First American Art Magazine No. 38, Spring 2023

TEN YEARS of CELEBRATING ART by INDIGENOUS PEOPLES of the AMERICAS

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

NO. 38, SPRING 2023

DISPLAY UNTIL JULY 3, 2023

TUNICA TREASURE

ORLANDO DUGI

INDIGIPOPX: NATIVE COMIC CON

ANITA FIELDS

OKLAHOMA STATE CAPITOL ART

TOM JONES

FAAM’S FIRST DECADE

ERIN SHAW

Enjoy an enriching, shared experience exploring centuries of Chickasaw history and traditions. The vibrant, vivid, living expression of Chickasaw culture unfolds through a 1700s tribal village, dance demonstrations, traditional gardens and engaging exhibits.

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INDIGENOUS ARTS FESTIVAL BUFFALO THUNDER RESORT & CASINO | SANTA FE, NM

AUGUST 18, 19 & 20, 2023 ARTS MARKET • CREATIVE ENTREPRENUERS FILM • PUEBLO FASHION • FOOD TRUCKS

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HEAR THEIR VOICES For 90 years, the Stewart Indian School operated as a federal boarding school for Native children. Today, the Stewart story is told through the belongings, artwork, and voices of its former students. Explore exhibits, changing galleries, the research library, reflection room, and educational spaces.

10am–5pm | Monday–Friday Closed Weekends, State and Federal Holidays 1 Jacobsen Way, Carson City, Nevada

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“Ancestral Duplication: Battle for our Language” Troy Jackson

HARD ROCK HOTEL AND CASINO TULSA SEQUOYAH CONVENTION CENTER Experience authentic Native art at one of the largest Native American art shows in Oklahoma. New work by accomplished Native artists from across the country will be on display.

Discover and enjoy their exquisite work and add to your collection with beautiful jewelry, pottery, sculptures, paintings, textiles and much more.

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issue no. 38, spring 2023

FEATURES

DEPARTMENTS

Justice, Sovereignty, and Honor: 22 Legacy of the Tunica Treasure A Louisiana tribe’s fight for their ancestors’ possessions lays the groundwork for repatriation policies.

By Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke)

Readers Respond!

10

Recent Developments

14

Seven Directions America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

18

Art+Lit Oscar Hokeah (Cherokee Nation/Kiowa): Fiction Writer

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

84

Collections National Gallery of Canada

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

88

Calendar

By Nicole Emmons (Citizen Potawatomi)

94

IndigiPopX Returns!

28 Native comic-con celebrates intersections of pop culture and Indigenous identity

By Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke), and Shelley Patrick (Mvskoke)

48

State of the Art: 34 Restoration and Reset at the Oklahoma State Capitol Native American artwork in this public arena highlights local Indigenous luminaries, history, and cultures

By Paige Willett (Citizen Potawatomi) We Have Words for Art: 42 The First American Art Magazine Story Launching a publication to expand the conversation about ancestral, historical and living arts by Indigenous peoples of the Americas

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

54

REVIEWS Exhibition Reviews

72

Report

78

Music Review

80

Theater Review

82

MEMORIALS

ARTIST PROFILES Orlando Dugi: Diné Fashion Design and Beadwork Artist

By Chadd Scott

48

Anita Fields: Osage/Muscogee Ceramic & Textile Artist

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

54

Tom Jones: Ho-Chunk Photographer

By Stacy J. Platt

60

Erin Shaw: Chickasaw/ Choctaw Painter

By Michole Eldred (Catawba/ Eastern Cherokee descent)

66

60

66

Tony Jojola (Isleta Pueblo, 1958–2022)

By Paul Niemi

92

Rachel Sahmie (Hopi-Tewa, 1956–2022)

By Steve Elmore

93

cover Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk), Elizah Leonard, from the Strong Unrelenting Spirits series, 2019, photograph, seed beads, shell beads, abalone, 40 × 40 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 5

issue no. 38, spring 2023 ISSN 2333-5548 (Print) • ISSN 2333-5556 (Online) Publishing Editor: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Literary Editor: Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD (Euro-Canadian) Contributing Editor: Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke) Advertising Representative: Barbara Harjo Operations Manager: James G. Bland Circulation Manager: Nicole Emmons (Citizen Potawatomi) Copy Editors: Rosa Cays (Chicana) and Jo Ann Reece Proofreaders: Travis D. Day, Staci Golar, Jo Ann Reece, and Angela C. Villa (Chicana) Layout and Design: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) and Corey Yazzie (Navajo) Social Media: Staci Golar, America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho), and Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke)

Regional Representatives

Great Basin: Melissa Melero-Moose (Northern Paiute/Modoc) Great Plains: Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho) Northeast: Kelly Church (Gun Lake Pottawatomi/Ottawa/Ojibwe) Northwest: Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Alutiiq) Southeast: Michole Eldred (Catawba/Eastern Cherokee descent) Southwest: Holly Coonsis (Zuni) and RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo)

Advisory Council

EXPERIENCE the

Miranda Belarde-Lewis, PhD (Zuni/Tlingit) Roy Boney Jr. (Cherokee Nation) Emily Haozous, PhD, RN (Chiricahua Fort Sill Apache) Linda Lomahaftewa, Hon. DHum (Hopi/Choctaw) Leah Mata Fragua (Coastal Chumash) Anya Montiel, PhD (Mestiza/Tohono O'odham descent) Denise Neil, PhD (Delaware Tribe/Cherokee Nation) Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa) Mary Jo Watson, PhD (Seminole Nation) India Rael Young, PhD

Coe Center Advertising Representative

Barbara Harjo, barbara@firstamericanartmagazine.com International distribution by Disticor Magazine Distribution Services

First Friday open houses the first Friday of each month Private tours available Indigenous art from regions around the world In midtown Santa Fe No admission fees

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

Copyright ©2023 by First American Art Magazine, LLC. Cover and contents are fully protected by copyright and may not be reproduced in whole or part by any method without written permission, except specific images listed with Creative Commons licenses. Any errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. First American Art Magazine® is registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Questions About Subscriptions?

For subscription services, changes of address, and wholesale inquiries: email circulation@firstamericanartmagazine.com or visit www.firstamericanartmagazine.com/subscriptions

Contact You can reach us at info@firstamericanartmagazine.com or: FAAM, 3334 W. Main St. #442, Norman, OK 73072

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1590 B Pacheco Street, Santa Fe, NM 87505 Email: info@coeartscenter.org | Phone: 505-983-6372

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NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 7

EDITOR’S GREETING

W

ELCOME to the tenthanniversary issue of First American Art Magazine!

So much has changed since April 2013, when this magazine was launched by Native artists who wanted a space to speak freely and honestly about our artwork. We wanted a break from marketing hype and stereotypes and to move beyond “Indian 101,” to instead host serious discussions about Indigenous art in all media from all times but in an accessible manner. We know not everyone has the luxury of attending art school, so we wanted to challenge ourselves: Can we bring the prevailing discourse and latest discoveries about art by Indigenous peoples of the Americas to the public?

I strongly believe the answer is yes, especially after compiling data from our readers' survey (see page 10). In this issue, we caught up with the four artists we profiled in FAAM No. 0, Spring 2013, to see how things have changed for them 8 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

over the last decade. Orlando Dugi (Diné), Anita Fields (Osage/Muscogee), Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk), and Erin Shaw (Chickasaw/Choctaw) took a risk in 2013 by being profiled in an unknown magazine. We’re glad we can revisit them, now that the magazine has international distribution and a loyal readership.

To commemorate the past decade, FAAM is sponsoring episodes of 5 Plain Questions, a podcast hosted by Joe Williams (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota) and the Plains Art Museum. Joe will interview Orlando, Anita, Tom, and Erin, as well as FAAM writer and Northern regional representative Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Alutiiq). Joe is such a great host; he gives Native artists and creatives space to share what’s most important to them. We hope you’ll take time to enjoy this more intimate connection with these Indigenous thought leaders. You can access 5 Plain Questions at soundcloud.com/eleven-warrior-arts or wherever you enjoy podcasts.

We are also planning a tenth-anniversary celebration at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe on Saturday, April 29, from 1:00 to 3:00 pm, with a roundtable discussion followed by a reception with light refreshments. The Wheelwright has been one of our strongest supporters, and the Case Trading Post was the first retail outlet that made FAAM available to the public.

Then on Friday evening, May 5, we’ll host another celebration at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship studios in the arts district of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Details will be available at firstamericanartmagazine. com/tenth-anniversary.

This publication would not have survived the last decade without our readers, advertisers, writers, editors, advertising representative, advisors, regional representatives, photographers, contractors, volunteers, and of course, Indigenous artists across the Americas. I am so grateful to each of you for helping make this dream a reality. Here’s to good things ahead in the next ten years!

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

ON VIEW THROUGH JANUARY 2024

California Stars/Huivaniūs Pütsiv creates a dialog between iconic and lesser-known works from the Wheelwright Museum’s permanent collection with important loans and new works devised especially for the exhibition. Since the 1970s, the Wheelwright Museum has had an important role in Santa Fe, and beyond, in bringing attention to established and emerging Native artists in solo shows and group exhibitions.

FEATURED ARTISTS Rick Bartow, Frank Day, Jean LaMarr, Frank LaPena, James Luna, Harry Fonseca, Judith Lowry, L. Frank Manriquez, Jacob Meders, Jamie Okuma, Cara Romero, Fritz Scholder, Billy War Soldier Soza, Liz Wallace.

Jacob Meders, b. 1977 (Mechoopda Indian Tribe of Chico Rancheria/Maidu) K’awí ć epém májdym (Earth-seeing person), 2022 Serigraph and wood block print, gold leaf on canvas Photography: Ben Calabaza

Wheelwright Museum

OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN 704 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe NM 87505 NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 9

READERS RESPOND! Feedback from FAAM's Fourth Reader Survey

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HANK YOU to everyone who completed our readers’ survey!

If you haven’t done so, you can take our survey at firstamericanartmagazine.com/survey. We want to hear from you. FAAM provides a means for different communities within the Indigenous art world to be better aware of each other and share histories and current events. Knowing more about our audience demographics and passions helps our writers and editors tailor the material to your interests.

Based on our survey results so far, you, our audience, remain well-educated, with 100 percent having attended college: 11.7 percent hold bachelor’s degrees, 42 percent hold master’s degrees, and 24.6 percent hold doctoral degrees. The gender ratio of our readership has shifted toward more women in the last four years since our last survey. Now our readers are 71.7 percent women, 26.1 percent men, and 2.2 percent two-spirit, nonbinary, and more. This trend is in keeping with larger trends of magazine readership; more adult women read magazines than use the top four websites combined.

Of our readers, 94.9 percent own art

by Indigenous peoples of the Americas. I encourage the remaining 5.1 percent to invest. I hope this issue inspires you to seek out Native artwork since there are so many affordable options online or in person for beginning collectors! In the upcoming year, 86.1 percent plan to travel to a Native art event while 13.9 percent do not. Of course, they might already live in a major center for Indigenous art.

For the first time, we asked what your roles within the Native art world are, and we discovered that many of you wear many hats, as many of us do here at FAAM: 60 percent are primarily collectors, 39 percent are educators, 26 percent are scholars, 21 percent are curators, 14 percent are museum professionals, 8 percent are arts administrators, 5 percent 10 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

You’re hitting a good word/image balance, and I appreciate the wide range of content coverage. Keep up the great work!

are gallerists/dealers, and 5 percent are newcomers to the Native art world. To those of your who are new, welcome!

Please feel free to ask any questions on our social media (Facebook @FirstAmericanart, Instagram @FirstAmArt) or via email (info@firstamericanartmagazine.com).

Other roles included archivist/librarian, philanthropist, appraiser, volunteer, ally, social media networker, anthropologist, retired, fan, art writer, appraiser, and interior designer.

Please don’t go to shorter articles. This mag should continue to be a resource for seriously focused subscribers.

The most avidly read sections of FAAM are, in order: artist profiles, feature articles, Spotlight, exhibition

reviews, and Recent Developments.

Spotlight, a column proposed by our late advisor James Bialac, is a deep dive into one specific artwork. We haven’t run one in a while, but we have one planned for the upcoming issue and will make sure Spotlight is included in future issues moving forward.

Staci Golar and I have been meeting with a publishing consultant who recommends moving the magazine toward a membership option. FAAM has always held educational events, from informal roundtable discussions to multiday symposia, so we want to organize these more strategically to serve the needs of our audience. We have an e-newsletter that we use sparingly (since so many of us are drowning in emails) to announce specific events or new content. When asked if you would like to connect with fellow readers via a periodic e-newsletter with art news, 47.4 percent said yes, 37.2 percent said maybe, and 15.3 percent said no. With that in mind, we will definitely make sure that such a service is offered as opt-in, with easy options to change or cancel a subscription. People were ambivalent about a membership program: 47.1 percent said maybe, 45.7 percent said yes, and 7.2 percent said no. We can grow our programs gradually while continuing to offer standalone magazine subscriptions.

For member benefits, virtual events and access to archives were the most popular, followed by classes and in-person events.

When asked if you would like to improve any aspects of the magazine’s layouts, 54.5 percent said “no” or otherwise responded with praise. Your kind words are encouraging! The inclusion of more images was requested by 16.4 percent of responders. Several people requested more blank space, and 7.3 percent requested shorter articles, while several people requested longer articles.

The solution is to have feature articles of varying lengths and bite-sized inserts.

SAVE THE DATE | NOVEMBER 3-5 CHOCTAW EVENT CENTER DURANT OKLAHOMA Make plans to join us as we kick off Native American month with one of the nation’s largest powwows.

Experience the sights and sounds of dancers from all over the country. You won’t want to miss it!

HOSTED BY

Finally, we asked you an openended question: What do you feel First American Art Magazine could do better?

We got requests to be more—and less— academic. The copy-editors, Rosa Cays, Jo Ann Reece, and I, are committed to making the writing accessible, but apparently we need to try harder and explain the meanings behind art jargon. A page on our website defines various art terms, firstamericanartmagazine.com/references/art-terms. Please ask us to define any words not found there!

Readers requested more Canadian and Indigenous Californian content.

Suggestions were made to expand and shrink our coverage area. FAAM’s core mission is to cover art by Indigenous peoples of the Americas, so our scope will not change, although we always improve our coverage of more diverse regions within the Americas.

To the reader who wrote, “Revive the blog,” make it so! To the reader who requested more on Pueblo pottery, you’ll

I LOVE your magazine. It is refreshing, and I LOVE learning about various artists/their works….

be happy to know Michelle J. Lanteri is writing an article about black-on-white ceramics for the summer issue. Other subject requests included art therapy (please check out FAAM No. 2), photography (see Tom Jones in this issue), families’ artistic histories, steps to artistic processes, pricing of art, laws affecting walrus ivory, voluntary returns of cultural

patrimony, language preservation, and more. Several readers requested more coverage of emerging artists and youth artists, which are great ideas. Others just requested more—more art, more artists, and more interviews—which we are happy to provide as we look forward to our second decade of publishing!

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

Take our reader survey at firstamericanartmagazine.com/survey

NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 11

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

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RECENT DEVELOPMENTS MUSEUMS The EITELJORG MUSEUM OF AMERICAN INDIANS AND WESTERN ART in Indianapolis, Indiana, hired its first woman president and CEO, Kathryn Haigh. She had served as the interim director and chief operating officer of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. She earned her bachelor of arts in art history from the University of Cincinnati.

The NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA in Ottawa, Ontario, selected Jocelyn Piirainen (Inuk) to serve as its associate curator for its Indigenous Ways and Decolonization Department. Originally from Iqaluktuuttiaq, Nunavut, Piirainen had been the associate curator of Inuit art at Qaumajuq, Winnipeg Art Gallery. She earned her bachelor’s degree with a focus on film studies at Carleton University.

The SHELBURNE MUSEUM in Vermont hired Victoria Sunnergren as its inaugural associate curator of Native American art, a position funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Sunnergren is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Delaware, where she earned her master’s degree in art history, criticism, and conservation. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Florida State University.

ART MARKETS The best of show winner at the 65th annual HEARD MUSEUM GUILD INDIAN FAIR AND MARKET in Phoenix, Arizona, was Raynard Scott (Navajo). Classification winners were Denise Wallace (Unangax̂), jewelry and lapidary; Jared Tso (Navajo), pottery; Eugene Tapahe (Navajo), 2-dimensional art; Arthur Holmes, Jr. (Hopi), Pueblo carvings; Leon Misak Kinneeveauk (Iñupiaq), sculpture; Phil Singer (Navajo), weavings and textiles; Victoria Adams (Southern Cheyenne/Arapaho), diverse art forms; Don Johnston (Qagan Tayagungin Unangax̂), baskets; and Raynard Scott (Navajo), open standards. Eugene Tapahe (Navajo) won the Idyllwild Arts Imagination Award, Mark Taho (Hopi/ Navajo) won the Conrad House Innovation Award, and Adrian Pinnecoose (Navajo/Southern Ute) won the Indian Arts and Crafts Association Commemorative Award.

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Visit our new website: crowsshadow.org Guided By Our Stars (We Were Never Lost), 2021, lithograph, 28” x 22 ¼”, edition of 14 Collaborating Master Printer, Judith Baumann

14 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

AWARDS & HONORS The DORIS DUKE FOUNDATION gave one of its six 2023 DORIS DUKE ARTIST AWARDS to Rosy Simas (Seneca).

The Minneapolis-based dancer, choreographer, and multidisciplinary artist directs Rosy Simas Danse and three thirty one space. Doubled this year, the $550,000 prize is the largest award for individual performing artists in the nation.

AMERICANS FOR THE ARTS, based in Washington, DC, gave its 2023 JOHNSON FELLOWSHIP FOR ARTISTS TRANSFORMING COMMUNITIES award to G. Peter Jemison (Seneca). The $70,000 award honors artists and culture bearers working in or with rural communities. The painter, mixed-media artist, filmmaker, and curator is the Ganondagan State Historic Site manager in western New York.

below Heard Fair 2023 Best of Show winner: Raynard Scott (Navajo), Dinetah-Poly, 2023, mixed-media sculpture, sterling silver pieces. Photo: Craig Smith, Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ.

UNITED STATES ARTISTS, a Chicago-based nonprofit, named its 2023 USA FELLOWS, who include several Indigenous artists of the Americas and artists of Indigenous descent.

Ofelia Zepeda (Tohono O'odham), Ernestine Hayes (Tlingit), Natalie Ball (Klamath/Modoc), Guadalupe Maravilla (Mestizo, El Salvador), Barbara Teller Ornelas (Navajo), and Kite (Oglala Lakota) received the $50,000 unrestricted fellowships.

The 2023 NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS named two Native American artists 2023 NATIONAL HERITAGE FELLOWS. Ed Eugene Carriere (Suquamish) from northwestern Washington state makes baskets, clothing, canoes, and paddles. Elizabeth James-Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag) from Massachusetts is a wampum maker, fiber artist, and marine biologist. The fellowships include a $25,000 stipend.

Nadya Kwandibens (Animakee Wa Zhing Ojibway) was named the PHOTO LAUREATE OF TORONTO. Kwandibens is the first Indigenous person and third person overall to have this honor. The Photo Laureate advocates for the intersections of visual arts, photojournalism, and cultural expression for a

three-year term. She receives a Can$10,000 stipend and will partner with the city to create a major photographic project.

The ARTIST TRUST, a Seattle-based nonprofit that supports artists from the state of Washington, bestowed its 2023 ARTIST TRUST FELLOWSHIP AWARDS upon Jacinthe Demmert (Haida), Addison Karl (Chickasaw/Choctaw), Priscilla Dobler Dzul (Maya descent), Natalie A. Martinez (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), Tammie Dupuis (Upper Kalispel/Salish), Jacqueline

NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 15

Wilson (Yakama), and other artists from Washington state.

The nonprofit gave 16 awards which each include $10,000 of unrestricted funds.

WORKSHOPS & FESTIVAL WEEK JUNE 12 - JUNE 30, 2023 IDYLLWILD, CALIFORNIA WORKSHOPS

June 12 - June 30, 2023 Registration Now Open Class offerings include Cahuilla Basketry, Cahuilla-Style Pottery, Hopi Jewelry, Hopi-Tewa Pottery, Navajo Weaving, Beadwork, New Native Kitchen, California Native Plants, and more!

FESTIVAL WEEK

June 18 - June 23, 2023 Laugh it Up! Exploring Comedy and Humor in Indigenous Expression Festival Week Lineup Sunday, June 18 from 11 am - 5 pm | “Welcoming Home the Birds” Kick-Off Event Monday, June 19 at 7 pm | Exhibition Opening Reception & Gallery Talk Still We Smile: Humor as Correction and Joy, Curated by Meranda Roberts (Numu (Paiute)/Xixana) Tuesday, June 20 at 12pm | Michael Kabotie Lunchtime Lecture Series Wednesday, June 21 at 12pm | Michael Kabotie Lunchtime Lecture Series Thursday, June 22 at 12pm | Michael Kabotie Lunchtime Lecture Series Thursday, June 22 at 6 pm | Movie Screening Friday, June 23 at 7 pm | Good Medicine Comedy Showcase Hosted by Jackie Keliiaa (Yerington Paiute / Washoe / Native Hawaiian)

Scholarships available for Native American adult and teen students!

SCAN FOR MORE INFO AND TO REGISTER, OR VISIT: idyllwildarts.org/nativeamericanarts 16 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

The MUSEUM OF INDIAN ARTS AND CULTURE (MIAC) in Santa Fe named jeweler Anthony Lovato (Kewa) the 2023 MIAC LIVING TREASURE, whose work will be featured at Native Treasures Indian Arts Festival. MIAC gave weavers Lynda Teller Pete and Barbara Teller Ornelas (both Navajo) its 2023 NATIVE TREASURES LEGACY ARTIST awards.

PUBLIC ART The US Postal Service issued the ART OF THE SKATEBOARD series of four first-class Forever stamps honoring the sport of skateboarding. This series includes art by Di’Orr Greenwood (Navajo), Crystal Worl (Tlingit/Athabascan), and Federico “MasPaz” Frum (Mestizo/Colombian).

PRECONTACT SITES US President Joe Biden designated two national monuments encompassing half a million acres of land. The AVI KWA AME NATIONAL MONUMENT in southern Nevada includes Spirit Mountain, which is sacred to the Mojave, Chemehuevi, and Southern Paiute peoples and culturally significant to neighboring tribes. The CASTNER RANGE NATIONAL MONUMENT includes 6,672 acres near El Paso, Texas, historically significant to several Pueblo and Apache peoples and later Southern Plains tribes. Both sites feature precontact petroglyphs and pictographs.

REPATRIATION The MUSÉE D'ETHNOGRAPHIE DE GENÈVE in Switzerland voluntarily repatriated a tortoiseshell rattle and medicine mask to the HAUDENOSAUNEE EXTERNAL RELATIONS COMMITTEE in a public ceremony. After Brennen Ferguson (Tuscarora) saw the mask on display, he contacted the museum’s administration, who deaccessioned the two items and returned them to the Haudenosaunee.

CRIME & LEGAL ISSUES The Ontario Provincial Police arrested eight people on 40 charges in possibly the largest art forgery ring in history. They seized more than 1,000 forged Norval Morrisseau (Bingwi Neyaashi Ojibwe, 1931–2007) paintings and counterfeit certificates of authentication in their sweep. They and Thunder Bay Police Service have been investigating these forgeries since 2020 and uncovered three distinct groups of forgers who produced an estimated 4,000 to 6,500 counterfeit Morrisseau artworks, many of which sold for tens of thousands of dollars.

ERRATA Our thanks go out to David Lieberth of Akron, Ohio, who called to our attention that we misattributed two ceramic sculptures on pages 20 and 21 of FAAM No. 37 (Winter 2023). The sculptures were made by Peter B. Jones (Onondaga/Seneca).

APR 8 – M AY 6 A VIRTUAL & IN-PERSON EVENT Experience one of the country’s most prestigious Native art shows. Enjoy and purchase authentic Native art.

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NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 17

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

AMERICA MEREDITH A Cherokee Nation editor, artist, art writer, and independent curator shares her top seven list

B

ASED IN NORMAN, OKLAHOMA, America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) is an art writer, editor, painter, independent curator, and Native art advocate.

She earned her associate degree in art from City College of San Francisco, her BFA with distinction in painting from the University of Oklahoma, and her MFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. She curated Louder than Words: Indigenous American Art & Activism at Idyllwild Arts; Azhwakwa: Contemporary Anishinaabe Art at Jacobson House Native Art Center; co-curated Earth Shakers: The Power of Cherokee Women with Callie Chunestudy (Cherokee Nation) at the Cherokee Heritage Center; and Stories from the Land: Indigenous Voices Connecting Within the Great Plains with Jeanne Merz-Edwards at the Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery. She is the publishing editor of First American Art Magazine.

SEVEN DIRECTIONS is my favorite section of FAAM. This guest column spotlights Native art professionals who might work behind the scenes. They are free to discuss anyone or anything that inspires them, including Indigenous projects outside the Americas, non-Native artists, or emerging artists.

Guest columnists have written about everything from Native American motorcycle gangs to sustainable First Nations housing developments.

Cherokee people, and many other tribes, envision the world in seven directions, each ascribed with a different corresponding color. Archaeologists love to describe the below world, middle world, and above world, but just try conceptualizing this idea combined with the four cardinal directions, each with their

own color and qualities. The idea of a top-seven list oriented in physical space made perfect sense to me, but I had a hard time recruiting the first writer. One artist told me he thought the idea was “gimmicky.” Luckily, heather ahtone (Choctaw/Chickasaw Nation) understood the concept and wrote the first Seven Directions in FAAM No. 2, Spring 2014, and from there on, different Indigenous guest columnists have put their own twist on the idea. For instance, in FAAM No. 28, Fall 2020, Brittany Britton (Hupa) used her tribe’s directions: upriver and downriver.

I’ve always wanted to share my own version, so here goes!

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

NORTH. Greenland’s population of 57,777 is 89 percent Inuit, according to the CIA Factbook. And 19,282—a third of them—live in the capital of Nuuk. This city's cultural hub, since 1997, has been KATUAQ. The cultural center hosts art exhibitions, concerts, films, conferences, and festivals. It boasts Cafétuaq, which serves locally sourced seafood and vegetables grown by Greenland Greenhouse.

“Katuaq is like a musical instrument that can begin to play at any moment,” its website explains. “During the day it's full of dreams—at night it acts like a magnetic field, drawing people into the light.” The building’s undulating larchwood exterior is “inspired by waving northern lights, icebergs, and the play 18 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

above 5 Plain Questions podcast logo, hosted by

the Plains Art Museum, Fargo, North Dakota. opposite, top America Meredith. Photo: Tony

Calzone (Mestizo, Salvadoreño). opposite, bottom Katuaq cultural center, Nuuk,

Greenland. Photo: David Stanley (CC BY 2.0).

of light on ice and snow.” I’ve learned about so many Greenlandic artists from following their website and social media, written in Kalaallisut, Danish, and English. The Nuuk Kunstmuseum is also in Nuuk, while Taseralik cultural center is in Sisimiut on the western coast. katuaq.gl ABOVE. The internet relays coded electromagnetic signals via radio waves, which is how I get podcasts on my phone.

One of my favorite Native American podcasts is 5 PLAIN QUESTIONS, produced by the Plains Art Museum (PAM) in Fargo, North Dakota. Joe Williams (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota) is the PAM director of community education and director of Native American programs. He poses five questions to Indigenous artists and other creatives, including writers and political leaders. The podcast is focused on the Northern Plains but also draws from diverse communities across the continent. I enjoy the mix of hearing from longtime, personal friends and then being introduced to new, unfamiliar voices.

As part of our tenth-anniversary celebrations, FAAM is sponsoring four episodes of 5 Plain Questions. soundcloud.com/eleven-warrior-arts WEST. Like so many others, I’m eagerly awaiting the renovation of the GORMAN MUSEUM OF NATIVE AMERICAN ART at the University of California, Davis, campus. Formerly the C.N. Gorman Museum, this is one of only two museums NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 19

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EAST. Getting to visit the NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN’S CULTURAL RESOURCES CENTER (CRC) can be a life-changing experience. Historical collections of Indigenous American art can be fraught, but the 1989 law that enabled the establishment of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, DC, also spelled out repatriation protocols for the Smithsonian Institution and was a test case for the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. One of the first actions under the NMAI law was the 1989 return of eleven wampum belts to the Six Nations of the Grand River in Canada. NMAI strives to establish and implement best practices for caring for artworks, which includes returning them to their home communities, as in the case of Di Wae Powa: They Came Back, an exhibition of Pueblo ceramics at the Poeh Cultural Center in Santa Fe. The collections are open to Indigenous researchers and artists. All they have to do is make an appointment in advance. Beholding such a vast collection of Indigenous art from both South and North America is awe-inspiring. americanindian.si.edu/explore/ collections/crc

above, top New façade of the Gorman Museum of Native American Art at the University of California, Davis. Pavilion designed by director Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (Navajo/ Seminole/Muscogee). Photo: Veronica Passalacqua. above, bottom Staff and community members from the Pueblo of Pojoaque and Poeh Cultural Center at the Cultural Resources Center for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian to discuss conservation treatment plans for a second loan of pottery, Suitland, Maryland. Photo: Katherine Fogden (Mohawk). Image courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution.

