First American Art Magazine No. 40, Fall 2023

TEN YEARS of CELEBRATING ART by INDIGENOUS PEOPLES of the AMERICAS

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

NO. 40, FALL 2023

DISPLAY UNTIL JAN. 9, 2024

CHILKAT WEAVING

JULIE BUFFALOHEAD

CENTER FOR NATIVE FUTURES

BONNIE DEVINE

SOUTHWOLD EARTHWORKS

DAN FRIDAY

DIQUÍS STONE SPHERES

PORFIRIO GUTIÉRREZ

ON DIS PL AY T IL L JANUARY 2024

ON DISPLAY TILL OCTOBER 2023

Always in Relation: artworks from the Schultz collection

Tue—Sat, 10 am—5 pm • wheelwright.org California Stars: Huivaniūs Pütsiv installation showing works Jacob Meders, Jamie Okuma, Rick Bartow, Fritz Scholder, Frank Day; loaned by Jacob Meders, Tia Collection, IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art. Photo courtesy of the Tia Collection; Photography by Addison Doty.

UPCOMING EXHIBITION IN NOVEMBER 2023

Master Glass: the collaborative spirit of Tony Jojola

Wheelwright Museum

OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN 704 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe NM 87505

July 16, 2023 – June 2, 2024

Artist once known (Diné), women’s shoulder blanket, ca 1860–1890, handspun wool, vegetal dye, indigo dye, aniline dye, sinew, plant matter. Gift of Mrs. Philip B. Stewart, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology 9100/12. Rapheal Begay, Spider Rock (Tseyi—Canyon de Chelly, Chinle, AZ) (detail), 2021, digital photograph.

Horizons is made possible through support from France A. Córdova and Christian J. Foster; the Terra Foundation for American Art; Tom and Mary James; Shiprock Santa Fe; the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs; and the Museum of New Mexico Foundation.

through April 7, 2024

on MuseuM hill in santa Fe, new Mexico internationalFolkart.org · (505) 476-1200 photo: St. Lawrence Island Yupik ancestor artist, Sanightaaq (ceremonial seal gut parka) (detail), early 20th century, Museum of International Folk Art, gift of Lloyd E. Cotsen, Neutrogena Corp., A.1995.93.986.

Photo by Addison Doty. Ghhúunayúkata is made possible through funding from the Terra Foundation for American Art. It is also supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the International Folk Art Foundation, The CIRI Foundation, and the Museum of New Mexico Foundation’s Exhibition Development Fund.

MoIFA-ANP+MIAC-HZ_FAAMsummer2023.indd 1

5/23/23 11:56 AM

“Before here was here, Raven was only named Yéil.

He was a white bird and the world was in darkness…”

ONLY AT

ORGANIZED BY THE ARTIST AND

LEARN MORE

PRESENTED BY

Preston Singletary (American Tlingit, born 1963). Dleit Yéil (White Raven), 2018. Blown, hot-sculpted, and sand-carved glass; steel stand; 19 1/4 x 9 x 14 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Photo by Russell Johnson.

S PECIALIZING IN T HE SALE OF ESTATE & PRIVATE COLLECTIONS

Double-sided Dagger depicting the Chinook Creation Story

by Greg A. Robinson, Chinook Nation

Contact director@quintanagalleries.com

Q UINTANA G ALLERIES

for consignment and purchase inquiries.

quintanagalleries.com 503-810-7525

issue no. 40, fall 2023

DEPARTMENTS Recent Developments

By Staci Golar and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

FEATURES 9

At Kasné Aa: A Brief History 21 of Chilkat Weaving among the Tlingit Among the world's most complex forms of weaving, Chilkat textiles enliven Tlingit ceremonial life today

By Zachary R. Jones, PhD

Seven Directions 15

By Traci L. Morris, PhD (Chickasaw) Spotlight: Charlene Holy Bear (Standing Rock Sioux), Jingle Dress Dancer

By Michelle J. Lanteri, PhD

72

Art+Lit Jim Terry: Ho-Chunk Graphic Novelist

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

90

Calendar

94

48

REVIEWS Exhibition Reviews

74

Report

83

Book Reviews

85

54

Unsettling the Southwold 28 Earthworks For decades, could archaeologists have gotten the purpose of the site wrong?

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD Native Artists Lead the Way at the Center for Native Futures An Indigenous artist–led collective shares an exciting new vision for downtown Chicago

By Sheila Regan

34

The Diquís Spheres of Costa Rica: A Recently Recognized National Symbol Ancient spherical stone sculptures hold layered meanings in their homelands and abroad

By Maria Fernanda Calderon

40

ARTIST PROFILES

60

cover Sydney Akagi (Tlingit), Dancing of the Robes, 2023, photograph, dimensions variable. @sydneyakagiphotography. Young Tlingit boy participates in the Dancing of the Robes at the Sealaska Heritage Institute, organized by Lily Hope (Tlingit), featuring 30 newly woven Chilkat robes, Juneau, Alaska. Image courtesy of the artist.

66

Julie Buffalohead: Ponca Draftsperson, Painter, and Printmaker

By Sheila Regan

48

Bonnie Devine: Serpent River Ojibwa Installation Artist, Painter, and Sculptor

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

54

Dan Friday: Lummi Glass Artist

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

60

Porfirio Gutiérrez: Zapotec Textile Artist

By Staci Golar

66

NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 5

issue no. 40, fall 2023 ISSN 2333-5548 (Print) • ISSN 2333-5556 (Digital)

EXPERIENCE the

DISCOVER ENGAGE CONNECT

Publishing Editor: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Literary Editor: Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD (Euro-Canadian) Contributing Editor: Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke) Advertising Representative: Barbara Harjo Circulation Manager: Nicole Emmons (Citizen Potawatomi) Copy Editor: Rosa Cays (Chicana) Proofreaders: Travis D. Day, Staci Golar, 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

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

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EDITOR’S GREETING

below America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Rabbit Gets Long Ears, 2010, pen and ink on Bristol board, 14 × 11 in., private collection.

O

UR BRAINS, we are told, are hardwired for story, but what does this mean? We may want to make rational decisions based on observed information, but our brain craves more. Logic is “data-driven decision-making, evidence-based reasoning, and critical thinking,” but “in life, there is never enough data, the rules are always evolving, and logic can never completely impose its will.”1 To fill these gaps, our brains create narratives by imagining cause-and-effect relationships, assigning motives, and focusing in on some data while ignoring others. We can readily remember these streamlined scenarios charged with emotion and generate meaning.

“Stories are a mechanism that humans evolved to help us package information about who we are, how we survive, what we care about, and then spread those ideas through time and space,” says biologist Liz Neeley.2 Part of our pleasure in storytelling is speculating what will happen next. This helps us predict possible scenarios. Brain activity of storytellers and listeners can sync up what is called speaker-listener neural coupling, which can increase our capacity for empathy.

Narrative art is simply art that tells stories. Even the most seemingly nonobjective abstract Indigenous art is often metaphorical. Even the most stripped down, most minimal Indigenous art form I know of, the Diquís spheres of Costa Rica, is still symbolic. These stone sculptures are not Platonic ideal forms of pure geometry, but public works that speak to the status of communities and their leaders and may allude to cosmological bodies.

Likewise the Southwold Earthworks in Ontario are not just utilitarian embankments. Filtered through the Eurocentric lenses of their stories, archaeologists interpreted them as defensive structures.

Only when they were reinterpreted through Oneida oral histories could a more accurate meaning be understood.

Chilkat blankets feature clan and related iconography drawn from deeply

entrenched cultural stories. Brought back from the precipice of extinction, this weaving style not only relays stories through its visuals but also with sound and motion.

In Chicago, Native stories have too often been distorted through a Eurocentric lens of mainstream art institutions. Now Native artists have banded together to open the Center for Native Futures in that city to be able to tell their own stories on their own terms.

All of these stories that we create are working models of complex realities. What models are too simple? Which models serve us best? What stories need updating and changing? Which obscure realities on the ground or are outdated and should be abandoned? We need better stories that are close to the sources—sometimes competing and conflicting—to create narratives that better serve us.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

1. Angus Fletcher and Tom Gaines, "The Limits of Logic: Why Narrative Thinking Is Better Suited to the Demands of Modern Combat," Modern War Institute at West Point, October 19, 2021, web.

2. “Your Brain on Storytelling,” NPR: Short Wave, January 14, 2020, podcast, audio, 14.26, web.

NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 7

GREAT BASIN NATIVE ARTISTS GALLERY

CREATING STORIES: Artwork of the Stewart Alumni The Stewart Indian School Cultural Center & Museum serves as a living legacy to educate visitors about the Native children who were removed from their homelands and brought to the federal boarding school. Learn about their stories in a new exhibition featuring paintings, drawings, baskets, and other artwork created by former students.

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023 – FEBRUARY 2, 2024 10am–5pm | Monday–Friday Closed Weekends, State and Federal Holidays 1 Jacobsen Way, Carson City, Nevada

(775) 687-7608 StewartIndianSchool.com

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS MUSEUMS The AGUA CALIENTE CULTURAL PLAZA AND MUSEUM opens on November 3, 2023, in downtown Palm Springs, California. The 48,000-squarefoot space will feature a gallery, educational classroom, teaching garden, event space, and more.

The HERITAGE CENTER AT RED CLOUD INDIAN SCHOOL in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, hired Tawa Ducheneaux (Cherokee Nation). Previously she directed Oglala Lakota College’s Woksape Tipi Library and Archives. The center will become an independent museum, MAȞPÍYA LÚTA.

ART SHOWS The Washington State Historical Society, based in Tacoma, hosted its 18th Annual IN THE SPIRIT CONTEMPORARY NATIVE ARTS exhibition. Carly Feddersen (Colville Okanagan/Sinixt)

won best of show, Timothy O’Connell III (Jamestown S’Klallam) won the Spirit of the Northwest award, and Denise Emerson (Skokomish/Navajo) won the Honoring the Ancestors award. Alison Bremner (Tlingit) received both the Honoring Innovation and the Purchase Prize awards.

Carolyn Pallett (Cherokee Nation) won the grand prize at the 28th annual CHEROKEE HOMECOMING ART SHOW, hosted by the Cherokee Nation, in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Categories winners were Richard Fields, traditional arts; Richard Graham, traditional pottery; Troy Jackson, contemporary pottery; Ronda Moss, traditional basketry; Hattie Lee Mendoza, contemporary basketry; Garry Martin, visual arts; Charlie Nichols, sculpture; Cathy Abercrombie, textiles; Tiffany Reiter, jewelry; Carolyn Pallett, beadwork.

Special award winners were Makiya Deerinwater, Bill Rabbit Legacy Award; Cathy Abercrombie, Betty Scraper-Gardner

Elder Award; and Adrienne Keene, Emerging Artist Award. All winners are citizens of the Cherokee Nation.

The Jacobson House Native Art Center in Norman, Oklahoma, hosted TWENTYFIRST CENTURY, a competitive juried art show. Jeff Yellowhair (Kiowa) won best of show. Jesse Howell (Pawnee) won first place, Janae Grass (Sac & Fox) won second place, and August Walker (Sac & Fox) won third place.

ART FAIRS Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish), director and chief curator of the Forge Project, curated the Focus section of the 2023 ARMORY SHOW held this September in New York. Focus included 17 Indigenous artists of the Americas: Seba Calfuqueo (Mapuche), Brus Rubio Churay (Murui/Bora), Renée Condo (Mi'gmaw descent), Sara Flores (Shipibo-Conibo), Beau Dick (Kwakwaka'wakw, 1955–2017), Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂ ), Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee), Patrick

NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 9

Dean Hubbell (Navajo), G. Peter Jemison (Seneca), Matthew Kirk (Navajo), James Lavadour (Walla Walla), Eric-Paul Riege (Navajo), Abel Rodríguez (Nonuya), Couzyn van Heuvelen (Inuk), Marie Watt (Seneca), Nico Williams (Aamjiwnaang Ojibwe), and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (Cowichan/Syilx).

Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee) has been selected to represent the United States at the 60th VENICE BIENNALE in 2024. Gibson will be the first Indigenous artist to represent the US in a solo exhibition and will activate the interior and exterior of the US Pavilion with sculpture, paintings, multimedia works, and a site-specific installation that invite reflection on individual and collective identities. Kathleen Ash-Milby (Navajo) of the Portland Art Museum is the first Native American curator of the US Pavilion.

ART MARKETS Raymond M. Chee Sr. (Navajo/Hopi) won best of show at the 102nd GALLUP INTERTRIBAL CEREMONIAL in New Mexico. Classification winners were Charlene Laughing (Navajo), weaving; Raymond M. Chee Sr., kachinas and carved wooden figures; Harrison Jim Sr. (Navajo), metalsmithing; Smokey Gchachu (Zuni), lapidary arts; Fannie King (Navajo), baskets; Barbara J. Morgan (Navajo), tribal arts; Mosgaadace Casuse (Navajo/Ojibwe), youth; Frankie J. Gilmore (Navajo), paintings; Ronald Goodluck (Navajo), sculptures; and Les Namingha (Hopi-Tewa/Zuni), pottery.

Jennifer Tafoya (Santa Clara Pueblo) received best of show at the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts’ 2023 SANTA FE INDIAN MARKET in August. Classification winners were Lyndon Tsosie (Navajo), jewelry; Jennifer Tafoya, pottery; Daniel HorseChief (Cherokee Nation/Pawnee), two-dimensional art; Arthur Holmes Jr. (Hopi), wooden Pueblo figurative carvings and sculpture; Ryan Benally (Navajo), sculpture; TahNibaa Naataanii (Navajo), textiles; Victoria Adams (Southern Cheyenne), diverse arts; Jackie Larson Bread (Blackfeet), beadwork/ quillwork; Aydrian James Day (Ho-Chunk/Lakota/Anishinaabe), youth; Carol Emarthle-Douglas (Northern Arapaho/ Seminole), basketry.

ORGANIZATIONS The GATHERING PLACE, a public park in Tulsa, Oklahoma, hired Laura Marshall Clark (Muscogee) as its curator of public art. She received her master’s degree from the University of Oklahoma and bachelor’s degree from East Central University.

AWARDS & HONORS The JOAN MITCHELL FOUNDATION awarded Mikayla Patton (Oglala Lakota) and Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂ ) two of its 15 JOAN MITCHELL FELLOWSHIPS for 2023.

Each recipient will receive $60,000 in unrestricted funds alongside professional development opportunities and convenings that will facilitate community building and peer learning.

10 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship 2023 / Nov. 11, 2023–Feb. 25, 2024 / Community Celebration / Friday, Nov. 10

Celebrating, supporting and amplifying the voices of groundbreaking Native contemporary artists.

Introducing The 2023 Eiteljorg Fellows

INVITED ARTIST

Ruth Cuthand

Sean Chandler

Raven Halfmoon

Natalie Ball

Mercedes Dorame

(Plains Cree) Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada

(Aaniiih [Gros Ventre]) Harlem, Montana

(Caddo Nation / Choctaw / Delaware) Norman, Oklahoma

(Klamath Tribes [Klamath/Modoc]) Chiloquin, Oregon

(Gabrielino Tongva) Burbank, California

ContemporaryArtFellowship.Eiteljorg.org

PRESENTED BY:

SPONSORED BY:

Ruth Cuthand (Plains Cree/Scottish/Irish, b. 1954), Anxiety, 2022, glass beads, thread, backing Museum Purchase from the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship

David Jacobs Ann W. King Fund, a fund of the Indianapolis Foundation; THE ARTHER JORDAN FOUNDATION; Anonymous

Downtown Indianapolis

FIRST PEOPLES FUND, based in Rapid City, South Dakota, announced its 2023 NATIVE ARTS ECOLOGY BUILDING GRANT awardees: the MniSota Fund, Red Eagle Soaring, Native Voices, Lightning Boy Foundation, and Warm Springs Community Action Team.

The NATIVE ARTS AND CULTURES FOUNDATION announced its 2023 LIFT EARLY CAREER SUPPORT FOR NATIVE ARTISTS AWARD winners. The award includes $10,000 and yearlong professional development. The Indigenous artists of the Americas who won are Jared Andreas (Agua Caliente Cahuilla), Kyle Kootswatewa (Hopi), Ayuthea LaPier (Hanis Coos/ Blackfeet/Tlingit), Agalisiga “Chuj” Mackey (Cherokee Nation/ Natchez), Alica Sheyahshe Mteuzi (Caddo/Cheyenne/Arapaho), Golga Oscar (Yup'ik), Mikaela Shafer (Hopi), Tomantha Sylvester (Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa), Zoë Urness (Tlingit), Alana Tiikpuu (Nez Perce/Navajo), and Ashley Young (Tlingit).

Maggie Thompson (Fond du Lac Ojibwe) won the 2023 JIM DENOMIE MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP. The Denomie/ Wilson family, All My Relations Arts, and Bockley Gallery created this award of $10,000 to honor the legacy of artist Jim Denomie (Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe, 1955–2022).

The ONTARIO ARTS COUNCIL bestowed its 2023 INDIGENOUS ARTS AWARD upon Penny Couchie (Nipissing Ojibway/Mohawk). Couchie, a dancer, actor, and choreographer, received Can$10,000, a certificate, and an Indigenous-designed blanket in an award ceremony at the Big Medicine Studio on Nipissing First Nation, Ontario.

Jennifer Tafoya (Santa Clara Pueblo), Caught by Surprise, 2023, clay, pigment.

Photo: Tira Howard. Image courtesy of the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts.

NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 11

THE CHAHTA PEOPLE EXTEND AN INVITATION TO VISIT THE CHOCTAW CULTURAL CENTER.

PLAN YOUR VISIT TODAY!

SCAN FOR MORE INFORMATION

The WYOMING ARTS COUNCIL awarded its NATIVE ART FELLOWSHIPS to Rose Pecos-SunRhodes (Jemez Pueblo) and Taylar Stagner (Wind River Arapaho/Shoshone). The Native Art Fellowship is a $5,000 award honoring work by Native artists in Wyoming.

REPATRIATION Germany returned two mid-15th-century wooden sun masks to Colombia.

Made by the Kogi people, the masks had been in the Ethnological Museum’s collection for more than a century.

Australia returned two objects to Mexico that border officials confiscated after they questioned their origin. One, a copper bowl, is attributed to a Mixtec artist who lived some 800 years ago.

Museums Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, returned several pieces of Mi’kmaw regalia to Nova Scotia to be cared for by the Millbrook Cultural and Heritage Center.

12 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

PRECONTACT ART Three pendants made from now-extinct giant sloth bones, from the SANTA ELINA ROCK SHELTER in Brazil, were recently dated as being 25,000 to 27,000 years old. This research confirms that humans lived in South America at the same time as the giant sloths.

UNESCO added the HOPEWELL CEREMONIAL EARTHWORKS to its World Heritage List. The sites listed include five locations in Ohio that feature land art constructed by Hopewellian cultures between 100 BCE and 400 CE. Several 3,000-year-old grass weavings, likely from a floor mat, were discovered at an ancestral Alutiiq site during excavations of a sod house on the shore of KARLUK LAKE on Kodiak Island, Alaska. These are the earliest known examples of Kodiak Alutiiq weaving.

CRIME & LEGAL ISSUES Cristobal Magno Rodrigo of Washington

was sentenced to two years in prison for selling more than $1 million worth of fakes as Alaska Native art. The forgeries, made in the Philippines, violate the Indian Arts and Crafts Act. Rodrigo is also required to donate $60,000 to the Tlingit and Haida Central Council Vocational Program, write a public apology, and serve three years of supervised release.

Native Northwest, a Vancouver-based Indigenous art wholesaler, filed a lawsuit against Sasquatch Gifts and Souvenirs and owners Bruce and Fiona Fearon of Harrison Hot Springs, British Colombia, for allegedly copying and selling t-shirts with a design similar to work by Francis Horne Sr. (Tsawout/Lummi).

ERRATA In her review of California Stars: Huivaniūs Pütsiv in FAAM No. 39, Summer 2023, America Meredith mistakenly wrote that California had the largest number of tribes. Alaska has the most tribes of any US state. California is second.

TRIBES GALLERY ART & APPRAISALS Established in 1990.

Distinguished for our expertise in American Indian art

2024 Holiday Market features a large variety of art including paintings, handcrafted jewelry, quilts,bronzes, beadwork, pottery, baskets & gift items.

Join us Nov. 18-19, 2023 for the 29th Annual Native American Art Calendar Signing & Holiday Market.

Preview the invitation & artist list for this event.

512 W. Main St. | Norman, OK 73069 | 405.329.4442 tribes131.com | tribesgallery405@gmail.com

66TH ANNUAL HEARD MUSEUM GUILD

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MARCH 14 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

2-3

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

Seven Directions

TRACI L. MORRIS, PHD A Chickasaw director, researcher, and policymaker shares her top seven list

O

RIGINALLY HAILING FROM COLORADO, I earned a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies from Colorado State University. Then I moved to Arizona for graduate work in American Indian studies at the University of Arizona. I am a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, which is headquartered in Oklahoma. Since 2014 I have been the executive director of the American Indian Policy Institute (AIPI) at Arizona State University. The AIPI provides policy analysis, tribally driven research, and capacity building.

A national expert in tribal broadband access, I testified at the Federal Communications Commission and Capitol Hill. Additionally I am an advocate for tribal digital equity, broadband policies, and digital sovereignty. I lead the only Indigenous academic team in the United States working on Indigenous Digital Inclusion and Equity and am working on a book on Indigenous Digital Sovereignty.

—Traci L. Morris, PhD (Chickasaw)

CENTER. I love MUSIC. Before college I worked for seven years as a hairdresser as this job allowed me to be a part of a growing punk music scene in Boulder and Denver, Colorado. Later, in graduate school, I began playing in a band. I was the bass player and cowrote the music in a Tucson band called Rodeo Queen. We played live for three years in Tucson and broke up after recording one album.

Music is still a huge part of my life. I have seen hundreds of bands, big and small: the Clash, U2, X, Depeche Mode, the Cure, LCD Soundsystem, and more. This year I’ve already seen eleven bands and have tickets for five more shows. I love to support bands and always buy their vinyl records. My collection now has more than 350 albums. above Traci L. Morris. All images courtesy of the author. right Rodeo Queen band logo.

NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 15

Michener Art Museum 138 S. Pine Street, Doylestown, PA MichenerArtMuseum.org

never broken Artist Unknown (Delaware), Bandolier Bag, 1850s. Cotton, wool, silk, and glass beads, 28 ¼ x 21 ¼ x 2 ¼ inches.Brooklyn Museum, Frank L. Babbott Fund, 2021.41. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Visualizing Lenape Histories September 9, 2023 — January 14, 2024

Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories is one in a series of American art exhibitions created through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of the Art Bridges Cohort Program.

This exhibition was supported by a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.

Additional support was provided by Eiseman Construction, Inc and Michener Art Museum’s Corporate Business Partners.

above Inaugural cohort of the Indigenous Leadership Academy, Phoenix, Arizona. opposite Matthew Rantanen (Cree descent) and Chris Mitchell facilitated the August 2023 Tribal Broadband Bootcamp in Akwesasne Mohawk territory in New York. Photo: Sarah Wilkinson.

16 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

NORTH. What guides my work, and always has, is service to Indian Country.

The mission of service guides me always.

Toward this end, I founded the Indigenous Leadership Academy (ILA) at AIPI. The ILA is a ten-week, Indigenous-led program for emerging leaders in Indian Country. The Indigenously developed curriculum focuses on a more holistic approach to leadership as exemplified

by the many guest speakers such as John Echohawk (Pawnee) of the Native American Rights Fund; Shelly Lowe (Navajo) of the National Endowment for the Humanities; Monica Nuvamsa (Hopi) of the Hopi Foundation; Sarah EchoHawk (Pawnee) of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society; Stacy Leeds (Cherokee Nation) of Arizona State University’s School of Law; Chris James of the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development, and more. To date, 66 participants have completed this training who represent 37 tribal nations from 16 states. We have an 86-percent completion rate. This program is one of the highlights of my work. aipi.asu.edu/content/ indigenous-leadership-academy SOUTH. I am inspired by my neighbors (who happen to be southeast of me), the GILA RIVER INDIAN COMMUNITY. Under Governor Stephen Roe Lewis (Piipaash), they have grown one of the longest-established tribal telecommunications service provider

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

organizations into a model of how to bridge the digital divide. I’m incredibly impressed with their Digital Connect Initiative (DCI). Gila River is a technological leader, and, as its website says, the DCI and its staff “promote digital inclusion, leverage broadband connectivity for community and economic advancement, and embrace modern technology as a resource for heritage preservation in the digital age.” digitalconnect.org EAST. Since 2009 I have worked with a community of people who advocate for tribal telecommunications and broadband policy support. Since the pandemic, when it became obvious how disconnected rural reservation communities were, these issues are now more elevated. As a result of this visibility, the US federal government has earmarked massive amounts of funding to bridge the digital divide in Indian Country. A total of $3 billion in funding is available through the TRIBAL BROADBAND CONNECTIVITY PROGRAM (TBCP), in addition to $2 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and $980 million from the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021. This investment is staggering in scale and something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. I’m grateful to be a researcher documenting this investment. aipi.asu.edu/tribal-broadband WEST. I am excited to see the growth of tribal-centric solutions to solve community issues. One of the most significant issues in reservation communities concerning broadband is the lack of capacity. One group working to solve this lack of capacity is the TRIBAL BROADBAND BOOTCAMP. This hands-on training program teaches participants the skills to build, deploy, and operate broadband networks on tribal lands. During this three-day program, participants gain hands-on experience building and maintaining wireless and fiber optic networks. It also helps build relationships between tribal leaders, telecom professionals, and policymakers. There have been an average of six to eight boot camps annually since 2020. tribalbroadbandbootcamp.com

NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 17

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

NATALIE BALL Graphic by Traci Morris, PhD (Chickasaw), 2023.

Prints

ABOVE. Tribal nations have been active in the policy space regarding internet and broadband communications since at least the early 1990s. Simultaneously Indigenous and other researchers have advocated for more research to quantify the vastness of the digital divide and document tribal network growth toward crossing the divide. As tribes move into this space, many new terms are emerging. Recently, informed by my research (see aipi.asu.edu/blog), I defined the term INDIGENOUS DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY, previously undefined, as a term to encompass all facets of digital equity on reservation lands. It is an umbrella term overarching Indigenous Data Sovereignty, Indigenous Network Sovereignty, Spectrum Sovereignty, and everything in between. aipi.asu.edu/blog/2023/07/ indigenous-digital-sovereignty-defined

48004 St. Andrew’s Road | Pendleton, OR 97801 | 541-276-3954

crowsshadow.org Deer Woman’s First Tribal Council Email, 2022, lithograph, 34” x 25” Collaborating Master Printer, Judith Baumann 18 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

BELOW. Sovereignty grounds us as members of tribal nations, and I am most indebted to those who have been fighting to maintain one of our greatest assets. In this instance, I am thinking of all the people who worked on recent US Supreme Court cases such as HAALAND V. BRACKEEN and MCGIRT V. OKLAHOMA, a landmark US Supreme Court case that ruled that much of the eastern portion of the state of Oklahoma remains Indian Country for purposes of the Major Crimes Act. Decided in 2020, it has had significant implications for the reach of tribal law in the region.

