First American Art Magazine No. 29, Winter 2021

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

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

NO. 29, WINTER 2021

DOLLS OF THE NORTH INUIT WORKS ON PAPER

TERI GREEVES

SKAWENNATI’S FUTURISMS

JOEL ISAAK

ZUNI FETISH CARVING DISPLAY UNTIL APRIL 6, 2021

JOANNA BLACKBURN

G. PETER JEMISON

IDYLLWILD ARTS ACADEMY & SUMMER PROGRAM INDIGENOUS ARTISTIC & EDUCATIONAL EXCELLENCE. SINCE 1950.

VISUAL ARTS

MUSIC

CREATIVE WRITING

FASHION

DANCE

INTERARTS

THEATRE

FILM & DIGITAL MEDIA

Join the long list of renowned Native artists and be a part of the creative journey at Idyllwild Arts.

Learn more about our arts programs, and reserve your space today for a virtual informational gathering.

UPCOMING ONLINE INFORMATION SESSIONS: Thursday, January 21 – 4 p.m.

Thursday, February 25 – 4 p.m.

Thursday, March 25 – 4 p.m.

TO REGISTER, CONTACT: jranchia@idyllwildarts.org | (951) 659-2171, Ext. 2347

@idyllwildarts KEVIN COOCHWYTEWA DESIGN

@lightning.kev . lightningkev.com

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The Indian Arts and Crafts Board offers a Source Directory of American Indian and Alaska Native Owned and Operated Arts and Crafts Businesses that sell authentic Indian art and craftwork, which is available at doi.gov/iacb.

Under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act (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 Act, including how to file a complaint, please contact: 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: doi.gov/iacb

Kathy Dickerson, Kiowa, Kiowa Women’s Boots, ©2005

wildcareoklahoma.org WildCare provides people a place to bring native, wild animals struggling to survive with the goal of releasing healthy individuals back into the wild.

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Book a presentation for your organization or take a tour!

Outreach requests should be booked three to six months in advance.

Tours of the aviary are available Thursday through Saturday by appointment only. Book at least three months in advance.

issue no. 29, winter 2021

FEATURES

DEPARTMENTS

Dolls of the North: 16 Depicting a Way of Life, Part I

By Michole Eldred (Catawba/Eastern Band Cherokee)

Recent Developments

8

Seven Directions: Daniel McCoy Jr. (Muscogee/ Citizen Potawatomi)

12

Metamorphoses in Zuni Fetish Carving: Three Artists Expand an Indigenous Art Form

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

24

Collections: The National Museum of Wildlife Art

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

72

76

Commodity and Heritage: Works on Paper by Myra Kukiiyaut

By Katharine W. Fernstrom, PhD

32

Spotlight: Hopi Polychrome Jar

By Nampeyo

By Michelle J. Lanteri

Other Places, Outer Spaces: Skawennati’s Virtual Futurism

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

38

48

REVIEWS

ARTIST PROFILES Joanna Underwood Blackburn: Chickasaw Ceramic Artist and Sculptor

By Laura Marshall Clark (Muscogee Creek)

48

Teri Greeves: Kiowa Beadwork Artist

By Staci Golar

54

Joel Isaak: Dena'ina Interdisciplinary Artist

By Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Alutiiq)

60

G. Peter Jemison: Seneca Painter

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

66

cover Joel Isaak (Kahtnuht'ana Dena'ina), Łuqa'ch'k'ezdelghayi Visions of Summer, 2016, fiveminute video loop projected through a salmon-skin screen, 24 × 38 × 3 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

Art+Lit 78 LeAnne Howe: Choctaw Nation Author, Playwright, and Educator

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD Artwork by Kristin Gentry (Choctaw Nation)

54

Book Reviews

83

Exhibition Reviews

86

Report

92

IN MEMORIAM Anthony Gauthier 94 (Menominee/Ho-Chunk, 1942–2020)

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

60

Irving Toddy (Navajo, 1951–2020)

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

95

Kathy Wallace 96 (Hupa/Karuk/Yurok, 1946–2020)

By Nanette Kelley (Osage/Cherokee Nation)

66

WINTER 2021 | 3

issue no. 29, winter 2021 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: Jo Ann Reece, Rosa Cays (Chicana), and Staci Golar Proofreaders: Travis D. Day, Staci Golar, 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), Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho), and Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa)

Regional Representatives

Coe Center Art inspires, energizes, and challenges.

Find hope in the creativity that surrounds us.

Experience the Coe

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 Band 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) Anya Montiel, PhD (Mestiza/Tohono O'odham descent) Jami Powell, PhD (Osage Nation) Mary Jo Watson, PhD (Seminole) India Rael Young, PhD

Advertising Representative Barbara Harjo (Cherokee descent), barbara@firstamericanartmagazine.com

Visit us virtually…

Being together while being apart. coeartscenter.org

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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

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he’s not from around here, 2020, gouache on Arches watercolor paper, 6½ × 13 inches

benjamin harjo jr.

american indian artist | benjaminharjojr.

an ancestor visits, 2020, gouache on Arches watercolor paper, 7½ × 9 inches WINTER 2021 | 5

EDITOR'S GREETING In Defense of Land Acknowledgments

Y

OU ARE AT A CONFERENCE, and the welcoming speech includes a formal land acknowledgment. The speaker lists the Indigenous peoples who currently or once lived in the local city or perhaps entire state.

You may wonder why one group was left out or why on earth another group was mentioned, pull out your smartphone, and begin scrolling through NAGPRA Notices of Intent to Repatriate of local sites to understand the connection. Then the first session begins, and the moderator reiterates the land acknowledgment.

Then every single speaker begins their talk with that same statement. The next session follows suit, and this is repeated the second and third day.

My initial encounters with land acknowledgments like this left me thinking they were bombastic, overblown, and insincere.

Long-winded land acknowledgments are too often issued as if they were royal decrees. But at an Association of Tribal Libraries, Museums, and Archives conference, the (almost all Native) speakers briefly thanked the tribe whose lands we met on that day. Their sincere expressions of gratitude changed my mind, and I began incorporating brief acknowledgments into my own public speaking events.

This morning I write to you from within the historical lands of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes. This magazine is printed, trimmed, and bound within historical lands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute. The acknowledgments or “welcomes to country” have been commonplace in Australia and New Zealand among Indigenous communities for centuries. The practice spread to Canada and is making its way south. In Spanish, the statement is known as reconocimiento de tierras. As the practice spreads, however, so do the backlashes and critiques.

A CBC article with the dramatic headline, “‘I regret it’: Hayden King on writing Ryerson University's territorial acknowledgement” made the rounds last summer and is still circulating online. Hidden within the article was a statement by King (Beausoleil Ojibwe/Potawatomi): “Now, in other circumstances, where you’re in less privileged spaces and maybe the acknowledgment is just evolving for the first time, then it does have the power to compel a conversation. And that’s helpful.”1 Museums, colleges, and cultural nonprofits generate land acknowledgments, but outside of these, the statements remain rare throughout most of the Americas.

I have assisted a few institutions with their land acknowledgments and feel it is important to consider the statement a working document. Community feedback is important, as is information about early tribes, which is not always easy to research. Some might want land acknowledgments to be a

feel-good activity, but the reality—particularly for the Caribbean and Eastern Woodlands—is that many tribal communities perished from disease, warfare, slavery, and displacement wrought by European colonists before being written about, and we simply do not know their names today. We may never know what they called themselves, but we can hold space for these peoples. Also, Native peoples traveled. The European or Asian model of peasants tied to the land, never to venture beyond their villages, does not carry over in the Americas. What time period do you trace? Do you try to trace them all? Is that even possible?

A good place to start is native-land.ca, a volunteer project created by Victor G. Temprano, but you must follow up with your own research. The website clearly states: “This map is not perfect—it is a work in progress with tons of contributions from the community.” They will update their map if you furnish citations for your corrections; I’ve been able to do so. They tend to err on the side of making the territories much larger than they were, and that is difficult to correct.

1. Rosanna Deerchild, “‘I regret it’: Hayden King on writing Ryerson University’s territorial acknowledgment,” CBC Radio, January 18, 2019, web.

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below America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), ᏧᏴᏢ ᎠᎹᏰᎵ, Tsuyvtlv Amayeli, 2008, watercolor, pen and ink on paper, 7 × 5 in., private collection. opposite America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), ᏧᎦᎾᏮ ᎠᎹᏰᎵ, Tsuganawv Amayeli, 2008, watercolor, pen and ink on paper, 7 × 5 in.

The maps in the Smithsonian’s series, The Handbook of South American Indians and The Handbook of North American Indians, are helpful; however, many of the maps are outdated, especially of South America, and should be viewed as starting points for further research. In Brazil, the Socio-Environmental Institute’s website, Povos Indígenas no Brasil (pib.socioambiental.org), is an invaluable tool available in Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

Treaties can be good resources, particularly in Canada, but also come with caveats. In California, many treaties with tribes remain unratified. Lands ceded in treaties were not always the homelands of a particular tribe. For instance, in two 18th-century treaties with the British, the Cherokee ceded lands in Kentucky, although we never historically lived in Kentucky, which was Shawnee territory at the time.

In the Prairies and Great Plains, access to horses dramatically changed lifeways and territories. Displaced by Europeans’ encroachment, disease, and warfare, several tribes entered

other tribes’ territories. For example, Osage people clashed with Wichita people in Eastern Oklahoma, then Cherokees encroached on Osage land and fought with them. Native people are aware of historical skirmishes, but this can be upsetting to non-Native people who might want to believe Indigenous peoples were historical pacifists. Any hint of violence destroys a picture of moral purity they have painted in their minds (though some tribes, such as the Hopi, are indeed people of peace). We understand that we are human beings, and being forced to clash for resources is different than unilaterally committing genocide for profit.

Indian Removal must be addressed in the United States.

The tribe whose homeland you might be on could now be in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, or elsewhere; it behooves you to research and not just name tribes currently nearby. People tend to gravitate toward familiar names of large tribes, but smaller tribes need to be acknowledged as well. Some people might want to use historical names for tribes that might sound more poetic to non-Native audiences, but sovereignty is better supported by using the current, official name of the tribe. The current year’s federal registrar that lists the federally recognized tribes is easily searchable online, and almost every tribe has its own website sharing a basic overview of its history.

Institutions may phrase their land acknowledgment loosely and vaguely, when their locations sit squarely on current tribal lands (for instance, in Tulsa). In this case, that tribe should be acknowledged first by its current, official name. Google Maps has become a handy resource for reservation boundaries.

While it is good to consult Native people in researching your land acknowledgment, particularly if you live in a region that forcibly removed local tribes, it is important to reach out to the tribes and First Nations themselves, rather than just individuals. Many Elders are busy and do not live to answer strangers’ emails. Tribal historic preservation officers and cultural centers are better equipped to educate the non-Native public.

These histories are often complex and contested, but dialogue about Indigenous lands and history is valuable. Native people should feel empowered to respond to any errors and omissions in your land acknowledgment, and institutions need to listen. Educational and marketing departments of tribes could proactively reach out to organizations within their current, historical, and ancestral homelands to get their voices heard and forge alliances.

While it is easy to bash land acknowledgments, they serve as educational tools, especially as they reach new audiences. Of course, the statements do not replace action; however, erasure is one of the fundamental challenges facing Indigenous peoples of the Americas today. By convincing non-Native people to think about Native people even briefly, land acknowledgments help push back against erasure and encourage place-based knowledge.

As the Native Governance Center in Minneapolis states, “Starting somewhere is better than not trying at all.”2

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

2. “A guide to Indigenous land acknowledgment,” Native Governance Center, web.

WINTER 2021 | 7

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS MUSEUMS The MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ARTS selected Juan Lucero (Isleta Pueblo) as its first full-time Native American art fellow. Lucero, originally from New Mexico, studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts and has a diverse background in the arts, including being a graffiti artist, art handler, and art buyer for the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community sponsored this fellowship.

SCHOOLS Novelist and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott donated $5 million to the INSTITUTE OF AMERICAN INDIAN ARTS (IAIA) in Santa Fe. Some of the unrestricted donation will immediately provide financial and technical assistance

to students. Funds will also go toward the establishment of the planned IAIA Research Center for Contemporary Native Arts. iSCHOOL at the UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON named Miranda Belarde-Lewis (Tlingit/Zuni) as the first Joseph and Jill McKinstry Endowed Faculty Fellow in Native North American Indigenous Knowledge. An assistant professor and independent curator, Belarde-Lewis earned her doctoral degree in information science and her master’s degree in museology from the University of Washington.

GALLERIES Almost 40 Inuit paintings, drawings, and prints were discovered in a derelict, abandoned house in Rochester Hills, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. Among

these are two dozen original pieces from the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in Kinngait, Nunavut, including works by the renowned Kenojuak Ashevak (Inuk, 1927–2013). Adnan Charara of GALERIE CAMILLE in Detroit is conserving the works on paper and will exhibit and sell the works on behalf of the homeowners.

ORGANIZATIONS The INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL, a New York– based nonprofit, chose Jordan Wilson (Musqueam) as its inaugural Indigenous Curatorial Research Fellow. An independent curator and PhD student at New York University, Wilson will research Indigenous language reclamation and partner with the Musqueam community in a curatorial project during his fellowship.

NATIVE AMERICAN ART APPRAISALS, INC. SINCE 1936

Gerald Stone, Crossroads (detail), 2020

Multiple Horizons Tribal Perspectives from the Confluence JANUARY 7 – FEBRUARY 28, 2021

(855) NAAA-INC INFO@NAAAINC.COM VISIT WWW.NAAAINC.COM

CALL EMAIL

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Multiple Horizons: Tribal Perspectives from the Confluence is hosted by the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians in collaboration with concept:art+movement, an incubator of Arts and Culture El Dorado.

View the exhibition at crockerart.org/multiplehorizons

4 page Keshi Ad Winter Edaakie Pot 2020 FAAM .pdf

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ART FAIRS The BIENAL DE SÃO PAULO, hosted by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, is postponed until September 2021; however, the fair hosted a physical exhibition, VENTO (WIND), from November 14 to December 13 at the biennial’s longstanding headquarters, the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park. Indigenous artists of the Americas who exhibited at Vento include Brazilian artists Gustavo Caboco (Wapishana), Jaider Esbell (Macuxi), Paulo Nazareth (Mestizo), and Uyra Sodoma (Munduruku); Chilean artist Sebastián Calfuqueo Aliste (Mapuche); Colombian artist Abel Rodríguez (Nonuya); and United States artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish/ Cree/Shoshone).

ART MARKETS The 15th annual CHEROKEE ART MARKET, an intertribal market hosted

We’re open 24/7 at Keshi.com and via Zoom 505.989.8728

by Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, went virtual this year. Best of Show–winner was Dallin Maybee (Northern Arapaho/ Seneca). Best of classification winners were Renee Hoover (Cherokee Nation), basketry; Dallin Maybee, beadwork/ quillwork; Tony Tiger (Muscogee/Sac & Fox/Seminole), diverse art forms; Peter Nelson (Navajo), jewelry; Benjamin Harjo Jr. (Absentee Shawnee/Seminole), painter/drawing/graphics/photography; Karin Walkingstick (Cherokee Nation), pottery; Troy Jackson (Cherokee Nation), sculpture; and Orlando Dugi (Navajo), textiles. Eugene Tapahe (Navajo) won the Innovator Award, and Beverly Bear King Moran (Standing Rock Lakota) won the Culture Keeper Award.

PUBLIC ART The NATIONAL NATIVE AMERICAN VETERANS MEMORIAL, installed on the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the

Xmas Pot: Tim Edaakie 1977 - 2020

American Indian, opened to the public on November 11, 2020. Designed by Harvey Pratt (Cheyenne/Arapaho), the memorial, WARRIOR’S CIRCLE OF HONOR, features a monumental stainless-steel circle, incised stone drum, and space for gatherings and reflection.

Pratt served as a US Marine during the Vietnam War. The ISLAND CORRIDOR FOUNDATION, the Canadian nonprofit that owns the E&N rail corridor, selected Q’ULLHANUMUTSUN, by Darrell Thorne (Cowichan), in a design contest.

Thorne’s formline design featuring a family of orcas will appear in marketing campaigns and will adorn the exterior of passenger rail service trains on Vancouver Island.

AWARDS & HONORS CREATIVE CAPITAL, a New York– based nonprofit, conferred its 2021 CREATIVE CAPITAL AWARDS WINTER 2021 | 9

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RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

on 42 artists, including Nosferasta, a Rastafarian vampire movie by Adam Khalil (Sault Ste. Marie Ojibwe), and Indigenous Absurdities, a visual art project by Anna Tsouhlarakis (Navajo).

The awards include $50,000 and career development services, from legal to financial advice.

The JOAN MITCHELL FOUNDATION gave 25 artists its 2020 PAINTERS & SCULPTORS GRANTS, including three American Indian and Alaska Native artists: Natalie Ball (Klamath/ Modoc), Linda Infante Lyons (Alutiiq), and Melissa Melero-Moose (Northern Paiute/Modoc). Grant recipients receive a $25,000 stipend and career development consultations. Awardees can apply for residencies at Joan Mitchell headquarters in New Orleans.

The Vancouver-based BRITISH C O LU M B IA AC H I E V E M E N T FOUNDATION gave its 2020 FULMER

AWARDS IN FIRST NATIONS ART to Jaalen Edenshaw (Haida), Lou-ann Neel (Kwakwaka'wakw), Kelly Robinson (Nuxalk/Nuu-chah-nulth), Cole Speck (Kwakwaka'wakw), Evelyn Vanderhoop (Haida), and Nathan Wilson (Haisla).

The 2020 Fulmer Award of Distinction went to Vanderhoop, while the Crabtree McLennan Emerging Artist Award went to Speck. The foundation will produce short films about the artists' work.

The UCROSS FOUNDATION in Clearmont, Wyoming, selected Anthony Hudson (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde) and Brendan Basham (Navajo) as its fall 2020 NATIVE AMERICAN VISUAL ARTISTS AND WRITERS fellows. The fellowships feature studio space and lodging at Ucross and a $2,000 stipend. Hudson is an interdisciplinary artist, drag clown, and filmmaker based in Portland, Oregon. Basham is a poet, fiction writer, and educator based in New York.

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ENTERTAINMENT NBC has made a put pilot commitment to SOVEREIGN, the first Native American family drama on television.

ARRAY Filmworks and Warner Bros.

Television Group produced the pilot.

Sydney Freeland (Navajo) and Shaz Bennett will executive co-produce the series with Emmy- and Golden Globewinning filmmaker Ava DuVernay and Bird Runningwater (Southern Cheyenne/Mescalero Apache), along with Paul Garnes and Sarah Bremner of ARRAY Filmworks.

Māori director and Academy-award winner Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo (Seminole/Muscogee) are creating a new series RESERVATION DOGS for FX, a subsidiary of Disney. The comedy series with all Native writers will follow the lives of four Native American teenagers living in Oklahoma and will debut in 2021.

PRECONTACT SITES Archaeologists rediscovered an eightmile long wall of pictographs in the SERRANÍA DE LA LINDOSA, mountains near Chiribiquete National Park in southern Colombia. Thousands of red ochre paintings, dating back 12,500 years, feature everything from abstract designs and human handprints to giant sloths, Ice Age horses, mastodons, and paleolamas. This find was made in 2017 but kept secret until now in anticipation of the British television series, Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon.

The archaeological team researching the rock art was led by Francisco Javier Aceituno of the University of Antioquia, José Iriarte, of Exeter University, and Gaspar Morcote-Rios of the National University of Colombia.

Researchers from the Nazca-Palpa Management Plan, funded by the Peruvian Ministry of Culture, rediscovered a COLOSSAL GEOGLYPH ON

MIRADOR NATURAL, a hill amid the Nazca Lines near the coast of southern Peru. The 121-foot-long feline dates back to the Late Paracas period circa 200 to 100 BCE, predating the Nazca culture and sharing stylistic traits with ancient Paracas ceramics and textiles.

CRIME & LEGAL ISSUES The US Senate voted unanimously to pass the SAFEGUARD TRIBAL OBJECTS OF PATRIMONY (STOP) ACT, introduced by US Senator Martin Heinrich (NM) and US Senator Lisa Murkowski (AK). The STOP Act increases the penalties for theft and illegal trafficking of Native American cultural patrimony. The bill will go on to the US House of Representatives.

IN MEMORIAM BILL HOLM, scholar of Northwest Coast art, passed away peacefully in his home on December 16, 2020, at

the age of 95. Born on March 24, 1925, in Montana, Holm was the leading 20th-century art historian of Northwest Coast visual arts. His classic survey, Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form, first published in 1965, sold more than 100,000 copies. In 2014, the University of Washington Press printed a 50th-anniversary edition with new commentary. He was professor emeritus of art history and curator emeritus of Northwest Coast Indian art at the Burke Museum at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 2003, the museum founded the Bill Holm Center of Northwest Native Art in his honor. Holm was also a visual artist, who exhibited at the Century 21 Exposition in 1962. The Sealaska Heritage Institute honored him with a certificate of appreciation on behalf of Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian people of Alaska. The institute recognized his life’s work when the Walter Soboleff Building was opened in 2015.

WE HAVE WORDS FOR

A Symposium on Writing about Art by Indigenous Peoples of the Americas virtual | information at FirstAmericanArtMagazine.com/words

February 27 & 28, 2021 Hosted by

WINTER 2021 | 11

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

DANIEL MCCOY JR. A Muscogee/Potawatomi Exhibition Specialist and Artist Shares His Top Seven List

A

N ENROLLED MEMBER of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and a descendant of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Daniel McCoy Jr. has 30 years’ experience in artistic circles in Oklahoma and New Mexico.

He has worked in the commercial art field and in Santa Fe’s best museums and galleries as an exhibition specialist. McCoy’s artwork has been featured in public spaces, markets, galleries, and renowned museums, such as the New Mexico Museum of Art and recently the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. He has worked with some of the Southwest’s most successful contemporary artists. McCoy currently resides in Santa Fe with his family.

DANIELMCCOYJR.COM “This article made me want to write about everyone,” says McCoy, “There are so many great artists I can think of. I feel these artists listed are some of the most innovative in contemporary Native American art today. My family and I have known many of these artisans for years and consider these great talents to be close as sisters and brothers—while a few others are new to me. I will continue to follow these seven innovators and suggest you might do the same.”

HERE: BRYON ARCHULETA

above, top Xxx. Image courtesy of the author. above, bottom author. opposite Xxx, 20 × 16 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

Born in Santa Fe, Bryon Archuleta is Tewa from Ohkay Owingeh and Santa Clara Pueblo. He grew up along the Rio Grande in Española Valley. Influenced by pop culture and music, Bryon’s primary media are acrylic and oil. His work combines Native imagery, history, the sexy, and the surreal, with a sense of humor and social commentary on 21st-century issues as seen from a Native perspective.

For me, Bryon is one of the originators of combining counterculture, such as music and film, with Pueblo subject matter. His fine line painting seems to stem from a genetic artistry found in Northern Pueblo pottery, but it’s still in a class all its own. Bryon currently resides in Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo.

Instagram @shrymper1, Twitter @shrymper1 ab ove, top right Daniel McCoy Jr. Photo: Topaz Jones (Shoshone/Kalapuya/Molalla/ Lummi). Images courtesy of the author. left Bryon Archuleta (Ohkay Owingeh), Jesse Ed Davis, 2015, acrylic on panel, 20 × 16 in.

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SEVEN DIRECTIONS

SLIGHTLY NORTH: GREG BALLENGER Greg Ballenger explains in his art statement that he “explores history, architecture, and his Diné identity through painting, sculpture, video and performance.” Influenced by his upbringing in a reservation border town, Greg’s work weaves threads of Indigenous humor and ingenuity to explore historical and contemporary challenges that Indigenous communities face and the creative ways they overcome such challenges.

Greg is a natural artist safe at home in any medium. His masterful techniques in figurative realism, as well as storytelling that employs cartooning techniques, combine to confront environmental issues in Indigenous territories. These narratives are deep in original content and provoke new thought pathways in the discussion of contemporary art. Just beginning on his artistic journey, Greg undoubtedly shows much promise for the years to come. He is a member of the Navajo Nation.

Instagram @_gregballenger_, Twitter @shicheiitwitch SOUTH: GARY KNIFFIN II Gary Kniffin II is an artist of Diné, San Carlos Apache, and Shoshone descent. He grew up on the Ramah Navajo Indian Reservation 50 miles south of Gallup, New Mexico. Gary’s classmates in Gallup introduced him to comics, graffiti, and Chicano art. From 1999 to 2001 he attended the Institute of American Indian Arts where he studied painting under Norman Akers (Osage/Pawnee). He then enlisted in the US Army from 2004 to 2010 as a graphic illustrator. Gary completed his enlistment as a sergeant E-5, and soon after he apprenticed and worked as a tattoo artist in Arizona and California. Kniffin combines all these influences into his recent work.

I have always thought Kniffin’s paintings are groundbreaking and have moved the genre of contemporary Native American painting a few steps ahead. He easily melds counterculture line quality found in street art and comics but remains uniquely Southwestern Native American.

Instagram @gkniffin

above Greg Ballenger (Diné), N'jaa t'oongiis..., 2020, acrylic on canvas, 20 × 10 in. right Gary Kniffin II (Diné/ San Carlos Apache/Shoshone descent), Gallop to Gallup, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 24 × 36 in.

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SEVEN DIRECTIONS

EAST: BLACKHORSE LOWE Blackhorse Lowe is a filmmaker from the Navajo Nation. His current feature film, FUKRY (2019), screened at the imagineNATIVE Film + Media arts festival and many other festivals internationally. Chasing the Light (2016), his previous feature, won the best cinematography prize at the Terres en Vues/Land InSights Montreal First Peoples Festival 2016. Currently he is a 2019–20 Tulsa Artist Fellow, writing a variety of genre features and programming film screenings in the Tulsa area.

Blackhorse Lowe’s list of awards and achievements is sure to keep growing with time. I am new to his films and must admit I am inspired instantly with his excellent cinematography and use of underground music, Native humor, and uniquely urban Native situations. I am eager to search out the remainder of Blackhorse Lowe’s catalogue. Visual art can influence filmmaking, and film influences visual art. vimeo.com/blackhorselowe

SOUTHEAST: JESSICA OSCEOLA Jessica Osceola is from Naples, Florida. She is a sculptor, photographer, and ceramicist creating an exceptional fusion of media. Jessica produces an art form that I can honestly say I have never previously seen come out of the Southeast Native art circles. Her relief work in clay is remarkable; to me it rings back to an ability of enduring. Jessica’s recent body of work focuses on navigating society as a Native American mother and as an American.

Osceola states, “The focus of this series of portraits and figures is to illustrate a narrative of different roles I inherently embrace to be a part of the society. From the vibrant individual to the devotion of motherhood, I reflect on the internal psyche that bridges my past with my child's future.” Jessica Osceola is a member of the Seminole Nation of Florida. jessicaosceolaart.com above FUKRY, 2019, film poster, drama, 90 minutes, directed

by Blackhorse Lowe (Diné), Morningstar Media. above, top right Jessica Osceola (Florida Seminole), Portrait IV, ca.

2016, acrylic on plaster bas-relief.

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NORTH: MOLINA (TWO BULLS) PARKER A Lakota, Molina (Two Bulls) Parker hails from Red Shirt on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. She began beading at age five under the direction of her grandmother, mother, and

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

aunt. “Strong women have guided me as I moved from 5 to 18 years old making and selling beaded cross chains and pins to community members to now selling my work to museums and collectors.

This has given me a solid foundation rooted in Lakota ways of doing, as well as keeping the continuum of Lakota art fresh and current. My artwork uses the environment—insects, animals— and infuses them with historic Lakota geometric design to create adornment that will inspire pride and happiness in those who wear and collect them.”

Molina’s beadwork and design continues to break new ground from one year to the next, steeped in Lakota aesthetics and offering new fields in contemporary art. molinas-lakota-beadwork. square.site NORTHEAST: JONATHAN THUNDER Jonathan Thunder is a multidisciplinary artist from Red Lake, Minnesota. He is known for surreal paintings, animated and experimental films, installations, and illustration work. I have been watching Jonathan’s painting evolve for more than two decades. I recognize his characters, animals, and themes, placed in everchanging settings. The 2016 film Walk in Dreams brought elements of his paintings to life that I had seen years prior.

The animation and musical accompaniment help me imagine what Thunder is pondering while creating.

The connection between filmmaking and painting is a unique dance that I find amazing. Jonathan says, “I believe in the simplicity of the moment. Some cryptic or spontaneous imagery invites the viewer to create a portion of the narrative for themselves or consider an interpretation. I enjoy merging my painter self with my filmmaker self to create art that lives and pushes the boundaries of space.” This year the Pollock-Krasner Foundation gave Jonathan an artist grant. Jonathan Thunder is a member of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians. thunderfineart.com

above, top Molina Parker (Oglala Lakota), Say Wut!, 2017, vintage seed beads, dentalium shells, resin elk teeth, Swarovski crystals, vintage clasp, collection of the Akta Lakota Museum, Chamberlain, South Dakota. above Jonathan Thunder (Red Lake Ojibwe), Modern Times: Beware of Artists, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 36 × 48 in.

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DOLLS OF THE NORTH Depicting a Way of Life, Part I

By Michole Eldred (Catawba/Eastern Band Cherokee)

T

HE CIRCUMPOLAR REGION of Canada, the United States, and Russia is home to Indigenous peoples who are racially, philosophically, and culturally distinct.

They include the Inuit, Yupik peoples, and Unangan.

Some of the Inuit-Yupik-Unangan language–speaking groups living in this area include the Iñupiat, Netsilingmiut, Yupiit, Siberian Yupik, and Aleut. Other Indigenous groups from both the Arctic and Subarctic who live in Alaska, Canada, and other northern regions include the Tlingit, Haida, and Athabascan peoples.1 While each group of people artistically reveals its own culture through the creation of their miniature doll figures, many cultures have also influenced each other.

