlines around the country proclaimed, “Half of Oklahoma is now Indian Territory” (as if it hadn’t been before). Native social media lit up with a million triumphant jokes as well as serious meditations on what the ruling would mean for the tribes as well as the state of Oklahoma.

Oklahoma Native artists know all about being unwillingly separated. It is in our DNA and our historical memory.

And we know about coming back together, whether physically or spiritually. As conversation about the court ruling swirled, protests continued, and the pandemic changed communities through illness, death, and new rules for moving about the world. Amid all of that, the vigorously insistent works of Re/Convening in downtown Tulsa, Indian Territory, reflected the continued existence of people who held their nations together through wars, forced removals, boarding schools, the urbanization program, centuries of attempted assimilation, and the trauma resulting from all of this and more.

Visitors to the exhibition were invited to leave signed or anonymous notes next to pieces that moved them.

While adult comments focused mainly on techniques and aesthetics, several youth comments were tributes to the power of art: “I really love the beautiful Native American paintings/pictures,” wrote one visitor, next to John Owen’s (Cherokee Nation) large acrylic painting, I will climb the rise at daybreak, I will kiss the sky at noon. “They give me lots of inspireation [sic] and i can’t wait to see what may unfold as i wonder [sic] more in this museum. (some of the words may not be spelled right. i am a kid.).” Next to Jessica Harjo’s (Otoe-Missouria/Osage/ Pawnee/Sac & Fox) Sunbeam Dance, a visitor wrote, “that’s so awesome seeing someone from the same tribe [as me], Sac & Fox, to be pursuing art & randomly

seeing it.” The comments ranged from formal to intimately casual, as if the writer were addressing a community member, which is a good representation of the many roles Oklahoma Native art plays: from object of admiration and study to personal inspiration to ceremonial object to the tangible result of creative processes, a kind of re/convening with ancestral movements, knowledge, and experience.

The art in this powerful exhibition— and the fact that the exhibition happened at all—suggests that we will continue to meet again, physically and spiritually, whether in this generation or another.

Indigenous people have been torn apart before, but as I wrote at the beginning and end of my scholar statement for the exhibition, not realizing how deeply I would want it to be true by the time it hung on the wall, “Re/Convening is to meet again like we’ve met before.... Oklahoma Native art is always Re/Convening.”

—Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke)

above Jessica Rosemary Harjo (Otoe-Missouria/Osage/ Pawnee/Sac & Fox), Bird Song, 2019, digital media, 42 × 36 in.

… we will continue to meet again, physically and spiritually, whether in this generation or another.

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BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS Form & Relation: Contemporary Native Ceramics Edited by Jami C. Powell Hood Museum of Art, 2020

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HE IDEAS PRESENTED in the exhibition catalogue, Form & Relation: Contemporary Native Ceramics, stem from clay’s ubiquitous function as a vessel that has stored the stuff of life for millennia: food and water. As such, the curators and contributors suggest that this ancient material, what Jami C. Powell (Osage) insightfully describes as “the flesh of the earth,” can be perceived as a universal language or organ that binds Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities together. The communicative possibilities of clay, one that speaks loudly “across semiotic barriers,” explains Powell, is evidence that clay not only connects us to each other but also to the earth as well.

The written texts, artist interviews, and artworks included in the catalogue emphasize that the abundance of ceramic forms record and preserve cultural knowledge that tethers generations to one another. As a vessel, as a container of things, the writers and artists approach contemporary ceramics as agents of meaningful stories and experiences. In this way, they function as aesthetic objects

but also as metaphors of meaning. Yet, in spite of this, they may be better described as storytellers.

The inherent relationality of clay is laid bare in Form & Relation. Not only does the medium of clay connect individuals and groups, but it is also equipped to question social and political concerns, though this is not always its primary use. To this end, the artists participating in the exhibition—Anita Fields (Osage/Muscogee), Courtney M. Leonard (Shinnecock), Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota), Ruben Olguin (Mestizo), Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara descent), and Roxanne Swentzell (Santa Clara Pueblo)—engage the symbolic potential of clay to examine a breadth of subject matter, from climate change and motherhood, to identity and colonialism. For Anya Montiel (Mestiza/ Tohono O’odham descent) and Sequoia Miller, “more than a medium for their art, clay connects [artists] to place and memory.” It is, they seem to suggest, a channel to the past and future; a way for the artists to access streams of experience and knowledge. The result convincingly demonstrates, somewhat ironically, the plasticity of clay.

While the catalogue and exhibition serve to better understand the state of contemporary ceramics produced by Indigenous artists, it must be noted that the participating artists were born and/ or currently live in the United States, particularly the Southwestern region.

Consequently, the catalogue does not include ceramics from contemporary practitioners among the Haudenosaunee, Mojave, Catawba, or others with lengthy histories of clay use. The catalogue (and the exhibition) should then be considered a measure of current practices by select artists rather than an exhaustive survey.

The formal structure of the catalogue is conventional but formidable—beautiful photographs of individual works combined with detailed installation shots and workshop documentation reveal the heterogeneity of practices, approaches, and processes. The text in Form &

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Relation is composed of critical essays, autobiographical reflection, and formal interviews. The hanging of Leonard’s sculptural installation, BREACH: Logbook 20, commissioned for the exhibition Form & Relation as well as the Hood Museum’s permanent collection, is a central feature of the catalogue. The production of the work and its conceptual underpinnings are expounded in Leonard’s essay, “On BREACH: Logbook 20/Nebulous.” It is also accompanied by a descriptive exegesis of her work that reads like an unorthodox yet captivating artist statement. Since artwork often enters the permanent collections of cultural institutions noiselessly, without much public hullabaloo or comment from the artist, the publication of Leonard’s account is not only welcome but an invaluable research tool.

A particularly compelling part of the catalogue is an interview between Morgan E. Freeman (Nipmuc), Roxanne Swentzell, and Rose B. Simpson. The conversation reveals anecdotes and nuances behind their relationships with their nation’s history, the implications of home, and the question of audience.

What emerges, response by response, is a profound discussion of the visceral implications of clay and how it helps to shape thoughts about family, community, self, and motherhood. Here, as elsewhere in the catalogue, the intrinsic communicative powers of clay, its deep relationality to people, places, and ideas, is persuasively illuminated and refined.

Form & Relation: Contemporary Native Ceramics makes a useful contribution to the growing literature on contemporary Indigenous ceramic practices in North America. The catalogue assists in shaping the trajectory of practices and possibilities, namely, that clay is a vehicle for social critique and personal healing and a medium that harkens back to generational knowledge while forging it anew. One need only to take a cursory glance at the works documented in the catalogue to understand just how the field of contemporary ceramics is open and unfolding in new directions.

—Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

BOOK REVIEWS

Knowing Native Arts Nancy Marie Mithlo University of Nebraska Press, 2020

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N THIS MONOGRAPH, Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache) offers readers the state of Native American arts scholarship while recollecting 35 years of shifting dynamics she has witnessed during her career. In a rich analysis of the discipline’s moving parts of museums, the academy of Indigenous aesthetics, Native arts in the digital era, and curatorial practices, Mithlo pitches the Native arts community and mainstream art world a nuanced call to take strategic action to advance the scholarship.

Each chapter features an edited essay written within the past 15 years that confronts the institutional, federal, educational, and pop culture industries as shapeshifting influencers that impact the health of Native arts scholarship and Native artists’ creative activity. Throughout eight chapters, Mithlo’s arguments pivot upon Native art studies’ urgent need to center Indigenous knowledge in both the expansion and experimentation of Native arts exhibitions, theorization, scholarship, and graduate education. Near the close of the book, Mithlo states that Indigenous artists, rather than museums, lead the path forward, as they possess the insights and mobility to mount unexpected interventions that most museums may never be able to bring to fruition.

Currently a professor of gender studies and American Indian studies at the University of Los Angeles, California, Mithlo formerly served as faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) as well as in a joint appointment between Occidental College and the Autry Museum of the American West.

A prolific author, Mithlo also co-curated several collateral exhibitions alongside the Venice Biennale from 1999 to 2017.

Knowing Native Arts covers a wide range of concerns in the field. Chapters 1 and 2 respectively address the challenging biases in federal and private funding for the Native arts studies and the layered orientation of Indigenous artists’ practices as interventions and movements through spatial histories. Chapter 3 focuses on new media outlets as a link between Native pasts, presents, and futures, while Chapter 4 provides an analysis of Native art forms as life-affirming relations of Indigenous philosophies. In Chapter 5, Mithlo advises participants in the field toward enacting curatorial sovereignty through Indigenous mentorship, reciprocity, and respect as they inform Indigenous aesthetics and reclamation. In Chapter 6, she assesses a selection of photographic representations of Native persons as embodying themes of cultural compositeness in changing communities, linear chronologies in the service of assimilation, and falsely dichotomizing identities. In Chapter 7, Mithlo foregrounds ethnic fraud as a violation of Native self-determination and argues against naturalizing the concept of fraudulent identity as a curatorial principle. In Chapter 8, she expresses her frustration with press outlets, museums, and academics that disregard Native intellectualism. She calls for a shared authority in museum leadership to bridge the divide to engender broader acknowledgments of Native philosophies.