The Haaland v. Brackeen decision is a landmark ruling that will significantly impact the lives of Native American children and their families. The seven-to-two decision reaffirms the importance of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act and its role in protecting the best interests of Native American children. If you are unfamiliar with these cases, please read about them. There is much information out there. sct.narf.org/caseindexes/mcgirt_v_ok.html narf.org/cases/brackeen-v-bernhardt

Take Home a Treasure from Indian Country Buy from members of federally recognized Tribes

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

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For a free brochure on the Indian Arts and Crafts 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: www.doi.gov/iacb

Tessa Robledo, Comanche, beadwork, Southern Plains Song Purse, ©2022

AT KASNÉ AA A Brief History of Chilkat Weaving among the Tlingit

By Zachary R. Jones, PhD

F above Chilkat Tlingit artist once known, Robe, 1860–1875, mountain goat wool yarn, cedar bark, dye, collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 16/1693.

Image courtesy of NMAI Photo Services.

OR CENTURIES Tlingit women of Southeast Alaska have refined the skill and science of Chilkat weaving. At kasné aa, “a weaver of textiles” in the Tlingit language, produces robes for dancing, tunics, aprons, and other wearable apparel used ceremonially and culturally within the Tlingit community. Historically these weavings were traded or sold to other Indigenous communities along the Northwest Coast who adopted them for ceremonial use.

Due to the intensive labor and knowledge this style of weaving demands, Chilkat weavers have remained few, historically and today. However, the compelling history coupled with the beauty and importance of Chilkat weavings today in

Tlingit country perpetuate the continuation of the craft.

Scholars have addressed Tlingit ethnogenesis with archaeological excavations that have documented Indigenous people living in Southeast Alaska for more than 14,000 years, and Tlingit people discuss living in Southeast Alaska since time immemorial. At the time of Russian contact in 1741, Tlingit territory encompassed most of the Alaska Panhandle, and the Tlingit had longstanding trade routes with neighboring tribal communities such as the coastal Haida and Eyak peoples, as well as interior Athabascan groups. Tlingit people possess a distinct culture, legal system, complex language, subsistence resource management NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 21

above, top Photograph of Clara Newman Benson (Tlingit, ca.

1856–1935) weaving, ca. 1890s, archives of Library of Congress.

Photo: Lloyd V. Winter and E. Percy Pond, PD. above, bottom Mary Ebbets Hunt’s weaving signature, PD. opposite, top Mary Ebbets Hunt (Tlingit, 1823–1919), attributed, Chilkat Blanket, ca. late 19th century, wool, dye, 46 in. high, Fort Rupert, Vancouver, British Columbia, PD. opposite, bottom Hunt’s same blanket, hamatsa neckring, and hamatsa mask worn by a woman from Qagyuhl village. Edward S. Curtis, A Tluwulahu costume— Qagyuhl, ca. 1914, silver gelatin print, archives of Library of Congress, PD.

22 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

practices, framework for land ownership, and concept of clan-based sovereignty.

The Tlingit generally self-identify based on their moiety, clan, and clan house, which are Tlingit kinship units, with recognition of the region (Kwáan) of their clan. The Tlingit clan regions of the Chilkat, or Jilkáat Kwáan, near present-day Klukwan, Alaska, and Chilkoot, or Jilkoot Kwáan, near Haines, were wealthy and powerful at the time of Euro-American contact. They had abundant food resources along the coast and Chilkat River but were also strategically located at the entrance to a key trade route with the interior. Trade overseen by the astute Tlingit of this region yielded wealth, power, prestige, and the ability to commission and create monumental pieces of art, such as Chilkat weavings or carved and painted house screens.

The origins of Chilkat weaving among the Tlingit are tied to the Jilkáat Kwáan. Scholars including Bill Holm, Cheryl Samuel, and Clarissa Rizal (Tlingit, 1956–2016) have detailed the history of Chilkat weaving. The early ethnographer George T. Emmons

(1852–1945) wrote The Chilkat Blanket (1907) and the monograph The Tlingit Indians (1991), published posthumously by anthropologist Frederica de Laguna.

An historical Tlingit account on the origins of Chilkat weaving comes from the anthropologist Louis Shotridge or Stuwukáa (Tlingit, ca. 1882–1937) who wrote a history of Chilkat weaving in the 1920s while he worked as a curator for the University Museum (now the Penn Museum). Shotridge was an aanyádi (aristocrat) of the Kaagwaantaan (Wolf) clan of Klukwan, and his first wife, Florence Shotridge or Kaatxwaaxsnéi (Tlingit, 1882–1917), a Lukaax.ádi (Raven Sockeye) clan woman, was a Chilkat weaver.

Louis Shotridge wrote that Chilkat weaving came to the Tlingit from the Tsimshian. Evidence and information about early Chilkat weaving by the Tsimshian is limited. Few items that appear to be from this period have survived. Apparently only a few Tsimshian practiced Chilkat weaving, which was in decline or extinct when the Tlingit obtained these weavings.

Shotridge did not provide a date for when this happened, only that it happened in the Tlingit past.1 He wrote how the Beaver Apron, the first Chilkat weaving that came into the possession of the Gaanaxteidí clan of Klukwan, was highly regarded by the Gaanaxteidí elite. A Chilkat weaving, the Rainstorm Robe, came into Tlingit possession when a wealthy Naanyaa.aayí clan aristocrat named K'uxshóo made a high-stakes trade with the Tsimshian. He took the robe to his home in Klukwan that he shared with his Gaanaxteidí wife, Yeidukdatán. They kept the robe a strict secret for a time. K'uxshóo and Yeidukdatán then had their teenage daughter Kh'aluwa Tláa study the robe in detail during her period of seclusion (a puberty rite), a time of two winters. With her mother, Kh'aluwa Tláa unraveled portions of the robe to learn weaving patterns, methods, and other detailed components of the robe’s composition.

1. See Louis Shotridge, “Notes on the Origin of the Ceremonial Robe called Chilkat Blanket” in Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas, eds. Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Jennifer Kramer, and Ḳi-ḳein (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 375–80. European explorers mentioned Chilkat weavings in the 18th century, and paintings showing robes begin to surface during the early 19th century.

Kh'aluwa Tláa then wove the first Chilkat robe in Tlingit country. At a special ceremony in Klukwan, K'uxshóo unveiled the robe to those at the ceremony, greatly surprising and amazing those present.

According to Shotridge, when it was revealed, the robe “shone forth, like the rays of the rising sun, a like creation which the people had never viewed.”2 Since that time, the Tlingit community has acknowledged the Gaanaxteidí clan women of Klukwan for honing the science and skill of Chilkat weaving. The robes woven by Tlingit women in the Jilkáat Kwáan were later dubbed “Chilkat” robes. The Tlingit term for a Chilkat robe is naaxein, and for a Chilkat tunic a naaxein k'oodás'.

Historically, Chilkat weaving was

practiced only by aanyádi women primarily from the Jilkáat Kwáan and later Jilkoot Kwáan, and the techniques of weaving were not readily conveyed.

Early Chilkat weavings were made primarily from mountain goat wool, naturally dyed, intertwined with coastal red cedar bark. The process for harvesting, preparing, and dying materials for Chilkat robes is arduous and exacting. This process requires extensive scientific knowledge about ecology, biology, and chemistry. Weavers knew not only the materials needed but also the right seasons to harvest and the naturally occurring chemical makeup of dyestuffs. Weavers learned to respect the forest through sustainable harvesting. By gathering limited amounts from

2. Shotridge, “Notes on the Origin of the Ceremonial Robe called Chilkat Blanket,” 379.

NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 23

Chilkat weavings have remained one of the most expensive items produced in Tlingit society but also one of the most ceremonially important.

above Jennie Thlunaut (Tlingit, 1891–1986) at her loom. The National Endowment of the Arts named her a 1986 NEA National Heritage Fellow. Image courtesy of the National Endowment of the Arts. opposite Chilkat Tlingit artist once known, attributed, Man’s Tunic, pre-1914, mountain goat wool yarn, dye, 39 × 26 in., collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 3/9273.

Image courtesy of NMAI Photo Services.

24 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

each area, they could return years into the future for an additional harvest.

If the extensive materials needed to make a Chilkat robe were not all self-harvested, these items could be traded for at great expense. George T. Emmons wrote around the year 1900, “For the manufacture of one blanket, three goatskins were necessary.”3 To begin, weavers strung their yarns to the top of the loom and wove from the top down. Weavers adapted designs that a male artist painted on a wooden pattern board. These were unique formline designs, that, as Emmons confirmed, “the weaver made frequent reference to.” Emmons also wrote that “these boards were highly valued; the painting of one was worth $5.00, and the boards themselves were valued from $10 to $60.”4 Emmons wrote, “The weaver was seated on the floor in front of the loom, with her legs drawn up in front of her, and wove from left to right in a close twining of two weft strands over each warp strand in succession.”5 It is often said it takes one dedicated year to weave a Chilkat robe. Shotridge wrote that “the

old time Chilkat blanket was woven in about four months’ time, while the preparation of the material required more time.

An industrious woman could turn out, on the average, one blanket a year.”6 On most robes completed after the year 1850, weavers left their signature, which sometimes assists in attributing weavings. Emmons recorded that “the private mark of each weaver was worked in on each lower corner where the fringe begins, and generally consisted of two colors.”7 Evidence suggests that sometimes more than one weaver worked on a single robe. Eliza R. Scidmore, a journalist who traveled to Klukwan in 1884, wrote in her memoir, “In one tent two women were at work weaving a large Chilkat blanket.”8 Chilkat weavings have remained one of the most expensive items produced in Tlingit society but also one of the most ceremonially important. Most often clans or clan houses commissioned weavings, items that would become their at.óow, the Tlingit term for a ceremonial clan-owned item of regalia.

The weavers who created these textiles have not been well documented in scholarship. Born before the year 1875, most of the oldest generation of weavers who can be documented can only be identified by name and birth year, due to their name appearing on historic censuses. No other records or historical memory have survived to tell us more about most of them. With only one exception (Mary Ebbets Hunt), census records document these weavers living at the present-day area of Klukwan and Haines and list their profession as being a “blanket maker” or “blanket weaver.”

The 1900 census records from Yandeist'akhyé (near Klukwan) also record a male blanket weaver, John Kow-wáde (b.

1862), even though Chilkat weaving was reserved for women or those with two spirits. No other information about him is

3. George T. Emmons and Frederica de Laguna, eds., The Tlingit Indians (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 224.

4. Emmons and Laguna, The Tlingit Indians, 227.

5. Emmons and Laguna, The Tlingit Indians, 227.

6. Louis Shotridge, “Notes on the Origin of the Ceremonial Robe called Chilkat Blanket,” 380.

7. Emmons and Laguna, The Tlingit Indians, 227.

8. E. Ruhamah Scidmore, Alaska: Its Southern Coast and the Sitkan Archipelago (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1885), 106.

known. Although each weaver has a story and some have written biographies, two weavers from this generation stand out for major impacts on the genre, history, and fate of Chilkat weaving: [9]Mary Ebbets Hunt and Clara Newman Benson.

Mary Ebbets Hunt, Anisalaga, or Anéin (Tlingit, 1823–1919), was born at Taant'a Kwáan, a Tlingit village on the Nass River, British Columbia. Her mother was Aanaseet of Gaanax.ádi clan, Yan Wuliháshi Hít (Drifted Ashore House), and her father was Kinnanook, also known as Chief Ebbits, a Teikweidí clan house leader. At a young age, Mary learned to weave Chilkat, though exactly how or from whom remains unknown.

At a young age and for political and trade advantage, Mary’s father had her married to a non-Native employee of the Hudson Bay Company, Robert Hunt. Robert and Mary Hunt didn’t reside in the region long; they moved to Fort Rupert and the adjacent Kwakwaka'wakw village on Vancouver Island. The Kwakwaka'wakw embraced Mary, and she introduced the weaving and wearing of Chilkat robes to them. Her legacy remains significant in Kwakwaka'wakw history. Mary’s unique Tlingit formline style and lack of cedar bark in her weavings make her weavings easily attributable.

Clara Ne wman B ens on, or Deinkhul.át (Tlingit, ca. 1856–1935), often remembered in the Tlingit community as “Mrs. Benson,” was a skilled Chilkat weaver of an aanyádi family of the Gaanaxteidí clan, Yéil Hít (Raven House) of Klukwan, and she was a Kaagwaantaan Yádi (Child of the Kaagwaantaan). She lived her whole life in Klukwan. Benson was a prolific producer of Chilkat robes and tunics.

She held statewide notoriety in her day and was even mentioned in reports by Alaska’s governor as a Chilkat weaver.

The territorial government hired her to teach weaving at a tribal school in Eklutna, and her work was later exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair from 1933 to 1934. Tlingit individuals and clans still wear her weavings today—weavings that continue to serve and empower clans and

communities in ceremonial events. She is also remembered as the weaving teacher of the next generation, especially as the teacher for Jennie Johnson Thlunaut (Tlingit, ca. 1890–1986), a prolific and avant-garde weaver who influences weavers even today. Benson also informed Tlingit anthropologist Louis Shotridge and non-Native anthropologist Ronald Olson. Benson’s words and the history of her community, its clans, and clan stories were documented in writing.

These preserved histories have remained accessible to the Tlingit community and empower individuals with knowledge shared by an elder from the past.

The next generation of weavers, who learned from and often worked alongside the older generation of weavers, was a smaller group. The skill and science of Chilkat weaving had been kept somewhat secret among selected families and clans, and the labor and skill level required to become a weaver kept numbers down. The

onset of the Christian and government boarding and day school programs for tribal youth in Alaska amid this generation’s life significantly impacted the transfusion of knowledge from one generation to the next. Some of the Tlingit weavers of this generation include Annie J. Klaney or K'aanaakéek Tláa (1882–1968), Maria Ackerman Miller (d. 1995), Eliza Moses Mork (1898–1976), She-Ku (b.

1890), Florence Shotridge or Kaatxwaaxsnéi (1893–1917), Jennie Johnson Thlunaut or Shax'saani Kéek', Jennie J. Paddy Warren or Khaa.ít (1895–1977), Phoebe Warren or Kaaxhashalugaaxh (1938–2008), and Kitty Williams (b.

1884). From this generation, weaver Jennie Thlunaut had a significant impact on the history of weaving.

Jennie Johnson James Marks Thlunaut, born at Laxacht'aak in the Jilkáat Kwáan, was the daughter of Mathew Johnson or Yaandakhin Yéil, from the Gaanaxteidí clan, Xíxch'i Hít

9. Zachary R. Jones, “Haa Léelk'w Hás Ji.eetí, Our Grandparents’ Art: A Study of Master Tlingit Artists, 1750–1989” (PhD diss., University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2018).

NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 25

The history of the current generation of Chilkat weavers is being written.

above Lily Hope (Tlingit) holding a child’s Chilkat robe at the Dancing of the Robes ceremony at Sealaska Heritage Institute, Juneau, Alaska, 2023.

Photo: Sydney Akagi (Tlingit), @sydneyakagiphotography. Both images courtesy of the photographer. opposite Children wearing the completed Chilkat robes at the Dancing of the Robes ceremony at Sealaska Heritage Institute, Juneau, Alaska, 2023.

Photo: Sydney Akagi (Tlingit), @sydneyakagiphotography.

26 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

(Frog House), and Ester Tom Johnson, or Kaakwdagáan (d. 1908), from the Kaagwaantaan Gooch Hít (Wolf House).

Thlunaut grew up and lived in the Jilkáat Kwáan and Jilkoot Kwáan. In 1902 her father took steps that would influence her life greatly: he paid his Gaanaxteidí clan sister Clara Newman Benson 50 dollars to teach Thlunaut’s mother how to weave Chilkat, who soon began teaching Thlunaut to weave. After her mother died in 1908, when Tlunaut was 18 years old, she then studied under Clara Benson and Saantaas', her clan aunt. Thlunaut went on to become arguably the most prolific Chilkat weaver. With almost 45 attributed weavings, more weavings can be credited to Thlunaut than any other weaver. Many of her weavings were new designs, patterns, and styles—truly avant-garde. Thlunaut is the only Chilkat weaver to be biographed by scholars other than recent work produced by this author. Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Suzanne Scollon also created the documentary, In Memory of Jennie Thlunaut, 1890–1986 (1988).

By the time Thlunaut became advanced in age, both she and the Tlingit community realized Chilkat weaving was endangered. Only a small group of

practitioners wove Chilkat, so Thlunaut gathered a group of Tlingit women for a Chilkat weaving workshop in Haines in March 1985. Just under 20 women attended this training, some of whom went on to weave a few Chilkat items during their lives. After this training, Thlunaut selected two participants to apprentice with her: Anna Brown Ehlers (Tlingit) and Clarissa Rizal (Tlingit, 1956–2016). These two women went on to become substantive producers of Chilkat weavings, some collected by museums, others used in the Tlingit community.

Thlunaut passed away a few months into apprenticing these women, but her teaching allowed the art form to continue.

The next generation of weavers includes Anna Brown Ehlers, Lani Strong Hotch, Suzi Williams, and the late Clarissa Rizal (all Tlingit) and non-Native weavers Dorica Jackson or Kóon Tláa, Cheryl Samuel, and Kay Parker. Parker and Samuel became accomplished weavers and scholars of Chilkat (and Ravenstail) weaving, and Samuel published a book on the methods of weaving Chilkat, a helpful guide used by weavers today. Both Samuel and Parker worked closely with the Chilkat weaving community and offered training, support, and fellowship to weavers of Chilkat style. Their work and service positively impacted the Tlingit community. Rizal, who was Thlunaut’s apprentice, was a versatile and accomplished Tlingit artist of many media. Energetic, dynamic, and a friend to all, she produced many Tlingit art pieces, including innovative Chilkat robes. Rizal taught and spoke publicly about Chilkat weaving. A kind educator and supporter of fellow artists, Rizal also taught her daughters, Lily Hudson Hope and Ursala Hudson, to weave Chilkat.

The history of the current generation of Chilkat weavers is being written.

Hope, an accomplished Chilkat weaver, is committed to carrying on the legacy by supporting and training other weavers.

In 2017 Hope organized Interwoven Radiance, a group exhibition on Chilkat weaving for the Portland Art Museum (PAM). The show included weavings

by Benson, Thlunaut, Rizal, and Hope’s own work to showcase the genealogy of weaving. For the exhibition, PAM commissioned Hope to weave a robe

for the museum’s permanent collection.

She wove Lineage Robe (2017), which commemorates the traceable ancestry of weavers Benson, Thlunaut, Rizal, and Hope. To be a Chilkat weaver, Hope said in an exhibition video, is to be “a woman who maintains the continuity of weaving, values the way of life, and what it means to be a true descendant of a master Chilkat weaver.”10 In the video, she went on to compare Chilkat weaving to “painting with yarn,” and she honored those who came before her and those who weave today.

Support from the Sealaska Heritage Institute and other funders facilitated Hope’s goal to apprentice and train 30 weavers from 2020 to 2023. Hope asked each of them to finish a child-sized robe by the completion of their apprenticeship.

She led the training with assistance from accomplished Tlingit weavers and teachers Shgendootan George and Ricky Tagaban.

In February 2023 the weavers all joined in a celebratory event and exhibition in Juneau of the nearly 20 completed child-sized robes. This event, known as a Dancing of the Robes ceremony, kicked off with guest speakers and ended when the robes were placed on the shoulders of young children at the Sealaska Heritage Institute, where they danced in its clan house. The robes were then exhibited at the JuneauDouglas City Museum. As a speaker at this program, this author posited that at no other time in documentable Chilkat weaving history have so many people been trained in Chilkat weaving and this many weavings produced from such a venture. The Dancing of the Robes was a major moment in art history, and one aimed at facilitating the continuation of the practice for generations to come.

Chilkat weavers today work to support each other and remember the weavers who practiced before them. At the 2023 Dancing of the Robes event, Lily Hope read excerpts of personal writings by her late mother, Clarissa Rizal, about the importance of sustaining the practice of Chilkat weaving. Rizal’s words acknowledged self-doubt, insecurities, and worry about the responsibility of being a Chilkat weaver. In a moment of doubt, Thlunaut told her, “Just call on me whenever you need help. Remember me.

Call on me. I will help you.”11 Hope counseled weavers to support each other, empower each other, and continue growing in their skills. Today the circle of Chilkat weavers works together not only to produce beautiful works of art but to also create a beautiful culture of support and a bright future for the continuation of Chilkat weaving.

10. Lily Hope, “Interwoven Radiance,” Portland Art Museum, November 20, 2017, Facebook video, 5:48, web.

11. “Chilkat Dancing-of-the-Robes Ceremony with Lily Hope,” Sealaska Heritage Institute, February 1, 2023, YouTube video, 1:33:32, web. Lily Hope reads her mother Clarissa Rizal’s writings at 34:00 minutes.

NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 27

UNSETTLING THE SOUTHWOLD EARTHWORKS

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

On the farm of a man named Chester Henderson, close to what is known as the Talbot Road, and about three miles inland from Port Stanley, on the north shore of Lake Erie, a little over one hundred miles west of Buffalo, there is a circular rim of earth enclosing about two and a half acres of land.

—Rev. William R. Harris, 18961

L

O CATED IN THE SMALL community of Fingal, Ontario, the Southwold Earthworks are believed to be a fortified village active from 1450 to 1550 CE. Canada designated this as a national historic site in 1923, and the village was subjected to two major

archaeological investigations. The National Museum of Canada (now the Canadian Museum of History) conducted a dig in 1935, and Parks Canada, the country’s national parks agency, excavated in 1976.

Since the early 19th century, academic studies, archival documents, archaeological surveys, local media, and oral histories have disclosed a breadth of contradictory information relating to the site’s timeline, occupants, and function.

These inconsistencies shroud the earthworks in a veil of confusion that often pits modern archaeology against Indigenous oral history and academic research against conspiracy theory. To unsettle established narratives while presenting new directions

1. Rev. William R. Harris, “A Forgotten People: The Flint Workers,” HathiTrust, 1896, web.

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enables a clearer picture of the Southwold Earthworks’ unfolding story—one that takes a number of unanticipated turns and revelations.

The earthworks are an egg-shaped enclosure with double-palisaded walls built on clay loam. When compared to contemporaneous Neutral Confederacy sites such as Lawson in London, Ontario (1500–1525 CE), it is markedly unusual. Whereas Lawson sits atop a plateau and is encircled by the Midway River and Snake Creek, both of which offer a strong defensive advantage, the Southwold Earthworks are positioned on a vulnerable tract of flat land. In total, the site measures 110 meters long

by 75 meters wide, an area of nearly one hectare. Archaeological investigations demonstrate that the site once included 18 longhouses varying from 12 to 50 meters long and 5 to 6 meters wide, complete with internal hearths, pits, and bunk lines that could house roughly 800 to 900 individuals.2 The Southwold Earthworks were constructed by an alliance of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) nations known as the Neutral Confederacy. Though the names and extent of the nations that constitute the alliance remain unknown, the Huron-Wendat people referred to the confederacy as Attiwandaron, meaning “peoples of a slightly different language.”

The confederacy represented the largest Indigenous community in the Eastern Woodlands during the 17th century with a population of nearly 40,000 and a fighting force of 4,000 to 6,000 warriors.3 Their first contact with Europeans was recorded by Recollect priest Father Joseph de la Roche Daillon in 1626 CE. Not only did Daillon fail to establish a mission on Neutral soil, but members of the nation were arrantly hostile to his overtures. Several years later, in 1640, Fathers Jean de Brébeuf and Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot once again explored Neutral territory and detailed in their journals that: The people of the Neutral Nation greatly excel in hunting Stags, Cows, wild Cats, wolves, black beasts, Beaver and other animals of which the skin and the flesh are valuable.… They have also multitudes of wild Turkeys, which go in flocks through the fields and woods.4 The 73 volumes of the Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (1610– 1791 CE) summarize the travels of Jesuit missionaries in New France and display a village in the vicinity of the Southwold Earthworks labeled “St. Alexis.” Brébeuf and Chaumonot visited this village in 1641 and deemed it to be the capital of the Neutral Confederacy; however, early archaeologists repeatedly confused St. Alexis with the Southwold site until the late 19th century. It is widely accepted that a European foot never stepped on

the Southwold Earthworks until the early colonial period (1500–1763 CE), and no European trade goods have been unearthed there, proving that St. Alexis probably refers to an entirely different village or one that has been lost.

The Neutral Confederacy resided over lands that included the Niagara region of Southwestern Ontario, the Niagara River, and areas of western New York state. Neighboring nations recognized them for their impartiality in the Iroquois Wars, also referred to as the Beaver Wars, that took place between the Huron-Wendat and the League of Five Nations Haudenosaunee from 1642 and

2. David G. Smith, The Archaeological Investigations at the Southwold Earthworks, 1935 and 1976 (Ottawa: Parks Canada, 1977), xi.

3. William C. Noble and Michelle Filice, “The Neutral Confederacy,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2016, web.

4. Fathers Jean de Brébeuf and Joseph Chaumonot quoted in Smith, The Archaeological Investigations of the Southwold Earthworks, 10.

above, top David G. Smith, Interpretive Map of the Southwold Site, from The Archaeological Investigations at the Southwold Earthworks, 1935 and 1976 (Gatineau, QC: Parks Canada, 1977). Image courtesy of Parks Canada. above, bottom Location in southern Ontario. opposite Earthen embankments at Southwold village site. Photo: Deconstructhis, PD.

NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 29

1646 CE. Though the Neutral Confederacy did not participate in the war, they were nonetheless allied with the Odawa in violent conflict against the Algonquin-speaking Mascouten peoples, the “Fire Nation,” of present-day Michigan and Ohio.

Scholars argue that the lucrative fur trade of the mid-17th century elevated fears of an alliance between the Neutral Confederacy and French colonists, so the Haudenosaunee nations preemptively launched attacks on their historical allies, the Neutrals, to obtain more land, power, and resources. This, coupled with diseases introduced by Europeans, prompted the decimation of the Neutral Confederacy by 1651. Those who were not killed, taken prisoner, enslaved, or overtaken by illness found themselves dispersed into various surviving societies including the Haudenosaunee League of Five Nations.

How the multifaceted history of the Neutral Confederacy went unacknowledged by the academics of their day speaks loudly to the racist sentiment of some North American settlers at the turn of the 19th century. For example, an 1877 article from the periodical the Illustrated Family Friend reads that the Southwold Earthworks must have been engineered by an ancient non-Indigenous civilization that existed “far in advance of the Indians, as we have known them.”5 Based on the extent of raised earth present at the site, the writer insists that Indigenous people were incapable of such elevated feats of ingenuity. The author also suggests that the pottery sherds uncovered at the site demonstrate a level of sophistication that no Indigenous nation could possibly replicate, going so far as to say that Indigenous nations did not even manufacture pottery or arrowheads (despite both being

identified at the site during pot-hunting and looting).