FAMILY AS A CHILD I had a large doll collection I proudly displayed on my dresser shelves. I would gather up my mismatch of cultural dolls to playact with them and reenact the real world around me, a common playtime activity. The children of Indigenous peoples of the North have been creating similar experiences with their own dolls for thousands of years.

Customarily, a ten-year-old child’s mother, older sister, or a sister-in-law teaches her the art of doll making, which includes pattern making, cutting, and sewing the clothing. Sewing is an important skill for Circumpolar cultures, whose lives in the arctic climate require well-made clothing to protect them from the harsh environment.

Making clothing is customarily the job of women in Northern Indigenous cultures, and sewing clothing for dolls educates a girl in the art of garment design, since dolls’ clothing typically mimics the garments worn in the real world. Through making layers of removable, miniature clothing for the dolls, girls learn utilitarian skills such as how to skin animals, stretch and soften fur, cut materials, and sew.

Learning to make these miniature figures not only helps teach sewing skills, but playing with them also promotes proper social skills that allow girls to transition into womanhood by

following the acceptable norms of family and community. Young girls learn how to care for other people by reenacting scenarios they encounter in their personal lives. Brendan Griebel, a Canadian anthropologist based in the Arctic, has observed through his research that the true purpose of the doll is for a girl to learn without raising her with the fear of failure.2 Each doll is named and assumes the behavioral characteristics of a human. Girls typically name each doll after someone they like or admire. Through play, the dolls communicate and form bonds with each other. Young girls use the dolls to replicate family roles, and often the most important doll in a little girl’s miniature family is the teenage girl. Although she

1. “Discover the Culture and Heritage of Athabascan Indians in Fairbanks,” ExploreNorth, accessed October 30, 2020, web.

2. Brendan Griebel, PhD, in discussion with author, November 2020.

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must frequently perform chores, she is the best dressed and is closely bonded to the grandmother doll, whose hair is made from white or grey fur. The mother in the doll family spends much of her time sewing and running the household and is often portrayed by young girls as very bossy and ordering the teenage daughter doll to do chores. Smaller children fight and play with each other and with the children from other doll families. A pregnant female doll might keep a tiny baby under her skirt, and the grandmother doll will help her give birth. The human girl wraps the newborn baby doll in a small sleeping bag often made from a rabbit’s ear.

While adult male dolls are created, they do not play a prominent role in this imitation of family life. They are sent out to hunt or fish and return later in the day and play a side role in the dolls’ story life.3 Miniature hunting and fishing tools as well as accessories such as watercraft and snowshoes are created for the male dolls to use. Boys in the family learn to carve these items, with the guidance of an adult male teacher. The skills and materials used to carve the tools help boys gain the knowledge needed to carve real-life tools used for daily hunting and fishing.4 Archaeologists and researchers engaged in fieldwork in the arctic region often come upon these miniature tools and houses. In place of an actual doll, a distinguishable rock is often found inside or next to the miniature house, assumed to have taken the place of an actual doll.5 Doll artist Anaoyok Alookee (Netsilik), from Taloyoak, Nunavut, says tragic incidents happen in doll life: “Sometimes … a dog could eat your dolls!”6 A particular type of doll that illustrates the value of family is the Innu tea doll. The Innu people have long been hunters within Eastern Quebec and Labrador in northeastern Canada. They lived a migratory lifestyle well into the 1950s. Originally mothers made the Innu tea doll to give to a child. Most of the original dolls were made of caribou

or moose hide and stuffed with approximately two pounds of tea. As the family migrated, belongings had to be carried with them. The tea doll was the child’s responsibility to care for. When supplies ran out, the tea doll would eventually be cut open for the family to access the tea. After the tea was consumed, the doll would be restuffed with moss and given back to the child. Not only was the tea doll a necessity, it also taught a child to share with all the members of the family.

Despite the Innu people’s more stationary lifestyle, tea dolls are still being made to continue the art and to remind children of the importance of sharing.7

3. Eva Strickler and Anaoyok Alookee, Inuit Dolls: Reminder of a Heritage (Toronto, ON: Canadian Stage and Arts Publications, 1988), 12–25.

4. Jill Holmgren and Mary Ellen Frank in discussion with author, November 2020.

5. Brendan Griebel, PhD, in discussion with author, November 2020.

6. Strickler and Alookee, Inuit Dolls, 12–25.

7. Grace Butland, “Labrador Tea Dolls: Steeped in History,” Saltscapes, accessed October 15, 2020, web.

above Unknown Innu artist, Innu Tea Dolls, no date, cotton, moose hide, tea, collection of Jill Holmgren. Photo: Jill Holmgren. opposite Left to right: Louise Ta l l (C u p ' i k , 1 9 2 1 – 2 0 0 9 ) , Woman Giving Birth, hide, cloth, glass beads, embroidery floss, yarn; Rose A. Kanrilak (Cup'ik, 1952–2017), Pregnant Woman , hide, fur, calico, r i c k ra c k ; U r s u l a P a n i ya k (Cup'ik, 1954–2016), Woman Breastfeeding Baby, hide, fur, glass beads, cloth. Photo: Heidi Catlett.

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above Peeteekootee Charlie (Netsilik, fl. 1970s), Packing Doll, ca. 1974, wool duffel, felt, yarn, collection of Judy McGrath.

Both artists belonged to the Arnaqarvik Collective located in Taloyoak (Spence Bay), Nunavut. Both images courtesy of Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq/ Kitikmeot Heritage Society, Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. opposite Arnaluaq Totalik (Netsilik, fl. 1970s), Legend of Nuleeaut, 1970s, wool duffel, felt, yard, collection of Judy McGrath.

Nuleeaut is the Goddess of the Sea, with missing fingers in accordance with her legend.

FOR SALE NON-INDIGENOUS PEOPLE increasingly infiltrated the North American Arctic in the 19th century. These early whalers, trappers, and explorers to the North arrived wearing wool overcoats and leather boots. They soon realized their garments were not appropriate for survival in the North and hired local women to make parkas, mitts, hats, and fur footwear. Traders purchased furs from Native families, and some women also helped traders prepare furs for

sale, according to Alaskan author Jill Holmgren.

When these working men left to return to their southern homes, they wanted to take a piece of the Arctic back with them, a memento to share with their families and friends. Circumpolar women realized that outsiders wanted their dolls that were small enough to be easily carried home. The dolls became the perfect commodity. Prior to selling clothing and dolls to the non-Indigenous workers, the women of the northern Indigenous cultures had few ways to earn money.

Dolls became their cultural denominator.

Travel companies like Thomas Cook and Son soon promoted tourism to the North, and the sale of dolls and other Indigenous art forms became a souvenir commodity and an ongoing business opportunity.8 As new materials became available, designs changed. For example, wool fabric rather than fur was used for the Inuit packing animal doll. In some cases, governments became involved in marketing Indigenous art. Both Canada and the United States have established marketing programs. Trading posts previously served as the middleman in reaching the tourist market, and only rarely could makers sell directly to visitors.

Now these Northern artists can sell online or to galleries. They can even place their dolls in online auctions with more of the profit going directly to the artist. Marine mammal protection laws have affected the sale of dolls, and many countries now forbid the importation of seal, polar bear, whale, and walrus ivory parts. Many Native artists no longer use materials from these animals as it will prohibit sales, and doll making is presently an important part of the family economy.9

TALOYOAK SEWING COOPERATIVE WOMEN IN THE SMALL VILLAGE of Taloyoak (formerly Spence Bay) formed a sewing cooperative in the early 1970s. Taloyoak, on the Boothia Peninsula, is the Canadian mainland’s most northern community. During the cooperative’s early years, the women met over coffee to brainstorm ideas

8. Brendan Griebel, PhD, in discussion with author, November 2020.

9. Jill Holmgren in discussion with author, November 2020.

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about the most marketable style of dolls.

Peeteekootee Charlie Ugyak, or Pitikuti Ugyuk (Netsilik), is credited as one of the first women to design the Taloyoak animal packing doll, which is dressed in an amauti, the Inuit women’s parka. The parka’s large built-in pouch against the mother’s back can comfortably carry a child up to three years old. The amauti is also designed so the mother can breastfeed without removing the baby from the pouch, which would expose it to the cold.

As the Taloyoak sewing group dreamed up marketable ideas, they realized that tourists would also be interested in doll versions of Arctic animals, so they created familiar Arctic animals from stuffed wool felt. Doll makers anthropomorphized clothed polar bears, owls, crows, and fish that stood on their back legs. The choice in animals was not random, as each was based on Inuit oral history. Doll artist Mona Igutsaq explains the story behind the half-woman, half-whale doll named Nualiyuk, or Sedna the controller of sea life: Sedna is turning into a whale. She was on the land, her son tied a rope around her waist and used her as a float and when he harpooned the whale passing by, he tied a rope around her waist because he wasn’t treated well by her.

So when he could see again, he first asked his sister, “Do you mind if I use our mom as a float?” The sister didn’t mind, then he asked his mother and he tied a rope around her waist and then he harpooned the whale. The whale was going in and out and Sedna was dragged by the whale and she was making the sound of a whale and she turned into a whale because she was in the water so long.10 An inaugural member of the Taloyoak sewing group, Igutsaq recalls the packing animal’s beginnings: “There must have been about 10 to 15 ladies. At that time the government had lots of money, so we had lots of women. One day we were having a coffee break and we were laughing: how would a packing animal look with a baby on its back in a parka? We

finally got all the ladies to [agree to it] and Peeteekootee was there, and she came back the next day and that’s where the packing doll started from.”11 Peeteekootee Charlie Ugyak’s first doll from 1974 was a fish. “We didn’t go with the fish, explained Igutsaq, “It couldn’t stand up. She [Peeteekootee] did nine designs: packing Sedna, packing walrus, packing beluga whale, packing bear (in 1992), packing seal, packing owl, packing raven, packing rabbit, and thunder woman. She did those, and I did packing muskox, packing inukshuk, packing loon, packing dog, packing fox, packing Ptarmigan.”12 Not every design was successful. An artist created a doll in the form of a raven using an owl talon for the raven’s beak, but owl talons are razor sharp. The other women realized tourists would want the dolls for their children, who could easily be harmed by a claw. Only one raven doll with a “proper” owl talon beak exists.13

The year 2022 will mark the 50th anniversary of the original Taloyoak Sewing Cooperation. The Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq, or Kitikmeot Heritage Society in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, will honor the occasion with commemorative programming. Since most of the early packing dolls were sold to tourists, they are now spread throughout the world in various collections and museums. Kitikmeot Heritage Society staff are currently collecting images of the historical packing dolls. In addition to photographs, they are recording oral histories from individuals from Taloyoak about the sewing cooperative and doll making. A digital archive will be available first for the community to explore, then they will produce an exhibition and print publication for non-community members in 2022.14 The Taloyoak sewing cooperative continues to thrive today. Through their dolls, these women pass cultural knowledge on to the next generation.

10. Anne Bissonnette, PhD, “Interview with Mona Igutsaq,” Anne Lambert Clothing and Textiles Collection, University of Alberta, July 28, 2010, web.

11. Bissonnette, “Interview with Mona Igutsaq,” web.

12. Bissonnette, “Interview with Mona Igutsaq,” web.

13. Judy McGrath, email message to author, November 6, 2020.

14. Brendan Griebel, PhD, in discussion with author, November 2020.

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DIVERSITY

above, left Left to right: Helen Slwooko Carius (Siberian Yupik, 1928–1998), Doll, fur, hide, glass beads, pigment; Ruthelle Kingeekuk Sears (Siberian Yupik, 1941– 2007), Doll, fur, hide, gut, thread, pigment, glass beads; Eleanor Gologergen (Siberian Yupik, 1841–2007), Doll, fur, hide, thread, pigment, glass beads. Dolls illustrate the use of Yupik facial tattoos. Photo: Heidi Catlett. above, right Neva Mathias (Cup’ik), Activity Doll, fur, seal gut, grasses, doll in the form of a gatherer. Photo: Mary Ellen Frank. opposite, top Iquyuilnguq M. Steifel (Yup’ik) holding her activity doll. Photo: Mary Ellen Frank. opposite, bottom Dorothy Nayamin (Cup’ik) from Chevak, Alaska, One-Eyed Kayaker, activity doll with accessories, seal gut, furs, bone, hide. Photo: Mary Ellen Frank.

CULTURES VARY in the design of dolls. One variant can be seen in the doll faces. Yup'ik peoples identify a doll’s gender through the facial expression or tattoos. A small number of Cup'ik artists living in Chevak, Alaska, make “the Uglies.” The faces of these dolls are distorted from twisted leather to create humorous facial expressions. Rosalie Paniyak (Cup'ik, 1934– 2007) and her daughter Ursula Paniyak (Cup'ik, ca. 1957–2016) are two of the best known “ugly” doll makers. Rosalie’s early dolls seem to be posed in thought. Her later dolls, along with Ursula’s, are sculpted in the act of performing daily tasks. She staged these “activity dolls” on the funny side of life. One doll, Woman Burning Dinner, is just that—an average-looking woman dressed to be cooking dinner that she mistakenly burns as black smoke billows from the stove chimney.15 Activity dolls engage in daily life enterprises, such as dancing, ice fishing, or weaving baskets, with props surrounding them. Activity dolls are made by Yup'ik artists, although other groups do make them occasionally. This genre emerged in the late 1960s. Martina Oscar (Yup'ik, 1929–2008) and Eve Heffle (Iñupiaq, 1935–2010) created activity dolls in the act of picking berries or mending nets. Some dolls, like those made by Ethel Washington (Iñupiaq, 1889–1967), carry miniature yet realistic tools. Some activity dolls portray people working in their profession. Lucy Berry (Yup'ik, 20th c.) created a doll in the 1970s 15. Jane B. Schuldberg, “All I Had for Hair Was Pink Yarn: A Survey of Doll Art from Alaska and Canada,” Inuit Art Quarterly 11, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 11–13.

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of a female village nursing aide. Dressed in a floral print parka with a fur hood covering her head, the nursing aide doll wears tall fur boots and carries a medical bag in one hand and nurse’s book in the other. One can imagine this nursing aide out on her village rounds ready to visit sick patients.16 A clue that helps to identify which culture a doll derives from is the artist’s choice of materials. Materials such as moose hide, seal skin, ivory, caribou, fish skin, and Arctic ground squirrel vary depending on what natural resources are available.17 Iñupiaq artists from Shishmaref on the Sarichef Island in west Alaska, create unique dolls called “Shishmaref bone dolls.” The core and head of the doll is carved from one piece of bone or antler.

A parka slips easily over the armless body.

The sleeves have attached mittens that suggest arms and hands. The pants have attached mukluks that suggest the feet.18 The “Mother Hubbard” is a style of women’s parka with a brightly colored calico fabric shell over an inner wool duffel garment. The hood resembles a sunburst trimmed with fur. The Mother Hubbard originated in Hawaii, where early Christian missionaries, offended by the lack of clothing Hawaiian women wore, convinced the women to sew European calico fabric into loose-fitting, long garments that provided more coverage.

As missionaries infiltrated Circumpolar regions, they brought the Mother Hubbard style with them. Indigenous groups altered the hood and insulation. A doll dressed in such attire is lovingly referred to as the Mother Hubbard doll.19 Clothing styles, particularly footwear, help identify the doll’s community, since doll clothing mimics what the people wear. Individual artists reveal their own community through personalized details. For example, Alice Johnnie (Tlingit, 1926–2019) created dolls in clothing embellished with clan crests on their hats and dance robes. Ellen Savage (Deg Hit’an Athabascan, 1919–2004) created dolls with detailed clothing of the people of her culture, such as the example on page 22 wearing a fur parka, moose hide mittens with beaded accents, wolf and

beaver ruff and tassels, cotton underdress, and velvet leggings.20

INFLUENCES OTHER DOLLS REFLECT outside influences and cross fertilization between community designs. The people of the North historically followed a migratory way of life, and mutual contact with other groups is a natural result. Trade among these groups led to materials from various regions being utilized in doll making.

Some of these influences resulted from historical tragedy. During World War II, Japanese and American soldiers battled over control of the Aleutian Islands. Some of the Indigenous communities were

16. Dorothy Jean Ray, A Legacy of Arctic Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 68–72.

17. Jill Holmgren, email message to author, November 2020.

18. “Dolls,” Maruskiya’s of Nome: Northwest Native American Art, accessed October 30, 2020, web.

19. Brendan Griebel, PhD, in discussion with author, November 2020.

20. “Native Athabascan Doll 19” Tall by Ellen Savage,” WorthPoint, accessed November 1, 2020, web.

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above, top Ellen Savage (Deg Xinag Athabascan, 1919–2004), Doll Couple, hide, glass beads, thread, cloth, fur, walrus ivory mount, front and back views. Photo: Heidi Catlett. above, bottom Alice Johnnie (Tlingit, 1926–2019) from Klukwan, Alaska. She is holding her dolls at a booth at the Anchorage Fur Rendezvous Winter Festival (Fur Rondy) in 2002. Image courtesy of Heidi Catlett.

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captured by the Japanese and suffered horrific treatment. Other communities saw their people being relocated to Southeast Alaska by the US federal government, where they were housed in substandard housing in cannery and mining buildings. Many people died in these unheated camps from exposure, bad water and food, and other foul conditions.

While detained in Southeast Alaska, the Aleutian people intermingled with the Tlingit. Their art made during this time, including dolls, shows the influence both communities had on each other.21 The 1950s brought a large tuberculosis outbreak to the northern Inuit communities, as well as large populations of Cree and Métis. More than 1,200 Inuit were sent to Hamilton Mountain Sanatorium in Ontario, where the standard treatment lasted for approximately two years and consisted of bed rest. With little to do, patients diverted themselves by creating prints, carving 21. “Aleutian Islands World War II: Battle for the Aleutians,” National Park Service, accessed November 5, 2020, web.

sculptures, and sewing dolls. Art became a reminder of what life was like in their home villages and communities, and since personal contact between patients was inevitable, they influenced each other through the sharing of ideas and designs. A legacy of art was left at the sanatorium where it was displayed as a tribute. An anonymous donor purchased the collection and donated it to the Art Gallery of Hamilton where it can be seen by the public. Many of the patients at Hamilton went on to become well-known artists.22 Another example of artists intermixing cultural portrayals appears in dolls made exclusively to be marketed to tourists. Many tourists who visit the North have a romanticized image of what was once called “Eskimo culture.” They want to bring a doll home with them that captures their own idea of the people, and they want a doll dressed in hooded fur.

It was once difficult to find an Aleut or Tlingit doll dressed in items the actual people wear. These artists would borrow clothing details from other groups to dress their dolls in styles that tourists wanted. To survive, they modified their dolls to meet market demands. Today many Tlingit doll artists have returned to dressing their dolls in more accurate, Tlingit wardrobe styles, because collectors have become more educated and are willing to purchase an unmodified doll.23 Doll making is a living art form that continues to morph with the cultures.

It stands as a reminder of lifeways that once existed and those that continue. Doll making helps to ensure that these cultures live on.

I am honored to have been given the privilege to learn about dolls from the North. My knowledge about Circumpolar dolls was previously limited to the few dolls I have seen brought back as collectibles from travels to Alaska. While these souvenir dolls are detailed and beautiful, they became a window into my own pursuit to learn about the broad topic of Indigenous-made dolls from the North.

I invite you to join me in learning more about these dolls and the people who make them. The second article on this topic will appear in First American Art Magazine No. 30, Spring 2021, and

above Xxx opposite Xxx

above Left: Unknown Alaska Native artist, Doll with Unangax Headdress and Tlingit Crest, hide, fur, glass beads, pigment, cloth. Right: Unknown Tlingit artist, Doll with Crest on Regalia, hide, fur, glass beads, yarn, cloth. Photo: Heidi Catlett.

will delve more deeply into individual artists and current developments in doll making. I also extend an invitation for your participation. If you have images and information that you would like to share about Circumpolar dolls and the artists

who make them, please contact me at michole@firstamericanartmagazine.com.

I wish to sincerely thank Mary Ellen Frank, Jill Holmgren, Heidi Catlett, Brendan Griebel, and Judy McGrath for their willingness to share knowledge.

Michole Eldred (Catawba/Eastern Band Cherokee), a writer, curator, and educator, received her master’s degree in education from Berry College in Georgia. She believes that art making and enjoyment of the arts should be accessible to all peoples, especially those with disabilities.

22. Kelly Bennett, “Telling the story of hundreds of Inuit, sick with TB, who were shipped to Hamilton,” CBC News, November 9, 2016, web.

23. Mary Ellen Frank, email message to author, November 2020.

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METAMORPHOSES IN ZUNI FETISH CARVING Three Artists Expand an Indigenous Art Form

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

F

ETISHES STAND at an intersection of spirituality, art, and the natural world. Some are found objects, while others are carved in stone, antler, shell, bezoar, metal, and other materials to resemble animals or other beings, which spiritual practitioners bless and sustain with small offerings.

“From time immemorial fetishes have been a part of Zuni culture. They are used for protection, health, farming, hunting, guidance, and luck,” writes Zuni carver Dee Edaakie. 1 Other Pueblos, Hopi, Navajo, and neighboring tribes also use fetishes today, as they have done for centuries.

What could be called religious, ceremonial, or true fetishes are not available to the public. However, the term fetish also includes small carved sculptures, an artistic genre that emerged from this spiritual practice. Beginning around 1900, non-Native traders first made them available to the general public.

Interest in fetishes increased in the 1920s and exploded in the 1960s. Gallerist Mark Bahti notes that a fetish and fetish necklace classification being added to the Gallup Inter-Tribal Ceremonial dramatically helped focus attention on the art form. Today he estimates about 150 to 200 artists, both women and men,

above Ray Tsalate (Zuni), Bear Cub, 2020, elk antler, pen shell, 1 × 1 × 1 in. Image courtesy of Keshi, the Zuni Connection, Santa Fe, NM. opposite, top Dee Edaakie (Zuni), Mountain Lion, jet, shell, coral, turquoise. Image courtesy of Keshi, the Zuni Connection. opposite, bottom Dee Edaakie (Zuni), Bear with Bird, cuprite, lapis, blue opal, turquoise, coral, heishe shell strand, 33/4 × 4 × 3 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

professionally carve fetishes,2 and the majority of these are Zuni.

The Pueblo of Zuni is the largest pueblo with 12,000 members. Their reservation in western New Mexico stands within their ancestral homelands.

Despite many efforts by linguists to include it in a language family, the Zuni language is an isolate.3 Zuni has been a trading hub for centuries and is an important art center today.

In this environment, fetish carving has evolved freely, being passed from generation to generation through apprenticeships and renewed through experimentation by self-taught artists.

Frank Hamilton Cushing (1857–1900), an early American ethnologist, studied and published a Smithsonian report about Zuni fetishes in 1883, and this has provided a reference for carvers. Artists also inspire and challenge each other.

To learn more about this Indigenous genre of sculpture I spoke with three Zuni artists, Dee Edaakie, Ray Tsalate, and Keli’i Eli, about their perspectives on fetish carving. These are just three of the many talented fetish carvers active today, but their distinct visions illustrate the diversity within this art form. While their work shares commonalities in materials, techniques, and subject matter,

1. Dee Edaakie, “The Story of Zuni Fetishes,” Dee Edaakie: Zuni Fetish Creations, web.

2. Mark Bahti, Spirit in the Stone: A Handbook of Southwest Indian Animal Carvings and Beliefs, 2nd ed. (Tucson, AZ: Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2016), 9.

3. Jane H. Hill, “The Zuni Language in Southwestern Areal Context,” in Zuni Origins: Toward a New Synthesis of Southwestern Archaeology, eds. David A. Gregory and David R. Wilcox (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007), 28.

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each artist has focused on different possibilities within the art form, developing varied aesthetics. In these conversations, it is impossible to ignore the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic; yet these artists persevere and continue to create.

DEE EDAAKIE HIS MATERNAL UNCLE by marriage, Gibbs Othole, and the late Jeffery Tsalabutie (1974–2009) were Dee Edaakie's primary mentors. His first piece was a bear made from Picasso marble, so named because the dark iron oxide streaks in the metamorphosed limestone resemble paint strokes. Now, Dee is known for carving fetishes with the toughest stones on the Mohs Hardness Scale and his range as a carver is vast. “I always want to create things that are challenging to me, and that’s how I went into other rocks,” he says.4 Softer materials pose challenges as well. He has sculpted with amber and copper, which require a delicate touch and restraint.

Dee’s carving strikes a balance between rendering an animal form with minimal interventions and maximizing the visibility of the mineral’s intrinsic qualities. The fetishes showcase an array of textures and qualities such as the glitter of pyrite, iridescence of labradorite, or translucence of quartz. He selects stone with strong juxtapositions of one mineral aggregated into a matrix of another.

“That’s what makes it a one-of-a-kind piece, because you’re not going to get another stone in that same fashion,” Dee says.

Dee collects from a vast stone market outside Phoenix and the annual markets, such as the celebrated Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. “It’s like a big candy shop for me,” he says. He also finds stone “when I go hiking or hunting or when I’m just out in the woods. Especially when we’re by a river or a creek, because you can see all the colors coming out when they’re wet. We’ll start picking stones up, and I’ll come home with a bag of rocks.”

4. All quotes, unless otherwise noted, from Dee Edaakie, in discussion with the author, September 2, 2020.

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The artist focuses on creating animals that are native to his Zuni homelands—bears, eagles, rabbits, turtles, mountain lions, bison, frogs, deer— and he often highlights predator/prey relations. Instead of imposing preconceived subject matter onto his materials, “The rock itself shows me…. The contour and colors of the stone show me what it wants to be.”

The overall form, indicating the animal’s identity, is enhanced with sparse incising and inlaid eyes, often of lapis lazuli or turquoise. Dee taught himself inlay. “I’d never done anything like that before,” he recounts. “At night when I was working, something just clicked in my head, You know you can do this and do this, and it will come out like this. I had to put some things down, while it was

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still fresh in my head. I need to do this.

So, I grabbed the shell, and I started just inlaying it and stuff. I figured it out, and I was amazed that I could do something like that.”

Some of his fetishes have smaller carved pieces attached to them. “If the piece needs that and it tells me so, then I’ll put a bundle on there,” says Dee. Bundles might include small pieces of turquoise, coral, lapis, and other materials, heishe beads, arrowheads, or even another minuscule fetish—all tied on with sinew.

Some of his animals wear their own wee necklaces with inlaid shell pendants.

“Sometimes it’ll happen, and sometimes it won’t. It just depends on what the piece itself thinks it needs, but if it’s done, then it’s done.”

Dee has carved fetish forms out of fossils. Once living animals, the fossils have been turned into stone by the vast passage of time, now to be sculpted back into animal form. “I carved a buffalo out of ammonite,” an extinct mollusk with a spiral shell. “On one side you can see the shell, and on the other side, you can see the inside where it has the lines on it.

Inside the lines, there were little crystallizations of pyrite in there.”

His carvings range from one to eight inches across. “My goal in the future is to get bigger.” When asked about the terms fetish compared to sculpture, Dee replies: “To me, a sculpture is something big. A fetish is like a good luck charm.

It’s a token you carry around with you.”

White bear fetishes have grown particularly relevant during the pandemic with its challenges to mental health. “A white bear is the father of all the fetishes.

It’s for strength, hope, healing, and just guidance. Also just for that inner strength that we all need right now. I think that’s the reason why that deer came out, too, because for this,” Dee says, referring to a spotted white deer he carved recently.

“A fawn is a sacred animal, especially a white fawn. It’s like a new beginning or a new world. Something beginning to change.” On the fawn’s tail, he placed a miniature silver dragonfly.

“The dragonfly is our messenger to our ancestors and deities of the spiritual realm. It’s a message of strength and

hope for a new beginning for us, because of what we’re going through. That’s why I called that piece Messenger of Hope.”

“This white ivory stone fawn represents the hope of a better tomorrow,” Dee continues. “The spots are inlaid with lapis, turquoise, black pen shell,5 and coral. They represent all the people in the world—all the races and ethnicities— and the red coral heartline is to unify us all to stay strong and pray that we will overcome this pandemic.”

Collectors have been interested in his bear and deer fetishes, “because with the pandemic going on, these help them to deal with it emotionally and mentally.”

While he has made more of these animals, “They are never going to be the exact same. They will always have their own characteristics, because they have to have their own life.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dee has encouraged his daughters to create art—whether fetish carving, painting, or photography. “We’re given a talent. We get it freely so we give back freely. I think most Natives understand that the more you give, the more you get back too,” says Dee. “What you give out, you’re blessed back for it.” edaakiefetishcreations.com

RAY TSALATE RAY TSALATE LEARNED fetish carving from his partner Troy Sice. The two collaborate frequently, but, of the two, “Ray’s work is a lot more whimsical,” observes Dee Edaakie. Ray agrees: “I like to incorporate a little bit of whimsy and a little bit of charm into the pieces that I do. Sometimes it’s on accident. It’s just the way the piece is supposed to come out on its own. And I just add onto the little flaws that make them individual.”6 Ray is known for his inlay, his Corn Maidens, and particularly his frogs. “I do a lot of the frogs,” the artist concedes.

“They are a symbol for abundance, and I have been abundantly blessed with a lot of the different things. I’m very humbled by the different ribbons that I’ve won,

because, starting from absolutely nothing, I’ve come a pretty long way. So those frogs have helped me a lot.”

Troy taught Ray how to carve in 2004. “I had been watching Troy create his work, and I would help him with the inlay,” says Ray. “I would tell him, ‘You should do this to it,’ and, ‘You should do that to it.’ So one day, he just gave me a piece of antler and was like, ‘Why don’t you try it?’ So, he taught me the basics of how to create the frog. I made my first one. I wasn’t so confident with it when I tried to sell it. But Bronwyn [Fox] at Keshi looked at it and said, ‘You know, I think you’re onto something.’”

In 2009, Ray entered Santa Fe Indian Market for the first time, and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian awarded Ray a fellowship. “That was a big stepping-stone for me, because I had never been exposed to anything like that before,” he recalls. “When I won the fellowship, it gave me more confidence in my ability to create fetishes and sculptures.”