As a Mellon predoctoral fellow and doctoral candidate in Native American art history at the University of Oklahoma, I find this publication to fulfill a much needed, candid outlining of the institutional structures and interdisciplinary relationships that fuse into the Native arts world. For instance, Mithlo highlights the national awareness and extensive media coverage from 2016 to 2017 of the water

protectors at the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, North Dakota, an American Indian–led movement known as #NoDAPL. She relates this visibility to the amplified attention given to Native arts in 2017 in two publications: a dedicated issue of Art Journal and of Art in America.

Naming this relationship between media visibility and the American imagination calls attention to Native participants’ stakes in the discipline, where creative practices visually enact protests for inherent human rights and Indigenous philosophies. Mithlo calls for an ongoing recognition of Native arts in popular media and the academic press to accumulate momentum in the field.

We are seeing a manifestation of this work with Christian Allaire (Nipissing Ojibwe) writing for Vogue.

In 2020 he has highlighted Native artists participating in the virtual Santa Fe Indian Market and Kiowa artist Keri Ataumbi’s fine jewelry practice. In the past two years he’s focused on the next generation of Native beadwork artists and a cadre of Native fashion designers.

This coincides with a string of important recent publications from museums: Native Fashion Now: North American Indian Style (Peabody Essex Museum, 2015), Native Art Now!: Developments in Contemporary Native American Art Since 1992 (Eiteljorg Museum, 2017), Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 2018), and Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists (Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2019).

Indigenous artists, rather than museums, lead the path forward Mithlo also puts pressure on academic institutions to establish a peer-reviewed, academic journal for Native arts scholarship. She identifies this void, coupled with a lack of substantial funding for Native-run institutions and programs, as a severe deficiency that slows the field’s growth. As a change on this front, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded IAIA a $434,000 grant in 2019 “to support the planning of a new research FALL 2020 | 77

BOOK REVIEWS

center at IAIA that focuses on the advancement of contemporary Native arts and culture, including not only the care of collections and records but also support for training via internships, fellowships, research, and guidance in Indigenouscentered methodologies.”1 Mithlo also addresses Native arts scholars’ reliance on interviews for publications and a lack of research engagement with existing literature and archives. She urges scholars to cross-reference interviews with archival material and secondary sources to ensure accuracies while becoming familiar with the field’s prior discourse. This process, in tandem with reaching out to tribal nations and Native arts communities, provides a method for academics and curators to deepen their education, enact integrity, and work respectfully in their decisions to focus on particular artists. Thus, Mithlo calls for Native arts exhibitions to center Native knowledge and community relations to uphold accountability. In this vein, she names Jimmie Durham’s career-long, ethnic fraud as an ongoing violation of tribal sovereignty and self-determination.

Indigenous philos ophies of knowledge and community building take center stage in Mithlo’s discussions of the local to global dynamics at the Venice Biennale. Reflecting on the series of Native arts events she co-curated there via the Indigenous Arts Action Alliance collective between 1999 and 2017, Mithlo explains how these collateral sites relied on support from Italian hosts who provided exhibition spaces. She identifies these projects as experimental—a quality offering the most possibilities for advancement of Native arts. Mithlo also recommends a framework for collaborative, Native arts projects, Indigenous Cultural Protocols and the Arts (Australia Council for the Arts, 2006), with principles of respect; Indigenous control; communication, consultation, and consent; and interpretation, integrity, and authenticity.

Let’s keep reaching, and as Mithlo writes, “do the work.”

—Michelle J. Lanteri 1. Eric Davis, “Institute of American Indian Arts Receives Grant for New Research Center,” Tribal College Journal (January 28, 2019), web.

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Skawennati: From Skyworld to Cyberspace Matthew Ryan Smith McIntosh Gallery, Western University, 2019

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OU CAN JUDGE THE BOOK From Skyworld to Cyberspace: Skawennati by its cover. With a fuchsia, computer-generated woman floating in a sea of blue, the cover’s acid-bright colors and futuristic font are high tech, vibrant, and contemplative. Both catalogue and exhibition underscore how Mohawk artist Skawennati successfully marries innovative media with ancestral narratives. All of her work in the show, including the video, personal attire, and drawings, demonstrate that new techniques, new media, and new styles are significant to Indigenous arts.

Published in English and French, this catalogue provides background and commentary to Skawennati’s solo exhibition, which ran from March 21 to April 27, 2019, at McIntosh Galler y, Western University in London, Ontario, before traveling to the University of Waterloo Art Gallery in Waterloo, Ontario, from September 12 to October 26, 2019. Guest curator Matthew Ryan Smith initiated the

exhibition during his tenure as curatorin-residence at McIntosh Gallery in 2018. The catalogue features critical essays by Smith and emerging scholars Wahsontiio Cross (Mohawk), Maize Longboat (Mohawk), and McIntosh Gallery curator Helen Gregory.

This show is not a retrospective but a deep dive into a few of her projects. Born in Kahnawà:ke Mohawk territory and a member of the Turtle clan, Skawennati is best known for her machinima videos. She also leads many projects, including Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace and the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, to open the virtual world to Indigenous youth. These organizations hosted Skins Workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling and Digital Media to teach programmers and designers to include Indigenous clothing and features in the online virtual world Second Life.

Skawennati shares her goals in the catalogue: “I fear that if Indigenous people cannot envision ourselves in The Future, we will not be there. We need to visualize ourselves as full participants in the multi-mediatized world of today and tomorrow to help ourselves become active agents in the shaping of new mediums and new societies.”

The catalogue captures many facets of Skawennati’s work: life-sized images of the artist’s avatar, the artist dressed as her avatar, corn husk dolls, and Barbies (the artist’s favorite toy from childhood) in miniature versions of the outfit, and movie stills from the machinima films (movies made in Second Life). The gallery screened her latest videos, including She Falls for Ages (2017), a retelling of the Haudenosaunee Creation Story in which the heroine Otsitsakaion (Ancient Flower) leaves her cosmic home, Skyworld, and founds Turtle Island. The show includes elements of her process, including stor yboard drawings, character sketches, and important parts of the mise-en-scène.

In his article, “Other Places, Outer Spaces,” Matthew Ryan Smith describes his goal for the show: to highlight how new technologies allow for new aesthetics and new approaches to storytelling. He

BOOK REVIEWS

notes, “Skawennati’s work attempts to visualize not only what the future might look like, but also how Indigenous (and non-Indigenous) communities might position themselves within it.” Smith finds the areas where scientific discoveries about time and space overlap with Haudenosaunee cultural values.

Wahsontiio Cross contributed the essay “The Power of Creation” to the catalogue. An artist, curator, and doctoral candidate in cultural mediations at Carleton University in Ottawa, Cross underscores the idea that using the images and technology from science fiction to tell ancestral stories is not a contradiction but a continuation. She notes that Skawennati’s narrative art follows Haudenosaunee protocols of “circular storytelling, a way of making the ideas in the story relevant to the viewer by repetition and making connections to the present.” For Cross, Skawennati’s doll making is integral to Haudenosaunee cultural expression, not only as children’s toys but also “for medicinal and spiritual purposes.”

"I fear that if Indigenous people cannot envision ourselves in The Future, we will not be there."

The article “Facelights, Screen Capture, Action!” by Maize Longboat highlights the machinima process.

Longboat, a master’s degree candidate at Concordia University in Montreal and participant in a Skins Workshop, offers insights into the special challenges of filming entirely online, which combines technical knowledge with dexterity.

In machinima, props might suddenly disappear or pixelate, and a character might need an invisible face light to retain details. He discusses the difficulties in creating the Tree of Life for She Falls for Ages. Each blossom had to be added individually so the tree would look lifelike. Longboat is enthusiastic about the benefits this technology offers emerging Indigenous filmmakers.

In “The Adventures of an Avatar and Her Real Girl,” Helen Gregory considers how Skawennati’s work plays with science fiction. With a doctoral degree in art and visual culture from Western University and an artist herself, Gregory states the works in the show express the potentials in drawing from customary storytelling practices “with digital media as a way to pre-record a future history.” She also explores the role of avatars in both the virtual and the physical world.

This bright, informative catalogue offers a vision of the show to those who cannot visit it and a deeper understanding for those who have. One small issue: the catalogue offers no information about the writers. Short biographies would have been helpful to understand their perspectives, plus it would have stressed the depth of knowledge and expertise present in this project. Like its bright, colorful cover, the catalogue reflects the vibrant exhibition.

—Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD

ADVENTURE AND INTRIGUE FROM COVER TO COVER. What You’ll Learn May Surprise You. • “Cherokee Newspapers, 1828-1906: Tribal Voice of a People in Transition” • “Records of the Moravians Among the Cherokees” Volumes 1-7 • “The Development of Law and Legal Institutions Among the Cherokees” • “The Life and Times of Reverend Stephen Foreman” Enjoy these and many other hard-to-find books on Cherokee history and culture.

21192 S. KEELER DRIVE, PARK HILL, OK 74451 888.999.6007 • CHEROKEEHERITAGE.ORG FALL 2020 | 79

BOOK REVIEWS

Unsettling Native Art Histories on the Northwest Coast Edited by Kathryn BunnMarcuse and Aldona Jonaitis University of Washington Press, 2020

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N S E T T L I N G N AT I V E ART HISTORIES ON THE NORTHWEST COAST is the latest volume from University of Washington Press to examine the Indigenous art and material culture of the Pacific Northwest. As the title suggests, the central focus of this book is “unsettling” how Northwest Coast art and culture have been historically presented by settler scholars in literature and exhibitions.