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exclusively focused on contemporary Native American art (along with the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts). Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (Navajo/ Seminole/Muscogee) is the museum’s director, and Veronica Passalacqua is the curator. Together in 2007 they launched the exhibition, catalogue, and subsequent conferences for Our People, Our Land, Our Images: International Indigenous Photographers, which provided the foundation for scholarship on Native photography. The new 4,000-foot space, with a museum store and library, is scheduled to open September 23 and 24, 2023. gormanmuseum.ucdavis.edu

BELOW. I’ve read that mining can generate three tons of waste to extract enough gold for a single ring.1 Mining can be devastating to land and water, which is why more jewelers are looking for sustainable metals and gemstones. The London-based RESPONSIBLE JEWELLERY COUNCIL established a Code of Practices Standard to “enable ethical, social, human rights, and environmental practices,” as their website says, and a Chain of Custody Standard to “enable fully traceable and responsibly sourced practices.” ETHICAL METALSMITHS, based in Cincinnati, envisions “a jewelry industry where a beautiful product does not bear a human or environmental toll.”

Concerned with environmental and social justice issues, Ethical Metalsmiths champion a Better Without Mercury campaign to remove mercury from contamination from an abandoned gold mine in Colombia. Most importantly, precious

1. Chen Zhu and Greg Anderson, Environmental Applications of Geochemical Modeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 7.

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metals can be recycled infinitely without losing quality. Salvaging these metals is called “urban mining,” which can mitigate the need to mine for raw materials. responsiblejewellery.com ethicalmetalsmiths.org SOUTH. Indigenous biennial art fairs have come and gone in Mexico, Chile, and elsewhere, but BIENAL INTERCONTINENTAL DE ARTE INDÍGENA, ANCESTRAL, O MILENARIO (BIAI) in Quito, Ecuador, has persevered and expanded through satellite exhibitions in Lima, Peru; Chicago, Illinois; and several sites in Michigan in the United States.

Jorge Iván Cevallos, José Ruíz Tume, and Harry Chávez co-curated the 2022 edition of this multivenue celebration of Indigenous art and knowledge. Through BIAI, I’ve learned about huarango ink drawing, the Usko-Ayar Amazonian School of Painting in Pucallpa, and Amaru Runa: Salón de Arte Visionario in Lima, both in Peru, and much more. biai.art

SPIDER GALLERY, both in downtown Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Multitalented artist Matthew Anderson (Cherokee Nation) manages both of these. The Cherokee Arts Center provides studio spaces, particularly for Cherokee National Treasures such as Thelma Forest, Dorothy Ice, and Lisa Rutherford (all Cherokee Nation). It also has classroom space, where the Southeastern Indian Artists Association meets. Spider Gallery is a commercial gallery and gift store on Muscogee Avenue, where the public can find work by established Cherokee Nation artists but also discover works by the new generation of emerging Cherokee Nation artists. artscenter.cherokee.org

above, left Gold scraps can be recycled or melted into gold bullion. Photo: Sophia Wilson, London, UK (CC BY-SA 3.0). opposite, right Poster for the 9th edition of the Bienal Intercontinental de Arte Indígena, Quito, Ecuador, 2022. below Interior of the Cherokee Nation's Spider Gallery in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Photo: Spider Gallery staff.

CENTER. I’m grateful to belong to a tribe that supports visual arts as much as the Cherokee Nation does. Two important institutions that the Cherokee Nation created to benefit artists are the CHEROKEE ARTS CENTER and the NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 21

JUSTICE, SOVEREIGNTY & HONOR Legacy of the Tunica Treasure A Louisiana tribe’s fight for their ancestors’ possessions lays the groundwork for repatriation policies.

By Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke)

T

HE STORY OF THE TUNICA TREASURE sounds like the unlikely plot of an action movie in which, for once, Native people win. It’s the story of a treasure that is not a treasure, found by an archaeologist who is not an archaeologist, housed in various places it didn’t belong until it was finally returned to a sacred space nobody could have imagined. Its recovery set in motion legal protection for future “nontreasures” in the United States.

Our tale begins near the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola, after the name of one of seven plantations that used to occupy that land.

The site has a brutal history of slavery and abuse. When it was James Prison Camp, the cruelty and injustice there led Louisianans to start the Prison Reform Association to change Louisiana law in 1896 to outlaw leasing prisoners for labor.

In 1901 the State of Louisiana purchased the prison camp, but brutality and harsh conditions continued, earning Angola the nickname of “the bloodiest prison in the South” by the 1960s.1

above The Tunica Trail, migration route from the central Mississippi Valley to their current homelands. Graphic by Herb Roe, ChromeSun. Image courtesy of Herb Roe. opposite Southeastern artists once known, Earpins and Beads, ca. early 18th century, sea mollusk shell columella; Incised Jars and Bowls, ca. early 18th century, clay. The Tunica Treasure includes Tunica, Natchez, and Caddo ceramics and earthenware. All images, unless otherwise noted, courtesy of the Tunica-Biloxi Cultural and Educational Resources Center.

1. “History of the State Penitentiary,” Louisiana Prison Museum and Cultural Center, 2019, web.

2. Charrier v. Bell, 496 So. 2d 601, 602-3 (Louisiana Court of Appeals, 1986).

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In 1967 Leonard J. Charrier, a 26-year-old Angola prison guard and self-described “amateur archaeologist,” concluded, after studying the changes of the Mississippi River’s course, that Trudeau Plantation, across Tunica Bayou near Angola, must be the site of a Tunica village. Frank Hoshman Sr. gave Charrier permission to explore the property with a metal detector, whose initial survey found dozens of burials arranged in a circle.

Only after Charrier reported the discovery did Hoshman inform him that he was not the owner of the land but the caretaker.

Undeterred, Charrier continued his amateur excavation for the next three years and collected from “approximately 150 burial sites, containing beads, European ceramics, stoneware, glass bottles; iron kettles, vessels, and skillets; knives, muskets, gunflints, balls, and shots; crucifixes, rings, and bracelets; and Native pottery.

The excavated artifacts [were] estimated to weigh two to two and one-half tons.”2 Charrier also found human remains, the people with whom these objects had been buried. With no regard for the people, he brought all the funerary items to his home in Bunkie, Louisiana.

ARCHAEOLOGY IN LOUISIANA THE TROUBLING HISTORY of Louisiana’s treatment of Indigenous sites and artifacts is perhaps best exemplified by the story of the Troyville site. The first European explorers to what is now the United States wrote about earthworks they found across the Southeast, but the first professional written description of Louisiana earthworks was by naturalist William Dunbar. He came upon the Troyville site in what is now Catahoula Parish on October 23, 1804. He returned to the site in January 1805 and wrote a description of it in his journal.

President Thomas Jefferson commented on Dunbar’s findings in a message to Congress, and Troyville soon became popular, though European-Americans attributed its construction to Aztecs or vanished races. For several decades, those working in the emerging field of archaeology assumed, with the prejudice of the time, that a superior race of people had

built the earthworks across the United States because they did not believe the ancestors of contemporary Indigenous people were sophisticated enough for such architectural feats. For this reason, decades passed before the oral history of local tribes or even the work of linguists and ethnologists was considered important to archaeology, which was partly founded on the idea that Indigenous people were “a vanishing race.”

The Troyville site lends its name to a cultural era spanning approximately 400 to 700 CE. The site included eight smaller mounds arranged around what was one of the largest mounds in North America, the 82-foot-tall Mound 4, called “The Great Mound.” In 1882 naturalist Cyrus Thomas wrote that the Great Mound, which had been 250 by 160 feet at the base and 60 to 75 feet high “with a nearly sharp summit” when he first saw it, was “so gashed and mutilated, having been used during the [Civil] War as a place for rifle pits, that its original form can scarcely be made out.”3 Because the ground in Louisiana

is often saturated (hence the famous above-ground tombs of New Orleans), modern people often used earthworks as cemeteries, and that was the fate of Troyville’s Mound 5. Thomas wrote that those who dug the graves there discarded Indigenous human remains and ceramics.

Mounds 2, 3, and 4 were nearly gone.

In the 1930s the Works Progress Administration funded large-scale excavations and preservation projects that helped professionalize the field of archaeology in the United States.

In 1931 Winslow M. Walker visited a Natchitoches site being destroyed by the construction of a fish hatchery. From there, he traveled to Marksville, where archaeologist Gerard Fowke was excavating. While in Marksville, Walker heard about the Troyville site being destroyed.

He rushed to see it, but when he got there, the largest mound had been leveled to the ground “by a construction company which used the dirt as a fill for the approach to a new highway bridge being built at that point.… This was the first

3. Robert W. Neuman, An Introduction to Louisiana Archaeology (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 23.

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time such an enormous mound had ever been so thoroughly razed.”4 Having witnessed the destruction at Troyville, Walker called for a parish-by-parish survey of archaeological sites from both professional and avocational archaeologists, but the survey did not happen for years. More earthworks were destroyed in the meantime. Walker also called for greater reporting and penalty for mound destruction, but perhaps his most important distinction was that he advocated working with ethnohistorians to “locate and investigate sites of historic tribes before attempting any classification of the prehistoric remains.”5 Finally—someone besides Native people themselves believed that contemporary Indigenous people could be the descendants of the ancient engineers and architects of the Southeastern mounds.

World War II ended the New Deal programs that funded excavation and preservation, but renewed interest in Louisiana archaeological sites led to the formation of the Louisiana Archaeological Survey and Antiquities Commission (LASAC) in the early 1970s. Since then, many archaeologists have worked alongside tribal nations to learn about and protect the state’s cultural sites, including, as we shall see, the Tunica-Biloxi.

THE TUNICA TREASURE THE ANCESTRAL HOMELANDS of the Tunica are mainly in Louisiana but stretch across the Mississippi River Valley to Arkansas.6 Like many Southeastern tribes, they traded, fought, and otherwise interacted with surrounding nations.

When the French arrived and established a mission in 1699, they depended on the Tunica to help fight against the English and their Chickasaw allies. Brain writes that the first missionary to the Tunica, Father Antoine Davion, observed, “They rejected his religion but accept[ed] his worldly goods.”7 The Tunica traded with the Europeans for practical and luxury wares, first with the French and after 1764 with the Spanish. The Europeans depended on the Tunica for horses and salt. In 1731, when the Tunica established the village whose burial ground Charrier later desecrated, they had been trading with Europeans for decades.

On June 14, 1731, the French won a battle against the historical enemies of the Tunica, the Natchez. A group of Natchez refugees came to the Tunica village and were offered shelter, but in the night, they attacked the Tunica, killing many, including the local chief, Cahura-Joligo.

Afterward, the Tunica moved a few miles

to what would later become the Trudeau site. There, the Tunica dead were buried with European and Native goods that would stay with them undisturbed until Charrier arrived in the 1960s.

From the burial ground, Charrier removed mostly European goods such as kettles, weaponry, porcelain, and more.

Brain’s initial inventory, published in 1979, reports “69 complete or restorable pots of aboriginal manufacture” representing Mississippian, Natchezan, and Caddoan (Red River and Ouachita regions) pottery styles.8 He wrote that “the relatively large number of native pots from a time when European replacements were readily obtainable shows a local strength of tradition quite at variance with the commonly stated rule that ‘all aboriginal mid-eighteenth-century sites contain little pottery.’”9

WHO OWNS THE TUNICA TREASURE? AROUND THE TIME that Charrier desecrated the Tunica site, Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology’s Lower Mississippi Survey began a study of the area. In 1969 Charrier asked local archaeologist Robert “Stu” Neitzel to help him find someone to purchase the Trudeau site collection. As Harvard archaeologists constantly pointed out to each other in their correspondence, Charrier lacked formal education, but he knew from years of independent research that he would get a better price by selling the collection to an institution rather than breaking it up among individual collectors, as other amateur pothunters had done at other archaeological sites. Charrier also wrote that he would prefer to see the collection kept intact at an institution, for he did understand the academic significance of the find. Like many non-Native people of his time, including professional archaeologists, he ignored the moral implications of desecrating Indigenous graves.

4. Neuman, An Introduction to Louisiana Archaeology, 49.

5. Neuman, 50.

6. The Biloxi homelands are on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The tribes joined together in the 1920s when they began to work toward federal recognition.

7. Jeffrey P. Brain and Bill Day, On the Tunica Trail (Baton Rouge, LA: Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism; Louisiana Archaeological Survey and Antiquities Commission, 1994), PDF. 8. Jeffrey P. Brain, Tunica Treasure (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1979), 224.

9. Brain, Tunica Treasure, 224.

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Neitzel alerted Jeffrey P. Brain, then-curator at the Peabody, who traveled to Louisiana to investigate Charrier’s collection. With a proprietary tone present in the writing of both Charrier and all the Harvard archaeologists, Brain described the scene he found at Charrier’s home: It was like Christmas morning. Artifacts were everywhere. On every piece of furniture and covering the floor— except for narrow pathways—under beds, in every nook and cranny, and closets.… I especially remember one large walk-in closet … filled to the height of 3 to 4 feet with a vast tangle of metal: dozens of kettles, musket barrels, wire, every conceivable type of iron artifact, but barely distinguishable except as a great pile of rust.10 Of course Harvard wanted the items. The Corning Museum and Smithsonian Institution also expressed interest.

Charrier agreed to work with Harvard but did not agree to their price. At first Charrier gave a false location for where he found the items, saying he did so to protect the landowner from being known for allowing him to dig up graves, and later to protect a few other amateurs who he had taken into his confidence as helpers of the disinterment.

On September 10, 1970, Charrier finally agreed to let Harvard lease the items and store them at the Peabody Museum while they negotiated a price.

When Charrier could not produce a legal document giving him the right to excavate the land, Harvard’s lawyers got involved.

For two years the lawyers worked with the feuding descendants of the original landowners for permission to survey the land and examine the items. They finally obtained permission in 1972. In 1974 Charrier filed the suit Charrier v. Bell with a Louisiana State District Court to declare himself the owner of the “treasure.”

Held up in court, the Tunica collection remained in Massachusetts as Harvard University counter-sued, continuing what would become an almost decade-long fight for the collection’s future.

All this time, the Tunica tribe, who were not yet federally recognized, did not know about the desecration of their graves,

the collection of funerary items, or even the legal battle until 1975. That year, the LASAC intervened on their behalf, claiming that the collection should be returned to Louisiana. After five decades of trying, the Tunica-Biloxi Indian Tribe gained federal recognition in 1981. Shortly thereafter, their ancestors’ funerary objects were brought to the Louisiana State Museum while the Peabody Museum underwent renovations. The court cases to determine ownership continued.

Louisiana attorney Frederick G. Benton, himself an amateur archaeologist, assumed representation of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe, pro bono, to bring the State of Louisiana into the lawsuit against Charrier.

A 1983 Harvard Crimson article describes the complexity of the case: The lawsuit has raised a number of complex issues including whether the find is legally “a treasure trove” or “property embedded in the earth;” what effect the fact that some artifacts are grave goods should have on ownership; and whether the Louisiana’s Purchase treaty negated tribal claims to the treasure. The case is further complicated by Louisiana’s legal system: it is the only system in the United States that is not based on English common law alone, but

In 1974 Charrier filed the suit Charrier v.

Bell with a Louisiana State District Court to declare himself the owner of the “treasure.”

above Glass trade beads and French artists once known, Fainence Plate and Jugs, ca. early 18th century, tin-glazed, enameled earthenware. opposite Southeastern Woodland artists once known, Incised Jars, ca. early 18th century, clay.

The Tunica Treasure includes Tunica, Natchez, and Caddo ceramics and earthenware.

10. Brain, 4.

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draws jointly on the French Napoleonic Code and common law. Because of this unique system, it is difficult to use court decisions from other states as precedent in lower courts.11 In legal terms, a “treasure” is basically something that is left to be found or which is abandoned and then found.

The legal question centered on whether the funerary items could be considered either of those things. In 1985 the courts ultimately ruled against Charrier, declaring—in an historic case for American Indian law—that “grave goods belong to descendants.”12 The case set a precedent that laid the foundation for the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which declares that institutions that house Native human remains, funerary objects, and cultural patrimony must return them to the tribal nation to which they belong when this can be determined. NAGPRA also declares that anyone who “knowingly sells, purchases, uses for profit, or transports for sale or profit” the human remains or funerary objects of a Native American is subject to a fine, imprisonment up to 12 months, or both.13 It also details treatment, inventory,

and cataloguing of current collections and rules for future excavations.

WHAT “THESE INDIANS” DID WHEN CHARRIER LOST his court case for possession of the Tunica Treasure, he told The New York Times, “I think this is going to cost Louisiana dearly.…

I plan to sit back and watch what these Indians do with it.”14 What the Tunica-Biloxi Indian Tribe did is step up for their ancestors in a huge way. Bill Day, the first director of the Tunica-Biloxi Museum, was instrumental in its development. He wrote, “When the ‘Tunica Treasure’ was returned to the tribe for placement in the new museum, it was discovered that the artifacts had seriously deteriorated. This condition resulted not only from their long stay in the ground but from that which followed: exposure to unstable air, humidity, and repeated handling while the ownership of the artifacts was being decided in the courts.”15 Fresh out of college and following an internship at the National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center in New York City, John

Barbry (Tunica-Biloxi, nephew of Earl Barbry Sr., cousin of Earl Jr. and Brent) returned to his tribe to help catalogue the collection. Today Barbry is the director of the Tunica-Biloxi Language and Culture Revitalization Program. “They gave me some training on how to handle the artifacts, and then they sent me down to the old US Mint,” a branch of the Louisiana State Museum, he told me. “I was in one of the rooms where they had stored the collection, and basically, I was just counting and labeling. We worked about two months just inventorying things.” Barbry especially remembers the astonishing amount of beads that he and others cataloged. “There was a beautiful variety of beads,” he said. “They ranged in size from a tiny seed to the size of the end of your thumb.”

Faced with preservation and protection of two tons of funerary objects in 1989, the tribe raised money to purchase two refrigerated truck trailers and hired experts in conservation to train tribal members to care for the objects.

Earl Barbry Jr. (Tunica-Biloxi), the son of the first Tunica-Biloxi chairman, Earl Barbry Sr., and his cousin Brent Barbry (Tunica-Biloxi) became the tribe’s first full-time conservators.

11. Michael F.P. Doming, “The Tale of the Tunica Treasure,” Harvard Crimson, October 13, 1983, web.

12. David Watt, The Tunica Treasure “Takuhpanitetimili Yoroni”: A Museum Companion to one of the largest archaeological collections of 18th-century American Indian relics ever discovered (Marksville: Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana, 2017), 5, PDF. 13. Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act: Enforcement, National Park Service, October 24, 2019, web.

14. Associated Press, “Court Denies Claim to Items Found on Indian Burial Site,” The New York Times, December 31, 1986, A15, web.

15. Brain and Day, On the Tunica Trail, PDF, 17.

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The tribe built a 1,200-square-foot museum “in the form of a sixteenthcentury Tunica village burial mound, with a temple above it like those in which Tunica priests lived. The museum had earthen walls so that the artifacts could be symbolically reburied.”16 Unfortunately the museum had to be torn down in 1999 when water intrusion made the foundation unstable, but the tribe preserved and stored the collection while they made new arrangements.

On November 30, 2011, the tribe dedicated the Tunica-Biloxi Cultural and Educational Resources Center in Marksville. In addition to a museum, class and meeting rooms, offices, and an auditorium, the 40,000-square-foot complex houses the Tunica-Biloxi Conservation Lab. The lab not only cares for the possessions of their own ancestors, it now offers a range of conservation and restoration services for private and institutional clients.

Barbry said the conservation lab and cultural center continue to maintain the Tunica Treasure and use it to teach their young people, as well as visitors, about the tribe’s history. They plan an expansion of the cultural center and enhancements to the part that houses the collection, but the tribe has also taken on another important task. Recently, the City of Marksville turned over the Marksville Prehistoric Indian site to the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe. They have begun cleanup of the site and have formed committees to plan their next steps for caring for this important site.

“When the museum closed in 2015, the items inside that belonged to the Smithsonian were returned, and some were returned to the State of Louisiana,” said Barbry. The site is the type site for the regional Hopewell culture known as Marksville, who are not the ancestors of today’s Tunica-Biloxi Tribe. However, Barbry said, when the Tunica moved to the Marksville area, they recognized that the earthworks and land at Marksville were sacred. Archaeologists have found evidence of 19th-century Tunica burials on and near the site.

The story does not end there but continues on as the Tunica-Biloxi tribe

works to preserve its language and culture, share its history, and sustain its legacy as a nation dedicated to honoring ancestors and preparing a future for descendants.

“In my current role, I am honored to educate and inform our community about the importance of the Tunica Treasure,” said Barbry. “We are a small tribe, and like others, we have suffered from assimilation, loss of our language, and all the things that came with colonialism. With all that loss, it can be difficult to point to things that show our strength.

The Tunica Treasure is a physical representation of where we fit into the history and development of this region, and we take pride in that.”

The Tunica-Biloxi Indian Tribe’s website shares a quote from a Tunica story: “The Sun strongly told us, ‘If the sun is shining, the Indian people are still here.’” Thanks to the Tunica-Biloxi’s determination to bring their ancestors’ goods home, the Sun shines on a better world for all Native people.

The Tunica Treasure is a physical representation of where we fit into the history.…

above, top Tunica basketry fragment, early 17th century. above, bottom Alice Picote (Ofo, 1898–1975), Basket, 20th century, rivercane. The Ofo people joined the Tunica and Biloxi communities in Marksville in the 17th century and are now enrolled in the Tunica-Biloxi Indian Tribe. opposite The original TunicaBiloxi Museum, Marksville, Louisiana.

16. John and Laurie Rials, “A New Museum for the Tunica Treasure,” Country Roads, April 29, 2012, web.

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INDIGIPOPX RETURNS! Long, long ago, in a galaxy not that far away…

By Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke), and Shelley Patrick (Mvskoke)

I

N OUR PREVIOUS EPISODE of IndigiPopX, the COVID-19 pandemic had locked down most of the world.

Our hero, IndigiPopX founder Lee Francis IV (Laguna Pueblo), had canceled the in-person version of the popular event as a safety precaution. IndigiPopX 2020 was scheduled to begin on March 25, right around the time lockdowns began in the United States. On April 17, Francis told FAAM in a 2020 interview that canceling “was a hard decision, but we know all these folks have families and grandmas, and we don’t want them to go back and cause strife in their own space.”1 With just a few weeks of planning,

above IndigiPopX logo, designed by Dale DeForest (Navajo) and Lee Francis IV (Laguna Pueblo).

1. Stacy Pratt, “Lee Francis Navigates the Lockdown,” First American Art Magazine, no. 27 (Summer 2020), 18–19.

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Francis transitioned the event to an eight-hour livestream. Francis also kept the rest of his impressive projects—Native Realities Press and his Albuquerque-based store, Red Planet Books and Comics, all under Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers—running through two long years of lockdowns.

Then, March 10 to 12, 2023…

KAPOW! Indigenous comic book illustrators, designers, cosplayers, voice actors, and more converged on First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City for the return of the in-person IndigiPopX—the Indigenous comic con that could not be defeated!

INDIGIPOPX ORIGIN STORY Stardate 47634.44, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, Earth.2 THE FIRST INDIGENOUS COMIC CON opened on November 18, 2016, at the National Hispanic Cultural Center for excited ticketholders, offering a weekend of pop culture, comics, art, games, cosplay, and more. However, this was not the typical comic con but one built on the integration of Indigenous culture and self-representation into the more widely known comic universes, fandoms, and subcultures.

“We wanted to bring all of these Indigenous and Native creatives into one space, [and show] that we’re operating in a pop culture world that often views Native people in historical context and only historical context and one in which Native and Indigenous peoples ... ceased to exist at the beginning of the 1900s, the era of the American empire,” explained Francis.3 What began as a small pop-up event at local comic stores eventually turned into a large, weeklong Indigenous pop culture celebration with arts, cosplay, film, fashion, music, and even wrestling. In 2019 popularity soared as new locations were added in Denver, Colorado, and Melbourne, Australia, while new ideas were implemented like Indigenous Pop X, a one-day mini Indigenous comic con.

Some of the 2023 guest artists are veterans of the event, having been there from the beginning, such as illustrators Dale Ray DeForest (Navajo) and Maria Wolf Lopez (Purépecha descent), writer/illustrator/musician Arigon Starr (Kickapoo/ Mvskoke), and actor/ musician Jonathan Joss (Mestizo) of King of the Hill and Tulsa King fame.

Celebrated illustrator Jeffrey Veregge (Port Gamble S'Klallam) was the first guest invited to Indigenous Comic Con. “When I had the idea for the con,

the first person I thought of was Jeffrey, so he is deeply tied to this event,” said Francis. “It was so rewarding for me to get him as our first guest. He put on a great panel and was just so generous. As an artist, he is inspirational for a lot of young folks who were able to see that you can weave your culture together with a style that is really unique and pop. He opened a lot of doors for Indigenous artists.”

Veregge has designed more than 100 covers for comic publishers Marvel, IDW, Valiant, Dynamite, Boom!, and Darkhorse Comics. The exhibition Jeffrey Veregge: Of Gods and Heroes (2018–20) ran for 16 months at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center in New York City, and two of his murals were acquired for the Smithsonian’s permanent collection. Over the last few years, severe health problems have kept

2. November 18, 2016, according to the Stardate Calculator. stoacademy.com/tools/stardate. The Stardate is a calendar system used in the television series Star Trek.

3. John Seven, “Interview: Lee Francis talks Native American comics, Indigipop X and the rise of the Indiginerd,” The Beat: The Blog of Comics Culture, July 19, 2019, web.

above, top Roy Boney Jr. (Cherokee Nation), Adam Youngbear (C h eye n n e -A ra p a h o) , a n d Candice Byrd-Boney (Quapaw/ Osage/Cherokee Nations). above, bottom

Román Zara-

goza (Mestizo/Akimel O'odham descent), actor from Ghosts. opposite, top Costume compe-

tition participants. All photos, unless otherwise stated, are by Kristin Gentry (Choctaw Nation).

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Veregge from working. At the 2023 IndigiPopX, artists and fans came together to talk about his influence and send encouraging videos. With the Veregge family’s blessing, Francis produced a limited run of pins with one of Veregge’s designs, the proceeds of which will help with his medical bills.

Since the first Indigenous Comic Con in November 2016, much in the world has changed due to the pandemic, making it difficult to hold such elaborate and long events. Despite this, Indiginerds have stayed strong! IndigipopX (shortened from Indigenous Pop X) still holds space for Native representation in comic con form over a full weekend. Although not as extensive as the original Indigenous Comic Con became, IndigipopX still provides inspiration and community for creators and fans in what Dr. Francis likes to call “the Indiginerd Realm.”4

MEANWHILE, AT INDIGIPOPX 2023…

FIRST AMERICANS MUSEUM is full of unexpected things to begin with, but during IndigiPopX, it was not uncommon to see pop culture characters in Indigenized costume—and/or giant inflatable dinosaurs and unicorns—coming around the corner.

Droids beeped and played music as they rolled along, while mini parades of characters from different fictitious worlds casually strolled by, waving, and taking pictures with fans.

Vendor booths selling stickers, t-shirts, games, and beaded everything wound through the museum’s glass-domed Hall of the People. Indigenous-owned print and publishing businesses as well as environmental and health organizations were also represented.

At one end of the hall, members of the Southeastern Indian Artists Association (SEIAA) ran a print action, slinging ink for donations to fund the museum’s upcoming children’s wing.

Ida Aronson (Houma) ran a booth on behalf of the Bvlbancha Collective, an Indigenous mutual aid collective based in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Bvlbancha is the Choctaw name for New Orleans.) “I’ve gotten to talk to a lot of people and explain what we’re doing down here in south Louisiana and just share that in a great nerdy setting,” they said. “I’m a multi-nerd. I used to do anime cons and comic cons. When I heard there was an Indigenous con, I was like, ‘Oh, I am 100 percent there.’”

Upstairs, more booths led the way to rooms where Indigenous artists and performers gave presentations and workshops on all things pop culture. Among the panelists were actors Tahmoh Penikett (White River Upper Tanana) of Battlestar Galactica and Kaniehtiio Horn (Mohawk) of Letterkenny, with Prey producer Jhane Myers (Comanche/Blackfeet).

Maria Wolf Lopez, who is based in Chicago, participates in conventions all over the country. She agrees with the many artists who say there is something special about an Indigenous-focused con. “I think it’s more welcoming, that’s for sure,” she said. “Natives like to be with other Natives, you know? Right away, you want to know, ‘What tribe are you from? Where are you from? What do you do?’ We all share a lot in common, so 4. Seven, “Lee Francis.”

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to be in one place where we are all happy to be surrounded by our own, it’s a good feeling. And everybody just wants to eat and talk!”

Johnnie Diacon (Thlopthlocco Mvskoke) agreed with several artists who said the Indigenous comic con allows artists to share their work with a different audience. “As an artist, I work in different genres,” said Diacon. “Here I can reach a different audience to share what it means to be Mvskoke and Indigenous. To me, that’s a wonderful thing—that I can share my gift and talent with people who appreciate it, whether that’s through fine art or comics. I cover the gamut, and I hope in all of it I’m doing my job as an artist to represent my people. IndigiPopX is for everybody, non-Natives and Natives. It’s a great privilege and honor to be here doing this. It’s exciting.”

Enoch Endwarrior and Manasseh Endwarrior (both Navajo/Oneida) of Albuquerque are the brothers behind Reclaim Designs, an art and apparel company. Since their company began in 2014, the Endwarrior brothers have brought their work to powwows, art markets, and comic cons, including the first Indigenous Comic Con in Albuquerque. Their website explains, “We use pop culture references to make the connection of today’s society and Indigenous teachings. By using pop culture references we reinforce the values, culture, and teachings of our own Indigenous background.”