Over time, Ray honed his personal style. “My main medium is elk antler.”

above Ray Tsalate (Zuni), Bringer of the Rain, 2020, elk antler, Mediterranean coral, Kingman turquoise, catlinite, serpentine, pen shell, black marble arrowhead, deer hide, 11/8 × 2 × 2 in. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite, top Dee Edaakie (Zuni), Messenger of Hope, 2020, marble, lapis, Sleeping Beauty turquoise, black pen shell, coral, abalone, purple spiny oyster shell, , sinew.

Image courtesy of the artist. opposite, bottom Dee Edaakie (Zuni), Bear with Salmon, 2 0 2 0 , l a b ra d o r i t e , s p i n y oyster shell, turquoise. Image courtesy of Keshi, the Zuni Connection.

5. Pen shells belong to saltwater clams of the Pinnidae family.

6. Ray Tsalate, in discussion with the author, August 30, 2020.

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above Ray Tsalate (Zuni), Zuni Maiden with Shawl, 2020, elk antler, jet, denim lapis lazuli, catlinite, serpentine, coral, sugilite, turquoise, chrysoprase, pen shell, 2 × 1½ × ¾ in. Image courtesy of Keshi, the Zuni Connection. The maiden's shawl depicts the sun and a creature inspired by Hawikuh pottery. opposite, top Keli'i Eli (Zuni/Native Hawaiian), Lucky, 2020, Nevada Number 8 turquoise, pen shell.

Image courtesy of Keshi, the Zuni Connection. opposite, bottom Keli'i Eli (Zuni/ Native Hawaiian), Mana, 2020, Picasso marble, black marble, 3 × 41/2 × 21/2 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

He carves figures “as big as the antler will allow.” He contrasts the antler’s naturally variegated roughness with gleaming, polished cream-colored surfaces. “Dark and light have to fight to have a nice visual,” so Ray burnishes details to a chocolate brown with a jewelry torch.

His Old Style series uses antler tines to create sleek and stripped-down zoomorphic figures that emphasize the antler’s porous grain.

The artist incises fine details into many of his figures. “I try to bring a lot of different colors,” he says, especially through inlaying brilliantly hued minerals: blue turquoise and lapis, red catlinite, purple sugilite, and more.

“You can add detail as you go, but you can never take away. Once you start taking away, you have less of a form to work with.” He keeps pushing his inlay skills, even creating pictograph-inspired designs, such as the pictograph image on the shawl in his intricate Zuni Maiden with Shawl standing only two inches tall. As a jeweler, Ray occasionally adds sterling silver elements.

His fetishes possess a sense of kawaii, a Japanese term for cuteness

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elevated to its own aesthetic, paired with grace. “A lot of the pieces that I create are little Pueblo kids—mostly little Pueblo maidens—because there is a sense of innocence and wonder in them.” They are “little pure beings.” He inlays black pen shell for their wide eyes. “Or closed eyes with their eyelashes. Kind of in prayer,” he muses.

“Different people that I’ve sold maidens to come up and tell me that, ‘This reminds me of me when I was this young’ or ‘This reminds me of when I was spending time with my grandma.’” His carvings are “a little reminder of the inner child in you that wants the ice cream.”

Ray and Troy moved to rural western New Mexico in March and have been busy in their studio. “We’ve been trying to make as much as we can, so that we can take our breaks when we need to.

We’ve learned to balance working on our pieces and then being on the computer and being bosses. It’s pretty hard, because I’m my own boss, and I really can’t get mad at me.” Ray continues, “I was telling Troy, ‘I think we were already quarantined.’ We spend almost eight hours a day in our workshop anyway, every day.”

They set up a website and participated in SWAIA’s Virtual Indian Market in August. The Amerind Museum gave them a virtual two-man show in October.

“We love doing what we do, and we enjoy making people happy,” says Ray. “It’s a great reward when somebody connects to something I’ve made. It brings me a lot of joy to see that smile on somebody’s face when they walk away happy, because it’s like they found a little piece of their puzzle. I feel like I’m always missing a piece, so if they find a little piece of their puzzle and they’re happy walking away with it, then that makes me complete.” dragonflystrail.com

KELI'I ELI KELI'I KALEIHUA ELI, whose mother is Zuni and father is Native Hawaiian, is a carver, dental student, and volunteer raising funds and awareness to help Zuni Pueblo during the COVID-19 crisis.

“He’s doing a lot for the community,” says Ray Tsalate. “And he’s also collecting donations of cleaning supplies, food, and different stuff like that. That’s pretty awesome.”

Keli'i began carving in November 2015, after losing his uncle, Amos Pooacha, the only fetish carver in his family at the time. “I mourned for him for a year and a half, and I felt a big disconnect,” Keli'i recounts.7 Growing up, he watched his uncle carve fetishes, and Amos invited him to try his hand at carving antler, jet, and other materials.

While Keli'i pursued many career paths, art remained part of his life.

“I come from a multi-generational family of artisans.” His grandmother was a textile artist, his grandfather and aunt were silversmiths and jewelers, and his mother painted. “But we’re a big Navy family,” Keli'i adds. His parents met while serving in the Navy, and his brother currently serves. Keli'i served on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, a massive aircraft carrier. “I’d go down to the dental offices to get the occasional cavity fixed or something like that. The field of dentistry intrigued me.”

After returning home to Zuni, “I went ahead and set my sights on that, and completed the dental assistant program in 2016 with honors.” He continued his studies toward a bachelor’s degree at the University of New Mexico [UNM].

When Keli'i began carving on his own, “I was already part of the dental assistant program with UNM….The tools that we operate on teeth with—the little Dremel

or diamond bits— are similar to the tools we use for carving fetishes. The diamond burs and the tungsten carbide burs used in dentistry are also used in carving.”

COVID-19 halted his studies and claimed his grandmother’s life. He asked himself, “How can I help my people right now?” With his knowledge of infection control and sterilization techniques, he thought, “I can help my people with this

7. All quotes Keli'i Eli in discussion with the author, August 7, 2020.

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above Keli'i Eli (Zuni/Native Hawaiian), Free Spirited, 2020, koi sculpted from honeycomb calcite, 13 × 15 × 8 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

virus by instructing them about proper hazmat and PPE [personal protective equipment] donning and doffing off, as well as the medical-grade disinfectants that are used in the dentistry setting to kill bacteria and viruses.” This year he raised funds and awareness to provide PPE and sanitizing supplies to Zuni families to help them resist the virus.

“But I do have my artistry,” Eli says.

Despite the massive demands on his time, he continues to carve. “My studio is my place of Zen. It’s filled with positive energy. It’s a sacred place to me, where I can reconnect with my ancestors, my uncle, my grandma, and my grandpa, 8. Bahti, Spirit in the Stone, 38.

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because I feel them. I feel their presence every time I’m carving,” says Keli'i. “That’s good medicine. I pour my heart and soul, blood, sweat, and tears into every carving that I carve. So I’m just truly blessed to have this gift to share with the world.”

Keli'i carves animals with a keen sense of naturalism, often carving out details of the fur and feathers. When he began to exhibit: “My fetishes were not really considered fetishes, because they were kind of small sculptures. And the first stones I was working with were white marble, and white marble is very, very hard. I had whales, dolphins, and sea life depicted from my Hawaiian heritage,” Keli'i says. “I’m bringing in my Hawaiian roots, tying it in with my Zuni roots.”

Even before contact, Zuni people maintained connections to the oceans.

Gallerist Mark Bahti wrote, “At Zuni, there was a tradition of expeditions to the Pacific Coast once every four years.”8 Keli'i’s carvings affirm these longstanding connections.

“Not one carving is the same, because each stone is different. Each stone has its own density, some stones are softer than others, some stones are harder. You have to know all those characteristics of the stone. Usually, when I get a stone, I sit there, and I can picture what it could be,” Keli'i says. “In a sense, the stone is my teacher, and I’m the student.”

Over the past five years, Keli'i keeps experimenting and learning from fellow artists, such as Anthony Ephram Chavez (Zuni), his second mentor.

“Each year, my art, the way I carve, has changed. It has evolved by attending these shows.” He participates in the annual Heard Fair and National Museum of the American Indian's Native Art Market and exhibited at the Zuni Shows hosted by the Keshi Foundation. “A big part of my inspiration has come from not only fetish carvers here in Zuni, such as Jeff Shetima. While attending these shows, other artists from other pueblos have also inspired me and have become good friends.” One is sculptor Cliff Fragua (Jemez Pueblo). “I’ve always liked to pick at his mind a bit, share some

techniques in carving, because in the last year and a half I’ve been veering into larger sculptures—kind of taking fetishes into a bigger perspective. Still having the same presence of the healing energies, our spiritual tie-ins to the animal in which we carve, but taking it to a little bigger scale.” He also thanks James Goodman (Diné) and Tim Washburn (Diné) for their advice, friendship, and encouragement.

“Carving has healing medicine.”

The artist continues, “You’ve got to have a strong mind and a clear heart, a clear mind and a strong heart, and you’ve got to bring good energy into your carvings.

Even before carving, you’ve got to have a good spirit. Everything has to be positive. That’s the energy, the presence that the collector is going to feel once they touch it. It’s tangible when you put it in their hands.” shiwivisions.com

CONCLUSION THESE ARTISTS HAVE BEEN able to craft their own websites during the pandemic. Many other talented and accomplished fetish carvers have not, as internet access in Indian Country remains a challenge. Zuni Pueblo depends upon the visual arts to survive.

Art provides the primary or secondary source of income for approximately 70 percent of adults at Zuni.9 Fortunately, many respected dealers and galleries from coast-to-coast represent Zuni fetish carvers and Albuquerque hosts the Zuni Fetish Museum, founded by the late Kent McManis and open by appointment.

While the mainstream art world favors monumental scale in sculptures,

there is room for the diminutive, the portable, and the intimate. Japanese netsuke, intricately carved kimono toggles that date back to the 17th century, provide an instructive example of another non-Western miniature utilitarian sculpture that has been embraced by the mainstream art world. These also may serve as talismans. Art today can still invoke prayers for protection.

“These animals have been our protectors for generations upon generations. They have continued into our beliefs here in modern-day societies as modern-day Indians,” Keli'i explains.

“Our prayers are not only for our Zuni people. Our prayers are for everybody, man, woman, and child. Our prayers are for the whole mother earth for the whole universe. We pray for everybody.”

America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) is a visual artist, art writer, independent curator, and publishing editor of First American Art Magazine, based in Norman, Oklahoma.

9. Lee Reynis and Gillian Joyce, “Zuni MainStreet: Community Economic Assessment,” University of New Mexico Bureau of Business and Economic Research (June 2014): 35, PDF.

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COMMODITY AND HERITAGE Works on Paper by Myra Kukiiyaut

By Katharine W. Fernstrom, PhD

I

NUK ARTIST MYRA KUKIIYAUT (1929–2006) from Qamani'tuaq, Nunavut, drew, printed, sculpted stone, and sewed textiles. Focusing on her works on paper, I will briefly compare and contrast her work to works on paper by her fellow Inuit artists Jessie Oonark (1906–1985) and Kenojuak Ashevak (1927–2013), in order to highlight aspects of Kukiiyaut’s work. All three artists create images situated at the intersection of commodity art and heritage. Kukiiyaut’s works emphasize Inuktitut texts, family stories, culture change, and then-current events. These three artists make for interesting comparisons, because they demonstrate the number of different ways shared cultural practices can be turned to the process of making new art forms such as drawings and prints on paper.

Jessie Oonark, Kenojuak Ashevak, and Myra Kukiiyaut all began, or intensified, production of works on paper in the late 1950s and 1960s, in part because of their families’ needs for cash income.

These three women lived in small hunting camps until they moved into permanent towns. Oonark and Kukiiyaut lived in Qamani'tuaq (Baker Lake). Ashevak lived in Kinngait (Cape Dorset). All three tailored clothing from furs or commercial fabrics. This prestigious skill involves piecing furs or fabric into warm, attractively patterned, individually fitted garments, and all three women transferred select aspects of these skills to

other media to thereby produce different outcomes.1 Their works on paper combine their lifetime of Inuit knowledge and practice with new media including paper, pencils, and printmaking technology. The work was guided and managed by the Canadian art co-op system, developed to market Inuit art for the Northern communities.

James Houston, based at Kinngait, and Jack and Sheila Butler in Qamani'tuaq

1. Marie Bouchard, “The Prints of Jessie Oonark,” in Power of Thought: The Prints of Jessie Oonark, Marie Bouchard and Jessie Oonark (Richmond, VA: Marsh Gallery, University of Richmond Museums, 2001), 11–12, 14; Jean Blodgett, Kenojuak (Toronto: Firefly Books, 1985), 34–37; Marie Bouchard, “Kukiiyaut, Myra (1929– 2006),” in North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Jules Heller and Nancy G. Heller (New York: Garland Publisher, 1995), 317–18.

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above The territory of Nunavut, Canada, marked in red and burgundy (CC0). opposite Jessie Oonark (Inuk, 1906–1985), Racing Kayaks, 1985, stonecut print, stencil on paper, 25 × 361/2 in., posed with gallery staff at the Polar Encounters exhibition (2018), Bonhams, New Bond Street, London. Photo: Malcolm Park, editorial/Alamy.

were among those who were instrumental in facilitating the success of the co-ops and the careers of these three artists.2 All these women drew from their experiences as young people in remote Inuit camps. They all sold the majority of their work to outside, non-Inuit buyers who were drawn to their combination of exotic Arctic imagery and the bold colors that appealed to proponents of 1960s Canadian modernism. All three have works either left untitled or labeled with explanatory titles placed on the work after conversations between the artist and the art shop.3 These three artists examined the subjects of food gathering, hunting, and fishing; nature; family and community; human-animal combinations and transformations rooted in stories; and both pre-Christian animistic practices and conversion to Christianity, in varying degrees of detail. All three artists abided by the advice of arts co-ops to create an individual style for themselves and, in printmaking, the process of selecting drawings to be turned into prints intensified their individual artistic identities.

These women were all literate in Inuktitut and were practicing Christians.4 The women’s individual choices, and maturing professional paths as artists, resulted in the production of very diverse bodies of work as legacies, despite their shared culture. All three artists settled upon unique sets of iconic images and elements to create and recombine in varying compositions. For example, Oonark is known for her boldly colored designs, which focus on female imagery including use of the ulu, or woman’s knife. She presents two ulus projecting at the top-sides of her print Figure in Striped Clothing (1971). Oonark prefers symmetrical designs, which Canadian art administrator and historian Marie Bouchard connects to her work as a seamstress of hide clothing. Meanwhile, Ashevak is known for her colorful birds, especially owls, and her “snapshot”-style

images of people. While some of her work is symmetrical, not all of it is, and she enjoyed configuring patterns and colors, as evident in Radiant Owl and Geese (2000–04). Finally, Kukiiyaut created a style that included colorful, asymmetrical combinations of abstract beings inspired by shape-shifting clouds and pools. In other works she also includes syllabic texts and “speech flares.” Kukiiyaut often depicted family and community stories about culture change, and I observe that fewer of her artworks focus specifically on women’s tasks and tools.5 All three women have been interviewed, and their answers and reflective comments have been placed into the art historical literature, which is accessible to collectors, museum patrons, and researchers.6 Their documented position in the art historical literature creates informative biographies for the three women, and for their works, from the perspective of the outsider. In contrast, Kukiiyaut’s additional use of Inuktitut texts leaves a door open that invites viewers who are

not literate in Inuktitut to consult an Inuktitut translator, and this has been my experience. In this way I suggest that Kukiiyaut, intentionally or unintentionally, paved the way for her work to circle back to Inuit communities. This approach is similar to the ongoing work

by Canadian art historian and author Norman Vorano, and communities on Baffin Island, in revisiting annotated work done by previous generations at the request of the administrator and advocate of Inuit graphic arts, Terry Ryan (1933–2017).7 In writing this article, my long-term goal is a single-artist exhibition of Myra Kukiiyaut’s work, which she has never had.

JESSIE OONARK BORN NEAR BACK RIVER, Jessie Oonark grew up in her family’s tundra camps in the Qamani'tuaq area. She moved permanently to the town of Qamani'tuaq, also known as Baker Lake, in the late 1950s to avoid wild game

2. Blodgett, Kenojuak, 31; Bouchard, “The Prints of Jessie Oonark,” 9; Norman Vorano, “Introduction: Early Printmaking in Cape Dorset”, in Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration; Early Printmaking in the Canadian Arctic, Norman Vorano with Asato Ikeda, Ming Tiampo, and Kananginak Pootoogook (Gatineau, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation, 2011), 10.

3. Bouchard, “The Prints of Jessie Oonark,” 15.

4. Marie Bouchard, “Jessie Oonark 1906–1985,” in Jessie Oonark: A Retrospective, by Jean Blodgett and Marie Bouchard (Winnipeg, MB: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1986), 6–28; Sheila Ord, artist biographies, in Qamanittuaq—Where the River Widens: Drawings by Baker Lake, ed. Marion Jackson, Judith Nasby, and William Noah (Guelph, ON: Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 1998), 93–96; Bouchard, “The Prints of Jessie Oonark,” 12, 14–15; Blodgett, Kenojuak, 1985.

5. Blodgett, Kenojuak, 34–37; Bouchard, “The Prints of Jessie Oonark,” 11–12, 14; Ord, Qamanittuaq, 93–96.

6. Bouchard, “Jessie Oonark 1906–1985,” 24n1; Marion E. Jackson and Judith Nasby, Contemporary Inuit Drawings (Guelph, ON: Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 1987), 65–66, 91–94; Ord, Qamanittuaq, 59–68, 93–96.

7. “Picturing Arctic Modernity: North Baffin Drawings From 1964,” Agnes Etherington Art Centre and The Canadian Museum of History, 2018, web.

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Oonark was monolingual and literate in Inuktitut. When titling or discussing her visual art she adhered to oral narrative.

She shared the content of her work to the co-op staff or to visiting art historians who interviewed her, but she did not inscribe her art with Inuktitut texts.10

KENOJUAK ASHEVAK

food shortages. She was the first artist in her community to sell drawings and the first to have her drawings replicated in prints in the late 1950s, before the formal commencement of the Canadian government art programs. Drawing, printmaking, and other arts were cash-generating activities that allowed Oonark and her fellow Inuit artists to buy food to replace wild game and fish. Oonark also held various jobs in town until her artwork generated enough cash that she could focus on art full time.8 Oonark’s drawings were considered suitable for print-replication from the beginning. They were sent to the print studio at Kinngait (then called Cape Dorset), which was then the only print studio in the northern Arctic, and they were an immediate success. Bouchard describes the visual strength of Oonark’s work as her bold blocks of color and combinations of abstract and narrative forms that resonated with Canadian modernism of the 1960s, for example her work Racing Kayaks (1985). Bouchard analyzes the patterns and lines of Oonark’s work as connected to her skill of sewing tailored, pieced clothing from prepared, pieced, animal skins to keep her family warm in Arctic winters.

She observes that Oonark also took such tangible and intangible constructs as amulets of an angakoq (shaman) and abstracted them into the patterns of her work. Oonark’s work is identifiable by the profiles of her parka-hooded men and women, dog sleds, transformation figures, women’s tools, and women’s personal accoutrements, such as ulus and hair sticks.9

KENOJUAK ASHEVAK was born on southern Baffin Island and entered art production in the early 1950s by making images of pieced seal skin and other sewn items. She changed to making works on paper around 1958 and was the first Kinngait artist to work on paper. She worked with the art co-op at the time James Houston was in charge. Houston introduced Japanese printmaking concepts to Kinngait, because of the global success of Japanese prints. Seeking to improve the marketability and public profile of Inuit prints, Houston studied printmaking in Japan and then modified the concepts to include local Arctic materials. Ashevak’s most famous images, Enchanted Owl and Arrival of the Sun, were printed in the early 1960s. Arrival of the Sun used a lithography block of local serpentine.11 Art historian Jean Blodgett interviewed Ashevak in 1980 and says that, artistically, Ashevak’s first objective was to work with color and pattern; she preferred that above all else. This has a parallel in the piecing of furs and fabric into patterned clothing and sewn objects for sale. Cutting and piecing hide and fabric involves focusing more on the positive and negative spaces of the pieces, and focusing less on the bilateral symmetry of the tailored garment or original animal skin.12 Ashevak’s reputation rested strongly on the success of her bird images, both asymmetrical and symmetrical. Despite her reputation for focusing on birds, Ashevak’s images are quite diverse and include human activities and fragments of animist stories from her childhood. A part of the emphasis on birds came from the choices made by the print studio to select drawings that would transfer well to print medium. Although she was consulted in the choices and, indeed, she did some of her own etching and engraving of plates, she did not do the printing itself. While she drew many scenes of human activity, she did not include personal family episodes or overtly religious topics, as did Kukiiyaut. Blodgett refers to Ashevak’s scenes as static or not “causal”; they are more like titled snapshots or moments, without a story.13 Ashevak genuinely enjoyed working with color and pattern but, like Oonark, she worked for the benefits of cash in order to supply her children and husband with necessary commercial items. Nevertheless, Ashevak considered art to be only one of many activities she did to care for her family and community.14

8. Bouchard, “Jessie Oonark 1906–1985,” 6–28; Bouchard, “The Prints of Jessie Oonark,” 10.

9. Bouchard, “Jessie Oonark 1906–1985,” 17; Bouchard, “The Prints of Jessie Oonark,” 12, 14–16.

10. Bouchard, “Jessie Oonark 1906–1985,” 18, 24–26n; Bouchard, “The Prints of Jessie Oonark,” 16. Ord, Qamanittuaq, 93–96.

11. Blodgett, Kenojuak, 31, 33, catalogue nos. 11, 28, 243–44; Vorano, “Introduction,” 85–86.

12. Blodgett, Kenojuak, 38–51.

13. Blodgett, Kenojuak, 34–37, 52–65.

14. Blodgett, Kenojuak, 73–75; Bouchard, “The Prints of Jessie Oonark,” 11–12.

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MYRA KUKIIYAUT MYRA KUKIIYAUT was born in Qamani'tuaq and was raised both in the town and in a family camp across the lake from town. Like Oonark and Ashevak, she entered the cash economy to earn income for her family of nine children and her husband, the sculptor Luke Arngna'naaq (Inuk, 1931–2007).

Kukiiyaut made and sold Inuit clothing to non-Inuit before beginning to draw and make prints in 1967. She also worked within the Canadian governmental arts co-op system, as did Oonark and Ashevak. Unlike Oonark and Ashevak, Kukiiyaut includes at least three family stories in her body of work, and several of her compositions are “causal” with an

implied story in action. I’ve observed that her work is not usually symmetrical, although she did have experience making clothing.15 I identify five notable characteristics in Kukiiyaut’s work. First, she included Inuktitut syllabic statements and red speech flares within her images; they frequently co-occur but not always.

Unlike Oonark and Ashevak, Kukiiyaut incorporated her literacy into her artwork in texts other than her artist signature.

Kukiiyaut is not unique in placing texts in her work; she shares this practice with other members of her generation.

American art historian Marion Jackson points out that the artists use syllabics to add information and to clarify details about an image, as is clear in the project

above Kenojuak Ashevak (Inuk, 1927– 2013), Radiant Owl and Geese, 2000– 04, crayon, ink on paper, 26 × 20 in., collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Image courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian. opposite Kenojuak Ashevak at the East Baffin Eskimo Co-operative.

Photo: Ansgar Walk (CC BY-SA 2.5).

15. Bernadette Driscoll, Inuit Myths, Legends & Songs (Winnipeg, MB: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1982), 43–44; Bouchard, Kukiiyaut, 317–18.

16. Marion E. Jackson, “Reflections of an Art Historian,” in Contemporary Inuit Drawings, ed. Marion E. Jackson and Judith Nasby (Guelph, ON: Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 1987), 16; “Picturing Arctic Modernity,” web.

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Picturing Arctic Modernity.16 However, I observe that the information is only directly accessible to viewers literate in syllabics. When the art is encountered in a gallery or museum outside of the Inuit community, the syllabics become an exotic visual detail. When closely examined, the combination of imagery and syllabic writing creates a potent narrative statement about the sociability of Inuit communities. The combination also creates a powerful visual heritage statement, even though the images leave the community and enter the art market.

Second, Kukiiyaut has a fluid, curvilinear style of abstraction inspired by flowing lines of such natural events as clouds, puddles, and pools. Many of these abstract compositions seem to be Kukiiyaut’s approach to discussing natural forces entwined with cosmology, which were a routine part of pre-Christian storytelling, and they bring to my mind images made by Irene Avaalaaqiaq (Inuk). Yet Kukiiyaut downplays her knowledge of historic legends in her interview with curator and art historian Bernadette Driscoll. In other images where the curvilinear animals are the focus, they are recognizable by one or more of these qualities: four generalized legs, fangs, vertical ears, muzzles, beaks, or tails. People are recognizable by faces and generally vertical bodies with arms and legs. Frequently they are intertwined in combination or with transformation figures. 17 Third, I observe that Kukiiyaut uses blockier human and animal figures to present narrative stories about day-to-day life in nomadic hunting camps and about human experiences with cosmological and natural phenomena that were part of that historic nomadic life.

Fourth, several of her story images are based in family events with accompanying narratives. Some of these stories are about culture change.

Fifth, Kukiiyaut created one-ofa-kind story scenes with unusual detail or organization. One example that also includes the first four of these qualities is her drawing, Untitled (1976), depicting her “grandfather, Nateelaq, [who] was an angakoq” and his shamanic helpers, as well as Jesus and an angel. In her interview with Driscoll, Kukiiyaut tells the story of Nateelaq meeting Jesus, while searching for his sons who had gone hunting. Nateelaq is portrayed as fully human, while Jesus and the angel are abstractly anthropomorphic. The helping figures are abstractly zoomorphic, floating horizontally and forming a framing line below the three main figures.

Jesus has a “speech-flare” with Inuktitut text, and Jesus “told Nateelaq that He loved him.” Kukiiyaut explains that the helping spirits “were fighting over [Nateelaq] but now they are showing their fear and surprise of Jesus Christ.”18 All five figures seem aerially suspended beneath a blue-ribbon sky. Flying and walking on clouds are two powers of angakut and also of angels.19 Writing about this image in the 1980s, Blodgett observes that Kukiiyaut’s composition was a rare example of Christianity and shamanism combined in one composition. Blodgett reports that most artists included only one religion, or the other, on a single sheet of paper.20 Nateelaq’s experience is a pivotal moment that is part of the larger scope of cultural change in the Arctic: an encounter with the changing force of Christianity. Although Oonark, Ashevak, and Kukiiyaut all experienced intensive culture change, Kukiiyaut is more explicit in specifically depicting the multiple components of change.

Oonark and Ashevak developed bodies of work that relied heavily on historical, syncretic, assimilative, and natural imagery for their art in order to participate in the change, without recording the changes as personal narratives.

Another example of Kukiiyaut’s

use of a speech flare and Inuktitut text is The Dying Man Becomes a Wolf (1971) in which the horizontal flying figure, dressed in a parka with an enlarged woman’s hood, is singing a song (indicated by a red flare) defined by the syllabics above her head. The audience looks straight on at the ground line defined by the coffin, the wolf, and the caribou, the Baker Lake chop mark, and Kukiiyaut’s name in the bottom right corner. The image is explicitly family-related because the song verse belongs to Kukiiyaut’s father-in-law.21 Red flares and Inuktitut text don’t always co-occur. In As It Is Given, So We Accept (1973), the woman has a red flare and is fishing with a line in the water, and there are fish on the ground next to her, suggesting the title. Based on previous discussions the red flare suggests speech or song. The absence of text and the fish on the woman’s cap suggests thought, speech, or song that is known in the mind and directed to an audience that does not require visible words, but who participate in an articulate engagement about the successful catch. Bouchard comments in her essay “The Prints of Jessie Oonark,” that articulating the relationship between thought and making things happen brings about the desired consequences.22 Bouchard addresses historic shamanic understanding, but this is also the foundation of prayer in all religions including Christianity. Once again this suggests Kukiiyaut’s direct engagement with the subject of culture change.

CONCLUSION THE SHARED ELEMENTS of the biographies of Oonark, Ashevak, and Kukiiyaut present a uniform story to the art-buying public. Their works speak of knowledge, experiences, and memories of their hunting and fishing lives on the land. Implicit as subtext are the episodes of food shortages that led to the intensification of the art-for-cash programs. They

17. Driscoll, Inuit Myths, Legends & Songs, 43; Anita E. Jones, “Now We Learn to Live Here…,” in Northern Lights: Inuit Textile Art from the Canadian Arctic, ed. Katharine W. Fernstrom and Anita E. Jones (Baltimore: The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1993), 40; Bouchard, Kukiiyaut, 317–18.

18. Driscoll, Inuit Myths, Legends & Songs, 4.

19. Jean Blodgett, The Coming and Going of the Shaman: Eskimo Shamanism and Art (Winnipeg, MB: The Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1978), 63.

20. Jean Blodgett, “Christianity and Inuit Art,” in Inuit Art: An Anthology, ed. Alma Houston (Winnipeg, MB: Watson & Dwyer Publishing, 1988), 88.

21. Driscoll, Inuit Myths, Legends & Songs, 45.

22. Bouchard, “The Prints of Jessie Oonark,” 10–11.

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above Myra Kukiiyaut (Inuk, 1929–2006), As It Is Given, So We Accept, 1972, colored pencil on paper, 20 × 26 in., collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Manitoba, acquired through a grant from the McLean Foundation, G-80-266.

Photo: Serge Gumenyuk. Image courtesy of the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

also speak about the dynamics of cultural change in the fact of the existence of the bodies of art and in the reflective content of the imagery. Although these works were created to be commodities, I believe they have also become heritage. I suggest that Kukiiyaut’s artwork, especially, can be perceived as heritage with their Inuktitut language content, even though she sold them to buyers outside of the community.