So what does it mean to “unsettle” history? As Bunn-Marcuse explains on page four, “at its core, ‘unsettling’ requires work that is actively aware of both past and ongoing effects of settler colonialism; commits to listening, learning, and acting in ways that respect and uphold Indigenous priorities; and calls for or demonstrates new practices based in this awareness and accountability to the impacts of scholarly work.”

To that end, this handsome volume brings together 21 Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors from

a variety of backgrounds and offers a breadth of writings that don’t exclusively emerge from academia but instead from embodied methodologies, lived experiences, and cultural knowledge.

Within the text, ways of knowing rooted in Western disciplines are not privileged over insights from communities, artists, or storytellers. Furthermore, these methodologies are shown not to be mutually exclusive, as several authors draw from more than one knowledge system in framing their chapters.

Editorial choices throughout the volume underscore the commitment to center Indigenous communities and women, beginning with the cover image of Raven’s Cloak (2014), a textile

by Tlingit artist Alison Bremner. By highlighting the contemporary appliqué cloak on the cover, the editors visually reinforce the text’s focus on women’s art, knowledge, and cultural centrality.

Land acknowledgments to the nations whose territories the editors live and work on also make clear the respectful and culturally appropriate tone that this volume strives for.

Most of the “unsettling” done here by the editors and contributors is the recentering of Indigenous and women’s voices (and artwork) in dialogues on Northwest Coast art. Within that process, Unsettling addresses historic, implicit biases that have overwhelmingly favored settler voices and men’s roles (and artwork) in academic texts on the subject.

The book also does crucial work to reframe Northwest Coast art and place it back into Indigenous community contexts where it has important roles in kinship, identity, and ceremony.

Unfortunately, there are too many contributors and essays in the text to be covered individually in this review, but I will tease out some threads and highlight a few chapters from the text that stood out to me. Unsettling is divided into an introduction by Bunn-Marcuse, four thematic sections, and a conclusion by Jonaitis. The categories of the sections are: 1) Cultural Heritage Protection: Questions of Rights and Authority, 2) Women’s Work: Stories, Art, and Power, 3) Changing Museums, and 4) Beyond Art.

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Before each group of chapters is a poem from an Indigenous writer that serves as an intervention to frame the essays and challenge the reader’s conceptions of what Northwest Coast art is or could be.

A major theme throughout Unsettling is the transformative power of museums to radically engage with Indigenous artists and communities in collaborative partnerships. Chapters by Bunn-Marcuse, Lucy Fowler Williams and Robert Starbard (Xunaa Tlingit), as well as Karen Duffek, Peter Morin (Tahltan), and Karen Benbassat Ali illustrate how productive and mutually beneficial these cross-cultural exchanges are to generate new understandings of art and culture.

Chapters from Jisgang Nika Collison (Haida) and Sharon Fortney (Klahoose) speak to the role that museums, in dialogue with communities, can play in reconciliation and correction of historic misrepresentations of Northwest Coast art through indigenously focused exhibits.

One of the most exciting dialogues to emerge in the book is around the writings and life of Tlingit curator and ethnologist Louis Shotridge (1883–1937).

Shotridge is perhaps lesser known than George Hunt (1854–1933), another Tlingit ethnologist who worked closely with anthropologist Franz Boas, but this text will almost certainly remedy that.

In Williams and Starbard’s chapter, Shotridge’s writing and collection of work for the University of Pennsylvania Mu s e u m o f A r c h a e o l o g y a n d Anthropology become the connective tissue between the museum and the Tlingit community of Hoonah, Alaska. In the essay, Williams details how Shotridge’s writings and field notes laid the groundwork for a successful repatriation of at.óow (clan-owned objects), which resulted in a long-term partnership between Williams, the museum, and the Hoonah community.

Megan Smetzer quotes Shotridge on page 130 in her chapter on Tlingit octopus bag maker Shgen George: “An invader might satisfy himself in saying the Native customs and habits have about disappeared … but could the lid of the true woman’s mind be thrown wide open there would be seen the mystic veneration of

TAKE HOME A TREASURE FROM INDIAN COUNTRY

BUY WORKS PRODUCED BY MEMBERS OF FEDERALLY RECOGNIZED TRIBES The Indian Arts and Crafts Board (IACB) offers a Source Directory of American Indian and Alaska Native Owned and Operated Arts and Crafts Businesses that sell authentic Native American art and craftwork, which is available at www.doi.gov/iacb.

Under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, it is unlawful to offer or display for sale, or sell, any art or craft product in a manner that falsely suggests it is Indian produced, an Indian product, or the product of a particular Indian or Indian tribe or Indian arts and crafts organization.

For a free brochure on the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, including how to file a complaint, please contact the Indian Arts and Crafts Board.

Evans Flammond, Sr., Rosebud Sioux, Dog Soldier Red Moon, Ledger Art, ©2014

her art still alive and active.” The quote succinctly accomplishes the main goals of the volume—to center Indigenous voices and women—and reinforces Smetzer’s point that Northwest Coast women’s art is a vehicle for cultural continuity, resilience, and cultural knowledge.

Ishmael Hope (Tlingit/Iñupiaq) offers what is sure to be a foundational text that considers Shotridge as a Tlingit man of his time through a close reading of his notes and writings. In Shotridge, Hope identifies an ancestral Tlingit academic who provides a culturally grounded blueprint for framing Tlingit aesthetics and an Indigenous art criticism. Drawing from his own formidable command of cultural knowledge and language, Hope illustrates how profoundly Tlingit-centric Shotridge’s writings and worldview were in side-by-side translations of Tlingit and English. What’s so crucial to Hope’s chapter is that it not only “unsettles” Northwest Coast Native art history, it also points to a culturally appropriate way forward.

Emily Moore’s timely contribution contrasts the 2017 unveiling of a William H. Seward bronze statue in Juneau, Alaska, with the raising of an updated Seward Shame Pole by the Taant’a kwáan Tlingit. Moore illustrates how Tlingit constructions of meaning around the Seward Shame Pole have evolved over time, beyond the original transgression by Seward in the 19th century (an unreciprocated potlatch) to broader, ongoing concerns of settler colonialism. Moore identifies the latest iteration of the Seward Shame Pole as a “countermonument” to the Seward bronze in Juneau, which challenges settler narratives on the land and acts as a reminder of the unpaid debts of the United States to Alaska Native peoples.

I think art collectors will find the several chapters in the volume focused on individual Northwest Coast artists useful and interesting. In addition to the aforementioned chapter from Smetzer, Christopher Green provides an intriguing, formal analysis of Tlingit artist James

U.S. Department of the Interior Indian Arts and Crafts Board Toll Free: 1-888-ART-FAKE or 1-888-278-3253 Email: iacb@ios.doi.gov Web: www.doi.gov/iacb

Schoppert’s (1947–1992) large, abstract panels, while Lou-Ann Ika’wega Neel (Kwakwaka’wakw) shares her personal journey to discovering the work of her grandmother, famed Kwakwaka’wakw carver Ellen Neel (1916–1966). Both Green and Neel bring new and fascinating insights to the artists in their respective chapters.

Unsettling Native Art Histories on the Northwest Coast is a valuable contribution to the growing body of scholarship working to center Indigenous voices in Northwest Coast art studies. The text accomplishes much of what it sets out to do and provides a solid collection of essays that speak to the contemporary concerns of Northwest Coast communities regarding representation of their arts and cultures. This volume will certainly become a classic and is an excellent learning tool and essential library addition for anyone interested in Indigenous studies, museum practice, or Northwest Coast art history.

—Christopher W. Smith FALL 2020 | 81

BOOK REVIEWS

Daniel C. Swan and Jim Cooley Indiana University Press, 2019

MAGAZINE

FırstAmericanArt

Art all year-round.

Wedding Clothes and the Osage Community: A Giving Heritage

The perfect gift for the person who has everything.

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S

O OFTEN ACADEMICS parse the complex relationship between objects, Indigenous people, and their cultural practices into disparate discussions. Not so in Wedding Clothes and the Osage Community: A Giving Heritage. Refreshingly, authors Daniel C. Swan and Jim Cooley explore Osage wedding clothes as cultural capital that fosters an economy of relationships within ongoing, cultural production. This scholarly exploration borrows from the best work being done in the fields of anthropology, folklore, and Indigenous studies, and this publication creates a template for what I hope will be continued interdisciplinary, scholarly approaches to Indigenous art and culture.

The book’s greatest value lies in its methodology.

Collaborating with the Osage community, the authors bring into the process their respective institutions (Sam Noble Museum, University of Oklahoma, and Mathers Museum of World Cultures, Indiana University Bloomington) with the Osage Nation Museum and the Wahzhazhe Cultural Center.

The Osage community members partnered in the process, both as subject and investigators, and intentional forms of institutional reciprocity and open discussion fed the relationship between the authors and the tribe. Importantly, in addition to the exhibition that traveled to each partner community, the project yielded a resource book filled with wedding photographs that remains the property of the Osage Nation Museum and the construction of a website hosted by the Sam Noble Museum for the benefit of the

BOOK REVIEWS

Osage community’s ongoing interests in the documentation of their own research and culture.

Through this complex but mutually beneficial methodology, the authors remained conscious of their own position as scholars in relation to the subject and the community. While the history of anthropology and many other forms of academia often foster the synonymous identity of author and authority, Swan and Cooley write, “We have intentionally sought to emphasize an Osage community voice and perspective.” Their history of the Mízhin, customary Osage weddings among young adults, and Iloⁿshka practices, which use the Osage wedding clothes within exchanges, rely on primary accounts of Osage people.