“We’ve always been in a unique position to go to art markets, powwows, and comic cons, but the Indigenous Comic Con was our first-ever event, so it’s kind of our home,” he said. “We enjoy all comic cons, but being at an Indigenous comic con, people just understand our work automatically. People get the pop-culture references, but they also get the Indigenous references without us having to explain so much.”

In addition to vendors and panels, IndigiPopX included film screenings such as Prey (in the Comanche language) with an introduction by producer Jhane Myers, performances by artists such as Elisa Harkins (Mvskoke Creek/Cherokee), and

opposite, top Traci Sorrell (Cherokee Nation) and Arigon Starr (Kickapoo/Muscogee) signing copies of their newly published Contenders: Two Native Baseball Players, One World Series (Kokila, 2023). Photo: FAAM. opposite, middle Steven Paul Judd (Choctaw Nation/Kiowa), artist, filmmaker, author, and staff writer for Zeke and Luther, a Disney comedy show. opposite, bottom Kindra Swafford (Cherokee Nation), dressed as Thor, screen-prints at the Southeastern Indian Artists Association booth to help raise funds for First Americans Museum to complete its FAMily Discovery Center.

above, top Cara Jade Myers (Wichita), actor from Rutherford Falls, will star in Killers of the Flower Moon, opening in October 2023. above, right Two visitors enjoying the comic-con. above, left Miss Oklahoma Indian Biker Princess Georgia Harjo (Mvskoke) with prints she collected from the Southeastern Indian Artist Association booth.

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games on the grounds of the museum.

Players debuted Glow Stickball, in which fans and competitors played the Southeastern Woodlands game wearing phosphorescent clothing and accessories and using stickball racquets wrapped in glow-in-the-dark tape. Founder of the Chimalli Institute of Mesoamerican Arts, author, archaeologist, and filmmaker Kurly Tlapowaya (Chicano/Nahua) taught people to play the Aridoamerican game Tambuchi and screened his documentary, Guardians of the Purple Kingdom (2022), about a weaving community in Oaxaca that carries on a rare dying technique. And of course the weekend ended, as Indigenous Comic Con and all its iterations always have, with a screening of Star Wars dubbed in the Navajo language.

INDIGINERDS UNITE!

above, top Playing Glow Stickball east of the Hall of the People. above, bottom Filmmaker and Reservation Dogs creator Sterlin Harjo (Seminole/Muscogee) examines ball-headed war clubs sculpted by Watio Splicer (Mohawk), at left.

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opposite, top Costume contest overall winner: Blossom Youngbear (Cheyenne-Arapaho/Euchee) dressed as Naru from Prey. opposite, bottom Kristin Gentry (Choctaw Nation), the director of community engagement and outreach of Native Realities and an IndigiPopX co-organizer, with the rap duo Lil Mike and Funny Bone (both Pawnee/Choctaw). Image courtesy of Kristin Gentry.

MAINSTREAM POP CULTURE has been Indigenized for ages—it came to the forefront in Indigenous pop art of the 1960s, for example—but the Indigenous Comic Con/IndigiPopX phenomenon provides a concentrated community of artists working in or with pop culture. Not only has it inspired artists of all ages to indulge their Indiginerd aesthetic, but it spawned smaller Indigenous cons as early as 2017 when the Absentee-Shawnee Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma hosted the IndigeNerd Native Arts Festival and Comic Con. Most recently, the first-ever SkasdiCon was held in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, in November 2022.

A collaboration between the Cherokee Nation Businesses’ Cultural Tourism Department and Northeastern State University (NSU), the IndigeNerd festival brought over 800 visitors to the NSU campus. The partnership came about through Cherokee Nation artist Roy Boney Jr.’s 2022 Sequoyah Fellowship. Boney, who has designed covers for Marvel, was among the artists at IndigiPopX, and none other than Lee Francis IV presented a panel at SkasdiCon. Skasdi is a Cherokee slang

word that loosely translates as “pride, impressiveness, awesomeness, fierceness, or feistiness, which can all describe many comic book and video game characters represented by artists and cosplayers who participate at comic cons,” according to the SkasdiCon website.

Boney said in an interview after SkasdiCon, “It was great seeing everybody having such fun and living their true geek selves out in public, doing it an Indigenous way.

There was a positive vibe throughout the whole event.

The vendors had good sales, and the community enjoyed coming out and having something for the family to do.”5 Co-organizer Candice Byrd-Boney (Quapaw/ Osage/Cherokee Nations) said, “SkasdiCon was an ‘Indigenerd’ dream come true. We wanted to uplift Native artists who work in the pop culture genre, and the response we got was very positive. We had several happy people come up and congratulate our department and NSU and say they really hope it will continue next year.”6

ONTO THE NEXT ADVENTURE! FROM INDIGIPOPX VETERANS to first-timers, vendors to performers, cosplayers to fans, all agreed that the event fulfills a need in the Indigenous art community. IndigiPopX was the first convention of any kind for Miss Oklahoma Indian Biker Princess Georgia Harjo (Mvskoke), a young artist who brought her beadwork, handmade clothing, and prints to the event. “This is my first convention, and I’m really grateful that we have something like this,” she said. “I love bringing Indigenous representation to things that I love, like Sonic the Hedgehog, the Peanuts characters, Spider Man … and I love to see other people share their love for these things.”

Tierra Begay (Navajo), founder of T Arrow Designs based in Albuquerque, agreed. “I love the environment,” she said. “I love meeting people from different tribes and seeing other artists bring their talent to everything they do, especially the Indigenized cosplay. It’s amazing. It inspires me to want to do it myself next year.”

Tierra should have that opportunity. Kristin Gentry (Choctaw Nation), newly appointed IndigiPopX director of community engagement and outreach, says IndigiPopX plans to return to Oklahoma. “I’m already working with Indigenous actors and artists that we’d like to bring to Oklahoma next year for IndigiPopX 24,” she said. “I’m honored to do what I love the most: to bring our First American communities together and create spaces for our evolving Indigenous pop culture.”

In other words, stay tuned for more adventures of the Indiginerd realm.…

5. Stacy Pratt, “Heroes descend on NSU for Native ‘SkasdiCon,’” Tahlequah Daily Press, November 7, 2022, web.

6. Pratt, “Heroes.”

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STATE OF THE ART Restoration & Reset at the Oklahoma State Capitol Native American artwork in this public arena highlights local Indigenous luminaries, history, and cultures

By Paige Willett (Citizen Potawatomi)

W

HEN CREWS BEGAN to organize the restoration of the Oklahoma State Capitol in Oklahoma City in 2015, the Oklahoma state legislature transferred the responsibility of funds distribution of the Oklahoma Art in Public Places Act from the Oklahoma Historical Society to the Oklahoma Arts Council (OAC). The arts council then created an Art in Public Places Division.

Work began to remove and protect all the art in the building as construction projects started in 2016.

“During that time we were able to do a deep dive into the collections and 34 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

look at what stories were being told and what stories were not being told,” said Jarica Walsh (Osage), OAC’s director of Visual and Public Art. “And we saw the funds that we had for Art in Public Places for new commissions as a chance to really expand the narrative and include some of these stories that we thought were being left out of Oklahoma history.”

After planning for more than six years, cataloguing more than 500 pieces of art, and commissioning 18 new pieces for the collection, the Oklahoma Arts Council began to reinstall work in the capitol in the summer of 2022. Many

of the new commissions were created

by Indigenous artists or feature Native history, culture, and prominent figures.

Walsh called the restoration a “chance for a reset,” using the opportunity to rethink the building’s layout in terms of a public art space. Each section now has a theme or highlights certain periods of state history, including pre-statehood and Native American history. While considering the architectural plan, which includes six floors and many hallways, the Oklahoma Arts Council held several meetings with a consortium of Native artists to collect their opinions. They

discussed what they felt was missing and how to fill those gaps in both a public and political space.

“What percentage of our work in the state art collection is made by Native American artists and/or about Native American communities? I think that’s a beautiful question to ask,” said Eyakem Gulilat, the Cultural Development director of the arts council. “What I remember—and I think I was very fascinated by—is that Native American art is not relegated to the status quo or an expectation of what Native American art is.” He recalls the planning discussions calling for “pushing the envelope.”

The art by and about Native peoples crosses many artistic media and styles including painting, pottery, installations, and sculptures, as well as pointillism, realism, and portraits. The capitol restoration project also expanded the diversity of Native artists and subjects in the capitol art collection and now includes art that references many of the 38 federally recognized tribes in Oklahoma.

POTTERY, SCULPTURE THE GROUND FLOOR by the visitor’s entrance focuses on pre-statehood history and now includes a couple of ceramic and sculptural pieces full of rich, historical meaning for the land that became Oklahoma. The Oklahoma Arts Council commissioned both pieces for the space.

One of the works is Kadohadacho

by Chase Kahwinhut Earles (Caddo), a tripod vessel made in a precontact Caddo-incised style. Earles is a citizen of the Caddo Nation, one of the peoples indigenous to Oklahoma. The lightweight, coiled pot stands two feet tall and two feet wide. Earles’s labor-intensive process began with digging the clay by hand from his ancestors’ homeland along the Red River, which serves as the boundary between Oklahoma and Texas.

“Then it is actually tempered with freshwater mussel shell. And that is something that Southeastern and Caddo tribes would add into the clay as kind of a uniquely regional cultural thing to this area. And so it has little speckles of

the crushed-up mussel shell in the clay,” Earles said.

After hand-coiling the vessel, he burnished it with a stone to make it shine, then fired it over an open-ground wood fire before carving Caddo designs into it, all of which took several months. Earles calls this type of pottery and process a “Caddo calling card.” He titled the piece Kadohadacho, a tribe within the Caddo Confederacy whose homelands were along the Red River. “It’s like reaffirming our original name, and at the same time, kind of reaffirming this land is Kadohadacho land,” he said.

Earles began his journey of learning how to make Caddo pottery in 2009 and immediately felt connected to the art form. “When I started, I realized that’s

above Chase Kahwinhut Earles (Caddo), Kadohadacho, 2022, hand-harvested, outdoor-fired clay, mussel-shell temper, 48 × 24 × 24 in., Oklahoma State Capitol Art Collection. Photo: Legislative Service Bureau. Image courtesy of the Oklahoma Arts Council. opposite View of the Oklahoma State Capitol from the north, overlooking the Tribal Flag Plaza, designed by MA+ Designs of Oklahoma City. Commissioned in 1989, the plaza features a 100-foot diameter earthen mound divided into four granite sections to create a medicine circle/sun circle design. Flags represent the 36 tribal nations in Oklahoma at the time. Two more tribes have since gained independent recognition.

The Guardian, a bronze statue by Kelly Enoch Haney (Seminole/ Muscogee, 1940–2022) is visible on the dome. Photo: Drew Tarvin (CC BY 2.0).

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exactly what I was meant to do, and I found my purpose and what I was going to do,” he said. “I did better with pottery, clay, and ceramics than I had ever done with painting and stuff like that.… But I definitely think our tribe had a very long and prodigious history of ceramics, so it was just like it was coming back to us.”

Earles felt honored the Oklahoma Arts Council chose him to create something for the capitol to represent both his tribe and Native people’s influence in state history and culture.

He was surprised and excited they chose pottery for the space and laid out an area dedicated to Indigenous art.

“If people are visiting the capitol of the state and the first thing they see is a representation of an Indigenous tribe, isn’t that something more than we’ve ever had there?” Earles continued, “I think it’s 36 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

a great accomplishment for the tribe as well to be able to have something there that talks, that speaks to us, our people, and our identity.”

Near Kadohadacho is a life-size bronze bust of Chief Allen Wright (Choctaw Nation, 1826–1885) by African-American sculptor LaQuincey Reed. He is the current artist-in-residence at the Skirvin Hilton Hotel in downtown Oklahoma City where he sculpted three commissioned pieces for the Oklahoma Arts Council capitol project. Chief Allen Wright was the Chief of the Choctaw Nation from 1866 to 1870, a significant leader in Indian Territory following the Trail of Tears and the Civil War and prior to Oklahoma’s statehood in 1907.

“When you’re doing a portrait of somebody and you’re trying to encapsulate their entire life … you have to

kind of pick the best kind of look,” Reed said. He noted that camera accessibility became commonplace less than a century ago, and he was fortunate to have several pictures from different stages of Wright’s life to use when creating the bust. Reed decided to depict Chief Wright with a mustache despite its absence in some well-known photos.

“I kind of felt like it wouldn’t be him if he didn’t have that because he had that toward the end of his life. He had it at the beginning of his life,” Reed said. “I went through and tried to pick out what I thought would be him. That’s kind of my process when trying to figure out how to do a portrait, especially with someone who’s lived a long life.”

It was Chief Wright who originally suggested the name Oklahoma for the new state, a translation from the Choctaw

language, okla meaning “people,” and humma meaning “red.”1 Reed learned about this history of the Choctaw people, the state, and Chief Wright while creating the bust. “You hear about all of the important things that he’s done, speaking numerous languages and trying to bridge the gap between Native Americans and [the US government],” Reed said. “Those are the reasons I think it’s important [to have this work in the capitol] because I didn’t know about him, and I don’t think a lot of people know about him.”

Reed’s commissions for other sections of the building include busts of educator and civil rights activist Clara Luper and former Oklahoma Secretary of State Hannah Atkins as well.

PAINTINGS PAINTINGS COMPRISE the majority of the capitol art collection and depict notable Indigenous peoples, ranging from the World War I Choctaw Code Talkers to the Five Moons, a group of Native ballerinas from Oklahoma who broke racial grounds in dance and achieved international success. Mainly portraits, the paintings show the influence of Native Americans in state, tribal, and national history, and their mark on culture, politics, and lifeways.

Artist Dylan Cavin (Choctaw Nation) painted Anumpa Luma Anumpuli, Choctaw for “code talker,” as a commissioned piece, new to the collection. The acrylic work depicts the Choctaw Code Talkers standing in uniform on the battlefield. They were Native American soldiers who used their tribal languages to confound enemy spies in World War I. The painting hangs on the second floor outside the doors of the Oklahoma Supreme Court in what is now known as the “Hall of Heroes,” which showcases military and veteran-themed artwork.

“When the [Oklahoma Judicial Center] building renovation was done, they dedicated funds to restore the Oklahoma Veteran’s Memorial in that

space and to do additional sidewalks to make it more accessible to all the veterans who visit. We felt like it was a nice tie-in to dedicate this space outside their doors [in the capitol] as a connection to their dedication to the veteran community at the judicial center,” Walsh said.

The fifth floor’s theme is “Roots of Oklahoma Commerce and Economic Development.” The Oklahoma Arts Council commissioned a new portrait of Cherokee Nation Chief Wilma Mankiller

by Muscogee artist Starr Hardridge, which he calls “not your typical state building portrait.” It incorporates two different styles: a more European style for Mankiller’s figure, and Hardridge’s own form of pointillism for the background.

“I wanted to do something that was going to do her justice but also stand out

1. “Choctaw place names in ‘Oklahumma,’” Chahta Anumpa Aiikhvna School of Choctaw Language, an authorized website of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, web. Kahlalin has argued in her self-published essay, “No, ‘Oklahoma’ doesn’t mean ‘red people’” (Medium, 2017), that this is not the correct translation; however, her hypothesis is not substantiated by the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Mississippi Band of Choctaw, Jena Band of Choctaw, or any other independent source. —Ed.

I didn’t have to subscribe to European methods of painting.

a b ov e Starr Hardridge (Muscogee), Wilma Mankiller, 2022, 36 × 30 in., acrylic, plaster on linen, Oklahoma State Capitol Art Collection. Photo: Legislative Service Bureau.

Image courtesy of the Oklahoma Arts Council. opp osite C . D y l a n C av i n (Choctaw Nation), Anumpa Luma Anumpuli, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 48 × 36 in., Oklahoma State Capitol Art Collection. Photo: Legislative Service Bureau. Image courtesy of the Oklahoma Arts Council.

This painting depicts Choctaw Code Talkers from World War I.

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above Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache, 1914–1994), As Long as the Waters Flow, 1989, bronze, 162 × 76 in., Oklahoma State Capitol Art Collection, commissioned by the State Capitol Preservation Commission. Photo: KS OKC (CC BY 3.0).

Houser's title comes from common phrasing in US treaties with tribes, promising the tribes would retain their land "as long as the grass grows and waters flow." This sculpture reminds the government that the treaties remain the supreme law of the land. opp o si t e N o c o n a B u r g e s s (Comanche), Doc Tate Nevaquaya, acrylic on canvas, 48 × 30 in., Oklahoma State Capitol Art Collection. Photo: Legislative Service Bureau. Image courtesy of the Oklahoma Arts Council.

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from the traditional way of how you might see a woman in those settings,” he said. “I wanted her to have a strong, straight-on view. A woman with power and a woman to be reckoned with. A woman with great respect. And I hope that comes across in that painting.”

In the painting, Mankiller wears a three-tiered gorget engraved with the three Cherokee principles of medicine, education, and prosperity in the Cherokee syllabary. The background features the Cherokee Nation’s seven-point star and oak wreath, composed with individual dots of paint. Hardridge began using pointillism in 2014 as a nod to Muscogee beadwork and to reclaim painting in an Indigenous way.

The style “just really struck me, and it wasn’t beadwork, and it wasn’t an imitation of beadwork,” he said. “To me, it was me taking agency over my own painting. I didn’t have to subscribe to European methods of painting. I felt that I was kind of taking the paint back for my own way to represent it and taking paint out of the context of a brush altogether.”

He felt honored to be chosen to depict one of history’s most prominent Native leaders for the Oklahoma State Capitol. “Chief Mankiller is an example to all Natives, but especially Native women—that they can be successful, they can be powerful, they can make an impact on their communities, their nations, and the world just through their thoughts, their actions, and their words,” Hardridge said.

The Oklahoma Arts Council also commissioned a portrait of the artist and Southern Plains flute player Doc Tate Nevaquaya (Comanche, 1932–1996) by Nocona Burgess (Comanche). It hangs on the capitol’s second floor in a hallway of “Oklahoma’s Cultural Treasures” along with a 1919 portrait of the storyteller and actress Te Ata (Chickasaw, 1895–1995) by Nellie Shepherd.

Walsh said the portrait of Doc Tate Nevaquaya “is one that we’ve been excited about and ready to get it up on display.

Burgess did a really fantastic job with the light, the shadow, the color. Inspiring!”

Outside of portraits, the ground floor near the visitors’ entrance includes several paintings and other works inspired by the prairie and ecology of Oklahoma.

The area focuses on pre-statehood and Native American history.

Yatika Fields (Osage/Muscogee/ Cherokee) completed a six-by-thirteenfoot mural for the ground floor. Spiro: Serpent River, Shelled Stories, Sun-Touched Engravings was inspired by the Spiro Mounds of eastern Oklahoma near the Arkansas River, the location of precontact Indigenous Caddoan Mississippian cultures.

“We were wanting to honor the vibrancy of this cultural hub and hub of commerce and trade, and so we asked him to create a concept that would embody that,” Walsh said.

Nearby in a new location hangs The Earth and I Are One by Chief Enoch Kelly Haney (Seminole/Muscogee), artist, principal chief of the Seminole Nation from 2005 to 2009, and member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives and Senate. Part of the capitol’s art collection prior to restoration, this painting depicts a Native man meditating in a field of Indian blankets, the state’s wildflower. It uses bright colors and an ombré effect to blend his body into the field, river, and wildlife he reveres and with whom he shares a mutually sustaining relationship.

INSTALLATION, VIDEO INSTALLATION EXHIBITS provide artists with opportunities for unbridled creativity. During the capitol restoration project, the visitors’ entrance was opened, and the hallways were widened. The OAC decided to commission two installations, “setting the tone as you enter the building,” according to Walsh.

One wall now includes The Resonating Memory of Red Earth by Anita Fields (Osage/Muscogee). Known for her multidisciplinary pieces and skills, she sometimes combines her love of textiles and clay to make wearable items made from the earth. For the capitol piece, she gathered clay from around the state in areas significant to specific tribes. Fields then used it to create a clay slip to paint on the tiles and make a stain for ceramic pieces. She built a ceramic wall installation from the stained pieces that is 3½ feet wide and more than 6 feet tall.

The hallway of the security area now includes an even bigger brass panel installation by artist Jessica Harjo, PhD (Otoe/Osage/Pawnee/Sac & Fox). People of the Great Sky, Constellations of the Land covers 75 feet by 24 feet and consists of more than 300 brass pieces laser cut with designs inspired by Indigenous cultures in the state. While it doesn’t directly represent Oklahoma tribes, “it’s designed in a way that people from the tribes of Oklahoma should be able to resonate with it and feel something,” Harjo said.

Harjo has a background in both architectural landscape and graphic design. Throughout the last few years, Harjo has focused on creating brass jewelry, including earrings and necklaces, under her brand, Weomepe Designs. The installation for the capitol has brought together her skills and interests in the physically largest piece of her career. “It’s sort of a culmination of the different areas I’ve been involved in,” she said. “I hope everyone gets as excited as I do when they see it for the first time and take something away from it, even if it’s just the beauty of the design itself.”

The panels hang about four inches from the ceiling with sunshine hitting them through the hallway’s skylights.

The shadows of the designs line the walls and floors. The physicality and size of the installation presented several challenges,

but Harjo enjoyed bringing her artwork to a new scale and public space. She worked on the panels for almost a year.

Harjo said that her favorite part of the project “was to be able to design something and adapt it to a space, like figuring out what worked best for my pieces, [which was to hang them] from the ceiling and down the hall. It just made sense once we got in there.”

Harjo feels the expansion of Indigenous art in the capitol gives wider representation to Native cultures and abilities. “It kind of shows that oftentimes people think we’re in this one category of art, but we do a lot of different types of art.… We’re really varied in our conceptual works, backgrounds, and styles,” she said.

While holding a town hall–style meeting with Indigenous artists, the NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 39

…it all sinks in that their work is going on display in the capitol; that they’re part of this history…

above Yatika Fields (Osage/ Muscogee/Cherokee), Spiro: Serpent River, Shelled Stories, Sun-Touched Engravings, 2022, oil on canvas, 72 × 156 in., Oklahoma State Capitol Art Collection. Photo: Legislative Service Bureau. Image courtesy of the Oklahoma Arts Council.

40 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

Oklahoma Arts Council and its guests came up with an idea for a different type of installation. They determined language from the state’s tribes was an important part of representation and cultural expression.

The OAC commissioned Buffalo Nickel Creative, a Pawhuska-based production company, to produce a short film for the lobby. Indigenous Greetings by creative director Ryan RedCorn (Osage) features members and citizens of different tribes greeting visitors in their language, dressed in everything from dance regalia to everyday shirts and jeans. It was coproduced by Sterlin Harjo (Seminole/Muscogee), the creator of Hulu’s Peabody Award-winning show, Reservation Dogs. The film lasts for approximately ten minutes and plays on a loop at the visitor’s entrance.

The building now also has three hallways outfitted as rotating galleries to showcase contemporary Oklahoma artists, some of which have already

featured Indigenous work in a variety of media, including Michael Elizondo Jr. (Southern Cheyenne/Kaw/Chumash) and Karin Walkingstick (Cherokee Nation).

The Oklahoma Arts Council plans to feature a new artist every two months for a total of 18 exhibitions a year.

“It’s been so much fun to work with these artists on the commissions and also to be here when they deliver the work.

And it all sinks in that their work is going on display in the capitol; that they’re part of this history and the collection of artists who are sharing and telling these stories,” said Jarica Walsh. “It’s been neat and touching to be part of that emotional experience for the artists.”

The public can freely visit the Oklahoma State Capitol. Small groups can join regularly scheduled docent-led tours. Larger groups of 15 or more people can request special tours a month in advance. More information can be found at the Oklahoma Arts Council’s website, arts.ok.gov.

Fresh Flowers by Terren Mattox @byterren

PRESENTS

“A Gathering of Sisters” FEATURING ARTWORK BY

Vivian Garner Cottrell Sharon Decker

Yonavea Hawkins

Gwen Coleman Lester

Lea Ferguson Mccormick Daina Ramsey

Amanda Rutland

MaryBeth Timothy

Karin Walkingstick

Artist Reception Sunday, May 7, 12:00 to 5:00 pm at Tribes Gallery, 512 W. Main St., Norman, OK  tribes131.com  @tribes131  @Tribes131

NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 41

WE HAVE WORDS FOR ART The First American Art Magazine Story

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

P

eople are lucky if they take one semester of Native art history in college. Even if one reads voraciously, books haven’t been published about most tribes’ art. Accurate information about the precontact Americas is rare in mainstream media.

In the Native art center of Santa Fe, especially back in 2012, I noticed that writing about Native art was ubiquitous, but often the underpaid writers were rushed by publications geared toward tourists with no fact-checking process in place. My artist friends and I were all too used to having our names, quotes, and tribal affiliations mangled.

The same half-dozen art stars were written about repeatedly, but we knew 42 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

so many fascinating Native artists who were seldom interviewed. Of course, it’s wildly inappropriate among many tribes to elevate oneself above your fellow tribal members, so the most culturally engaged artists—the ones that the public should know about—don’t promote themselves in the ways that the mainstream art world demands.

My perspective on the situation was influenced by my background. I grew up in the Native art world, but in Oklahoma.

There my parents, Benjamin Harjo Jr. (Absentee Shawnee/Seminole), Sharron Ahtone Harjo (Kiowa), Mary Jo Watson (Seminole), and their friends opened the Center for the American Indian in 1978. My sister and I were tasked

with organizing their mailings by zip code. Later, during my long, protracted undergraduate college career, I took every Native American and Latin American art history class I could. At the University of Oklahoma, I encountered Mary Jo Watson again. In her Native American Women’s Art History class, she impressed upon us students that we needed to write about the Native artists that we studied.

Dr. Watson’s plea to write stuck with me through the years. In 2008, the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) posted that they were hiring an instructor of early Native American art history. They hired me, so my boyfriend, my cat, and I moved from San Francisco to Santa Fe, where I launched my short-lived academic teaching career.

The classes I taught, Native art history from the earliest times to 1850 and then 1850 to 1960, were hemispheric in scope. We moved, like a steam roller, from the Tierra del Fuego to northern Greenland. I avoided culturally sensitive items and anything too taboo to show in class. Every week I devoured new books, trying to keep ahead of the lectures, and my mind was blown by what I kept discovering about Native art.

Teaching was not my strong suit. I hated being a disciplinarian, taking roll, and calculating grades, but I wanted to share everything I was discovering about Indigenous art history. I figured writing was the best route, so in January 2011, I created ahalenia.blogspot.com to improve my writing skills. So many Native artists and collectors don’t have the luxury of attending art school, so my goal was to break down the academic writing already being published about Native art and artists for a time-crunched general readership. I kept writing on the blog through the end of 2012.

At that time, various publications covered Native art, but with narrow focuses like region or media, and most left out film, installation art, performance art, street art, and even photography—still considered by some to not be “Indian” enough. A vast gulf existed between art magazines and Native magazines.

It became increasingly clear that a new publication, one that centered Native people and not just the works of Native art, was needed.

I had some basic familiarity with writing, design, and publishing. I’ve edited newsletters and zines throughout my life. I took classes in journalism, creating writing, design, and relevant software. I had worked for two newspapers and an offset print shop. I had self-published small catalogues and books. But creating a professional art magazine from start to finish was daunting.

I’d never been particularly anxious before but began waking up at 5:00 am stressing out about being in over my head. Fortunately, Rick Stivers and Marcia Swain from SCORE, a nonprofit where retired professionals advise business startups, advised me on the basics.

Nordhaus Law Firm trademarked our name, which had to be First American Art

Magazine. Finally, after the emotional and painful process of dissolving an initial business partnership, I registered an LLC and began recruiting writers, artists, and advertisers to get the ball rolling.

The pilot issue, FAAM No. 0, Spring 2013, only had Indigenous writers. I had no funds to pay them, so they wrote out

above, top Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Barbara Harjo. Photo: Ann Sherman. above. bottom Randy Kemp and Bobby Dues Wilson hawking FAAMs at Heard Fair, Phoenix, 2015. Photo: FAAM. opposite Tara Lasiloo and Sasha Noche, Santa Fe, 2014. Photo: Stephen Lang.

NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 43

of their generosity and support for the Native art scene. I’m deeply grateful to Roy Boney Jr. (Cherokee Nation), Reid Gómez (Navajo), Teri Greeves (Kiowa), Andrea R. Hanley (Navajo), Suzan Shown Harjo (Southern Cheyenne/Muscogee), Melissa Melero-Moose (Northern Paiute/Modoc), Jessica Metcalfe (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), Denise Neil (Delaware Tribe/ Cherokee Nation), Sarah Sense (Chitimacha/Choctaw), and Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa). Neebinnaukzhik wrote our first column, “Exploring Native Graphic Design.”

Emily Haozous (Fort Sill Chiricahua Apache) volunteered to serve on the advisory council and Maggie Ohnesorgen (Mestiza), Jim Rivera (Pascua Yaqui), and Paula Rivera (Taos) joined her.

With the first issue, I sought to completely obliterate persistent stereotypes about Native art. One of those was that Native artists were isolated from the international art world.

Roy wrote about traveling to Paris to exhibit at the Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées, and Andrea Hanley wrote about Indigenous artists participating in the Sydney Biennale. Sarah Sense reviewed Arte Textil Contemporáneo in Santiago, Chile, and I covered 21st-century Greenlandic Inuit artists.