Co-op staff worked with artists to develop titles and explain narratives, and I think she could have had her texts translated permanently into the works of art for her art-buying public, but she didn’t, and neither did the co-op. Anyone who wants direct access to her text requires someone fluent in reading Inuktitut to translate it. Therefore, these works of art are empowered to go back to an Inuit

person after they were launched into the art market.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: I thank three of Myra Kukiiyaut’s children: Silas Arngna’naaq, Jenny Qaummaqsiaq, and Rebecca Arngna Naaq Kautaq for speaking with me online, and I also thank Rebecca for a conversation in Winnipeg.

I hope we will have more conversations in person. I thank the Maryland Institute College of Art for the 2017 award by the Adjunct Faculty Professional Development Fund to enhance teaching Native

American art history that allowed me to visit works on paper by Myra Kukiiyaut at the Art Gallery of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. I thank Judith Varney Burch of Arctic Inuit Art gallery and the Arctic Culture Forum in Charlottesville, Virginia, for introducing me to Myra Kukiiyaut’s work approximately 20 years ago. The journey I have taken from that introduction permits me to reflect on other people’s processes of art creation and what it means to be a member of various audiences.

Katharine W. Fernstrom, PhD, is an anthropologist, independent curator, art appraiser, member of the International Society of Appraisers, and part-time faculty member at Towson University and the Maryland Institute College of Art in Maryland. She served on the curatorial staff at the Baltimore Museum of Art for 13 years and earned her doctoral degree from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

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OTHER PLACES, OUTER SPACES Skawennati’s Virtual Futurism The time of this avant-garde is not progress, but interruption—stopping time, or slowing it down, or reaching into past time, forgotten time, in order to shatter the placid surface of the present.

—Susan Buck-Morss, “What is Political Art?”1

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

to implement an Indigenous presence on websites, virtual environments, video games, and other forms of digital media in today’s Information Age. Utilizing historical Kanien'kehá:ka Mohawk knowledge, her work makes strident efforts to break from Western mechanisms of space and time to propose that past and present historical conditions are better understood through a futuristic lens.

SPACE-

TIME

S

KAWENNATI’S BODY OF WORK forges experimental conceptions of Indigenous sovereignty, historical narratives, and self-expression. It also negotiates and recovers past and current issues facing Indigenous peoples for the benefit of future generations. 2 Drawing on ancestral stories to map such realities is an elemental philosophy of Indigenous Futurism, the cultural movement that reimagines the artistic and social potential of Indigenous peoples now and tomorrow. Put simply, Skawennati adopts the framework of Indigenous Futurism to perceive the future of Indigenous peoples as synonymous with hope.

Her recent work approaches information technology as a frontier for aesthetic innovation, seeking to visualize not only what the future might look like, but also how Indigenous (and nonIndigenous) communities might position themselves within it. To a considerable degree, it continues the artist’s project

IT WOULD APPEAR that the fluid rhythms of space and time in much of Skawennati’s work reconciles Haudenosaunee ancestral narratives with quantum mechanics, the study of matter and energy in the knowable universe.

In 1999, cosmologist Stephen Hawking examined physicist Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity in a lecture titled, “Space and Time Warps.” Hawking sought to demonstrate how Einstein formulated

space-time warps, making space travel a theoretical possibility. Somewhat surprisingly, he insists that the universe may not contain a single history but indeterminate histories on multiple dimensions, many of which we cannot readily see, hear, or feel. Though Einstein used Western physics to deconstruct space-time in 1915, Indigenous cultures around the world have abstracted space and time in non-linear or multidimensional expressions for a very long time.

For instance, in a study on Indigenous approaches to the concept of time, the Aymara people of the Andes place the “past in front” and the “future behind,” while the Yupno of Papua New Guinea point uphill or downhill when talking about the future and the past.3 These observations led researchers to conclude that numbers themselves can operate independently of linear timelines, Western empiricism, or other metric spatial representations.4 Time may be cyclical, fractured, seasonal, and even

1. Susan Buck-Morss, “What is Political Art?” inSITE 97: Private Time in Public Space: San Diego and Tijuana, ed. Sally Yard (San Diego, CA: Installation Gallery, 1997), 22.

2. See: Lindsay Catherine Cornum, “The Creation Story is a Spaceship: Indigenous Futurism and Decolonial Deep Space,” Voz-à-Voz, 2015, web. The full quote reads: “The Internet, like outer space, is a new place where old conversations about sovereignty, self-determination, belonging, and relationship need to be reconsidered and reworked for the possibility of liberation for all.”

3. Rafael Núñez, Kensy Cooperrider, and Jürg Wassmann, “Number Concepts without Number Lines in an Indigenous Group of Papua New Guinea,” PLOS ONE 7, no. 4 (April 25, 2012), web; Inga Kiderra, “Backs to the Future: Aymara Language and Gesture Point to Mirror-Image View of Time,” University of California, UC San Diego News Center, June 12, 2006, web. For most Indo-European cultures, spatial metaphors for time are based on the body’s orientation or physical movement; the past is behind us and the future is ahead. However, a study of Indigenous Aymara people in Northern Chile reveals how they structure time in total reverse, placing the known past ahead of them and the unknown future behind, proving that numbers can operate independently of linear timelines, Western empiricism, and other metric spatial representations.

4. Núñez, Cooperrider, and Wassmann, “Number Concepts,” web.

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typographical in nature. “Our people,” confirms Mohawk activist Ellen Gabriel, “have always used time travel to figure out the problems of today.”5 By reinterpreting ancient Haudenosaunee stories through online virtual environments, one can argue that Skawennati warps space and time itself, making time travel to historical events not only feasible but thoroughly entertaining. She uses real-time computer

graphics software found in virtual reality platforms to produce animated movies called machinima. In the platform, Skawennati and her team created AbTeC Island, an Indigenously determined space used to produce historic and futuristic mise-en-scènes and customized characters that explore critical narratives in Indigenous history. In one of her latest machinima, Words Before All Else, Parts 1–3 (2017–18), Skawennati’s

above Skawennati (Mohawk), Celestial Tree, 2017, machinimagraph from She Falls for Ages, inkjet print, 46½ × 46½ in., edition 2 of 3. All images courtesy of the artist.

5. Alice Ming Wai Jim, “Technologies of Self-Fashioning: Virtual Ethnicities in New Media Art,” ISEA2015: Proceedings of the 21st International Symposium on Electronic Art, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver (2015), 4.

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own avatar, xox, delivers her version of the Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen (Thanksgiving Address) to audiences in three languages: Kanien'kéha, French, and English. The Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen is used ceremoniously to introduce Kanien'kehá:ka assemblies or to initiate the beginning of a new day. The one who calls the address acknowledges

their gratitude to this world and to the Creator; crucially, however, they also communicate their thanks spiritually. In response, the metaphysical connection between all things—nature, animals, and human beings—is continued and strengthened.

Words Before All Else, Part 1 (2017) begins with the words Ohen:ton

Karihwatehkwen. When considered in relation to Canada’s history of European colonialism, the work insinuates that the ideological value of Kanien'kéha, French, and English languages differed tremendously. Skawennati’s homogeneous articulation of the Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen in three languages renders each in a non-hierarchical framework.

As a consequence, Words Before All Else opposes the racial discrimination that nearly erased the Kanien'kéha language, which only 3,500 individuals speak fluently today. It also underscores how, as fluent speakers of Indigenous languages pass on, younger generations speak only English or French, further elucidating how the Government of Canada’s assimilation policies of yesterday manifest themselves today in ways seen and unseen.

Since Skawennati’s Kanien'kéha language is embedded beside the voices of Europe, the work represents a veritable collision of language and histories; for example, the violent punishment for children speaking their own language in Canada’s residential schools, the Dominion of Canada’s illegalization of Indigenous cultural identity, and the invention of the reserve system to segregate and thwart those expressions that remained. In turning the camera around to reverse the gaze, confronting the viewer head-on, and speaking her tribal language, Skawennati (and her avatar) command agency over self-representation and therefore redress the ideologies that structured racial stereotypes in Canada. “When Indigenous people move behind the camera, even while (perhaps especially while) remaining in front of it,” write Wendy Gay Pearson and Susan Knabe, “they are in a sense creating reverse shots—this is, films that reverse and revise from within their own perspective the dominant culture’s view of Indigenous people.”6 It is also important that the giving of thanks is bestowed within the matrix of cyberspace, which renders it atypical and almost unnatural when compared to

6. See: Wendy Gay Pearson and Susan Knabe, “Introduction: Globalizing Indigenous Film and Media,” in Reverse Shots: Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context, eds. Wendy Gay Pearson and Susan Knabe (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014), 3–40. Robert J. Flaherty’s popular documentary film Nanook of the North (1922) is the first feature documentary film and a continuation of the visual subjection of Indigenous peoples since the first volume of Edward Curtis’s photographic series The North American Indian (1907).

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long-established ancestral customs; on this basis, Skawennati reframes the way that the address is presented, received, and disseminated. The symbolic (and visual) transition from reciting the address through the voice of the earthly body to reciting the address through the

voice of the digital avatar also marks a profound discursive shift in how it is embodied. Ultimately, Words Before All Else renews the Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen by demonstrating that the giving of thanks can not only be used in cyberspace, but that it can also be useful.

above Skawennati (Mohawk), Dancing with Myself, 2015, diptych: machinimagraph and photograph, inkjet prints, 72 × 30 in. each, edition 1 of 2. opposite Skawennati (Mohawk), Birth of an Avatar (Homage to Mariko Mori), 2017, machinimagraph, inkjet print, 70 × 45 in., edition 1 of 3.

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MACHINIMAGRAPHY IN 1827, French inventor Nicéphore Niépce took the first photograph of the real world featuring a view from a window, most commonly referred to as View from the Window at Le Gras. Nearly 200 years later, in 2018, Skawennati creates pictures called machinimagraphs, which reconceptualize photography beyond the domain of the real world as we experience it and into the in-game environment. “If a ‘machinima’ is a movie made in a virtual environment,” she writes, “then a ‘machinimagraph’ must be an image made in a virtual environment.”7 S k awe n n at i’s p h ot o g r ap h i c practice does not fit comfortably into art history, per se, but functions instead as historiography, the act of writing (and rewriting) the past. If every photograph is a “certificate of presence,” as Roland Barthes deems it to be,8 then Skawennati’s machinimagraphs, much like her machinima, emphasize the virtual presence and embodiment of Haudenosaunee people in cyberspace.

Skawennati’s first machinimagraphs were conceived as production stills from movies and were captured during rehearsals (she was too busy directing avatar operators and ensuring that she found the right shots during filming). The machinimagraphs permit Skawennati and her team to take a narrowed focus at a particular character or scene that might otherwise pass too quickly. Later, she began to think of machinimagraphs as “final products,” as autonomous artworks in and of themselves, which eventually led to taking pictures of xox.

Machinimagraphs featuring xox, Skawennati’s avatar from the video game Second Life, also fracture the long-established relationship between photography and self-portraiture. Broadly defined, an avatar is a figure or symbol that represents individuals in virtual or digital environments, such as video games, social media forums, and virtual reality. As media theorist Edward Castronova suggests, avatars may also represent a “chosen self ” exposed to boundless freedoms and potential in such virtual environments; in his own words, “We inhabit it; we drive it; we receive all of our sensory information

about the world from its standpoint.”9 Yet, as Skawennati’s work clearly illustrates, they reach beyond the limitations of digital environments to penetrate physical space as aesthetic material.

Following this logic, avatars allow Skawennati to take “chosen self-portraits,” and under these circumstances we may begin to question whether one’s corporeal, human body is still required for a conventional self-portrait. Online virtual reality platforms provide Skawennati with tools to build environments and dramatically alter avatars, including their skin, eyes, shape, and pose, in addition to hair and clothing, a level of creative control that maintains her agency over self- (and ancestral-) representation.

><XOX>< IN RECENT YEARS, Skawennati has begun to take machinimagraphic portraits of xox. Clad in black leather boots, a black tutu, silver-spiked bangle, and a high-collar black top, xox wears a variety of hairstyles. The cyberpunk elements of her appearance are also

7. Skawennati, “She Falls for Ages,” Skawennati, web.

8. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1980), 87.

9. Edward Castronova, “Theory of the Avatar,” CESifo Working Paper no. 863 (February 2003), 5.

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balanced by the inclusion of a ribbon shirt, her one regalia item. Skawennati designed its calico pattern from a flower she has doodled since childhood. In Birth of an Avatar (Homage to Mariko Mori) (2017), xox updates Japanese artist Mariko Mori’s “virtual pop star” holographic self-portrait Birth of a Star (1995).10 Mori’s experiments with early versions of Adobe Photoshop question how pop stardom and the cult of celebrity influence Japanese culture. By the same token, Skawennati’s machinimagraphs aestheticize her cultural identity in novel ways, including representing Haudenosaunee people as active participants in cyberspace and the future.

“By virtualizing itself the body is multiplied,” writes media theorist Pierre Lévy;11 but then again, the multiplication of identities is something that Indigenous individuals and communities in Canada have experienced since the colonial period. Adrian Stimson (Blackfoot) reminds us that, when faced with the prospect of cultural destruction from assimilationist policies and practices, the formation of another self becomes a necessary strategy for survival.12 When forced “to act like someone/thing else,” he proposes, one is compelled to “be someone else.”13 The virtual environment offered by Second Life is far more than an expansive simulation in cyberspace, it is the home of Skawennati’s second self, of xox, and the sanctum where she can respond to history by rewriting it.

In the diptych Dancing with Myself (2015), a photograph of Skawennati and a machinimagraph of xox hang side-by-side. Not only is her avatar’s outfit reproduced for Skawennati’s body, but a fashion photographer, make-up artist, and hairstylist were also hired for a professional photo shoot. Moreover, a special pose was created for the avatar so she could imitate Skawennati’s unusual stance. Against a white background, the

artist and avatar stand with their hands on their hips and each turned slightly toward the other; at first, the tangible differences between the artist and xox are tricky to distinguish. “What I hope to show,” says Skawennati, “is not that I want to be like my avatar or my avatar wants to be like me but [that] we want to be like each other.”14 The digital representation of Skawennati’s avatar is not intended to produce a convincing simulacrum of the artist’s physical appearance, per se, but a fierce symbiosis, which explains how the self can splinter into different but integrated identities through digital technology.

10. “Star Doll (for Parkett no. 54),” Museum of Modern Art, web.

11. Treva Michelle Pullen, “Skawennati’s TimeTraveller™: Deconstructing the Colonial Matrix in Virtual Reality,” AlterNative 12, no.3 (2016), 246.

12. Matthew Ryan Smith, “This Other Me: Uses of the Alter Ego in Contemporary Art,” First American Art Magazine no. 16 (Fall 2017), 26.

13. Smith, “This Other Me,” 26.

14. Pullen, “Skawennati’s TimeTraveller™,” 246.

a b ov e , t o p Skawennati (Mohawk), Te l e p a t h (Otsitsakaion drawing), 2017, machinimagraph from She Falls for Ages, inkjet print, 16 × 28 in., edition 1 of 3. above, bottom Skawennati (Mohawk), Words Before All Else, Part 1, 2017, machinima HD video, 1:14, in Kanien'kéha, English, and French, edition 2 of 6. opposite Skawennati (Mohawk), Renewal, 2017, machinimagraph from She Falls for Ages, inkjet print, 33¾ × 60 in., edition 1 of 3.

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above Skawennati (Mohawk), She Falls for Ages, 2017, machinima HD video, 21:00, edition 2 of 6.

GENERATIONS OF PLAY IN THE SCULPTURE Generations of Play 3D (2017), three figurines—a Barbie doll, a handmade corn husk doll, and a three-dimensional print of Skawennati’s avatar—illustrate systems of play throughout time and their ensuing influence on self-representation.15 In 1998, Mori released Star Doll, a limited-edition 10¼-inch statuette modeled after her likeness. With it, she reacts against archetypal roles of Japanese women as “silent, beautiful, carefree, and mindless” by manufacturing a futuristic vision of Japanese women as uncompromising and dynamic.16 Not unlike Star Doll, Skawennati’s Generations of Play 3D bridges feminine imagery from the past to the present and into the future.17 The artwork also emerges as a deconstruction of relations between the digital image and the physical body—the disproportionate and impossible Barbie

doll questions idealized representations of women through toys since early childhood. With these works, Norman Bryson describes how Mori “uses her body as a lens that captures the light of the contemporary image-stream” to make “clear what the image-stream really wants of us.”18 In the manner of Star Doll, Skawennati’s Generations of Play evaluates how interpretations of women’s bodies remain unsettled by contemporary gazes, particularly those within the digital matrix. But it does not end there.

Also included in the exhibition is the companion piece to Generations of Play 3D, the two-dimensional triptych Generations of Play (2017), composed of a photograph of a corn husk doll, a photograph of a Barbie doll, and a machinimagraph of Skawennati’s avatar, all wearing xox’s costume. Each figurine appears without a face to follow

15. Claudine Hubert, didactic, Skawennati: Tomorrow People, Oboro, Montreal, February 4–March 18, 2017.

16. Kara Kelley Hallmark, Encyclopedia of Asian American Artists (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 130.

17. Jolene Rickard, Skawennati: Tomorrow People, Montreal: Oboro, 2017, exhibition brochure, 3.

18. Norman Bryson, “Cute Futures: Mariko Mori’s Techno-Enlightenment,” Parkett no. 54 (1998/1999), 78.

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the protocols of Haudenosaunee corn husk dolls, in which the corn sister used her husk to create a beautiful doll that traveled from village-to-village entertaining children. Before long, the doll became so conceited with her appearance that the Great Spirit punished her by removing her face. Corn husk dolls were purposely left faceless as a stiff warning against ostentation and vanity. In both Generations of Play 3D and Generations of Play, a positive response to self-imagery is instrumental in connecting historical Kanien'kehá:ka stories and material with innovative technology and handicraft.

CLOSING SKAWENNATI’S MOVIE She Falls for Ages (2017) retells the Haudenosaunee Creation Story through avatars in cyberspace. In the work, protagonist

February 12–August 21, 2021 30 W. Dale St. Colorado Springs, CO 80903 (719) 634-5581 fac.coloradocollege.edu

Otsitsakaion learns of the death of her cosmic home Sky World and agrees to populate the newly formed new world below. During a renewal ceremony, the sacred Celestial Tree is uprooted, leaving a jagged hole where the vast unknown of glowing stars and spiral galaxies can be seen. Otsitsakaion bids farewell to loved ones before stepping into the void and, quite literally, falling for ages. Eventually her fall is broken by a compassionate goose and she forms a new world from sacred seeds on the back of a green turtle. Turtle Island, the original name for North America, is the result of Otsitsakaion’s interstellar voyage.

She Falls for Ages presents the corporeal transition for Otsitsakaion from Sky World to Planet Earth. And like the printing press, painting, or documentary video before it, digital

technology is another instrument of resilience, continuity, and storytelling.19 In making use of it, Skawennati translates ancient Haudenosaunee narratives into the two-dimensional space of the pixel, so that time and space warps into the divine light of the computer screen.

The artist’s future of pleasure and play dissects the realm of today for a fantastical vision of tomorrow. Often cited as “science fiction”20 by scholars and curators to denote its hyper-futuristic feel, her work may be better explained as science friction, the projection of a self-determined presence in the future and the tensions lying therein. The analysis of her recent body of work included in the exhibition Skawennati:

From Skyworld to Cyberspace determines that it unites Indigenous concepts of space and time to (re)imagine the future as a sovereign territory of history, experience, and happenings. In the interconnected orbit of cyberspace protagonists like Otsitsakaion, self-portraiture, avatars like xox, and material objects continue their cosmic trip from Sky World to Cyberspace, where space-time bends just enough to break endless falls and fashion new worlds.

This essay was revised and reprinted with permission from the essay “Other Places, Outer Spaces” originally published in Skawennati: From Skyworld to Cyberspace, exhibition catalogue (London, ON: McIntosh Gallery, 2019).

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

19. Heather Igloliorte, Julie Nagam, and Carla Taunton, “Introduction,” PUBLIC 54, Indigenous Art: New Media and the Digital, ed. Heather Igloliorte, Julie Nagam, and Carla Taunton (Winter 2016), 11.

20. Jason Lewis, “A Brief (Media) History of the Indigenous Future,” PUBLIC 54, 36–50; Cornum, “The Creation Story is a Spaceship”; Gregory Volk, “Close to the Bone,” Voz-à-Voz, 2015, web; Jim, “Technologies of Self-Fashioning,” 5.

WINTER 2021 | 45

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PROFILE

Chickasaw Ceramic Artist and Sculptor

JOANNA UNDERWOOD BLACKBURN

By Laura Marshall Clark (Muscogee Creek)

W

E SAT SIDE BY SIDE at the computer that late afternoon in the darkened, lamplit office.

A prism of vibrant color glowed on her large computer screen. Neither of our temporary offices had windows, so we were unaware that the sun was setting. We were lost in our work, lost in ancient rememberings. As so often before, Joanna Underwood Blackburn, with her eye for beauty and perfection, maneuvered photography of Chickasaw mounds, ancient Southeastern artifacts, and Mississippian period clothing into vivid pages onscreen like seedlings emerging from warm earth. The result was magical as, one by one, they sprang to life. Revisions came easy that evening, encouraged by unseen ancestors watching nearby.

YAAKNI' CHOKMA' AAMINTI: FROM THE GOOD EARTH I BEGAN WORKING WITH JOANNA BLACKBURN more than 15 years ago in the Chickasaw Nation Division of Arts and Humanities in Ada, Oklahoma. I first came to know her through the projects we shared and was amazed by the beauty of her art, especially her pottery fashioned from rich, red, Oklahoma clay. Although we’ve worked on many projects since, I often remember that Joanna’s creative vision and artworks are an outward expression of the inward artist, an embodiment of both the Chickasaw culture she carries and an inward beauty in the way she views the world. This is conveyed in the Chickasaw phrase, yaakni’ chokma’ aaminti, which holds dual meaning: “It comes from the good earth,” referring to the clay used by a potter, and similarly, in reference to the potter, meaning “she comes from the good earth.”1 Joanna is an interdisciplinary artist. Her primary media are pottery, sculpture, and graphic design, and her secondary work is in painting and photography. While completing her bachelor of fine arts in visual communications at the University of Oklahoma, she discovered the world of ceramic sculpture.

She was intrigued by the art form and began researching pottery of her Chickasaw ancestors. She spent time with staff of the Chickasaw Nation Cultural Resources Department to find out all she could about ancestral pottery.

“I thought I could find somebody who was already making pottery,” Joanna remarked, “and I would just learn from them. I thought they would show me the designs and what they meant, the forms and the shapes; but what I found out was, there wasn’t anyone making [Chickasaw] pottery.” The cultural resources staff helped her research and provided photography of pottery with handles and designs. She later examined broken pottery sherds from the tribal homelands of Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee.2 She found that pottery of the Woodland period, ca. 1000 BCE to ca. 1000 CE, that included Southeastern tribes such as the Chickasaws, was somewhat plain and utilitarian, with simple forms, a rough exterior, and design work pressed onto wet clay by cords, sticks, fabric, and paddles with carved motifs.3 But the Mississippian period that followed, ca. 900 to ca. 1400 CE,

1. Lokosh (Joshua D. Hinson), PhD (Chickasaw), email message to author, November 10, 2020. Dr. Hinson is director of the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program and provided several Chickasaw translations for this article.

2. Joanna Underwood Blackburn, “Research: Chickasaw Pottery, Ancient Designs,” Chickasaw TV, November 5, 2013, video, 2:46, web.

3. Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 63.

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JOANNA UNDERWOOD BLACKBURN

above Untitled, fish effigy pot, at left, and two incised pots, 2016, Oklahoma red clay, smoke fired with cedar, with water designs, various sizes. Photo: Laura Tusek Photography. opposite Joanna Underwood Blackburn. All images, unless otherwise noted, courtesy of the artist.

held the greatest intrigue for the artist. It revealed a more complex, Southeast tribal pottery tempered with shell, made into a variety of forms with a smooth exterior and iconography of the period painted or incised onto the vessels. Historian Charles Hudson aptly described Mississippian Period pottery as “exquisite.”4 In her last year of school, Joanna began to recreate Chickasaw pottery from photographs of ancient artifacts and photocopied research from books.

Deeper discoveries about Chickasaw mound-building culture and ancient designs inspired her work as she learned more about how pottery fulfilled utilitarian and tribal ceremonial needs.

Clay pots carried water and stored oil, seeds, and nuts, and were vessels to cook food over an open fire. They were also an important part of spiritual and other ceremonies. Pottery was vital to tribal life, and Joanna’s work began to reflect imagery of Chickasaw lifeways, gourds

and squash, water designs, and animal effigies. Decorative elements on her pots soon included circles, crosses, steps, spirals, scrolls, flora, and clan symbols such as turtles, birds, bears, and fish. A stylized design drew inspiration from the Chickasaw custom of gathering muchloved possum grapes in the fall to make grape dumplings.5 After graduation in 1994, Joanna excelled as a prolific ceramicist, bringing ancient pottery into a contemporary context. Her artistic practice continues in carefully building vessels by hand-coiling her clay. It demands precision, and she is thoughtful and takes her time. She uses both commercial clay and clay that she digs from Oklahoma soil, specially cleaned and prepared for building pots.

After she adds her designs to a new pot, she burnishes its surface to a soft shine.

The pottery is then fired and smoked with cedar branches or dried pine needles, giving it a blackened, smoky color to

resemble ancient pottery utilized over an open fire. Her red Oklahoma clay pottery and white cedar-smoked porcelain pottery have won numerous awards and are collected in museums and private collections across the United States, including the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, and the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, among other museums.

Today Joanna is credited with singlehandedly revitalizing the art of Chickasaw pottery making, which she views as a deep reflection of tribal culture and family values. She credits her upbringing in a strong Chickasaw family with her drive to represent these through her art: I reflect back on my life, the things my parents, grandparents, and close relatives taught us about family and life; these were Chickasaw ways. It

4. Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 86–90.

5. Joanna Underwood Blackburn, “Pottery Descriptions” (unpublished manuscript, November 5, 2020), Microsoft Word file.

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PROFILE

Yaakni’ chokma’ aaminti, these are from the good earth.

OKA' CHOKMASI: BEAUTIFUL WATER

above Water Jar, 2017, bronze sculpture, 46 × 36 × 34 in.

Artwork currently on view in Visual Voices: Contemporary Chickasaw Art through January 18, 2021, at the Briscoe Western Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas. opp osite Po t te r y of t h e S o u t h e a st , b ro n ze wa te r fountain. Public Collection of the Oka’ Chokmasi (Beautiful Wa t e r ) p a r k i n S u l p h u r, Oklahoma. Photo: Joanna Underwood Blackburn.

was not necessarily how others grew up. As I visit with others, I see we were raised differently, with a sense of tribal views such as how we take care of one another, honoring our elders, honoring our families, and the environment. I have a deep gratitude for my childhood experiences, for the teachings of growing and harvesting our own food that my mother and grandmother taught us; for having a voice and a sense of importance instilled from my father, uncles, and grandfathers; for our family get-togethers and reunions that are all very special.6 Joanna’s Chickasaw identity was developed by this form of caring, this type of honoring, and a gratitude for cultural knowledge, all visible in each work of clay.

IN 2010 JOANNA DRAFTED A PROPOSAL and sketches for the Chickasaw Nation envisioning largescale, bronze water features in a pocket park in historic downtown Sulphur, Oklahoma. She began with designs positioned together as an elevated central fountain of a gourd-shaped pot with a bottle neck adorned with large woodpecker-sculptured handles; a wide-mouthed, round Chickasaw bowl positioned at an angle; and a large fish effigy pot. These comprised the central fountain, which was complemented in a lower pool by a four-foot bronze Water Jar, a female effigy pot with a turtle design similar to Mississippian stirrup bottles (dating from ca. 1000 to 1600 CE),7 symbols of the importance of women as water bearers in Chickasaw history.8 A long rock wall of the pocket park was also designed to hold four bronze medallions with ancient Southeast motifs, each four feet in diameter. The tribe approved her proposal and commissioned the work in 2011. She then began the arduous process of making her designs a reality, of moving from ceramics to bronze for the park that would be named Oka' Chokmasi, which means “beautiful water.”

With the adoption of her designs for Oka' Chokmasi came an additional idea from tribal leadership: a commission for even larger-scale bronzes, this time seven-foot medallions for a permanent piece on the grounds of the Chickasaw Cultural Center, also in Sulphur. The gorget designs each carry a story all their own, bearing symbols from Mississippian cultures found on carved shells worn around the neck and on pottery. The designs refer to sun circles that she interprets to represent the warmth, light, and life given by the Creator. One medallion holds a cross at its center, interpreted as

6. Joanna Underwood Blackburn in discussion with the author, November 10, 2020.

7. Manuela Well-Off-Man, “Visual Voices: Contemporary Chickasaw Art,” in Visual Voices: Contemporary Chickasaw Art, ed., Laura Marshall Clark (Edmond: Visual Voices, 2018), 19.

8. “October 2014: Joanna Underwood Blackburn,” Chickasaw Nation News (CNTV), October 2014, video, 3:41, web.

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JOANNA UNDERWOOD BLACKBURN

a symbol of the cardinal directions, the four seasons, and the logs of Chickasaw sacred fires; another bears the image of a spider from oral history who created a clay bowl for her back to carry fire to mankind. My personal favorite is the woodpecker motif from ancient shell carvings, which we interpret to represent the conquering spirit, determination, and strength of warriors.

The beautiful imagery and scale of Joanna’s bronze sculptures are mesmerizing additions today in the Oka' Chokmasi park and at the cultural center, erected serenely within the Oka' Aabiniili' (a place for sitting on the water) Water Pavilion. From sketches to proposal to clay models, or maquettes, to foundry and finally to installation, Joanna completed the fountain bronzes, wall medallions, and seven-foot bronzes for Oka' Aabiniili' within three years. The bronze sculptures stand today as testaments to the importance of visual artists expressing Indigenous history and culture to future generations. Joanna reflects as a sculptor about the connections her artworks create: Sharing our cultural values and visual stories is an aspect of our identity that helps us understand life and the world around us. It’s how our parents and grandparents raised us and taught us how to live and survive. Our Southeastern ancestors preserved and shared their lives with us in their … pottery, shell work, textiles, and baskets. They were showing us their lifeways in the houses they built for the summer and winter, and how they stored their food. They showed us how they fought, prayed, and how each clan family had important responsibilities. All of this is how we survived, and how we got where we are today.9 Joanna’s artworks reach back to and push forward the Chickasaw story.