This line of thinking is, in part, due to the mythologization of the Mound Builders, a mysterious pre-Indigenous “lost race”6 whom settlers initially claimed to have produced some of North America’s enormous earthwork structures such as Monks Mound in Illinois and Serpent Mound in Ohio.

The Mound Builder conspiracy was deeply rooted in classical and biblical ideology that attributed these locations and others to giants, Danish explorers, Toltecs, and even giant white Toltec Vikings.⁷ Locally, the theory was deeply ingrained. A Reverend L. C. Tearney of nearby St. Thomas, Ontario, argued that all Indigenous peoples living in North America “descended from the two lost tribes of Israel which the ‘Sacred Volume’ informs us separated from the other ten.”⁸ Not until the late 19th century did the Mound Builder myth slowly dissipate in favor of tangible evidence that supported the notable contributions of Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Several imposing earthworks from these early peoples share some fascinating characteristics with those observed in archaeological findings at the Southwold site. Reminiscent of Ohio’s Serpent Mound, the long axis of the Southwold Earthworks’ enclosed structure is oriented parallel to the magnetic southwest-to-northeast axis.

It is also accompanied by a small sandy knoll located directly west of the site but is now barely observable. Though it may appear coincidental, the spatial position of the enclosure throws into question the possibility that the site may be astronomically aligned to track or communicate with the cosmos. Is it simply happenstance that the northeast–southwest axis of the earthworks corresponds with the summer solstice, the longest day of the year when the sun rises its farthest in the northeast sky?

If the site was constructed to synchronize with the passage of the sun, it is not the only earthwork in Ontario to do so. On a parcel of land that overlooks

5. “Ancient Mound Builder’s Fort,” The Illustrated Family Friend (February 1877), 63.

6. See George Bryce, “Among the Mound Builders’ Remains,” The Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba Transaction, 66 (Winnipeg: The Historic and Scientific Society of Manitoba, 1904), web.

7. Gwen Rempell, “Manitoba History: The Manitoba Mound Builders: The Making of an Archaeological Myth, 1857–1900,” Manitoba Historical Society no. 28 (Autumn 1994), web.

8. Robert J. Pearce, “Mapping Middleport: A Case Study in Societal Archaeology,” London Museum of Archaeology (1996), 10.

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above A view of the earthworks facing east. Photo: Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD. opposite David G. Smith, Rim Sherds from the Southwold Site, from The Archaeological Investigations at the Southwold Earthworks, 1935 and 1976 (Gatineau, QC: Parks Canada, 1977). Image courtesy of Parks Canada.

Rice Lake in Keene, Ontario, a distance of nearly 350 kilometers northeast of the Southwold site, is the earthen burial site Serpent Mounds (dated to 58 BCE).

Owned by the Hiawatha First Nation, the largest of the burial mounds is designed to resemble an immense crawling snake and measures a substantial 60 meters long by 8 meters wide. Surrounding the snake form is a series of eight smaller burial mounds that are circular and regarded as the “serpent’s eggs.”⁹ Similar to the Southwold enclosure, the body of the snake is situated in alignment with the northeast–southwest axis while the serpent’s head faces definitively toward the northeast. To some researchers, this is convincing evidence that the mound intentionally corresponds to the astronomic configuration of the summer

solstice.10 The frequency with which these and other precontact earthworks in Ontario coordinate with astronomical phenomena remains largely unexplained and so too do the potential interrelationships between sites. Yet speculation grows that the early Indigenous nations of Ontario understood astronomical activities in a far greater capacity than settlers previously suspected.

The Southwold Earthworks have stood out from other precontact sites in Canada due to its double-walled palisades. Archaeologist Craig S. Keener suggests that between 1100 and 1300 CE, northeast villages like Bates, Calvert, and Sackett sites were protected by circular or oval palisades and occasionally accompanied by exterior ditches. Thereafter, from 1300 to 1500, a second row

of palisades fitted in a circular or oval pattern was commonplace among Haudenosaunee villages in the Northeastern Woodlands, with some villages boasting three to four rows of defensive palisades.11 The Southwold Earthworks’ second palisaded wall fits comfortably within this time frame and was likely installed at a later date, as confirmed by archaeologist Wilfrid Jury: On examination, the soil of the outer wall proved to be of solid earth while that of the inner wall yielded ashes, pottery, and other camp debris. From this we concluded that the outer walls had been built first and the second, or inner walls were erected at a later date by scraping against them the surface of the site.… Substantiating this belief

9. Hiawatha First Nation, “Serpent Mounds Park,” web.

10. See Andrew King, Serpentine: An Ancient Solstice Monument in Ontario (2019), web. A third site in Ontario, the Cedar Creek Earthworks in Essex County, about 140 kilometers from the Southwold site, also bears evidence of astronomical orientation with the summer and winter solstices and possibly even lunar events. See Christopher Watts, “Recent Investigations at the Cedar Creek Earthworks (AaHq-2), Essex County, Ontario,” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 41, no. 1 (February 2016), 19.

11. Craig S. Keener, “An Ethnohistorical Analysis of Iroquois Assault Tactics Used against Fortified Settlements of the Northeast in the Seventeenth Century,” Ethnohistory 46, no. 4 (Fall 1999), web.

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was the discovery of a fireplace with a stratum of undisturbed ashes, pipe bowls, and animal bones directly under the inner wall.12 Historically, the double-palisaded wall provides an excellent defensive shield against attackers; at the Southwold site, a remarkably flat and difficult position to defend, its appearance seems irrational.

Archaeologist David G. Smith describes the location as “atypical” when compared to the established defensive patterns by precontact Northeastern peoples.13 Western researchers did not put forward reasonable alternatives for the Southwold Earthworks’ peculiarities until Oneida oral histories were published in a 2007 Parks Canada policy document titled “Management Plan.”

Upon reading, the ceremonial dimensions of the Southwold Earthworks as interpreted through Oneida oral history challenge the sanctioned, decades-old archaeological data. While archaeologists generally maintain that the site operated as a year-round fortified village and trading center, the oral history asserts that the site was principally employed in sacred ceremonies. Namely, the double-palisaded wall functioned as a

type of protective screen that prevented the uninitiated from witnessing the events occurring inside the enclosure.14 In addition, the first major excavation of the site headed by archaeologist William J. Wintemberg in 1935 failed to mention the presence of a dam in the creek bed located at the south end of the outer palisade, though Jury confirmed it in 1944. “At the south side of the outer palisade,” Jury writes, “where the stream or rill joined the depression at a branch or moat between the walls we located the remains of a dam.”15 The rediscovery of the dam is significant for several reasons. Not only did it supply a two- to four-foot-deep freshwater source, but it also directed water to flow between the two palisaded walls, giving the appearance of a defensive moat. In his report on the two archaeological investigations of the Southwold Earthworks, Smith explains, “This evidence, if it is such, of Prehistoric technology is interesting” but cites how the 1935 photographs and field notes of the area surrounding the dam have been lost, and that the evidence was not reanalyzed in the 1976 dig.

Though judged to be a moat by archaeologists, Oneida oral history maintains that the stream flowing through

the village was dammed and ebbed between the two palisade walls to form a circle during purification ceremonies, which occurred one to two times a year when water levels were adequately high.

The raised earth walls of the palisade then served as a kind of vessel when the streambed was dammed, symbolically “encircling the site with water like fluid in the womb of Mother Earth.”16 Today the streambed and any semblance of a dam are no longer visible, yet the implications of this knowledge objectively transform our collective understanding of the earthworks from an atypical, fortified village to a sacred place.

The oral history also rattles faith that the fortified village was active and occupied by 800 to 900 individuals year-round, as archaeologists assert, rather than “a seasonal place of pilgrimage.”17 This is not to suggest that the site was completely devoid of people since it is reputed that elders, assistants, and caretakers would have resided there permanently as stewards. A main challenge to the large population theory is the site’s peculiar scarcity of debris in a space that supposedly contained 800 to 900 people for one hundred years:

12. Smith, “The Archaeological Investigations,” 33.

13. Smith, “The Archaeological Investigations,” 76.

14. See Andrew King, Serpentine: An Ancient Solstice Monument in Ontario (2019), web. A third site in Ontario, the Cedar Creek Earthworks in Essex County, about 140 kilometers from the Southwold site, also bears evidence of astronomical orientation with the summer and winter solstices and possibly even lunar events. See Christopher Watts, “Recent Investigations at the Cedar Creek Earthworks (AaHq-2), Essex County, Ontario,” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 41, no. 1 (February 2016), 19.

15. Smith, “The Archaeological Investigations,” 21.

16. “Southwold Earthworks: National Historic Site of Canada; Management Plan,” Parks Canada, 2007, PDF, 4, web.

17. “Southwold Earthworks,” Parks Canada, 4.

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Curiously, there was little evidence of refuse and garbage within the site.

Oral traditions describe a place that was looked after by certain people throughout the year, but a place where many people gathered only twice a year. There would be markedly less refuse created in such a situation, and indeed, perhaps refuse was disposed of in a special way because the site was special or sacred.18 While the official government narrative proclaims, “The archaeological interpretation and the oral traditions complement each other,”19 the centuries-old academic research and conclusions about the Earthworks tell a profoundly different story. The paradoxical information contained in Oneida oral history unsettles the 1935 and 1976 archaeological investigations and is crucial because it contributes an entirely different proposition for the site’s population and purpose.

Near the end of his report on the two excavations, Smith shares two unusual components unearthed at the site that potentially dispute the estimated historical timeline of its occupation. He cites that a disinterred “non-Iroquoian” rim sherd might have been Saugeen complex (200 BCE–500 CE) in origin.

For this reason he proposes that the Southwold Earthworks might have operated as “a winter campsite” during the Middle Woodland period, which consequently pushes the chronology of the site back nearly 700 years. Secondly, an assortment of arrowheads excavated at the site, also of “non-Iroquoian design,” were assessed to be of the Brewerton type, denoting that the Southwold Earthworks “may have served as a temporary campsite during the Archaic period.”20 What is fascinating about Smith’s analysis of the artifactual material is that it troubles the site’s estimated occupancy of 1450 CE to 1550 CE and explicitly stretches it by hundreds if not thousands of years. In doing so, he boldly eclipses the official picture of the earthworks and opens further space for Oneida oral history to address deficiencies in chronology.

above Opening (Dedication) of the Southwold Earthworks, September 15, 1930, Heritage Collections Elgin–St. Thomas, Don Cosens Collection M5 S1 Sh1 B7 F3 2.

Image courtesy of the Elgin County Archives and Museums. opposite Overhead satellite view of the site. Image courtesy of Google Earth.

The story of the Southwold Earthworks does not end with archaeological research or with oral history but continues with human suffering. On August 30, 1994, the body of Sonya Nadine Mae Cywink (Ojibwe) was discovered at the site. She was pregnant at the time of her death. Originally from Whitefish River First Nation in the Manitoulin District of Ontario, Cywink was the second youngest of 13 siblings, and a resident of London, Ontario. “The only consolation I have,” says Cywink’s sister Meggie, “is knowing that her last breath and her last moments on earth [were] in a place of our people and that she was greeted by our people.”21 At the time of writing, no one has been charged in the murder, and $60,000 has been set aside for testimony that leads to a conviction. Her family still hopes to find justice. Cywink’s life is not an addendum to the unfolding story of the earthworks but an elemental piece of its complex history.

The paradoxical information concerning the Southwold Earthworks’ historical timeline, population, and function embroil the site in a deluge of misrepresentation, falsehood, and contentiousness. Based on evidence from archaeological sources, the perspective of

the earthworks becomes slightly clearer, but it fails to adequately reconcile with how Oneida oral history interprets the site. It appears that a healthy compromise cannot be achieved when the two sides are so distant. The truth about the site may not lie somewhere in the middle.

The Southwold Earthworks’ spatial configuration may be coincidentally aligned with the magnetic northeast– southwest axis, yet it corresponds to the transit of the sun in the sky during the summer solstice. It may not have been double-palisaded for defensive security but screened to protect from uninitiated eyes. Its streambed provided sustenance but could also be dammed to perform sacred rituals. Were the earthworks not a precontact “fortified village” as its official plaque reads but instead a ceremonial meeting place, one conceived far earlier than most archaeological studies infer?

Today the grass at the Southwold Earthworks is long and unkempt, so monarch butterflies and honeybees are plentiful. Birds chirp loudly and squirrels dart up the huge beech and maple trees that tower above where the palisades once stood. The history continues to unfold.

18. “Southwold Earthworks,” Parks Canada, 4.

19. “Southwold Earthworks,” Parks Canada, 4.

20. Smith, “The Archaeological Investigations,” 102.

21. Liny Lamberink, “26 years later, sister wants OPP to use new techniques to find Sonya Cywink’s killer,” CBC News (August 30, 2020), web.

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NATIVE ARTISTS LEAD THE WAY AT THE CENTER FOR NATIVE FUTURES

By Sheila Regan

T

HE CENTER FOR NATIVE FUTURES (CfNF) is making waves in downtown Chicago, marking its vision for the future as the sole Indigenous-run, nonprofit art organization in the city limits. Located on Adams Street across from the bustling federal plaza where an iconic Alexander Calder sculpture stands, the storefront space has big windows that look out onto the sidewalk and passersby. The flexible layout of the center features a lecture area and studio space for resident artists. It’s a hub for thinking, dreaming, and creating.

“We’re in a very prime location,” says Monica Rickert-Bolter (Prairie Band Potawatomi), a CfNF cofounder and director of operations. “And we’re also the only Indigenous-owned representative space in the Chicago downtown loop area, so we’re definitely making sure our presence is known.”

Cofounder and director Debra Yepa-Pappan (Jemez) says she’s been dreaming about creating the center for many years, and so has her husband, artist Chris Pappan (Kaw/Osage/Lakota). Born in South Korea to a Korean father and a Jemez Pueblo mother, Yepa-Pappan grew up in Chicago in the 1980s, a time with few local opportunities for Native artists.

She returned to the city with Pappan after

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they both graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts. For a long time the idea of creating an Indigenous art center remained a dream. Then they realized other folks shared the same dream.

“It wasn’t until I started meeting other people who had similar interests that I started planting that seed like, hey, that’d be really cool if we had this thing,” Yepa-Pappan says. Yepa-Pappan and Pappan began organizing with RickertBolter and another collaborator, Patrick Del Percio, about what a center could look like. “It wasn’t until the pandemic that we started forming these relationships with other Native artists who had been starting to move to Chicago,” Yepa-Pappan says.

After many Zoom meetings, the growing group of collaborators began to ask, “What’s stopping us? Why don’t we just do this?”

CfNF employs Futures in its title as a way to imagine what lies ahead for

Native artists. “The Chicago community can be very tough and have a very set view of what a Native person should be and what their backstory is,” RickertBolter says. “Part of the futurism is about we don’t want to always just look at how it was or traditional practices. We want to see what’s going on beyond.”

Like a number of the cofounders, Rickert-Bolter has a mixed identity: she’s Potawatomi and Black. “We’ve definitely embraced those other identities,” RickertBolter says, “but we’re also showcasing how we still hold on to certain traditions from various tribes, tribal affiliations, or cultural backgrounds.”

The group wants to see the Native arts community thrive. “We were just so sick of seeing good people leave the Chicago area and not feel like they could express themselves fully,” Rickert-Bolter says. “How can we network? How can we make sure Chicago actually sees us as living, breathing cultures?”

Part of that work means having an active, visible presence, one that in some cases responds to erasure, problematic institutions, and emblems of colonization that are alive and well in Chicago today. Take, for example, the series of glass murals in the lobby

of the Marquette Building. Created by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Jacob Adolph Holzer, they depict scenes featuring the Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette and French explorer Louis Joliet interacting with members of the Peoria tribe, though in the images they are dressed in Plains Indian garments.

“The way Native people have been represented is just not great,” RickertBolter says.

The CfNF team, including one of its founding artists, Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe descent), met with the MacArthur Foundation, who owns the building where the Tiffany murals are installed, about the problematic nature of the glass mosaics.

Carlson is known for her searing work that deconstructs notions of colonialization, sovereignty, and power.

In 2021, for instance, she created a

huge mural along Chicago’s downtown Riverwalk, made of five panels that read, “You are on Potawatomi Land.”

Carlson, Yepa-Pappan, and Pappan talked to the MacArthur Foundation about the murals and the need to do an intervention around them. During those conversations, the foundation offered up an empty, 3,800 square-foot storefront space directly across from the Marquette lobby. The partnership includes in-kind donations for the renovation of the space and a modest rent for three years, according to Rickert-Bolter.

Carlson will also be collaborating with curator John Low to create an exhibition slated for 2024 that responds to the series of glass murals in the lobby of the Marquette Building, where CfNF is now located. The planned exhibition, This is an Intervention, to be installed in the Marquette lobby, will highlight

“How can we make sure Chicago actually sees us as living, breathing cultures?”

above Center for Native Futures, Marquette Building, view from Adams Street. All images courtesy of the Center for Native Futures, unless otherwise noted. opposite Center for Native Futures logo.

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“When you begin to understand that complex and dynamic history, it … helps to forge a way forward toward the future.”

above Left to right: Jason Wesaw, June Carpenter, Chris Pappan, Debra Yepa-Pappan, Monica Rickert-Bolter, Kelly Church, and Le'Ana Asher, in front of artwork

by Carpenter, Church, and Wesaw at EXPO Chicago 2022. opposite Works by John Hitchcock (Comanche) and Holly Wilson (Delaware Nation/Cherokee) at the Center for Native Futures booth at EXPO Chicago 2023.

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Potawatomi culture and history and feature artwork by regional Native artists.

One of the center’s biggest supporters is the Terra Foundation, who gave CfNF initial seed funding as well as funding to build out their physical space. The Terra Foundation has also tapped CfNF to partner on Art Design Chicago Now, a series of artist talks and workshops that CfNF will develop in the next couple of years.

The Terra Foundation, also an organizer for EXPO Chicago, approached the center to be part of the fair in 2022. “How can you say no to that?” Yepa-Pappan says. “So we said, sure, let’s do this.” Working very quickly, they put together a booth that featured three of the founders, Yepa-Pappan, Pappan, and Rickert-Bolter, as well as June Carpenter (Osage), Le'Ana Asher (Keweenaw Bay Ojibwe), Kelly Church (Gun Lake Potawatomi/Odawa/Ojibwe), Jason Wesaw (Pokagon Potawatomi), and Noelle Garcia (Klamath/Modoc/ Northern Paiute). All of the artists were either based in Chicago or were from a tribe whose territories overlapped the Chicago area. “We wanted to make sure

that there was that presence at EXPO,” Yepa-Pappan said.

Jason Wesaw, a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, had gotten to know Yepa-Pappan and Rickert-Bolter at Native art markets over the years. He worked with them during the Native Truths project, an initiative by the Field Museum developed with an advisory council of Native scholars, museum professionals, and tribal representatives. Yepa-Pappan was the Native community engagement coordinator at the time the Field Museum opened the permanent exhibition, Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories, in 2022.

At the EXPO Chicago in 2022, Wesaw showed mixed-media textile pieces, part of his blanket series about community teachings and shared knowledge. “It uses the blanket as a metaphor for a warm embrace, in how you can be wrapped up in that through the knowledge and the identity of who you are and the cultures that you come from,” Wesaw says.

Showing the work for a global audience allowed Wesaw to erase the

invisibility of Native people. “We’re living in a time when people need to know more about those stories and more about that history,” he says.

For Wesaw, the work of CfNF is so important, especially in Chicago, where people from all over the globe congregate. “People need to understand the depth of its beauty and the place that it holds in world culture,” he says. “They need to understand better the cultures that have always been here and continue to be here, and that’s our Anishinaabe cultures, the people of the Great Lakes.

The Potawatomi are just one of those tribes who called this place home.

“When you begin to understand that complex and dynamic history, it really, in my opinion, helps to forge a way forward toward the future,” Wesaw continues, “where people are more knowledgeable of that place or more appreciative of the people who helped to make that place.” The center brings visibility to Native artists and tribal stories that are part of not just the Native community’s history, but the shared history with everyone else.

“I want people to know who we are, the things that we make, and how when we create something in 2023,” Wesaw says, “it’s an expression of these cultures that we come from and how they’re still just wildly relevant.”

CfNF participated in EXPO Chicago again last April, and Newcity named the group’s booth one of the top five at the fair. FAAM no. 35 included a report of the CfNF at EXPO Chicago, and Dazed magazine highlighted the exhibition in a piece called “The art world agitators driving Chicago’s creative renaissance.” For Sixty Inches from Center, Luz Magdaleno Flores wrote: “As I walked around EXPO Chicago for the first time in ten years, I was so happy to encounter the CfNF booth—it was Brown like me, and the art told stories I did not see being told in any other booth.”1 Magdaleno Flores also had high praise for a panel discussion featuring Yepa-Pappan and

three other Native leaders in the field of art and museums: “Mountains are hard to budge, but Yepa-Pappan’s dedication for creating visibility within and despite pushback is inspiring to say the least.”2 “The word’s getting out,” RickertBolter says about the center’s showing at the EXPO. “People haven’t seen anything quite like that.” She said having powwow chairs in the booth made Native folks know they were welcome. “We weren’t quite what you would really expect at EXPO, but why shouldn’t we be here?

Our Native artists can do some really

fantastic, phenomenal things and make people think about what Native art can really be.”

Holly Wilson (Delaware Nation/ Cherokee), one of the artists featured

by CfNF at the EXPO, described the booth as “an inviting space.” Among the pieces Wilson showed in the booth was Bloodline, Keeper of the Seeds (2021), small bronze figures walking along a cedar log.

“It’s about the removal of different tribes.

When they were removed, they’d sew seeds into the base of their skirts or carry them within fabric so that they could then

1. Luz Magdaleno Flores, “Leading the Way: Women Indigenizing Institutions,” Sixty Inches from Center, May 12, 2023, web.

2. Magdaleno Flores, “Leading the Way,” web.

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above, top Holly Wilson (Delaware Nation/Cherokee), Bloodline, Keeper of the Seeds, 2021, unique cast bronze with patina, cedar, steel, 30 × 98 × 18 in. Image courtesy of the artist. above, bottom Noelle Garcia (Klamath/Modoc/Northern Paiute), Medicine Bottle series, 2023, glass seed bead weaving.

Image courtesy of the artist. opposite FLEX Pop-Up featuring artwork by Le'Ana Asher (Keweenaw Bay Ojibwe) at the Center for Native Futures Gallery, 2023.

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plant their food as they traveled across the Delaware [River],” Wilson says.

At EXPO Chicago, Wilson found herself telling the story of the work and its symbolism. She didn’t mind because she feels it’s important to share the knowledge. “We had people wanting to come back and have conversations with all the different artists who were up. I have photographs of people getting really close, looking at the beadwork or the photos.

It was beautiful to watch the public be engaged with the work.”

From here, CfNF heads into a strategic planning process. “We just need to focus on making sure that we’re showing Native art and supporting Native artists in whatever ways we can,” Yepa-Pappan says.

First up was their grand opening weekend on September 16 and 17 with programs centered around the inaugural exhibition. In December they’ll be hosting the Mound Summit symposium, which facilitates discussions around Indigenous Futurisms, a term coined by artist and scholar Grace Dillon. “This year we want to focus on curation, so talking about amplifying or elevating Native curators and having an artist moderate those panels,” says Yepa-Pappan. “We want to see how Native curators are thinking about the future of Native art.”

Noelle Garcia is currently the artist-in-residence at the center. An assistant professor at National Louis University in Chicago, Garcia met Yepa-Pappan after a community engagement event at the Field Museum.

Garcia reached out to Yepa-Pappan as a resource for her teaching work. Soon Yepa-Pappan asked if Garcia was interested in becoming more involved with the center.

“I was surprised but really excited. I feel [that] for Indigenous artists who are working within the frame of the white

cube and institutional critique, outside of solely the Indian market, it’s pretty lonely,” Garcia says. “I’m surrounded by amazing artists, but they don’t quite get the hurdles you experience being an Indigenous person who grew up on a reservation and came out to the fine arts world in an art school that doesn’t notice you exist.” Enrolled in the Klamath Tribes and of Modoc and Northern Paiute descent, Garcia grew up in the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony in Nevada before moving to Illinois to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and later got her MFA degree at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

This is why Garcia is so excited about the Center for Native Futures.

While she has an MFA, Garcia’s formal education didn’t include Native art history. She learned from her community.

Garcia says, “A good part of my success as a professor and as an artist is because of my familial knowledge about how to do bead weaving and understanding patterns and how to observe the environment.”

The Center for Native Futures is at 56 W. Adams Street in Chicago. Their inaugural exhibition, Native Futures, will be on view through May 17, 2024.

Further information about their planned

programming can be found online at centerfornativefutures.org.

“Right now is such a wonderful but critical time because we’re nesting in that new space,” says Garcia. “It feels good.”

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THE DIQUÍS SPHERES OF COSTA RICA A Recently Recognized National Symbol

By Maria Fernanda Calderon

O

N COSTA RICA’S SOUTH PACIFIC COAST, the Diquís Delta catches the eye with its flora, fauna, and archaeological wonders. The area encompasses an extensive alluvial plain formed by the sediments carried by the Térraba and Sierpe rivers, contributing to its rich biodiversity.

Here is an important transition from humid tropical forest to a humid premontane forest toward the coast, dominated by wetlands and mangroves found within the Térraba-Sierpe Wetlands, a national park. A conglomeration of environments, the Térraba-Sierpe Wetlands includes tidal channels, 40 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

above, top Diquís stone spheres in situ, Finca 6 archaeological site, Palmar Sur, Osa, Costa Rica. Photo: Diego Padilla Durán and Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz (CC BY-SA 4.0). above, bottom Map of Costa Rica with the Diquís Delta marked in red. Graphic by Eric Gaba (CC BY-SA 4.0).

swamps, ocean shores, and mangrove and palm forests. This variety sustains abundant wildlife. A vast number of plant species provides food and shelter to birds, deer, monkeys, raccoons, felines, snakes, and many others. In the brackish waters live different species of reptiles, mollusks, crustaceans, and fish.

This dramatic territory is the source of most pre-Columbian stone spheres.

Also called petrospheres, these orbs range from small enough to hold in a hand to six feet in diameter and weighing 15 tons.

They are unique and distinctive works of precontact Costa Rican societies known for their “fine finish … their almost perfect sphericity, the variety of sizes, as

well as the manufacturing process, their symbolism and use in public spaces …”1 Stone spheres have also been found in Isla del Caño, a small island in the Pacific Ocean near the Osa Peninsula.

Communities first settled on the island in 1000 BCE. They harvested from the sea and eventually adopted agriculture.

Researchers discovered two stone spheres on the island, suggesting a close relationship with mainland communities.