Our first launch party was at GF Contemporary Gallery on Canyon Road in Santa Fe. Then my uncle Carl Milam (Cherokee Nation) generously hosted a launch party at his Lobby Café in Oklahoma City. Early on, we held launch parties for every issue.

Looking back at the photos, attendees were a who’s who of collectors, Native artists, and art professionals.

44 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

FAAM No. 1 was scheduled for the fall of 2013. We expanded our circle of writers to include non-Indigenous scholars to share a wider range of perspectives from diverse geographical regions. To fund the magazine, 82 generous backers donated $5 or more to our Kickstarter campaign.

By 2014, FAAM established its quarterly schedule. Barbara Harjo became FAAM’s stalwart advertising representative, expanding our revenue toward a path of self-sustainability.

FAAM No. 2’s new contributors included Matthew Ryan Smith of London, Ontario, who became our literary editor, and Nadia Jackinsky-Seth (Alutiiq) of Homer, Alaska, who became our Northern regional representative. Both still contribute to FAAM today, including this issue. Our contributors included writers from the United States, Canada, France, Norway, and the United Kingdom. Continuing international coverage, Staci Golar wrote about Southwestern Native artists traveling and exhibiting in China. In FAAM No. 3, Kevin Simpson of Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, submitted the first of many excellent features on art by Indigenous peoples of Mexico. Thollem, an experimental musician and activist, joined FAAM writers with FAAM No. 4, Fall 2014, and covers Indigenous music, sound art, and noise.

My mom, Mary Ellen Meredith, and sister, Samonia Byford (both Cherokee Nation), helped proofread in English, Spanish, and an ever-changing range of Indigenous languages.

Our proofreaders have always been heroes since we encourage not just Native languages but also Native writing systems. Much later, FAAM No. 18, Spring 2018 included the first published poem in Mi’kmaq hieroglyphics, written by Michelle Sylliboy (Mi’kmaw), which I hand-calligraphed.

Regional representatives grew out of support for the magazine by Kelly Church (Gun Lake Pottawatomi/Ottawa/ Ojibwe) and Melissa Melero-Moose. They informed me about important exhibitions and up-and-coming artists and distributed magazines at events they participated in. Rosa Cays (Chicana) began copy-editing with FAAM No. 10, and Jo Ann Reece began copy-editing with FAAM No. 20.

John Paul Rangel (Mestizo) set up our website, firstamericanartmagazine.com where people can subscribe, order back issues, and advertise. The site also provides resources, such as our online calendar, a glossary of art terms, and advice, such as how to write a press release. Beginning in 2018, Stacy Pratt (Mvskoke) contributed heavily to the FAAM blog and plans to do so again. Staci Golar helps manage FAAM’s active social media, now on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. A major change for both me and the magazine was my 2017 move to Oklahoma. That summer became the Summer of Durham. James Luna (Payómkawichum/Ipi/MexicanAmerican, 1950–2018) called me, saying, “We have to write about Durham.” I pointed out that FAAM only covers Indigenous writers, so Jimmie Durham, a non-Native sculptor who had just opened a massive touring retrospective, fell outside our scope. An hour later, Nancy Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache) called to reiterate that FAAM had to address Durham. Upon further reflection, I agreed, and Roy Boney joined us in writing essays carefully explaining how Jimmie Durham, Anglo-American born in Houston, Texas, was not a Native American or Cherokee

artist by any metric. We only addressed him because universities throughout Canada and the United States held him up as the example of a successful “Native” artist to emulate.

In 2017 and 2018, FAAM produced the Heard Fair program. While we ceased that publication, we remain media sponsors of the fair to this day. Gloria Lomahaftewa and Linda Lomahaftewa (both Hopi/Choctaw) hold down the FAAM booth, which provides an excellent opportunity for reader feedback and recruiting new writers.

In addition to the magazine, FAAM has sponsored several educational events, such as the Cherokee Art History Symposium at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, in 2018. In March 2018, FAAM contributor Jean Merz-Edwards spearheaded the symposium and exhibition, Stories from the Land: Indigenous Voices Connecting Within the Great Plains, at the Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery and other venues in Lindsborg and Salina, Kansas.

We hosted workshops in beadwork, led

by Yonavea Hawkins (Caddo/Delaware/ Kickapoo), and collage-making.

When COVID-19 hit North America in spring 2020, the art world shut down. Isolating at home, we knew artists lost their markets and exhibitions, so on April 10, 2020, we announced a call for entries for Masked Heroes: Facial Coverings by Native Artists, a virtual art exhibition. To encourage participation, we added a competition, and 26 FAAM editors, writers, advisors, and regional representatives judged the artwork. Sixteen days later we unveiled the exhibition of 125 entries from 73 artists across Canada, the United States, and even England. Howard La Fortune (Tsawout Saanich) won Best of Show with his Bear Snout, a carved cedar mask.

Major museums collected the prize– winning artworks, and the Museum of International Folk Art designed an exhibit based on Masked Heroes.

Stacy Pratt suggested that we document how the Native art world responded to the COVID-19 crisis to give people hope but also to provide a historical record of that time. In “Native

above Angela C. Villa proofreading FAAM at Trinosophes Projects, Detroit, 2021. Photo: Thollem. opposite Linda Lomahaftewa and Jeri Ah-be-hill at the FAAM No. 1 Launch Party, LoneDog NoiseCat Gallery, Santa Fe, August 2013. Photo: FAAM.

Art World Responds to the COVID-19 Pandemic,” FAAM No. 27, Summer 2020, Stacy Pratt, RoseMary Diaz, Staci Golar, Christopher W. Smith, Thollem, and I wrote about how internationally known Indigenous artists sewed scrubs for healthcare workers, crafted facial masks and shields for essential workers, shared coloring pages, gave virtual concerts, and created artwork to understand and overcome the trauma of that time.

Beginning in May 2020, FAAM partnered with the Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts in Santa Fe to produce Collections Spotlight, a series of virtual discussions. Native artists selected artworks from the Coe’s collection that they wanted to discuss. Collections curator Bess Murphy handled the artwork for the camera in Santa Fe while I interviewed the artists. Rachel Wixom edited the videos, all 21 of which are still available through the Coe Center’s website.

In February 2021, FAAM offered “We Have Words for Art: A Symposium on Writing about Art by Indigenous Peoples of the Americas,” a two-day virtual event. Critical Minded, Noksi Press, University of Virginia Mellon Indigenous Arts Initiative, and the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians sponsored the symposium, and to our surprise, all 500 spots rapidly filled up.

Videos of the individual and group

presentations are available through firstamericanartmagazine.com/word.s This was immediately followed by a multiweek, online art writing workshop with Indigenous Californian artists led by Stacy Pratt and me.

In 2022, FAAM hosted the online “Beyond Art: Respecting and Protecting the Sacred” and the in-person “Currents in Indigenous Art: Native Writers Discuss Native Arts” with colleagues from other publications, such as Native Max. Now Nicole Emmons (Citizen Potawatomi) has taken over subscription fulfillment in the FAAM office. Staci Golar and I have been meeting regularly with a magazine consultant to strategize for the future. My first cousin Michael Sobral (Cherokee Nation), a financial advisor had helped Barbara Harjo and me streamline our pricing and alternative revenue streams (FAAM runs on cousin power!). Our newly reorganized advisory council convened for its first quarterly Zoom meeting, and regional representatives are soon to follow.

The CIRI Foundation just funded FAAM’s first Alaska Native art writer fellowship; the details of which we will share soon. Collectively, we’ve all learned so much in the last decade and hope to offer even more to the Indigenous art community—the artists, collectors, scholars, and allies—in our second decade.

NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 45

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PROFILE

Diné Fashion Designer & Beadwork Artist

ORLANDO DUGI

By Chadd Scott

T

HE COUTURE SECTOR of the Native American art community has exploded in popularity and visibility since Teri Greeves (Kiowa) interviewed Orlando Dugi for the debut issue of First American Art Magazine ten years ago. High fashion has been elevated from sideshow to main event. Look no further than the now annual Indigenous Fashion Show at SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market that premiered in 2014 and has become the hottest ticket in town in a relative blink of an eye. In 2022 it was expanded to two days.

Dugi has a pair of provocative theories as to why this meteoric ascension of Native fashion has occurred, the first being a counteraction by mainstream designers looking for ways to collaborate with Indigenous designers after decades of misappropriation. He also believes Indigenous designers are “breaking free of the bonds of art markets.” Dugi elaborates: “Art markets have such standards and a lot of different rules and regulations that you have to abide by, and if you’re stuck under those rules, there is really no room to expand on the ideas that you have.”1

Ever since he transitioned his creative focus from beaded handbags and jewelry to fashion around 2011, Dugi has intentionally occupied a space of his own. While holding firm to some of the goals he set for himself a decade ago, others he’s let go.

“The direction for my work is mainstream fashion,” Dugi told Greeves back in 2013. No longer.

“In the very beginning, I think every up-and-coming designer [wants] to be in the mainstream; you want to be in New York. But over the years I’ve matured enough to realize that I don’t care to be within the mainstream fashion industry,” says Dugi, who has lived in Santa Fe since 2009. “I think it’s important for Indigenous designers to establish their own fashion council where we have our own fashion industry. I think that is a better goal.”

Other sentiments established at the outset of his design career remain remarkably similar to what they are today. “My designs are geared toward all women, not just Native women,” Dugi told Greeves. “I may take some aspect of the work from my culture or Native culture in general, but it’s not the sole focus.”2 His unique fusion of Diné culture with mainstream couture has established Dugi as one of the most accomplished designers in the Native fashion world. His designs have been featured alongside the beadwork of his partner, Ken Williams (Northern Arapaho/Seneca), at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian and the Center of Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. He’s been included in group and traveling shows at the Peabody Essex Museum, the Museum of International Folk Art, and the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA). The Denver Art Museum recently acquired his chiffon dress, The Eye Dazzler.

“Orlando’s designs stand out from others through his thoughtful and subtle references to his cultural background that are overtly present to some but unrecognizable to most who lack the cultural context to understand. You can see this in the flashy, hand-beaded portion of his Eye Dazzler dress (2021) that references the bold color and dizzying design of some 1800s Diné textiles,” says John Lukavic, the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Native Arts at the Denver Museum of Art. “He is clearly in the vanguard of Indigenous fashion and is there to stay.”

Dugi’s first solo exhibition came in 2019 at the Avenir Museum of Design and Merchandising at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

1. All quotes, unless otherwise noted, from Orlando Dugi in discussion with the author, January 18 and February 2, 2023.

2. Teri Greeves, “Orlando Dugi: Diné Beadwork Artist and Fashion Designer,” First American Art Magazine no. 0 (Spring 2013), 12–17.

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ORLANDO DUGI

“Orlando’s work, steeped in luxurious finery and immaculate detail, is simultaneously inspired by his Diné heritage and haute couture fashion houses. While his designs and techniques clearly reference both, the end results are uniquely and unapologetically his own,” says Elysia Poon, director of the Indian Arts Research Center (IARC). Dugi was a 2022 fellow at IARC. “Perhaps like any good artist, Orlando occupies a space that is constantly moving forward without jettisoning the past, challenging expectations, and flipping convention on its head.

He demonstrates by example some of the potential for not just the Native fashion industry but the broader industry.”

SUBTLY NATIVE WHILE GENER ALLY UNDERSTATED about his Diné heritage, Dugi’s work has always been and remains deeply influenced by his childhood roots in rural Gray Mountain, Arizona. There he remembers watching his grandparents working with beads, and at six years old, he began emulating them. He also remembers the countless stars above him in the endless, northern Arizona night sky and their importance to the Navajo stories, songs, and prayers his grandparents shared.

“My work focuses on elegance and complexity that stems from Navajo ceremonies and teachings. They’re very elegant when you listen to the songs and the prayers and the protocols,” Dugi says. “For me, that’s where the focus comes from. I try to carry on what I’ve seen growing up, what I’ve experienced, and translate that beauty and elegance through my work, whether it’s a woman’s dress, a man’s garment, whatever.”

A series of silk tops with yellow topaz glass beads that spell out the Diné words Hózhó and Nizhoní directly connects Dugi’s background to his designs.

Hózhó is an important philosophy in Diné culture that signifies an individual being in balance and harmony with their surroundings. Nizhoní translates to beautiful and good.

“I’ve done knitwear, hand-knit wool sweaters, and those designs were highly

inspired by old-style Navajo wearing robes,” Dugi says. His indigeneity is in the work, but it’s subtle. His debut men’s collection from 2022/2023 refers to part of the Diné creation story told to young children. Dugi’s website explains how “in this epic, Sun is the father of twin boys determined to protect their people from danger. Sun presents his sons with gifts in the form of zigzag lightning and garments, armor, and weapons made of flint and sunlight.”

His Naldo silk charmeuse, buttonup shirt with custom black arrowhead print relates back to the story and the weapons. “Some of the things I design interpret a story very subtly, like little [arrowheads], but it’s a pattern on a printed fabric, cut and made into a shirt.

above Mike, 2022/23 Collection, hand-knitted sweater with natural white, natural black, and indigo dyed rambouillet yarns; brass button closure on right shoulder. Wool fleece sourced from New Mexican rambouillet farms. Processed, spun, and dyed in New Mexico, Inspired by 19th-century Diné wearing robes, sometimes called Chief's Robes. Model: Michael Montoya.

Damel, 2022/23 Collection, tencel high-waisted, wide-leg trouser with a three-inch waistband, double-front pleats, back flap pockets, and side inseam pockets. Photo: Wes Cunningham, One Trip Media. opposite Orlando Dugi with his beadwork. Photo: Walter Lamar (Blackfeet/Wichita).

NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 49

PROFILE

It’s a custom print, not a ready-made printed pattern. I’ll continue to do things that way,” Dugi says.

His admirers eagerly anticipate Dugi’s continual innovations in finding fresh ways to blend Diné traditions with haute couture. “The Red Collection (2014) was inspired by Navajo women and the matriarchal social setting before Spanish colonial contact,” explains Amber-Dawn Bear Robe (Siksika), SWAIA fashion show producer and guest curator of Art of Indigenous Fashion (2022) at IAIA MoCNA. Dugi was included in the exhibition and is a regular at the fashion show.

“Orlando Dugi made the red hues for

the silk and threads with the cochineal [insect] honoring Navajo women and cultural design process. While cochineal red has a global story, the color has a significant narrative around Navajo textiles.”3 For his SWAIA capsule collection created in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dugi named his dresses in honor of his grandmothers and other close family members. “The women in my family have always protected me,” Dugi explains in the documentary centered on that body of work, Becoming: ORLANDO DUGI (2020). Dugi’s Native influence reveals itself more distinctly in the making than the outcome, but again, this is mostly hidden from the wearer.

His grandmothers were weavers who made their own clothes and moccasins; his mom worked with beads; his dad, silver. As he carries on the legacy of his family and Diné culture, Dugi painstakingly undertakes every step of the creative process himself: he imagines the design, picks the colors, sources the materials, then constructs everything by hand, down to his signature beadwork.

Some of the beads he uses are the size of a grain of sugar or smaller, so small in fact that he must thread them by hand because needles are too large for the job.4 The shimmering sparkle he achieves in his garments, like a night sky full of dazzling stars, pays homage to the artist’s childhood and his grandparents’ stories.

The beads and sequins and crystals achieve the effect.

Dugi’s reputation for outrageously intricate detail has been earned through endless, eye-blurring hours of meticulous hand stitching, hand embroidering, and hand beading—often one bead at a time—not to mention featherwork and the use of delicate crystals. He taught himself how to work with silver so he could manufacture his own clasps.

His devotion to hand-making garments has come at a cost. “I’ve always had perfect vision my entire life, but sitting for years doing that really fine beadwork and the strain on my eyes took a toll. I now need glasses. My near-sight vision is bad, so I don’t use those tiny, tiny beads very often anymore,” Dugi says. The smallest of beads he reserved specifically for use on his clutches. “Now, even when I’m doing the beadwork for the dresses, I have to stop after a while to exercise my eyes, get up, and walk around.”

His one-off couture pieces can take a year or more to complete. Clothes from the men’s line remain made to order and their considerable prices reflect the extraordinary time and effort required to produce them.

“I focus on quality, and I like the small scale; I want to be able to see everything and put my hand on it, and that’s important for me. That stems back to my upbringing seeing my family working on things,” Dugi says. “It’s all done by hand.

3. Cochineal insects are indigenous to the Southwest United States and south into western South America. They are among the few domesticated animals of precontact North America. —Ed. 4. From interview with Avenir Museum of Design and Merchandising.

50 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

ORLANDO DUGI

There still has to be that base in everything that I do, and it’s better if something is made only after it’s ordered. There are pros and cons to that model, but a lot of it has to do with me personally not wanting to create more than is needed.”

OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM “NOT WANTING TO CREATE more than is needed” puts him starkly at odds with the dominant, mainstream trend of “fast fashion,” defined by the constant and rapid production of a neverending supply of cheap new styles from global brands backed by billion-dollar marketing campaigns that motivate

buyers to purchase clothes as if they were groceries. In fast fashion, clothes are worn a couple of times and then thrown away for what’s fresh.

This churn-and-burn business model demands wages and conditions for the garment makers be mercilessly low to keep prices down and extracts an atrocious toll on the environment to produce the gargantuan volume of new items pushed at consumers and transported around the world.

A 2020 report by Princeton University found the fashion industry puts out more carbon emissions worldwide than air travel and maritime shipping combined and is responsible for a staggering tenth of all water consumption globally.5

5. Ngan Le, “The Impact of Fast Fashion on the Environment,” Princeton Student Climate Initiative, July 20, 2020, web.

I focus on quality, and I like the small scale.… above Left: Naldo, silk charmeuse button-up shirt with custom black arrowhead print, natural shell buttons.

Right: Alex, silk charmeuse button-up shirt with custom gold zigzag arrow print, natural shell buttons.

High-waist, wool trousers with side buckles, 2022. Models, left to right: Michael Montoya, Angelo Almanzar. Photo: Orlando Dugi (Diné). opposite Lorraine Dress, hand-beaded, hand-em broidered black tulle, silk charmeuse and silk organza dress. Model: Maria Bran (Maya descent). Photo: Tira Howard Photography.

NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 51

PROFILE

With the things I want to create, I’m better off going at my own pace than a pace set by someone else.

above Hero Twins jacket, 2022, hand-embroidered and handpainted silk/wool coat and silk brocade trousers. Coat hand-painted by Ryan Singer (Diné). Model: Kiowa Gordon (Hualapai). Photo: Bazh Nibah Photography.

52 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

Conversely, Dugi continues working small. “I’ve evolved slowly, growing slowly, and I’m just fine with that,” Dugi says in contrast to the mainstream fashion aspirations he expressed at the beginning of his career. As with many artists and humans in general, Dugi has matured out of youthful ambitions like fame, fortune, and glamour to settle into quieter but ultimately more fulfilling and meaningful pursuits.

Dugi works mostly by himself. Contractors are only brought in to help finish items, but he remains a one-person team.

He recognizes the limitations this puts on his career.

“I don’t want to do mass production. That is something I really, really do not want to do,” Dugi says. “Of course in the beginning, that’s what I thought I had to do, but it’s such a waste. With the things I want to create, I’m better off going at my own pace than a pace set by someone else.”

And so he goes. Slowly but surely, the considerable recognition he’s received along the way spurs him forward when the days turn tiring, and the garments refuse to cooperate. Dugi won Best of Show for a beaded clutch in the first fine art competition he entered, the Utah State Fair in 2009. The next year his first gown earned a first place at Santa Fe Indian Market. More ribbons and awards would follow at SWAIA, the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market, and a Best of Show at the 2012 Cherokee Art Market for a double-sided beaded bag collaboratively made with Williams.6 Dugi’s list of awards and exhibitions and stature in the industry belies the brevity with which he’s pursued couture.

His men’s line was a major milestone, the attainment of a goal he’d long set for himself and a celebration of sorts to mark ten years as a designer. From that original gown he created with sewing techniques recalled from a seventh-grade home economics class7 to showing at New York Fashion Week and his regular participation now as a featured designer in the SWAIA Indigenous Fashion Show, Dugi’s men’s line affirmed to him he had made it.

LOOKING AHEAD DUGI IS CURRENTLY designing new collections, clothing for women, men, and nonbinary people, all to debut later in 2023 and 2024. That’s about as far out as he allows himself to project his career.

Another big change from his earlier self.

“I don’t like to look too far into the future because a lot of times things

6. Neebinnaukzhik Southall, “A-i-R Journal—Orlando Dugi,” Institute of American Indian Art, April 1, 2018, web.

7. Pauly Denetclaw, “Unlikely fashion designer is artist-in-residence at IAIA,” Navajo Times, February 1, 2018, web.

ORLANDO DUGI

happen. Things have to change, and I leave room to do that,” Dugi says. “At the very beginning [of a career], there are certain expectations everyone has of you because you are a designer. You’re supposed to say, ‘In five years I see myself doing this and in ten years [that],’ and that’s great for the people who achieve things in that way.”

But Dugi is not one of those people.

He doesn’t resent the people who are, nor does he wish to be one—not anymore.

“When you’re first starting out, there are certain expectations you feel you’re supposed to follow,” says Dugi, who will celebrate his 45th birthday this year. “That’s how I started out, but after designing for several years, I’ve started to really find my voice in what I want to design, show, and make.”

The artist gives much more attention now to where his designs come from. He’s

more thoughtful about origins than outcomes. Pieces, collections, and designs don’t have to advance his career. They can simply be and exist on their own.

As for goals, Dugi continues to be interested in finding new venues to show his work. He also shares a dream common to many designers. “I still want to open a boutique. That has always been on my mind. With the amount of work that I do it’s difficult, but a tiny one would be fine,” he says.

Dugi has many years—decades—to keep working toward a boutique to call his own. Having only started as a designer in his early 30s, much more lies ahead for him, and whether or not Native couture maintains the trajectory it’s on, there’s a feeling Dugi will open that boutique one day. Slowly but surely.

above Left to right: Lillie Gown, hand-beaded, hand-embroidered silk gown, ostrich feathers, hand-pleated iridescent silk organza, heavy silk crêpe de chine, silk charmeuse, silk habotai. Model: Mona Bear (Menominee).

Belle Dress, gold metallic mirrored vinyl dress. Model: Tiffani Begay (Diné).

Alice Gown, hand-beaded, hand-embroidered tulle, silk gown with open sleeves.

Model: Maddie Lamb Sanders (Mvskoke/Mojave).

Lorraine Dress, hand-beaded, hand-embroidered black tulle, silk charmeuse, silk organza dress. Model: Maria Bran (Maya descent). Photo: Tira Howard Photography.

ORLANDODUGI.COM NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 53

PROFILE

Osage/Muscogee Ceramic & Textile Artist

ANITA FIELDS

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

B

ORN IN HOMINY, Oklahoma, Anita Fields is an enrolled member of the Osage Nation and a Muscogee descendant. At the age of eight, she moved to Colorado. Her maternal grandmother introduced her to sewing, which influenced her lifelong appreciation of textiles. After graduating

high school, Fields attended the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) before leaving in 1974 to start a family. During this time, she took classes in weaving and ribbonwork at the Osage Nation Museum and enrolled in Oklahoma State University. She soon graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine art and special-

ized in ceramics. Her early work focused mainly on small clay figurines using the method of terra sigillata—“sealed earth,” highly refined ceramics that can be polished to a glossy sheen.

Fields became recognized for incorporating Osage ribbonwork designs in her ceramics, which connects the memory of the land with her identity and community.

Her artwork has been featured in major solo and group exhibitions at galleries and museums nationwide including the National Museum of the American Indian, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Philbrook Museum of Art, and abroad. Fields’s work also resides in major public and private collections including the Heard Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, Frist Art Museum, and National Museum of Women in the Arts.

In 2021 the National Endowment for the Arts named her a National Heritage Fellow, and she won a 2022 Anonymous Was a Woman Award administered by the New York Foundation for the Arts.

The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art named her a 2021 Contemporary Art Fellow. Fields is currently participating in the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, an award that supports local and national independent artists.

Clay is something of an unforgiving medium. What appears solid and stable before firing can often burst in the kiln or fire pit. What are the lessons to be learned from clay’s temperament?

When I was young, I didn’t have access to art materials or community centers.

When you’re in an urban area those things are available to you, but I lived out on a farm in rural Oklahoma when

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I was little. Since I didn’t have access, natural materials were what I was drawn to. In a sense, I have been working with mud since I was a kid. There are many lessons to be learned when working with clay. Clay has a memory. If you were to roll out a slab of clay or coil something, and maybe it broke or had a tear in it, the molecules in the clay remember that. I can repair it, I can patch it, but it still has a memory of this. When I fire it, it may tear again, or it might reveal itself again after the firing. I’ve found so many qualities in clay that remind me of being human.

Every time you make something, you go into it knowing that this may not make it through the kiln. If you’ve done this long enough, you know it’s part of the process. You have a great leap of faith every time you create something, which leads you to the idea of whether it is more about the process. Is it more about the experience of being able to create something? Is it going to dry correctly? Who knows what’s going to happen? Again,

it’s how life is for us. We know that there will be successes and failures. All these things are wrapped up in making things out of clay.

Can you talk about the spiritual dimensions and properties associated with clay?

When people refer to Mother Earth, that’s how I feel about clay. The earth does provide everything that we need for us to exist as human beings. Clay is an extension of that. Clay almost invites you to be able to work with it. It has such amazing properties. You can take this dry form of material that is natural, from the earth, add a little water to it, add the right sand mixture, and you can form and shape almost anything you want. Besides drawing on cave walls and that sort of thing, it is one of the earliest forms of expression, which I find interesting. Not only that, but we also use it for shelter. So it provides for us.

Because of how it is formed over time and what it takes to get to the stage of

I’ve found so many qualities in clay that remind me of being human.

above Curved Shapes From the Earth, 2021, porcelain clay, impressed with handmade stamps, gold glaze, 17½ × 40 × 16 in. Photo: Tom Fields (Muscogee/Cherokee). All images courtesy of the artist. opposite Anita Fields with her Osage wedding outfit installation, To Know Your People Are Beautiful (2020). Photo: Tom Fields (Muscogee/Cherokee).

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Clay allows this connection of understanding the earth.

above On Behalf of Water, 2021, seven clay figures with tent remnants from Standing Rock, clay, mixed media, collage, paper, gold luster glaze. Each figure is 10 to 12 in. Photo: Etienne Frossard. opposite Standing In the Light, 2014, clay, clay slips, gold leaf, underglaze, 31 × 16 × 5 in., collection of Wilson Pipestem (Otoe-Missouria/Osage) and Brenda Toineeta Pipestem (Eastern Band Cherokee).

Photo: Conrad Eek.

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being clay, it has a footprint of mankind.

It carries a history of place and time and the people who were at a certain place and time. It has all these natural elements: earth, fire, water. I’ve worked in lots of studios, all of them furnished with high-tech materials—the biggest kiln, slab rollers, and glaze labs—but in essence, all you need is fire and water. There’s a dichotomy there. Don’t get me wrong, I love a beautiful studio, but if we boil it down, that’s all you need.

There’s also the thought of being able to quiet yourself and use your hands on this material during this process. It allows you a quiet, introspective time.

That’s important because as human beings we’re pretty disconnected from nature. I understand not everybody is, but even though I work with clay I feel at times I’m disconnected from nature myself. Clay allows this connection of understanding the earth. This material is actually what holds us up as human beings and allows us to be able to stand on this earth. In my mind there’s a deep connection.

Much of your ceramic work makes use of a signature pattern and design. For example, in sculptures such as Finding Our Way to the Earth and Memory Bottle, you create spirals, orbs, crosshatching, and other forms to build layers and texture. What are these

forms, and why do they frequently appear in your work?

Gosh, I started that quite a while back.

Clay has such a beautiful, soft quality. It holds texture. You can print something into it, so I started making these stamps.

I was pushing them into the clay but also rolling out thin fragments of clay and then pushing these handmade stamps into the clay. I then tore these bits up and almost collaged them on the surface. In addition to that, I do lots of processes in my work. I love collaging on paper and fabrics, so I feel that these processes that I utilize transform over into clay.

I’ll give you an example. I do Osage ribbonwork, and I kept trying to find a way to transform that idea into my clay pieces. It dawned on me that there was no way I have the talent to do that in an expressive way. I don’t think I can capture the beauty of that, which is what I was trying to do. I thought about trying to take my ribbonwork patterns that are made out of plastic that you can get at a hobby shop, a thin plastic graph paper, so I have templates from my ribbonwork, and I thought, What if I press those into these stamps and use those fragments as a part of this collage? I’m still including how I feel about ribbonwork in clay. I had to find a way to make my thoughts not so straightforward. But these objects, shapes, and forms are carrying the idea.

ANITA FIELDS

You’ve said, “The essence of who we are as Osage people, who we are in our being, I find this all wrapped up in clothing.” Can you talk about the synergistic relationship between identity and clothing? Why should this relationship not be overlooked or ignored?

It’s important. As an artist, I’m always looking, searching, and questioning. I’m thinking about how things relate to our culture or trying to break things down.

If I’m somewhere, say at a social event, I start thinking, What is actually taking place here; what are we actually doing?

That’s why I always use that word essence.

Clothing is tied up in that. The idea of transformation I find fascinating. When our people were in Missouri and started trading with the French, we had access to materials, needles, and ribbons. So we made this transfer of how we were dressing with natural materials to this clothing that was related to the trade system. How we dress today still emulates how we dressed at that time. Osage people have lots of photographs of how we dressed.… It points to our history. It’s so telling.