When referencing the interesting historical literature on Osage culture, which they explore enough to prove they are aware of it, these scholarly accounts are verified through either Osage oral accounts or interviews with living community members. The continued examination of the history of Osage wedding clothes with culturally guided affirmation shifts the authority from scholar to community.

This book successfully reveals that the best knowledge about Osage practices remains with the Osage people. This is a sentiment, I trust, that many tribes will echo.

The series of chapters follow a vein of thinking about Osage culture that reveals the key elements of cultural practice, including the introduction of new cultural and social forces and the importance of conscious deliberation and sacrifice. The text discloses how, through social cooperation, the Osage continue to maintain a cultural order uniquely their own. The chapters look at the history of Mízhin wedding practices; the role of Osage wedding clothes, particularly the adoption of military coats and hats and their elaborate decoration; and the specific role of wedding clothes within Iloⁿshka social exchange. The authors conclude with a chapter that explores the Osage wedding clothes as a form of cultural currency, importantly affirmed through their continued use in building kinship and social relationships. Supporting their arguments, the authors regularly and efficiently use the footnotes to cite many of the emerging and important Indigenous scholars in the field, especially Osage scholars, when possible.

An underlying strength of the chapters is that, while it may have been easy to consider the elements of currency, capital, and exchange from a capitalist perspective, the authors never do. The value of these elements is held closely within Osage ontology. The importance of gifts and exchange remains linked solely to their value supporting the construction of kinship and fostering social relationships.

The repetitive acts of exchange using the Osage wedding coats and other items discussed as the cultural currency, such as drums, blankets, and horses, serve to reinforce Osage identity. The exchanges are deliberate actions fostering an active cultural identity, not simply one of heritage and custom. The authors show Osage people navigating through their economic system of generosity

as world citizens. The people act in full awareness of the social mores and influences that might distract them from their culture and choose to produce Osageness as a form of social order.

I encourage readers to follow the critical role food plays as another form of currency. Casually addressed within the various ceremonial components, the authors seem to invite further discourse on food as a subtle but critical component of the exchanges related to paying for the groom and the drum. Recognizing the patrilineal institutions discussed, both for the Mízhin where children were subject to the decisions of their parents (often discussed as decisions made by the fathers) and Iloⁿshka (which was historically a man’s dance), the role of food expresses a distinctly maternal role in affirming, supporting, and encouraging these exchanges and relationships as cultural practice.

Finally, one of the shifts in the publishing world has been the ongoing movement to make scholarship available as open-source documents. The authors prepared their publication intending it to be available as soon as possible as open source. This fostering of new scholarship using their methodology as a reference is an important act of reciprocity with the academic fields, certainly. Perhaps more importantly, to circulate their work quickly and freely is important to reciprocate the generosity of the Osage community.

Placing the community’s voice directly in the ongoing, scholarly discourse is a gift by the authors that will serve as a legacy for others to follow. We need more scholarship with the Indigenous voice placed first.

—heather ahtone, PhD (Choctaw/Chickasaw) FALL 2020 | 83

MUSIC

NATIVE SOUNDS

By Thollem

A

S WE MOVE ON from this terrible summer and into an even more uncertain autumn, it is inspiring to hear the music being developed by Native musicians right now. The musicians that I follow have continued with their work through this pandemic, creating an important cohesion for their respective lives as well as those of everyone around them. While many adjustments are needed, especially in collaborative projects, most musicians have been able to continue working unimpeded.

Music expresses truths and challenges that are as important now as ever before. The common thread is the musician’s dedication to their work and to their communities, but their approaches are wildly different and veer from there— sometimes even from the same individual musician.

The introduction I share about each musical artist below provides a leaping-off point for anyone who would like to investigate further. With much of this work available online, more information can easily be found. The variety, quantity, and quality of the work is staggering: from new albums and multimedia performances to heavy metal bands, string quartets, noise projects, the International Double Reed Society’s conference, a podcast interviewing young musicians about composition, and a drone festival from the rooftops of Tulsa!

VIOLINIST L AUR A ORTMAN (White Mountain Apache) released a new 30-minute, one-track album of field recordings commissioned by ISSUE Project Room (IPR) for their Isolated Field Recording series. Ortman states on the IPR website, “As a White Mountain Apache woman from Arizona living 23 years in New York City, I have recorded the subways, traffic, parades, block parties, middle-of-the-night hollering on the streets, birds, dogs, fireworks, car alarms, bonfires, hiking, water, laughing,

musical rocks, singing, rivers, insects, and more that have ended up in many of the incessant ways I am influenced by as an artist.” The album is available through her Bandcamp profile, the Dust Dive Flash.

In collaboration on a new project with filmmakers Michelle Latimer (Métis/Algonquin) and Brooke Swaney Pepion (Blackfeet/Salish) and artist Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee), Ortman created new music for Settlement, a 29-artist, Indigenous-led response to the Mayflower 400 in Plymouth, England.

JACQUELINE WILSON (Yakama) is a bassoonist and assistant professor at Washington State University. In July she participated in the International Double Reed Society’s first virtual conference as a performer and lecturer and presented “Inspired Native: Redefining Identity through Reclamation, Decolonization, and Artistic Sovereignty.” She performed Louis W. Ballard’s (Quapaw/Cherokee, 1837–2007) “Katcina Dances III. Kwahu (Eagle)” and “Katcina Dances IV. Momo (Bees)” for bassoon and piano as well as a solo bassoon piece by Raven Chacon (Diné) entitled “For Jacqueline Wilson.”

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Her concert reminded me why bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. Jacqueline Wilson is a virtuoso, and in her care we are presented with a deeply rich, sonic experience.

NATHAN YOUNG (Delaware/Pawnee/ Kiowa/Cherokee) is an interdisciplinary artist and the founder of Tulsa Noise, which presents regional musicians through various formats. In early October, they held their inaugural Drone Fest. The event was streamed live from the roof of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship’s Archer studios and was supported by Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

Composer RAVEN CHACON (Diné) has a new solo album, An Anthology of Chants Operations, published by the Italian label Ouidah and distributed by SoundOhm. His first in a decade, this album features a cornucopia of experiential, musical approaches and results of Chacon’s music over the last ten years. Each piece is a brief dip into a unique, sonic world. Tenderizor, Raven’s thrash metal band, released Glory Horse, their long-awaited follow-up to Touch The Sword, available through Bandcamp. Raven also participated in the New Mexican portion of the High

MUSIC

Zero Festival with percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani and bassist Carlos Santistevan streamed live from Santa Fe. WARREN REALRIDER (Pawnee/ Crow), noise artist, has performed as Tick Suck since 2016. He performed in Tulsa Noise’s Drone Fest and has a tape coming out called Atira Rarahwaktahu on Nathan Young’s record label Peyote Tapes.

He’s also composing the soundtrack for a collaborative, multimedia installation with painter Joshua Garrett (Mvskoke/ Seminole) this winter. Tick Suck activates objects through guitar pedals and amplifies them at high volumes. He recorded Kípaacu' Kícáturaaru' (Raw Road River) in a riverside slag pile near the intersection of I-35 and I-40.

MICHAEL BEGAY (Diné), guitarist, bassist, and composer, is involved in an incredible array of projects. He composes, blogs, and works at KGHR, the community radio station in Tuba City. He teaches alongside Raven Chacon in the Native American Composer Apprentice Project.

He also has a hip hop duo with Mr. Dv (aka Daniel Mendez), who recently appeared on KQST’s “Today’s Hottest Music” out of Northern Arizona. Michael plays in three different metal bands: he is the lead guitarist for Akklamation, who have just released their second album, II; the bassist in Lozen, who are in the process of recording their first single; and he’s the new guitarist for Scarlet’s Vine, who are about to start recording.

His newest project is a podcast on Mixcloud called Original Score, an Indigenous perspective on music. Made possible through a grant from the Lewis Prize for Music, Original Score allows Michael Begay to interview emerging Navajo and Hopi musicians and composers. The Museum of Native American History in Bentonville, Arkansas, is interviewing Begay and livestreaming Original Score on their website (monah.us). “Every project that I am a part of is a team effort. All of my knowledge stems from my parents, my teachers, and mentors. I am very thankful for the opportunities that have presented

themselves and I am grateful for the projects that are now unfolding,” he says.

Finally, LONG HAIR MUSIC, a record store in Albuquerque, offers free shipping to anyone living in Dinétah, the Mescalero Apache Reservation, the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, and the Pueblos of Zuni, Katishtya, Isleta, Cochiti, Acoma, Walatowa, Kewa, Kha'po Owingeh, Nambe Owingeh, P'osuwaege Owingeh, P'ohwhóge Owingeh, P'įwweltha, Tamaya, Taos, Zia, or Tetsuge Owingeh.

Customers in these communities can now get packages delivered via the US Postal Service free of charge.

above, top Tick Suck, Warren Realrider (Pawnee/Crow), IIII Kitapaatu, 2020, video still, documentation of performance at the intersection of I-35, I-40, and North Kícpahat (Canadian [Oklahoma] River). Image courtesy of Tick Suck. above, bottom Michael Begay (Diné), top left, with participants o f t h e N a t i ve A m e r i c a n Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP) in the Navajo Nation.