The quantity of stone spheres found (more than 300), the number of years they were manufactured (approximately 1,000 years, from 500 to 1500 CE), and their variety of sizes show that there was an important collective effort for their manufacturing and conservation. The earliest spheres were sculpted during the Aguas Buenas period (300 BCE to 800 CE), but the Diquís culture progressed stone sphere development during the Chiriquí period (800 to 1500 CE).

These societies led with advanced sociopolitical development to maintain large territories governed by caciques.2 “The leaders of the delta controlled a vast territory where they consolidated their economic and ideological power,” shares the Museo Nacional de Costa Rica on the Diquís website. “Extensive farming and the availability of natural resources would have created favorable conditions to undertake important public infrastructure works, create monumental sculptures, and obtain symbolic, deluxe goods according to their social condition.”3 The spheres are public artworks, whose meaning is not entirely known today, that reflected cosmological views and conveyed the stature of the community.

Indigenous peoples sculpted these stone spheres primarily from coarsegrained igneous rocks, such as gabbro, often dark green or grey; monzogabbro, which contains quartz; and granodiorite, a mix of quartz and feldspar. These boulders come from the Puerto Nuevo Formation, created millions of years ago

above Diquís culture artists once known, Stone Sphere, 800–1500 CE, on loan from the government of Costa Rica to Musée du quai Branly, Paris.

Photo: akhenatenator (CC0 1.0).

While the full meaning of the spheres is unknown, they are thought to possibly reference the moon or other celestial bodies.

during the Miocene era when magma solidified deep within the earth’s crust and cooled down slowly. The slow cooling process permitted the minerals to grow visible crystals.

NEED FOR CONSERVATION UNFORTUNATELY the sites of Delta have been looted, and stone spheres have been lost and altered. When United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands) arrived in Costa Rica, much land was deforested for a banana plantation. Workers rediscovered the first spheres in the 1930s and destroyed some due to the false belief that they contained gold within.

In Costa Rica an innumerable amount of pre-Columbian artifacts has been stripped of their context, stolen, sold, and used as mere exotic, decorative objects for those who could afford it. For a country that prioritizes resources and culture to the city—the Great Metropolitan Area in San José and the Central Valley—and abandons its coasts, it is remarkable that some of the spheres stayed in their original territory. Now Costa Rica has outlawed moving the petrospheres from their current locations.

Nevertheless, a large conservation effort was made by the community of Osa and the National Museum of Costa Rica, which houses six stone spheres. Costa Rica designated the spheres as a national

1. “Objects of Power,” Museo Nacional Costa Rica: Diquís, web.

2. Francisco Corrales Ulloa and Adrián Badilla Cambronero, “Los sitios arqueológicos con esferas de piedra del Delta del Diquís: Protección, conservación, investigación y participación de la comunidad,” in La conservación del patrimonio cultural en Costa Rica (March 2013), ed. Mónica Aguilar Bonilla and Olimpia Niglio (Rome: Aracne editrice S.r.L., 2013), 305–26.

3. Corrales Ulloa and Badilla Cambronero, “Los sitios arqueológicos con esferas de piedra del Delta del Diquís,” 305–26; Museo Nacional Costa Rica: Diquís, web.

NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 41

The National Museum has recovered more than 150 stone spheres from private hands.…

symbol in 2014. That same year, UNESCO declared four chief settlements with stone spheres from Diquís to be World Heritage Sites: Batambal, El Silencio, Grijalba-2, and Finca 6. The National Museum manages these four archaeological sites through research, conservation, impact assessments of various factors, and public education, which draws the attention of visitors and grows support.

FOUR SETTLEMENTS above Sstone spheres installed in the courtyard of the National Museum of Costa Rica in San José. Photo: Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz (CC BY-SA 4.0). opposite A cluster of five stone spheres in the courtyard of the National Museum of Costa Rica in San José. Photo: Rodtico21 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

42 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

THE FOUR ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES declared treasures by UNESCO are all located on the Diquís Delta and are open to the public. Batambal is located on a hill facing the Térraba River and at the foot of the Fila Retinto in the Cordillera de Talamanca, a coastal mountain range.

The village was first settled in 300 CE but then abandoned and resettled around 800 CE. The later residents sculpted spheres and constructed four rectangular buildings with foundations of rounded river stones. They left axe heads and purposely

broken fragments of figurative stone sculptures. Archaeologists believe this area was a ceremonial center rather than a population center.

Finca 6, located in the alluvial plain formed by the Térraba and Sierpe rivers, was part of the largest and most complex settlement in the delta. An area of hidden treasures, it is where a rectangular structure made with boulders was located.

This is one of the few public sites where spheres remain in their original location.

In an open space, two alignments of stone spheres are the only survivors of several clusters that existed, which were ravaged by farmers or vandals.

One cluster consists of three spheres across a length of 77 meters. The other has two spheres with a distance of 11 meters between them. They were found partially buried by sediments. The spheres measure between 4½ and 6¼ feet in diameter. Their east-west orientation suggests possible associations with celestial phenomena. Near the group of structures was a funerary zone and a deposit of almost 200 ceramic vessels in the sides of a rectangular earthen mound.

The third World Heritage Site is Grijalba-2, which is based on a terrace of the Balsa River and has semicircular mounds. Lined with limestone and river stones, these earthworks once supported buildings and have an east-west orientation. A four-foot-wide sphere sits 100 meters from the settlement’s center. The site has fewer remnants of pottery and tools than the surrounding area.

Finally, El Silencio rests on an alluvial terrace near the Térraba River at the foothills of the Cordillera de Talamanca. Near the foothills of the mountains lies the largest sphere yet recorded. At 2.66 meters in diameter, or 8.4 feet, it weighs more than 16 tons.

The sphere was damaged by fire, which caused serious peeling. It was sculpted from granodiorite, a hard stone used in road building that was quarried from only a kilometer away.

RECLAIMING & PRESERVING WHILE MUCH OF COSTA RICAN HERITAGE was irreparably lost due to theft and vandalism, the government and the National Museum of Costa Rica have taken steps to recover, protect, and preserve the stone spheres. For instance, the law mandates that the museum guard, investigate, and protect national archaeological heritage and process the illegal possession of archaeological objects.

The National Mus eum has recovered more than 150 stone spheres from private hands, 80 percent through deliveries and the rest through confiscations and repatriations. The first spheres recovered were exhibited at the central headquarters of the National Museum.

For more than a decade, the José Fabio Góngora headquarters has been available for the protection of this heritage. When the spheres are recovered in the south of the country, they are stored at the Finca 6 Site museum headquarters in Osa. The National Museum has a campus in San José, the capital of Costa Rica, where some of the spheres are beautifully displayed in the garden and the room of pre-Columbian artifacts.

Next to the National Museum, the Plaza

HOW WERE THE SPHERES MADE? THE DIQUÍS STONE SPHERES, or petrospheres, were primarily made from tough igneous rocks, although a few were sculpted from sedimentary rocks like sandstone or limestone. The igneous rocks were quarried far from their resting places in the foothills of nearby mountains.

The sculptors likely sought boulders that were already generally rounded and used chisels and hammers made from the small hard stones to flake away unwanted edges. Rapid heating and cooling may have made the carving easier. Wooden tools could measure the surface and guide the rounding process. After the

of Democracy and the Abolition of the Army, where the government dismissed its military in 1949, houses the glass-andmetal spherical structure that contains a stone sphere from Diquís. Anyone can go in, sit, and enjoy the public space.

Spheres can also be found a short walk away at the Jade Museum and the Justice Plaza. Imitation spheres were placed at the entrance to Chinatown in

rounded shape was roughed out, sculptors likely switched to sand and hides to smooth the surfaces, and some spheres were even burnished to a high polish.

Sculptors finished carving the spheres in situ and then rolled them to their final resting places.

The labor-intensive challenge of transporting them suggests that teams of people worked together, clearing paths to push the petrospheres through lush vegetation.

They were installed in nearby settlements, often in strategically aligned clusters that allude to cosmological significance.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

San José. They stand above graffiti that reads, “The spheres are ours,” speaking to the community pride in these pre-Columbian sculptures.

And indeed, they are ours. The spheres have granted Costa Rica a position on the global cultural map and serve political and promotional purposes.

“The spheres are promoted as functional evidence for national affirmation as NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 43

spheres, declared as a national symbol and promotional object for the country, and the political situation of Indigenous leaders in the country.

LOCAL COMMUNITY TODAY’S INHABITANTS of the Osa canton have clear links to the preColumbian past. In the 1940s and 1980s, an influx of newcomers led to an amalgamation among the local inhabitants, who include descendants of Indigenous populations, such as the Boruca people, and the migrants who arrived during the banana boom.

After the end of the banana boom, a good part of the population remained in the area. Their descendants, in their constant process of construction of identity, have taken the pre-Columbian legacy as one of their referents. An example of this has been the concrete struggles to protect the archaeological heritage, including popular mobilizations to avoid the output of stone spheres from the canton. These actions are part of the collective imagination and have turned the spheres into emblems of the community.

The near perfection of the stone spheres inspires Costa Rican national identity.

above Precontact stone sphere inside a glass-and-stainlesss te e l s p h e r i c a l s t r u c t u re installed at the entrance of the National Museum of Costa Rica as a permanent symbol of national identity. Photo: Axxis10 (CC BY-SA 3.0). opposite Three Diquís stone spheres at the main entrance of Legislative Assembly of Costa Rica in San José. Photo: Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz (CC BY-SA 4.0).

44 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

the owner of something unique and exclusive,” writes Alexandra De-Simone, a professor at the Universidad de Costa Rica. “The Costa Rican governments have rediscovered spheres as representative elements of Costa Rican culture.”4 The near perfection of the stone spheres inspires Costa Rican national identity. Rounded stone objects can be found in other countries but not in the size and numbers that Costa Rica boasts. The beauty and wonder of these items attract worldwide tourists and researchers.

There is no doubt that the spheres are embraced as a symbol of national identity, especially in Osa, and the descendants of the communities who made them. Nonetheless, there is a disconnect between the treatment of the

LAND STRUGGLES & THREATS IN COSTA RICA, disputes ignite over the lands of Indigenous peoples. Eight Indigenous tribes, the Bribri, Bröran, Brunka, Cabécar, Chorotega, Huetar, Maleku, and Ngäbe—2.4 percent of the population—control 24 Indigenous territories. In 1977, Costa Rica passed Indigenous Law 6172, which prohibits non-Indigenous people from buying or selling land in the 24 Indigenous territories and obliges the state to return these lands to the Indigenous communities.

But in 2023, much land within Indigenous territories remains in the hands of non-Indigenous owners.

The same Indigenous law says nothing about compensation or aid to

4. Alexandra De-Simone, “Esferas precolombinas de la zona sur en Costa Rica: cultura y poder en la tecnología de la piedra,” Tecnología en Marcha (September 3, 2013), 77. Translation by author.

In Our Hands

Native Photography, 1890 to Now October 22, 2023–January 14, 2024 This sweeping exhibition traces the histories of photography and diverse Indigenous cultures from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Circle.

Organized by a council of primarily Native artists, scholars, and knowledge sharers, in partnership with Mia curators, “In Our Hands” presents more than 150 photographs of, by, and for Indigenous people. See through the lens held by Native photographers and celebrate their influence on photography today.

artsmia.org 612.870.3000 In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now is organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Lead Sponsors:

This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

Major Sponsors:

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Generous Sponsors:

Media Sponsor:

Lorraine R Hart Cara Romero (Chemehuevi, born 1977), TV Indians (detail), 2017, archival inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist © Cara Romero

farmers, many of whom have been there for generations, to help them leave the Indigenous territories.

In the absence of a state regulator to help redistribute these lands, Indigenous communities began a movement in 2010 to recover their territory by occupying land and evicting illegal landholders themselves. “The people who recover land have certainly faced threats. They have faced death,” says David Solís Aguilar, a Colegio de Michoacán professor who studies Indigenous land rights. “But the recovery of land in Costa Rica is an exercise that’s not only legitimate, it’s also legal.”5 An Indigenous leader, Jhery Rivera (Brörán de Térraba, ca.

1975–2020) was murdered while recovering farmland within the Indigenous territory. This year, the

court sentenced his murderer, Juan Varela Rojas, to 22 years and 15 days in prison. In 2019 another Indigenous leader, Sergio Rojas (Bribri, Uniwak clan) was murdered. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights took precautionary steps to protect the Bribri people due to growing threats on their lives and had asked Costa Rica to protect the tribe. Shamefully, the government did not apply their mandate.

Undoubtedly, Costa Rica is a beautiful country with treasures left by their Indigenous ancestors, preserved by current communities and institutions, and named as a national symbol by the government.

However, the pride that the country feels in its protection of Indigenous patrimony must be equal to the level of protection and well-being of the current Indigenous communities.

5. Kimberley Brown, “‘We go in and take Indigenous lands back from cattle ranchers’: Q&A with activist Pablo Sibar,” Mongabay, November 21, 2022, web.

NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 45

nelda Schrupp Nakota jeweler, silversmith, sculptor & textile artist Cherokee Art Market Catoosa, OK October 14 & 25, 2023 Tubac Festival of the Arts Tubac, AZ February 7–11, 2024 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market Phoenix, AZ March 2 & 3, 2024

NeldaDBANakotaArts.com (701) 740-0775 Commissions welcome!

Spark of the Eagle Dancer The Collecting Legacy of Lambert Wilson Join us in celebrating the life and legacy of Lambert Wilson in this exhibition featuring over 140 works of contemporary Native American art from the collection of one of Western North Carolina’s most notable art enthusiasts. Baskets, pottery, carvings, and more tell the story of Wilson’s impact on countless lives over the fifty years he spent building his collection and forging relationships with Native artists from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Cherokee Nation, and sovereign nations of the Southwest. from left: Lottie Queen Stamper (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians), Woven Rivercane Mat with Chief’s Daughter Design (detail), 1965. John Julius Wilnoty (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians), Eagle Dancer (small version), n.d. Tammy Garcia (Santa Clara Pueblo), Harvest Time, 2019. Photographs by Tim Burleson.

AUGUST 8 – DECEMBER 8, 2023

| WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY FINE ART MUSEUM

Free and Open to the Public | Tues–Fri 10–4 | Thurs 10–7 | 828.277.ARTS | bardoartscenter.wcu.edu | @bardoartscenter |

KARMA HENRY OWENS VALLEY PAIUTE

10th Invitational New Mexico Painters’ Exhibition NM Highlands University Las Vegas, NM Through Oct. 31, 2023 SWAIA Winter Market Santa Fe Convention Center November 25 & 26, 2023

Sütta’ Hugwa-ti (a little bit windy), 2023, acrylic on canvas, 24 × 30 inches

KarmaHenry.com

PROFILE

Ponca Draftsperson, Painter, and Printmaker

JULIE BUFFALOHEAD

By Sheila Regan means to be a human being,” Buffalohead says. “You have good traits and bad traits and we all kind of live in this grey zone.”

With her many accolades, including being sought after for museum collections and solo exhibitions around the United States, notably at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Denver Art Museum, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, Buffalohead goes her own way.

Her work often has a subtle sense of humor and just as often has a bite. Among her trickster traits, Buffalohead effortlessly moves between drawing, painting, printmaking, collage, or some combination of disciplines.

FLUIDITY OF FORM

“I

’VE ALWAYS FELT A BIT CONTRARY,” remarks Julie Buffalohead (Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma) as she sits in her studio in Saint Paul, Minnesota. “I just think and do things differently than a lot of people.”

There’s a sly glint in the artist’s eyes as she says this. Buffalohead, who has received national grants, including the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, is a bit of a coyote herself, one of the animals who comes up often in her drawings, paintings, and prints.

Coyotes, like many of the animals in her work, function similarly to those in Native storytelling. They are mutable.

“Animals don’t just represent one thing all the time,” Buffalohead says. “It was all the things that embodied the character that made it what it was.”

The coyote tends to be significant to Western tribes, used in stories across the Plains, Plateau, Great Basin, and California.

Buffalohead posits this may be because the range of the coyote is so huge, but it also has to do with how the coyote encompasses both the negative and positive. “To me he represents what it 48 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

A GRADUATE of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design as well as Cornell University, Buffalohead studied printmaking in college, but early in her career didn’t have access to the equipment and space needed to engage in the practice. That’s changed with partnerships with places like Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis, a nonprofit organization that has collaborated with the artist on several projects where she’s explored new ideas in printmaking forms.

Investigating new techniques and new processes for articulating her distinctive vision forks in different directions, depending on the tools at her disposal. In her prints, she doesn’t aim to replicate her painting work but enters the practice fresh and new. The same holds true for her other artwork.

Gallerist Jessica Silverman, who has presented Buffalohead’s work in solo and group contexts out of her San Francisco gallery, notes a stylistic distinction between the artist’s paintings and works on paper. “Her large-scale horizontal paintings reveal complex narratives that invite viewers to spend time unpacking,” Silverman writes in an email. “Buffalohead’s drawings and collages on paper are far more intimate, even nostalgic.”

FOCUS ON IDENTITY BUFFALOHEAD, a citizen of the Ponca Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis. She’s the daughter of two scholars and educators, Roger and Priscilla Buffalohead. Roger Buffalohead, also a member of the Ponca tribe, started the American Indian Studies Department at the University of Minnesota, the first of its kind. His father had been forced to attend an Indian boarding school, one of the many violences inflicted on the Ponca people, who were forced at gunpoint from their home in what is now Nebraska

JULIE BUFFALOHEAD

to Oklahoma. The horrific experience compelled Julie Buffalohead’s grandfather to urge his family to pass for white. “The Native was beaten out of him, basically,” Julie Buffalohead says. “He thought that if they could pass in the white world, somehow they would be better off.” As for Buffalohead’s father, he cared deeply about preserving Native knowledge through his work, something Buffalohead continues through her art, which weaves metaphor and narrative with a keen eye toward form.

While Buffalohead sources Native storytelling in her work, she doesn’t illustrate the stories precisely. Instead, she interprets stories through the lens of her own experiences, her social and political views, and her Native identity.

One recent painting began as a dream Buffalohead had where birds were coming out of her mouth.

Her clan is Hisada, which means “the stretching of a bird’s leg when

running.”1 “There’s a lot of bird symbolism in that clan,” Buffalohead says.

“People have a reverence for birds, but also there’s a mysteriousness to them too.

I thought maybe it was about ingesting and expelling the Native part of me, this constant taking it in, getting it out kind of thing.”

Her explorations have also arisen out of research done around the boarding school experiences of her tribe. “I’m sourcing school records of particular Ponca people who went to Carlisle,” she says, referring to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which operated from 1879 through 1918. It was founded under the leadership of Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt,2 who coined the phrase, “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Really, what the school did was force Native children to assimilate to American culture.

Buffalohead researched the individual young women who attended the school. If they refused to do something,

“People have a reverence for birds, but also there’s a mysteriousness to them too.”

above Queen Isabella, 2014, acrylic, ink, graphite on Lokta paper, 19⅜ × 30⅛ in., collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Eugene and Virginia Palmer Fund for Prints and Drawings, 2014.119.2. opposite Julie Buffalohead.

Photo: Nathaneal Fink. All images courtesy of the artist.

1. James H. Howard in collaboration with Peter Le Claire, The Ponca Tribe (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1965), 90.

2. Richard Henry Pratt ultimately achieved the rank of brigadier general in the US Army. —Ed.

NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 49

PROFILE

they were painted in a negative light by the authorities at the school. “They’d get a whole write-up about how they were obstinate or something like that,” Buffalohead says. She became interested in using dressmaking as a way to remember each of the individual Ponca women she found in her research and has been engaged with creating dresses that incorporate text from the documents she’s found in her research.

When she was younger, Buffalohead would make Native crafts and sometimes sell them. “For a long time I used to separate Native crafts and artwork, as if they were two separate categories,” Buffalohead says. “Lately I have come to the idea that those things are not separate and that they can be one.”

As an example, Buffalohead has referenced the craft of ribbonwork by taking shapes, colors, and patterns of the practice as elements in painting and works on paper. Native women historically obtained bits of fabric and ribbons via trade from the Europeans, who considered the adornment passé. “They’d trade it with the Natives, and the Native women used it with a different intention in which it was meant,” Buffalohead says.

“They used it to create these patterns of dark and light, and geometric shapes.”

In the mixed-media work, White Savior Complex (2019), Buffalohead depicts a woman lying on her back with a coyote perched on top of her, dangling a bird on a string over her face. Near her feet, a raccoon holds ribbonwork in his paw while another raccoon plays 50 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

with Lone Ranger stick figures. At the bottom of the piece, Buffalohead lays a ribbonwork design that runs along the width of the paper.

Nowadays Buffalohead has been exploring the craft with real fabric. It offers a more tactile experience than simply painting the patterns and shapes used in Ponca ribbonwork design. “It frees me to be able to make work that’s kind of different and new and exciting,” she says. “I’ve also been working on sculptural things. I’ve been infusing traditional Native craft but trying to make them more contemporary.”

SOCIOPOLITICAL CRITIQUE BUFFALOHEAD HAS NOT BEEN AFRAID to take on controversial topics. In the fall of 2017, she exhibited at Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis a work on paper titled The Garden, in response to Scaffold, a sculpture by non-Native artist Sam Durant that depicted multiple historical gallows, including the one used to hang 38 Native men in Mankato, Minnesota.

Scaffold was installed at the reopening of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in 2017. Adjacent to Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Spoonbridge and Cherry sculpture, Scaffold was designed so that children could play on it. After protests from the Native American and especially the Dakota community, the Walker Art

Center, which operates the park with the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, removed and dismantled the installation.

In Buffalohead’s The Garden, a coyote, rabbits, and a young girl upend numerous famous sculptures from the sculpture garden in an act of subversion.

In the catalogue exhibition for Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, which included the piece in 2019, curator Jill Ahlberg Yohe likened Buffalohead’s depiction of Spoonbridge and Cherry to the apple tempting Eve in the garden of Eden.

“Buffalohead places the girl in the center, tempted by the cherry and distracted and perhaps unaware of what is right in front of her,” Yohe writes. The Garden was ultimately purchased by the Walker.

Buffalohead’s earlier work has been described by writers as “whimsical” or like a fairy tale, particularly when she was producing work that grappled with her experiences as a young mother. Those words don’t truly describe her intention, though. “It actually deals with the negative side of motherhood,” she says. “It deals with emotions that you’re not supposed to have. You’re supposed to keep it all in and not express these thoughts.

You’re supposed to tough it out.”

Art has always been a place for those thoughts to go for Buffalohead. “I have to just get it out—those thoughts of being completely used up in a way.

You love your child, and you want to be a mother, but it’s also so draining. You don’t have much energy for anything else.”

As a young mother, Buffalohead abandoned painting because of the fumes,

JULIE BUFFALOHEAD

first when she was pregnant and then in the first years of her daughter’s life. She couldn’t paint at home with a young child, and she couldn’t leave her daughter for long periods of time. Instead, she focused on drawing. “It was easier to work on the kitchen table,” Buffalohead recalls.

She also felt drawn to the control she thought she needed when she was a young mother. “When your kids are little, you have to control things,” she remarks.

“You don’t want them to eat something and get sick. You have to make sure they’re in a safe environment. And then when they get to elementary school, you have to make sure they’re learning and exploring.” The artist spent years trying to gain that control through her work, but she finds herself less compelled to do so now.

Now Buffalohead’s daughter is a teenager. “She doesn't really need me as much anymore,” the artist comments.

With that change in her life, Buffalohead has experienced a release. “I feel like I need to let things happen and then respond to those things that are happening in the work,” she says. “With this new way that I’m painting, which is a lot more like an ink style type of painting, you have to let the paint do something, and then you can respond to it. So it’s not the same with drawing.”

More recently Buffalohead has investigated motherhood from a different

angle, after her mother was diagnosed with inoperable cancer and who died not long ago. In December of 2022, the artist was featured in a solo show, Noble Coyotes, at Jessica Silverman Gallery, which featured many works that dealt with caregiving. “There was a lot about referencing my mother and sort of motherly things,” Buffalohead said.

It was difficult work, emotionally.

“The thing I’ve thought about most about my mother is that when your parent gets older, you become the parent to your parent. It turns your world upside down because you feel like you’re not somebody’s child anymore. It’s a very strange passage of life to be in, you know, it’s very, sort of like being in limbo.”

AN EXPRESSIVE PROCESS THE WORK FEATURED in Noble Coyotes contains animal but also human figures, an intentional choice by the artist.

Buffalohead also often inserts her own figure into paintings. As a younger artist, she would work from life, but nowadays she has a more intuitive process.

“Lately I do these rough sketches and then I kind of completely abstract the figure,” Buffalohead says. “Sometimes I’ll reference things like a turn of a head or shape of the arm.”

“It turns your world upside down because you feel like you’re not somebody’s child anymore.”

above The Trickster Showdown, 2015, lithograph and serigraph on paper, 27½ × 89½ in., edition 1/1, Highpoint Editions. opposite White Savior Complex, 2019, acrylic, graphite, collage on Lotka paper, 52 × 124½ in., collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Jane and James Emison Endowment for Native American Art, 2020.2.1A,B.

NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 51

PROFILE

above, top All Are Welcome, 2022, oil on canvas, 60 × 124 in., collection of John and Susan Horseman, St. Louis, Missouri. above, bottom Detritus, 2023, acrylic, ink, graphite on Lotka paper, 60 × 132 in., collection of the Tia Collection. opposite Isle of Dogs, 2022, oil on canvas, 52 x 841/4 in.

52 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

Occasionally Buffalohead will look at a photograph to quickly pick up a gestural motion, but more often she approaches a style akin to Richard Diebenkorn. He used abstracted, pensive figures as a component in his expressionist paintings beginning in the 1950s.

“It’s a lot about the paint and the process,” Buffalohead says. “You’re not making it look like it’s exactly from life. As long as there’s a bit of human there, that’s what I’m interested in.”

At times Buffalohead only draws the outline of a figure or will paint lightly

enough that the background behind it remains visible. The effect is an air of mystery. The figure is there, but it also is not. Look at the painting a certain way, you see just a whisper of a figure. Look at it again, and it appears more solid. The technique forces the viewer to focus and refocus, seeing the painting as both a whole and a sum of its parts.

When she paints, Buffalohead enjoys the feeling she doesn’t get with paper. “I’m really drawn to roughly going in and painting and putting it on. With paper, I have a preciousness quality.”

JULIE BUFFALOHEAD

Her painting process begins with a basic color field. “I use paint like it is ink,” Buffalohead says. She mixes it so that it becomes very liquid, then pours the paint onto the canvas. “Then I squeegee it on, so it creates this abstract field,” she says. After doing that a few times, she’ll add other elements: perhaps a ribbonwork design, and figures of animals or people. The abstraction remains visible even as she adds suggestions of spatial orientation.