I can talk about the Osage wedding coats that I’ve created. Our history is so embedded in them. I also like the idea of how every individual is so expressive.

For instance, if you go to our dance, and you see the men. Their clothing is not all the same. Everybody chooses these beautiful fabrics to carry their expression. You see this beautiful array of color and movement. It creates this synergy with the drum and what’s happening in the space.

The space itself is activated by these dancers. It creates its own visual effects. Every dancer chooses their own colors. The way we obtain this clothing is different. Somebody can give you your clothes; it can be a gift from a relative or someone close to you who can make it for you. You can go to someone and ask them to create your clothing. You might have a discussion with them about the patterns or colors you want to use, or you totally give it over to them because you respect them so highly. I like that there are so

many ways into that system, and it all goes back to our identity and our culture.

How to keep things moving forward is all wrapped in that idea of transformation.

The inclusion of writing, government documents, and related files in your work pushes it beyond textile or installation and into the stuff of memory and archive. Do you consider your work an archive? Or is it better understood as a container of memory?

It’s both. I haven’t [previously] thought of my work as an archive, but I can certainly see that connection. It also goes back to the ability to have seen so many [art] collections and the privilege to be able to look at very old items. I have a collection of my grandmother’s most treasured items, and so they have become my most treasured items. Again, they hold that history. When I choose to use documents to put a point across—it can be a facsimile of a document or a document printed on NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 57

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fabric—I’m making that connection to our history.

By doing it in an artful, expressive way, maybe more people would look at it and be drawn to it without knowing everything behind it. They could take away something that they might have not known before.

I’m also into those documents and archival materials in terms of how we were seen at certain periods in our history. The things that were written about us were unkind and dehumanizing. They’re so telling about how we were seen, but that’s not at all how we are. That’s why I make things with archival materials that are so beautiful because I think, Well, we never defined ourselves by those documents. We could always find who we are through our art, our culture, and our language. No matter what is out there, we never have to rely on anybody’s idea of who we are. Our creations and worldview define us—how we see the world.

What’s your dream project? What’s something that you would love to create but haven’t as of yet?

I do a lot of community work with groups, creating installations, and I like that kind of work. A lot of times I think, I would love to see this, but it would take me a whole year to create it, but if I could just get 50 people on board with me, we could have it knocked out in a month.

I do that a lot. That came from working with children.

I did a lot of residencies in the schools. We always used terracotta clay because we didn’t have time to use glaze or anything like that. We would make projects and sit them all together. All these individual expressions would be placed together to create this larger installation. I like this idea of everybody’s contribution to making something bigger than ourselves. Sometimes people don’t understand what I’m talking about, even though I show slides—and I’m dating myself calling them slides—but when it starts to take form, they understand what I’m thinking. I’ve said, “Can you imagine a whole room filled with these, shelf after shelf after shelf?” I’ve got some ideas based on that thought but I’m not quite sure how much money it would take or how long.

You’ve been awarded numerous honors and have shown your work around the world, but can you talk about the more difficult side of being an artist? Specifically, what do you find challenging as an artist or during the creative process?

Juggling things. I’m currently in Tulsa in a Tulsa Arts Fellowship and I commit to things that I find interesting. I commit to things that I feel like, I have a lot to learn if I do this. So my interest is there, but a lot of times it’s difficult to separate all the paperwork that is needed for things. Writing and planning versus actually getting into the studio and working for eight- to ninehour stretches. But that’s what it takes. Sometimes it’s 58 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

ANITA FIELDS

day after day after day until you complete something. A lot of times when that starts happening, I just think, I’ve got to begin now. It’s not uncommon for me to just let those other things go, but I pay for it in the end. I have to answer to somebody at some point. [Laughs.] It’s hard to find that balance because the requirements to create are large.

This interview is featured in the tenth-anniversary issue of First American Art Magazine. Can you speak to the importance of Indigenous-determined publications such as this and what it means to have it exist in the world?

Oh, it’s so important. The thought that

it’s our voice. The thought that it gives scholars and key players opportunities in the Native art world; that it’s their voice. It’s important that the people who contribute already have an understanding of this culture. It’s not like they’re stepping in there without any knowledge, which happens sometimes. People get interviewed, and it may be skewed a little bit because they didn’t understand the thought behind something. When I pick up the magazine, I see things from cultures I’ve never been able to visit and enjoy the opportunity to have a connection, to read about them, to see the similarities, to see the differences. It’s important.

No matter what is out there, we never have to rely on anybody’s idea of who we are.

above What the Elk Could Not Foresee, 2022, ink, linen, ribbon, photo transfer on fabric, embroidery thread, metallic fringe, personal document, 62 × 45 in. Photo: Dan Farnum. opposite Memory Bottle, 2020, porcelain, gold leaf, paint, 6¾ × 6¾ × 26 in. Photo: Claire Cross.

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Ho-Chunk Photographer

TOM JONES

By Stacy J. Platt

A

RTIST, EDUCATOR, AND ENROLLED CITIZEN of the Ho-Chunk Nation, Tom Jones is basking in long overdue art-world recognition. For more than two decades he has been making substantive and absorbing work about the Ho-Chunk across more than a dozen bodies of work. For more than two decades I have wondered why this maker of ambitious and timely work had yet to become famous in the small and insular world of art photography.

Tom and I met in our MFA graduate program at Columbia College in Chicago at the start of the millennium. I recall him as someone with strong boundaries, deep sincerity, an almost pathologically diligent work ethic, and an infectious giggle that could identify him in any crowded room. He was the first Indigenous photographer I had met, set adrift in a graduate program that had yet to do much self-interrogation of their subject position vis-à-vis people of color. Race was an adjective rather than an identity, and we were still living in a time of “color blindness” despite living in one of the most racially diverse cities in the country.

Tom is one of the few of our MFA cohort whose artistic output I have followed with interest, and in setting up this interview with him, I jokingly referred to this as “The Year of Tom.” Here is a brief accounting of how and where the Year of Tom has blossomed: • Tom Jones: Here We Stand, solo retrospective, Wisconsin Museum of Art, 2022 (traveling to the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida, May 2023) • 2022 Outwin Prize winner for the National Portrait Gallery • Water Memories (2023), Metropolitan Museum of Art • Speaking with Light, organized and first exhibited by the Amon Carter 60 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is doing for the National Gallery of Art—she was the first [contemporary] Native artist that they had in their collection. So this show is their way of saying, “Okay, we need to have a Native show.”

When I applied for the Outwin, I was like, “Okay, I'm going to send work out.” It just all came together at once.

Patricia Marroquin Norby, the curator at the Met, just remembered that work; I think she saw the work on Instagram or Facebook. I wouldn't have even thought of it because it was for a water show. But it was a tree that pointed toward a spring.

Museum of American Art, currently at the Denver Art Museum through May 21, 2023 • Native America: In Translation, at the Milwaukee Art Museum, curated

by Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke), through June 25, 2023 • Surviving the Long Wars, Chicago Cultural Center, through June 4, 2023 • In Our Hands: Native Photography 1890–Now, Minneapolis Institute of Art, opening October 23, 2023 When you and I were having dinner in Santa Fe while you were doing your residency at IAIA, you were saying that you don’t ever promote your work or send it out because it takes time away from making more work. So what has happened?

I started putting stuff on Instagram and Facebook, and that creates hype. But [in] this moment right now, museums are starting to make up for not having Native work. That’s what the Amon Carter Museum did and that’s why they put that show together: because they had a real deficit of Native American photography in their collection. The [exhibition] that

I read that catalogue essay by Graeme Reid, where he wrote, “Jones has no desire to be famous” [laughs]. So I wondered, is it happening against your will?

It was a question that a grad student had presented at one point. “Don’t you want to be famous?” and I said, “No, it’s not an interest of mine,” and then she said, “Well, I want to be famous.” That other part is so much work, and I’m drowning right now, and that’s why I ended up hiring two people so far to help just to get the work out there. I want to get to that point where I can hire people, so I can continue making newer pieces.

Right. And you’re hiring Ho-Chunk people, as they’re familiar with the beading?

Yes. My nephew Lightning hasn’t done that much; he’s learning and picking it up really fast. My other relative is Toni Funmaker, and she’s beaded before. But she has a full-time job at the casino. It’s about finding people who are close by.

Fortunately moving up here I’m closer to the community in Wisconsin Dells.

Are you in Madison right now?

No, I’m in Prairie du Sac, which is 20 to 30 miles from Madison.

TOM JONES

In America Meredith’s profile on you from [FAAM No. 0] ten years ago, you said, “I created a body of work that my professors can understand.” How do you feel your teaching and what you’re trying to impart to your MFA students differ from how you were taught?

You’re making work about your tribe, but your methodology for each body of work is different. We’re taught in MFA programs that you have a lifetime project and a discernible style traceable through all of the work.

You’ve done the one but not the other.

Something that’s happening now is this interdisciplinary approach. You have to be able to speak about many disciplines. We just did our grad interviews for incoming students, and almost all of them said they want to do interdisciplinary work—more installation work. The work I started in grad school was The Ho-Chunk People, and I got pushback. I said that my audience first was the tribe, and I was told, “Well, why should I look at it then?” And then they asked, “Is it important that people know the codes that a Ho-Chunk would pick up on?” and I said “No, it’s

“Don’t you want to be famous?” and I said, “No, it’s not an interest of mine.…” above Marker Tree at Devil's Lake, from the Marker Trees series, 1998, photograph, 18 × 18 in. All images courtesy of the artist. opposite Tom Jones. Photo: John Shimon, Shimon Lindemann.

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Museum of the American Indian] in a couple of years. He passed away a couple of years ago. He was the first curator for the NMAI in DC. So there’s a legacy in Madison particular to your immediate family.

Your work isn’t about trying to cover all of the issues of all Indigenous people; you’re really just focused on your tribe, the Ho-Chunk. Do you know of any other artists, photographic or otherwise, that are so faithfully trying to represent their specific tribe in their work?

Brian Adams [Iñupiaq].1 He’s in Alaska, and he’s documenting mainly just his community. The amount of Native photographers now has just bloomed. I don’t know all of them or the newer ones coming up. But when I started, you could count on your two hands all the Native photographers that were actively doing work. It’s rare where someone’s just doing their own tribe. That’s why I was so drawn to Horace Poolaw [Kiowa, 1906–1984].

Down there, there are so many Native tribes that he was photographing. But the fact that he was photographing his own community there in Oklahoma was something that influenced my work.

But when I started, you could count on your two hands all the Native photographers that were actively doing work. above JoAnn Jones, from the Strong, Unrelenting Spirits series, 2015, digital inkjet photograph, glass seed beads, 29 × 23½ in. framed, ed. of 5 with 2 artist’s proofs. opposite Raymond Goodbear, from the Strong, Unrelenting Spirits series, 2019, digital inkjet photograph, glass seed beads, shell beads, 40 × 60 in.

62 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

your responsibility as a viewer to find those things out if you’re interested in it.

I’m not going to have a placard next to it and explain what it is.” I kept getting pushback about it, so that’s why I decided to do the work appropriating the postcards and doing the Dear America stuff.

It’s more like spanking white people for the atrocities, and they can get that. It’s almost like they want to be spanked.

Well, of course, it’s white guilt. White guilt sells.

[Laughs.] Yeah.

I learned so much about you from Jane Aspinwall’s catalogue essay. I didn’t know that your father was an Eastman Kodak rep. Did your uncle teach at Madison?

Yeah, Truman Lowe. They’re going to have a show of his at NMAI [National

About this blow-up moment. I’ve been thinking about that too in terms of Black art. Why are curators interested all of a sudden? After the summer of 2020, all the gallery and museum rosters were full of Black artists for two years. It’s easy to think of it cynically, that everything will just go back to the way it was. You are so much more generous about things that you could be angry about. You could take a much more pessimistic view of things, like with the reenactors in the series Encountering Cultures, but you don’t. Do you have thoughts about this moment that’s being capitalized on for Native photography?

It’s what my work is about: getting the visibility of my work and my people out into the world. Oh, that’s one thing my mother corrects me on: it’s our nation as opposed to tribe. When they did the constitution when she was president, they made it a point that it was nation.

I guess that’s what’s happening with this blow-up with these museums.

TOM JONES

I’ve told other Native artists, you’d better jump on the wave while you can. Even with Jill Yohe, they bought the whole Dear America series. She’s a curator of Native art at Minneapolis Institute of Art. She saw it in Kansas City at the Nerman Museum, and she said, “Why don’t I know about your work?” It’s getting out to the mainstream. I’ve been showing constantly for the past 24 years, but it’s the writing: getting in books, getting in articles, and the Instagram page. People are searching now.

So it’s not problematic for you because it’s all serving the collective end of giving representation to the Ho-Chunk nation.

Exactly. And that comes down to academia too, because the art historians are all back in their world of what they’re teaching. I find they teach out of books, and so it’s just starting to change now where they’re putting new things and new people into the curriculum. Part of the change now are younger curators coming in.

There are also Indigenous curators, and larger museums are creating positions for them. That’s also how I imagine things would change—if there’s actually any power in those roles. I want to go back to having to educate the viewer—that’s now anti-racist thinking/teaching 101.

One shouldn’t let marginalized people have to do the labor of explaining to them about marginalization. Are you finding that this is something that’s changing, that [white] people are doing “the work”? Not just in the museum world, but in this generation of students coming through, Gen Z? I don’t know if the students are doing the work. I am diversifying who I am choosing as grad students, though. I’ve only had one Native photo grad this whole time I’ve been here. I don’t know if it’s just because there aren’t that many pursuing grad school. I’ve had Native undergrads, I have had Hispanic grads, and we have two Iranian women coming in this year. It’s the same learning to diversify the teaching. When I started, it was

just all the established artists that we’ve all learned. And now the university is starting to try.

It’s about visibility. [For] the young kids, the teenagers—being able to see yourself represented in art is so powerful. Are you seeing representations of yourself?

It’s also a conversation in writing too.

Can anyone write anyone? Can anyone make pictures about anything? What are the considerations for someone who is not Indigenous making work about something that is not from their own community? Versus you, you are from the Ho-Chunk people, so you have a different set of things that guide you.

Right, there’s inherent cultural knowledge where you maybe know how or what to do. There’s also access. At least for our community, we’re very secretive, looking at you side-eyed, like, “What do you want?” Then who actually has the knowledge? Is there somebody who doesn’t know as much, but they’re talking

1. See Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, “Brian Adams: Iñupiaq Photographer,” First American Art Magazine no. 25 (Winter 2020), 44–49.

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as if they do? Just knowing how to ask the questions and where to point the camera is what’s important, as opposed to just the surface knowledge of things.

I always have four or five different ideas stewing on the side.…

above Untitled, from the Sacred Places series, 2023, photograph. opposite The New Indian War, from the Remnants series, 2018, digital photographs, engraved glass, 11¾ × 34½ in., 1/10 ed.

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One of the most interesting things I read in the catalogue essays was that you are sitting on the majority of your work, and you don’t know if you’ll ever show anyone because they’re photos of things that used to not be photographable, like ceremonies.

What’s interesting is that my previous leader in the medicine lodge, Ken Funmaker Sr., told me that I have the right to photograph in there because I’m a member. But they also allowed H. H. Bennett, the family [photography] studio, to shoot an actual film in there. Ken said that the tribe allowed them to do that, so you should have the right to do that as a member. But there are certain times they don’t want you to photograph.

In the photograph that I did in grad school, I photographed the meal that was on the ground at a medicine lodge. I got permission from the person doing it, and he said, “They haven’t started eating

yet, so it’s okay for you to photograph it.”

Someone came up to me at an opening, a Ho-Chunk, and said “My mother would be really upset that you photographed that.” With the advent of the iPhone, there are Ho-Chunk spectators that videotape during the ceremonies. So that’s changed people’s perspective on it.

You mean the Ho-Chunk perspective?

Yeah, the members in the medicine lodge.

The old-school ones would be like, “No.” But just because everyone has iPhones now and can videotape and photograph, it is something that has changed.

My current leader had said, “Are you photographing everything?” and at first, I thought, Oh, is he upset that I’m photographing? but then he said, “Well, you should be documenting everything.”

He is thinking of it as having visual documentation for future generations. There are times when I am purely documenting something, and it’s not an artistic photograph, I’m just taking a picture so that we have it documented.

Do you hope that you will get to show that work, or be able to create a body

TOM JONES

of work around these photos to be seen in whole?

It’s not important to me that the outside world sees it. I always have four or five different ideas stewing on the side, and one right now is that I want to photograph sacred places where there are stories associated with them. And that’s for future generations, so that they know where they are and what they are. I don’t know if I would share the stories if I were to do a show of it, but I would be fine showing those because they come off as landscapes.

You’ve said that you make work for the Ho-Chunk, that they’re your audience.

Do you feel like that’s true for all the work that you make? It sounds like you’re making a demarcation between work that you wouldn’t want to exhibit or share those stories, like at the National Gallery.

That’s something that I’ll just have to figure out. When I started the marker trees, I was going to put on the coordinates, but then I worried that people would start messing with those trees. So I decided to be more generic about it in the title. The same goes for the sacred places.

That’s why I let things stew for a while. Do I put a little blurb on there about what this place is about, or do I just call it Sacred Place #1?

But is there work that you’ve made or want to make that you want to reserve for documentation or for the Ho-Chunk people?

Yes, that’s what all the medicine lodge

photos are about. In the retrospective, which was the first time I showed any of that, I showed two pieces. But it’s during a time when they photograph a new member, and I asked permission for that, “Is it okay to show these portraits?” and the leader said yes. I’ve been photographing these since 1998, but that was the first time that I’ve shown them in an exhibition.

Because you work on multiple bodies of work, how do you know when a body of work is done? Are you still doing photographs for Remnants, or is that done? Do you have a sunset on Strong, Unrelenting Spirits?

With Remnants, I’m still photographing the carpets. I’m not sure if the etchings and the carpets together need any more because there are 50 of them. But does the carpet come up in a different iteration?

Oh, like the carpets get reappropriated for a new body of work. But with Remnants, you’ve said everything that you wanted to say with that work.

Yes. That one’s done, the trees are done.

There are 50 of those too. How many of those do you need, really? The veteran memorial poles will be ongoing. The Strong, Unrelenting Spirits will be too because it keeps evolving. I’m doing new things with the way that I’m beading it. I guess it’s the more conceptual work that stops. Like the Cultural Appropriation series; that’s done; I don’t need any more

of those. Those are the times when I’m talking about Native people as a whole, as opposed to talking about specifics of a tribe.

Are you going to be in the Southwest anytime soon?

For that mid-career retrospective show, they're trying to find a venue in the Southwest. I’m working on a Ho-Chunk basket book. I have a Ho-Chunk grad student that’s going to write the essay, and then I’m going to get that out. I’m working on another book on the potter Martha Arquero [Cochiti] and I want to have a traveling show for that. I’m going to be in Colorado this summer. Greg French is writing a book about my mother, so we’re going to a retreat in Edwards, Colorado.

I love your relationship with your mother. Somebody should write a book about her. That could be a whole other profile: artists and their mothers, you and your mom.

She was the one who went with me when I photographed all of the elders. She’s been an integral part of all of that.

Is there anything that you want to add?

So many Native artists don’t get out there. Culturally, at least for Ho-Chunks, we’re not supposed to talk or boast about ourselves. And that’s one reason why Native artists are not getting their work out. It’s just not part of our culture.

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Chickasaw/Choctaw Painter

ERIN SHAW

By Michole Eldred (Catawba/Eastern Cherokee descent)

M

erriam-Webster’s definition of the word displace is “to remove from the usual or proper place; specifically: to expel or force to flee from home or homeland.” Displacement can affect more than the physical removal of a person.

When a person or a group of people is displaced, it can lead to emotional loss.

Many Native people experience this sense of loss even today, a hundred years after their ancestors were removed from their homelands. How do we, as a culture and as individuals, recover from this loss?

How do we feel comfortable in our skin?

There is no single answer. It is a complicated task.

Erin Shaw addresses the feeling of displacement from her ancestral homelands and culture through creativity. Her artwork reinstates her sense of place and belonging.

Shaw was born in Ada, Oklahoma, the headquarters of the Chickasaw Nation. She grew up within the Choctaw Nation near Allen, Oklahoma. Her maternal grandmother was Chickasaw, and her maternal grandfather was Choctaw.

In the ten years since FAAM originally profiled Shaw, we have seen her evolve and grow as an artist and as a human being. Her path has taken her from a student exploring various avenues of artistic expression to a confident artist who understands and accepts her creative process. Shaw has gained clarity through understanding and trusting who she is.

She has realized the value of her art and that her work merits acceptance.

All of us are impacted by our individual childhoods. Some effects are obvious and others more subtle.

An artist’s professional career often involves the manifestation of personal 1. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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limestone blocks from a quarry on the land. Originally it was a Native American schoolhouse. This was the home I grew up in. That land was a tangible connecting point that I found between myself and my ancestors.

and spiritual insight. My conversation with Shaw encompassed her professional growth, inseparable from her personal thoughts and emotions.

How did your childhood influence you to become an artist?

It certainly influences my work to this day. I often talk about a geographical location called the Stream of Stories. It’s the place where all the stories that have ever been told or are in the process of being told are held. They live there in liquid form, and if you know where the stream of stories is located, all you have to do is sit along its banks, dip your hand in the stream, and pull out whatever story you need for the day.1 I believe that geographical location exists on the land I was raised.

It’s difficult to get away from your beginnings, and that place, 400 acres in southeast Oklahoma, shaped me. As a child, I had free roam of the land and time to explore the created world that shaped me. The house was built at statehood by Native Americans who dragged

Where was your career in 2013?

I was still in graduate school at the University of Oklahoma.… I had no idea what I was doing in 2013 or if I could even make a life as an artist outside of school.

Graduate school was a life-changing experience for me. It was a gift to have three years to focus on why I wanted to be an artist, who I was, and how to push into my voice, research, and imagery. I came out of graduate school a totally different person but still not knowing what a life of art might look like for me.

I barely recognize the person I was ten years ago. The growth in the decade has been significant. I hope this is how every decade of my life is moving forward.

What was happening personally for you in 2013?

One major area of growth for me is in my Chickasaw identity and heritage.

Becoming a mother and moving back to Oklahoma in 2009 awakened a deep need to integrate my Chickasaw identity into my life. [During those] first years back in Oklahoma, I was so hesitant, apologetic, and insecure about my identity. I wasn’t sure if it was okay for me to explore Chickasaw stories or history. So much of my experience of being Native American revolved around reconnecting. I wanted to be respectful, but I also had this compelling need to uncover these dormant aspects of who I was and who I had always been.

Can you imagine yourself ten years from now?

ERIN SHAW

I have just emerged from a time where I have been in the liminal space, personally. Something ended, and I lived in the in-between. Those thresholds are profound opportunities for us to be jarred out of our current reality and to make room for something new. I believe I am moving out of that in-between space. I feel I have been remade in the past seven years. Plus, I am moving into the second half of my life, and I feel very empowered in who I am and who I am becoming. I am shedding so much to make room for what is next.

Where did you find your confidence and clarity?

In 2015 Bobby Martin, Tony Tiger, and Jace Weaver invited me to be a part of Return from Exile, an exhibition representing tribes removed from the Southeast in the 1830s. At a symposium at the University of Georgia, I had a moment of clarity. I had spent so much time feeling like I needed permission to be Native American, to embrace and understand these parts of me. But while I was talking at that symposium, it hit me that my experience of being Indian is the result of removal. I understood this is what it looks like [for me] to be Native American today, having been removed from my language, my customs, my beliefs, and my homelands. The reconnecting had been painful, difficult work, more so with

my wondering if I even belonged in this conversation. With this awareness, I realized not only did I belong, but I have something to say. I no longer apologize for my experience or who I am.

How did that newfound confidence make its way into your work?

My early work explored duality. I found stories about opposing forces and tried to make sense of them. I understand more clearly now that I was exploring this within my work because I was trying to reconcile it within myself. As my work has progressed and as I have grown, I still acknowledge duality but in a different way. My growth has shown me that duality is false. It is a Western, man-made construct. I believe and see clearly that all of reality is relational. Where duality exists, it is something that man has created for their needs and purposes, but it isn’t deep wisdom.

My early work was all about trying to make sense of the duality that I felt in my life. I would say my current work explores nonduality. There can be tremendous tension in that place. It can feel painful and disorienting, and there are urges to explain it or understand it, but as I grow, I see that the tension is my place.

I was meant to live and inhabit these places, not explain them away. Today I look for places where things seem to be in opposition to each other. It indicates to me to press into that place because some

I realized not only did I belong, but I have something to say. I no longer apologize for my experience or who I am.

above Beneath the Ancient Shallow Sea, 2018, acrylic on canvas. All images courtesy of the artist. opposite Erin Shaw. Photo: Jacquelyn Sparks (Chickasaw).

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PROFILE

deep truth resides in the tension and an invitation to embrace both.

Stories are as much my medium as paint and canvas are.

above Samuel Shaw (Chickasaw/Choctaw) and Erin Shaw (Chickasaw/Choctaw), The Stream of Stories, 2018, installation of acrylic on panels. opposite Hoopisatok (They Saw It), 2018, acrylic and photo transfer on canvas.

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Who or what specifically inspires you to create?

Mainly it’s that I am compelled. I sense that it is what I am supposed to gift the world with, and I want to say yes to that. I am also inspired by nature, cycles of life and death, people and their stories, and sacred narratives.

You’ve stated that your son, Samuel, was an artistic collaborator. What specifically is it about children that motivates you to create? What do you enjoy about working with children?

Samuel has always been the trusted person in my artistic process. When he was born, so much shifted for me as a person and an artist. I often say that I found myself in motherhood, and because of that, Samuel has always been a gift to me and my process. Our last major collaboration was in 2017. It was a larger-than-life installation, The Stream of Stories. I can’t be sure, but

it still might be the best work I have ever made. Samuel’s role in my process has changed, but it is still very central.

He has moved into the role of trusted advisor. He can critique me in ways that nobody else can. I love having his voice present in what I do, in whatever way I can. Samuel is now a sophomore in high school, and I keep hoping for one more collaboration before he leaves home.

I haven’t collaborated with children since I moved to Arkansas in 2018.

The fabric of my life changed so much, but I recognize the abundant creativity in children. I worked with them in hopes of keeping that aspect of my creative process alive and empowering them to live into their creativity.

What artist, past or present, would you like to spend a day with? How would you spend that day?

T.C. Cannon. My father, Marvin Embree, was good friends with T.C., and he talked about him, their friendship, and his process all the time.

I always felt like T.C. was a friend

ERIN SHAW

of mine as well. His work has greatly influenced mine, and it would be so fun to have a conversation with him and Marvin together.

Are you mentoring any young artists?

If so, how?

I feel like all I do is mentor young artists now. In 2018 I took a job teaching at John Brown University. It is a small liberal arts university in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. The art department at JBU is the largest department on campus and a special place. Our students are the best. I work closely with them in their artistic development. This is my fifth year, which means students I had as freshmen are now seniors. I know them, their work, and their development.

You tell stories through your art.

Some of the visual stories are based on repeated Chickasaw stories. Some are your created expansion of these stories. Some you create yourself. How do you relate your own storytelling to Chickasaw and Choctaw cultures?

Stories are very important to me. I learned from many scholars, but specifically [American folklorist] George Lankford, the power of symbols as carriers of stories.

This is a dominant element of all my work. Stories are as much my medium as paint and canvas are. Throughout history, stories have had many interesting functions. I often say they have staying power.

No matter how much our world changes, stories will always hold our attention.

Stories serve people, and I suppose we, as humans, serve our stories as well.

I appropriate my own imagery. I go into old paintings and capture specific images and recontextualize them by putting them into new paintings. I believe this mirrors the way we interact with our

stories in our lives. Stories are the fabric of who we are. Each of us has unending stories. Some of them are more important than others, but we take each of them into every new stage of life we encounter. The stories might be the same, but we are different, thus making a new story. This is one of our most basic human vocations.

When I first began investigating and looking for Chickasaw stories, I was frustrated. They were elusive. I felt sad, as it seemed to me that much had been lost or forgotten. One day a wonderful friend said, “The stories aren’t lost. You may not know where to look, or you may not have the eyes to see them.” The conversation impacted me deeply, but it would be years before I understood what she was saying. One of the places I began to look for stories was internal. An awareness that there are ancient stories buried deep inside of me began to compel me in a new way. That same friend told me, “You are Chickasaw. Any story you tell is a Chickasaw story.” That statement has to be handled with care and responsibility, but it felt true to me.

One of your works, Hoopisatok, is a series of five images. The first image is of a simple black line painting of a bird’s head and upper body. Upon closer look, the bird’s eye is colorfully painted abstract objects. Each subsequent image zooms more closely into the bird’s eye. The final image reveals in greater detail images of people, places, and objects. What is the visual story within the eye?

Hoopisatok is my offering to the many voices who have guided me. I’ve had many important voices who have helped me on my journey of understanding who I am and my American

Indian identity. I have deep gratitude for their help and encouragement, and accountability.

Why are birds prominent in your work?

Birds are messengers. I believe that birds contain deep wisdom, solutions, and modalities for humankind. Birds are everywhere, wanting to speak to us and bless us with this deep wisdom, but we must have eyes and ears to receive it. I guess I am trying to use birds to deliver beauty and wisdom to people.

How do you reconcile Christianity with Chickasaw and Choctaw beliefs?