Image courtesy of the Museum of Native American History, Bentonville, Arkansas. opposite Jacqueline Wilson (Yakama), bassoonist and professor. Image courtesy of Jacqueline Wilson.

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Colville Nez Perce Author, Poet & Playwright

BETH PIATOTE

By Tiffany Midge (Standing Rock Lakota)

A

WRITER OF SHORT FICTION, personal essays, drama, and academic essays, Beth Piatote is also the author of a scholarly monograph, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature. Her mixed-genre collection, The Beadworkers: Stories, is just out from Counterpoint Press. Her play, Antíkoni (which appears in The Beadworkers), had a staged reading in 2018 at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is an associate professor of Native American studies. In addition to writing, Beth is devoted to Indigenous language revitalization focused on Nez Perce. She is Nez Perce, enrolled with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.

TM: Congratulations on your newest book, The Beadworkers.

I was thrilled when I first learned about it. Is there any kind of aesthetic, tone, or theme that Nez Perce writing might subscribe to? Anything that might characterize the writing of the Columbia River Plateau?

BP: First, thank you for your kind words—I am a big fan of your work! I appreciate this opportunity to have this conversation.

I’ve been influenced by Michael Wasson and by other Columbia River writers including Elizabeth Woody, Gloria Bird, Janet Campbell Hale, Inés Hernández-Ávila, Sherman Alexie, and, from an earlier generation, Mourning Dove/Christine Quintasket [Syilx, ca. 1884–1936]. One of my stories, “Feast III,” is kind of a love letter to Mourning Dove, because I had read her papers at WSU [Washington State University] and was so moved by her personal writings about working in the fields, caring for sick and dying family members, enduring all kinds of grief, and continuing to write through all of it. That experience of the migrant labor camps at the turn of the century and early 20th century was a common experience for Columbia River people, and in that piece I tried to capture what it was then (and now) to see that land always as Indigenous, even when covered with hops and apple trees and farms. Perhaps that way of seeing is an aesthetic.

TM: One of the things that makes The Beadworkers such a watershed book is that it opens with a long poem and continues with short fiction, and ends with a play! It was beautifully balanced, but mixing genres in the same book can sometimes be risky. At what point did it occur to you to mix the different forms together in one book?

To me, the movement through multiple forms is itself an experience of being Indigenous. At one level, the formal experiments recall a long intellectual history where early writers like William Apess, Samson Occom, E. Pauline Johnson, Zitkála-Šá/ Gertrude Bonnin, and so many others, as well as our chiefs and diplomats, could quickly apprehend and master rhetorical forms and languages. In doing so, they were able to critique dominant culture on its own terms or appeal to familiar forms of sentiment and logic.

So a piece like the “Feast” triptych, which is structured as a Nez Perce feast, asserts a stability to our order of the world against all the ways that it becomes disordered. In the three parts of this piece—a poem, prose poem, and narrative story—each one is a different genre yet each has the exact same structure.

BP: That’s a great description of the book. I was intentional about the use of form, and it never occurred to me that I was doing anything unusual until I got a few rejections from agents and publishers who clearly had objections to its composition.

TM: You work in a lot of different formats—drama, short fiction, poetry. Do you tend to work in all at once? Or go through periods where you only want to write fiction, or only want to write poetry or drama?

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opposite Beth Piatote. Photo: Kirsten Lara Getchell. above Mikailah Thompson (Nez Perce), Medallion, seed beads, shell discs, brass brads. Image courtesy of the artist. right The Beadworkers: Stories, by Beth Piatote (Counterpoint Press, 2019). Cover art: detail of Marcus Amerman (Choctaw), The Gathering, 1997, seed beads on cotton, collection of Portland Art Museum.

BP: I have lots of projects going all of the time, just chipping away at each one, and then when deadlines come up, I devote myself to the one that has to get done. It took me a long time to write The Beadworkers, because it was always subordinated to my academic work and teaching. But in a way, having a day job allowed me total artistic freedom because I didn’t have to produce a book to support my family, and no one was expecting or waiting for anything from me.

TM: Several of the stories take place during different periods of the past.

What was it like to write about a different period? And how did you ensure historical accuracy? Did you research? Or interview family members to bring the period to life?

BP: I do a mix of aiming for historical accuracy and retaining creative freedom.

I don’t want anyone to read my stories as

history. Family and community stories point me toward certain events that are significant. The historical research that I spend the most time on are the everyday details—in “Fishing Wars,” for example— what book would the mother be reading?

What songs were popular? What slang did people use? What did telephones look like? I go to libraries and read LIFE magazine or other things like that to try to get a feeling of the time.

TM: I’m fascinated (and delighted) with Antíkoni, which is a retelling or even an appropriation of the classic Sophocles play, Antigone. Would you talk a little about how the idea first arrived to you?

BP: I wrote it as a fun puzzle for myself.

I loved writing that piece, and it felt like pure indulgence to be able to study Sophocles and to think about how to translate his moves into my context.

I read Antigone as a freshman in high

school and I’ve always loved that play. In fact, I think everyone in America should be reading Sophocles right now and thinking hard about the political implications of his critique of state power and megalomania. Equally, people should be reading Indigenous cannibal and Windigo stories, because they show us exactly what is going on.

Anyway, I first thought about a Native version of Antigone in 1996 when the Ancient One, or Kennewick Man, was pulled from the Columbia River and immediately became a contested figure between our tribes and the state. I thought, What is wrong with these people?!

Don’t they even read their own foundational texts? How could anyone read Antigone and not understand—not be moved—by these fundamental questions of what the living owe the dead, or what the limits of human law are in the face of moral law? I also wondered, If the Greeks FALL 2020 | 87

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and I would go the NMAI and write in the gallery surrounded by Nez Perce and other Indigenous belongings. Writing from inside a museum, writing with those spirits, profoundly shaped the work.

Over these many years I had also studied a fair number of Nez Perce stories, and when I looked at Sophocles’s chorus, I saw that those old Greek storytellers were telling the same kinds of gruesome and fantastic stories that our storytellers told.

I was happy to get a chance to put these two ancient literatures in conversation. I love to think about Sophocles’s chorus and the chorus of aunties getting together and telling stories all night.

TM: What would you want readers to take away from The Beadworkers?

BP: I don’t have a specific idea in mind. I think with stories there is no single takeaway. One of the ways that I think about the book is as a beadwork table, where people are coming together to create, to tell stories, to laugh, to bring the real pain posed “universal” human questions, why they did not include us? Are we not human?

At first I tried to write it as a narrative story, sort of a story within a story. I tried setting it in a university where Native students were acting in the play while they were also fighting to get ancestral remains from the museum. I tried different things like that but none of them really worked. So I set it aside for some years—many years—went to grad school, had children, etc.

I started thinking about it again when I came to Berkeley in 2007 and became aware of the incredible mess at the [Phoebe A.] Hearst Museum, which holds more than 9,300 ancestors—the largest number outside of the Smithsonian. That’s when I decided to write it as a play and set it in the museum. But I still had to write my academic book and get tenure. I think I finally started writing it as a play and figuring the main characters as an Indian family around 2015. I wrote large chunks of it in 2016 when I had a fellowship at the Bard Graduate Center in New York 88 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

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of their lives—personal and historical— into a shared space where it can more easily be borne. I want readers to feel like they are at the table. I want to show the pain and beauty of Indigenous lives, with an emphasis on life. I want readers to experience the practices of kinship—with the land, with animals, with ancestors, with each other. I want the stories to travel on with readers, and perhaps a story will come to them as medicine when they need it.

MIKAILAH THOMPSON

A

NIIMÍIPU (NEZ PERCE) BEADWORK ARTIST and emerging fashion designer from Lapwai, Idaho, Mikailah Thompson just earned her bachelor’s degree in business and communication this spring from Lewis-Clark State College. She minored in marketing, leadership, and Nez Perce language, and plans to put all these fields to use in her next endeavor in Alexandria, Virginia, where she will work in marketing and event planning.1 An active organizer, Thompson coordinated basketball games, youth health clinics, and other community events. Most recently, she has organized and spoken at Black Lives Matter rallies this summer throughout northern and western Idaho.

Her grandmother Chloe Halfmoon (Nez Perce, 1939–2019) taught Thompson to bead at age 10. The artist’s mother, Nancy Halfmoon (Nez Perce), was also a beadwork artist. Thompson dabbled in the art form but only pursued it seriously after entering Haskell Indian Nations University, with encouragement from her cousin. Once she had honed her beading skills, she gifted the Chief Joseph Medallion to her grandmother.

She draws inspiration from historic Niimíipu beadwork, known widely for bold geometric and pictorial floral designs with contour stitching, and uses a regional palette established in the 19th century;

however, she also incorporates trade items, such as brass brads and shell discs.

“If there is something I am not sure how to do, I get creative and find a way to do it,” Thompson writes. “Those pieces ultimately challenged my creativity and as a result, my signature pieces are because of those.” —America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

1. Chloe Thompson, “It’s a Different World,” Nimiipuu Tribal Tribune 2, no. 11 (September 2020), 4.

above Mikailah Thompson (Nez Perce), Medallion, seed beads, cut delica beads, brass brads. opposite, top Mikailah Thompson (Nez Perce), Chief Joseph Medallion, seed beads, shell discs, brass, private collection. opposite, bottom Mikailah Thompson (Nez Perce), Chief Whitebird Medallion, seed beads, brass. All images courtesy of the artist.