US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (Muscogee/ Cherokee) affirms this Indigenous paradigm. “Everyone’s behavior, or story, affects everyone else,” says Harjo. “I think of each generation in a spiral standing together for healing, and maybe that’s what it comes to. What each of us does

makes a wave forward and backward. We each need to be able to tell our stories and have them honored.”10

ASHOPPALA' SHAALI': CARRIES THE LIGHT WHAT BEGAN AS A LOVE FOR ART in kindergarten has grown into an artist’s courageous pursuit of creativity and endeavor. Joanna Blackburn’s precision in drawing and design is not only matched by patience in skilled pottery and sculpture production but it is also motivated by a strong desire to advance the arts and artists of her tribal community. In 2013 Joanna and four otherChickasaw artists came together to dream about expanding the reach and impact of Chickasaw art. That dream birthed a groundbreaking initiative to develop an all-Chickasaw touring exhibition of contemporary art now known as

Visual Voices: Contemporary Chickasaw Art. Because of my previous work with Joanna and Chickasaw Nation arts, I was excited to be invited into the project as a codeveloper and exhibition program manager. Joanna served as chair of the five-member artist board, the innovative, creative development team that included Kristen Dorsey (Chickasaw), Daniel Worcester (Chickasaw), Brent Greenwood (Chickasaw/Ponca), and Margaret Roach Wheeler (Chickasaw/Choctaw). Joanna was also responsible for the graphic design work of all advertising and the 128-page exhibition catalogue.

The nationally touring exhibition is closing at its fifth museum, the Briscoe Western Art Museum in San Antonio on January 18, 2021. We look back at the last seven years with deep gratitude for the faith and generous support placed in the project by the Chickasaw Nation and Governor Bill Anoatubby; for the curatorial voices and professional consultation

9. Joanna Underwood Blackburn, “Artist Statement” (unpublished manuscript, June 10, 2016), Microsoft Word file.

10. Élan Young, “Joy Harjo’s New Poetry Collection Brings Native Issues to the Forefront,” Smithsonian Magazine, August 13, 2019, web.

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PROFILE

Joanna created three sculptures for the Visual Voices exhibition. The first two consist of another large-scale, bronze Water Jar and a white porcelain sculpture, Wild Onion Bloom, inspired by childhood memories. Wild onions are a beloved food source for many tribes in Oklahoma, and wild onion dinners are a community affair at stomp grounds, Native American churches, and in homes. The artist fondly remembers her mother, father, grandmother, and other family members digging for wild onions in early spring while the children played and searched for gourds. Visual Voices co-curator Manuela Well-Off-Man, chief curator at IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, describes the porcelain artwork: …the wild onion [is] in blooming stage: beautiful white flowers accentuated by white buckskin ribbons and seed pods coexist in her composition.

The seeds are much larger than life and decorated with abstract patterns, inspired by ancient Southeastern designs. The pure white color and fragility of the porcelain, the work’s elaborate decorations, and the use of precious materials such as freshwater pearls emphasize the significance and beauty of the wild onion in the artist’s personal life, as in Chickasaw and other Southeastern tribal cultures.11

above Prayers Rising, 2018, metal and clay sculpture installation, 11 ft.

Artwork on view in Visual Voices: Contemporary Chickasaw Art at the Briscoe Western Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas. Photo: Laura Marshall Clark. Image courtesy of the author. opposite Joanna Underwood Blackburn (Chickasaw) wraps up in a cotton blanket of her own design, Yaakni’ Chokma (Good Earth), 63 × 53 in., featured in the Mahota Textiles Artist Collection. Photo: Jesse Allbritten.

that guided each step of the venture; for wonderful people we’ve met along the way in the museums that hosted us; and for the 15 Chickasaw artists and collectors who loaned 57 remarkable artworks for the tour. In all of this, Joanna carried the torch and led the way. In the Chickasaw language, she could be described as ashoppala' shaali', which means “she carries the light.”

11. Well-Off-Man, “Visual Voices,” 18.

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Also in the exhibition, the artist’s favorite sculptural project to date is Prayers Rising, an eleven-foot sculptural installation formed from steel and clay. It took a year to complete and apprehends the eye from floor to ceiling and back again. Created from Oklahoma red clay that the artist dug, cleaned, and prepared herself, the base has four ceramic quadrants resting in a circle of steel, imbued with ancestral designs representing the four directions and four seasons. Like the fires around which centuries of Chickasaw ancestors danced, the ceramic “sacred fire” lights our imagination with three bowl-like structures forming flames.

Chickasaw/Choctaw scholar and senior curator at First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City heather ahtone notes the significance of Prayers Rising in the exhibition: “Placing our sacred fire within

JOANNA UNDERWOOD BLACKBURN

the gallery, [Joanna] asserts the importance of our cultural and spiritual practices as foundational for the tribe to move forward, physically embodied through this installation as the exhibition travels across the country.”12 Above the fire of red clay rise four spiraling steel coils bearing 113 elongated clay tiles. Hung in staggered heights, the spirals represent smoke circling upward from the fire, carrying prayers to Aba'Binni'li' (the One who is sitting or dwelling above). Incised into each tile is a prayer provided by a member of one of Oklahoma’s 39 tribes.13 During its creation, Joanna reached out to members of each of these tribes with an invitation to write a prayer for the clay tiles. “It was great to get Oklahoma tribal communities involved,” she said about the process. “Some participants were able to come to my studio themselves and carve their prayer directly onto the clay tiles. Others who couldn’t make it in person sent the words they wanted written through email and texts.”14 Many prayers on the tiles are in tribal languages. As a contributor of a prayer for the healing of my people in the Mvskoke language, I experienced both the sacredness of having a prayer included in the sculpture and also a shared connectivity to the prayers of others from multiple tribes. Joanna prays over every pot and clay work fired in her cedar, asking blessings on those who will own her pottery and sculptures.15 The artist’s thoughts for the future include a new sculpture series in 2021, and recent ventures involve weaving and textiles.

Mahota Studios in the ARTesian Gallery and Studios in Sulphur is a consortium of local weavers in a neighboring gallery space close to Blackburn Studios. The weavers’ studio was created and led by textile expert Margaret Roach Wheeler. Two years ago, Joanna asked if she could learn along with the others to weave fabrics. Joanna’s hunger to learn and laser-sharp attention to detail included videotaping Margaret’s instructions while they worked together on the loom. Because of her well-developed expertise in color and design, Joanna rapidly progressed in her ability to produce beautiful, woven textiles and now weaves on a loom at home.

As colleagues and friends, Margaret and Joanna have collaborated on numerous projects since 2006. Margaret says of Joanna, “I think of her as the Leonardo da Vinci of Sulphur.

I don't think I have ever had a more astute, intelligent weaver learn from me in such a short time.”16 Joanna joined the design team of Mahota Textiles, also launched by Margaret, which is the first textile company owned by a Native American tribe. Joanna designed a blanket for the company’s Mahota Artist Collection based on her Oka’ Chokmasi water pots, showcasing the beauty of pottery and honoring oka (water) as the sustainer of life. I had the privilege of collaborating with her and others on the title of the blanket design, and we settled on the semiotics of the blanket.

CLAY, WATER, EARTH: YAAKNI’ CHOKMA' (GOOD EARTH) JOANNA AND I HAVE HAD SIMILAR MOMENTS again as in earlier days, this time working long distance from our homes. Whether conferring on Visual Voices or planning for future projects, we still become lost in our work, don’t notice the sun setting in our dimly lit offices, talk for hours about art, about culture … and get lost in ancient rememberings. The reward for this type of collaboration is joy, and I am grateful for the experience. From the good earth to beautiful waters to sacred fires, Joanna Underwood Blackburn’s life and art encourage the continuance of Chickasaw culture, innovation, and leadership.

JBLACKBURNSTUDIOS.COM

Laura Marshall Clark (Muscogee Creek) is an interdisciplinary scholar, writer, independent curator, and a 2020-21 Fulbright US Scholar to Ireland. She earned her master’s degree in Native American studies from the University of Oklahoma.

12. heather ahtone, “In the Summer We Dance: Aesthetic Renewal and Gratitude,” in Visual Voices: Contemporary Chickasaw Art, ed. Laura Marshall Clark (Edmond: Visual Voices, 2018), 13.

13. Oklahoma has 38 federally recognized tribes, but many institutions include the Yuchi, the majority of whom are enrolled in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. —Ed. 14. Joanna Underwood Blackburn in discussion with the author, November 10, 2020.

15. CNTV, “October 2014.”

16. Margaret Roach Wheeler, email message to author, November 11, 2020.

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PROFILE

Kiowa Beadwork Artist

TERI GREEVES

By Staci Golar

T

HE FIRST CHAPTER of Teri Greeves’s life begins in Wyoming, where she was born and raised. She grew up on the Shoshone side of Fort Washakie on the Wind River Reservation. Her mother was Kiowa and Comanche and her father was white. As a child, she often found herself in situations where she was the only Native, and she heard white people say things about Native people that she will never forget. Raised in the Kiowa way, she remembers standing out at local powwows because of her tribal clothing and knowing she had a different ancestral home base than many of her classmates. As a result, she always felt like a bit of an outsider and acknowledges this has undoubtedly impacted the way she approaches her work.

The art and aesthetics of the Wind River area would imprint her forever, though, and remain foundational to beads becoming her chosen medium. Her mother, the late Jeri Ah-behill, was well known for her love of Native fashion and art, especially works by Native women, and she owned and operated the Fort Washakie Trading Company that bought and sold art and supplies. The incredible pictorial beadwork that Shoshones are known for were just some of the items to pass through the trading post. As a child in the middle of it all, Teri benefited from both her mother’s expert eye and knowledge and from the talented artists who would come in to buy and sell.

“I have been surrounded by outstanding beadwork my entire life,” Teri says. “Beads have always been an extremely sensory thing for me as well. I remember as a little girl the cool feeling of the glass, the sparkle when the light hit it. My mom had these special trade beads secreted away in one of her top shelves at the shop. My sister and I could see those beads from the ground, and they looked like candy. They were just so cool.”1 Teri expressed an interest in learning to bead at eight years old and started to absorb the basics from her adopted Shoshone aunt, Zedora Enos. “I got pleasure from it the moment I started doing it,” Teri says. Notable, since many who try beadwork don’t pick it up again due to frustration with its precision. Zedora used a baby moccasin to introduce several concepts about beading that Teri uses to this day. “I learned the hump (or lane) stitch first, and then how to reduce and expand, how to go around a curve. I was excited and wanted to bead in the top, but Auntie said, ‘No, you can’t fill it up, we leave this space open on purpose,’ as the design represents the hoof of a deer. In that moment I learned about the negative space of a design as well. I think for me as an artist, in terms of artistic growth, that was my first lesson. Understanding that what is not there is as important as what is there.”

Differentiating spaces and making acute observations, Teri’s story was already starting to reveal some of its themes. “I came home in a fully beaded Kiowa cradleboard,” she says, “I think doing beadwork was inevitable.” And, while she always knew that beadwork would be a part of her life, being a full-time artist was not. Instead Teri had long planned on being a lawyer who practiced American Indian law. Hearing this will make perfect sense to anyone who knows Teri or who has heard her speak. She is whip smart, passionate about Native and social justice issues, and like her mother, will educate the hell out of anyone who takes the time to respectfully listen. But, as they say, life had other plans.

NEW MEXICO, NEW DIRECTIONS AFTER HIGH SCHOOL Teri moved to Santa Fe, where her mother had also landed following a divorce from Teri’s father.

“I went to St. John’s College in Santa Fe for a year before I knew that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my time in college reading a solely European curriculum.” So she packed the car and headed to California, eventually graduating from University of California, Santa Cruz, with a bachelor’s degree in American studies that focused on Native American studies. She moved

1. All quotes, unless otherwise noted, from an interview with the author, October 23, 2020.

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TERI GREEVES

above Spider Woman/Emerging Woman: Beaded Heeled Shoes, 2015, 12° Czech beads, 13° Czech cut beads, stamped sterling silver, seed pearls, faceted jade, faceted garnets, rose quartz, Swarovski crystals, heeled shoes, collection of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas. Photo: Stephen Lang. opposite Teri Greeves. All images courtesy of the artist, unless otherwise stated.

back to New Mexico and had already started the process of prepping to take the LSAT, a qualifying test for law schools, thinking she would attend the University of New Mexico, when her career trajectory was about to change.

She started to sell her beadwork in a more serious way in Santa Fe and had smashing success. First show, sold out.

Second show, sold out. Third show, sold out. At her fourth show, the world-renowned Santa Fe Indian Market, she won Best of Show. The message seemed loud and clear. “All of that desire to become a lawyer, foundationally, and to this day, all of that was about fighting for justice,” Teri shares. “I wanted to fight, and since you can no longer take up arms against the government for your people, you fight through the law. So I thought, That’s what I’ll do, dammit. I’ll arm myself with the law. But it ended up that I armed myself with beads instead, and now I fight that way.”

Initially, Teri created and embellished mostly utilitarian objects like

bags, purses, and moccasins, experimenting with both abstract designs that Kiowa women create and more pictorial imagery. But a few things coalesced to change her direction and hone her focus within the medium. One, she realized that she could tell more stories through her work using more pictorial imagery, and two, work that was meant to be used or worn but then ended up sitting forever on a shelf pained her.

“I was visiting a client who had purchased a pair of Kiowa-style moccasins from me, and—don’t get me wrong, I was so honored that this collector had wanted to buy them,” Teri explains. “But I went to touch them, and they were stiff as a board. I knew they would never be danced. I was immediately stricken with sadness that I had made these, but they would never ever be worn. They would always be an object. I was devastated. I vowed that I would never make another one of our customary things for sale.”

She clarifies that this is her personal feeling, and understands that many

artists survive by selling these objects. For Teri, however, the experience created a moment of clarity: she knew the direction she wanted her future work to go in. “This new ‘rule’ I made for myself opened the doors a little bit as I was able to—forced to—experiment.”

NARROWING IN ON NARRATIVES YOU SEE THIS EXPERIMENTATION in the blend of Kiowa oral histories, biting social commentary, witty humor, and more that make their way into the layered narratives within Greeves’s work.

She says ideas come to her and will feel like a rock in her shoe. She can feel them rolling around until they finally come out in the form of a finished piece. As with most artists, those exact ideas and subject matter have evolved throughout the years, but a consistent theme is that of sharing Native stories with a Native lens.

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At first many of those stories questioned the what, when, and how of historical events and she interpreted and documented them in pictorial beadwork. After becoming a mother, Greeves realized she wanted to tell the stories of Kiowa people to her children and started sharing those with the rest of the world through her artwork as well. Lately Teri has focused on honoring and exploring all things Native women.

Experimentation can be seen in the actual objects that Teri beads, whether they are things that already exist in the world, or pieces she creates and assembles herself to better express her thoughts.

One of these, Indian Parade Umbrella helped change Teri’s career path as it was awarded Best of Show at the 1999 Santa Fe Indian Market. Constructed with an antique umbrella frame using bright, braintanned deer hide rather than cloth, each of its eight panels is illustrated with

a colorful, beaded scene reminiscent of the parades Greeves watched as a child at American Indian fairs.

In this work Teri used an accessory commonly used at parades to shield one from the sun as a way to discuss how Native people take tools of colonialism and turn them on their head to express Indigenous pride. “The whole idea of Indians parading seemed very natural to me as a young person.” Teri says in a statement about the piece. “It wasn’t until later, after a college education, did I realize that originally Indians had historically been put on parade2 … but this wasn’t what I saw growing up. The parades I grew up with were run by Indians for Indians. Generally, the only white face was that of the lone politician who had entered our parade to win our votes.”

Indeed, a non-Native politician makes an appearance in one of the panels complete with a sparkling 24-karat, beaded, gold

convertible, toothy grin, ten-gallon hat, Indian-head nickel hubcaps, and a banner that says Vote Narcis Conman Senator.

Another accessory, Converse All Star tennis shoes, have become a bit of a trademark for the artist. While Teri certainly wasn’t the first Native person to bead tennis shoes (in fact, as a teen she was inspired by a pair that a Lakota woman had brought to sell at her mom’s trading post), hers might be the first to contain such rich narratives. In an earlier artist statement, Greeves said, “I make beaded tennis shoes because through the ages Kiowa people have almost always adorned their footwear. Making beaded tennis shoes is simply a continuance of something started long before me: the idea that personal adornment can be an expression of self, of society, of tribe, and of humanity.”3 The whimsical, casual nature of Converse shoes creates a kind of shared

2. Teri Greeves, “Past Work: Indian Parade Umbrella,” Teri Greeves Beadwork, accessed October 29, 2020, web.

3. “Image information—Teri Greeves, Beaded Tennis Shoes,” Local Learning Network, accessed November 9, 2020, web.

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humanity as well. An unsuspecting viewer sees them and is immediately drawn in, wanting to know more. As Teri says: My intention is once the viewer is comfortable, to tell a more complex story of contemporary Indian life with the beaded illustrations. Most of my tennis shoe stories deal with our living history, culture, society and daily life through imagery from a particular dance or custom. In some way then the viewer becomes educated, even if only subconsciously, to the fact that we, as Native people, exist in the here and now and not as caricatures and stereotypes but as real and multifaceted human beings. The story then of all of the shoes I have made is that of survival from genocide. We, as Kiowas, have lived through a violent, dangerous, awesome, and proud history and I believe in some way these shoes can stand as testament to our survival not just as people but also of a material culture that expresses our lives and values as Kiowas in the 21st century. The beaded tennis shoes I make are my hopeful and joyful expression of the continuance of the Kiowa people.4 Teri has approached some of her other work in a more two-dimensional fashion, constructing flat panels of buckskin that she then beads and edges.

Figures stand out against the light-colored hide, drawing viewers in with their dazzling color and sparkles. In one series she reimagined and indigenized recognizable, European paintings. Her Elk Tooth d’Estrées is based on a painting in the Louvre that showcases Gabrielle d'Estrées, one of King Henry IV’s favorites, and one of her sisters in a sort of awkward presentation in a bath. In Teri’s version, one of the subjects holds an elk tooth instead of the King’s coronation ring, and the servant sewing in the background of the original is now a Native woman outside of a tipi, butchering a buffalo.

In 2011 Teri’s beadwork reached a new level when she stitched larger pony, Czech glass, metal, shell, wood, and crystal beads onto six- and seven-foot

stretched silk-and-vinyl supports. Each of the pieces in this series explored the historical, spiritual, and political stories of American Indian women. In She Loved Her People, for example, Teri honors the story of the 16-year-old Cheyenne girl who witnessed George Armstrong Custer stab the pregnant belly of a Cheyenne woman who was killed during a raid at their camp on the Washita River. Later, this same teen sneaked into the war party that was headed to the battle of Little Big Horn, found Custer’s dead body, removed his sword and used it to slit him open, from navel to neck. In Teri’s piece, this woman floats on a glimmering raw silk panel, and through the expert placement of glass and mother-of-pearl beads, is shown brandishing a long sword while wearing an elk tooth dress and a German silver drop, or trailer. To this day, the drops that Southern Plains Indian women wear at their waist honor this Cheyenne girl’s act of bravery and resistance.

above Indian Parade Umbrella, 1999, braintanned deer hide, 12° and 13° cut beads, glass seed beads, abalone shell, Bisbee turquoise, cloth, brass studs, nickel studs, antique umbrella frame, private collection. Photo: Dan Barsotti. opposite Sunboyz: The Original Kiowa Superheroes, 2008, 13° Czech cut beads, 12° Czech beads, Converse shoes, 9½ × 3½ in. each shoe, collection of the State of New Mexico. Photo: Dan Barsotti.

4. Teri Greeves, “RezPride/RezGirls Beaded shoes,” Home & Away Gallery, web.

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BEYOND BEADWORK TERI’S TALENTS DON’T STOP at masterfully bringing stories together through beads. She’s taught classes, written articles for exhibition catalogues and other publications, lectured around the country, and in 2014 began a journey to co-curate the extraordinary exhibition, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia). The first major museum survey to explore the artistic achievements of Native women across the continent and through history into the present, the show opened in June 2019. It made waves in the museum world for its inclusive curatorial approach and Native, female-first subject matter, all thanks in large part to Teri’s input and oversight.

When Jill Ahlberg Yohe, the associate curator of Native American art at Mia and Teri’s co-curator for the exhibition, had approached Teri about getting involved, Teri said yes but asked that a diverse, all-women advisory board be put together. These 21 women, Native and non-Native, guided the exhibition from start to finish. They generously shared knowledge, from what type of work should be included, to how the exhibition should be structured, and more.

As Teri said in the New York Times feature on the exhibition, “In the Native community, this is not unusual—to have a group of women speaking together about powerful, important things.”5 The advisory board was also invited to write for the exhibition catalogue and speak on several panel discussions. In the end, more than 115 artworks from the United States and Canada were included, spanning more than 1,000 years.

A large chunk of Teri’s life the last few years has been spent promoting Hearts of Our People, including participating in several online panels during the coronavirus pandemic. Has being a part of an exhibition in this way changed her outlook on the art world?

“It confirmed things for me,” she says. “I am clear that the voice of Native artists will not be heard unless the boards change at these institutions, and I hope that as time goes on, there is a reckoning with the devastation that inequality from patriarchy and racism has caused. We are starting to see how this is hurting all of us in this country. Misinformation gets written and 5. Tess Thackara, “The Hand of Native American Women, Visible at Last,” New York Times, May 31, 2019, web.

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codified as truth. Who is given a voice and handed the mike is so important. It is absolutely the reason why 41 contributors are in the exhibition catalogue.”

Teri is hopeful the reckoning has started with art museums, however, especially after this year. “There is a structure that hasn’t been challenged in how museums talk about things like ‘craft’ or ‘women’s art’ not being ‘fine art.’ That’s what they did to American Indian art as well. It’s always ‘fine craft’ or ‘antiquities.’ I want to help correct that and it’s why I stuck my neck out to do Hearts of Our People. There was this massive, gaping hole overlooking Native women as major players even though they have had an enormous influence on American art. The influence of Native art is everywhere. Abstraction did not begin with Georgia O’Keeffe. Hilma af Klint did not discover abstraction. Abstraction in North America began with Native artists.”

Given the success of the exhibition in changing some of these unchallenged museum norms, one might assume that Teri would want to continue with curatorial projects, but instead she says, “I made it very clear that I was not becoming a curator. This is a one-time deal.”

ART FOR THE PEOPLE WHAT’S NEXT THEN, for this talented Kiowa artist, teacher, mother, and wife who has been featured on television, won respected fellowships and residencies, and is in more than 25 collections around the world?

“Right now, the only desire I have is to make things for my family,” Teri says, hoping to hunker down this winter and make items for relatives like her husband, the talented Grand Traverse Odawa artist Dennis Esquivel; her sister, the acclaimed Kiowa jeweler Keri Ataumbi; her sons Animkeewa White Eagle and Ahbedoh White Eagle, and various aunts, uncles,

and more. Otter turbans need to be made, dresses for Black Leggings Ceremonial need to be jazzed up … in other words, significant, soul-filled things that she’s not had time to do for years.

“With everything going on in the world at this moment in time, family is far more important than beading for anything else,” Teri states. “I’m really interested in making prayerful work for my own people and our dances. I do want to create again, and I want it to be beautiful and prayerful because the world needs that right now.”

above Sovereign Citizen, 2008, 13° cut beads, 10° seed beads, braintanned deer hide, cotton cloth, 14 × 11 in., collection of Craft in America, Los Angeles, California. opposite She Loved Her People, 2011, raw silk, canvas, wood, glass beads, wood beads, mother of pearl, 80 × 26 in., collection of the Portland Art Museum, Oregon. Photo: Dan Barsotti.

TERIGREEVESBEADWORK.COM Staci Golar is a nonprofit arts and communications consultant and arts and culture writer whose work has appeared in publications across the United States.

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Dena'ina Interdisciplinary Artist

JOEL ISAAK

By Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Alutiiq)

O

RGANIC MATERIALS are a hallmark of Joel Isaak’s multifaceted arts practice. He often works with salmon skins, moose hides, and other natural materials and is also known for his bronze installations, ceramics, performance work, and fashion. Isaak, whose Dena'ina name is Łiq'a yes ve'izhi (Salmon Skin), was raised in Alaska’s southern Kenai Peninsula in Soldotna and Kenai and is a member of the Kenaitze Indian Tribe. His parents are Sharon and David Isaak, and his maternal grandmother, Feodoria Kallander, was originally from the village of Ch'aghałnikt (Point Possession).

I have been drawn to Isaak’s work since I first encountered his fish-skin creations nearly a decade ago. In his hands, fish skin may be transformed into functional garments such as a pair of boots, a vest, or a dress, but he also uses the material to create masks, sculptures, and drums that convey the importance of salmon culture. I have also admired the way Isaak’s work opens up space for discussions around decolonization, language revitalization, and the importance of subsistence practices in Alaska.

His work often has a multisensory impact through the use of audio and video projections, as well as kinetic aspects that invite viewers to engage in a physical way.

Isaak’s practice is informed by everyday cultural activities such as fishing and hunting, research of historical arts in museum collections, work with Elders, and scientific findings. Isaak has studied and experimented with the chemical process of skin tanning, for example, and incorporates scientific data into his work. He uses the knowledge that he gains to teach others through workshops and artwork that provide a window into Isaak’s experiences of the world as a Dena'ina man who is deeply connected to place.

ways people use fish skin in Alaska. We are all salmon people.

When I first started studying fish skin, I read 17 hide-tanning books and then I started experimenting. I sewed a pair of boots and made a mask. When I showed what I was doing to Helen Dick (Dena'ina Elder), she told me I was overscraping the skins. If the skins still smell like fish after processing, that’s okay.

Helen doesn’t even use soap. Historically we made fish skin boots to wear, not to save for hundreds of years. A pair of boots might be worn just one season before a new pair is made.

NJS: Helen sounds like she has been an important mentor for you. Can you tell me a little more about her?

Isaak completed his bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF), in 2012, a master of fine arts degree in sculpture from Alfred University in western New York in 2016, and he is currently pursuing his doctoral degree in the Indigenous studies program at UAF. Along with his work as an artist, Isaak is a tribal liaison for the State of Alaska Department of Education and Early Development and a Dena'ina language teacher.

NJS: I know you work with a lot of natural materials. What is your favorite material to work with?

JI: I am always working with fish skin. It is a material tradition that is at least 1500 years old and still going strong. Growing up near the Kenai River, fish have always been part of my daily life. I have had a chance to travel around Alaska learning about fish skin, from the Yukon to the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region to the Southeast, and have seen the different

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JI: Yes, I have been working with her on language and material culture for the last ten years. Helen is amazing. She was raised by her grandparents in Lime Village, Alaska, and has a lot of knowledge. She has made a bear-gut parka, now in the Anchorage Museum’s collection, and fish-skin boots. She makes dipnets and fish traps from materials that she gathers in the forest. She has shown me how to tan moose hides and how to twist sinew. I am learning from her the cultural transmission of knowledge. I’m learning our customary way of how to treat animals. I don’t walk on bones. I think Elders like Helen trust me because they know I am working in a good way.

NJS: Some of your work is shared in public spaces. One of your sculptures that has received a lot of attention lately is a bronze sculpture of Olga Nicolai Ezi [Ahtna, 1875–after 1940] at Ship Creek at the Port of Anchorage. Can you tell me a little bit about this work?

JI: Olga was a matriarch from Eklutna.

As part of a mitigation plan for building

JOEL ISAAK

the Port of Anchorage on top of a traditional Dena'ina fish camp, the Village of Eklutna sent out a call for proposals to create a sculpture representing her.

I was honored to be selected. I wanted the sculpture of Olga to represent that we are still here as people. When we were installing this statue, the belugas were fishing, and we could hear them. It was amazing to hear and see them. The fish still come to this spot.

Olga is represented looking out over the dipnetting site. In spring before the salmon come, there are little sticklebacks that go up Ship Creek. When you think about seasonal living, winter is long and cold, and you do not know when the animals are going to come to you. In springtime, the food supplies start to get low, and it can be a starvation time.

The stickleback would come before there is food anywhere else, so they were an important food to carry people through

the lean times. That is the significance of this place.

I wanted to portray Olga as an Elder when she was alive and honoring some of the traditions that were relevant to her life in a place that is still significant. She is wearing fish-skin boots, regalia, and a scarf over her hair. I also wanted to make visible that we are not a static people; we are a resilient people. We still put up our fish. We still do what we have always done. Her feet are on the concrete plinth.

She is approachable, integrated into the space, and looking out over the [historic] dipnetting spot. Her back is turned to a distant statue of Captain Cook in downtown Anchorage.

NJS: There has been quite a bit of controversy around the Cook sculpture recently. Can you tell me about how your representation of Olga contrasts with the bronze sculpture of Captain James Cook?1

I also wanted to make visible that we are not a static people; we are a resilient people.

above Detail of Olga Ezi, 2018, cast bronze, 62 × 26 × 12 in., on Small Boat Launch Road in Anchorage, Alaska. opposite Joel Isaak. All images courtesy of the artist.

1. Captain James Cook (1728–1779) arrived in the inlet that now bears his name in May 1778, while looking for the Northwest Passage for the British government. In 2020, amid a global movement to remove public sculptures of colonial figures, citizens brought the proposal to remove the statue of Captain Cook before the Municipality of Anchorage. As a result of that petition, the city has agreed to allow the Native Village of Eklutna to decide what will become of the Cook statue.

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JI: Some of the contrast between the Cook sculpture and Olga is that when people go to visit Olga, they feel welcomed. They can approach her, and she is integrated into the land. She is holding fish, doing what we do. She is walking and existing in a positive and thriving way.