She’ll also add a point of view, perhaps commentary on colonialism, Native identity, sports mascots, or satirical pieces on politics. Detritus draws inspiration from the January 6 riots. Buffalohead describes looking at images from the event and noticing heaps of garbage left by the rioters. Among the trash were flags the people had simply abandoned. “I thought that was so poignant to see these flags disposed of like garbage,” she says.

In the painting, Buffalohead has created a mound of garbage filled with American flags as well as text emblematic

of violence against Native people. “Kill the Indian Save the Man,” one piece of text reads.

On top of the dump heap, a group of rabbits appears to have been busy devouring rabbits. One of the living rabbits holds out a coup stick, an implement of war among many Plains Indian tribes, to touch one of the bobcats.

“They basically thought that the highest honor of the warrior was to take the stick and hit the enemy with it, “ Buffalohead explains. “It wasn’t to kill. If you could hit the enemy with the stick, it was like you received a great honor.”

As tricksters, the rabbits provoke their predators, even as some among them have been eaten. Buffalohead likens the scene to the act of using her own voice as an artist. “I see it like a cycle,” she says.

“You challenge ideas and thoughts, and then you get devoured and then you heal, and then you go back again and do the same thing over again.”

In another political work, All Are Welcome (2022), Buffalohead paints her version of George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, which was built as a sacred space at the intersection where the Black man was murdered by police. Buffalohead created the piece in response to white people who displayed “Black Lives Matter” signs on their lawns in the wake of that tragedy.

She saw the whole thing as virtue signaling, a way to advertise they were a “good” white person. “And I thought, well, this isn’t enough to do that,” Buffalohead says. “And it never is enough. You have to sort of direct people to know what they need to be doing as opposed to what they already are doing.”

And yet, even in her most direct critique, Buffalohead’s works are often more than they appear. She delivers her expression with a wink. If you think you’ve got it, look twice, because it’s likely the coyote has tricked you once again.

JULIEBUFFALOHEAD.COM NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 53

PROFILE

Serpent River Ojibwa Installation Artist, Painter & Sculptor

BONNIE DEVINE

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

S

IXTY-THREE WHITE BODY BAGS sway ever so slightly as they hang in rows from the ceiling of the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis. Each bag is labeled with the name of a First Nation, one bag for each of the Cree, Ojibwa, Dakota, Oji-Cree, and Dene First Nations in the province of Manitoba. In 2009 several of these territories received body bags from the Canadian government in response to an H1N1 influenza epidemic. This chilling installation, Manitoba, was created by Anishinaabe artist and scholar Bonnie Devine in 2010.

Sharing an hour-long drive from Toronto to the Art Gallery of Hamilton to see the exhibition Radical Stitch, Devine told me that she had difficulty procuring such a significant number of body bags for the project. Suppliers were skeptical about her motives. Ultimately she contracted a producer to realize her visual critique of continued genocidal policies toward Indigenous people. Saulteaux artist Robert Houle described Devine’s unwavering commitment to social justice and said she “confronts any obstacle to human dignity with the compassionate rigor of a warrior.”

A member of the Serpent River First Nation of Northern Ontario, Bonnie Devine has translated Indigenous histories and narratives into visual form for more than three decades. Her work is in numerous collections across North America. In 2008 Faye HeavyShield (Kainai) curated a solo exhibition, Writing Home, a body of work in response to prominent First Nations scholars as well as signatories of the 1850 Robinson-Huron Treaty.

Handwritten letters, photographs, and cast glass sculptures of the rocks that line the Serpent River convey Devine’s reflections on her ancestral homeland.

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From Water to Water: A Way Through the Trees (2021–22), a site-specific mural at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, explores the history and ecology of the Carrying Place Trail, a Wendat (Huron) and Anishinaabe portage route connecting Lake Ontario to Lake Huron. The mural memorializes

the Wendat people whom rival Iroquoian invaders ethnically cleansed and almost annihilated in the 17th century, and the exhibition incorporates incredibly well-preserved artifacts excavated from the area. Consulting Wendat cultural advisors, Devine painted interpretations of the human effigy pipe fragments over a

BONNIE DEVINE

map surrounded by local flora and fauna.

From Water to Water evinces continued focus on land, histories of mapping, changing ecologies, and the centrality of the Great Lakes.

Similarly in Battle for the Woodlands (2014–15), a large-scale installation at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the artist painted herds of bison and flocks of birds over and around a large interpretive map of the Great Lakes. Sculptural works including Treaty Robe for Tecumseh and three graceful basket figures titled Battle for the Woodlands: Anishinaabitude were rotated to complement the mural.

Devine is also well known for her nearly 16-foot-long Canoe (2003) made from her sewn-together, handwritten MFA thesis notes on uranium mining and the ecological disasters it created.

Beyond her studio practice, Devine also advocates for Indigenous artists through curating exhibitions, publishing, and teaching. She studied sculpture and installation at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) before earning

an MFA at York University in 1999. In 2007 she curated the retrospective exhibition The Drawings and Paintings of Daphne Odjig in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Sudbury and the National Gallery of Canada. Devine established the Indigenous Visual Culture program at OCAD University in 2009. Currently she is co-editing a catalogue of First Nations art from the McMichael Canadian Collection with its chief curator, Sarah Milroy.

How did your family influence you?

My family was not artistically focused, but my maternal grandparents were traditional trappers and hunters. Everything we had—tools such as pelt stretchers, blankets, etc.—I saw come out of my grandparents’ hands. My grandmother was a talented seamstress and knitter, and my grandfather would fashion tools and implements from all manner of materials.

Using a pen knife and a length of cord or sinew, he would bend, fold, stretch, and lash together various elements to make

“Everything we had— tools such as pelt stretchers, blankets, etc.—I saw come out of my grandparents’ hands.”

above Manitoba, 2011, 63 vinyl body bags, laser cut lettering.

All images courtesy of the artist ©Bonnie Devine. opposite Bonnie Devine painting From Water to Water: A Way Through the Trees, 2021, acrylic mural installed with Wendat effigy pipes.

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above Canoe, 2002, graphite and mixed media on paper (the artist’s MFA thesis notes), thread, beads, waxed cotton cord. opposite, top Bonnie Devine (Serpent River Ojibwa) with Stephanie Enosse-Thompson (Wikwemikong Ojibwa), Anishinaabitude, 2015, maple, red willow, unidentified twigs, paper, sea grass. opposite, bottom Battle for the Woodlands: Anishinaabitude, 2014–15, acrylic and mixed media mural/installation with felt, brass and nickel beads, deer hide, moose hide, buffalo hide, gathered twigs, sea grass, installation view, collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, 2016/168, purchase with assistance from the Estate of P.J. Glasser, 2016.

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things. This is where I believe I learned the fundamentals of sculpture.

When I was six years old somebody asked me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and I said, “I want to be a sculptor.”

People were dismissive. I didn’t even really know what a sculptor was, but I knew it had something to do with making shapes and forms out of various materials. The kind of sculpture I do is like a test to see if you can make what you imagined using materials that come to hand, and I learned that from my grandmother and grandfather.

For instance, how do you build a canoe? So I watched. You don’t build it from the inside out. You don’t build the frame or armature first and then attach the skin to the outside, as most structures in mainstream cultures are devised. But with an Anishinaabe canoe, you start on the outside. You start with a large piece of

birchbark and gradually work toward the interior structure and frame. Then you fold everything together and stitch it around the top edges. That was very instructive for me to see different approaches to creating a solid form that was durable but also flexible, that would cooperate with you.

I feel very lucky. I marvel.… We had role models, but not ones who could lead us to success in Western eyes. Our role models were traditional, and there was no future in traditional ways of life as far as my parents and grandparents were concerned. They really encouraged us to seek success in the settler world and that was hard. There wasn’t a lot of opportunity.

It seems this disconnect is part of what motivated you to create the Indigenous Visual Culture program at OCAD, to bring Native culture into the Western education system.

Yes! A healthy culture contains gifts and histories from all people. A unitary or

BONNIE DEVINE

monolithic approach to culture or history is poor. It’s poverty-stricken and starving of the lifeblood of its people. I still am very committed to making a place for Indigenous knowledge and ways and making. Not only because I want to magnify or prioritize Indigenous culture but also because I want to enrich Western culture with these ideas.

And for youth: to give young, mixed-up kids (like I was) an opportunity to find a place where they can explore their questions and do their experiments.

It’s really important to me.

I consider the museum, as much as the academy, a colonial institution that has really deep roots in Europe. To challenge those roots and try to graft something else onto it that doesn’t feel tenuous and vulnerable is very, very difficult.

Is this also what motivated you to curate?

I started curating because there was a need. It wasn’t a choice. I’m still tempted sometimes, but mostly the reason that I did a bit of curating was there was work to be done and no one was picking it up. I felt kind of guilty to see that need and not respond. But ultimately I chose to focus on my studio practice.

Did you grow up hearing and speaking Anishinaabemowin?

My grandparents and mom spoke it around us, but they didn’t teach us. My mother went to residential school and was afraid [that speaking] Anishinaabemowin would hold us back. I remember the first time I heard [my language] on television.

It was through puppets. Their gentleness and soft laughter made me cry. I also watch Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), which covers NHL hockey games in Cree.

Your work is very research driven. What are you currently reading?

Reclaiming Anishinaabe Law by Leo Baskatawang and Jim Daschuk. It’s about sovereignty across many different trajectories: education, politics, law, medicine.… That book put me on to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

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I’m very interested in the militarization of the Great Lakes and how the waterways have been used as both a bargaining chip and a barrier.

above Circle of Enquiry for a Dish with One Spoon, 2018, reeds gathered at Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. opposite The Gift, 2022, acrylic paint, graphite, ink, beaded felt, surveyor’s transit, and red cotton cloth.

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I’m also reading Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Indigenous Life, another book by James Daschuk. I like fiction, but I just don’t have time right now. I’m interested in filling in some of the blanks in my own education and my own understanding of what happened here in North America.

You often incorporate text into your installations. Would you talk about that a bit?

Some of the texts are my own and some of them are appropriated. [One work in Writing Home] is a memento to William Warren, a 19th-century Anishinaabe historian. He wrote about the customs, habits, politics of the Anishinaabe people in the Minnesota region, and how they were struggling against the Dakota people and the white settlers. He provided a very important set of data.

I [have long been interested] in Tecumseh, a warrior from the Ohio Valley … who managed with some kind of incredible spirit to organize large groups of formerly competing nations, trying to stem the tide of settlement in his territory, and trying to push it back.

It was an enormously courageous project … but they didn’t have the weaponry or capacity to make shot. They didn’t have the technology to pour lead into a mold, and this was their downfall.

I’m very interested in the militarization of the Great Lakes and how the waterways have been used as both a bargaining chip and a barrier. Pontiac, who was earlier than Tecumseh, was also deeply involved in trying to ensure that the Great Lakes remained in Indigenous hands. What a difference it would have made to the ecology of this area had the Indigenous people been able to keep control of that! The Anishinaabe already knew how to manage trade on those lakes. They had been managing them for probably thousands of years. They knew the routes and understood the navigation.

Most of the writing on these topics is by non-Native, Western scholars and historians. They leave out a lot, so what I try to do is fill in some of the blanks and connect some of the dots where there are grey areas.

What artists have you found particularly inspiring?

BONNIE DEVINE

Norval Morrisseau, and of course Daphne Odjig. These people came from the province of Ontario and worked in a visual language that seems to be inside me as well. George Morrison, another Anishinaabe painter but from south of the border. James Luna and the way that he has taken stories and histories and translated them into actions, into tableaux.

Robert Houle really influenced me in terms of not being afraid to bring intellectual content or historical content into [my] work. [Art] isn’t only about making a pretty picture or depicting reality in a really truthful way. Also Rebecca Belmore, who is deeply committed to current events.

I had the great honor of meeting Truman Lowe a few years ago in Indianapolis at the Eiteljorg and … oh my god, what a great artist. Just the soul in the way he uses materials really speaks to me.

our MFAs. I had produced a series of 78 drawings, very small, 8-by-9-inch, mixedmedia drawings telling the story about the discovery of uranium on Serpent River Reserve when I was a kid. They were a trilogy. There were three little books, and if you spread them out they made 78 little framed pictures. Rebecca suggested that we use stills of those drawings as a backdrop for a video that would tell the story with words and music, intercut with live action. So we went up to the uranium mines at Elliot Lake and shot a lot of material [to create] Rooster Rock: The Story of Serpent River (2002).

Independently I’ve made a number of shorter videos using the same method, which was to start with drawings. They fade in and out and are interspersed with live action. It’s this notion of sewing things together. So [I] have these clips and [I] figure out how to fasten them together.

You have also written and directed several films.

Yes, my very first one was my longest, 32 minutes. I made it with Rebecca Garrett, who is a non-Indigenous video maker. It was actually her idea. We met at York University when we were doing

Has music influenced you?

Oh yes. I’m deeply interested in music.

I have worked on several projects with David Deleary who is an Anishinaabe musician. He has written a piece for

an exhibition titled La Rábida, Soul of Conquest: An Anishinaabe Encounter about the Doctrine of Discovery, which is the Papal Bull written in the Vatican in 1493, the year after Columbus returned from his first voyage. David set the preface to the Doctrine of Discovery to music and that played in the background to a video. I’ve worked with Dave on a number of projects. We did another thing on the Black Hills in the Dakotas: A Grim Fairy Tale (2008).

I don’t play an instrument, but years ago I composed a piece that was based on the human genome, set it to music, and arranged it in GarageBand. I’ve played that a number of times in different settings. It’s called Mitochondrial DNA. What genres are you most inspired by?

I like everything! I have to have it all. I love jazz, opera, rock and roll (British and American), and Bob Dylan. His songs are so visually rich.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to learn more about you!

Thank you.

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PROFILE

Lummi Glass Artist

DAN FRIDAY

D

ANIEL JOSEPH FRIDAY is Lhaq'temish, a citizen of the Lummi Nation, who lives near Washington State’s Puget Sound. He combines Coast Salish cultural knowledge and iconography with glassmaking technologies. “Creativity was fostered in me by my family from an early age,” he recounts in his artist statement.

“Living without TV and knowing our rich cultural heritage of the Lummi Nation meant that making things with our hands was a regular activity.”

Friday attended the Northwest School (originally the Northwest School of the Arts, Humanities and Environment in Seattle), South Seattle College, and the Pilchuck Glass School, where he received a Page Grant in 2011 and has also taught studio glass art. During the last 27 years he has worked as a gaffer for seminal glass artists including Dale Chihuly, Paul Marioni, and Preston Singletary (Tlingit) and has also taught at the University of Washington and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.

The artist has participated in major solo and group exhibitions at galleries and museums in the United States, Canada, and internationally, such as the Sandra Ainsley Gallery (Toronto), Bellevue Arts Museum (Bellevue), and the Museum of Glass (Tacoma), where he was an artist in residence. The Corning Museum of Glass, the Burke Museum, and Dream Community in Taiwan have also hosted him for artist residencies. Several North American galleries represent him, and his work resides in numerous public and private collections throughout the world.

The Netflix reality show called Blown Away, about glass artists who compete at the Corning Museum of Glass, featured Friday in their third

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By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

season. I communicated with Dan Friday through a series of email exchanges in August 2023.

Let’s begin with family. Your great-grandfather, Joseph Hillaire [Lummi, 1894–1967], was a story pole carver, and your uncle passed down

knowledge of the Lummi Nation to you. Can you talk about their influence on your work and how you honor their memory?

My grandfather passed away before my birth, but his life and legacy have definitely affected my journey. We share the Lummi name Kwul Kwul tw. It is a huge

DAN FRIDAY

honor for me. It comes with the responsibility of a powerful name. I have many teachers on my journey: Aunt Fran, Troy Olsen, and many more. My practice is a culmination of their teachings.

My great-grandfather, Joseph Hillaire (Kwul-kwul't), was raised in [his father] Haeteluk [Frank Hillaire]’s longhouse and grew up during a time of massive change for the Xwlemi people.

[Joseph Hillaire] was a powerful orator, cultural bearer, and also a diplomatic advocate for his people. His ability to speak served him well when he negotiated with the unions in Washington’s state capitol for the hiring of Native American workers. At a time when traditions and language were forbidden, his drum still beat. Because of the struggles of our ancestors, our families still have a seat at the table. To carry his name forward gives me a sense of responsibility. His father Haeteluk’s final words were “Keep my fires burning,” and it is with that request that I approach my works with glass and our next generation.

You attended art schools early in your education. How formative were these schools in shaping your artistic practice?

Going to alternative schools like University Heights [Center’s elementary school in Seattle] and the Northwest School, their focus on the arts really nurtured our family tradition of creativity.

One teacher in particular, Jerry Satterlee, helped channel my anger and frustration in the ceramics department.

Your friend’s mother worked at a glass studio. By chance, you found yourself in the studio and were immediately impacted by glass art.

Can you describe what first attracted you to glass?

Having been raised in the arts but out of practicality—needing shoes and the capacity to sustain myself—I ended up in the automobile industry. Our lives have many crossroads, and walking into the glass shop for the first time I instantly knew this was for me. It is such a dynamic material when in the hot molten state.

The flames, equipment, and team aspect instantly drew me in. The ability to create and work with my hands is such a privilege and keeps me passionate about what I do.

Glass is an amorphous solid that can become liquid. What are the material properties of glass— its character, its particularities?

There are so many factors when working with furnace glass. Gravity and centrifugal force while hot; lighting and orientation while cold. I am particularly drawn to the transparent and translucent coloring of

above, top Aunt Fran’s Five-Star Basket, 2022, woven cane mosaic glass, 11½ × 11½ × 11½ in. All images courtesy of the artist. above, bottom Joseph Hillaire (Lummi, 1894–1967) and Edna Price Hillaire (Lummi, 1894–1958). opposite Dan Friday at the Longhouse Education and Cultural Center (s'gwi gwi ʔ altxw: House of Welcome) at Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington.

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“I love how transparent glass eats light!”

above We the People, 2022, hand-sculpted furnace glass.

Photo: Ian Lewis. opposite Stellar Jay Totem, 2022, hand-sculpted furnace glass, 17½ × 6½ × 5½ in. Photo: Ian Lewis.

the material. Many of the opaque glass applications remind me of ceramics, and I love how transparent glass eats light!

You’ve worked with some of the best-known glass artists in the world, Dale Chihuly and Preston Singletary, among several others. What have they taught you?

Much like Coast Salish art forms, glass is a sit-beside art, meaning you learn working next to (or with) a master. The apprentice approach is not something you can learn from a book or a simple course. Much like being a musician or any other complex trade, the 10,000-hour rule applies. Many of the things I have learned from those amazing artists are not glass related but about the creative process and managing the nuance of it all.

Your recent work combines elements of Coast Salish cultural iconography with the latest techniques and technologies used in glass art. Why do you think the linkage between Coast

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Salish iconography and glass works so well?

The last of my grandfather’s poles stands in front of the Whatcom County Courthouse in Bellingham, Washington.

It has been restored twice with fiberglass, and all of his other works have returned to the earth through decay. Studying at the Corning Museum of Glass, you can see Egyptian artifacts made 3,500 years ago, and, although fragile, glass can also be very resilient. I find it empowering to retell these Coast Salish stories in such a permanent medium and relish the fact that my work will tell the stories of my ancestors long after I am gone.

In other artworks, you’ve incorporated salmon, paddles, and geoducks—all things that directly engage with the water. Can you talk about why water resonates in your work, and especially the physical connection between water and glass?

Mní Wičóni, Water is life (mike drop).

I think glass as a medium to depict and

DAN FRIDAY

translate water and all its inhabitants, including us, is perfect.

Good point. In We the People (2022), viewers encounter a customary headdress atop a ceramic skull. The glass that forms sections of the skull, including the eyes, teeth, and nose cavity, appears to glow in blue light. It isn’t the only glass skull you’ve created. How did these works come about and how do they connect to Coast Salish people?

The piece We the People is a glass skull made using opaque and translucent glass appliqué and is part of the We Are Still Here series. The series incorporates different types of headdresses of the Coast Salish peoples.

The skulls are symbolic of our forefathers and are not meant to be seen as morbid. Instead, they remind us how we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. We walk on their lands and swim in their sea. We are Salish people, bigger than our tribal affiliations and blood quanta. Tribal categories are so small, and most of us are not just from one nation but a mixture from across state lines and national borders.

You said something that resonated with me: “Glass is a medium that will survive millennia and a great way to tell a story to future generations. It is, metaphorically, a contemporary painting on the cave wall.” Do you see glass as a merger of history, material, and archive?

How do we understand our universe with the telescope, the lightbulb, and these screens we are using? Glass is a material that has uncountable uses.

You’re right. It’s funny how ubiquitous glass is in our daily lives but not as prevalent in the art world, though this appears to be changing. The latter point, glassas-archive, stands out because the Burke Museum recently awarded

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“Indigenous people have always used whatever material is available to them.”

above Lummi Lightning Bear, 2018, furnace-sculpted glass, 7¾ × 11 × 3½ in. opposite Sxwo'le Anchor, 2019, hand-blown, hot-sculpted, sandblasted glass; cedar bark rope, 18 × 10 × 8 in. Photo: Ian Lewis.

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you a Bill Holm Center Grant, which offered you access to their large collection of Coast Salish artifacts.

Being able to see my great-great-grandfather Frank Hillaire’s personal artifacts with his name written by his hand is indescribable. It gave me goosebumps.

Working with glass is extremely strenuous, even dangerous. I’ve watched artists work with glass in person and am interested in the performance that takes place in the studio. There is bending, crouching, flameworking, molding, and squatting, which all make up this kind of intense dance with fire. Am I wrong? Is there an element of performance to glass making?

There is not always an audience but there is most definitely a choreography that goes along with it. I liken it to being in

a band; timing and harmony are everything. There is a joke in the industry: What is the difference between a rock star and glassblower? Not all rock stars think they are glassblowers.

I haven’t heard that one, but after working in a commercial glass gallery during graduate school, I get it. Access is a serious issue in glass art. The cost of operating and maintaining a glass studio is, as you know, exorbitant.

What are ways that you’re seeing this change in recent years? How can glassmaking become more accessible to emerging artists, to emerging Indigenous artists?

In 2017 I started the Native glass retreat at the Pilchuck Glass School with Tina Aufiero and my sister Raya. It will be going on into its fifth season this year. I have also recently bought the old netshed

DAN FRIDAY

warehouse on my reservation and plan to build a glass casting studio there, with the intention to make glass more directly accessible to tribal members and students of the Northwest Indian College. Indigenous people have always used whatever material is available to them. The exhibition Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass was curated by Letitia Chambers [and consultant Cathy Short (Citizen Potawatomi)] at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe. It has been well received with multiple printings of the catalogue and will be traveling to a museum near you until 2027.

Where do you see glass art heading in the next 10 to 20 years? Certainly the Netflix show Blown Away has helped to introduce the art form to a wider audience.

I definitely feel like glass has gotten quite a bit of attention lately in both the borosilicate-torch movement1 and the traditional furnace glass approach. The Studio Glass art movement has been glass-blowing-centric. I think there will be a shift to kiln-casting glass as access for everyone will be strained. The rising cost of energy for firing and melting glass, alongside increasing demand on elements and minerals required for the base and colored glass, will present challenges.

What is the most difficult aspect of glass art?

Well, there is the thing … glass breaks!

But I guess it wouldn’t be worth as much if it didn’t?! Besides the obvious overhead and access issues, aches, and pains are real! The better you take care of yourself the better off you are. It is a physically demanding process, with heat also being a factor—makes it very taxing on your body.

What are you reading these days?

What artists are you looking at?

I just finished the book Empire of the Summer Moon, about the Comanche,

Quanah Parker, and Rachel Plummer Parker, and Indian wars of the Great Plains. So fascinating! One of my favorites is Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, who is widely known for his influence of Art Nouveau and early poster art, but lesser known are his oil paintings. He even had a stint with glass and design!

Finally, what projects are you engaged in now? Are you working toward a gallery or museum show?

I recently moved north of Seattle to the Skagit Valley and am working on putting

together a hot shop on the property. I am showing in Port Townsend with my friend Brian Perry [in October].

Thank you for speaking with me, Dan. Hy'shqe for your time, Matt!

Dan Friday will be part of the group exhibition, We Are One, curated by Brian Perry (Port Gamble S'Klallam) at the Jefferson County Historical Society from October 5 to December 31, 2023.

FRIDAYGLASS.COM

1. Borosilicate glass, primarily made from silica and boron trioxide, has a low melting point and is resistant to chemical attack and thermal shock.

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Zapotec Textile Artist

PORFIRIO GUTIÉRREZ

By Staci Golar

I above Untitled from the Continuous Line series, 2020/21, wool tapestry with natural cochineal dyes. All images courtesy of the artist. opposite Porfirio Gutiérrez gathering pericón for dyeing, Oaxaca. Photo: Keith Recker.

MMIGRATION, IDENTITY, AND BORDER POLITICS—these may not be the first things people ponder when they look at Porfirio Gutiérrez’s textiles, but the work wouldn’t exist without this subject matter. What’s perhaps more obvious, even to the most casual viewer, is that the Zapotec artist’s weavings are beautiful in a way that only handmade objects are. The techniques used to construct them have been passed down through centuries and infuse the pieces with a feeling and wisdom that machines can’t replicate. Whether they are created

with customary, eye-dazzling Zapotec designs and patterns or with a more minimal look, they always consist of rich, luscious colors straight from the earth.

They feel durable in their construction, with warps and wefts that transform what once protected sheep from the elements into an object now used by humans for art, décor, or ceremony.

Born in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, a small Zapotec village nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Juárez mountains of Mexico, Porfirio grew up in the local weaving culture. His community is world-renowned for its woven goods, and hundreds of weaving families currently live there. The village has an estimated 2,000 or more looms, and about 75 percent of the population is somehow connected to weaving.1 The town is believed to have been formally established in 1465, making it one of the first in the area to have been founded by the Zapotecs, but the Zapotec practice of weaving goes back much further.2 The looms and wool used today were introduced by the Spanish colonizers.

Before that time, Zapotec weavers used ixtle (agave fiber), animal hair, or cotton and backstrap looms to create most of their textiles. Gutiérrez’s family has been weaving for countless generations through these changes.

Knowing this, it’s no surprise that Porfirio learned to weave when he was a child. His first piece was a backpack he made at age 12 to carry to school. Before that, his parents had taught him about other components of weaving like how to process wool, prep bobbins, and identify plants and insects used to dye wool every color of the rainbow. In The New York Times, Porfirio reminisces about hiking into the mountains above the village with

1. Erica Goode, “In Mexico, Weavers Embrace Natural Alternatives to Toxic Dyes,” The New York Times, September 18, 2017, web.