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EXCERPT FROM "ROOTLESS" IN THE BEADWORKERS: STORIES “I’m glad to be out of there.” “I bet.”

“This morning I left my cat and my hu s b a n d .” “For g o o d ? O r just—temporarily?”

“For good. Yeah.”

I didn’t say anything. I felt bad about the cat. I’ve left men before. I wondered if I should say something about the cat.

Neither of us said anything for a few minutes, and then I realized that she was crying. above Mikailah Thompson (Nez Perce), Post Earrings, 2020, seed beads, 23/4 in. each.

T

HE WOMAN CARRIED a soft brown leather purse, the kind sewn with the nap side out, with a long shoulder strap.

It was trimmed with turquoise beads and fringe. She held a thick paperback novel called Shenandoah on her lap.

“You don’t have any bags,” I said, as the bus pulled away from the curb.

“That’s right.” She threw her hands in the air. “It’s an adventure!”

Just then my phone rang. I fished it out from my bag, pushing aside a small container of camas roots. I was returning home from Root Feast on the Rez, or maybe I was returning to exile, taking my roots with me. It doesn’t seem right that one should be returning on both ends of a journey, but that’s how it felt. On the phone I explained to my boyfriend that my plane had been delayed, so I would be at the station a bit later. “Call me when you get to MacArthur,” he said.

When I hung up, the woman said, “If you ever run away from home, hold on to that thing. Because you just can’t put a coin in a box anymore.” “No, I guess not.”

“You can’t even find a pay phone.

When did that happen?” “It’s too bad.

Sometimes you need a phone like that.”

She shrugged. “What are you going to do?”

The bus rolled noisily past warehouses and taco trucks. She leaned toward me.

“Will you help me listen? For the station?

I have trouble,” she said, pointing to her right ear.

“Oh,” I said. “Don’t worry. The shuttle goes straight there. No stops.” “And which one?”

“Coliseum.”

“Is it south or north of the city?” “South.”

“Okay. I’m going to Albany.” “That’s a bit north.”

“Yeah, my friend is going to meet me.”

“There’s no stop in Albany.”

“Okay. Then the next stop?” “El Cerrito.”

“El Cerrito stop. Thank you for being so kind.”

I told her it was nothing. It is no hardship to recite the train schedule.

“We’re going to the ocean, going to get some air. You know there is less oxygen in Nevada? Sixteen percent less oxygen at that elevation.”

“Wow.”

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“That crazy bastard damn near broke my nose,” she said. A laugh sputtered out.

“Now I don’t know what.”

“You’re doing the right thing.”

“Tell me I can’t cry here,” she said. “I can cry when I get to my friend’s house. But not here. Can’t be crying in Oakland.”

People cry in Oakland. But I knew what she meant. “That’s right,” I said. “Stiff upper lip, then.”

I felt awkward saying it, but I felt a moral obligation to be chipper.

She wiped her eyes quickly with an index finger. “I’ll just cry into my hat,” she said. She choked on a laugh again.

“But I forgot my hat.”

“Now there’s the tragedy.”

She nodded and choked some more.

“You’re good,” she said. “That is a tragedy.

You can’t go outside without a hat in Nevada.” “No. That sun will kill you.” “I can’t believe I left it.”

I wanted to say that she would get a new hat, but I didn’t want to burden her with metaphors. The bus arrived at the station and we filed out. The woman went to buy a ticket, and I took the stairs to the platform.

—Beth Piatote (Colville Nez Perce)

MEMORIAL

JOAN HILL December 19, 1930–June 16, 2020

T

HIS SUMMER the Native American art community lost one of its renowned brightest lights. Joan Hill (Muscogee/ Cherokee), or Cheasequah (Redbird), was a trailblazer in the early days of the Oklahoman Indian arts world and an inspirational figure to many Native American women who came after her.

Joan Hill’s paintings differed from those of her peers. Hill was among the few artists who chose to give the prevalent Flatstyle of its time movement, form, contour, and depth. She developed several styles of artwork and composition throughout her career including Oklahoman Flatstyle, oils with a unique vertical drybrush technique, abstract, figurative, and landscapes. Hill’s array of techniques was remarkable and different.

At times her subject matter or narrative would transcend from the natural world to spiritual dreamscapes, Native and global themes, and graphic colors combined with Hill’s very own form of storytelling. She possessed an extraordinary knowledge of historical ceremonial regalia, which allowed her to recount spiritual scenery in her paintings.

Joan Hill was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Her parents, William and Winnie (Harris) Hill, encouraged her to develop an interest in the arts. The artist enjoyed a close relationship with her parents and to her home on the historical family allotment in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation where she grew up.

Hill graduated from Muskogee Central High School and then attended Bacone College in Muskogee and Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

Hill taught art in the Tulsa Public School system for four years before making the shift to becoming a full-time fine artist.

Hill garnered awards and acclaim in the years to follow and became one of the first female Native American painters from Oklahoma to attract widespread attention from collectors and museums.

As Joan’s abilities and styles developed, her paintings took her to 36 countries to

above Joan Hill with one of her paintings.

produce work. Over the years she received more than 280 awards for her art, among them a commemorative medal from Great Britain; the 1985 Oscar d’Italia from Accademia Italia in Calvatone, Cremona; and the Waite Phillips Special Artists trophy from the Philbrook Museum of Art for Lifetime Achievement.

Throughout this creative period, some of Indian Country’s most prestigious art collections procured Hill’s paintings, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Arts and Crafts Board in Washington, DC; National Museum of the American Indian, George Gustav Heye Center, Smithsonian Institution, New York, New York; Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona; Cherokee Heritage Center, Park Hill, Oklahoma; and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. During these years, Joan Hill must have been in touch with something special to have the creative power to meet all the deadline, travel, and public appearance obligations she accomplished with a graceful dignity.

Before I close, I would like to share a story about Joan Hill that I have only told to three other friends. In the last five years, I was fortunate to establish a relationship with Hill after following her career since a young age. After interviewing her for First American Art Magazine No. 9 (Winter 2015/16), we would communicate from time to time through a letter or the occasional phone conversation. During one of these phone calls, I asked Hill if she was working on any new paintings.

Hill told me she was going to begin a new piece based on a dream. In her dream, she was walking along the banks where the Arkansas River, Verdigris River, and the Grand River conjoin and form the Three Rivers area near her property in Muskogee. She had dreamt of ancient villages of Natives on the banks of the rivers. She was among them, she knew them, they knew her, and she could understand the language being spoken— it was not Cherokee nor Muscogee, but nonetheless Hill could understand what was being said. Hill worked from what she had experienced in her dreams, and I found that to be fascinating. She was obviously tuned into something deeply spiritual. I waited awhile to see this idea come to fruition but never heard of this painting’s completion. I decided to paint a version of her dream myself and send it to her out of gratitude for the article and friendship. She ended up loving the painting, which made me incredibly pleased. I had painted her profile with the river and village in the background.

After hearing of her passing over a month ago, I would like to believe that somehow she has joined her family and is among the ancient spirits and village along the river before the waters were given the names they have now. I believe she is at peace now, wherever she may be.

The Native art community honors Joan Hill and her many achievements. She will be deeply missed and fondly remembered for years to come.

—Daniel McCoy Jr. (Muscogee/Potawatomi) FALL 2020 | 91

MEMORIAL

NAKOTAH LARANCE August 23, 1989–July 12, 2020

above Nakotah LaRance performing in TOTEM for Cirque De Soleil, Toronto, Canada, 2011. Photo: WENN/Alamy.

All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing.

—Wovoka (Northern Paiute, ca. 1856–1932)

I

MET NAKOTAH LOMASOHU RAYMOND L ARANCE (Hopi/ Assiniboine/Tewa/Navajo) nearly seven years ago while writing about him for a Taos-based publication. Whenever our paths crossed again at Native art-related events and social gatherings, he would offer his hand and ask, “How’s it going?”

Those greetings meant a lot to me.

They were always sincere, heartfelt, and reflected some of what made Nakotah so beloved by so many. He was free of self-importance, cared about others, and took the time to let us know we mattered.

Nakotah embodied what the world needs most: bright, clear light, warm and unobstructed, illuminating a steady path toward good things.

News of Nakotah’s sudden passing in early July cast dark clouds over Indian Country and left members of local, national, and international communities stunned and saddened by this immeasurable loss. For days following the announcement, social

media feeds in every curve of the globe delivered countless condolences and remembrances of the young, handsome star. (His name Lomasohu means “Handsome Star” in the Hopi language.)

Nakotah, whose Tewa name was Oveen P'ing, or “Duck Mountain,” was the second child of Steve LaRance (Hopi/ Assiniboine) and Marian DenipahLaRance (Ohkay Owingeh/Navajo); brother to ShanDien Sonwai LaRance, Nizhoni Denipah, and Cree LaRance; and nephew of numerous aunts and uncles.

He was born in Barrow, now Utqiaġvik, Alaska, just north of the Arctic Circle.

He grew up in Flagstaff, Arizona, and eventually settled in New Mexico in 2013, following his family’s move to Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, within his mother’s Tewa ancestral homelands.