The sculpture of Captain Cook is presented in a very colonial manner. He is towering over viewers, and his presence is dominating. Captain Cook did not actually get off the boat in Anchorage. He was in the Cook Inlet area for about two weeks total. There were a lot of atrocities that were committed in that brief space of time. I think we should not venerate people who committed atrocities, like rape and human trafficking. I think that this history of these abuses is something that should be talked about and properly contextualized, not ignored.

NJS: Is there a particular work of art that you are most proud of?

JI: Honoring the Ordinary, my MFA thesis show, is one piece that I am very proud

of. For the project, I wanted to convey the scope and feeling of salmon runs to people who had never experienced salmon culture and that deep human connection to place. What does it look like to live in harmony with a massive run of fish, and how do we communicate that to a society that goes to the store to buy food?

I took the data collected by fish and game from the sockeye and king salmon runs for the Kenai River, and I embroidered it into lengths of fabric. Then I brined the fabric and smoked them in the same way that I would smoke salmon to eat. I suspended these fabric pieces in the gallery so that people could engage with them in this space. It was a way of taking over this space through smell. I brought in nine tons of sand for the gallery floor.

The act of walking on the deep sand drew attention to how a person senses the world through their feet.

NJS: How does your work with language revitalization play a role in your arts practice?

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JI: I view art as a way of communicating.

Art is language and has its own visual dialect. I feel that my work with language and art support each other really well. Art gives me a way to articulate things that I do not have words for.

I wanted to learn Dena'ina since I was in second grade. I wondered who I could talk to about that. There was no access to language learning in Soldotna as a nine-year-old in the early ’90s. I also wanted to make regalia. To me our clothing and regalia go hand in hand.

The material culture was my inroads to language work. I started working with Helen Dick and the late Dr. Alan Boraas, a professor of anthropology at the Kenai Peninsula College.

Now I am working with my tribe as a language resource contractor. I am also working on the new edition of a series of language books and the Dena'ina verb system. Dena'ina is a verb-based language, and it is difficult to learn when you have fewer than ten speakers.

The emotion that goes into language work is amazing, but it is also

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soul-crushing. Art has been a way to safeguard from getting too discouraged but also to process all the grief of language nearly being annihilated. Though Alaska is experiencing a lot of language loss right now, there is also a lot of language use, a resurgence.

One of the tools that I use in language work is a computer program that takes language and flattens it out in terms of volume, frequency, and hertz. It results in images that are called spectrograms. They are basically a visual system for recording sounds where each sound has a corresponding visual representation. A spectrogram looks kind of like a constellation. For the exhibition Origins, I took a spectrogram for the word bejex, the Dena'ina word for caribou, and translated it into a visual representation.

I carved the representation as a bas-relief in caribou fur, so the resulting image is the word caribou in caribou fur. Part of the idea is thinking about where language comes from, the connection to the earth and the animals that live on the land, and how these connections are reflected in the language.

NJS: I was intrigued by the images of your installation, Catalog of Madness (2015), that I saw on your website. Was this project inspired by James Luna’s Artifact Piece? What is the story behind this installation?

JI: In Alaska we are so privileged to still have subsistence hunting, fishing, and harvesting available to us. It is amazing to contrast this way of life in Alaska to other places in the world. When I went to school in New York, I brought freezer boxes of salmon that I had harvested with me. The concept of putting up fish was so foreign to the students there. I had an art history teacher who was treating me as an object. We had a really hard time communicating. Everything that I wore in that class was considered Other.

For the Catalog of Madness project, I put all of the objects that that teacher had commented on in vitrines (like my salmon skin boots, my work gloves). I put myself in a crate, not wearing much clothing. I had a statistic list by my head that shared things like life expectancy, 56

years; likelihood to serve jail time for a violent crime, 1 in 5; likelihood to sexually assault a child, 1 in 33; likelihood to graduate from high school, 40 percent; likelihood to become an alcoholic, 1 in 2. These are the statistics that are shared about Alaska Native men. I also had labels

above Catalog of Madness, 2015, pallet wood, glass, Dena'ina person, 24 × 72 × 40 in. opposite Honoring the Ordinary, 2016, embroidered smoked muslin, sand, cherry, pine, beech, rope, 300 × 600 × 300 in., installed at Alfred University, Alfred, New York.

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that noted, “Live specimen, perishable, keep frozen.” I wanted to point out that my culture is dependent upon winter. When the faculty came to visit my show, I could hear them read the list of statistics and then gasp when they saw me in the box. This experience finally communicated what I was feeling. It was a way for me to let go of the discrimination. I didn’t learn about James Luna’s Artifact Piece until two years after I had finished this project.

NJS: What have been some of your biggest challenges as an artist?

JI: There are two. One is the looming fact that my hands will stop working from genetic arthritis. As an artist not being able to use my hands is really hard to deal with. I do not play sports anymore and am very careful with my hands. I have adopted working with a pressure washer to help save my hands from the labor-intensive work of working skins. I think about how much typing I am going to do. I have to balance whether I want to be typing and working on language or art-making. I struggle with that decision.

The other worry that I have is the future access to fish skin. Fish are a precious resource that face many threats. As salmon runs decrease or man-made catastrophes happen that kill species in my area, I am worried that I will not be able to work with fish skin anymore. It will 64 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

JOEL ISAAK

become extinct or it will become illegal.

Other people face this with the materials that they are working in as well. The hands issue, though, I can’t overcome that.

NJS: What is it like for you to be working during COVID? JI: When the epidemics (Spanish flu, smallpox, and tuberculosis) came through Alaska one hundred years ago, it killed everyone in my grandma’s village. Her family evacuated from Point Possession to Anchorage. I think about how fortunate I am that I am working from home and still able to talk to Elders and still do a lot of work. My grandma’s experience was going to sanitariums and boarding school and everyone dying.

NJS: What are you working on now?

JI: I am making a bronze Yup'ik family group for the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation in Bethel. I have two of the figures finished and most of the fish done. This should be wrapped up by next summer. I’m trying to say no to taking on more work and am not actively pursuing solo shows until I finish this commission.

NJS: Is there anything else that you would like to share?

JI: I would not be able to do the work that I do without the strong women who teach and work with me. That is one of the things that I am very proud about with the sculpture of Grandma Olga. I was able to portray a strong, prominent, Alaska Native woman in a prominent place. I think that we need more visual statements that show our people portrayed as living and healthy people. It makes me really happy when people can see themselves visualized in my work and I hope that my art can help bring awareness in a positive direction.

If you visit Alaska, you can see Joel’s public sculptures at the Dena'ina Wellness Center in Kenai, the Port of Anchorage, as well as in the collections at the Sheldon Jackson Museum in Sitka, Alaska.

Chin’an, Joel, for sharing your powerful work with the world.

JOELISAAK.COM

Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Alutiiq) is an art historian and museum consultant based in Homer, Alaska. As a program director at the CIRI Foundation, she oversees a program dedicated to supporting Alaska Native arts and artists. Her research interests include Alaska Native art, cultural revival, and Indigenous curation.

above Niłts’iłt’an (Husband and Wife), detail of wife, 2014, salmon skin, moose hide, artificial sinew, 24 × 11 × 12 in. opposite, top Bejex, 2018, caribou pelt trimmed to form a spectrogram of the word bejex, 28 × 36 × 2 in. opposite, bottom Halibut Skin Moto Jacket, 2013, halibut skin, linen, 21 × 25 × 10 in.

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Seneca Painter

G. PETER JEMISON

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

B

ORN IN SILVER CREEK, New York, in 1945, G. Peter Jemison belongs to the Heron clan of the Seneca Nation of Indians.

He received classical art training from the University of Siena in Italy and later earned a bachelor’s degree in arts education from State University of New York College at Buffalo in 1967.

Jemison is also a knowledge-keeper of Haudenosaunee cultural history. A NAGPRA representative for the Seneca Nation of Indians, he has served on the US Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, co-edited Treaty of Canandaigua 1794: 200 Years of Treaty Relations between the Iroquois Confederacy and the United States, and contributed original research on repatriation and patrimony to American Heritage, the New York State Historical Association’s journal. For his achievements in championing Indigenous cultural heritage in the United States, SUNY Buffalo State College awarded him an honorary doctorate of fine arts in 2003, and a year later, the American Alliance of Museums elected him as board member at large.

Jemison’s curatorial work includes the Pan-American Exposition Centennial: Images of the American Indian (2001) at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo and Stan Hill: The Spirit Released/A Circle Complete (2001) at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. His paintings, drawings, and films are in numerous private and public art collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Heard Museum, Denver Art Museum, and the British Museum.

Since 1985, Jemison has served as the historic site manager of Ganondagan State Historic Site, the location of a 17th-century Seneca town located in Victor, New York. Ganondagan is a National Historic Landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

MRS: Orenda is the long-held Haudenosaunee belief that every living thing embodies a spiritual force.

It is also the philosophy that drives your work. Can you speak about the significance of orenda?

GPJ: I have always reserved the right to work in whatever style or whatever subject matter that I find important at the time. I know that my work can sometimes be a stretch for people in the sense that “this is not obviously Native American,” or they don’t think that it is. For example, I work at Ganondagan, which is a Seneca historic site. There are 569 acres of land, and a lot of my inspiration over these 35 years that I’ve been here have been from simply observing the natural world—in our gardens, the whole surrounding [land] that we have. In addition to that, the other thing that has really played into my work has been our stories. I don’t like to call them legends; I’d rather call them stories. Some of them are based on historical fact, some of them are teaching

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lessons, and some are oral tradition. All of those things are part of my art. In terms of the natural world, whether it be plants or trees, animals or birds, each of them embodies that spirit we acknowledge.

We have the Thanksgiving Address, which is how we open all our gatherings.

It accounts for people, the earth, the water, the plants, the medicine plants, the animals small and large, the trees, the birds, those creatures that live in the water. It acknowledges the plants we’ve been given for food. It acknowledges the thunder, the wind, the sun, the moon, the stars, and in those, Medicine People who are those teachers that came to us. That’s the basis, again, for what is my focus, what I have to think about.

Early on, I really worked on learning this in our language, Onödowa'ga:', the language of the People of the Great Hill, the Seneca. In the process of learning, I really observed the natural world to try and understand not just the words but what actually occurs in the natural world from season to season.

G. PETER JEMISON

above White Dog Dream, 1985, egg tempera, acrylic, and ribbons on handmade paper, collection of the Museum of the Plains Indian, Browning, Montana. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite G. Peter Jemison. Photo: Rikki Van Camp. Image courtesy of the Friends of Ganondagan, Victor, New York.

MRS: You received part of your formal education at the University of Siena in Italy. I’m curious to know how classical European training, specifically in Renaissance techniques and art history, influences your current art practice?

GPJ: When I went to school at Buffalo State College, the only options were art education or industrial arts; they didn’t have all the other options that they have now. I was in art education. As part of that, we had an exchange program with the University of Siena. Students lived there for six months. Part of that experience was studying the art of the Renaissance. When our classically trained art historian entered into the classroom, everyone stood up and waited until he got to the front of the class before we could sit down. He didn’t want anyone to talk when he was talking. It was very strict.

He would prepare us for the city that we were planning to visit each

weekend. If we were going to Rome, we spent the week learning about the important families of Rome, learning about the important artwork that was created for Rome, the architecture, and so forth. We drove down Friday night and spent Saturday and Sunday just looking. We would drive back to Siena on Sunday afternoon. We did that for Venice, Florence, Padua, and elsewhere.

Every place we went to, we prepared for.

In the afternoon we had a studio experience. We created frescoes on the wall, which could later be removed from the wall by using something like cheesecloth that was laid overtop it. Then they would add more to it and actually put it on stretcher bars. With a fresco mural, you build up paint in layers from light to dark and there is no correcting. You would have to redo the wall then start painting again. We also did sculpture as though we were going to cast a bronze.

We worked with plaster and clay.

What my education consisted of was really being taught how to use oil paint, how to use egg tempera, how to use watercolor, how to do a fresco, or how to do gouache. A lot of art education, I found out later, was just putting you in a room and saying, “Go ahead and make something, create what you want to create, and if you have a question we will come around and maybe we’ll answer it for you.” In contrast, I had this more hands-on, teach-you-how-todo-it approach. In art school, I had to take ceramics, photography, sculpture, jewelry, painting, drawing, and art history—all that was part of my educational experience.

So, where does it fit in? I had very formal training in how to use media.

Then you learn, after that, how to break the rules.

MRS: You have stated that drawing has always been your first love. What is it about drawing that fascinates you?

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GPJ: Some of the greatest draftsmen that ever lived were from Italy: Michelangelo, da Vinci, Raphael—we can go down the list of people who became well known for their drawings. Figure drawing was a part of my education. We had a live model, and you sat and tried to learn how to draw a live model. When I started out, I wasn’t particularly good at drawing. I had to work at it. I had to develop eye-hand coordination to render what I saw in front of me. At first the figure was fascinating to me; then it was the use of light and shadow.

Seneca people [today] value someone who can draw naturalistically.

By then I had that ability. For my people, that’s kind of the be-all and end-all.

If you can do that, they think you’re a good artist. They’re not so interested in the other work that I do—the abstract.

I’ve had that strain running through my art from way back: strictly observing what I see and re-creating it onto a

two-dimensional surface. With the Renaissance came perspective, creating figures in space. I learned later how that notion was pulled apart, through Cubism up to Abstract Expressionism, the pushpull of space. I was looking for breaking out of that earlier form of art I created to form something different and new.

MRS: When you returned to Buffalo after six months abroad in Italy, how did that city shape your education?

GPJ: I had the good fortune of going to school across the road from the AlbrightKnox Art Gallery. The strength of their collection was the Impressionists up to the 1960s at that point in time. For five bucks you could join the gallery as a member, which gave you access to the library. I had access to catalogues, magazines, and books on any artist who I wanted to study. I wasn’t a particularly good academic, but I spent hours sitting

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in that library researching different artists until I got to the point where I could give my fellow students a tour of the AlbrightKnox and talk about the artists.

MRS: You then moved to New York City to pursue a professional career as an artist. New York City was the center of the art world at that time, and that era is kind of mythologized in books and film.

GPJ: I started going to New York City from college when I was about 19 years old. I would jump in the car with people who were driving there. I would stay at a friend’s house if I could. I would spend a lot of time going to museums or galleries and just looking at the work. Whatever was inexpensive, if there was no charge, that was great because I didn’t have much money. I looked at a lot of art.

MRS: What did you see? What were you looking at in particular?

G. PETER JEMISON

GPJ: I have to say this: in all of my formal education, I did not see one image created by a Native American artist. We had a conversation in ceramics about Native American–built pottery using coil construction. One of my anthropology classes touched on the Northwest Coast.

But in terms of actually having any education about Native American art, it didn’t exist in the school that I went to. All of that I had to seek out once I left college, once I began this return to my community to learn what it meant for me to be a Seneca.

I grew up in a family that was quite assimilated. Even though I had some experiences as a young person and went to some of our ceremonies, I didn’t retain the memory of them. So I had to go out and begin that process when I became an adult. It happened through a connection with other Native American artists.

It began to make me more and more curious. I was about 26 years old when I really began to look back to my own tradition and try to learn from it.

The biggest opportunity that was given to me was being hired by the Seneca Nation to go back to Cattaraugus where I was able to run the education program for the nation. They already had a remedial tutoring program for our students in school, but they didn’t have a cultural component to it. It was up to me to hire the people who had that traditional knowledge, knowledge of our songs, dances, language, art, crafts, cooking, all of that—to hire those people to teach those things to high school students and adults who were interested in taking it.

The benefit for me was to meet the people who had the knowledge and spend the time with them. Some of the people I hired didn’t have a car, so I had to drive them home or to the classroom. They wanted me to stay and learn, and on the way home or when I took them to shop for groceries, we had conversations. In working with the people from Allegany, I got to meet my relatives from my mother’s side, that extended family, in addition to relatives on my father’s side. Once I could meet these people, they established who I was and who I was related to. That was really when I began to learn, in the early ’70s. All this other stuff was going on, too: Wounded Knee, the Occupation of

Alcatraz, taking over the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs]. So on top of me tuning into the traditional, all this other political movement was taking place … a great awakening across the country.

MRS: This was also the time when your drawings and paintings on paper bags became something of a signature motif for you. How did they come about and what do they mean to you?

GPJ: When I graduated in 1967, I was an ironworker during the summertime.

I got through ironworking in August and jumped on a Greyhound bus and went to New York City. I moved in with a friend of mine and started looking for a job because I didn’t get into the graduate school of my choice. I wanted to go to Yale, but I didn’t get in, so I decided

above White Bead ’81, 1981, crayon, graphite, felt-tipped marker on paper, 18¼ × 11 in., collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 25/9531.

Image courtesy of NMAI Photo Services. opposite Sentinels, 2006, acrylic, oil on canvas, 36 × 48 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

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lower Park Avenue, and saw these artists who I thought were my heroes when I was going to art school. When I moved back there in 1978, street art was really gaining traction. This was the time of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Kiki Smith, Christy Rupp, and Charlie Ahearn.

Charlie Ahearn was the first one who saw me drawing on a paper bag. He said to me, “I’d like you to do some more of those. I’m putting together a show over in Times Square. It’s in a former massage parlor, and we’re going to take it over with artists who have art training—street artists, outsider artists. It’s all going to be put together in the three stories of this building and I want you to put some of those paper bags in there.” I decided I would do it.

MRS: This is the event that sparked the popularity of the paper bag works?

above As the Crow Flies, 1986, acrylic on handmade paper bag, 15 × 10 × 8 in., collection of the Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts. Image courtesy Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts, Santa Fe, NM. opposite Northern and Brown, 1 9 8 5 , wa te rco l o r, p e n c i l , glitter on paper, 301/3 × 401/8 in., collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 26/2212.

Image courtesy of NMAI Photo Services.

to move to New York City to become a famous artist, to struggle and do all the rest. Anyway, I got a job delivering art supplies. I had to drive a station wagon around New York City, and I had to learn how to drive like a cab driver in order to survive. I had a license that allowed me to park in commercial spaces all over the city. I would do my deliveries, then I’d park in a commercial zone, run up into an art gallery, take a look, come back out, and go back to work [laughs].

MRS: At least you were using your powers for good.

GPJ: Absolutely. I was hanging around the artists’ bar, Max’s Kansas City on

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GPJ: Out of that show I got invited to other shows to create paper bags. This was the beginning of an idea I had to take the entire show in a shopping bag if I used graduated sizes of bags. So the shopping bag would be the transport medium, inside of that would be the grocery bag, inside of that would be the bag you got when you bought a can of beer, and inside of that would be the bag you got when you bought a nickel bag, and so on. When I would carry the bag on the train, people would always be asking me, “Where did you get that bag?” I would tell them, “I made it, it’s mine.” I would take some bag and transform it with my images on the exterior. But when I gave it to the show, they created kind of a pyramid—the smallest bag at the top and gradually down to the biggest bag at the bottom.

That kind of thing was, for me, fun.

MRS: The paper bags seem like something that would connect all classes of all people, be they in cars, buses, subways, houses, apartments— it’s this universal vessel that connects people.

GPJ: Yeah. At some point I arrived at the observation that everyone on the train in New York carried some sort of bag: a handbag, plastic bag, shopping bag, briefcase, something. Every time I showed [the bags], critics wrote about them, so

G. PETER JEMISON

I kept doing them. No matter what else I showed, they wrote about the bags!

MRS: You’re also recognized for being involved in several films including The Iroquois Creation Story (2015), The Two Row (2009), and The Muhheakantuck in Focus (2009). Often you work in close collaboration with others, and in particular your two sons. To this end, your most recent film, Reclamation (2014), encapsulates “a father’s quest to lose more than 100 pounds to ensure that he would be around long enough to import his knowledge to his young son.” How did this film come to fruition and what are its underlying messages?

GPJ: A good friend of ours is one of the kids that came to our youth and elder’s gatherings. After he got married, he was gaining a lot of weight. He also had a son who was born prematurely. His son went through a lot of struggle to come into this world. Our friend made up his mind that he wanted to be around for his son’s future and he had to lose weight in order to do so.

At Ganondagan, we have a hill called Fort Hill. At the top of that hill, the Seneca people built a palisaded granary.

Inside that palisade they stored their corn. It was a fort for protection but it was also a granary for storing the surplus corn in bark silos. It has very steep slopes up the sides of the hill to the top. There was a natural trail that came up the back side of Fort Hill. We always felt that our people used backpack baskets to carry the corn up the hill to the fort where they stored it. So he decided that he was going to load up my pack basket, fill it with corn, and walk up the hill, making himself do it to get in shape. He was doing some weightlifting and watching his diet, too. Then he decided he would run up the hill with the backpack on his back. I had a young guy who was able to run with him doing the camerawork, but he had to do it almost backwards in order to stay ahead of him.

He did it three times to get all the shots.

MRS: A story about reclaiming one’s health and history. Do you see a relationship between film and healing?

GPJ: That particular one I do. Some of my other films are more on the order of historical events. I get people who are my friends to put on our traditional outfits, and we use our bark longhouse for the setting to tell a story of an encounter that took place. Then I like to bring it into the present and have an aspect that is translatable or understandable to people living today; to have contemporary people talking about historical events. I want them to visualize what it was like, to put themselves back there. I want them to have two experiences: the first, to hear an explanation from people who are living today, and second, the visual of what it was like back then. Trying to help our own people to understand their own history, their own story.

GPETERJEMISON.COM

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

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Collections

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WILDLIFE ART

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

T

HE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WILDLIFE ART (NMWA) lies between Jackson, Wyoming, and the entrance to Grand Teton National Park. Built into the East Gros Ventre Butte and overlooking the National Elk Refuge, the NMWA blends beautifully with its natural surroundings. Its façade, built of Idaho quartzite, was inspired by remnants of medieval Scottish castles. In winter, one can sit in the café and take in changing panoramic views of Sheep Mountain elk herds grazing in the valley. The area is the historical homeland of the Gros Ventre, Shoshone-Bannock, Apsáalooke, and Northern Cheyenne peoples.

The collectors William and Joffa Kerr established the NMWA in 1987 with the goal of raising public appreciation for both nature and artistic responses to it.1 The Kerr collection includes many works by German-American artist Carl Rungius (1869–1959), known for his idyllic landscapes of Western North America. The NMWA serves a small local community and many tourists visiting Grand Teton and Yellowstone.

Wyoming is rich in natural beauty but has just three art museums; the others are in Cody and Laramie.

A museum focused on a specific subject prompts one to consider how

1. The NMWA’s current location opened in 1994.

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different cultures have portrayed that subject. In the NMWA one encounters a wide range of styles from trompe l’oeil to expressionist. Like genre and portraiture depicting human lives, scenes of wildlife can be intimate, violent, contemplative, or humorous.

Ninete ent h-centur y French Orientalist painters depicted some animals as symbolic of the unknown Other, as in Henri Rousseau’s Exotic Landscape with Tiger and Hunters (1907).

Théodore Géricault studied Peter Paul Rubens’s paintings of lions to learn the Baroque master’s style, while Rosa Bonheur sketched from close observation.

COLLECTIONS

The NMWA also includes sculpture by Auguste Rodin, who attempted to depict movement in bronze.

American painters George Platt and Alexander Pope Jr. captured game for still life paintings to exhibit their technical prowess in verism. Wildlife can sometimes be difficult to find in sublime Hudson River School landscapes

by German-American painter Albert Bierstadt, whereas British photographer and inventor Eadweard Muybridge photographed animal locomotion as a scientific investigation. John James Audubon’s encyclopedic project to document birds of North America provides an interesting counterpoint to paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, whose depictions of skulls might be understood as modern vanitas paintings.

In stark contrast to all of these approaches, Native American artists often portray animals as symbols of personal and clan identity, or as protagonists in creation stories. Various bird species, notably the raven, figure prominently in many Indigenous cultures, as do mammals, including bears, coyotes, and rabbits, and amphibians such as turtles.

Of course, the horse and bison are central for Plains nations.

The oldest objects in the collection are tiny stone fetish carvings from ca.

2500 BCE. A Mogollon ceramic bowl dated ca. 1000 CE features a stylized moth or butterfly on the bottom of the inside. A triangular hole marks this as a funerary object related to the Mimbres ceramics many museums have recently pulled from view over ethical concerns, highlighted by a canceled exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.2 Included among the more contemporary pottery is an olla from 1981 by Jennie Laate (Acoma, 1933–1994), whose abstracted and animal designs recall older Zuni and Acoma imagery.

Currently the collection consists of 5,000 objects, of which about 200 are

by Native artists. Amy and Ray Minella commissioned Marvin Oliver (Quinault/ Isleta Pueblo, 1946–2019) to create a site-specific 23-foot-tall totem pole for the NMWA. Tetons (1996) has pride of place under a skylight inside the museum.

Oliver combined symbolism from the Northwest Coast (raven, thunderbird, a copper shield) and the Plateau/Plains (the Teton mountains, fireweed, Indian paintbrush). The collection also includes several screen prints by Oliver of animals in formline style.

2. This object has never been on public view at the National Museum of Wildlife Art.

above, left Pablita Velarde (Santa Clara Pueblo, 1918–2006), High Country, 1984, casein on board, 20 × 25 in., collection of the National Museum of Wildlife Art, gift of the 2009 and 2010 Collectors Circles. ©Pablita Velarde. All images, unless otherwise noted, courtesy of the National Museum of Wildlife Art. above, right M a r v i n O l i ve r (Quinault/Isleta Pueblo, 1946–2019), Tetons, 1994, red cedar, acrylic paint, abalone inlay, cast glass, bronze, copper, 288 × 43 × 24 in., collection of the National Museum of Wildlife Art, generously sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. Ray Minella. ©Marvin Oliver. opposite The National Museum of Wildlife Art at dawn.

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buffalo wait for a time of safe return.

As children today joyfully climb through the tunnel in this granite bison, we are reminded of transformation. In them, there is hope for a future in which people and wildlife can peacefully co-exist.3

above, top Raven Skyriver (Tlingit), Borealis, 2019, off-hand sculptured and sandblasted glass, collection of the National Museum of Wildlife Art, gift of the 2020 Blacktail Gala. ©Raven Skyriver. above, bottom Stewart Steinhauer (Cree), Little Buffalo Mountain and Buffalo Mountain, 2015, granite, collection of the National Museum of Wildlife Art, purchased with funds donated by Lynn and Foster Friess with additional assistance from the National Museum of Wildlife Art Acquisition Fund. Photo: Andrea L. Ferber.

Image courtesy of the author.

On the museum’s outdoor sculpture trail one will find Stewart Steinhauer’s (Saddle Lake Cree) Buffalo Mountain and Little Buffalo Mountain (2015). Carved from granite, the pair relay a Cree story: When the last of the [buffalo] herds were seeking shelter from man’s slaughter, a spiritual being known as “Rock Grandfather” opened a special passageway through the mountains, leading to an alternate dimension.

There, suspended in the past, the

This year the NMWA acquired its first piece of ledger art. Black Wolf Society (2019) by Terrance Guardipee (Blackfeet) depicts a masked rider on a horse, both decked in colorful regalia, running alongside black wolves. This formidable warrior raises a deadly war club with his right arm and carries a prayer stick in his left. A certificate of ownership from the International Minerals and Chemical Corporation frames the rider, and checks from various banks are affixed symmetrically around the edges. Repeated groups of three (wolves, mountains, stars) suggest this is a sacred number.

Julie Buffalohead’s (Ponca) oil painting Six Pack Colonialism (2018) imagines Columbus’s three ships ensnared by plastic beverage rings. A trickster rabbit sticks out her tongue at the tiny trio while an owl stands ready to squash them with a fly swatter. At right another owl is perched atop a reclining fawn, which perhaps represents the artist herself (she is Deer clan), playing with the plastic curiosity.

Curator of art Tammi Hanawalt was brought on in part because of her expertise in Native art. Her primary responsibility is to build and diversify the collection. She laments that a lot of strong work does not meet the definition of “wildlife art,” as this excludes not just non-representational art but also depictions of domesticated animals such as cattle, chickens, and often horses. She is collaborating with the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art to produce an exhibition of animals in the West, which will feature Native American artworks from both museums’ collections.

Another priority for Hanawalt is training museum educators and docents to understand and discuss non-Native depictions of Native peoples with critical sensitivity. Paintings by artists such

3. Jane Lavino, “Buffalo Mountain and Little Buffalo Mountain,” National Museum of Wildlife Art, web.

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COLLECTIONS

as George Catlin (American, 1796–1872), Karl Bodmer (Swiss, 1809–1893), and Charles M. Russell (American, 1864– 1926) are often viewed as objective documents rather than outsider perspectives that stereotype and misrepresent individuals and customs.

Collector Jay Kaplan has expanded the NMWA’s holdings of Native art with gifts of contemporary Inuit sculpture.

Today’s Inuit carvers across the Arctic continue a 2,000-year-old practice that became important economically when hunting was no longer viable. These works are typically only a few inches high and carved from soapstone, granite, or antler. One example, a uniquely carved caribou with antlers made from bone, adds another perspective to the many depictions of ungulates included in NMWA’s permanent collection.

“I think it is important to expand the way we look at wildlife in art,” says Hanawalt. “There is a bigger story behind

the art of the Inuit people. To better understand the role wildlife plays in the lives of people from various backgrounds and how that relationship influences their artwork is really a common ground, a place where perhaps humans can begin to better understand each other.”4 Hanawalt considers that some of the most compelling Inuit artworks depict transformations, where there are visible parts of both humans and animals in one being. She envisions a special exhibition of Inuit art in the near future that features the collection of sculptures, along with Inuit prints and wall hangings from other museums, and looks forward to collaborating with Inuit scholars and artists.

WILDLIFEART.ORG

above, top Julie Buffalohead (Ponca), Six Pack Colonialism, 2018, oil on canvas, 29¼ × 82 × 2 in., collection of the National Museum of Wildlife Art, gift of the 2019 Blacktail Gala. © Julie Buffalohead. above, bottom left Ashevak Adla (Inuk), Dancing Bear, n.d., soapstone, 6½ × 3 × 7½ in., collection of the National Museum of Wildlife Art, gift of Jay Kaplan. © Ashevak Adla. above, bottom right Francis Ye l l o w, Wa n b l i K o y a k e (Mniconjou Lakota), Tatanka Wan, a Buffalo Bull, 1993, bronze, 12 × 18 × 3 in., collection of the National Museum of Wildlife Art, gift of Dr. Patricia L. Hutinger. ©Francis Yellow, Wanbli Koyake.