2. Cayetano Esteva, Geografía histórica del estado de Oaxaca (Oaxaca: Tip. San-Germán Hnos., 1913), 384.

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PORFIRIO GUTIÉRREZ

his family each fall to collect plants. They would gather “pericón, a type of marigold that turned the woolen skeins a buttercream color; jarilla leaves that yielded a fresh green; and tree lichen known as old man’s beard that dyed wool a yellow as pale as straw.”3 What might be a surprise, especially since Porfirio has made revitalizing and preserving Zapotec weaving and natural dyeing his life’s work, is that when he first started weaving, he didn’t like it. While he had grown up immersed in a culture that held deep respect for the art form, he could feel that it was being driven by the expectations of an outside market, and that held little interest for him or his imagination.

I was born and raised in an environment with such deep creativity … as well as the worldview and the understanding about the sacredness and divineness of nature, the overall worldview of the Zapotec people.

I grew up with those values and understandings but especially the creativity. There are so many ways I could describe that creativity—how Zapotecs engage with material and nature and so on. But when I was born, I was actually born into an environment where our ‘tradition’ had already been standardized by tourism and wholesale dealers and designers in my community in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The standardization of tradition—and what I’m referring to is what are now known as our Zapotec rugs— became completely driven and shaped by tourism and the interests of a market.4 Before the disruption by outside forces, weaving had met the needs of the Indigenous people in the communities of Oaxaca who made and traded objects like rugs, clothing, wraps, and other utilitarian items. They had creative control of their work. What they produced wasn’t dictated by orders coming from wholesalers who, especially in the 1970s, asked artists to create the same rug with the same design and color for the same price to customers ordering them from catalogues thousands of miles away.

American dealers—and possibly Peace

Corps volunteers—had brought Navajo designs to the community, asking the Zapotec weavers to replicate them due to the demand for “Southwestern style” home goods in the United States. Not only did this appropriation undercut Navajo weavers’ livelihoods in the states, but it also exploited the labor of the weavers in Teotitlán del Valle who were not paid as well. The negative effects of this are still felt by both Native communities. Porfirio says of when he first learned weaving: “I was always interested in learning and doing things with my hands. Getting on the loom and learning the integrity of that process and seeing the quality of work was amazing, but the minute after that, it became extremely boring for me. I absolutely didn’t like weaving at all because now I was working under the rules of these people.”

The same market forces that contributed to his lack of interest in

weaving ultimately lured him to the United States. With the promise of economic opportunity that would allow him to send money back to his family, Porfirio decided to leave Mexico at the age of 18. He wasn’t the only one. He remembers that almost everyone his age immigrated to the United States. “At least for me, someone born and raised in a family with very, very little, I never saw opportunity in the village.” Porfirio now believes that this is a direct result of the outside influence on creative economy in Teotitlán del Valle. “The standardization [of the weaving] freezes creativity and steals our right of imagination and dreaming. It inspires immigration. It is why I am in the United States.”

Porfirio landed in Ventura, California, after he left Mexico and worked his way up through jobs as a cook, cashier, and then manager at a fast food restaurant. He also drove a concrete truck

3. Erica Goode, “In Mexico,” web.

4. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from Porfirio Gutiérrez in discussion with the author, June 8, 2023.

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PROFILE

Porfirio explains, “When these new markets shifted to a much more Western focus, this is also when the last few families using natural dyes would be wiped out.” He adds, “Teotitlán del Valle is an area so well known for its rich culture.

People go there for a certain reason. But that industry has shaped the community in a way I’m not sure my ancestors would be proud of.” In other words, the area is beloved for its Indigenous art and way of life, but pull back the curtain and one sees that so much of the work is being churned out and cheapened due to Western demands. “So, my whole thing is how to revitalize not just the natural dyes but the memory of the ancestors and the integrity of the work they did,” Porfirio says. “I’m just someone who has been able to listen to and connect to this information and create something that has integrity that can speak to the ancestors.” for a construction company before overseeing one of the company’s plants. Along the way, he became fluent in English, married, started a family, secured US citizenship, and, about ten years after leaving Oaxaca, had the chance to return. The visit would prove to be a turning point in his life and career.

HOMECOMING IT WASN’T JUST THAT ABSENCE had given Porfirio a renewed appreciation for the ceremonies, food, language, and other facets of his culture, it was that he could also see, with fresh eyes, the threats to all of these things. “In a way, I gained independence from the market in Oaxaca by going to the US,” Porfirio recalls, “so when I went back to visit my community, I started to recognize the beauty of the arts we do, but I was also very concerned about the romanticization and ‘folkloricization’ of Indigenous people to tourists and visitors. There’s so much more the world could learn about us through, say, the science and chemistry of creating color, but the world doesn’t learn any of that because they just see a beautiful lady making all these beautiful things, and they just buy it without knowing more, even today.”

Another concern was one already mentioned: how most of the families in 68 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

the village, including his own, relied upon intermediaries to sell their work since otherwise they would have no access to those markets. Because of this, the middlemen held the power. Beyond the issues of unfair pricing and taking advantage of weavers who rely on those buyers for income, there is also a vicious cycle that the commodification of Zapotec weaving has created. The buyer’s need for consistent, more quickly made, production-style pieces has caused an increase in the use of chemical dyes in the village.

The chemical dyes then threaten the natural resources of the community by polluting water and soil and potentially harm the artists who use the chemicals to color their wool.

While Porfirio’s family isn’t the only one in the village dedicated to using natural dyes, he estimates that about 95 percent of the natural dye demonstrations a tourist might see while visiting Teotitlán del Valle misrepresent studio practices behind the scenes. Once the tourists leave, the majority of the weavers turn to the chemical dyes. It’s a challenging, complex situation because many weavers are simply trying to survive in response to a demand that has been created, and they don’t want to be slowed down by the natural dye process. Tragically, others no longer possess the knowledge it takes to utilize plant and insect dyes.

CONTINUUM INDEED, Porfirio has become a cultural ambassador of sorts, working tirelessly to educate others about his culture and art form. It’s a role he seems made for with his friendly demeanor, sincere concern about his ancestral community, and impressive business acumen. While he’s quite savvy about getting his message out there, it feels rooted in thoughtfulness and gratitude instead of exploiting indigeneity to woo the unfamiliar. His dedication is paying off. He was a 2015 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, and his work can be found in the collections of the Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares and Fomento Cultural Citibanamex, both in Mexico City; the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Indian in the US, and many others. A selection of dye materials from the Gutiérrez family has even been added to Harvard Art Museums’ Forbes Pigment Collection, a world-renowned archive of some 2,700 pigments from around the world.

Much of Porfirio’s time involves travel. In the past he’s gone to Seoul, Korea; Washington, DC; Kokand, Uzbekistan, and many places in between, to give lectures, visit collections, sell work at markets, and teach dye and weaving classes. In June he taught a cochineal dye workshop at the Harvard Art Museums in Massachusetts. There he educated

PORFIRIO GUTIÉRREZ

participants about the cultural and spiritual significance of the color red (the color the cochineal insect produces) in the Zapotec community. Then he guided students through the entire process, from using a mordant to preparing a pericón under-dye to learning to control the end color by altering acidity.5 When travel slowed to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Porfirio took the time to establish a Ventura-based studio and start work he hadn’t otherwise had time to bring to fruition. Having a studio space in California, in addition to the one in Mexico, has been a way to further stake claim to his binational existence and remind his critics that Indigenous people have migrated on this land for millennia (some have questioned the “authenticity” of the work if it’s made in California). Ventura is about 2,000 miles away from Teotitlán del Valle, yet he can find yagshī (Baccharis salicifolia, also called mule-fat or seepwillow), carrizo cane (Arundo donax), and other plants there that he learned to harvest in Mexico.

Fans and followers are often shocked to hear this. He’s had studio visitors in California ask him how he moved all of the cactus paddles (used to harvest cochineal) from Mexico to Ventura, totally unaware that the cactus also grows there. “So, this is also home,” Porfirio says. “Nature tells Indigenous people when we’re home.”

Continuous Line is one of Porfirio’s pandemic-era series that builds on this dialogue around the perception of borders. Named after the drawing technique where a single, unbroken line is used to create an image, it comments on viewing the Americas as “one home and one land where traditions and knowledge have been endured for thousands of years.”6 Porfirio expounds on this idea: “When I think about our culture, and in this case the art, it lives within us, the people who carry this tradition. Our head is our house, essentially. It is not something that we could leave behind. It’s not something we left on the other side of the fence when we jumped over. Tradition is carried and flows through us.”

The textiles in the series are somewhat minimalist and graphically bold. Some pieces evoke cityscapes of

skyscrapers; others look like magnified elements of Zapotec designs. Embroidered components accentuate the geometric nature of the work. Porfirio points out that he intentionally framed the textiles like paintings to present them more like a Western concept of fine art.

“The idea is to continue to ask questions.

Society has created these frames as a country and confined us in one space, but it’s also framing the perception of Indigenous people’s work. Is it art? Is it

above Porfirio Gutiérrez with Untitled from the Fragment series, 2019, wool, natural dyes.

Photo: Soraya Matos Photography, San Francisco. opposite Untitled, from the Continuous Line series, 2021, wool tapestry with natural dye, 40¾ × 51 in.

5. “Materials Lab Workshop: Exploring Traditional Zapotec Cochineal Dyeing with Porfirio Gutiérrez,” Harvard Art Museums, 2023, web.

6. “Selected Work: Continuous Line,” Porfirio Gutiérrez, web.

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something ceremonial? Or is it something we use every day?” The Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation exhibited the complete body of work in Porfirio Gutiérrez: Continuous Line, Linea Continua in 2021.

Another series born during the pandemic is Diaspora. It emphasizes freedom to move on the land and references the monarch butterfly, known for its north– south migrations from Canada to Mexico and back. As Porfirio notes, “The butterflies do this for survival; the border is obsolete.” The metaphor to most Mexican immigrants’ circumstances is clear. Porfirio created the pieces in Diaspora in a different manner than his other work.

Starting with a white, woven wool “canvas,” he dyed the cloth as opposed to weaving a predetermined design using colored yarn. The Zapotec symbol for a butterfly was then needle-felted in wool all over the cloth. The result is visually stunning as the dye process adds depth and an ombré effect under hundreds of triangle points. These easily conjure up a swarm of butterflies moving through the atmosphere.

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MIGRATION, CONNECTION & HEALING LIKE THE MONARCH BUTTERFLIES, Porfirio regularly makes the north–south trek. When he heads south, it’s usually to visit his parents, Amado Gutiérrez and Andrea Contreras, his sister Juana Gutiérrez Contreras, a dye master, Juana’s husband, Antonio Lazo Hernandez, a master weaver who helps develop the textile designs, and dozens of others in his extended family, all Zapotec, who are key to supporting the Gutiérrez livelihood and legacy. As Porfirio points out, “A 29-by-34[-inch] weaving takes around 500 to 600 hours, and around 10 to 13 people will touch the piece before it’s done.” It’s an art form that takes an entire community, a community Porfirio feels lucky to be part of.

In the north, Porfirio has made connections with Native American artists in the United States and mentions friendships with people like painter

Tony Abeyta (Navajo) and interdisciplinary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota). “It’s been a blessing for me to connect with the Indigenous people who have stayed on this side of the fence,” he says. “We have been disconnected from one another for a long time.” Porfirio is also grateful to have been able to work with Navajo weavers and feels the conversations with them are ones born out of necessity. “Our relationship has been damaged due to the mass producing of Navajo designs in my village,” Porfirio explains. “This is a huge topic, and I was able to spend some time with [Navajo weaver] Barbara Teller Ornelas in conversation but also in an exercise of co-creating a piece that is now in the Arizona State Museum collection where we were able to discuss it.”

The Arizona State Museum’s Honoring Traditions: Connecting Indigenous Master and Emerging Artists Across Cultures and Museums project brought him and Barbara together to mentor three emerging Indigenous artists on natural dyeing and weaving. The group traveled

PORFIRIO GUTIÉRREZ

to Oaxaca and the Navajo Nation. It granted Porfirio and Barbara time to peel back the layers of the issue.

Porfirio admits: “I’ve asked myself, How do I address this thing? because I don’t even know.” Porfirio was at a trunk show in Arizona when a Navajo elder approached, obviously angry. “I’m sure it was hard for the Navajo gentlemen to even look at us. It was probably like, ‘Be careful, we know what those guys are doing.’” Nonetheless, he hopes these conversations will help heal the issue. In a way, they already have. Barbara Teller Ornelas in Weaving Has a Heartbeat, the exhibition portion of the Honoring Traditions project, states: I was taught not to like the Mexican weavers because they copy us, take from us.… But now I have a better understanding of the mentality of why they did what they did. They needed to feed their families, and they were responding to people telling them to weave in a certain way for the market. They weren’t thinking that maybe they were encroaching on someone else’s designs. Lynda and I had long talks about how meaningful the trip was. I felt at home in Porfirio’s homeland. There is something about Teotitlán del Valle that reminded me of our home. Porfirio and his family were willing to open their minds and their hearts to the people who were visiting so we could understand their works and lives.7 In a social media post about the same project, Porfirio wrote: “I’m often reminded that I’m an immigrant in this country, but being here in the Navajo Nation is being at home with my Native American relatives. At times I even forgot that I was in the United States.

We are connected through our land and our traditional practices. Today’s society must not forget this land known as the Americas, where many of you are living now, is sacred to us. We are still here fighting to preserve our traditional knowledge and sovereignty.”

In the same post, Porfirio closed with a thought by Salvadoreño spiritual leader and activist Adrián Esquino Lisco (Nahua, 1938–2007) that seems apropos not only to his Honoring Traditions experience but also to his life story: “‘They may cut down our sacred tree. But they forgot to destroy the roots. And now the roots are blossoming.’”8

PORFIRIOGUTIERREZ.COM

above Untitled from the Diaspora series, 2022, wool, cochineal dye, tapestry on treadle loom, resist dye, needle felting, 72 × 47¼ in.

Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Three finished rugs at Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, 2022. Photo: Nikhol Esteras, Oaxaca.

7. “Oaxaca Excursion,” Weaving has a Heartbeat, Arizona State Museum, June 1, 2023, web.

8. Porfirio Gutiérrez, “The United States and Mexico border was established by the colonizers through the 1819 Adams–Onís Treaty between the United States and Spain,” Facebook post, October 5, 2022, web.

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SPOTLIGHT Charlene Holy Bear (Standing Rock Sioux), Jingle Dress Dancer, 2010

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AKOTA ARTIST Charlene Holy Bear’s Jingle Dress Dancer (2010), a mixed-media doll in the Albuquerque Museum’s permanent collection, embodies Indigenous women transferring knowledge across generations. The female figure reflects the significance of passing the jingle dress dance on to fellow Indigenous women.

Origins of this healing dance are kept in community. Popular accounts often tell of a medicine man—possibly from the Mille Lacs Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe or the Whitefish Bay First Nation in Ontario—who wanted to heal his sick daughter and received a vision of four women dancing in jingle dresses.1 At least by 1905 Ojibway women in Ontario wore jingle dresses.2 Women carried the dance on to neighboring tribes, which began as one for wellness purposes. Women jingle danced during the global influenza pandemic of 1918–19203 and the 1921 United States government’s ban on Native American ceremonial dancing. Nevertheless, the jingle dress dance continued to be performed regionally. In the late 1960s women danced it at powwows, and in the 1970s the jingle dress dance became a competitive powwow classification.

opposite Charlene Holy Bear (Standing Rock Sioux Tribe), Jingle Dress Dancer, 2010, glass beads, fabric, hide, ribbons, aluminum, wire, wood, ceramic, feather, abalone, buckskin, 19½ × 11 × 10 in., collection of the Albuquerque Museum, PC2022.44.187, gift of the Estate of Ruth and Sidney Schultz.

Photo: Christopher Bratton.

Image courtesy of the Albuquerque Museum.

With male drummers and singers leading the songs, women jingle dress dancers perform in groups and create a dual rhythm between their feet and their dresses with numerous copper, tin, or aluminum jingles that make a rain-like sound. In contemporary jingle dress dancing, women may cross step, as demonstrated by the communicated motion in this doll.

The brightly colored and heavily adorned dress also emphasizes the contemporary context of this dancer. Rows of metallic-colored ribbons, sequins, cordage, and hand-rolled aluminum jingles overlay the soft purple fabric and complement the doll’s abalone earrings and white hair feather. Holy Bear made the head and arms of cellulose clay and the body she constructed by wrapping buckskin around wire.

For this artwork, Holy Bear studied Chippewa jingle dress styles and filtered her research through her own design sensibilities. She spent three years making this doll with the highest quality materials and implementation. The doll’s beadwork adornments convey several cultural influences. The hair ties and the inside panel of the fan feature patterns and colors based on parfleche paintings and the Art Deco style. The outer panel of the fan showcases an adaptation of an Egyptian lotus flower design.4 Holy B e ar’s indiv idu a lize d approach to each doll she makes parallels the unique identity she infuses into each of them. She later made a doll similar to this one in 2013, but they differ in one main way: the 2010 figure has a beaded belt while her 2013 sister wears a concha belt. They are related but not identical.

The artist learned how to make dolls by age five. She entered her first SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market in 1986 and won a

second-place youth award. Her older sister and adoptive guardian, Rhonda Holy Bear (Standing Rock Sioux Tribe), taught her the art form. Over the years Charlene established her own style distinct from her sister’s. She champions the power of Native women’s art forms and is known for her Northern Plains floral beadwork designs. She attended the University of New Mexico and vastly broadened her knowledge of world arts through her studies in fine art and art history.

Through her work, Holy Bear increases the visibility and awareness of Native women artists and the ever-expanding possibilities for new approaches to doll making and beadwork. She does this through participating in Santa Fe Indian Market, where she won a Best of Classification award for Jingle Dress Dancer in 2010. Vogue recently featured her geometric beadwork designs appliquéd to slip-on Vans sneakers—an idea that arose when she wanted to make a pair of beaded shoes for her son to wear to the Gathering of Nations powwow.

Holy Bear continues the legacy of Native women’s leadership in art-making practices. She provides an example for female Native artists looking to enter the field, some of whom continue to produce their own jingles from metal snuff-can lids since the demand exceeds supply. At the core of her practice, Holy Bear’s commitment to a successful art business coupled with her relationships with collectors allows her to take care of her son. The previous owners of this doll, Sidney Schultz (1921–2022) and Ruth Schultz (1923–2019) of Albuquerque, New Mexico, supported the work of contemporary Native artists for more than 50 years and formed many deep friendships with the artists. Their memories are honored. —Michelle J. Lanteri, PhD

1. Irmgard Stegner, “The History, Symbolism, Spirituality, and Transformation of the Jingle Dress and Dance of the North-Eastern Woodland Indians” (master’s thesis, Carleton University, 2008), 54–55.

2. Stegner, “Jingle Dress and Dance,” 65–66, 89. One of the earliest known photographs of a jingle dress is of an Ojibway woman in Ontario, ca. 1905.

3. Mark G. Thiel, “Origins of the Jingle Dress Dance,” Whispering Wind 36, No. 5, Marquette University e-Publications (January 1, 2007), 16, web.

4. Georgina Badoni, “Visual Expressions of Native Womanhood: Acknowledging the Past, Present, and Future” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2017), 110–11.

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above Bill Harris (Catawba), Kučin ʔɛtwas (Raven Bowl), 2015, pit-fired earthenware, collection of the University of South Carolina, Lancaster.

Photo: Mandy Catoe.

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Resurgence and Renaissance: Art of the Catawba Nation Since 1973 Columbia Museum of Art

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HE ART OF THE CATAWBA Indian Nation was on display at the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina for twelve weeks this past summer. The exhibition, Resurgence and Renaissance, was a 50th-anniversary show of a 1973 Columbia Museum of Art (CMA) exhibition. The recent exhibition looked at

some of the finest Catawba artists over the past half century. Eighty-five pieces of pottery, basketry, beadwork, quilts, photography, and digital art were displayed.

Resurgence and Renaissance centered around pottery. The Catawba Nation has preserved their ancestral pottery legacy and continues to express their creativity in both historical and current ways. For thousands of years, Catawbas have been shaping vessels from clay harvested from the banks of the Catawba River where it divides the South Carolina counties of York and Lancaster near the North Carolina state line.

At the entrance on the title wall, Catawba artist Alex Osborn created a digital portrait of Chief Nophekhi, (Catawba, ca. 1700–1763), a warrior more commonly known outside the nation as King Hagler. The clay-colored tones of the portrait honored the Catawbas’ long history of making pots and vessels.

Osborn said he intended to “combine traditional pottery elements with more realistic human features to create a relatable but impactful design for gallery visitors.” His use of charcoal-mimicking textures paid homage to the ancient firing technique used in making pottery.

The first display case of ceramics featured the potters from the 1973 exhibition, Catawba Indian Trade Pottery of the Historic Period, a show curated by Steve Baker, a graduate student from the University of South Carolina who feared Catawba pottery was dying out.

He exhibited the work of four Catawba potters: Sara Ayers (1919–2002), Doris Blue (1905–1985), Georgia Harris (1905– 1997), and Arzada Sanders (1896–1989).

This first known exhibition of Catawba pottery as art generated demand for the pottery and a new urgency to teach the younger Catawbas how to work and shape the clay.

Former Catawba Nation Chief Bill Harris, grandson of Georgia Harris, notes that for more than 4,000 years there has never been a Catawba generation that did not practice pottery. He teaches the art form and still uses the tools handed down to him from his grandmother. Display cases, grouped by pottery style, use, or maker, were surrounded by blue-painted walls symbolizing the river.

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Catawbas only teach tribal members the craft of pottery. A dual lineage chart on the wall illustrated the matrilineal descent and teacher-apprentice lineage of the potters. For the past 450 years, all ceramics have been made from clay that comes from a single vein on the banks of the Catawba River. Only Catawbas know the location. Clay is often harvested in spring, cured and shaped in summer, and placed in firepits in the fall. It can take months for pottery to go from a lump of clay to a finished piece. The pottery is hand formed and pit fired. Their surfaces are incised with corncobs and everyday objects like fork tines. Before being placed in the fire pit, potters burnish the pieces to a glossy shine with river rocks or deer antlers. The color of the fired pots is a combination of minerals in the clay, the type of wood used, and chance.

The Catawbas call themselves Yè Iswà, meaning “the people of the river.” The Catawba Indian Nation is the only federally recognized tribe in South Carolina, and they have lived along the Catawba River for millennia.

Their ancestral lands once covered the Piedmont areas of the Carolinas and part of Virginia. Settler-colonialists chipped away at their land, and war and disease reduced their numbers from a peak of about 20,000 in 1540 to less than 1,000 in 1760. Current Catawba enrollment is a little more than 3,700.

Symbols important to the Catawba figured prominently throughout the exhibition, including the black snake, which represents power and protection. Labels were written in both English and Catawba.

Osborn, a photographer and digital artist, wants people to know that the Catawbas are still present and making art.

Five of his photos hung on the blue wall.

“Each photo documents the existence of our people,” he said. “These people came before us and guided us in our creativity and they each have a unique impact on what our tribe looks like.”

The five Catawba Elders portrayed, Keith Brown, Caroleen Sanders, Beckee Garris, Faye Greiner, and Monty Branham, have all been artists in residence at the Native American Studies Center in Lancaster, South Carolina,

and their art was included in the CMA exhibition.

The Columbia Museum of Art, University of South Carolina Lancaster, Native American Studies Center (NASC), and the Catawba Cultural Center collaborated on this exhibition. The display was about reclamation as much as it was about renaissance and resurgence. Jackie Adams, CMA director of art and learning, said she wanted to allow the Catawba Nation to tell their story.

“From the show text to the exhibition graphics, plus the layout and object selection, we wanted to make sure Catawba language, folklore, kinship, tradition, and innovation from Catawba individuals was infused,” Adams said.

“It was important we work with the Catawbas to present a holistic, culturally centered exhibition.” This was accomplished by working with artists Osborn and Beckee Garris, NASC curators Sharon Simmers-Norton and Brittany Taylor-Driggers, and fellow citizens of the Catawba Nation.

The exhibition hosted related lectures to offer a deeper understanding of the tribe. Catawba citizen and University of Tennessee professor, Dr. Brooke Bauer, took part in an hour-long conversation about her book, Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and NationBuilding, 1540–1840. “My staff and I spent a good amount of time exploring Catawba culture, heritage, history, and its people,” Adams said. “Bauer’s book pulled it all together historically and gave a deeper context for what we were learning.”

Dr. Bauer said she is excited to see a museum focus on the Catawba cultural and material arts. “There are still so many people who have not heard of the Catawba Nation, even in South Carolina,” she said.

“This exhibition highlights not only the long history of Catawba pottery but also the diversity of Catawba-made art.”

Feedback indicated that museum visitors were moved by the impact of colonialism and its continued effect on tribal nations. “People are empathetic to this history, which helps give a deeper meaning to the ideas and practices of reclamation,” Adams said.

—Mandy Catoe

JUNEAU

Visceral: Verity Legacy Identity Alaska State Museum

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HIS THREE-PART exhibition features “Alaska Native Gut Knowledge and Perseverance” as conduits for connection and protection in three galleries within the territory Áak'w Kwáan on view through mid-October 2023. Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Athabascan/Inupiaq), an Anchorage-based curator and persistent artist-advocate teamed with conservator Ellen Carrlee to co-curate Kelliher-Combs’s installations as well as historic works by Inupiaq, St. Lawrence Island Yupik, Yup'ik, Cup'ik/Cup'ig, Unangan/Unangas, Sugpiaq/Alutiiq, Athabascan, Eyak, and Łingít artists.

Mixed-media expressions from the land and sea are united across space and time.

Born in 1969 in Mamterilleq (Bethel), Kelliher-Combs grew up in Sitŋasuaq (Nome). She has Athabascan family from Noolaaghe Doh (Nulato) on the Yukon River in Interior Alaska and Inupiaq family from Utqiaġvik on the North Slope. Her curatorial approach and hybrid art come from her rural roots and formal studies. At the University of Alaska Fairbanks Native Arts Center, she studied with Ron Senungetuk (Inupiaq,1933–2020). The trilogy of exhibits is guided by and infused with Kelliher-Combs’s sensibilities and communal vision guides: Verity, a solo exhibition of Kelliher-Combs’s work; Legacy, Kelliher-Combs’s and historic works; and Identity, historical Alaska Native artworks.

Visceral: Verity opened first on March 3, 2023. Visual and textual voices are gathered to evoke connection and community. Works join accelerating efforts underway across Alaska—and beyond—to address intergenerational trauma still commonly unspoken or silenced. Kelliher-Combs seeks to reach past uncertainty toward a return to openness, balance, trust, and renewed interest in creating with material provided by the land and sea.

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Credible, Alaska (2022–23) extends Kelliher-Combs’s Credible series begun in 2005 to explore sexual violence, betrayal, pain, and shame perpetuated by the Roman Catholic Church. In this installation, an enlarged and flattened celestial view of Alaska is bordered by a thick black (robe) line. Textual scatter-plot overlays project onto the map. White text fans out like explosions of invasive dandelion fluff to both reveal and obscure names, years, and 35 locations where Catholic clergy and laypersons are “credibly accused … of sexual abuse.” ProPublica published accusations naming numerous church workers.1 Overlapped and splayed textual arrays catalogue a stark inventory that powerfully chronicles perpetrators known to have committed reoccurring acts of sexual violence. This escalating crisis spread across nearly four generations under the auspices of the reticent and wrong-footed Catholic Church. The incisive video and painting installation broadcasts troublesome details but offers a way to comprehend the enormity of this situation. Validated complaints span from 1926 through 2005.