Nakotah’s natural gift for dance became evident when he began traveling the powwow trail with his aunt Lynnae Lawrence, MD (Hopi/Nakoda) when he was four years old. That summer he met

1. Jules Evans, “What is Duende?,” History of Emotions, March 6, 2014, web.

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his longtime mentor, Derrick Suwaima Davis (Hopi/Choctaw), a seven-time hoop dance world champion. Davis recently recounted in the Arizona Republic the young Nakotah sneaking into his camper to borrow his hoops while Davis was preoccupied with competing in the dance arena. That inspired Davis to make Nakotah a set of his own hoops, a gesture that undoubtedly contributed to Nakotah’s early successes, among them his first world championship hoop dance title at just twelve years of age. Davis also recalled that “Nakotah learned to hoop dance from watching others.”

And in turn, others learned by watching Nakotah. Soon after rooting himself in Northern New Mexico, he helped to establish the Pueblo of Pojoaque Youth Hoop Dancers, wherein he mentored Native youth from kindergarten through high school. The group fostered the creation of the Lightning Boy Foundation in 2016, following the death of one of Nakotah’s students, eight-year-old Valentino Tzigiwhaeno “Lightning Boy” Rivera (Pojoaque, 2008–2016), with whom he shared a friendship that transcended the difference in their years.

Like all great performers, Nakotah possessed a commanding stage presence and exuded the kind of artistry that wells from the deepest part of the soul—duende, as described by British philosopher Jules Evans: “Those moments in artistic activity when something else takes over, when something speaks through you.…

‘A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.’” 1 Nakotah’s passion for artistic activity was indeed beyond philosophy; it was the essence of who he was, and his contributions to the world of hoop dance are unquantifiable. He introduced new steps, styles, and shapes, and ranked among the standard-bearers of the art form: always the one to watch, and, for those hoping to make their own mark in the dance arena, the one to best in competition. In flashes of color, moving in perfect time with the drum, Nakotah danced with

MEMORIAL

an agility and grace that defined his personal style and kept other contenders to the hoop dance championship title on their toes, literally. “Anyone who ever watched Nakotah dance saw that he had an obvious disdain for gravity and other laws of physics,” said family friend Marcus Amerman (Choctaw).

In three decades Nakotah achieved a level of success that most of us can only dream about, even if we live to be 100. He earned a place in history reserved for the rarest of the rare among dancers, and with that came many accolades and recognitions. In an announcement from their home in Ohkay Owingeh the Denipah-LaRance family said, “Nakotah was one of the most unique individuals this world has known, a pioneer of many achievements, too many to list.” But despite the fame and laurels, Nakotah also had a great respect for his gift, and he kept that in full tact. He wore his celebrity with humility, never flaunted his success, and never let it be lost to ego.

A few highlights of an illustrious and groundbreaking career include nine world championship hoop dance titles; featured opening dancer at the Pan American Games in Toronto, Canada, in 2015; a three-year billing as principal dancer for Cirque du Soleil’s traveling show, TOTEM, which commenced in 2009; a 2004 guest appearance on NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno under the heading, “The Most Interesting Person in Arizona,” an auditioned-for spot that led to roles in film and television, including Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (2007), Longmire (2012), and Into the West (2005), for which Nakotah won a First Americans in the Arts Award for Outstanding New Performance by an Actor in a Film.

Nakotah had recently expressed to his family his distress about the coronavirus pandemic and all the souls lost to it who had not completed their journey into the next world because their families could not observe the cultural protocols of their loved one’s passing. He wished he could help them with the healing power of the hoop dance. It’s not difficult to imagine Nakotah doing that: dancing across the heavens, kicking the dust off Orion’s Belt, twirling past the moon and stars, all the while his hoops in formation to reveal the history of humankind, to get to those in need.

Nakotah’s last moments on Mother Earth were lived under a waning Buck Moon, when male deer grow their antlers in preparation for the impending change of season; when breezes from the north toss fallen seeds toward the promise of growth; when ducks take to the mountains to wait out the rain. And though he is no longer with us in physical presence, Nakotah’s legacy will remain infinitely, in those he taught, mentored, and inspired, in his creative contributions to the universe, and in the spirit of the hoop dance.

I close with these words from Nakotah, as spoken to Julie Grimm in 2017 on the value of educating the youth: “It’s what is supposed to be done to keep the culture alive and it’s absolutely necessary. I just want everybody to teach. These knees are not going to last forever, so you have to pass it along to the next generation, look forward to all the creativity and the spirit.”2 Donations can be made in Nakotah’s name at the Lightning Boy Foundation, Inc. —RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo) 2. Julie Ann Grimm, “Flash of Lightning,” Santa Fe Reporter (May 16, 2017), web.

BEN DAVIDSON April 6, 1976–August 15, 2020

H

IS HAIDA NAME, TLANANG NANG KINGAAS, or “The one who is known far away,” aptly described Ben Davidson, a Haida woodcarver, sculptor, printer, and jeweler who loved his family, the outdoors, cycling, dancing, and installing his passion for Haida culture in the next generation. The life of this father, husband, artist, gallerist, and mentor was cut suddenly short by a heart attack, but his legacy will stand the test of time.

Born in Mission, British Columbia, into the Yahgulanaas Raven clan and a family of renowned Haida artists, Benjamin Ray Davidson was son of master carver Robert Davidson. Ben first lived in Whonnock and Aldergrove with his mother, Susan Davidson. At age ten he moved in with his father in South Surrey.

He learned Haida dancing when he joined the Rainbow Creek Dancers, a dance troupe founded by his father and his uncle Reg Davidson. Ben began carving as early as four years old but only started a formal apprenticeship with his father at age 16, which lasted for four years, through 1998. He also studied under his uncle Reg and John Livingston (1959–2019), a non-Native artist who lent his skills to many First Nations carvers.

In 2001 Ben moved to Haida Gwaii where he met and married Tawni Jones. Together they had five children and made a home in Skidegate. There Ben created his own studio and gallery, All About U, which showcased not only his work but that of his relatives and artists he admired.

Ben's sleek, precise carving allowed the woodgrain and textures to shine through, while his bold serigraphs were electric with super-saturated color fields. Always innovative, Ben experimented with Forton™ MG, which could be impregnated with pigments and metals. He used them to create bas-relief wall panels.

Douglas Reynolds Gallery in Vancouver represented Ben, who also exhibited at Lattimer Gallery. He carved a chief ’s seat that the Vancouver Art Gallery featured in Raven Travelling: Two Centuries of Haida Art (2006). His artistic skills earned him the 2014 BC Achievement Foundation Fulmer Award in First Nations Art and also caught the attention of internationally known British artist Damien Hirst, who collected his work and commissioned Ben to carve a 30-foot totem pole.

A dedicated youth mentor, Ben led a weeklong painting course in 2010 with teenagers at the Swan Bay Rediscovery Camp, a Haida cultural program. The children, including two of his sons, painted three longhouse fronts.

In 2014 Ben, an avid cyclist, carved a totem pole almost ten feet tall and carried it along with fellow cyclists on a 1,093mile fundraising ride from Masset to Edmonton, where he presented it as a gift to Stollery Children’s Hospital. He donated a massive aluminum, raven mask to the CASA Centre for Child, Adolescent and Family Mental Health to help them pay off bills.

His generosity, humor, and love for his family and Haida culture will live on through his artwork, his children, and all the lives he touched and inspired.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) FALL 2020 | 93

MEMORIAL

SADIE MARKS July 31, 1948–July 30, 2020

above Sadie Marks. Photos: Bernard G. Siquieros (Tohono O'odham). Image courtesy of Siquieros.

“M

Y GREATEST JOY is to be among the O’odham people,” Sadie Marks once said. “We are like family.”

B orn Sadie Tenakhong va in Hotevilla, on the Third Mesa of the Hopi Reservation, her Native name was Yoihongsi. The renowned basket maker attended Phoenix Indian School, where she met the love of her life, Homer Marks of Santa Rosa Village, Arizona.

The couple married in 1969, and she moved to Sells, Arizona, on the Tohono O’odham Nation.

There, in the 1970s, her mother-in-law taught Sadie how to weave in a Tohono O’odham style. Soon, she was blending the designs of her Hopi heritage and Tohono home to create a completely unique new style. In a 2018 Tucson Meet Yourself interview she said, “My baskets combine Hopi and Tohono O’odham tradition, but mine are a little different than other basket weavers because they have different colors. I don’t dye my materials. They’re from the Tohono O’odham Reservation. Banana yucca root is the red, yellow yucca, green yucca, white yucca, and devil’s claw, which is black.”

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Sadie wove with locally sourced, natural materials such as yucca leaves and roots, beargrass, and devil’s claw.

She began with a coiled center but often used openwork in the middle and outer sections of her baskets. She even incorporated representational imagery, such as Grandmother Spider, butterflies, or Hopi clan symbols, in her weaving.

“O’odham dancers use my baskets when they’re dancing, and also for coming out into womanhood,” Sadie continued.

“So that puts me close to the culture. I never had a coming out, but my daughter did. And I did baskets for her. She’s a basket weaver too.” Her husband and her son, Homer Marks Jr., are artists, as well.

The family of artists traveled frequently. For instance, Sadie demonstrated basket weaving in numerous locations, including Elko, Nevada, and Phoenix, Arizona. She exhibited at the Southwest Indian Art Fair in Tucson and the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market in Phoenix.