I am acutely aware of the atrocious history of Native communities at the hands of professing Christians. I must make room for that. I do not pretend to have answers where incredible tension lies, but I have engaged much of my life into that tension.

Christian is not a word I use to describe myself. It might seem like a superficial distinction, but I don’t know what the word Christian means, and I don’t want it as a label.

A current collaboration I have with Bobby Martin and Tony Tiger is Altars of Reconciliation, and it explores this tension. When we began working on this project, we framed it with this question: Why do I believe in the religion of the white man?

Within my process, I always start with questions. Over the years, I have realized that when I keep asking a question, it is not rhetorical but an actual question I am supposed to ask and push into. Why do I believe this?

Making this work and pushing into that question has given me such clarity about the “white man’s religion.” Jesus was a radical brown man who turned over NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 69

PROFILE

We live in a very fractured and fragmented time, mainly because people are fragmented and fractured.

above Illit Fallamat Taani, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 2015 opposite Protect us from Ruin, 2019, photo transfer, string, gold leaf on piano parts.

every system of power that existed in his day. He upset the empire so much that he was killed. He embodied his authority, but he gave up his earthly power. How has Western Christianity missed these essential parts of the story? It is sincerely puzzling to me.

The Doctrine of Discovery was an official decree of the pope that asked early explorers “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all … pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed.…”2 A decree from their highest authority to go and conquer by whatever means necessary. This same document perpetuated the slave trade from Africa to Europe and the Americas.

Why is this important? Because this document encoded racial ideas that created a hierarchy of power that lay in the hands of European Christians. The language identified those outside the European Christian world and enforced the Western theological imagination on non-Europeans as Others. These realities remain embedded in American Christianity to this day, but they are shockingly absent in the story of Jesus.

It is often suggested that we as humans possess a genetic memory. Do you find some of your art comes from deep

within your Indigenous ancestors and European as well?

Undoubtedly. Although it feels very mysterious and difficult to articulate.

Do you ever have conflicting feelings with your art when portraying one of your ethnicities over another?

I have an entire body of work that I call Everything Belongs. It is a direct response to this question. It represents my coming to peace with the fact that all the parts of my life are important; every story, experience, and person has shaped me. I cannot nor should not wish away certain aspects of my story.

And I know that Everything Belongs.

What inspires you personally when visiting your Indigenous homelands?

What is it about your ancestral homelands that spark your creativity?

Wisdom sits in places. This is certain.

The time I have spent in my homelands has always impacted me. As best I can understand, it is putting a physicality to a spiritual knowing. We are spiritual beings but also physical, and having something to touch has helped me.

What specific Southeastern Woodland symbols can we see in your art? Can

2. The Bull Romanus Pontifex (Nicholas V), January 8, 1452.

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ERIN SHAW

you give us a description of one of your pieces that incorporates these symbols and icons?

I use lots of different symbols, but one that you see repeated in many places is the divided tree. Others refer to it as the axis mundi. It is present in a painting called Axis Mundi. But I tend to take those images and reimagine them into my current context, so it is not exactly the same imagery.

Can you talk about any specific pieces or projects that hold special meaning to you?

The Stream of Stories was an amazing experience. I loved that process because it was a collaboration with Samuel as well as other children from the community. The way it came together was magical, profound, and whimsical.

What can you tell us about any upcoming exhibitions or projects?

I am doing an onsite installation at First Americans Museum this spring. I am very excited. The Altars of Reconciliation exhibition continues to travel for the next couple of years across the US. A project I am working on outside of the studio: I spend quite a bit of time giving presentations, lectures, and talks about creativity and art as an avenue for human integration. We live in a very fractured and fragmented time, mainly because people are fragmented and fractured. So much of the deep work I have done in my life has centered around integrating all of who I am. I want to be a whole person who shows up in her intellect, her body, her spirituality, and her emotions. If we hope to heal cultural fragmenting, we first need to allow our

individual fragments to be mended. Art and creativity provide such incredible help to us in these regards, and I teach on this a ton.

How are you connecting your past, present, and future?

I have always been connected to creation and the Creator, and that has been evidenced in my work. But I have a deepening awareness of the incredible wisdom that exists within everything created. My work in 2023 is invested in this: the stories creation is playing out for us every moment of every day. Much of the last ten years can be summed up with that word: trust. I trust myself more, the process, my place in the world, who I am, where I am, and where I am going. It’s a beautiful place to be.

ERINSHAWART.COM NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 71

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SARASOTA, FLORIDA

Reclaiming Home: Contemporary Seminole Art The John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Florida State University

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OR THE FIRST TIME in its 96-year history, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art has devoted an entire exhibition to art created by working Native artists.

Credit is given to curator Ola Wlusek for presenting an exhibition of all Indigenous-created art. Still, more appreciation is due for allowing the artists to represent themselves as they interpret their culture and personal life experiences individually.

None of the exhibiting artists were boxed into a creative corner of producing art to fulfill the many preconceived expectations of non-Indigenous viewers.

Intricate beadwork, reimagined family portraits, and patchwork designed to be playful, abstract, and thought-provoking are some of the pieces that can be seen in Reclaiming Home: Contemporary Seminole Art. Other art on exhibit includes original installations, short films, digitally produced work, recorded performances, graffiti, skateboard art, and hand-carved, utilitarian objects. Twelve artists who share a common Seminole or Miccosukee heritage are included in this exhibition. The Florida-based artists are Noah Billie (Seminole Tribe of Florida, 1948–2000), Wilson Bowers (Seminole Tribe of Florida), Rev. Houston R. Cypress (Miccosukee Tribe of Indians), Alyssa Osceola (Seminole Tribe of Florida), Jessica Osceola (Seminole Tribe of Florida), Brian Zepeda (Seminole Tribe of Florida/Mexican), Corinne Zepeda (Seminole Tribe of Florida/Mexican), and Pedro Zepeda (Seminole Tribe of Florida/ Mexican). Several exhibiting artists are not based in the State of Florida but have a strong connection to their ancestral and familial homelands. These artists include Elisa Harkins (Muscogee/Cherokee Nation), C. Maxx Stevens (Seminole Nation/Muscogee), Tony Tiger (Sac & 72 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

Fox/Muscogee/Seminole), and Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (Navajo/Seminole/ Muscogee).

Brian Zepeda’s beadwork could be taken at face value. His pieces are constructions of historical clothing, such as bandolier bags and panel belts. However, a closer look at his beadwork shows the whimsical side of his art. You can let your imagination run wild while following a trail of glass beads on his bandolier bag titled Sugar Ants. Virtually every Floridian has fought a battle with the Florida sugar ant. A pink-trimmed bag covered in precisely sewn pink beads in the shape of organic floral hearts is titled Heart Felt.

Zepeda’s art shows his witty humor if you look carefully.

An entire Searing West Wing gallery room is dedicated to C. Maxx Stevens’s installation, Last Supper. The mixed-media piece of a fanciful dinner table sparkles like snow, everything white. Every piece of food placed on the table glitters. It seems magical, almost fairytale-like. What appears so alluring is actually a display of sugar-laden processed food. Around the room are framed images of food packaging labels revealing the harmful ingredients that go into these products. The history of commodity food isn’t spelled out in Stevens’s work; however, it is a nod to the food provided to tribal communities by the US

government that has led to an epidemic of diabetes among Indigenous people.

Stevens’s installation makes us stop and think about what we feed our bodies.

Many Seminole artists still choose to work in media found in the environment. Pedro Zepeda’s dugout canoe is carved from Florida cypress. His functional canoe could float on any body of water, just as canoes have done for millennia. His skilled craftsmanship shows off the wood color and grain. The lines and shape of the dugout create an elegant yet useful work of art. Pedro Zepeda explains the importance of exhibiting Native art in and his connection to Florida.

Reclaiming home at Ringling is another step in the right direction, showcasing contemporary Indigenous artists. I’m happy that when Ola Wlusek came to work at Ringling, she noticed the absence of the local Indigenous artist. For Indigenous people, representation is important, no matter the field. I feel like in my creative journey, this is a turning point and not a culmination. This is where I begin to explore sculpture in the native materials of my home, using various local wood to say something about myself to the world—the materials I use and I were both raised on the same land.

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The exhibited art of Tony Tiger includes his abstract painted patchwork.

The designs are geometric, rhythmic images, and the colors and patterns reminiscent of nature. Sunset, sunrise, and organic forms remind us of the cycle of time. Layered within the painting are family photographs. Beyond the apparent sentiment of familial relations, the photographs are another reminder of time and place. Tiger’s installation piece, Community Arbor: Time and Place, lets us contemplate that we are not alone in our current position. Tiger appreciates the ability to exhibit his artwork in his Seminole homeland: I have been given the opportunity to exhibit for the first time my installation/sculpture in a meaning ful exhibition in the Seminole homeland.

At the Ringling, I was given a team to assist me and place the piece in its location in the gallery. It is a tremendous honor and privilege to exhibit my art at this time and place.

Mvto to the Ringling Museum of Art, Ola Wlusek, and the team of staff who executed a beautiful expression of the Seminole narrative.

Performance artist Elisa Harkins takes the viewer in a completely different direction with her chosen art form. Her work is concerned with Indigenous language, history, and musicology. Although Harkins is originally from somewhere outside of Florida, her musical performance videos showcase hymns in the Muscogee language and were filmed in ancestral Florida homelands.

I feel relieved to see an Indigenous art exhibition in a major Florida art museum. The participating artists are exhibited as true working artists. The focus is on art and the connections that art can make for each of us. The art is not presented as an anthropological study. No historical artifacts are seen in this exhibition. I hope that this exhibition is only the beginning of more to come.

I imagine a day when we can walk into art museums and see Indigenous-created art hung on gallery walls next to non-Indigenous-made work. I long for the day when Native artists will be accepted and valued as artists, each with varying ideas, philosophies, and talents.

This exhibition will be on view through September 4, 2023.

—Michole Eldred (Catawba/ Eastern Cherokee descent)

The materials I use and I were both raised on the same land.

—Pedro Zepeda

above Jessica Osceola (Seminole Tribe of Florida), Portrait One, Portrait Two, and Portrait Three, 2017, bas-relief ceramics, each panel: 197/8 × 123/8 × 13/16 in., collection of the John and Mable Ringling Museum, 2022.8.1–3. opposite Pedro Zepeda (Florida Tribe of Seminole/Mexican), Cypress Canoe, 2022, cypress wood, 198 × 21 × 19 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

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SANTA FE

Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery Museum of Indian Arts and Culture

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OTTERY STORIES. Intermingling. Overlapping. Traveling.

Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery (July 31, 2022–May 29, 2023) unites a community of voices through the Pueblo Pottery Collective, 60 community members who co-curated and brought this exhibition to life. The exhibition’s time at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC) marks its first venue on a multiyear tour that includes the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Vilcek Foundation in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in Texas; and the Saint Louis Art Museum in Missouri. A collaborative effort between the School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe and the Vilcek Foundation, Grounded in Clay features more than 100 pottery vessels arranged in a nonchronological

and nongeographical format. Commemorating 100 years of the SAR’s pottery collection at the Indian Arts Research Center, the exhibition, organized into a dialogue, shares stories from the Pueblo Pottery Collective to immerse visitors into a sea of vivid clay narratives.

The exhibition includes numerous video segments of artists’ spoken sentiments both at the galleries’ front entrance and at the back of the galleries in the “kitchen” room, a space that honors where many pottery artists make their vessels. The kitchen includes a table and chairs where guests can watch the artists’ videos and connect with the collective.

The centrality of the kitchen table also comes up in the middle of the exhibition galleries. Nora Naranjo Morse (Santa Clara Pueblo), a co-curator, offered a comment on fellow co-curator Lonnie Vigil’s (Nambé Pueblo) large, black micaceous jar (1995), emphasizing that he made this striking vessel, reminiscent of a night sky, at his kitchen table.

Providing context to the life of a pottery vessel, Vigil makes a strong point in a video heard throughout the exhibition galleries. He states, “Nothing is perfect.” His thought reflects the Pueblo

Pottery Collective’s selection of many vessels with broken rims or cracks in their bodies. It recognizes the well-worn vessels as living beings who possess faults and flaws collected on tumultuous journeys.

As such, collaboration with the vessels as both vehicles and community members that transmit knowledge forms the legacy that the Pueblo Pottery Collective activates in Grounded in Clay.

Each member of the Pueblo Pottery Collective curated one or two pieces from the SAR and Vilcek Foundation collections to include in Grounded in Clay. The collective wrote their own labels and catalogue entries with an emphasis on first-person voices and with a relational approach. In some cases, members of the collective contributed longer narratives in the form of poetry.

For instance, co-curator Diego Medina’s (Piro-Manso-Tiwa1) poem, “A Covenant of Salt,” ruminates on the act of remembering and does so across languages to find a kind of homecoming. In the Grounded in Clay catalogue,2 Medina writes about his Piro ancestor’s Spanish last name, Salado, which translates to “salty” and refers to the tribe’s sacred salt beds that facilitated the movement of salt throughout the Southwest region.

Medina also notes that his Piro ancestors were separated from this locale through displacement. As a kind of reunion, he attributes this narrative to his vessel in focus, a black-and-white Piro jar.

The theme of homecoming also emerges in co-curator Max Early’s (Laguna Pueblo) reflections on a polychrome Laguna/Acoma dough bowl (ca. 1830-50) that he’s known over the decades. In “Convergence of Clay,” Early documents all of the places he found the dough bowl: in a book, at a gallery, in the Denver Library, and eventually in the Vilcek Foundation’s catalogue of Pueblo pottery. His thoughts honor this pathway of reconvening with this vessel.

During a recent program at MIAC, Early responded to an audience question about the exhibition’s tour by alluding to the vessels’ own desire to go on a trip to the different museums.

The theme of travel also grounds the exhibition. Co-curator Lorraine Gala

1. The Piro/Manso/Tiwa Indian Tribe of the Pueblo of San Juan Guadalupe is not federally recognized as a tribe, but they have petitioned for federal recognition. —Ed. 2. Pueblo Pottery Collective, ed. Elysia Poon and Rick Kinsel, Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery (London: Merrell Publishers Limited, 2022).

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Lewis (Laguna Pueblo/Taos/Hopi) writes in the catalogue about a Mesa Verde ladle (ca. 1050–1350) in a poem entitled, “Visions from Our Past.” A line enacting the voice of the pottery reads, “My journey over the years is to show you … who I am.” Gala Lewis has studied Mesa Verde vessels for more than a decade, and in this context she gives words to her relationship with this era of pottery and their makers.

She also expresses this through her text in the exhibition galleries where she states that she introduces herself to her ancestors through the process of spending time with the ladle and a Mesa Verde mug (ca. 1150–1300), the pieces she selected.

These works create a tether to Mesa Verde as an important place to Pueblo people, and the vessels connect one point in time to another.

Throughout the galleries, large images of hands form a backdrop in many of the clear cases of pottery. The galleries feature enclosures that run the perimeter of each room, akin to a long and continuous pathway, another main theme of the exhibition rooted in the passage of knowledge transference through hands. The combination of this

above Cochiti artist once known, Figurine, ca. 1912, ceramics, pigment, collection of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, gift of Dr. Phyllis Harroun, 50009/12. opposite Tewa artist once known, Polychrome Soup Bowl, ca. 1650, ceramics, pigment, collection of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, 1955/11.

pathway with the photographs of hands in and on pottery enlivens the space and emphasizes the tactile relationships between the pottery makers and the pottery vessels. This foregrounds the hours and hours of direct touch that must take place for the vessel to find its way from clay to its journey in the world. It also speaks to a relationship of respect for a pottery vessel’s will. In a recent program at MIAC, co-curator Evone “Snowflake” Martinez (San Ildefonso Pueblo/Cochiti) discussed the clay’s own desire to become a certain shape and form that differs from the potter’s original intent.

As one of her two curation choices, Martinez selected a red-and-black San Ildefonso Pueblo water jar (ca. 1905– 1910) with several splatters of green pigment and a four-points design that encircles a four-points floral motif. The vessel also features a wild spinach motif around the rim, of which a large piece is missing. Martinez spoke of being drawn to this vessel and that it called her.

Both its timeworn condition and motifs indicate a layered, grounded existence in its movement between places with the intensity of life’s twists and turns.

Grounded in Clay includes a wide variety of vessels in black, polychrome, and micaceous surfaces, among other styles that include figurative works from Cochiti and Taos Pueblos. It demonstrates the variety of Pueblo pottery through a communally grounded presentation that highlights the individual qualities of vessels. At the entrance to the galleries, Naranjo Morse’s text says that one must look closely at the pair of lidded storage vessels (San Ildefonso polychrome, ca.

1905), selected in honor of her twin son and daughter, to note their differences.

From these sentiments, visitors become encouraged to look closely at the pottery vessels and listen for the intersections between the vessels and the Pueblo Pottery Collective’s stories. With the exhibition organized as a dialogue, stories and vessels sit next to each other, keeping each other in good company, adding another layer to their journeys by way of the Grounded in Clay experience.

They travel together in community, their movements oscillating between earth, sky, and breath. —Michelle J. Lanteri, PhD

TAHLEQUAH

Collective Wisdom The Gallery at Cherokee Springs Plaza

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RT IS CONVERSATION— between the artist and the medium, between the finished piece and the viewer, between the artist and history, and between different aspects of the artist’s psyche. The list goes on. In the case of Collective Wisdom, artists are also in direct conversation with each other through the creation of collaborative pieces. The result is a dynamic, emotional, and intellectual experience.

Coordinated by Billy Hensley (Chickasaw Nation) and managed by Ashlee Ray (Chickasaw Nation), Collective Wisdom is a traveling exhibition that showcases more than 20 collaborative pieces by Native artists from a variety of tribal nations. It was first exhibited at Chokma’si Gallery in Ada, Oklahoma, from July 22 to September 9, 2022. This review is based on the exhibition’s stop at the art gallery of Cherokee Springs Plaza in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the capital of the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. It will be at the ARTesian Gallery and Studios in Sulphur, Oklahoma, through May 31, 2023, and is forthcoming at Red Earth Gallery in Oklahoma City this summer and in November at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas, then the Museum of the Southeast Indian in Pembroke, North Carolina, and FaraHNHeight Fine Art in Santa Fe. Artists whose work appears in the exhibition include Cherokee Nation artists Roy Boney Jr., Nathalie Standingcloud, Kindra Swafford, and Bryan Waytula; Chickasaw Nation artists Billy Hensley, Chance Brown, Lokosh (Joshua D. Hinson), Brenda Kingery, Dustin Mater, and Cotie PoeUnderwood; Choctaw Nation artists Marcus Amerman and Kristin Gentry; Marwin Begaye (Navajo), Amber L. DuBoise-Shepherd (Navajo/Sac & Fox/ Prairie Potawatomi), Stuart Sampson (Citizen Potawatomi), Margaret Roach Wheeler (Chickasaw/Choctaw), Erin NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 75

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above Billy Hensley and Lokosh (Joshua D. Hinson), Abikoppolo' | Plague, 2022, acrylic, graphite on canvas, 24 × 36 in.

Shaw (Chickasaw/Choctaw), Brent Greenwood (Chickasaw Nation/Ponca), Tom Farris (Otoe-Missouria/Cherokee), Hoka Skenandore (Oneida/Oglala Lakota/Luiseño/Chicano), Micah Wesley (Muscogee/Kiowa), and Summer Zah (Navajo/Jicarilla Apache/Choctaw).

When the show opened, pandemic social distancing had ended relatively recently. The tentative return of cultural, ceremonial, and familial gatherings, as well as exhibitions and art markets, meant Native artists were once again able to meet in person with their communities, peers, collectors, and the wider art world.

Even when they do not directly refer to the pandemic, the works in this exhibition reflect the traumas, survivals, and celebrations of their historical moment as well as those of past generations.

Abikoppolo' | Plague by Billy Hensley and Lokosh (Joshua D. Hinson) comments directly on the COVID-19 pandemic, placing it in the larger context of loss in Native history. In the painting, Hensley’s “characteristic lines and textures take on the resemblance of layered earth, similar to the way an archaeological site would be divided and prepared.”1 Arranged between Hensley’s lines are Lokosh’s skull-and-bone symbols, alterations of designs found during archaeological excavations at the

Mississippian site, Moundville, in central Alabama—not incidentally, the site of the largest NAGPRA repatriation to date, which occurred in 2022 after years of work by seven tribes whose homelands are in what is now the southeastern United States.2 The eyes of Lokosh’s skulls resemble the now-familiar image of the COVID-19 virus, the lens through which we now view, for one thing, physical collaboration like the works in this exhibition. In a larger sense, Abikoppolo' comments on how history is (sometimes literally) buried then reinterpreted when it is revealed or reexamined later. How does our experience of COVID-19 impact our understanding of our ancestors’ experience of devastating plagues and diseases?

What might our descendants understand or misunderstand about our experience when we are no longer on the earth?

Many of the pieces in this exhibition lead to questions, the kind you might ask if you encountered two artists having their conversation. That is one of the joys of this exhibition: the sense of being in a room with conversations going on you are welcome to listen to or join— for that is the sense of this exhibition, a celebration of being together, sharing jokes and insights (sometimes one and the same), joining individual talents and visions together for a new perspective.

Among the humorous pieces is Cherokee Ghost, a cedar die-cut of a pop culture ghost on a skateboard by Kristin Gentry and Nathalie Standingcloud, which uses a wood sacred to many tribal people to comment on mortality in a whimsical way. A striking piece that probably requires lived experience to find funny is And Who Might You Be?, an acrylic painting by Micah Wesley and Kindra Swafford. Like so many of the pieces in this exhibition, this one showcases the artists’ distinctive styles. For anyone who knows their work, it is easy to recognize Micah Wesley’s portraiture in the bemused, antlered woman looking up at a mysterious owl—an owl in Kindra Swafford’s “glitch” style. The “glitch” suggests that the owl may be more than an owl, but the women’s body language is not fearful. Rather, she seems to be in conversation with the owl—and why that is funny almost defies explanation if you are not “from here.” The piece depicts two beings who are known to Southeastern tribes and who are not supposed to be spoken of (but, of course, everybody talks about them the minute night falls, and Seminole/Mvskoke filmmaker Sterlin Harjo refers to both in his hit television show, Reservation Dogs).

And Who Might You Be? is characteristic of the “conversations” presented in this exhibition. If you approach these pieces without context, they will still be powerful and evoke an aesthetic or emotional response, but, as they say on the internet, “If you know, you know.”

Collective Wisdom is deeply informed by Oklahoma and Native history, of tribes forced into exile with people who might have been their enemies in the past, and of diverse Native people forced to communicate in one foreign language at boarding schools. Somehow, through so many traumas, Native people held on to our distinctive cultures while forming a wider Native community that is able to joke together, to work together for our survival and rights, and to reflect for each other the beauty and vitality that remains despite all that has happened.

Collective Wisdom is part of that ongoing communication.

—Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke)

1. Billy Hensley and Lokosh (Joshua D. Hinson), Artist statement, Abikoppolo' | Plague, 2022.

2. Jenna Kunze, “10,245 Indigenous Remains Reported at University of Alabama,” Native News Online, September 7, 2022, web.

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VANCOUVER

Guud san glans Robert Davidson: A Line That Bends But Does Not Break Vancouver Art Gallery

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AIDA ART and its ceremony were once on the verge of extinction, but as Robert Davidson (Haida) humbly contends, Haida art is now recognized as one of the world’s great forms. The master carver, painter, printmaker, jeweler, sculptor, and cultural leader, along with others of his generation, arrived in the Haida continuum “in the nick of time.”1 They recognized its significance which drew attention to what Davidson calls the vocabulary of Haida art. His life’s work over the last five decades has been to analyze, interpret, master, and reinterpret the vocabulary that is found in Haida formline, a unique system in Northwest Coast art that incorporates ovoids and U-shapes within a larger form.

Davidson’s dedication to Haida art is on display in Guud san glans Robert Davidson: A Line That Bends But Does Not Break, which opened at the Vancouver Art Gallery on November 26, 2022. Curated by Richard William Hill (Cree), the Smith Jarislowsky Senior Curator of Canadian Art, and associate curator Mandy Ginson, the exhibition is a visual analysis of Davidson’s journey from burgeoning printmaker to master painter. Featuring nearly 140 pieces, it juxtaposes early career print works from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s permanent collection with paintings held by private collectors from the 1980s forward.

“When the eagle lands, the Natives will rise again.”2 This was an old eastern Canadian Indigenous prophecy told to Davidson in his mid-twenties, a few years following the famed 1969 raising of the Mother Bear totem pole that he and his brother Reg (Haida) carved in their home village of Old Masset in Haida Gwaii off

above Robert Davidson, T-Silli-AA-Lis, Raven Finned Killer Whale, 1983, screenprint on paper, 231/2 × 391/4 in., collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, gift of Mr. and Mrs. David Young.

the coast of British Columbia. It’s a compelling statement since Guud san glans, Davidson’s Haida name, means “Eagle of the Dawn.” Also, that innocent, unselfish act—intended to help his grandparents’ generation, the last link to Haida culture and ceremony, remember the past, and celebrate what it was to be Haida for the last time—helped to lift the Haida people from the cultural darkness first imposed upon them by the 1884 Indian Act. First Nations were forbidden to create art or participate in cultural ceremonies such as the potlatch. It wasn’t until 1951 that the Canadian government loosened its restrictions. Remarkably, the pole raising sparked an interest in the rediscovery of Haida ways and set the Haida people on a new path forward.

The great-grandson of famed carver Charles Edenshaw (Haida, ca.

1839–1920), Davidson learned to carve from his grandfather Robert Davidson Sr. and his father, Claude, starting at age 13. At the time, he understood very little about what it meant to be Haida. It wasn’t until he was 18 and left to finish high school in Vancouver that Davidson would traverse the halls of local museums and finally have an opportunity to see the

best examples of ancestral Haida carving.

Hardly any historic art remained in Old Masset since it had either been destroyed, stolen, or collected. His thirst to learn more grew, and he regularly sought out examples of ancestral art to study.

Davidson recognized that, while the early Haida artists adhered to the strict principles of formline, each had their own style. “Creativity was key,” but only “within the foundation of that knowledge.”3 The confidence derived from this understanding permitted Davidson to boldly expand on the linguistics of Haida art. Like his ancestors, he bends the demanding principles of Haida formline but never compromises them. His playful contemporary point of view has helped Davidson emerge as one of the world’s most unique and renowned artists.

Familiarity with Haida history, Haida art, or Robert Davidson’s work is not necessary to appreciate Guud san glans Robert Davidson: A Line That Bends But Does Not Break. His pieces stand alone and have proved time and again to be aesthetically alluring, even for those with little knowledge about art.

Familiarity adds context to the process and subject matter, though, and Davidson

1. Paul Niemi, “Life Lessons Learned from True Icon Robert Davidson,” National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, June 18, 2014, web.

2. Niemi, “Life Lessons Learned from True Icon Robert Davidson.”

3. Robert Davidson, “Discovering Haida Art: A Personal Journey with Master Artist Robert Davidson,” Sealaska Heritage Institute, February 16, 2019, YouTube video, 59:23, web.

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insists on challenging the spectator to look beyond what is presented in two dimensions to see even more.

Over time, the primary color palette of Haida art has consisted of red and black. They set the tone for the exhibition.

Visitors won’t find a carving in sight, save the red and black acrylic cedar panel T’sillialis (Raven Fin), 2014. Just as formline has its own movement, the panel sets things into motion and is the catalyst for the subconscious mind to be surprised and intrigued once inside the galleries.

Next to the title wall, visitors are greeted by a large widescreen monitor (one of three used to humanize the Canadian legend and function as transition mechanisms). In a looping video, Davidson shares an engaging in-studio artist chat focused on his childhood, family, and influences. It gives glimpses into the artist’s seriousness, discipline, and humor. QR codes on description placards allow visitors to access audio narrations by Davidson himself, making it feel as if he is walking alongside them.

Beyond that wall, a massive feast for the eyes awaits in the form of numerous early serigraphs and screen prints of cultural event announcements and greeting cards, examples of Davidson’s commercial success. While Davidson’s paintings and prints since the 1990s are looser, visceral, colorful, bold, and defiant, his earlier prints offer a teachable moment in the basic elements of Haida formline.

While teaching carving at Gitanmaax School of Northwest Coast Indian Art in 'Ksan, British Columbia, in 1968, Davidson made his first print of a frog.

Created as promotional material for a student art show, its “flatness”4 of design demonstrates the focus of a perfectionist but also the learning curve of a highly talented and self-aware novice.

So fixated on refining his skills, he produced screen prints just a year later far superior in movement and technique. In fact, Davidson was so productive over the next two years that he was able to release 14 print editions.5 The curation carries the spectator through Robert Davidson’s trajectory of experimentation, triumphs, and failures on the way to mastery of the Haida art

vocabulary. He notoriously reworked the same theme or subject by adding new elements or improving or expanding on others. Davidson began painting in 1980 after decorating drums in preparation for a potlatch. Along with the ease he felt with the medium came a boldness in his work not previously seen. He began to extract elements of formline and expound on that vocabulary. Davidson’s earlier screen prints have a simplistic beauty, but the bold blues, yellows, and greens and experimentation with positive and negative space introduced in later works elicit pure elation.

The exhibition highlights a raised rectangular Lucite case that houses notes, small pencil drawings, and cutouts of works-in-progress that Davidson sold to the Vancouver Art Gallery. It offers a rare glimpse into how the artist’s ideas come to be. A large brown paper stencil hangs on the wall, complemented by a video in which Davidson demonstrates its use as just one step in the painstaking process of bringing one of his larger paintings to life.