4. Tammi Hanawalt, email messages to author, November 18 and 19, 2020.

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SPOTLIGHT

HOPI POLYCHROME JAR

BY NAMPEYO below Nampeyo (Hopi-Tewa, Corn clan, ca. 1859–1942), Hopi Polychrome Jar, ca. 1920, clay, pigment, 18¾ × 21 in., collection of Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona, GP-6215.

Photo: Michelle Dillon. Image courtesy of the Arizona State Museum, Tucson.

F

ROM THE TEWA PUEBLO OF HANO in the Hopi homelands,1 Nampeyo’s large vessel carries an important position in the front gallery of the exhibition Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. As one of the first artworks

visitors see within the exhibition’s area devoted to the theme of legacy, it conveys renewal through its materiality, painted patterning, and collaborative process.

The vessel also communicates renewal through its cross-cultural activity.

This high-shouldered vessel radiates a gold-orange surface from the outdoor

firing of clay from First Mesa. This warm color evenly envelops the entire jar, which features a quartet of design panels in black and red pigments applied with yucca fibers. These panels hold space at four points below the vessel’s neck, suggesting the cardinal directions as situated between the above and below, while accounting for the center. The neck bears a thick, black line with a deliberate break that allows this brushstroke to remain open. In accordance with cultural protocols, the line break faces the eastern direction.2 The jar held this position in each iteration of Hearts of Our People.

This vessel evokes Nampeyo’s most renowned style, called Hopi Revival in its day and referred to as Hano Polychrome by the late 1950s.3 Both of these names reference Nampeyo’s use of motifs found in pottery sherds at Sikyatki, an ancestral village at First Mesa that was abandoned in the early 16th century.4 Due to the close proximity of the ancient village to Hano, Nampeyo became familiar with Sikyatki pottery, featuring figurative, bird, and plant motifs in red and black pigments on gold-orange backgrounds.

She incorporated these patterns into her vocabulary that already fused an array of Native pottery designs from the Southwest region. According to Nampeyo’s great-great granddaughter, Rachel Sahmie (Hopi-Tewa), the Tewa potters at Hano did not know the original purposes of the Sikyatki designs, and they made their own judgments about adopting them into their repertoires.5 Made with the coil-and-scrape method, the artwork under consideration attests to Nampeyo’s nearly six decades of work in the Hopi Revival style, beginning in the 1880s. In these vessels, Nampeyo abstracted aspects of her worldview in a red clay slip and a black pigment made of beeweed on the gold-orange backgrounds of the

1. Arizona State Museum, “Nampeyo’s Life Timeline,” web; Barbara Kramer, Nampeyo and Her Pottery (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 24, 195; Jill Ahlberg Yohe and Teri Greeves, eds., Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Art in association with University of Washington Press, 2019), 86, 88. Nampeyo was a Corn clan mother and the daughter of White Corn (Tewa, Corn clan, d. ca. 1901–09) and Quootsva (Hopi, Snake clan, d. ca.

1897–1899). Nampeyo married Lesso of Walpi (Hopi/Diné descent, Cedarwood clan, ca. 1860–1930).

2. Jill Ahlberg Yohe, email message to author, November 12, 2020.

3. Kramer, Nampeyo and Her Pottery, 143, 160.

4. Arizona State Museum, “Nampeyo Showcase,” web.

5. Paul Niemi, “The Road to Indian Market 2010: The Nampeyo Legacy with the Sahmie Sisters of Hopi,” August 25, 2010, YouTube video, 9:39, web.

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SPOTLIGHT

fired clay. She often combined imagery of migration, birds, plant life, and dance personages, drawing on Sikyatki motifs as well as other regional designs. Nampeyo also regularly collaborated with her daughters as painters of these vessels, and this jar’s designs suggest both Annie Healing (Hopi-Tewa, ca. 1884–1968) and Fannie Nampeyo’s (Hopi-Tewa, 1900–1987) adaptations of their mother’s patterns. The jar’s creation date of circa 1920, with a possibility of earlier production, also implies a mother-daughter collaboration, a common practice for Tewa pottery-making families.

Facing east, the design panel underneath the vessel’s line break takes on an anthropomorphic composition and calls to mind Nampeyo’s dance personage designs, popular with collectors during the early tourism era. A pendant-like form centered in the upper portion creates a forehead-like space. Below the pendant, two banks of angled lines in black create a triangular boundary at the sides of a black arch with a red semicircle nested within it. The lines suggest moisture, while the filled areas recall the curvature of rainbows.

Flanking this panel, a pair of oblong strips at the vessel’s shoulder gesture towards the sky. Two forms approaching the jar’s base evoke eagle tailfeathers, as black-outlined ovals, and a red pair of modified triangles bookend this lower section. As Nampeyo above Nampeyo (Hopi-Tewa, Corn clan, ca. 1859–1942), Hopi Polychrome Jar, ca. 1920, clay, pigment, 18¾ × 21 in., collection of Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona, GP-6215. family hallmarks, the eagle tailfeathers and Photo: Ken Matesich. Image courtesy of the Arizona State Museum, Tucson. red triangles emphasize relations to birds as sky messengers. Taken as a whole, the panel invokes hope for the renewal of rain to a retail location in Holbrook, Arizona; and into the hands in the arid desert. of two Arizona institutions. In 1928, the jar joined the collecA north-facing panel furthers these patterns of water tion of the Gila Pueblo Archaeological Foundation when the through a combination of the Nampeyo family’s variations of group’s founder, Harold Gladwin, purchased three of Nampeyo’s migration and bird designs, as implied by a red, winglike form artworks at the Commercial Hotel in Holbrook.7 In 1950, the above the shoulder. A bank of black lines placed above this motif artwork changed residence again when the Arizona State extends upwards from the vessel’s shoulder to its neck. Angled to Museum in Tucson received the foundation’s collection after the right, these stripes suggest moisture and migration through the organization dissolved. geometric movement. They feature overlays of black triangular In its current tour with Hearts of Our People (2019–21), forms with filled-in apexes. These points recall mountains as Nampeyo’s large vessel establishes new relations between both markers of Tewa world boundaries and the San Francisco Peaks the artworks and audiences that communicate with it. Its idenas a home of Hopi katsina beings. Helping situate this vessel in tity becomes increasingly multifaceted through every exchange time, these stripes and triangles appear in the same variation in in which it participates. This jar journeys through place and one of Nampeyo’s wide-set bowls dated to circa 1918 to 1920.6 time, seeking renewal through its pathways. It remains part of The vessel’s provenance allows for a tracing of some of an unending web carried through by Nampeyo’s descendants.

—Michelle J. Lanteri its cross-cultural movements, from its origination in Hano; 6. Edwin L. Wade and Allan Cooke, Canvas of Clay: Seven Centuries of Hopi Ceramic Art (Sedona: El Otro Lado, 2012), 181.

7. Diane D. Dittemore, email message to the author, November 12, 2020.

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ART+LIT

Choctaw Nation Author, Playwright, and Educator

LEANNE HOWE

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

L

EANNE HOWE was born in Edmond, Oklahoma, in 1951.

She writes fiction, creative n o n f i c t i o n , p o e t r y, a n d screenplays that engage Indigenous experience in the Americas.

Her first novel, Shell Shaker (Aunt Lute Books, 2001), received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. She was named a 2012 USA Ford Fellow in literature, and Wordcraft Circle named her 2002 Writer of the Year. The French translation of her novel, Équinoxes Rouges (Gallimard, 2004), was a finalist for one of France’s most prestigious awards, the Prix Medici Estranger, in 2004. She has held several writing residencies throughout the United States and was a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar to Jordan.

As a screenwriter and on-camera narrator, Howe appeared in the PBS documentary, Indian Country Diaries: Spiral of Fire. She founded and is the director of WagonBurner Theatre Troupe. Howe is currently the Eidson Distinguished Professor in American Literature in the department of English at the University of Georgia, Athens (UGA).

MRS: I’d like to begin with your philosophical approach to writing.

What are your concerns?

LH: What are my concerns, that’s a good question. Mainly I worry that I don’t have time to write everything that I have on my plate: a novel-in-progress, a CNF [creative nonfiction] story about my grandmother’s life, and a new poetry project I’m working on with another poet. Having time seems to be my greatest challenge.

MRS: What comes naturally to you, and what do you struggle with when writing?

LH: You know, I’m a sentence-bysentence writer. The first sentence must sound right and fit a certain cadence in my head before I can move on with the next sentence. So, getting that first page down is the struggle. After that, I can then settle in, move the words on the page into the story that I imagined I would write.

MRS: Your first novel, Shell Shaker, published in 2001, tells the story of the murders of two Choctaw leaders over a 200-year period. The first, in 1738, involves the Choctaw’s war against the English. The second, set during the 1990s, describes the battle against Mafia infiltration of a tribe’s casino. How do you feel about this work today?

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LH: I am very grateful that the novel is still taught and read today, which is very rewarding. I spent ten years researching the 18th-century history and then writing the novel. The year 2021 will be the 20th anniversary of Shell Shaker’s publication.

Aunt Lute Books asked me to write a new introduction for the novel. Really, I’m surprised by the novel’s literary acceptance. This was my first novel, and it’s all very gratifying to know that even after 20 years the novel holds interest for readers.

MRS: Can you ruminate on how you’ve grown and developed as a writer since you first began putting pen to paper?

What are the benefits or detriments of maturing as a writer?

LH: Oh gosh, I’ve been writing stories since I was six or seven [laughs], so I’ve changed a lot, and I no longer use a No. 2 lead pencil. But seriously, if you

ART+LIT

read a story like Shell Shaker (2001) and compare it to Savage Conversations (2019), maybe you wouldn’t say that my focus has changed much over 20 years, but the form has changed. I write about American Indians and I use different genres to tell the story I’m interested in. My first novel is set in both the 18th and 20th centuries.

Savage Conversations is set in the 19th century. Both are historical novels and yet they refer to the future, which is now.

Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story was very much out of my comfort zone as it was about baseball. Mostly I think a writer has to be curious, and that curiosity is what leads you to new material as a maturing writer. Oh dear, I can’t believe I said maturing.

MRS: Can we get into the minutiae of writing, of constructing sentences and conveying meaningful thoughts and emotions through words? How do you approach the construction of sentences?

What is essential in making sentences effective?

LH: One word at a time. One line at a time. One paragraph at a time. And choosing words that excite me. Then I spend a great deal of time in revision. I revise and continue to revise. Real writing happens in revision. Or at least for me.

MRS: Your new book, 1918, engages the life of your Cherokee grandmother and it’s written in poetry and creative nonfiction. How did this book come about? What drew you to this subject?

above, top LeAnne Howe, Shell Shaker (Aunt Lute Books, 2001). above, bottom LeAnne Howe, Savage Conversations (Coffee House Press, 2019). opposite LeAnne Howe. Image courtesy of the poet.

LH: I’d been interested in Granny’s life for several years. I knew her first husband died from the 1918 flu; they both had it at the same time. They were newlyweds, only been married about a year and six months. He died next to her in bed, bled out, literally. She lived. I think he had the flu for only three days before he died. So when our own 21st-century plague hit, I recovered my memories of Granny’s story.

I wrote my first poem from her point of view and I’ve been working on them ever since March.

MRS: How does the combination of different forms of writing—poetry and creative nonfiction—transform how you tell a story? What are its strengths or advantages?

LH: I’m not sure I can answer that fully.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean.

Recently I started a new play coauthored with another writer here at UGA. We knew we wanted to write a play, but somehow in the writing process the play turned into a musical. Mostly—and this is the magical part—stories tell the writer what form they want to be told in.

In this case, the play wanted to become a musical, so we incorporated music, lyrics, and dance moves to tell the story of de Soto and the Lady of Cofitachequi, a [possibly] Muskogean woman chief.1 The story is set in 1540 and today. Lady Coi was a real person and she appears in the historical documents of the Spanish. She met de Soto, and we think she had something to do with his “tragic” death. Picture the scene: de Soto is standing in the muck and mud when Lady Coi drives up in her gold, convertible DeSoto Adventurer and says, “Get in the car, bitch.”

MRS: Who is influencing you today— who or what are you currently reading?

LH: I’m reading many contemporary writers and poets such as Michael Ondaatje, Henri Lefebvre, Marguerite Duras, CAConrad, Jennifer Foerster, Susan Power, Dean Rader, Heid Erdrich, and many others writing today.

MRS: Thank you for speaking with me today, LeAnne.

LH: Yakoke, chi kana.

ILEANNEHOWE.COM

1. See: Blair A. Rudes, “Place Names of Cofitachequi,” Anthropological Linguistics 46, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 359–426. Tribes who spoke Muskogean, Siouan, and Iroquoian languages, as well as linguistic isolates, resided in the region believed to have been the 16th-century province of Cofitachequi, so the linguistic identities of the province and the Lady of Cofitachequi have not conclusively been determined. —Ed.

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1918 I Maybe it was while reading the 1918 Union Valley Bulletin A political handbill given John Hoggatt by a hacking cougher at the feed store Maybe it was the sour apple gone mahogany black that he’d eaten from his wife’s cellar stash. He knew he should have given it to their hog Trudy Maybe it was the six-mile walk to and from his father’s farm in Stonewall, Oklahoma Just to ask, need help with that heifer, Pop? Maybe it was the burning tingling running over the top of John’s head As if he was being roasted alive, filling him with fear He coughed into his fist, no

Iva honey, lock the gate so the Crowder boys can’t steal our cow He coughed into his fist, no Iva honey, He coughed into his fist Iva cold.

Winds like a siren whip the Junipers outside, maybe 90 per, He swayed left, and then right, and onto their Jenny Lind bed

A wedding gift,

Coveralls still on.

left Kristin Gentry (Choctaw Nation), PhotoSynthesis, from the Pollinators series, 2018, acrylic, ink, on cradled wood panel, 12 × 12 in. All images courtesy of the artist. opposite Kristin Gentry (Choctaw Nation), Opened Shawl, from the Between the Lines series, 2011, acrylic, ink, on cradled wood panel.

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II

III

Shocked into consciousness by sunlight Iva supports herself with her arms and leans forward Eyelids feel thick and gluey Has she been crying in her sleep?

The sun is yet a rumor Iva sleeps like the dead Until she doesn’t.

On the third day she feels herself rising She observes herself in the mirror Washes her mahogany cheeks That’s odd, she thinks Lock the gate, John, Or the Crowder boys will steal our cow.

The bed is cold, the stove out Her long black hair matted by high fevers In her dreams, the sounds of a gurgling brook She looks at John, her teeth chattering He is completely blue now.

She presses on John’s chest.

Blood and mucus slip between his blue lips Breathe, John, Breathe.

Don’t worry I gave our baby girl to your sister, Euda Yesterday, the day before, maybe last week, She’s safe.

Didn’t make a sound, just waved bye-bye, Bye-bye, bye-bye, Mommy.

Like you, she doesn’t complain Like you, she’s more Irish than Cherokee — like me.

Breathe, John. Breathe.

Take a breath, John Hoggatt How many times? Breathe.

Iva curls up by his side, played out Who hast never bruised a living flower, she whispers.

Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to take If I should die before I wake.

Breathe, John.

She coughs into her handkerchief John honey, She coughs into her handkerchief John honey, She coughs into her handkerchief Hear me.

Yes Iva You live in unmeaning dreams, he says, The grave is ready.

John honey Stay I washed your Sunday shirt Hung it on the line to dry We can bury our faces In autumn laundry Taste the scent of sun In a field of light Breathing as one Stay

—LeAnne Howe (Choctaw Nation), excerpt from “1918 Union Valley Road, Oklahoma” WINTER 2021 | 81

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KRISTIN GENTRY

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ORN AND RAISED in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Kristin Gentr y (Choctaw Nation) works in numerous media, from portrait photography, jewelry, and printmaking to painting. Her sculptor grandfather James Oran Hoover, her mentor Benjamin Harjo Jr. (Absentee Shawnee/Seminole), and her art professors all inspired her.

In spring 2020, Gentry earned her master’s degree in Native leadership from Southeastern Oklahoma State University.

She earned her BFA degree in painting and printmaking from Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma, in 2009. From 2011 to 2013, she participated in the Arts-in-Medicine program at the University of New Mexico. The National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development gave Gentry one of its 2012 Native American 40 under 40 awards.

Her abstract paintings explore botanical themes, inspired by natural forms, cultural representations of plants in textiles, and the symbiotic relationships of crops, people, and animal pollinators. An avid gardener, Gentry researches Indigenous agricultural practices and draws artistic inspiration from the processes of pollination and seed germination.

Having worked as an arts educator, she now devotes her time to her own studio practice. Gentry exhibits at the Southeastern Art Show and Market, Artesian Art Festival, Cherokee Art Market, and shows throughout Oklahoma and New Mexico. She has curated individual and group exhibitions and writes for several print and online periodicals.

Currently, she lives in Owasso, Oklahoma, with her husband and daughter.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

KRISTINGENTRY.COM

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above Kristin Gentry (Choctaw Nation), Mali Chito (The Storm), from The Circle series, 2020, watercolor, ink, poetry on paper, 22 × 30 in.

BOOK REVIEWS

Little Big Bully

By Heid E. Erdrich Penguin Books, 2020

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O NOT MISTAKE ME for an Ojibwe teller of tradition teller of the living lit of long-dead tellers but do count me as a teller of still-alive stories,” Heid E. Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) writes in the poem “BearAncestry.com.” In the contextual notes at the back of the collection, Erdrich informs any reader who might need to know, “The website ‘BearAncestry. com’ does not exist and there is no genetic test for your clan animal.” Thus it is throughout the collection: Dry wit intersperses with a keen (in both senses) awareness of the way language and imagery reflect and affect not just identity but existence.

The “still-alive stories” in Little Big Bully are alive despite various attempts to silence or erase them, through physical, institutional, environmental, or emotional violence. Erdrich meets these attempts with the aforementioned sardonic wit, allusions to canonical literature and popular culture, and especially, an interrogation of language. From Grand Portage Ojibwe artist Andrea Carlson’s cover art to the contextual notes at the back of the book, every part of Little Big Bully responds to the silencing effects of violence by wresting control of words, space, and the “rules” of literature.

The collection’s cover art is from Carlson’s 2019 screen print, Exit. Carlson’s statement on the image is included in the end matter. She calls the image a “sigil for warding off loss.” It references imagery from mound cultures. Carlson cites the defacement and destruction of mounds as an example of colonial erasure and calls the image “an attempt at reparative presence for the space between the Twin Cities and Chicago.” The poems in the collection reflect other physical and spiritual destruction.

Erdrich writes that many of the poems were written or revised during the Polar Vortex of 2019 when “schools were closed, meetings canceled, and everyone hunkered down to binge watch and scroll, wonder, and worry about us all.” The book was published during the COVID-19 pandemic when people around the world found themselves in similar isolation with a much longer-lasting cause whose ending remains uncertain. These circumstances, too, are a kind of silencing, and the fact this collection arose from them adds a layer of immediacy to the historical forces referenced in the poems, from blood quantum to politics, colonialism to the virulence of the Trump presidency.

While Little Big Bully is certainly not an explanation of Indigeneity for outsiders, it uses the conventions and trappings of such writing (like context notes at the end) as part of its commentary on how Indigenous people are defined from both within and outside their own communities and selves.

The poem “Fauxskins” is an example of the work within the collection that can make you stop reading and wince in relieved recognition that someone else has articulated truths you’ve felt but not been able to speak for all the reasons Erdrich addresses in the collection as a whole. “Fauxskins” is about people who think they are Indigenous for a variety of reasons: “I’ve always been close to nature so close to animals so close to rocks // so close to you // I am right / behind you getting better than you at the language the beadwork the smudge / the water protection and skirt shaming and de-colonizing and outrage and being… // so spiritual / so yes very / spiritual your / spirit animal.”

“Fauxskins” points out that the ancestors who come to these people in “one-time visions” never bring “a message to vote in tribal elections // or get that GED / or go for a run or party party party” and exposes the pathetic (in a non-derogatory sense) means by which people separated from their own culture grasp for an identity defined for them by, at best, romantic notions that are themselves a weapon of erasure.

Perhaps one of the most admirable qualities of Little Big Bully is that the poems never take an easy way out. They invite the reader to question what forces define every “us” and “them” when it comes to Indigenous people, whether that be through legislative, academic, artistic, or cultural means. And they do it with an authoritative yet compassionate voice.

Erdrich is a champion of Native

Erdrich is a champion of Native writers and a prolific writer herself. writers and a prolific writer herself. She has published seven collections of poetry, an Indigenous foods memoir, and two anthologies, all well-received. In her powerful introduction to New Poets of Native Nations (Graywolf Press, 2018), Erdrich tells a story from her publishing history: She writes that when she was seeking publication of her second book, she was “told by more than one publisher that it was ‘too bad we already have our Indian poet.’” Throughout her career, she has done her part to keep the same from happening to other writers, which has sometimes led to her name being associated almost more with her support than with her own fine work. That is one reason it is pleasing to see the positive reception of this 2020 collection. A National Poetry Series winner, Little Big Bully dares to speak plainly to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers, and it could not have come at a more necessary time.

—Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke) WINTER 2021 | 83

BOOK REVIEWS

Larger Than Memory: Contemporary Art from Indigenous North America Edited by Tobi Lopez Taylor and Deborah Paddison Heard Museum, 2020

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HIS CATALOGUE offers an artwork-forward approach in a visual summary of its namesake exhibition, organized by Heard Museum curators, Erin Joyce and Diana F. Pardue. The publication gives participating artists a high quality, archival space to represent their practices through a generous collection of detail and overview images. In their central presence, the images serve as an organizational tool for the catalogue. They remind audiences of the key actions that artworks take in forging the beginnings of exhibitions and publications, while critically interrogating museum practices and art historical discourses. Guided by the artworks’ positions and patterns, the essays tackle several moments of crisis currently underway in both art writing and exhibitions of Indigenous arts of North America.

The project’s title phrase, larger than memory, borrows concepts from two intersecting fields. “Grace,” a poem published in 1990 by Joy Harjo (Muscogee/Cherokee), the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, conveys survival as a way of knowing that a commencement of the beyond awaits. Harjo’s lyrics state, “I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.” Her words exert confidence in Native peoples’ creativity and they also point ahead to the exhibition’s timespan of 2000 to 2020—a period that coincides with the flourishing “information age.”

Reproduced in full, “Grace” interlocks with another context of this phrase, which is employed in computer science discourses in such questions as, “What lies outside our current ability to store and process data? What is larger than memory?”

With a focus on urgent questions concerning Indigenous arts, the catalogue’s six essays offer a prism of considerations relating to the artworks’ unifying motive of “larger than memory.” Christopher T. Green proposes White Earth Ojibwe writer Gerald Vizenor’s framework of transmotion, or Native peoples’ rights to movement, as a viable theory from which to contextualize contemporary art from Indigenous North America. The essay addresses a current crisis in academia— the lack of Indigenized theories for analyzing Native arts in scholarly and museological platforms.

Erin Joyce confronts a mosaic of violence embedded in arts and museum practices that inflict trauma on Indigenous peoples. She names several facets of these persistent conditions that run deep in colonial histories and continue today.

In forms particular to time and place, these institutional violations include the misrepresentation and sidestepping of Indigenous artists, colonial “legitimization” of Indigenous cultural practices, fetishization of Indigenous arts, and the complicit amnesia of place histories.

David Martínez (Akimel O'odham/ Hia Ced O'odham/Mexican-American) names the imposed order of linear time

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as a fiction that attempts to colonize Indigenous ways of knowing and being.

Linear time carries over into outsider designations of Native arts through imposed values within cultural, temporal, and medium-based categories. Martínez emphasizes that Native epochs, kinships, and ceremonies forge a continuum of Indigenous spaces sited within sets of mutual terms and complex identities.

Anya Montiel (Mestiza/Tohono O’odham descent) broaches the health crisis in Indian Country through an analysis of artworks that voice social commentaries on these issues. Cree artist Mike Patten’s Native Beating #1 (2011), a baseball bat covered in beadwork, portrays beauty, pain, and the corporeal in its blood-red-and-white composition. Active reciprocity grounds Trade Canoe: Fry Bread (2018), a collaborative installation by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish/Cree/Shoshone) and Neal Inuksois Ambrose-Smith (Salish/Cree/ Shoshone descent). In their work, a suspended canoe filled with frybread commemorates its route as a returned trade offering to colonial forces. Likewise, Seminole/Mvskoke artist C. Maxx Stevens’s Last Supper (2011), a banquet installation, calls out the detrimental effects of processed foods through her use of wax casts that reference the yellowish tint of butter.

Diane F. Pardue sketches an institutional context for the exhibition.

She traces the Heard Museum’s history from its opening in 1929 through projects dating to 2014, noting paradigm shifts along the way. Beginning in 1964 in a sales format, the museum hosted solo shows for Native artists and began a new focus of purchasing contemporary Native artworks from temporar y exhibitions. By the 1970s, an invitational format emerged as two-to-four person exhibitions featuring Native paintings and sculptures of the era. From 1983 through 2002, the invitationals took a new form as biennials—a proposition that Jaune Quick-to-See Smith put forth to the museum staff. From the 1990s through the 2010s, thematic exhibitions of Native

BOOKS REVIEWS

arts in solo and group formats paved the way for current projects like Larger Than Memory.

In the book’s closing essay, Edgar Schmitz offers a reading of today’s global contemporary moment through a dialectical, or contradictory, lens. He considers the exhibition’s artworks as strategic foils to institutional acts of denial. Schmitz also muses on the ironies of the intertwined conditions of immobility and togetherness running concurrent with the raging climate crisis. He proposes that the artists in this exhibition do not use their works to recode, per se, but rather to enact initiations of recovery in their embodied arrangements of relationships.

Larger Than Memory: Contemporary Art from Indigenous North America features artists Neal Inuksois Ambrose-Smith, Nanobah Becker (Diné), Nanibah Chacon (Diné/Chicana), Lewis deSoto (Cahuilla descent), Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee), Elisa Harkins (Muscogee/Cherokee), Brian Jungen (Dane-zaa), Brad Kahlhamer (no tribal affiliation), Ian Kuali'i (Native Hawaiian/Apache descent), Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota), Tanya Lukin Linklater (Alutiiq), Meryl McMaster (Plains Cree), Kent Monkman (Cree), Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache), Mike Patten, Eric-Paul Riege (Diné), Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Jock Soto (Diné), Kali Spitzer (Kaska Dena), C. Maxx Stevens, Marie Watt (Seneca), Kathy Whitman-Elk Woman (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara), and Steven J. Yazzie (Diné/Laguna).

—Michelle J. Lanteri WINTER 2021 | 85

REVIEWS

ALBUQUERQUE

Feminisms 516 ARTS

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ATHER THAN SHYING AWAY from the word feminism, which all too often is used in a derogatory manner, the exhibition Feminisms boldly embraces the term and expands on it by adding an “s” to make it plural in order to include diverse cultural expressions of female power and culture. In the show, feminism is not defined as anti-male but as an appreciation of a female perspective in terms of aesthetics and media. The show begins with Queer Indigenous Feminisms (2020), in which the title is painted on the wall in almost life-sized letters that grow upwards into a rainbow of colors.

Painted directly on the wall of the 516 ARTS gallery by Haley Greenfeather English (Turtle Mountain Chippewa/ Red Lake Ojibwe), the word takes on its own life. A recent graduate from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, English articulates the importance of kinship and the power of women, using vibrant colors to describe the interconnectedness of communities and ecosystems.

Feminisms considers how art can both illustrate a female perspective on the world as it is and serve as a catalyst for cultural change. This show was organized as part of the Feminist Art Coalition, which shows feminist perspectives through a series of exhibitions and programs across the nation in the months leading up to the 2020 election and as a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to legalize women’s suffrage in 1920. As the host, 516 ARTS, a non-collecting, nonprofit space, has a long record of promoting art that is challenging and diverse by inviting curators to consider current events and different perspectives and affording artists the opportunity to create something new, like English’s Queer Indigenous Feminisms.

Curated by Andrea Hanley (Diné), chief curator at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian

in Santa Fe, this exhibition includes a diverse group of artists, including Native American, Latinx, and women who immigrated from other countries, working in a range of media and content to express and to display unusual images and media. Hanley has been working in the field of contemporary Native American art for more than 25 years.

For Hanley, gender issues are more than political; she is from a matrilineal culture, and her mother actively fought for the rights of women and Native Americans.

She cites many role models, including LaDonna Harris, a Comanche activist and politician who has been a leader in promoting Native female empowerment.

All of Hanley’s experience in the art world has heightened her awareness of the lack of a woman’s voice in the hierarchy, which discourages female artists from articulating their perspective.

The show catalogue includes a conversation between Hanley and independent

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curator and noted feminist art critic Lucy Lippard, in which Hanley notes a distinct female language that the artists in the show can use “and elevate it, amplify it, and turn it into art.”

As suggested by the title, the artists chosen for this show demonstrate the depth and breadth of art created by women, suggesting that there are different ways in which feminist ideologies are expressed by different cultures. The choice of materials is key for the works in the show, which is often outside the norms in the art world. For example, the artists Natalie Ball (Modoc/Klamath/ Black) and Rosemary Meza-DesPlas (Mexican-American) used their own hair in their art. Ball’s Pussy Hat series incorporates materials including her hair, shells, and textiles set on metal poles, reminiscent of severed heads set on spikes. Meza-DesPlas uses her hair to embroider images of noted women across history.

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Eastern Band Cherokee artist Luzene Hill’s Retribute uses mylar emergency blankets, the type given to asylum seekers entering the United States, to create a series of cloaks. Hill uses precontact forms, like the feathered cloaks illustrated in codex drawings, to articulate current issues. Cutting the blankets into strips and forming them into ruffles sewn onto the base, these reflective garments are both inorganic in material and natural in form, with spirals like flower petals.