Credible II (2022), a two-wall, threeby-twelve grid installation, features 35 closeup topographic views of local land and waterways. Paper maps on birch

panels are encased in translucent polymer and pierced with human hair. Thick red iconic dot-and-circle motifs center black patterns that appear as a spray of darkening splotches from afar. Blighted works could be read as effects on people and each place where sexual violence is publicly acknowledged. A blank center in the installation space recognizes unreported and silenced complaints.

Credible, Small Secrets (2007–23) is a probing series of sometimes transparent and opaque, dyed, or glossy winter white vessels, sometimes phallic, elongated, squat, conical, walrus-tusked, or ovalshaped. Each daring pouch variation is wide-mouthed, with interrupted tops cut flat straight across. These potent, empty vessels, reminiscent of customary Indigenous art forms, are made from natural and synthetic membranes including cleaned gutskin, printed cotton maps, polymers, and caribou and sheep rawhide. The pouches are unadorned or precisely embellished with human hair, glass beads, and regularly and sometimes loosely stitched nylon thread and fibers.

This provocative installation illuminates and evokes relentless complexities familiar in 355 communities across Alaska where trauma from sexual violence and invasion linger, largely unchecked.

above Detail of Legacy: Resilience, installation by Sonya Kelliher Combs (Athabascan/Inupiaq) of historical gutskin pouches and plastic rosaries, part of Visceral: Legacy, Alaska State Museum, Juneau.

The series with 71 pouches in five lines stretches out along shadowy, horizontal rows. These cocoons transverse a sharp corner. Their eye-level placement offers frontal and panoramic viewing. Hung from T-pins, they seemingly float and cast echoing shadows, juxtaposed against sterile walls wiped clean. The enormity of these carefully paced, intimate, and ambiguous vessels—filled with nothingness—is not easy to evade.

Credible, Small Secrets radiates from the margins of a far corner and are situated kitty-corner from the 35-part Credible II, suggesting an exponential hyperobject nature of credible events.

Together they visually and spatially record a muffled yet resounding run of difficult patterns of irregularity.

Credible, Idiot Strings (2022) extends a six-part Idiot Strings series, inspired by the suicides of several of the artist’s male relatives. The series pays homage to victims and seeks to divulge and therefore dissipate grief.

Emboldened texts raise awareness of the tragedy of suicide within families across 35 communities where credible claims of violence are acknowledged. Forty empty pouches, composed of 35 US Geological Survey maps printed on vintage fabric, hang among five blankly white idiot strings representing all other claims.

Each pouch is tethered to monofilament coiled around steel wire. They dangle from above, stiffly suspended, and cast intersecting shadows: bodiless avatars of enduring collective pain as a gaggle of gut garment sentinels keep watch in the distances.

The second exhibition, Visceral: Legacy, highlights historical artworks echoing themes of Visceral: Verity. The installation Legacy: Resilience features 35 historic Indigenous gutskin storage vessels from mid-19th century to mid-20th century. They contain an array of cheap factory-stamped red, white, purple, pink, green, and yellow plastic rosaries. Heaps of 59 ritual prayer beads with crucifix centerpieces spill out as representations of the life of Jesus transformed into repeated pleas to quell angst across generations. The seventh of 36 spaces in the installation—a translucent,

1. Ellis Simani and Ken Schwencke with Katie Zavadski and Lexi Churchill, “Credibly Accused,” ProPublica, January 28, 2020, web.

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overflowing, white plastic form—is lit from below to draw attention to those who suffer Catholic atrocities in silence.

Legacy: Perseverance highlights 30 immaculately conceived utilitarian expressions of intricate and sheltered domesticity that exude beauty, provision, sustenance, and sharing. Legacy: Transcend celebrates continued connections despite colonization, with 13 distinct gutskin parka masterpieces gathered with respect and for reflection.

Visceral: Identity introduces a broad survey of English texts explaining cultural and technical aspects of various gut designs and compositions. Archival images display sophisticated world-class garments designed, created, and worn by Alaska Natives across time and space.

Identity is the final exhibition.

Identity: Innovation focuses on exquisite gutskin parkas. Identity: Knowledge highlights seams and protective, reinforcing, and embellished stitchery techniques and showcases 19 utilitarian objects. Text touches on the seasonality of harvesting, the necessity of collaborative approaches, and steps of processing and cleanup.

Embedded symbolism, foodways, use of natural and commercial materials, and their care, shaping, and repair are suggested. Identity: Expressions displays 21 stunning and innovative masterworks of gutskin sewing.

Kelliher-Combs, whose bodies of work have long explored themes of secrets and persistence, made a mid-August trip this year to the National Nordic Museum in Seattle for the opening of Arctic Highways. There she said it took her two decades to be able to speak openly about trauma: “It is hard to talk about the trauma our communities, families, and ancestors have been through without consequences. I don’t know a single person who has not been touched by the loss of a loved one as a result of trauma.”

She continued: “Whether it was inflicted yesterday or 100 years ago, it is still there, like a scab that won’t heal, reopening with every additional trauma.

My dream and desire [are] for collective healing.” This exhibition—like its cocurators—invites unforgetting.

—Alice Rose Crow, Maar'aq (Yup'ik)

above Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish/Métis/Shoshone), Trade Canoe: Don Quixote in Sumeria, 2005, oil on four canvases, 60 × 200 in.

NEW YORK

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map Whitney Museum of American Art

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HE FIRST SOLO SHOW of an Indigenous woman’s artwork in one of the country’s most prestigious institutions is long overdue.1 And it has occurred at a critical moment when historical truths are being whitewashed by (white) legislators who promote fanciful interpretations and outright denials of systemic racism and genocide. The latest efforts to erase and romanticize US history make the works in Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map more timely and urgent than ever.

This watershed exhibition, curated

by Laura Phipps with assistance from Caitlin Chaisson, has received more attention from mainstream media outlets than many others this year (even Wangechi Mutu’s mind-blowing Intertwined at the New Museum) precisely because it sets so many precedents.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish/ Métis/Shoshone) has granted interviews to major broadcasters whose coverage does not always include contemporary art. For the most part, these introductions reflect a growing public awareness of living Indigenous people and their histories, but they also remain introductions to a matriarch whose lifelong work has laid the foundations for so many artists’ careers.

The retrospective is spread out over an entire floor and spills out onto other levels of the Whitney Museum. Ongoing thematic series have become icons of her career, such as I See Red, canoes, flags, horses, dresses, and maps. The artist utilizes these images to critique historical and current events. Several began as a response to quincentenary celebrations of Christopher Columbus’s arrival to the Americas in 1492. Trade Canoe: Don Quixote in Sumeria (2005) depicts a vessel floating in a sea of blood filled with symbols of death. Though this piece was prompted by the American invasion of Iraq, Quick-to-See Smith laments the recurrence of wars and violence, which makes her commentary painfully relevant year after year.

The series Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World (1991) presents the Plenty Horses family: Ken, Barbie, and Bruce as cut-outs with a selection of different outfits, including Matching Small Pox Suits for All Indian Families After US Gov’t Sent Wagon Loads of Smallpox Infested Blankets to Keep Our Families Warm and Maid’s Uniform For Cleaning Houses of White People After Good Education at Jesuit School. Since the United States has never had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission like South Africa or Canada, the atrocities of residential schools remain largely unacknowledged in mainstream America.

Another motif Smith frequently uses is Mickey Mouse. Like other artists, such as Enrique Chagoya and Roger Shimomura, she appropriates the cute rodent and other Disney characters as a stand-in

1. The Whitney’s first solo exhibition of an Indigenous American artist was Alan Michelson: Wolf Nation (2019–20).

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above Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish/Métis/Shoshone), Indian Madonna Enthroned, 1974, mixed-media installation, 52 × 34 × 20 in., collection of the artist, courtesy Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, fabricated by Andy Ambrose. ©Jaune Quickto-See Smith. Photograph: Neal Ambrose-Smith (Salish/Métis/ Shoshone descent).

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for American capitalism and cultural imperialism. McFlag (1996) joins this reference within a flag, wryly pointing to both nationalism and American artist Jasper Johns.

Her maps are another play on Johns. While his aims were less political, hers underscore the irony and ambiguity of boundaries, place names, news headlines, advertisements, and racial categories. State Names Map I (2000) prompts one to imagine alternative names of so-called “Washington” and “Florida” in locally derived languages. Memory Map (2000) suggests winter counts and locations of petroglyphs from coast to coast. Fifty Shades of Brown (2017–18) simultaneously pokes fun at Linnaean taxonomy, extremist nightmares of

shifting demographics, and sexual prowess. Brilliant.

Perhaps most exciting to viewers familiar with the artist’s oeuvre are relatively unknown works, especially works on paper and collaborations with her son, artist Neal Ambrose-Smith (Salish/Métis/ Shoshone descent). A charcoal self-portrait on blue paper from 1974 shows a young Smith seated yet in motion, her arms in three positions, a spider woman wearing a blue and yellow plaid shirt over a pink sweater.

The same year Smith created Indian Madonna Enthroned, a life-size sculpture of a female figure seated in a chair adorned with signs of colonial control and Indigenous resilience. A US flag drapes across her legs while her feathered hands hold a copy of God Is Red (1973), the manifesto by Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Dakota, 1933–2005).

The chair is marked property of BIA, but she wears her pride in the form of many beaded necklaces and floral beaded moccasins.

While Smith is best known for two-dimensional work, Memory Map makes clear that her sculptures are not anomalies. She made Warrior for the 21st Century (1999) with Neal AmbroseSmith and maintains the tongue-in-cheek humor of Indian Madonna Enthroned.

This kinetic figure dances by the action of a gear and comes equipped with essentials such as fry bread, sweetgrass, and a snag bag. Revealing mastery of yet another medium, Urban Trickster (2021) is a cast bronze bust of a mischievously smiling coyote.

With vibrant colors, caustic humor, and grace, Smith unapologetically confronts American racism and global climate change. Governors, your efforts to censor history and science are futile against Jaune’s truth telling.

Memory Map closed at the Whitney on August 13, 2023. The exhibition will travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Seattle Art Museum.

A richly illustrated, full-color catalogue with essays by diverse scholars is available from Yale University Press. Select texts, as well as an audio guide, are also accessible on the Whitney’s website.

—Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

REVIEWS

ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI

Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1940s–1970s SAINT LOUIS ART MUSEUM

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HIS STORY MIGHT BE FAMILIAR: In 1941 Jackson Pollock stepped into the Museum of Modern Art to see Charley Turquoise (Diné, ca. 1868–1960) and Dinay Chilli Bitsoey (Diné, ca. 1913– unknown)1 creating a sandpainting on the gallery floor. After several subsequent visits, Pollock placed his canvas on the floor, dripped paint from above, and became the face of Abstract Expressionism, hailed by critics as American rather than European. Pollock was not alone: Barnett Newman looked to Northwest Coast art as source material for a modernism that could transcend social difference. Mark Rothko, interested in Native religions, attended Hopi and Pueblo dances before developing his distinctive abstract composition.

Histories of Native art twist around the canon of modern abstraction; yet many Native artists who actively participated in the movement—and expanded upon it— have only recently been acknowledged by mainstream art institutions.

Action/Abstraction Redefined, at the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) through September 3, 2023, was the first major traveling exhibition to explore the complex history of mid-20th-century Native abstraction. “The exhibition expands the narratives of abstract studio art in the US in the decades following WWII,” Alexander Brier Marr, associate curator of Native American art, stated. “It demonstrates how Indigenous artists participated in national movements and styles by bringing their own artistic heritage to bear on vocabularies of abstraction.” Curated by Manuela WellOff-Man, Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer (Hopi/Choctaw), and Lara M. Evans (Cherokee Nation), the show was

above Installation view, Action/Abstraction Redefined. Image courtesy of the Saint Louis Art Museum.

originally installed at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe and will travel until May 2024.

The exhibition features nearly 100 works produced by Native abstractionists between the late 1930s through the 1970s, a period often neglected by scholars and museums that nevertheless witnessed a flourish of nonfigurative work. Artists drew on Indigenous knowledge(s) and historical works from their communities and engaged in critical debates in places like New York. The exhibition also builds on a wave of recent scholarship that addresses histories of abstraction outside an overstudied Western canon. A riff on Action/Abstraction, a 2008 exhibition about Pollock and Willem de Kooning’s New York School, Action/Abstraction Redefined positions itself not simply as an effort at inclusion into a predefined canon. It presents Native abstraction as its own fully formed discourse developed in parallel with—rather than in reaction to—other abstract artistic movements.

Central to this history is the opening of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in 1962. The experimental pedagogy of cofounder Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee Nation, 1916–2002) emphasized the combination of material experimentation grounded in students’

Indigenous heritage and knowledge of global arts. The curriculum developed individual expression while it encouraged cultural pride. Action/Abstraction Redefined celebrates several generations of IAIA’s faculty and students, but its largely chronological story begins much earlier.

“Indigenous abstraction is a longstanding practice in North America that predates the establishment of IAIA by thousands of years,” Marr pointed out. And while the exhibition focuses on studio painting rather than historical works, it begins in the 1940s and ’50s prior to IAIA. Greeted

by Edwin C. Hill, a triptych by Mary Sully (Yankton Dakota, 1896–1963), a viewer is immediately divested of the expectation that definitions of abstraction will be simple or straightforward. Sully defied categorization. Her “personality prints,” as she called them, drew from inspirations as diverse as historical events, comic books, archetypes, and celebrities, and were equally indebted to parfleche and pop culture. Across the gallery we see the work of George Morrison (Grand Portage Ojibwe, 1919–2000), White Environ IV. Morrison, active in the New York School, denied any influence of his Native identity on his paintings, at least initially. “The phenomenon of paint was what the painting was really about,” he’s quoted as

1. Their names might also be spelled Charlie Turquoise and Denet Chilli Bitsui. —Ed.

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saying on the wall label. Meanwhile, other artists in the gallery such as Joe Hilario Herrera (Cochiti, 1921–2001) painted in an abstract language inseparable from ancient Pueblo petroglyphs.

Native abstraction is already presented as far more heterogeneous than mainstream critical narratives of abstraction would suggest: that freed from the act of representing subjects in space, painting became a “pure” examination of the inherent properties of the medium itself [2], as Morrison alluded to. To the contrary, overlaps between painting and other artistic media, as the second gallery

suggests, permeate Native abstraction.

Untitled (Squares) and Indian Beadwork, two paintings by New, reference textiles.

Squares, a patch-worked grid of twelve small canvases, seems to reference quilt squares or weaving. In Indian Beadwork, the canvas protrudes into three dimensions through tufted ridges, secured with metal studs. Set against flowing bolts of fabric printed by New and IAIA students, these paintings almost beg for their canvases to be recognized as textile, not just an invisible support for paint.

In the exhibition’s third gallery, this focused meditation on textile seems to

above Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee Nation, 1916–2002), Untitled (Squares), 1968, acrylic on canvas, 42¼ × 31½ in., collection of the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Fe CHE-23. © Estate of Lloyd Kiva New. Image courtesy of the Saint Louis Art Museum.

2. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961).

3. Alfred Young Man, email message to editor, August 10, 2023.

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unfurl. Walls bloom with the reds and blues of New Mexico, a series by Fritz Scholder (Luiseño, 1937–2005), and Pueblo-inspired architectural paintings

by Neil Parsons (Piikani). Paintings such as the hard-edged Indian Blanket by Alfred Young Man (Chippewa Cree) that were inspired by research into anthropological photographs of blankets and the artist’s firsthand observations of textiles on his reservation, epitomize how artists expanded the formal language of abstraction with historically and culturally specific references.3 Against a wall of windows rest sculptures by Otellie Loloma (Hopi, 1921–1993), Bertha Lujan (Taos), and other first-generation IAIA affiliates. A wooden sculpture by Doug Hyde (Nez Perce, tribally designated artisan), featuring nails in the style of Kongo fetishes, attests to IAIA’s emphasis on global studies and his jewelry training with Charles Loloma (Hopi, 1921–1991).

Together, an image of a pan-medium, pan-Indigenous education materialized; through difference, relation, conversation, and solidarity, artistic innovation emerged.

The gallery and works therein also quietly prod at a question that haunts historians of abstraction: namely, whether abstraction is even an appropriate or useful term. Whereas sculptures like Construction by John Cruz Romero (Taos) resemble Bauhaus studies of “pure” space and material, the undulating wooden Totem by Bill Prokopiof (Unangax̂, 1944–1999) integrates formline carvings of animals. Placed in the same line of sight as works like Scholder’s, a viewer questions whether the term abstraction falsely holds together strategies that share fewer commonalities than differences.

In so doing, the exhibition highlights a need for more nuanced language about different histories of nonfigurative or nonobjective art. As a non-Native viewer, I also wondered whether certain works that appeared abstract to me carried particular meanings to people within an artist’s community; the relationship between abstraction, secrecy, and intentionally stratified levels of access remained an open question throughout the exhibition.

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The following galleries expand upon these themes through painting, sculpture, and print. A focus gallery devoted to five students prompts viewers to identify visual influences between their works and their teachers’ in previous galleries. The bold, vivid colors of turpentine-splattered paintings by Earl Biss (Apsáalooke, 1947– 1998) and crisp, geometric works based on parfleche by Redstar Price (Apsáalooke), while stylistically distinct, seem to me to recall the color combinations of Scholder’s works in the previous gallery.

Likewise, labels and works attest to the mentorship of Otellie Loloma on Peter B. Jones (Onondaga). The next gallery, organized by the distinction between gestural abstraction on one side and hard-edge painting on the other, turns to techniques, while a third focuses on works on paper.

A fourth highlights student exhibitions throughout the 1960s.

Together these galleries emphasize how students at IAIA worked between and across media. A sinuous monoprint by Christine Nofchissey McHorse (Diné, 1948–2021), trained as a potter, seems to anticipate her later sculptures, and a casein painting by Roger Tsabetsaye (Zuni) prompts consideration of what it means to flatten forms from pottery into two dimensions. Works by Michael Medicine Horse Zillioux (Akimel O'odham/Cheyenne/Pawnee, 1952–2020) and Alice Loiselle (Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe, 1949–2003) differently address the infamous drip associated with Pollock. A printed book, Four, demonstrates how New’s curriculum extended to written and performing arts. Each of these galleries is focused and engaging; yet, I would have also appreciated a more direct thematic organization to these 1960s works. Several undercurrents that run through the exhibition—crossovers between textile and fine art, reclamations of Indigenous inspirations for New York School painters, different methods of interpreting customary materials, among others—seem to demand explicit focus. The exhibition also prompted questions about how abstract work by artists unaffiliated with IAIA differed from works by their contemporaries. As Marr explained, the SLAM installation

added several works from the 1950s and 1970s from beyond IAIA to the exhibition, a treatment that would have been fascinating for the 1960s as well. Lastly, stemming from scholarship on Black abstraction during the Civil Rights era, I was interested to learn more about how IAIA artists engaged with the American Indian Movement (AIM) and other political movements of the 1960s.

…the relationship between abstraction, secrecy, and intentionally stratified levels of access remained an open question throughout the exhibition.

This does not detract from the stunning celebration of the greater legacy of IAIA in the exhibition’s final gallery called The Rise of Contemporary Native Art. In it we see familiar works anew. A series of 1970s terrain paintings

by Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee Nation) is thrown into historical relief against her predecessors’ abstract explorations of landscape. We now see George Morrison’s Red Totem I and Fritz Scholder’s famous Indian Rug series within a larger historical trajectory of each artist’s experimentation and development. Even after a viewer exits the exhibition into Saint Louis Art Museum’s contemporary galleries, a quick glance to the right puts them face to face with the bright wisps of Neuf Series (1995) by Edgar Heap of Birds (Southern Cheyenne) and the work of Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota) from 2019, Untitled (Quiet Strength VI), an homage to Lakota quillwork. To a viewer leaving the exhibition, these contemporary works are likewise thrust into historical relief. As museums continue to collect and display contemporary Native art, exhibitions like Action/Abstraction Redefined will be crucial in recognizing historical actors who enable contemporary creation.

—Julia Silverman

TULSA

Protection: Adaptation and Resilience Living Arts of Tulsa

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HE FIRST THING I noticed about Protection: Adaptation and Resistance was its immense scale—literally and figuratively.

This exhibition takes up a lot of space, not just because it has large pieces, but because it makes and leaves room for the complexities it describes and the conversations it begins.

Protection: Adaptation and Resistance is a collaborative project initiated by the nonprofit Bunnell Street Arts Center in Tuggeht (Homer, Alaska).

Between the fall of 2019 and the winter of 2021 and 2022, Bunnell presented five workshops and four mentorships for Indigenous artist-mentors and Indigenous artist-learners. Many of the pieces in the exhibition grew from these workshops. An excellent online catalogue on the art center’s website (bunnellarts.org) explains that the exhibition was co-curated by Asia Freeman, artistic director of Bunnell Street Arts Center, and the 52 participating Alaska Native artists.

The curatorial statement posed this question: “In times of climate crisis, pandemic, and ongoing assaults to human rights, how are Indigenous Alaska artists today strengthening self and community and guiding the next generation from surviving to thriving?” The short answer is “adaptation and resistance,” expressed in the exhibition by three sections: Land and Culture Protectors, Activists for Justice and Sovereignty, and Resilient Futures.

Moving through the sections elicits emotions ranging from rage to mourning, delight to laughter—but throughout, and most distinctly, hope.

In her catalogue essay, mentor Lily Hope (Tlingit) writes, “We Alaskan Natives are born into protection and adaptation. Our lives depend on practicing them.” The project began just months before the COVID-19 pandemic.

All the mentors and learners had to adapt by moving online for the literal protection of themselves and their community.

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above Bobby Qalutaksraq Brower (Inupiaq), Melissa Ingersoll (Inupiaq), Cassandra Tikasuk Johnson (Inupiaq), Jackie Qataliña Schaeffer (Inupiaq), Beverly Tuck (Unangax̂), Healing Stitches, 2021, installation with cotton, polyester, thread, dimensions variable. Photo: S. Pratt.

Unable to work together on looms, Lily and her weaving learners adapted. She writes that their Chilkat Protector Masks were inspired by First American Art Magazine’s 2020 invitation for Indigenous artists to create and share masks in a virtual exhibition, Masked Heroes, during the early days of the pandemic. One of her masks received a Judge’s Choice award in that exhibition and was featured on the cover of the Spring 2021 issue of the magazine. Seeing Hope’s mask displayed along with the learners’ masks was a powerful reminder of what it felt like to be a FAAM writer as the magazine worked alongside the Indigenous art community to survive that historically challenging time.

The video Qulliq (2019–21) chronicles the work of Marjorie Kunaq Tahbone (Inupiaq/Kiowa) and her mentees as they learn to carve and use the qulliq, a soapstone lamp lit with seal oil. They began their work together before the pandemic, then had to work alone via Zoom lessons.

The symbolism of carving a vessel for light and warmth as they moved through that uncertain time is extremely powerful and highlights their functional and spiritual context within the community.

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A second video, Tupik Mi (2020), features the extremely charismatic Holly Mititquq Nordlum (Inupiaq), who is instrumental in revitalizing the art of Inuit tattooing. In the video (created with filmmaker Michael Conti), Nordlum explains the history of women’s tattoo customs interspersed with extremely moving footage of her tattooing a woman, an intimate practice affected but ultimately not threatened by the pandemic lockdown, thanks to Nordlum and other women determined to carry on this art form deliberately endangered by antiNative laws and cultural harm.

Photos of women with cultural tattoos, a display of incredible birchbark baskets, Ahtna Athabascan/Northern Paiute artist and curator Melissa Shaginoff ’s humorous yet powerful zine, How to Be a Good Guest, Ahtna Athabascan artist Sarah Whalen-Lunn’s graphic design in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, and Dimi Macheras (Ahtna Athabascan) and Casey Silver’s very funny Chickaloonies cartoon panels all caused me to stop, learn, and genuinely enjoy. Life-size mannequins wearing Lingít and Haida Cedarbark Hats by

Kunagoo Linda Starbard (Lingit) and learners with the appliquéd Kaxátjaa X'óow dance robes by the Herring Protectors collective were inspiring.

But the most dramatic piece in this exhibition may be Memorial Qaspeq by Amber Webb (Yup'ik). Inspired by the 2012 disappearance of a family friend, the 12-foot qaspeq, or atikłuk in Inupiaq, is made of bedsheets and features ink drawings of more than 200 Alaska Native women who have been missing or murdered since 1950. The sheer size of the piece is breathtaking, and the delicacy with which the faces are drawn bears witness to their lives with what can only be described as love. A qaspeq is a garment for warmth and a cultural marker for Alaska Natives. This qaspeq seems large enough to fit all the women represented on it, and, sadly, still has room for Alaska Natives who may be murdered or missing in the future.

In front of Memorial Qaspeq were the qaspeq of Healing Stitches by Bobby Qalutaksraq Brower (Inupiaq) of Utqiaġvik. She invited Indigenous women from across Alaska to sew garments in memory of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. The red garments were various sizes, including one for an infant. They are displayed as if they are holding hands in a circle, and the personal story of each one further individualizes and humanizes the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) crisis in Alaska.

The works in this exhibition address environmental, historical, and personal crises with courage backed by action. As a whole, Protection: Adaptation and Resistance lives up to its title, showcasing how art and cultural practices continually adapt to protect Indigenous people as we continue to resist extinction through assimilation.

Protection: Adaptation and Resistance opened at the Pratt Museum in Homer in 2022. It showed at the Anchorage Museum then the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation in Portland, Oregon. It will be on view at Living Arts of Tulsa through October 13. Next, it travels to the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe from December 3, 2023, to April 7, 2024. The tour concludes with an exhibition at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau from May to October 2024.

—Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke)

Native American jewelry and arts marketplace shop online: www.homeandaway.gallery

The artistry of Earl Plummer, Navajo Sculpture | Prints | Jewelry |Beadwork |Baskets

REPORT PANAMA CITY

Mola Museum

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N 2019 MUSEO DE LA MOLA, or Mola Museum (MuMo), opened in Panama City, with the support of the Alberto Motta Foundation and with contributions from longtime mola collectors David de Castro and José Félix Llopis. The small museum, located in the capital’s Casco Viejo (Old Quarter), a bustling point of Panama’s tourist sector, was established with the backing of the leading Guna governmental bodies. These include the General Congress of Gunayala and the General Congress of Guna Culture.

The involvement of Guna authorities in such an endeavor was a relatively novel development in Panama and was likely responsible for a much-welcome and positive shift in the representation of the country’s Indigenous artistic production.

above Tree of Harmony installation of molas at the Mola Museum. Photo: P. Szok.