The pièce de résistance is the exhibition’s central room with its high ceilings painted in a stunning flannel grey upon which mostly red and black paintings and prints hang. In the center of the silent gallery sit two benches where a revolving cross-section of visitors from all walks of life sit and contemplate the experience.

The subdued visual transition from the previous brightly lit galleries is profound and mimics a response akin to entering a holy place. The art creates a narrative that hits the eyes with a feeling of splendor and amazement. Davidson’s depictions of spirit forms as seen in Two Spring Salmon (2019), acrylic on canvas, delineate between two worlds in a haunting and extraordinary way. The room, full of meditative eyes, takes on a sanctuary-like quality, providing a spiritual experience that hints at the sacredness of Haida art and its vocabulary that never leaves Davidson’s mind while he is creating.

Robert Davidson’s impact on the Haida artistic continuum is undeniable and substantial. He helped change the course of history, and, like the strict principles of the Haida art vocabulary, the Haida are resilient and refuse to be

4. Ian M. Thom, ed., “The Evolution of an Artist” in Robert Davidson: Eagle of the Dawn (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery with University of Seattle Press, 1993), 70.

5. Thom, “The Evolution of an Artist,” 71.

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broken. Long ago, Haida art was at risk of disappearing, but Davidson has influenced multiple generations of talented artists who are following in his footsteps, pushing the Haida people forward even more. If the exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery is any indication, it seems that the Haida are just getting started. Guud san glans Robert Davidson: A Line That Bends But Does Not Break closes on April 16, 2023. —Paul Niemi

REPORT SITKA, ALASKA

Sheldon Jackson Museum

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HE OLDEST MUSEUM in Alaska, the Sheldon Jackson Museum was established in 1888 as a place “to provide and have on hand for study by the students [of the Sitka Industrial Training School1] the best specimens of the old work of their ancestors … otherwise, in a few years there would be nothing left to show the coming generations of Natives how their fathers lived.”2 Originally called the Society of Natural History and Ethnography, the museum was founded by the Rev. Dr. Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian minister who served as the first General Agent of Education in Alaska from 1885 to 1907.

The museum was renamed in 1910 upon Jackson’s death, and since 1987 has been owned and operated by the State of Alaska.

Housed in an octagonal building constructed in 1895 and the first concrete building in the state, the Sheldon Jackson Museum collection includes roughly 6,000 artifacts. The majority of the collection was acquired by Jackson who traveled widely throughout Alaska during his annual inspection of Alaska’s territorial schools.3 The diversity and depth make this one of the most significant 1. The Sitka Industrial Training School was Alaska’s first boarding school for Alaska Native students.

It opened in 1878 and served as a model for subsequent Indigenous boarding schools built throughout the United States that sought to assimilate Indigenous students.

2. “Alaska State Museums-Sheldon Jackson MuseumSitka,” Alaska’s Digital Archives, web.

REPORT

collections of Alaska Native art in the world: full-size Tlingit and Tsimshian totem poles, Unangan and Yup’ik grass baskets, Iñupiaq walrus ivory carvings and whaling gear, Tlingit war helmets and daggers, Athabascan moosehide garments embellished with intricate quillwork, Haida argillite carvings, Sugpiaq masks, and many examples of hunting and fishing equipment, gut and fish-skin parkas, and other cultural treasures.

Some of the materials have the makers’ names recorded, such as work by Tlingit silversmith Rudolph Walton (1867– 1951), Haida carver Da.axiigang Charles Edenshaw (1839–1920), and Tlingit weaver Jennie Thlunaut (1891–1986), though most of the artists are not individually identified. A scholar of Alaska Native arts could spend a lifetime here studying materials, designs, and artistry.

I am particularly drawn to the museum’s collection of masks, which are displayed so that visitors can see the front and back of the masks through a clear exhibition case. There are 129 from the village of Point Hope alone, representing the largest assemblage of masks from this area. Several communities that are no longer inhabited, such as King Island and Andreafsky, are also well represented.

The Yup'ik mask collection includes 112 specimens, many with hoops and feather appendages still attached. A few Athabascan masks are part of the collection, including a few representing women.

The museum is organized by culture group as well as by theme. Several cases are dedicated to Southeast Alaska with regalia, tools, and fishing materials. Yup'ik and Iñupiaq materials are displayed together with cases highlighting clothing, masks, and basketry, with smaller displays of Unangan and Athabascan materials.

In the center of the museum, visitors can open study drawers to see smaller items such as jewelry, children’s toys, tools, snow goggles, and walrus ivory figurines.

The museum has a history of strong partnerships with Alaska Native artists and communities. In 1989, for

example, the museum collaborated with the Coastal Yukon Mayors Association to develop a small traveling exhibition of materials from this region. Yup'ik community members Wassillie Evan, Andy Paukan, and Willie Beans traveled to Sitka to select materials for a modest display during the Mountain Village dance festival. This was the first time that Alaska Native people had come to the museum to curate their own culture.4

3. Before the museum was established in Sitka, much of the material that Jackson collected was sent to institutions on the East Coast, notably Princeton University and the Smithsonian Institution. To learn more about Sheldon Jackson and his collecting practices, see former museum curator Rosemary Carlton’s book, Sheldon Jackson: The Collector (Alaska State Museum, 1999).

4. Tim Troll, “Bringing Native History out of Museums and into the Spotlight,” Anchorage Daily News, November 8, 2019, web.

above, top Athabascan artist once known, Mask, ca. 1890s, wood, willow rods, feathers, pigment, twine, glass beads, Koserefsky (Holy Cross), Alaska, collection of the Sheldon Jackson Museum, SJ-II-J-1.

Photo: Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Alutiiq). above, bottom Sheldon Jackson Museum, Sitka, Alaska, late 20th century. Photo: Jet Lowe, National Park Service (CC 0).

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above Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂), Rumination 3, 2012, C-print of performance, ed. 10. Photo: Larry McNeil (Tlingit/Nisga’a). Image courtesy of the artist.

Today the museum regularly collaborates with Alaska Native artists and community members. Since 1996 the museum has hosted a robust Native Artist Residency program that brings artists to the museum for research, workshops, and demonstrations. The museum also hosts occasional exhibitions of contemporary Alaska Native art in the foyer space and presents artist talks throughout the year.

They also participate in a ceremonial loan program where select pieces from the collection are accessible to local clan leaders for display during koo.éex' (potlatch or memorial ceremony).

I reached out to a few artists to share their experiences working with this museum’s collection. Allison Warden (Iñupiaq), who participated in a three-week artist residency in 2014, said, “My time at the Sheldon Jackson Museum meant a lot to me. The museum has one of only two existing Iñupiaq whaling suits in the world. It is made out of ugruk (bearded seal) hide. It was so inspiring to see it in person because it is a unique part of our history and gives information about our ingenuity. While I was at the museum, I was able to study this suit, and then, right there in the museum gallery, worked with the museum staff to create a replica using plastic and zip ties. We were working together just like we were part of a whaling crew.”

A Sitka local, Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂) has engaged with the museum to study examples of historical arts, and in the past as a younger artist, to demonstrate. Galanin says of the museum, “It is a place to access our ancestral objects, like many institutions, a space that we have to learn to navigate more and more. It comes with

a problematic side.” Galanin visited the museum in 2012 with his daughters to create the photograph series Rumination. He shared that this photograph series brings attention to how Indigenous communities are often imagined behind cases, as static, and through the lens of dominant culture’s narratives. He wanted to include his children in these images to highlight the next generations and their future relationships in the museum.

Community conversations in Alaska have currently broached an idea of changing the name of the Sheldon Jackson Museum. For some, the idea of changing the name could be an important way to decolonize the space and make room for an Indigenous sense of belonging in a location that is very much tied to the history of colonization and boarding schools in Alaska.5 While this discussion is in the early stages, it will be interesting to see what happens next at the museum and how it will come to be known for future generations. For now, I encourage anyone who visits Southeast Alaska to make time to visit the museum in Sitka and see for yourself this exceptional collection of Alaska Native material culture.

—Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Alutiiq)

MUSIC REVIEW JACQUELINE WILSON

Works for the Bassoon by Native American Composers

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HIS ALBUM, Works for the Bassoon by Native American Composers, is a 13-year effort by bassoonist Jacqueline Wilson, DMA (Yakama). It is effort well spent.

The album, available through the Washington State University Recordings label, consists of compositions written by six Native composers including Connor Chee (Diné), Juantio Becenti (Diné), Jack F. Kilpatrick (Cherokee, 1915–1967), Raven Chacon (Diné), and Louis W. Ballard (Quapaw/Cherokee, 1931–2007). As a result, this historic album deserves special attention. The most indelible aspects for

me after the initial listening are Wilson’s masterful playing, her attention to nuances, and her deep tone on this double-reeded conical instrument. The sound of this instrument is so rooted in European concert music, it’s rarely heard outside of this genre, and too few compositions feature the instrument.

The album is an important addition to the overall repertoire of the bassoon as well as to the voice of Native composers in the context of what is commonly called classical music.

In a brief interchange I had with Wilson, she stated that there is a long and

5. “Alaska Native Community Engagement and Trust Building Webinar,” First Alaskans Institute, December 14, 2022, YouTube video, 1:47:12, web.

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MUSIC REVIEW

ever-present history in classical music of non-Native composers writing Native-inspired works. “I’m so proud that this album stands in oppositional contrast to that practice,” she said, “Native people writing and playing our own music, telling our own stories, and speaking for ourselves.” Wilson plans to continue her work in Indigenous self-representation and artistic sovereignty throughout her career. She said, “My next big [recording] project is expanding this work internationally to include three new commissions by Māori composers Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal, Philip Brownlee, and Takerei Komene.”

Works for the Bassoon by Native American Composers begins with gentle rolls on the marimba, preparing a wide-open scene for mysterious coming events. “Nocturne for Bassoon and Marimba” by Connor Chee provides an enjoyable starting point to this adventure for solo and accompanied bassoon. It feels like an invocation to oneself, a safe space to interpret freely as one wishes. Different with every listening, it is a sonic mirror without judgment where anything can happen. Through this enters the extremely satisfying first sound of the bassoon. I immediately feel an underlying trust in Wilson’s sensibilities and technical abilities with this uniquely characteristic instrument. From the liner notes, Renata Yazzie (Diné) writes, “While many of Chee’s compositions are based on traditional Navajo songs, this nocturne’s inspiration is instead initiated by the sound of a peaceful wind going into the night and leaving the same way it came.”

“Dance Suite for Solo Bassoon” by Wilson follows. A suite of six short pieces—Grand Entry, Grass, Men’s Traditional, Fancy Shawl, Women’s Traditional, and Fancy Feather—honors powwow dances from which she drew for this work. As stated in the liner notes, these are not powwow songs but rather a sonic interpretation of the dances themselves. Wilson cites the English composer Benjamin Britten’s (1913–1976) “Six Metamorphoses” for solo oboe as an inspiration.

It’s a unique experience to peer into the study of this instrument by such a skilled composer/performer. The sound of the bassoon as a solo instrument is intimate and vulnerable, and Wilson is perfectly adept and at ease throughout the suite and the entire album. Her musicality evolved from years of cultivating her sound and vision. Every nuance of phrasing, articulation, dynamics, and intonation is in service to these charming compositions. I enjoy the variety of tempi, turns of phrases and melodies, and slight transposition of modalities.

This album is intended to be a friendly guide that welcomes us to fully listen and be present in this work. By the end of the suite, I consciously appreciated the sequencing of the album. Conner Chee’s “Nocturne” sets the stage for these studies which, in turn, encourages a deeper curiosity of what’s coming next.

“Four Pieces for Bassoon” by Juantio Becenti (Diné) is inspired by everyday experiences from the composer’s life such as bluebirds alighting in the desert, winters without snow, and Navajo country dance songs, as well as a reference to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) and Serialism, an early 20th-century innovation that dictates the form of a composition through an initial series of fixed patterns.

Along with most of his works, Jack Kilpatrick’s “Romance” was recently discovered in a storage facility at the University of Oklahoma School of Music. Born in Stilwell, Oklahoma, in 1915, he passed away in 1967. His early musical experiences

and inspiration likely stemmed from his mother, Ferol Helton Kilpatrick (1891–1965), a beloved pianist. Kilpatrick wrote many works for orchestra, choir, chamber ensemble, opera, voice, and solo piano. From the liner notes: “Kilpatrick often drew inspiration from his Cherokee heritage, infusing the essence of it into his music, whether by direct quotation and gesture or through musical imagery.” This piece was likely written around 1975.

Raven Chacon’s “For Jacqueline Wilson” is one piece in a series of 13 graphic scores, “For Zitkála-Šá,” in recognition of the Yankton Dakota composer, librettist, writer, teacher, and political activist. The series is dedicated to Indigenous and Mestiza women of the Americas who have devoted their lives to music and sound.

With this piece, the Pulitzer Prize–winner provides a refreshing dip into the abstract nature of sound, deepening the listener’s experience for the remainder of the album. This study of the complex within the simple focuses on the attack, duration, and release of the sound throughout various fluctuations of trills. The liner notes include an enlightening description of the notation and directions in Chacon’s composition.

Louis W. Ballard’s eight-piece suite “Katcina Dances” eases us out of the album. Ballard studied composition with Hungarian Béla Rózsa (1905–1977), who introduced him to the works of the composer and ethnomusicologist Béla Bartók (1881–1945). Bartók is an historic figure because he recorded folk songs from around the world and integrated these melodies and concepts into his own compositions. Bartók recorded folk songs along his travels for years. Ballard’s intention with the “Katcina Dances” was, as the liner notes state, “to achieve a musically and culturally viable universal statement without violating the integrity of the Indigenous milieu.”

I deeply appreciate Renata Yazzie’s insightful liner notes and the cover art by Carmen Selam (Yakama/ Comanche). Though it took 13 years to achieve, the release of this album builds momentum toward endless possibilities.

I’m excited to hear the next installment!

—Thollem NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 81

THEATER REVIEW

above Madeline Sayet (Mohegan) performing in Where We Belong at the Public Theatre, Lewiston, Maine. Photo: Joan Marcus.

THEATER Where We Belong Madeline Sayet

Directed by Mei Ann Teo

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ONE-PERSON PLAY, Where We Belong is written and performed by Madeline Sayet (Mohegan). Hao Bai designed the set and lighting, Asa Banally (Navajo) designed costumes, and Mei Ann Teo directed the show. Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in association with Folger Shakespeare Library produced Where We Belong, which has toured nationally at such venues like the Philadelphia Theatre Company, Seattle Rep, and the Public Theatre in Maine.

Sayet’s journey begins in a queue as she waits to cross international borders to continue her PhD program studying William Shakespeare in England. She ponders the arbitrariness of borders, invisible lines that are drawn, and wonders, Where does she belong? A border patrol agent interrupts her and asks her which way she would have voted during Brexit. She isn’t British, so she couldn’t have voted. Border patrol insists on an 82 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

answer. She would’ve voted to stay. The agent cheerily waves her through. She is relieved she has chosen the “right” side— but who decides who is “right”?

Today’s story is not Shakespeare, nor is it a customary Mohegan story she tells us. Madeline’s story is about how she became a bird and learned to fly. And fly she does.

Her Mohegan name, Achokayis, means Blackbird or “one who flies apart,” but Mohegan people (once part of the larger Pequot nation) are called wolf people. “Is it possible to be both a bird and a wolf?” Madeline speculates. Wolves stay grounded; they do not leave their home. To be a bird means learning to fly.

Madeline weaves her story deliberately and carefully with the joys and sorrows of her people’s history and her own. Her opening segment on borders and sides becomes a larger haunting question of “what if ” as she travels back in time to the splitting of the Pequot and Mohegan peoples in a time of war against the British. The Mohegan nation led by Uncas (Mohegan, 1598–1683) allies with the British. The invaders lay waste to the Pequot communities, leaving only a few children to survive. “What if we had allied with our cousins?” There are no easy answers. Just the knowledge gained that these invaders do not fight to settle disputes. They fight to win.

A young Sayet grapples with the responsibility and the pressure of what her Mohegan name means. Having to be renamed due to an error in translation (she was first named after an inanimate dead bird), Achokayis spends her time performing with a local Shakespeare theater company and working for her tribe. In her Shakespeare rehearsals, words make sense. Shakespeare makes her feel “normal.” As a young thespian, she finds herself captivated by The Tempest and a tempting supposition, “What if Caliban got his language back?” She directs a play where Caliban is Indigenous. It makes sense because, as she notes, the sailors leave the island at the end of the play.

In this world she reimagines that Shakespeare was anticolonial.

Off Achokayis flies, to England to pursue a doctoral degree in Shakespeare.

Overseas she doesn’t have her people or her language, but she finds a comforting connection to home when she stumbles upon a stone memorializing Mohegan leader Mahomet. Mahomet Weyonomon (Mohegan, 1700–1736) crossed the ocean in 1735 for an audience with King George II to denounce the treatment of his people.

He died of smallpox, waiting in a queue.

“F—ing queues!” She speaks Mohegan with him and brings him tobacco. Here, Sayet carefully mimes the action of offering tobacco, knowing that offerings of the sacred nature are not for all audiences. I appreciated her handling of this scene and a later scene with her mom, who attempts to smudge Sayet through a Zoom call to great comedic effect.

In and out, Sayet weaves images of community and isolation as she physically traverses a cleverly minimalist yet versatile set and lighting designed

by Hao Bai, a multifaceted New York– based freelancer who works throughout North America and Asia. A single bar of light becomes a security checkpoint, and Mohegan Hill is suggested by an earthylooking mound. In one section of the play, the lights drop from the ceiling at various levels to become the British Museum, eerily and suffocatingly filled with stolen sacred relations and relatives.

Shakespeare changes for Achokayis as she is asked to fly more often and is invited to speak about his words and Indigenous plays. She morphs into a

chorus of eager colonial institutions as echoes from the past, “They fight to win,” and Caliban’s lines from The Tempest, “You taught me language, and my profit on’t/Is [I know how to curse.]” The lights flicker ominously as she physically twists and resists against the assumptions, the labels on her work, on herself. This is a different form of violence inflicted upon her but from the descendants of the same people who laid waste to hers. They aren’t here to listen to her. Shakespeare is no longer escapism.

GAIL TREMBLAY

What if Caliban got his language back?

FROELICK GALLERY Portland, OR | 503.222.1142 In 1967 Everything Was Frozen at the Camp, in 2022 the River Ice Was Not Thick Enough to Ice Fish On and in October, the World Still Had Areas of Green and Blue, 2022, 16mm footage from the film At the Autumn River Camp, 16mm green, blue and white leader, and silver cord, 10.5˝ tall x 7˝ diameter photo: Mario Gallucci

Bryan Parker (Muscogee Creek & Mississippi Choctaw) Munchie Run, 2022, acrylic on canvas

Achokayis questions her path. She is drawn back to the recurring theme of language loss. There are no more fluent speakers of Mohegan, but she dreams of a time when her people can say their language has been fully restored. “Would anyone have cared about those Mohegan words—if they hadn’t come from Caliban?” Americans and Britons preserved and cared for Shakespearean language because they assigned value to his words, even the ones that had no meaning. But the Mohegan language was violently torn away. Every time Sayet speaks of language loss, my breath catches in my throat, and something aches inside. They are gut punches. What would our world be like if our Indigenous languages were fully restored? What stories could we tell? Maybe we would fly too.

Even so, Achokayis knows her ancestors are with her, speaking with her and watching over her journey. She quits her PhD program and comes home. Her mom persuades her to come to her graduation ceremony (she received her master’s degree). At the ceremony, her mom, the Mohegan medicine woman, tells the congregation the story of how she was named. Her mom says her family always knew she would need to learn to fly. Every time she does, she learns something new and brings it back to strengthen her people.

Like many Native and Indigenous stories, Achokaysis concludes like a circle. We are reminded that we are part of the story too. It’s a story from long ago, and it’s about where we belong today. Her parting Mohegan words show gratitude to the ancestors as she sings herself offstage. Many Native American ceremonies and gatherings end with a prayer or a song. It is only fitting she would leave us audience members with a song full of hope.

Sayet’s command of the stage and use of space is captivating. From the beginning to the end, she rhythmically leads her audience through her narrative at varying tempos depending on what each section calls for. Sometimes it’s hurried, reflecting the inner response to an external catalyst, but always intentional and punched with repetitions so we don’t lose the image. Sayet is a master of levels, both physically and emotionally, by giving us moments of joy, dread, comedy, and curiosity. She tells hard truths while also caring for her audience.

—Candice Byrd-Boney (Quapaw/Osage/Cherokee Nations)

June 4 - August 13, 2023

Call for Entries - Due May 12, 2023

Entry Form & More Info at www.redcloudart.show The Heritage Center at Mahpiya Luta | Red Cloud, Pine Ridge, SD

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Cherokee Nation/Kiowa Fiction Writer

OSCAR HOKEAH

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

A

CITIZEN of the Cherokee Nation and the Kiowa Indian Tribe of Oklahoma, Oscar Hokeah earned an MA in English from the University of Oklahoma and a BFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA).

IAIA awarded him a Truman Capote Literary Trust Scholarship, and the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference gave him their Native Writer Award. His short stories have appeared in publications such as the South Dakota Review, American Short Fiction, and RED INK Journal.

Hokeah’s literary fiction focuses on intertribalism, transnationalism, and multiculturalism, with a special focus on Tahlequah and Lawton in Oklahoma. For nearly 20 years he has worked in child welfare as a way to empower Native American youth. Hokeah’s debut novel, Calling for a Blanket Dance, took 14 years to complete, and Algonquin Books published it in 2022.

Can you speak on your experience of writer’s block and how you broke through it?

My first bout of writer’s block started in early 2009 when I was at the Institute 84 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

of American Indian Arts (IAIA). I had just finished writing two of my earliest chapters in Calling for a Blanket Dance, which are Quinton Quoetone’s and Hayes Shade’s chapters. I had successfully captured what I felt were a distinctive Kiowa voice (Quinton Quoetone) and a distinctive Cherokee voice (Hayes Shade).

Despite having written such powerful stories, I still had self-doubt. I didn’t know if I was going in the right direction. It got to a point where I couldn’t even put my flash drive into my computer to write fiction. I could do critical writing for school assignments. It was the creative writing that had me stumped.

I graduated from IAIA and started at the University of Oklahoma (OU) in 2010. The program was an MA in English, which concentrated on critical writing, and I focused on Native American literature. I went on to publish those two early chapters as standalone stories in American Short Fiction (2010) and South Dakota Review (2011). Even with the success of getting those stories published, I still couldn’t put the flash drive into the computer. I spent a lot of time with Dr. Geary Hobson, the head of my thesis

committee. He talked to me about his writing process and coached me through the block. He gave me suggestions like carrying around a small notepad. He kept pieces of cut paper in his shirt pocket and would pull them out and write a little something when it struck him. He also talked to me about my creative writing projects, like what I was doing at IAIA and what I wanted to do in my creative writing career. This is where I started to deepen my perspective as a writer, where I figured out I was a regionalist writer who would write from tribally specific and historically targeted communities— the communities I grew up in: Tahlequah and Lawton, Oklahoma.

While I couldn’t write creatively, the time at OU gave me space to explore themes in race, class, and gender. It deepened the symbolic value I placed on characters, dialogue, and setting. I fell more in love with literary fiction. I started writing fiction again after I graduated from OU in 2012. From 2012 to 2013, I wrote a typical novel-in-stories titled Reflections on the Water, a comparison between a mother and her son. Some of those elements carry over into Calling for a Blanket Dance, but the novel-in-stories didn’t have much of a narrative arc. I shopped it to agents back in 2013 and couldn’t get any takers. So I went through another writer’s block and didn’t write for two more years.

This is when I started to learn new forms of art. I started painting, playing guitar, and cooking new dishes. I told myself I was going to “stay creative.”

While I couldn’t write creatively, I inherently knew I could work my way back into writing fiction. I still play guitar, and I’ll paint from time to time, and cooking, well, it comes and goes. But I was eventually able to get myself writing again.

In 2015 I decided to write a different novel—one structured more like a typical novel. I wrote the first draft to that one, which is now my book number two. Then

ART+LIT

I received an email from Dr. Geary Hobson. He would check in on me from time to time just to see how I was doing and how my writing was going. He asked, “What are you working on?” I told him about the first draft of book number two and then I remembered the unsuccessful novel-in-stories. This is when I gave myself permission to tear it apart. I took stories out and added new ones in. Then Calling for a Blanket Dance became more like it is now. It had a narrative arc, where Ever Geimausaddle was becoming more aggressive and making a mess of his life, and then he came to a crisis point where he had to make a decision. Was he going to turn things around? By 2018 I had a fully developed manuscript and that year I connected with my agent.

to endure. There is a harshness to our lives, and we have added obstacles in life. We are the smallest minority in the US and have some of the highest disparity rates. One in four Natives lives in poverty, which is higher than any other group.

Literary fiction is meant to show audiences the stark reality—not a new fantasy. And we have to be careful about

Not many writers discuss how physical exercise helps them with their writing, but you have. What is it about exercise that helps with your work?

I think movement somehow distracts us from the tangles in our mind, and those knots will loosen themselves if we quit pulling on them so hard. Sometimes it’s best just to go to the track and walk. While walking, the nuances of the issues we’re stuck on will suddenly unravel themselves. It’s interesting how that happens.

I don’t play competitive sports. I’ll shoot around on a basketball court or go for a walk. I’m not a competitive person. If someone wants to be number one, then I’ll just let them. [Laughs.]

When I write, I push myself to get a step better than I was the day before. I tend to look directly at the next thing in front of me, as opposed to getting caught up in an outcome. Physical activity allows me space to contemplate and untangle the next thing and then the next thing after that. Ultimately, I just like staying busy. It’s hard for me to do nothing, which is something I’m working on. I think we need periods of inaction. I’m just not very good at it.

You continue to work with Indigenous youth in Tahlequah.

It’s been nearly 20 years. I’m curious: how does working in child welfare influence your writing?

It’s an important part of my brand of fiction. I’ve worked directly in the community for so long and specifically with at-risk Native youth or Native families supporting at-risk Native youth that my writing is tied into those work experiences. Working in this field has given me a lot of experience to write on this topic. Similarly, being a father of six—three adult children and three school-age children—also plays into my writing. I tend to focus on family environments, and I like to write adult characters who work with youth. Those themes will carry over into future books.

Calling for a Blanket Dance engages a breadth of heavy subject matter, from police corruption to serious illness.

Can you discuss how you convey themes such as hope and renewal even in the darkest of places?

I’m glad you asked this question, and I appreciate you giving me space to speak on it. For me, literary fiction is a space where I can capture realism and pull readers out of the fantasy associated with Native American cultures. Folks want to talk about our dances, our ceremonies, and our spirit, but all that comes alive with a special vibrancy because of the trauma we’ve had

above Cover of Calling for a Blanket Dance (Algonquin Books, 2022). Cover art by Christin Apodaca. opposite Oscar Hokeah. Image courtesy of the author.

how new fantasies creep in. We are susceptible to our underlying values, and those values can alter our perspective. Meaning, we can embrace Native people but only want the dances, ceremonies, and spirit. Our biggest obstacle is invisibility. When we start paying attention to the disparity rates, then Native peoples become visible. And my literary fiction is branded in realism for that reason: to give voice to the stark reality of Native life. Showing hope is fairly easy because we have great resilience. Those dances, ceremonies, and histories people love so much? They are the things that sustain us. It keeps us alive and healing. I intertwine cultural elements in the story as solutions to hardships.

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It’s the voice of the characters mixed with capturing the landscape. I think there are subtle elements throughout the novel that construct the feel of Oklahoma, like mentions of smaller communities and how they’re interlinked. With regard to landscape, it’s recognizing the shift between Southern Plains and Ozark Hills. Dialect and accent are also very important parts of regionalism. Transferring the way people speak depending on tribe and region goes a long way toward getting the feel of Oklahoma on the page.

Can we talk about character development? Where does the protagonist Ever Geimausaddle surface from?

It’s loosely based on my personal experience. There are major differences between Ever and myself, but I tend to take events from people around me and mesh them together. Once I start to blend experiences, I have to modify the “real life” events and then it becomes very much fiction. I use this method because making something unique for an audience requires specificity, and there’s no better way to create newness in a story than to grab pieces of real life and transform them. In a broad sense, every story has been told, but we can play with specific events/ experiences to develop something unique for our audiences. So in Quinton Quoetone’s chapter, he and Ever have fun the way newly adulted teens have fun—cars and parties—and I took experiences from my older cousins and meshed them together to create something entertaining. I myself didn’t have a party with the Kiowa per cap, but I did buy a car so I could get to and from work. This is an example of how I take experiences from people around me and blend them together.

When I’m writing, it’s the only time I can be truly human. There’s no one to judge me at my desk.

The cover of the book is striking. How does the cover art tie into the novel?

The art on the cover was created by Christin Apodaca, who has a very postmodern style that matched the postmodern style of my debut. The image is very striking and captures the internal working of the main character, Ever Geimausaddle. The crumpled dollar bill signifies a part of our honoring process in Gourd Dance culture, where we will drop a dollar bill in front of one of the dancers to honor them, and then we’ll stand next to that dancer and dance alongside them. The sash streaming out from around the face is a Gourd Dance sash, with red on top to signify the main character is connected to the Kiowa community. The fractured face speaks to both the effects of historical trauma and the process of healing. The image shows how the main character is coming to terms with living his life with honor and it’s inextricably tied to his family and communities.