Marie Watt (Seneca Nation) constructed her 2014 large-scale quilt Untitled (Dream Catcher), which forms an intricate pattern of concentric circles like a target with long loops of satin binding usually used to edge blankets.

The loops hang loosely from the piece, reminiscent of Eva Hesse’s famous Hang Up (1966), a seminal work of feminist art. For the artist, the exhibition reflects her experience as a Seneca woman from a matrilineal community. She describes herself as coming from protofeminist stock, a culture in which women are respected for their ability to work and contribute. Watt often uses blankets to create wall hangings since many tribes give blankets as a token of respect and appreciation. She organizes sewing circles, bringing women together to sew the quilts and add a backing to honor the history of quiltmaking and to offer a shared experience for those involved, providing a quiet moment to bond together and to discuss different issues.

Most of the blankets in her work were purchased in secondhand shops, usually for only a few dollars.

To accompany the exhibition 516 ARTS organized several online events to celebrate different aspects of female culture, including an evening of poetry with Luci Tapahonso (Diné), Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota), and Edie Tsong, and moderated by Elizabeth Jacobson, poet laureate of Santa Fe. Hanley joined a panel discussion with other women curators from New Mexico, including Lippard as well as New Mexico State University Art Museum director and head curator Marisa Sage, University of New Mexico Art Museum curator of prints and photographs Mary Statzer, and Southwest Contemporary publisher and editor-in-chief Lauren Tresp.

The artists include Natalie Ball, Dorielle Caimi, Desert ArtLAB (including Chicana/Rarámuri artist April Bojorquez and Chicano artist Matt Garcia) in collaboration with Shawna Sunrise (Diné/Kewa), Angela Ellsworth, Haley Greenfeather English, Elisa Harkins (Muscogee/Cherokee), Mara Lonner, Luzene Hill, Carrie Marill, Thais Mather, Rosemary Meza-DesPlas, Edie Tsong, and Marie Watt. These artists demonstrate the power and diversity of perspectives within feminist art today.

—Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD

above Natalie Ball (Modoc/ Klamath), Wedding, 2019, wool, cotton, pine, braiding hair, woven cedar, acrylic paint, 96 × 60 in. opposite Marie Watt (Seneca), Untitled (Dream Catcher), 2014, reclaimed wool blankets, satin binding, thread, 107 × 991/2 in.

Photo: Aaron Johanson.

WINTER 2021 | 87

REVIEWS

CHICAGO

Apsáalooke Women and Warriors Field Museum

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HE FIELD MUSEUM has joined the ranks of major institutions recontextualizing its collection by putting Native voices at the forefront. Apsáalooke Women and Warriors centers around painted hide shields from the Field’s permanent collection of 40 million objects. The exhibition is organized both thematically and chronologically, starting with the Apsáalooke creation story (relayed in an animated short) and the discovery of sacred tobacco, displayed in medicine bundles with permission from members of the Crow Tobacco Society.

Guest curated by Nina Sanders (Crow), the exhibition highlights retention of cultural knowledge. For example, mountains and the tipi are represented as triangles in historical items, such as an embossed parfleche, and more recent work is also displayed including beaded horse regalia by Lydia Falls Down (Crow). The juxtaposition of historical and recently made objects shows an unbroken lineage of cultural heritage. A video short of Elias Not Afraid (Crow) beading a medallion is available on the Field’s website, which is particularly useful for educators.

Another custom handed down through generations and prominent throughout this exhibition is the iconic elk tooth dress. Early iterations reflected wealth and hunting prowess, requiring 400 to 500 teeth—the result of over 200 kills, since only two incisor teeth from each animal can be used. For decades dressmakers have used imitation elk teeth, and contemporary dresses and suit jackets designed by B.Yellowtail (Crow/ Northern Cheyenne) featured in the final gallery are made from fabric printed with the elk tooth pattern. This display is enlivened with mirrored videos of individuals wearing the symbolic fashions riding horses on the Crow Reservation

near Billings, Montana, over a rap soundtrack by Supaman (Crow).

A grid of 27 photographic portraits

by Adam Sings in the Timber (Crow) shows Crow women wearing elk tooth dresses, celebrating a matriarchal society.

Baté (two-spirit) warriors Finds Them and Kills Them (Crow, ca. 1854–ca.

1929) and The Other Magpie (Crow, ca.

1849–after 1900) are introduced in one display, signaling that in Apsáalooke

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above Elias Not Afraid (Crow), Beaded Bag, 2019, deer hide, elk teeth, glass beads, Italian leather, collection of the Field Museum. Photo: John Weinstein. © Field Museum. opposite Unknown Crow artist, Baleiíttaashtee (Celebration Shirt), buckskin, short-tailed weasel tails, seed beads, pony beads, collection of the Field Museum. Photo: John Weinstein. © Field Museum.

REVIEWS

culture, definitions of both woman and warrior are not exclusive.

In its first 50 years of existence, the Field Museum oversaw 440 collecting expeditions. Perhaps 60 painted hide shields were acquired by former Field director Stephen Simms in 1901 and 1902. Seven of those are shown in this exhibition for the first time. Women were keepers of the shields. In this gallery, large portraits of individual women watch over each object.

One significant element in this exhibition is that all labels and didactics are written in first person, centering oral tradition. I, we, and our statements personalize otherwise dry, institutional, “authorless” information. Acknowledging the source of information lends a sense of authenticity compared to third person, perhaps more so in this age of disinformation. The Field Museum has produced all texts in English and Spanish for several years, and Apsáalooke terms are woven into this exhibition.

Several artists were commissioned to create work for Apsáalooke Women and

Warriors. Among them, paintings by Ben Pease (Crow/Northern Cheyenne) stand out. Giant banners of Sacred Under the Cliff of Yellowstone are visible from Lake Shore Drive outside the museum. The painting depicts five women riding horses against a ledger paper background. Halos signal their sacred status as ancestors and bearers of culture.

Future in Our Eyes is a twelvefoot-tall, foam and fiberglass sculpture of a man and woman standing back to back. Intimating generic plastic toys, the couple is distinguished by tribally specific regalia. For Wherein Lies the Beauty of Life, Pease hand-colored a reproduction of a young woman cradling an infant, surrounding them with vibrant flowers.

Indecipherable text is scratched into the paint at the bottom.

Apsáalooke Biakalishta (Crow Girls) is an oil painting by Allen Knows His Gun (Crow) derived from a historical photograph of five girls sitting astride horses. Kevin Red Star (Crow) is represented with four acrylic paintings.

Mountain Crow Flower Dress portrays a woman in a white dress wearing beaded accessories and otter pelt hair ties. Two warriors stand behind her. Unfortunately this installation suffers from inadequate lighting.

The exhibition opened on March 12 but was closed the following day along with most Chicago cultural attractions due to the pandemic. The exhibition was organized in conjunction with the University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, where additional objects are on display until December 18, 2020. The Field Museum exhibition has been extended to July 18, 2021. A catalogue edited by Sanders and Neubauer curator Dieter Roelstraete is available.

In its approach, Apsáalooke Women and Warriors provides a preview of the major reinstallation of the Native American hall, slated to open in 2022, which privileges contemporary Native voices and living cultural practices.

—Andrea L. Ferber, PhD WINTER 2021 | 89

REVIEWS

SANTA FE

Indigenous Futurisms: Transcending Past/ Present/Future IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts

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ATSY PHILLIPS (Cherokee Nation), director of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), echoes Grace Dillon’s definition of the Indigenous Futurisms movement as “the creation and visualization of possible futures for Indigenous people.” The way I might describe it to my friends and family, who may not be familiar with Indigenous Futurism, would be to think of Indigenous Futurism as a science-fiction way of imagining Indian people in a future in which your kids exist and thrive, but in a fun way. However you want to phrase it, it’s an exciting exercise and genre.

Certain artists come to my mind when it comes to Indigenous Futurism.

Diné painter Ryan Singer has been mining this material for a while now by consistently rewarding viewers with Star Wars references/Easter eggs throughout many of his paintings. Cochiti Pueblo artist Virgil Ortiz has been playing in this sandbox for a long time as well.

I remember joining Steven Paul Judd (Kiowa/Choctaw) on an afternoon drive to Ortiz’s very nondescript Cochiti studio where Ortiz dressed Judd up and photographed him in what looked to me like garb for an S&M Pueblo freedom fighter. Ortiz’s subversive take on Pueblo Futurism reminds one that every artist has a point of view that can be wonderfully weird and subjective and, if they’re good, worth a look.

Because of COVID-19, I had to wait to drive up to see the show at the MoCNA, but I felt it necessary to see it firsthand. While MoCNA does have an excellent recreation of the show online, I’m old fashioned and prefer to see the real thing. I need to be there in person.

The show does reward a live viewing.

While one could argue that every show needs to be seen in person, this particular work does demand to be seen in person.

Walking into the show, visitors are greeted by a Star Wars/Star Trek– type sci-fi portal, framing a flat-screen TV with an image of a planet. They are having fun with this show and they should. As an Indigenous film critic, I have long lamented the fact that so many Indigenous films begin in and dig themselves out of a mud pit of trauma; it’s as if so many of these films have to begin and take on an act of healing to proceed to an objective. It’s a lot to deal with. As an artist and as a viewer, I look forward to a time when Indigenous people, likely a few generations down the road, will not have to perform this act of artistic ceremony before they can jump into a story headlong.

So, this show tells you from the beginning, “have fun.” It’s empowering if you let it be. And anything that references pop culture as surely as any of this art does will be able to be understood by the whole family: uncles, cousins who get bored easily, kids, everyone. Who says accessible art is in any way bad? I certainly don’t.

Walking further into the show, I was immediately drawn to Virgil Ortiz’s life-sized installation of futuristic Pueblo

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above, top Ryan Singer (Diné), Sand People Sand Painting, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 30 × 40 in. above, bottom Jeffrey Veregge (Port Gamble S'Klallam), Mars Attacks, 2014/2020, digital art on paper.

REVIEWS

GAIL TREMBLAY (Mi’kmaq and Onondaga)

FROELICK GALLERY Portland, OR 503.222.1142 When the Ethnographic Present Ceases to Exist, Does the Red Leader Get Very Thin?, 2018, 16mm film, red leader, silver braid, 9.5 x 7 x 7˝ photo: Rebekah Johnson

Revolt figures, Venutian Soldiers (2020).

One has a male shape, one a female shape, and they are draped in shiny gowns with the latest in dystopian gas mask Indigenous gear. If the masks were made in Anadarko, they might have been beaded (they were not). The two beings hold spears. They are fun to look at and be near, a little exotic, even a little naughty.

These figures, frozen in time, are living their best Indigenous sexy post-apocalyptic lives. One could see these two inhabiting the world of Mi'kmaq filmmaker Jeff Barnaby’s recent zombie thriller, Blood Quantum (2019). Ortiz says he’s been developing a screenplay titled Revolt 1680/2180 for the last two decades (!). It could be just the impetus and inspiration for his installation work, but I’d like to see it come to fruition.

Port Gamble S'Klallam painter/ illustrator Jeffrey Veregge’s Northwest Coast lines and patterns are always satisfying to see. He has such clean lines, and the color choices are always spot

on. This is likely influenced by the more than 100 comic book covers he has done up to this point in his career. His work can be mischievous such as his digital print, Mars Attacks (2014/2020), with its repetition of ’50s era Martian figures which reference the equally mischievous Tim Burton film Mars Attacks! (1996).

The Martian bodies feature Northwest Coast–influenced stylization, which I overlooked upon the first viewing. That’s the genius of his work and what makes it fun. Veregge’s work marries the concept of Indigenous Futurisms by fusing these Northwest Coast designs along with familiar pop culture images, so in that way, these designs live on in new arenas, projected into the future.

Ryan Singer’s two selections of paintings conceptualize a world where Star Wars and Navajo culture are one and the same. Sand People Sand Painting (2019) posits, what if sand people lived in a hogan as Navajos do and painted sand paintings of their own, in this case

of R2-D2? And in Fallen Star Destroyer (2016), a Star Destroyer has crash-landed onto the Navajo Reservation, as two Navajo ladies walk by with their sheep, not startled in the least. Singer turns the oft-mentioned cliché, “living in two worlds,” on its head. Only in Singer’s two worlds, he doesn’t reference tradition versus modernity, rather in Singer’s two worlds reality combines with a world in which Boba Fett lives and breathes freely and stands in line to order a mutton sandwich.

Guest co-curators Suzanne Fricke and Chelsea Herr (Choctaw Nation) and MoCNA chief curator Manuela Well-Off-Man have put together a thoughtful exhibition and collected some of the best representations of the genre. I look forward to more works that will be created by up-and-coming Indigenous artists that will no doubt have us thinking about the possibilities of what lies ahead in new ways. We need it now more than ever.

—Jason Asenap (Comanche/Muscogee) WINTER 2021 | 91

REPORT

ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA

Elisa Harkins and Quese IMC Artist Residency Crisp-Ellert Art Museum

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HE CRISP-ELLERT ART MUSEUM (CEAM) at Flagler College is a longtime supporter of Indigenous art. The museum consistently exhibits works by Native artists, and their programming includes Native artists actively producing art.

What stands out about the programming at CEAM is how they incorporate Native art. Indigenous artists and artworks are not stuck in a box and labeled as “Native art,” only to be viewed through an anthropological lens. The programming is designed so that Flagler students engage, question, and respond to the Indigenous artists as they would any artists. CEAM’s pairing of Elisa Harkins (Muscogee/ Cherokee) and Quese IMC (Pawnee/ Seminole) as artists-in-residence is the latest programming designed to educate and expose Flagler students to Native art.

Julie Dickover, the museum’s director, told me: “The CEAM Artist Residency is a regular program of artists-in-residence to engage in themes of place-making while collaborating with some aspect of St. Augustine’s local community through a variety of ways.

One of our goals is to invite artists from a range of fields, who integrate and collaborate between the areas of fine art and broader fields of inquiry, such as curatorial practice, performing arts, and creative writing.”

Dickover first discovered Harkins’s work through the Tulsa Artist Residency.

Harkins’s practice is interdisciplinary, encompassing music, performance, and sculpture. As Dickover explained: “I was particularly drawn to her use of Cherokee and Mvskoke languages and how she incorporates electronic music into her work, along with … Creek hymns and songs. I reached out to Elisa, and after having a conversation with her I invited her to participate in the residency.”

Quese IMC, born Marcus Frejo Little Eagle, is a hip-hop artist, music producer, performance artist, and cultural

activist. He described his CEAM project: “My program was a mix of Indigenous 3D art and Indigenous cultural storytelling and hip hop. On one hand I [was] taught how to make a hand drum, … and on the other hand I carried a microphone translating my story and musical talents through hip hop. The program is a balance and teaching I share to teach about the importance of maneuvering different worlds and gifts from my own personal existence.”

Harkins and Quese have previously worked on projects together. “I heard about Elisa through her music,” said Quese. “We later went on to collaborate on like interests based around our Creek Seminole connection. I produced some beats for her for her new project and collaborated on a Creek Seminole hymn CD I recorded in 2005. When someone understands the importance of the

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culture and positive affect it can have on our Native people, I’ll usually be open to working with them.”

Their joint artist residency schedule consisted of in-person and livestreamed internet events. On Tuesday, November 10, 2020, Harkins gave an artist talk to Flagler College students. The discussion was livestreamed so community members could participate as well. The next day, Quese conducted a drum making class with Professor Laura Mongiovi’s 3D Concepts and Materials class. That Thursday Harkins gave a performance at the college and online. The following day Harkins met with BFA and BA portfolio students to give them individual critiques.

After a weekend of exploring the history and sights of St. Augustine, Harkins and Quese filmed a performance video at Castillo de San Marcos. The Spanish built the defensive fort between

REPORT

above Quese IMC (Pawnee/ Seminole) and Elisa Harkins (Muscogee/Cherokee) shooting video at the Castillo de San Marcos, St. Augustine, Florida.

Image courtesy of the CrispEllert Art Museum, Flagler College. opposite, top Elisa Harkins (Muscogee/Cherokee), Wampum, performance at Flagler College, St. Augustine, November 2020.

Image courtesy of Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, Flagler College, St. Augustine, Florida. opposite, bottom Quese IMC (Pawnee/Seminole). Image courtesy of the artist.

1672 and 1695. The fort remains a controversial marker of Indigenous oppression.

It was built as a prison to hold Seminole warriors, including Osceola, during the Second Seminole War. In the late 1870s it was used to incarcerate Native people from the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Caddo tribes from the Red River Wars. Again, in the late 19th century the US federal government imprisoned more than 500 Apache people at the fort. As a result of this traumatic history, Native people now visit the site as a place to mourn and remember their ancestors and the past. Harkins and Quese visited the Castillo de San Marcos to remember.

Both artists visited the Seminole Brighton Reservation during their residency. They attended a service at the Brighton First Indian Baptist Church

where they sang hymns in the Mvskoke language. Harkins and Quese were grateful for the opportunity to interact and learn from Seminole Tribe of Florida citizens. Flagler College students and faculty appreciated the visiting artists sharing their insights and artwork with the Florida community.

“Florida was good,” Quese wrote to me. “I’m Seminole so I’ll always have a spiritual connection here. My great-greatgrandma walked from here to Oklahoma when she was 13. She lived to be 120.

She raised my mom. I love my Seminole roots. I’m Bear clan, with my fist in the air. Being here empowered me as I’m finishing up my new album. I’m gathering power along the way; that’s part of the art form for me. Herre mahe.”

Harkins reflected, “Well, our residency has come to an end, and my experience has exceeded my expectations.

I enjoyed the interaction with the students through lectures, virtual performances, and a workshop. I also shot a video with Quese at the Castillo for a video for the Seminole Creek hymn, ‘Heleluyvn.’” She thanked CEAM for bringing her videographer and photographer, Ian Byers-Gamber, to Florida, and thanked Jewel Lavatta (Florida Seminole), Mvskoke language instructor. “The thing that I didn’t expect to happen was the rekindling of interest in Seminole Creek hymns for the Brighton First Indian Baptist Church,” said Harkins. “I sang ‘Hesaktv Meset Likes,’ and then Quese got up and sang several hymns in the old style, and it was very moving. Many people said it brought tears to their eyes because it reminded them of the elders who had passed on. It felt so good when everyone wanted the CD that we published of the Sand Creek [Eufaula Baptist Church] congregation back home in Wewoka, Oklahoma.

“I only have memorized three hymns, but I now want to learn more,” Harkins reflected. “This wasn't my intention to accomplish from the residency, but I now know the importance of being a song holder. And I am inspired to keep carrying these songs with me for future generations.” —Michole Eldred (Catawba/Eastern Cherokee) WINTER 2021 | 93

MEMORIAL

ANTHONY GAUTHIER November 13, 1942–December 2, 2020

above Anthony Gauthier (Menominee/Ho-Chunk, 1942–2020), Creations of the Clans/Circle of Life, 2010, public mural, 132 × 576 in., Vinal Street, Wittenberg, Wisconsin. Photo: Corey Coyle (CC BY 3.0).

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CELEBRATED MURALIST AND PORTRAIT PAINTER, Anthony “Tony” Gauthier is best known for his Circle of Life mural in Wittenberg, Wisconsin, and for his iconic Bicentennial Painting, in which paired portraits of Nez Perce Chief Joseph and Martin Luther King Jr. reflect the parallel civil rights struggles of Native Americans and African-Americans.

Creation of the Clans/Circle of Life, painted in 2010, has three sections. The first shows the Menominee creation story in which a bear emerges from the waters to create humans. The second shows Ho-Chunk, Menominee, and Potawatomi women—the three main tribes present in Wisconsin in the 19th century—at a powwow and features a jingle dress dancer. The final panel shows clan animals from current tribes living in Wisconsin, including the Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Oneida, and Stockbridge-Munsee tribes of Mohican and Lenape people. He juxtaposed dramatic landscape painting with ribbonwork design borders.

Both works feature naturalistic portraiture and stylized abstraction

with abundant cultural details to relay historical narratives with social commentary. His concern for greater social reform earned Gauthier a spot in the 1990 Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) Museum (now IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts) exhibition, Radicals and Renegades: American Indian Protest Art. Gauthier came by his cultural knowledge first from his parents Peter Gauthier and Adeline Decorah Gauthier.

Born in Neopit, Wisconsin, on the Menominee Indian Reservation, the artist was enrolled in the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin and was of Ho-Chunk descent.

He was a boarding school student at the Winnebago Indian School in Neillsville, Wisconsin, before graduating from high school in Shawano, Wisconsin.

In 1964 he enlisted in the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army. GI Bill funding enabled Gauthier to study at the San Francisco Art Institute, New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and IAIA. He earned his associate of fine arts degree in 1979.

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The artist explored numerous media: woodcarving, pastel drawing, painting, jewelry, and mixed media in the easel arts, as well as book illustration and graphic design. He exhibited frequently in Santa Fe and across the country, from the Native American Center for the Living Arts in Niagara Falls, New York, to the Sioux Indian Museum in Rapid City, South Dakota. He participated in the annual Red Cloud Indian Art Show in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Public collections including those of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, IAIA, University of Wisconsin, and New Mexico Highlands University hold his work.

Gauthier’s daughter Amber Gunn Gauthier and his younger brother John Gunn Gauthier are both artists, and he exhibited with his family several times including in Amerind Continuum: Past, Perseverance, and Possibilities (2010) at the Trickster Gallery in Schaumburg, Illinois. Anthony Gauthier’s artworks and his family will carry his legacy of art, cultural engagement, and activism forward.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

MEMORIAL

IRVING TODDY February 4, 1951–November 25, 2020

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RVING J. TODDY was Bit'ahnii clan (Folded Arms People), born for Tachii'nii clan Naaneesht'ezhi (Zuni, Red/Charcoal Streak Across Forehead).1 His parents were Elizabeth Roan Bennett and Beatien Yazz (also known as Jimmie Toddy Sr. 1928–2012), a Navajo code talker and celebrated Studio painter who studied at the Santa Fe Indian School. As a young child, Irving Toddy accompanied his father on trips to Gallup to deliver art to dealers. Toddy was the oldest son, and his younger brothers are also artists: Calvin is a silversmith, and Marvin is a painter. Irving taught his sister Frances how to draw and paint.

Growing up in Pine Springs on the Navajo Nation, he herded family sheep and learned Navajo oral history from his grandfather. Toddy’s first language was Navajo, but he picked up English by the time he entered kindergarten at Pine Springs Day School in Houck, Arizona. In third grade he switched to Roosevelt Elementary School in Gallup, New Mexico.

Toddy moved to Brigham City, Utah, to attend Intermountain Indian School. There he met Frances Halstrom, head of Utah’s Upward Bound program, which prepared disadvantaged youth for college. With Halstrom’s encouragement, he joined the program for several summers and met AfricanAmerican and Latino students. “My time there really opened my eyes,” he told the Gallup Independent. “Before I used to think that it was just Indians that were isolated from the American mainstream.”2 With that foundation, Toddy entered Utah State University (USU) in Logan. He left school for a short time to work as an illustrator for the Gallup-McKinley County Schools.

In 1973 he married Stella Mae Phillips. In 1983 he completed his bachelor of arts degree in illustration with a minor in painting and earned a master’s degree in 1986, also from USU. Eventually, Toddy moved back to his home community of Houck, where he and his wife raised six children. He pursued art full time and served as a Navajo Nation administrator from 1988 to 1990. Committed to education, he advocated for the BIA-run Pine Springs Day School to include the Navajo language and culture in its curriculum.3 He taught painting workshops, led students in mural projects, and volunteered with the nonprofit Art of the People to provide scholarships.

Toddy’s own artwork evolved from early flat works with minimum background to a lush, naturalistic style, celebrating Southwestern landscapes. Canyon de Chelly was a favorite subject. He painted not only intimate portraits of his fellow Navajos but also people he met from other tribes. His superb drawing skills provided strong foundations for his paintings, and he drew inspiration from Andrew Wyeth, a 20th-century Regionalist painter from Pennsylvania. Not one to grow complacent, Toddy returned to Flatstyle in recent years.

above Irving Toddy (Navajo, 1951–2020), Goodwill Games, 1989, oil on canvas, 231/2 × 233/8 in. Inspired by a powwow Toddy attended in Seattle, this painting won Best of Show at the 1992 Navajo Nation Fair.

The artist exhibited and accrued countless awards throughout the Southwest, notably at Gallup Inter-Tribal Ceremonial, Santa Fe Indian Market, and the Museum of Northern Arizona. Old Town Gallery in Flagstaff represented his work throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The Navajo Nation Museum includes his work in its permanent collection, and Twin Arrows Casino Resort in Flagstaff displays his murals.

While his paintings are still avidly sought after by collectors, Toddy used illustration to reach broader audiences. The Southwest Indian Foundation partnered with Master Pieces, Inc., in transforming one of Toddy’s paintings, Navajo Legacy, into a jigsaw puzzle. The complex work includes historical figures such as Navajo Chief Manuelito and US politicians signing the Navajo Treaty of 1868. He also illustrated numerous books including Cheyenne Again (Clarion, 1994), Dzání Yázhí Naazbaa': Little Woman Warrior Who Came Home; A Story of the Navajo Long Walk (Salina Bookshelf, 2005), and D is For Drum: A Native American Alphabet (Sleeping Bear Press, 2006) among others.

He even illustrated books by Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa). Some of the books are in Navajo as well as English—a means for Toddy to continue to share his language with others and to inspire upcoming generations.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

1. “Irving Toddy: Painter, Sculptor,” Art of the People, web.

2. Jerry Jammer, “Navajo Artist Strives for Realism in Paintings,” Gallup Independent, August 10, 1997, C-10.

3. Sandra J. Wilson, “Reclaiming Indian Education Through Partnerships with Engaged Institutions” in Engaged Institutions: Impacting the Lives of Vulnerable Youth through Place-Based Learning (Washington, DC: The Rural School and Community Trust, 2003): 43.

WINTER 2021 | 95

MEMORIAL

KATHY WALLACE March 16, 1947–October 2, 2020

above Katherine Wallace holding a trinket basket that she wove.

Photo: H. J. Tsinhnahjinnie (Seminole/Muscogee/Diné).

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N ENROLLED MEMBER of the Hoopa Valley Tribe and of Karuk and Yurok descent, Katherine Gale Wallace came from a long line of cultural leaders and basket weavers. A founding member of the California Indian Basketweavers’ Association, she was a weaver, an educator, and a community activist who helped to revive the art of California Indian basket weaving, including those of her peoples and other tribes.

Kathy’s sister, artist Lyn Risling, describes their elders as wonderful cultural role models. “Our dad and grandfather and aunts and uncles had a great influence on our lives, our generation. A lot of us just followed in their footsteps in some way or another,” she said.1 Apparently, like their father, renowned elder David Risling Jr., Kathy was a natural teacher and had a way of bringing out confidence and nurturing talents to enable others to become leaders in their respective communities.

As a child, Kathy gathered basketry materials with her grandmother and had several basket weaving teachers, but it was her aunt Vivien Hailstone (Hupa/Karuk/Yurok, 1913–2000) who especially influenced Kathy in the art of her ancestors. From her relations, Kathy learned that basket making is more than a means-to-an-end product. Much of this complicated, high art 1. Lyn Risling in discussion with the author, November 4, 2020.

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form is a yearly and ongoing cyclical process, and it is crucial for basket makers to care for their material source, the land.

“Forming a relationship with the land is the only way the land is going to survive; people have a responsibility to help care for that land and the land will help care for us,” said Kathy in a recorded storytelling series for the Jan T. Lowrey Cache Creek Nature Preserve, one of the places she actively participated in California Native basket maker material restoration efforts.

Kathy advocated for restoration and caretaking of the Indigenous ancestral territories throughout California. While advocating for the right to gather on public lands, she helped to educate both state and federal agency personnel about gathering practices and the detrimental effects of pesticides on ancestral gathering areas.

She was an educator for over 20 years including classes in Native American studies and basket techniques of material cultures in California and beyond. Kathy taught at D-Q University (which was the first tribal college established in California), University of California, Davis, and San Francisco State University (SFSU) where she taught for the last several years of her life.

Kathy was a cultural liaison to the Native communities in the San Francisco Bay region. At SFSU she was able to provide an Indigenous perspective, working with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) program.

She was also a NAGPRA consultant to the Native Council for the Oakland Museum of California and a collections consultant on California baskets. As an advisory council member for Cultural Conservancy at Presidio of San Francisco, she concentrated on the protection of sacred lands and sites.

Although a significant cultural leader in the art of basketry for multiple material cultures, Kathy did not produce a large body of artistic work. Instead, she advocated for the longevity of Indigenous ancestral knowledge and the rights of Indigenous Californians to manage, burn, and gather materials within their historic territories. She left behind a legacy to her peoples and her students by ensuring protections for the basket making processes.

The true nature of Kathy’s art form is evident in a statement she composed for the First Peoples Fund where she had been a Fellow and Community Spirit Award Honoree. “Long before a weaver or regalia maker sits down to put together the materials into a beautiful piece of art, he/she has developed a relationship with the plants and animals from which they came.”

Kathy wrote, “Knowledge of the land, the cycles of the plants, the seasons, the weather, how the material can be manipulated into the piece and how to honor these living things must be taught to the artist. Each piece will contain a part of the maker’s spirit as well as the spirit of all the things that are used in the completed piece.” —Nanette Kelley (Osage/Cherokee Nation)

ON VIEW MARCH 20, 2021 THROUGH OCTOBER 3, 2021

INDIGENOUS WOMEN: Border Matters Makaye Lewis (Tohono O’odham) Daisy Quezada Ureña (Mexican-American) M. Jenea Sanchez (Latinx) Gabriela Muñoz (Latinx)

704 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe NM 87505 wheelwright.org • (505) 982-4636

Indigenous Women: Border Matters features a timely look at four Indigenous women artists who speak to issues on both sides of the US border. Their practice is guided by current contemporary issues of identity, selfdetermination, human rights, and the impact on the human experience.

Makaye Lewis b.1996 (Tohono O’odham) Checkpoints: Now and Forever?, 2019

Wheelwright Museum

OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

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