Sadie was a founding and active member of the Tohono O'odham Basketweavers Organization, a nonprofit based in Sells, Arizona. She worked with Terrol Dew Johnson and other Tohono O’odham basket makers, and they exhibited together in The Language of Native American Baskets: From the Weavers' View (2003–05) at the Smithson Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). NMAI and the Arizona State Museum acquired Sadie’s baskets for their permanent collections. The State of Arizona gave one of her baskets to a group that received the Governor’s Art Awards in 1997 for their work restoring the Mission San Xavier del Bac, a Roman Catholic church built by Tohono O’odham labor centuries ago.

Sadly, she contracted COVID-19 this summer and walked on, but Sadie Marks has left those who knew her with memories of laughter, dancing eyes, and a contagious smile.

—Jennifer Juan (Tohono O’odham) and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

MEMORIAL

MOLLY NEPTUNE PARKER February 6, 1939–June 12, 2020

M

OLLY NEPTUNE PARKER, also known as Jeannette Katherine Newell, was born in Indian Township, Maine.

Daughter to Irene Newell Dana and Lewey Dana, Molly was generosity personified.

“We had to do everything together,” Molly recalled about growing up in her community with her parents and siblings.

“If our family had more than enough, and the people next door didn’t hardly have anything, my mother always made sure she took potatoes, vegetables, meats, and everything over,” Molly continued. “When somebody needed something, she’d share her stuff. I remember we had such horrible winters.

Some people would run out of wood before the winter was over with. A bunch of us would gather and take big sleds across the lake there, fill them up with wood, and haul them back and take them to the people that needed it. Everything we did, we did as a group.”

It was with this same generosity and love for her community and neighbors that Molly led her life. It wasn’t uncommon for Molly to serve you a full plate of food when you went to visit her—even if you weren’t hungry—or to eat last at family gatherings or community events where she was catering to make sure everyone had enough. Food was one of the many ways she cared for the people she loved, and she often split her meals with community members at art markets, encouraging them to sit down and visit with her.

Muskrat stew, hulled corn soup, tuhmahsis (the Passamaquoddy version of fry bread), spaghetti, chop suey, fish cakes, fruit and cream pies, and potatoes with fiddleheads are some of the many dishes and acts of love that will be missed by all who were fortunate enough to love her back.

A fierce advocate for her people, Molly became the first woman to be elected to the Passamaquoddy Tribal Government at Indian Township as lieutenant governor in 1984. She served as director of the housing authority, served as director of the health department, served as the director of the child welfare department, testified before Congress in

above Molly Neptune Parker with one of her signature brown ash baskets.

Washington, DC, to secure funding for tribal police, forestry, and ambulance service, and directed a multimillion-dollar block grant to build new homes in her community. If there was a need to be filled at any level, Molly was there to help make sure it got done, serving on boards and committees if she felt that was the right path forward.

In addition to public service, Molly was a talented and successful businesswoman. In the 1960s, she and her first husband, Moses Neptune, operated a fish-scale basket business in Sipayik, the sister Passamaquoddy community located near Eastport. Employing members of the community, together they produced a hundred scale baskets a week for the fishing industry in Eastport, who used them to collect fish scales that were used to create nail polish and lipstick.

Hiring and supporting community members was natural practice for Molly.

In the 1980s, she purchased a cabin business on Lewey Lake at Indian Township that she expanded to include a restaurant and a summer takeout. Many community

members fondly remember Molly as their first employer or the employer who hired them when they had nowhere else to go, whether it was as maid service cleaning out the cabins, serving as waitstaff at her restaurant, or working as a cook. If artists in the community needed a place to sell their work, Molly purchased their art wholesale to sell in the giftshop attached to her restaurant where tourists and seasonal visitors would invest in pieces for their collections of Passamaquoddy art. After Molly closed her gift shop, she continued to support artists by buying their work to resell at local art markets in Maine, a practice she continued until she passed.

Molly’s greatest passion was sharing her love of brown ash and sweetgrass basketry with anyone who wanted to learn, whether it was through listening to her stories about making baskets or sitting down and making a basket with her. She is fondly remembered by Wabanaki people in Maine for leading basket making workshops in their communities through the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance (MIBA), of which she was a founding member and the longest serving president up until her passing. Molly would travel anywhere to teach and taught annual classes at Indian Township School, mentoring the next generation of weavers, with her children or grandchildren accompanying her as co-instructors. More than a hundred Wabanaki people could easily claim to have Molly as one of their teachers since the founding of MIBA in the early 1990s.

She acquired numerous awards in recognition of her commitment to preserving and passing down the brown ash and sweetgrass basketry practices, including the 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellowship, an honorary doctorate of fine arts from Bowdoin College in 2015, Maine Arts Commission’s Fellowship Award for Traditional Arts, and the First Peoples Fund Community Spirit Award. She is sorely missed.

—Frances Soctomah (Passamaquoddy), granddaughter to Molly Neptune Parker FALL 2020 | 95

MEMORIAL

JUANITA PAHDOPONY-MITHLO January 18, 1947–August 21, 2020

A

N EXEMPLARY STRONG COMANCHE WOMAN, Juanita Pahdopony-Mithlo served as a beacon of light, shining kindness, and generosity to all with whom she shared her beloved culture and creativity. As her friend Annette Arkeketa (Otoe-Missouria/Muscogee), the playwright and filmmaker described, “She could transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.” It was “her gift.”

Many knew Juanita as an educator.

She had degrees from Cameron University (AA), Southwestern Oklahoma State University (BA), and Oklahoma City University (MEd). She taught at Elgin Public Schools, Oklahoma City University, University of Science of Arts of Oklahoma, and Cameron University. Her last positions were as dean of academic affairs and, finally, interim president at Comanche Nation College. Her commitment to integrate Indigenous culture within the curriculum and to foster creativity motivated her, as she supported students through the ranks to achieve their best.

A testament to her students’ success, she formed lifelong relationships with many, which included printmaker John Hitchcock (Comanche), who followed in Juanita’s footsteps to become an educator.

Juanita was a tribal administrator for the Comanche Nation and was asked regularly to serve as a cultural consultant.

She assisted with various administrative and historical assignments, always in the pursuit of learning about her culture and expanding the knowledge held within their community. She cooperated with scholarly and artistic research. On occasion, these research adventures would combine with creative artistic expressions, and such was the case when Juanita served as a guide to Mark Dion in support of a recent exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of Art (Fort Worth, Texas) for The Perilous Texas Adventures of Mark Dion (2020). Her generosity in helping a new acquaintance learn about West Texas, the Comanche homelands, was just one more expression of her kind and

above Selfie by Juanita Pahdopony with her nephew Dustin Tahmahkera, PhD (Comanche).

Image courtesy of E. J. Sweetly (Comanche).

inquisitive nature. Juanita’s part in the Mark Dion project was simply an extension of her lifetime of creative efforts.

A well-published poet, Juanita was an avid writer and artist. As a young artist she was mentored by members of the Comanche Gallery of Art, a local Comanche artists’ group that included George Smith “Woogie” Watchetaker (1919–1993), Wakeah Bradley (1916– 2001), William Poafpybitty (1930–2005), and Leonard Riddles (1919–2003). She participated in exhibitions throughout her life, including H2OK: Indigenous Response to Water in Oklahoma at MAINSITE Contemporary Art in Norman, Oklahoma, and traveling exhibitions such as Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 2, hosted by the Museum of Art and Design, New York City, New York; Re-Riding History: From the Southern Plains to the Matanzas Bay, launched from the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum in St. Augustine, Florida; and Savages and Princesses: The Persistence of Native American Stereotypes, launched from 108 Contemporary in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in April 2019 and still traveling cross country through March 2024.

As one of her most expansive projects, Juanita organized Our Place at the Table (2007), a collaborative work that reimagined Judy Chicago’s The Dinner

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Party (1974–79) featuring Native women as its subject. Prepared for Current Realities: A dialogue with THE PEOPLE (2007), the full-scale room installation was both a creative response that created space for Indigenous feminine voices and served as an important contribution to an exhibition advocating for Indigenous presence during the state of Oklahoma’s centennial celebrations. Through her arts, culture, and educational work, Juanita was “fearless and funny,” according to Jimmy Arterberry (Comanche), tribal historian preservation officer.

In the last few years, Juanita enjoyed serving as a cultural advisor for the AMC television series, The Son (2017–19). She enjoyed attending the productions and helped to protect the authenticity of the Indigenous representation during the fictional tale of a Texas oil empire.

She worked with many members of the Comanche community as actors and production team members on the set.

In one of her final consulting projects, Juanita served as an Oklahoma advisor to the Philbrook Art Museum’s presentation of the celebrated traveling exhibition, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists (2019–21).

An advocate for the arts and cultural community in Oklahoma broadly, she was a member of the Southern Plains Indian Museum Association, Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers & Storytellers, and the Oscar Jacobson Foundation.

Her awards include the 2019 Oklahoma Governor’s Arts Award, 2017 Roma Clift Montgomery Citizen of the Humanities Award, and the Lawton Indigenous Peoples’ Day Honored Elder Lifetime Achievement Crystal Eagle Award.

A descendant of the revered Comanche leader Quanah Parker on her maternal Tahmahkera family side, Juanita was born to Sam and Marjorie Pahdopony. Juanita is survived by her beloved husband, Harry Mithlo; her children, Robert, Mark, Brooke, Michael, and Lisa; and several beautiful grandchildren. Many friends join me in mourning her passing.

—heather ahtone, PhD (Choctaw/Chickasaw)

ᎤᎦᏙᎲᏒ ᎠᏣᎳᎩ

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