The book’s plot is set in Oklahoma. How did you construct the look and feel of Oklahoma so that readers can get a strong sense of it?

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Are there points during writing where your personal emotions are significantly heightened? How do you reconcile the emotional toll involved with the writing?

I love to write with emotion. That’s a part of my brand. When readers come into my writing world, I want them to experience every human emotion. Not only sadness and laughter, but also frustration and anger and elation and joy. When I’m writing, it’s the only time I can be truly human. There’s no one to judge me at my desk. I can feel without critical eyes and verbal judgments; I fall into something of a fugue state when I write. As I disappear, I’m left to experience the scenes playing out in my mind with genuine emotion. If you cry when you read my words, it means I cried too. And likewise with every other emotion on the page. Ultimately, it creates opportunities for catharsis, where I can alter small pieces of my personality as I come to terms with trauma. If I can find small spaces where I change, then maybe it gives the reader that same opportunity.

Do you have another novel in the works? What are you writing these days?

I’m on the polishing phase for book number two. I can’t say anything about it yet because my editor hasn’t seen it, and she still needs to give me the green light. If she passes on this one, I have a first draft of a third book I’ll jump on right away. But I’m in a limbo state right now about which project will be the next book. I am steadily writing, though.

OSCARHOKEAH.COM

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Collections

NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

T

HE NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA (NGC) sits on the south bank of the Ottawa River in Ontario. Before Queen Victoria named Ottawa the nation’s capital in 1855, this site of confluence was an important trading post. Ottawa derives from the Algonquin adawe: to trade.

Established in 1880, the National Gallery of Canada outgrew three buildings before its current glass-andmarble cathedral opened in 1988. This architectural spectacle was designed by renowned architect Moshe Safdie. Since 2005 Louise Bourgeois’s monumental bronze spider Maman—one of seven in the world—has graced the entrance.

Upon entry, visitors encounter one of the building’s defining features: a ramp the length of a football field leading to a Great Hall. Several artists have accentuated this long, narrow space for site-specific works, including Shuvinai Ashoona (Inuk) and Joi T. Arcand (Muskeg Lake Cree).

Today the NGC collection includes approximately 49,000 works—not counting works within series or partial works such as potsherds—which is managed by 13 curators in six departments. Nearly five percent of the art is

by Indigenous artists. NGC collected hundreds of Inuit prints and drawings since the 1960s; however, Indigenous art was not a focus for the first century of the NGC’s existence. As Diana Nemiroff explains, “When the gallery sought to develop a context for its Canadian pictures, it looked to Europe for its acquisitions, finding in the art of Britain, France, and Italy its cultural roots.”1 Numerous initiatives aimed to rectify this omission, beginning in the mid-1980s, have created one of the strongest collections of Indigenous Canadian art. Like other museums, the NGC’s holdings grew from major donations, purchases, and transfers of collections from other institutions. The acquisition of The North American Iceberg

(1985), painted by Carl Beam (M’Chigeeng Ojibwe, 1943–2005), marks a shift in focus. The first solo exhibition for an Inuit artist at the NGC featured Pudlo Pudlat (Inuk, 1916–1992) in 1990, and two years later some galleries were designated exclusively for Inuit art.

Growing collections led to watershed exhibitions. Land Spirit Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada (1992) was one of the first international surveys of Indigenous art in Canada.

Curated by Diana Nemiroff, Robert Houle (Saulteaux), and Charlotte TownsendGault, the show brought together work by 18 artists. Major solo exhibitions followed: Norval Morrisseau (2006), Daphne Odjig (2009), Carl Beam (2010), Charles Edenshaw (2014), Alex Janvier (2016), and Rebecca Belmore (2018).

The NGC has staged two iterations of global Indigenous sexennials intended to “build frameworks that sustain connections and communication,” according to curator Christine Lalonde.2 This

1. Diana Nemiroff, “Modernism, Nationalism, and Beyond: A Critical History of Exhibitions of First Nations Art” in Land Spirit Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada, ed. Diana Nemiroff (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1992), 18–19.

2. Christine Lalonde, “Introduction: At the Crossroads of Indigeneity, Globalization and Contemporary Art,” in Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, by Greg A. Hill, Candice Hopkins, Christine Lalonde (Ottawa: National Gallery of Art, 2013), 17.

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momentous exhibition series was the brainchild of Greg A. Hill (Mohawk), who in 2007 became the inaugural curator for the NGC’s department for Indigenous art. The museum purchased and commissioned numerous works for Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art (2013) and Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu continuel (2019–20). The next in the series is planned for 2025.

Sakahàn, Algonquin for “to light a fire,” included 80 artists, including artists who were Canadian First Nations, Métis, and Inuit; American and Native American; Australian First Nations; Māori and other Pacific Islanders; Indigenous Asian; Indigenous Central and South American; Sami, Greenlandic Inuit, and African. Site-specific installation prevailed. Inuk Silis Høegh (Kalaalleq) draped the exterior of the Great Hall with Iluliaq (Iceberg). A soundscape enhanced this work. Inside, Marie Watt’s (Seneca) Blanket Stories: Seven Generations, Adawe, and Hearth (2013) towered over visitors, and César Antonio López (Amuzgo) painted directly on gallery walls.

Hill, Christine Lalonde, Rachelle Dickenson (Métis descent), and Crystal Migwans (Wikwemikong Ojibway) curated Àbadakone, working with many consultants, including Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish), Ariel Smith (Plains Cree), and Carla Taunton. The exhibition brought together 65 artists and two collectives that included artists who are Canadian First Nations, Métis, Inuit, American, Native American, Asian, Sami, African, Australian First Nations, Māori, other Pacific Islanders, and Indigenous Central and South American. Performance art and video featured more heavily in this exhibition, highlighting the work of Edgar Calel (Kaqchikel Maya), Jeneen Frei Njootli (Vuntut Gwitchin), and Dylan Miner (Métis descent), among others.

It is difficult to select only a few artists among such a strong group, but I am also compelled to mention exquisite, minimal sculpture by Maureen Gruben (Inuvialuk) and beautiful porcelain smoke-fired stoneware by Pierre Aupilarduk (Inuk).

Unfortunately, online archives for these exhibitions are lacking.

The NGC’s presentations of Indigenous art from its permanent collections have been masterfully analyzed by several scholars, notably Ruth B. Phillips in Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (2011). She found the 2002 intervention of Indigenous art in the Canadian galleries to be “dull and lifeless” but noted improvements by 2009.

What has developed since this assessment?

All Canadian art museums have benefited from substantially increased funding for Indigenous arts. In support of both the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts adopted a new strategic plan in 2016 that earmarks funds for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis cultural production. In only five years, this nearly quadrupled the funding available for Indigenous arts.3 Prompted by Canada’s 150th anniversary of Confederation, in 2017 the NGC again reinstalled its permanent collection galleries described by Phillips with the goal to further integrate Canadian art with historical and contemporary Indigenous art. Exhibition designer Adrien Gardére opened up spaces to encourage a more flexible visitor experience. The new design decentralized the iconic Group of Seven, early 20th-century Canadian

above, top Inuk Silis Høegh (Kalaalleq), Iluliaq (Iceberg), 2013, installation of ink jet print on PVC-coated scrim mesh, 40 × 28 x 28 meters on the National Gallery of Canada. Photographs of iceberg by Ivars Silis. Image courtesy of the artist. above, bottom Egevadluq Ragee (Inuk, 1920–1983), 1960, Stone matrix for Sky Stars, collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Photo: A. Ferber. opposite National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario. Photo: Ian G. Dagnall/Alamy.

3. From $6.3 million in 2015 to $23.7 million in 2020, as reported by canadacouncil.ca. Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache) explains in Knowing Native Arts (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) that the US equivalent to the Canada Council for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, does not designate funds for Native American artists.

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above Indigenous and Canadian Galleries installation view.

Foreground: Algonquin artist once known, Canoe, early 20th century, birchbark, white cedar, spruce root, spruce gum, collection of the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario. Background: paintings by the Group of Seven, National Gallery of Canada. All photos: A. Ferber opposite, top Indigenous and Canadian Galleries installation view. opposite, bottom Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Study Room at the National Gallery of Canada. Photo: A. Ferber.

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landscape artists, and introduced multilingual didactics with Native perspectives.

Even for those unable to read Inuktitut, Cree, Ojibway, or any of the other Indigenous languages, this presence signals the existence of worldviews and knowledge beyond the English lingua franca. Wall text relays, “Since the inception of this ongoing initiative, more than 160 labels in 28 Indigenous languages and dialects have been produced.”

I visited the NGC in July 2022 and found the diversity of works and juxtapositions to be lively and insightful. A Brief History of Northwest Coast Design (2007)

by Luke Parnell (Haida/Nisga'a) is eleven planks of wood adorned with a symmetrical black and red menagerie of animals in formline design. From left to right the planks read as a chronology of Indigenous histories: fresh and vibrant to distressed, then whitewashed (but still visible), to remedied, and finally restored. Its visualization of Indigenous resiliency and survivance is supported by the range of

works in the gallery, from a 2,500-year-old Thule comb to a recent abstract painting

by Mi’kmaq artist Jordan Bennett.

Another exceptional work nearby is Jessie Oonark’s (Inuk) panoramic drawing When the Days are Long and the Sun Shines into the Night (1966–69). This work provides a glimpse into a multitude of activities: games, sports, hunting, sledding, fishing, and socializing. A circle of suns in the center indicates the two-month phase of continuous daylight in Nunavut. Oonark’s meticulous renderings show the beauty and variety of Inuit fashion and the joie de vivre of a happy community.

Another galler y displays an Algonquin birchbark canoe for its aesthetic qualities in front of a wall with European-style paintings. The proximity underscores the beauty, ingenuity, and skill of artists working in different media during the same period. This curatorial approach is particularly successful in dialogues created between Inuit carvings in

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whalebone, steatite, and ivory displayed with large-scale Minimalist and abstract paintings. Also of note, this was the first time this author has seen birchbark bitings exhibited alongside paintings and sculptures in a major museum.

The Canadian Museum of History, just across the river from the NGC in Gatineau, has the largest collection of works by Norval Morrisseau (Bingwi Neyaashi Ojibwe, 1931–2007), with 130 original pieces; however, the NGC boasts several major paintings. Observations of the Astral World (ca. 1994) is a bifurcated composition showing the human world on the left and the spirit realm on the right. Figures on each side face each other, and a school of spirits in the form of fish traverses from one to the other, indicating fluidity and exchange between worlds.

Carl Beam’s Voyage (1988), a 1:5 scale model of Christopher Columbus’s Santa Maria, appears to have run aground in front of a dark wall drawing by American Minimalist Sol LeWitt. Sliced open to reveal details of its structure and painted white, the ship’s ghost-like appearance is further enhanced by constantly changing daylight due to its placement near a four-story bay window.

I also visited the print study room at the NGC, where I had the rare opportunity to view a stonecut matrix for Sky Stars (1960) by Egevadluq Ragee (Inuk, 1920–1983). These matrices are similar in depth to a woodcut and reveal the smooth yet granular surface of a metamorphic rock. Most stones carved for stonecut prints are resurfaced multiple times and canceled to prevent post-edition printing, but some have been archived for research purposes. The NGC has six, one of which is double-sided.

It is especially mesmerizing to view original drawings that served as the basis for prints. Kenojuak Ashevak’s (Inuk, 1927–2013) monochromatic graphite drawing for The Enchanted Owl (1960) was editioned at Kinngait and became a national icon after it was featured on a 1970 postage stamp. The orange and navy print is true to the sketch (though arguably the eyebrows are a bit more fierce). Ashevak drew her sketch for The Owl (1969) with markers: bright primary colors and reddish-brown, whereas the

editioned impression utilizes the white of the paper and is printed in earthy greens.

The NGC has made strides toward inclusive presentations of art and history over the past three decades by prioritizing acquisitions of Indigenous art, staging major group and solo exhibitions, reinstalling permanent collection galleries, integrating Native voices into gallery texts, and hiring more Indigenous staff.

This is still an early phase for major institutional change; however, as evinced by messy and controversial administrative debacles. In her short tenure as director of the NGC, Sasha Suda established a Department of Indigenous Ways and Decolonization with the appointments of Steven Loft (Mohawk)

and Michelle LaVallee (Nawash Ojibway).

Suda resigned just five months later, and this past fall interim director Angela Cassie fired four senior staff (including curator Greg A. Hill) due to apparently irreconcilable approaches to “decolonization.” Even among advocates, there is no consensus on the definition, feasibility, or suitability of this term or process. Still, the NGC remains an institution to watch for developments on this front, especially compared to mainstream peers in the United States lagging further behind. As expressed by Cowichan/Syilx painter Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: “America is a difficult place—I mean, they're still trying to figure out if they want to take down the Confederate flag.”4

4. Ammiel Alcalay, “Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun,” BOMB, July 15, 2016, web.

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MEMORIAL

TONY JOJOLA August 11, 1958–December 28, 2022

above Tony Jojola. Photo: Cathy Short (Citizen Potawatomi).

A

RT SEEMS TO HAVE a life of its own, long after its maker leaves this realm. Isleta Pueblo hot glass artist Tony Jojola passed away on December 28, 2022, and the breath of culture and history will live on in his work. One of the pioneers of Native glass, Jojola inspired a new generation of Native artists who work in the unpredictable molten medium today.

Influenced by a Pueblo potter grandmother and a grandfather who was a silversmith and woodworker, Tony Jojola was born at Isleta Pueblo, just south of Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1958. In the mid-1970s, at the height of the American glass movement, Jojola was sent to boarding school at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. There he first gained exposure to glass as an art form under the tutelage of the late Carl Ponca (Osage,1938–2013) and Larry Ahvakana (Iñupiaq).

After studying at Maine’s Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Jojola applied to the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington State, where he apprenticed with Dale Chihuly and later became his assistant. Jojola experimented with form and sought ways to incorporate his cultural influences into glass, a medium he called “clay you can’t touch.”1 At Pilchuck, Tony Jojola clicked immediately with the world-renowned artist, and the bond set the stage for him to work on the team that brought Chihuly’s famed Venetians

(1989) to life. Jojola later took up residence in Taos, New Mexico, when Chihuly and Karen Kaperick founded Taos Glass Arts and Education in 1999. There he served as director and taught at-risk youth of all backgrounds for the next 13 years. He also taught at Prairie Dog Glass in Santa Fe. He believed that the glass medium strongly appeals to students and builds excitement.

Once engaged in the process, they learn a skill and important life lessons such as the value of teamwork.

Another legacy that Tony Jojola leaves behind is his efforts to establish Taos as one of the top centers for hot glass in the country. Jojola touched the lives and careers of many other Native American artists, including Preston Singletary (Tlingit), who credits him with giving him the push to explore his own indigenousness in his work, as well as Ira Lujan (Taos/Ohkay Owingeh), Robert “Spooner” Marcus (Ohkay Owingeh), Dan Friday (Lummi), Jody Naranjo (Santa Clara Tewa), Rosemary Lonewolf (Santa Clara Tewa), and sculptor, jeweler, and glass artist Adrian Wall (Jemez). Wall and Jojola collaborated on a couple of recent projects and had plans for more.

“Tony’s influence is definitely profound,” Wall recently told FAAM. “Even before I became involved in glass, I studied his forms and his presentation.” As a sculptor, Wall was intrigued by how Jojola used his medium and how his cultural background emerged in his art. “I was excited to work with him,” Wall said.

“He pushed me to expand on all of my ideas and inspired me to look at glass in new ways.”

Color-rich vases and ollas, both bright and dark, comprise Tony Jojola’s body of work. They not only showcase the beauty of l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake), but Pueblo culture through his creative arsenal that includes symbols and designs found in Pueblo vessels as well as other artifacts. He may best be known for his signature bears. He routinely utilized his grandfather’s jewelry stamps in his work, thereby “putting a little bit of him on the pieces.”2 Jojola’s glass has been shown at the National Museum of the American Indian, Burke Museum, and Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian. His work also garnered him the spotlight in a one-man show at the Finnish Glass Museum in Riihimäki. His last exhibition, Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass, closed last June at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe. The scale of the show, also filled with the work of his collaborators, made it the largest Indigenous blown-glass exhibition ever mounted.

Native American art forms always find new ways to exert themselves, and Jojola embraced glass techniques as a natural step in the evolution of Native art. He understood that Native culture infused into blown glass leaves infinite creative possibilities for the artist.

—Paul Niemi

1. Stephen Kinzer, “Arts in America; An Indian Craftsman Sees Glass Full of Possibilities,” The New York Times, July 3, 2001, web.

2. “Clearly Indigenous featuring Larry ‘Ulaaq’ Ahvakana (Iñupiaq) and Tony Jojola (Isleta Pueblo),” Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, February 8, 2022, YouTube video, 53:28, web.

92 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

MEMORIAL

RACHEL SAHMIE March 21, 1956–November 23, 2022

M

A STER HOPI-TEWA potter Rachel Sahmie passed away at the age of 66 at Polacca village at Hopi.

She died after a long battle with cancer and was interred by her family at the Tewa cemetery below First Mesa. A direct descendant of Nampeyo (Hopi-Tewa, ca.

1860–1942) through her daughter Annie Healing (Hopi-Tewa, 1884–1968), Rachel Sahmie learned Hopi ceramic skills from her mother, Priscilla Namingha (HopiTewa, 1924–2008). Under Priscilla’s guidance, Rachel and her sisters Nyla, Jean, and Bonnie all became accomplished traditional potters.

While in high school, Rachel began showing her work at fairs and shows. She even continued potting while serving with the US Army in Germany by mailing completed pieces back to her mother for firing. After retiring from the army, she returned permanently to Hopi, where she concentrated on her ceramic career. Her trip to research Hopi pottery in Thomas Keam’s collection at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, resulted in my book, In Search of Nampeyo, which presented our discovery of Nampeyo’s early unrecognized work.

Rachel often expressed gratitude for being able to make pottery. “We are certainly blessed, the Native traditional potters,” she once said. “I can hardly wait to do this each day.”

Rachel’s interest in Nampeyo’s work intensified her commitment to pottery and increased her production. She mastered all elements of Hopi pottery, from digging the clay to outdoor firing.

Inspired by many of Nampeyo’s designs from museums and old collections, she refused to even use a pencil to paint her own versions and interpretations. She was a consummate artist. Her pottery won major awards and was collected by many museums and institutions, in addition to the many collectors who enjoy her work.

Rachel always saw pottery as connecting her to her ancestors, and she

above Rachel Sahmie with one of her bowls. Image courtesy of Steve Elmore Indian Art, Santa Fe.

strived to carry on their legacy. “I remember touching it with my mother,” she once said of pottery, “and so now when I touch it, it brings back memories of my mother—I guess all my relatives.

To know that they were all potters and they all worked with this material, that it’s … part of earth and part of where we came from.”

She was cherished for her good humor, insight, and dedication to work and family. Rachel was a great soul who will be greatly missed by many. She is survived by her daughter, Carla Talashie; her partner, Claude Pahona; sisters Nyla, Jean, and Bonnie; brother Andrew; grandchildren; and many nieces and nephews.

—Steve Elmore NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 93

CALENDAR April 1 – May 6: Vancouver, BC Land, Ice, Cosmos at the Marion Scott Gallery, 2423 Granville Street +1 (604) 685-1934 | marionscottgallery.com April 1–June 28: Fullerton, CA Native Motion at the Salz-Pollak Atrium Gallery, Pollak Library North, CSUF, 800 State College Boulevard | library.fullerton.edu April 1–October 29: Reno, NV The Art of Ben Aleck at the Nevada Museum of Art, 160 West Liberty Street | (775) 329-3333 | nevadaart.org April 1, 2023–January 7, 2024: Winnipeg, MB Inuit Sanaugangit: Art Across Time at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, 300 Memorial Boulevard | +1 (204) 786-6641 | wag.ca April 1, 2023–March 31, 2024: Indianapolis, IN Native Art History is Made Here at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 500 W. Washington Street (317) 636-9378 | eiteljorg.org April 5–May 13: Eugene, OR Rick Bartow (1946–2016): MYTH/REALITY at Karin Clarke Gallery, 760 Willamette Street | karinclarkegallery.com April 6–May 27: Warm Springs, OR An Eye for the Rez: Edward Heath Photography at the Museum at Warm Springs, 2189 US 26 | museum.warmsprings-nsn.gov

NATIVE AMERICAN ART APPRAISALS, INC. SINCE 1936

April 7–TBA: Phoenix, AZ Brenda Mallory: The North Star Changes at the Heard Museum, 2301 N. Central Avenue | (602) 252-8840 | heard.org April 10, 2023–January 14, 2024: Minneapolis, MN Piitwewetam: Making is Medicine at All My Relations Gallery, 1414 E. Franklin Avenue | (612) 235-4970 | allmyrelationsarts.com April 14–May 27: Winnipeg, MB Richard Asham: Sirens, Sharks & Shipwrecks at the Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art Gallery, 203–290 McDermont Avenue +1 (204) 942-2674 | urbanshaman.org April 18–August 12: Missoula, MT Terran Last Gun: Future Cosmic Energy at Missoula Art Museum, 335 N. Pattee Street | (406) 728-0447 | missoulaartmuseum.org April 19–August 13: New York, NY Jaune Quick-To-See Smith: Memory Map at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street | (212) 570-3600 | whitney.org April 22: Sulphur, OK Artesian Arts Festival in Artesian Plaza, West Muskogee Avenue, hosted by the Chickasaw Nation | artesianartsfestival.com

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CALL EMAIL

94 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

April 22 & 23: Tulsa, OK 2nd annual Mvskoke Art Market at River Spirit Casino Resort, 8320 Riverside Parkway. Hosted by the Muscogee Nation (918) 549-2434 | muscogeenation.com/mvskokeartmarket April 22–July 29: Victoria, BC Hair Prints: Tanya Lukin Linklater at Open Space, 510 Fort Street, 2nd Floor | +1 (250) 383-8833 | openspacearts.ca

April 29: Santa Fe, NM FAAM No. 38 Launch Party and Tenth Anniversary Celebration at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, library, 704 Camino Lejo, 1:00–3:00 pm | firstamericanartmagazine.com April 29: Albuquerque, NM Spring Arts Market at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, 2401 12th Street NW | (505) 843-7270 | indianpueblo.org April 29–August 27: Winnipeg, MB The Art of Faye HeavyShield at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, 300 Memorial Boulevard | +1 (204) 786-6641 | wag.ca May 5: Tulsa, OK FAAM No. 38 Launch Party and Tenth Anniversary Celebration at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship Studios | firstamericanartmagazine.com May 5–7: Madison, WI Native Art Market at the Arts + Literature Laboratory, 111 S. Livingston Street, Suite 100 | (608) 556-7415 | artlitlab.org May 6: Gallup, NM Spring Friends of Hubbell Auction at the Gallup Community Service Center, 410 Bataan Veterans Street | friendsofhubbell.org May 6 & 7: Bernalillo, NM Bernalillo Indian Arts Festival at Loretto Park, 237 S. Camino del Pueblo | (505) 867-9667 | bernalilloindianfestival.com May 7–June 11: Norman, OK A Gathering of Sisters at Tribes Gallery, 512 W. Main Street. Native American women artists | (405) 329-4442 | tribes131.com May 11–May 27: online via Toronto, ON Rarities via Feheley Fine Arts, 65 George Street, Inuit prints +1 (416) 323-1373 | feheleyfinearts.com May 18–October 23: Oklahoma City, OK Patterns of Knowing at Oklahoma Contemporary, 11 NW 11th Street (405) 951-0000 | oklahomacontemporary.org

Warrior Maiden

by Ray Tsalate Zuni Pueblo

May 19–21: Ivins, UT Festival of the Americas at Center for the Arts at Kayenta, 861 Coyote Gulch Court. 40 artists | (435) 674-2787 | kayentaarts.com May 20– September 24: Toronto, ON ᑐᓴᕐᓂᑐᑦ TUSARNITUT! Music Born of the Cold at the Royal Ontario Museum, 100 Queens Park | +1 (416) 586-8000 | rom.on.ca May 21, 2023–April 7, 2024: Santa Fe, NM To Keep Them Warm: The Alaska Native Parka at the Museum of International Folk Art, 706 Camino Lejo | miaclab.org May 25–June 2: Washington, DC Robert Houle: Red is Beautiful at the National Museum of the American Indian, 4th Street & Independence Avenue SW (202) 633-1000 | americanindian.si.edu/explore/exhibitions May 26, 2023–March 31, 2024: Washington, DC Sharing Honors and Burdens: Renwick Invitational 2023 at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1661 Pennsylvania Avenue NW | americanart.si.edu/exhibitions May 27 & 28: Santa Fe, NM Native Treasures Art Market, hosted by the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center, 201 W. Marcy Street | museumfoundation.org/native-treasures

Since 1981 Fetishes Jewelry Pottery 227 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe 505.989.8728 keshi.com NO. 38, SPRING 2023 | 95

May 27, 2023–January 1, 2024: New York, NY Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch at the National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center, One Bowling Green (212) 514-3700 | americanindian.si.edu/explore/exhibitions June 1–3: Oklahoma City, OK 37th annual Red Earth Festival at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, 1700 NE 63rd Street | redearth.org June 3 & 4: Morrison, CO 22nd annual Tesoro Indian Market at the Tesoro Cultural Center, The Fort, 19192 CO-8 | (303) 839-1671 | tesoroculturalcenter.org June 3 & 4: Collinsville, IL Cahokia Mounds Indian Market Days at Gateway Center, 1 Gateway Drive | (618) 346-5160 | cahokiamounds.org June 4–August 13: Pine Ridge, SD 55th annual Red Cloud Indian Art Show at the Heritage Center at Red Cloud Indian School, 100 Mission Drive | redcloudart.show June 10 & 11: Los Angeles, CA 32nd annual Autry American Indian Arts Marketplace, hosted by the Autry National Center, at the Autry in Griffith Park, 4730 Crystal Springs Drive, with 200 artists | (323) 667-2000 | theautry.org June 10–September 17: Brookings, SD Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe at the South Dakota Art Museum, South Dakota State University, 1036 Medary Avenue (605) 688-5423 | southdakotaartmuseum.com June 10–November 12: Huntington, NY Courtney M. Leonard: Logbook 2004–2023 at the Heckscher Museum, 2 Prime Avenue | (631) 380-3230 | heckscher.org

Native American jewelry and arts marketplace 2 Christensen Lane Kennebunk, Maine 207 423-8473

shop online: www.homeandaway.gallery

June 12 & 13: Denver, CO Ucross Symposium: Curating Native American Art at the Denver Art Museum, 100 W. 14th Avenue Parkway | denverartmuseum.org June 12–June 30: Idyllwild, CA Native American Arts Center Workshops and Festival Week at the Idyllwild Arts Foundation, 52500 Temecula Road #38 (951) 659-2171 | idyllwildarts.org/nativeamericanarts June 16–18: Crazy Horse, SD Gift from Mother Earth Art Show, art market, at the Crazy Horse Memorial, 12151 Avenue of the Chiefs | crazyhorsememorial.org June 23 & 24: Indianapolis, IN 31st annual Eiteljorg Indian Market & Festival at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 500 W. Washington Street | (317) 636-9378 | eiteljorg.org/indian-market-and-festival June 24–September 3: St. Louis, MO Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1940s–1970s at the Saint Louis Art Museum, 1 Fine Arts Drive | slam.org/exhibitions June 24–October 22: Shelburne, VT Built from the Earth: Pottery from the Anthony and Teressa Perry Collection at the Shelburne Museum, 6000 Shelburne Road (802) 985-3346 | shelburnemuseum.com

Black ash and sweetgrass point basket Sarah Sockbeson, Penobscot Jewelry | Baskets | Prints |Beadwork |Sculpture 96 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

June 24–November 26: Annandale-on-Hudson, NY Indian Theater at the Center for Indigenous Studies, Bard College, 30 Campus Road | (845) 758-7556 | americanstudies.bard.edu For more events, visit our online calendar at

FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM/ CALENDAR

RECLAIMING HOME CONTEMPORARY SEMINOLE ART

ON VIEW

MAR 18 – SEP 4

ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION: NOAH BILLIE // WILSON BOWERS // HOUSTON R. CYPRESS ELISA HARKINS // ALYSSA OSCEOLA // JESSICA OSCEOLA C. MAXX STEVENS // TONY TIGER // HULLEAH J. TSINHNAHJINNIE BRIAN ZEPEDA // CORINNE ZEPEDA // PEDRO ZEPEDA

INFORMATION + TICKETS

ringling.org

Paid for in part by Sarasota County Tourist Development Tax Revenues. This exhibition is supported, in part, by the Gulf Coast Community Foundation; The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Endowment; the Mandell and Madeleine Berman Foundation Endowment; and the Bob and Diane Roskamp Endowment. Sponsored, in part, by the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Arts and Culture; the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; and the National Endowment for the Arts. Special thanks to The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for supporting the Curatorial Research Fellowship.

Tony Tiger (Sac and Fox/Seminole/Muscogee [Creek], b. 1964), Mvskoke Boys (detail), 2020. Etching, ink, serigraph hand-painted acrylic on paper, 12 × 14 in.

Private collection. Courtesy of the artist.

– COMING 2023 –

PALM SPRINGS, CALIFORNIA

– Featuring – AGUA CALIENTE CULTURAL MUSEUM THE SPA AT SÉC-HE • OASIS TRAIL & GATHERING PLAZA visionaguacaliente.com