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above Museum exterior. Image courtesy of the Museo de la Mola. left Guna artist once known, Mola, reverse appliqué cotton, thread, part of the Tree of Life installation. Photo: P. Szok.

The Guna are Panama’s second largest Native group, numbering over 100,000 people with the most important populations historically residing on several dozen coral islands that run along Panama’s eastern Caribbean coast. Over the last few decades, Guna people have steadily migrated to Panama City, so that today more than half of them live in or near the capital. The Guna are famous for defending their autonomy and for their artistic and literary prowess. Especially notable are their achievements in the verbal arts.

Their creative undertakings also include the mola. The mola is a reverse appliqué panel that Guna women wear proudly on their blouses and that looms large, if ambiguously, in Panamanian society. The mola features several layers of cotton cloth that designers cut into stylized representations of varied subjects and frame in vivid geometric patterns.

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the mola, with a strong preference for the use of mixed and contrasting colors.

Like other forms of Native clothing, the mola serves as a centerpiece of Indigenous identity, a “canvas” of sorts that adorns Guna women and that distinguishes them from those around them, along with their head scarfs, nose rings, necklaces, leg and arms bands, and other elements of female dress. Nevertheless, the mola is also a tourist item and a symbol of Panamanian nationalism. Indeed, just as Guatemalans have “wrapped themselves” in Maya textiles, Panamanians have embraced the mola’s zigzag forms and have placed them nearly everywhere in the country, sometimes to the dismay of the Guna community.

The Guna boast an able cadre of lawyers who help defend their cultural and intellectual property. Nevertheless, molas and their designs have appeared in venues as diverse as Panama’s governmental ministries, gas stations, corporate offices, and its international airport. In recent decades, the mola has even found its way onto jackets, ties, tennis shoes, and cocktail dresses, sometimes through the initiative of Guna people, but often without their permission.

While the Guna have linked the mola to the deep recesses of their history, others have suggested that it arose in the second half of the 19th century, perhaps out of an earlier practice of body painting. Guna communities responded to new commercial networks, heightening the impact of Western influences and increasing access to manufactured fabric. The Guna had begun to produce ivory nuts, turtle shell, and coconuts for the international market and likely moved from the mainland to the islands, in part, to facilitate the trade with outsiders.

The mola is a female art form, although members of the omeggid gender (women-like men) also produce its depictions of daily life, nature, politics, and other topics. Like a newspaper, the mola is ever-changing and can include subjects as wide-ranging as esoteric knowledge, plants, animals, spaceships, and comic book characters. The insistence that “creativity” is central to Indigenous art practice applies well to the making of the molas.

Women wear the molas on the front and back of their shirts while marketing them directly to tourists and producing them for stores in Colón and Panama City. Since the mid-20th century, the Guna have exploited outsiders’ fascination with the garment and have transformed it into an important source of income. The US Canal Zone served as a key point of commercialization. US military bases relied heavily on Guna laborers, and many Zonians became avid mola collectors. Meanwhile, Panamanian and foreign writers produced a plethora of publications about Guna artistic practices.

Although their perspectives were not uniform, these authors shared a marked tendency to depict the mola as a folk art or craft, whose aesthetic principles were decorative and formulaic.

Occasionally they even suggested that the mola was an illustration of Guna degeneracy. Simultaneously foreigners and non-Indigenous Panamanians shamelessly appropriated the mola’s geometric configurations to create a glut of mola-inspired bric-a-brac, which served to obscure other artistic manifestations and fostered a powerful sense of primitivism.

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In this context, the mola was increasingly seen as a relic, something like the ruins of Old Panama, that suggested a colorful past but had little connection to the present or future.

The Mola Museum takes a different perspective. Following the lead of more thoughtful scholarship, it places the mola squarely in the world of art, free from the assumptions of folk art and craft, and linked more obviously to Guna perspectives.

The museum’s modest environs reference the Guna foundational story and the history of the Galu Dugbis.

Galu Dugbis translates roughly as the “Sanctuary of Art,” a sacred place in a parallel dimension of the world, whose rocks and trees boast exquisite patterns. The female spiritual leader Nagegiryai traveled to the haven and returned to teach other women about what she had seen and to incorporate the marvels into their clothing, hammocks, leggings, and jewelry.

The vibrant mola emerged from this process and became subject to a well-established system of aesthetics, with its own techniques and notions of beauty and execution. The latter include the use of labyrinths and diagonal curves, as well as an aversion to unfilled space, bold colors with sharp tonal differences, and a tendency for duality and subtle asymmetries that twirl the viewer about the canvas, much like the participants in a Guna dance. The museum features some 200 molas that display the Galu Dugbis’s artistic principles and their connections to Guna cosmology, history, and geography. A mola-covered conical structure (The Tree of Life) hangs from the ceiling and drives home the museum’s central point with grandeur.

The mola is not a trinket or a folkloric object but instead a complex and evolving art whose intricacies are worthy of respect and appreciation.

The Mola Museum is located at 200 Calle José D. de la Obaldía and is open Tuesday to Friday from 10:00 am to 4:30 pm, and Saturday and Sunday from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm.

Admission is free. —Peter Szok, PhD

BOOK REVIEWS Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America Matika Wilbur Ten Speed Press 2023

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HOTOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION of Native Americans has been rife with inaccuracies, stereotypes, and misappropriation for mainstream media and scholastic consumption. Native Americans have been caricatured as mascots touting raw pride or tokenized and valued only as the product of another era. And visual representation has predominantly come from an outsider's perspective—often an outsider with little to no connection to any tribal ancestry, heritage, or community.

How should Indigenous people reconcile with such a skewed view of themselves?

They shouldn’t. For Tulalip/Swinomish photographer Matika Wilbur, “reconciliation” with inaccurate and offensive imagery was not an option.

For a decade Wilbur spent her time dedicated to altering the misrepresentation of Native Americans by photographing all US federally recognized tribes for her book, Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America. Wilbur’s purpose was not to just take more accurate photographs

of Native American people but, as she wrote, to “uplift the contemporary complexity of Native America’s intelligence, the truth of our hearts, to build a better way to the other side.”

When Wilbur set out, there were 562 federally recognized tribes to visit. By the time she published the book, 574 tribes were federally recognized. In addition to federally recognized tribes, Wilbur also met with state-recognized tribes, urban and international tribal communities, and unrecognized peoples.

Wilbur began fundraising for Project 562 in 2012 through Kickstarter. In a month, Wilbur raised $35,428, quit her job, packed up, and headed out. Eventually she visited every state via hundreds of thousands of road miles through all kinds of weather while contending with personal and historical events—both her own and those of her subjects. “I am a photographer who believes in the power of images, but the people’s stories throughout the book are equally if not more important than their portraits,” Wilbur states in the introduction.

“This is not anthropology,” but information “from Tribal members themselves and other common reference sources.”

Project 562 is not just a coffee table book, as photography books of Native Americans often are. “They say that it takes a village. For Project 562 it took a nation,” begins Wilbur’s personal statement, a short but heartfelt message of contributor recognition, life changes, and genuine gratitude.

Two images accompany the message, serving as key scenes from the project: one image of a tattooed hand holding cedar and another of Highway 163 in the Navajo Nation, representing the end of Wilbur’s story in this book and the beginning of the stories of the peoples and nations from which this book came.

Of course, the stories Wilbur tells in this book began long before Project 562, before federal recognition, and before the phrase “one nation, indivisible” in the Pledge of Allegiance further erased tribal identities through racially motivated, political systemic practices. These stories began with the people photographed throughout the book pages, the ancestors who came before them, and the teachings shared between them. Families, friends, tribal members, and people connected by various forms of kinship are gathered in this book, taking part in cultural NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 85

practices and sharing tribal knowledge.

Community shines through the images, a testament to the survival and continuance of Native American peoples.

Amid community representations, individual stories are interspersed, presenting struggles and successes of resistance and continuance. In one image, a lone woman in a red ribbon dress with a white apron stands in the foreground, poised with purpose and determination on her face. A well-kept wooden walkway stretches far into the background as if illustrating the long journey it has taken to get this far. Trees stand straight and silent on either side of the pathway, bearing witness to the woman as well as all who take this particular path. Much of the story is told through the scene, but what can you not see in this picture?

The woman in the photograph is Donna Pierite (Tunica-Biloxi). This composition tells a lot of her story just through visuals alone. However, without the included written story, you would not know the oral history Pierite shared 86 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

of her people, noting: “Not everything is written down” and “we know from what we know.” Pierite tells of the struggles of the Tunica-Biloxi Indian Tribe, who only gained federal recognition in 1981, of the hardships of her parents and their eventual move to New Orleans, and of the rapport she built with her grandma who “couldn’t read or write, she wasn’t allowed,

above Matika Wilbur (Tulalip/Swinomish), detail of Donna Pierite, Tunica-Biloxi, digital photograph, dimensions variable.

but she had a lot of wisdom.” All of this history led to Pierite dedicating herself to “reawakening the Tunica language,” which led to a partnership with Tulane University and the bringing together of 60 Tunica speakers of all ages to participate in the Tunica Language Project. Like many of the photographs in Project 562, this one is deeply enhanced by the written composition that accompanies it.

“Try to understand what it means to become human from an Indigenous perspective,” John Trudell (Santee Dakota, 1946–2015) suggested on a “lively afternoon in San Francisco” in 2015.

Trudell’s statement pushed Wilbur to find a “better question” to ask than “what it meant to be an Indian in this day and age.” Project 562 is full of the answers to the “better question” that Wilbur asks: “What does it mean to be who we are in our own language?” Photographs adorn the stories throughout like ornament to dress, a visual and literary kinship built upon by shared histories and cultural knowledge. —Shelley Patrick (Mvskoke)

BOOK REVIEWS

Substance of Stars Sheryl Conkleton, ed.

Heard Museum, 2022

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HIS CATALOGUE accompanies the groundbreaking, long-term exhibition that opened on November 6, 2022, after three years of intense planning by teams of renowned Indigenous artists, memory keepers, advisors, and helpful scholars, collectors, builders, and funders—named and unnamed.

Substance of Stars houses intersectional artistry and incorporates first-person narratives embedded in Indigenous languages in current and past orthographic forms. It offers a myriad of public-facing presentations of origin stories, beliefs, and celestial views held by citizens of four Native peoples: the host Akimel O'odham, Diné, Hodínöhšö:ni:h (Haudenosaunee), and Yup'ik among sister Alaska Native peoples.

Guests are immersed within a twostory Sky Dome theater infused with enveloping soundscapes and looped moving images that serve to transport visitors into earthly and celestial places of existence across changing seasons and locales. Curated, commissioned, and loaned works elevate Indigenous expressions while magnifying continuity, change, connections, and ways of knowing across space and time. These works will be rotated and refreshed regularly.

The Substance of Stars catalogue presents more than 20 essays and poems including interpretations penned by

guest co-curator Nengqerralria, Chuna McIntyre (Yup'ik), and longtime collaborator Sister Josephine Aloralrea, OSU (Cup'ik). These culture bearers are members of the esteemed traveling troupe, Nunamta Yup'ik Singers and Dancers.

McIntyre and Aloralrea are elders, scholars, authors, and ambassadors.

They have worked with artists including those who are Sugpiaq/Alutiiq, Inupiaq/ Iñupiaq, Kalaalleq, and St. Lawrence Island Yupik. They are also celebrated skin sewers and makers of atkupiat (“genuine,” highly embellished, “fancy” fur parkas) and accompanying regalia.

Visual language and messages are embedded in familial designs and compositions of elaborate dance attire and accouterments from head to toe. Each

suite of ceremonial garb complements pulsed, sung, and flowing gestural supplications to celestial beings and ancestors.

In the same manner, using mostly English language text, McIntyre and Aloralrea’s catalogue offerings reveal the nuanced, complex, and accommodating cosmology of First Alaskans whose expansive homelands encompass the vast subarctic tundra of the Kusquqvaq (Kuskokwim River) and Kuigpak (Yukon River) deltas and the Northwest Coastal Imarpik (Bering) Sea. Aloralrea’s understated essay, “Foundations of Native Spirituality,” manifests complex and quietly conscientious belief systems through a personal and vocational lens, including her service as an Ursuline nun ministering to peoples of southwest, southeast, and south-central Alaska as well as the San Francisco Bay

above Chuna McIntyre (Yup'ik), Ellam Yua (Spirit of the Universe), 1995, batik fabric, 21¾ × 29 in., private collection. Image courtesy of the artist.

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BOOK REVIEWS

Manchester Center, Vermont Native American Art and Jewelry in Southern New England since 1986

Denise Wallace and Family Jewelry Show opens Thanksgiving Weekend: Online and in Person

More details on our website!

www.LongAgoAndFarAway.com Long Ago & Far Away Gallery • 4963 Main Street P.O. Box 809 • Manchester Center, Vermont 05255 802-362-3435 www.LongAgoAndFarAway.com

Area in California, for more than a half century. Her clear, erudite essay articulates generous ways of knowing and being as informed by her genesis and upbringing in Cev'aq (Chevak), Alaska, near the Bering Sea coast. In Aloralrea’s essay, she joins our paths to the many peoples she has communed with as a positive example of yuuyaraq, a right way of living. Her mindful contribution is both timely and refreshing. An independent scholar with a master’s degree in religious education from San Francisco State University, Aloralrea focuses on Yup'ik/Cup'ik values.

Co-curator Sean Mooney, curator of the Edmund Carpenter Collection of Arctic Art at the Menil Collection in Houston, wrote “Of One Mind,” an introduction with straightforward and relevant foundational knowledge.

Accomplished weaver, poet, filmmaker, and Heard Museum assistant curator Velma Kee Craig (Diné) made her mark with an incisive essay, “Put a Bead in Coyote’s Mouth.”

She shares adept commentaries on Diné artworks.

Mooney’s and McIntyre’s commentary deftly contextualizes art forms and iconography from throughout western Alaska, Sivuqaq (St. Lawrence Island), and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), with Sugpiaq artists included too. McIntyre shares expertise informed by his maternal grandmother Augilnguq, Minnie Carter (Yup'ik, ca. 1900–1992). Her care-filled smile radiates from a steadfast, regal 1985 portrait.

McIntyre’s visual art Ellam Yua: Dweller of our Consciousness (1995) is featured in the exhibition. He created reverberating batik fabric work in Bali, Indonesia. It shows a luminous, deep, starry night sky of possibility beyond a vibrant earth-toned human representation of Ellam Yua. The forward-facing, close-up masked countenance features a radiating ellanguaq (concentric-circled model universe), a wise and centering qauraq (brow) adornment, cungapak and caqiqsaq (chin labret and side labrets or lip plugs), and tamlurun (chin line tattoos) of simple and distinct celebration. Aqlitet (earrings) hooped to echo steadying cardinal directions dangle to emphasize the nature of beauty, within and without.1 McIntyre writes: “Ellam Yua is the dweller of our consciousness. In essence, the Spirit in all that is sentient.” He continues: “Ella is the consciousness we possess. The very air we breathe. It is the ground we stand on. It’s the vastness of the universe we know to be out there. That is the Yup'ik sense of ourselves within this realm of Ella.”

Ellam Yua shares sentiments with the Haudenosaunee concept of Ó:nen ska’nikon:ra ón:ton, the Diné concept of Nihokáá Dine'é Bíla'ashdlaii, and Akimel O'odham concept of O'odham Himdag. “The stars belong to all of us,” as the curatorial statement says, “We are all the substance of stars.”

—Alice Rose Crow, Maar'aq (Yup'ik) 1. Native speaker and linguist Pikaniralria, Vernon Chimegalrea (Yup'ik) facilitated the proper use and orthography of the Yugtun language throughout the exhibition and catalogue.

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BOOK REVIEWS

Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives, and Museums Yve Chavez and Nancy Marie Mithlo, eds.

The University of Arizona Press, 2022

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N TODAY’S WORLD where toxic positivity dominates collective consciousness, an absence of open dialogue about weighty subjects remains. With Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives, and Museums, editors Yve Chavez and Nancy Marie Mithlo fill said space with the presence of twelve essays. These essays, according to Mithlo on page 3, “undertake the difficult task of assessing, from Indigenous viewpoints, how histories of colonialism are commemorated in the creative arts and memory institutions—archives and museums.” They feel that “celebratory appraisals of Indigenous survival alone” are not enough. While heavy in nature, Chavez and Mithlo’s anthology leaves readers with complex mapping of how artists, curators, and scholars confront these colonial histories and move forward in revolutionary ways.

The complexity of Visualizing Genocide roots itself in subject matter and derives from a panel discussion that took place at the 2018 College Art Association (CAA) annual conference.

At CAA, panel chairs Chavez and Mithlo facilitated a conversation around Indigenous survivance in the face of genocide with four Native American scholars.

Visualizing Genocide expands this discussion from the discipline of American Indian studies with a multidisciplinary approach that encompasses art history, anthropology, studio arts, and visual culture. Contributions include authors based in present-day Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, Norway, and the United States.

The significance of this anthology moves beyond its stated intention and scope—from Indigenous viewpoints to how histories of colonialism are commemorated in the creative arts and memory institutions—and offers instruction to its readers. A specific example may be found in Part I: Reclaiming Space Through Presence Making of Visualizing Genocide. On page 40, writer, lecturer, curator, and scholar Stephen Gilchrist, who belongs to the Yamatji people of the Inggarda language group of northwest Western Australia, writes “Genocide produces absence. We are haunted by the absences … It is marked by the unsung songs and the ceremonies that never were.” He then illustrates through a close study of three different works by three different Indigenous artists how to engage with the politics of genocide by sharing both individual and collective trauma that genocide generates and challenges the absence it creates.

Despite the pain of engaging with the politics of genocide, Visualizing Genocide persists. According to Mithlo on page 108, she wants to “remind the reader that this work of exposing Western culture norms rooted in the violence of our colonial past is work, it is labor.” It makes sense then, that from the twelve essays in the text, Mithlo solely contributes four and coauthors a fifth. My favorite of her essays, “Owning Hate, Owning Hurt: The Aesthetics of Violence in American Indian Contemporary Art,”

is found in Part II: Control of Historical Resources, Reappropriation. She begins with a brief and skillful unpacking of events at the end of the Donald Trump administration and conceptually shifts us to “taking and possessing rather than passively accepting,” by way of art in the medium of collage, a strategy that produces a “whole from fragments.”

While overwhelmingly edifying, the greatest challenge in Visualizing Genocide is finding clarity in certain places. For example, within the editors’ introduction, Chavez and Mithlo offer at least four varied themes. This proves challenging to follow for this reader. I chose to focus on the first, broadest goal presented in the opening statement—reappraising colonial legacies in museums, archives, and other cultural institutions through Indigenous perspectives—because it made the most sense to me. The introduction additionally suggests three key “themes and movements:” human rights, artistic practice, and civil rights. My logic expected the division of the book into three parts to correlate clearly with the stated three themes/movements, but it did not. Finally, I fumbled back and forth between the Contents at the beginning of the book and the Contributors section at the end of the book. I grew confused about a disparity: there are ten authors in the Contents and fifteen Contributors.

After reading the text through, I realized that some of the artists whose work is highlighted, or in one case who was interviewed, find their place as contributors to the anthology. Although somewhat confusing, these challenges were minor in comparison to the achievements of Visualizing Genocide.

On the whole, Chavez and Mithlo overwhelmingly achieve their stated primary goal. And subsequently, surprising instruction arises in the process: Visualizing Genocide provides multiple revolutionary pathways through art to move outside the colonial framework of otherness toward the recentering of oneself through decolonization practices that include embodiment, celebration, knowledge creation, experimentation, and counternarrative.

—Jean Merz-Edwards NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 89

ART+LIT

Ho-Chunk Graphic Novelist

JIM TERRY

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD take years to untangle, good and bad, regardless of their involvement in our lives. Only this morning I had a realization about the way love was or wasn’t shown in my upbringing and how it’s still affecting me today. That stuff goes deep and is in the very roots. It bleeds into every fiber of who I am. So their impact is as critical as anything could possibly be.

B

ORN IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, Jim Terry grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. His father, an Irish-American jazz musician, was from Chicago. His mother was a citizen of the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin. Terry began illustrating at an early age and started creating original graphic novels in his late 20s. He has contributed to comics such as The Crow: Skinning the Wolves, Sundowners, Alice Cooper vs. Chaos, and Vampirella. Street Noise Books published his latest graphic novel, Come Home, Indio: A Memoir (2020), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Ignatz Awards. Come Home, Indio tells the story of Terry’s early life and struggles in Chicago before his turn toward sobriety and spiritual renewal.

Terry is a fixture on the ComicCon circuit in the United States and is considered to be one of the most prolific Indigenous graphic novelists of his generation. Terry lives in Chicago with

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his three cats. I corresponded with him through a series of email conversations.

Much of the biographic information on you can be found in Come Home, Indio: A Memoir. Can you discuss your roots in Southern California and how you and your family made it to Chicago?

Neither of my folks were from California, but they were out there for their own reasons.… They ended up connecting out there, and before you knew it, I came along and blew everything up.… We stayed out there for a few years, but I think we ended up back in the Midwest to be closer to the rest of the family once my sister was born. My memories of California are very few and have that sort of faded Polaroid feel to them.

Your parents figure prominently in Come Home, Indio. Can you discuss their impact on you and your work?

Hoo boy, I’m still working on that. I feel that our parents impact us in ways that

The publication of Come Home, Indio was met with critical and commercial success. Why do you think it resonated with audiences?

That’s a tough one to answer. I can only assume that folks have connected with something in there.… I struggle with a lot, ha ha, and I talk about it all pretty openly in the book, and perhaps they’ve either tackled similar things or have someone close who has. It’s all about relatability and sincerity for me, and I can only hope that came through.

You’ve openly discussed addiction elsewhere so can we talk about it here? Alcohol led you to darkness in your past; however, you’re now 17 years sober. Could you break down this transformation and what you continue to learn from it?

It’s truly a daily process, and it’s always teaching me something new. There are things that I do every new day that are very routine-oriented and give me a reprieve for the next 24 hours, as long as I stick to the things I’ve learned. But with that comes a freedom that allows me to be open to growth in other aspects in my life. When I quit drinking, I was worried I’d lose my artistic “muse” and be unable to tap into that primal source I could sometimes contact while drinking—but that was like tossing a horseshoe through a rolling tire. With a clear head, I discovered that I could always tap into that, that the elusive “muse” was a myth, and

ART+LIT

“Being sober has also opened spiritual paths that I’d previously kept at bay: ideas and beliefs that I was either too cynical to believe or too down on myself to feel I deserved.” inspiration (for me) was found through commitment to what I was doing.

Being sober has also opened spiritual paths that I’d previously kept at bay: ideas and beliefs that I was either too cynical to believe or too down on myself to feel I deserved. Exploring who I am as a human, as a creative, as a Native— these were things that I couldn’t even look at through the fog of alcohol. Once I was free of that, I was also free to define myself on my own terms for the first time in my life.

That’s an important and informative response, thank you. Let’s turn to writing and illustration. When did you start and why?

I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller and I always loved art. My school textbooks were filled with doodles, and I would write short stories in between my class notes all the time. I think that from the beginning I wanted to connect with people, and this seemed the way. I don’t know if that’s healthy or not, but I definitely felt validated through my creativity more than anything else.

I tried doing the movie thing through my twenties but realized that being broke, having no connections, and suffering from a need to control the story were not helpful. It was after a close call with getting something actually made that I realized I needed to be doing comics, where I could have absolute autonomy over the storytelling. Or so I thought, ha ha.

I understand that you’re mainly self-taught. It may be an unpopular opinion, but I think there’s an advantage to being self-taught in many ways because you don’t have to unlearn a lot of the academic dogma taught in art school. Is being self-taught advantageous today?

I did go to college and studied art there,

but I always tell folks who are interested in art that all they need to do is draw from life and learn perspective. If they work on those two things, they can truly draw anything. The classes I took were fairly broad. Going to a school for comics was not even on my radar and the university route was one we could afford.

above Come Home, Indio: A Memoir (Street Noise Books, 2020). opposite Jim Terry. All images courtesy of the artist.

NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 91

ART+LIT

“Getting roughed up by life a little, discovering obscure or forgotten artists, and watching the storytelling and compositions of old noir films were things that inform my work today.”

I’ll add this, though, and it’s something I really believe. Reading Indio, you probably realize that there was a lot of lost time. I didn’t get my first paying comics job until I was in my late 30s and I would kick myself when I’d see folks almost half my age doing incredible, prestigious work. What I realized eventually was that I’d always been reading, always studying film, always listening to strange music, and filling my brain even through the fog. So when it came time to get my act together, I had experience and information that I wouldn’t have otherwise, and that needed to become my strength. If all one is doing is reading comics, that’s all they bring to their work.

Getting roughed up by life a little, discovering obscure or forgotten artists, and watching the storytelling and compositions of old noir films were things that inform my work today.

Comics, zines, street art, graffiti, and others have been considered “low art” for much of art’s complicated history, but I believe this sentiment is slowly changing. Where is the genre heading?

Is there a graphic novel renaissance?

I’ll tell you what I’ve noticed is that the creators are changing, and I think that’s going to push a sea change in how comics are perceived. So many of the younger folk I see who are passionate about comics are of every possible mix of race and gender you could imagine, and I hope their experiences will inform things differently. New voices!

There’s also the fact that it’s more accepted today. Back in the olden days I’d get relentlessly knocked around for a

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ART+LIT

Wolverine t-shirt or carrying around The Lord of the Rings with my Trapper Keeper, ha ha. Today nobody thinks twice. It’s culturally acceptable in a different way. I just wish people would read more!

Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986) was the first graphic novel I read. The way it spoke of the Holocaust through animal protagonists was a revelation to my young mind. Orwell’s denouncement of socialism and authoritarianism in Animal Farm (1945) had a similar effect. What was the first graphic novel you read?

That’s a tough one, but it might be Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986).

It was printed in a format that was only sold in comic shops, and I got my books from the local convenience store, so getting my hands on it was something of a coup. The themes in that were about as complicated and dark as my mind could imagine at that time, and the art was a revelation. Years later I discovered Will Eisner’s New York: Life In The Big City (2006), and that had an even more profound effect on me. It was moving in ways I didn’t think comics could be—a masterpiece in maudlin storytelling. It’s informed everything I’ve done since, I’m sure of it.

For those who haven’t read many (or any) graphic novels, what’s your recommended reading list, maybe a list of your five important books?

I could take days pondering this one, so I’ll answer off the top of my head.

My favorite superhero GN is probably Daredevil: Born Again by [Frank] Miller and [David] Mazzucchelli. Best crime book is Stray Bullets by David Lapham. Of course, Will Eisner’s New York, … Maus and Watchmen [by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins] certainly deserve to be on that list, and I’ll put Jeff Smith’s Bone (1991–2004) on there as well—it’s one of the most joyful reads I’ve ever had.

What follows Come Home, Indio?

What projects do you have on the go?

I’ve been working freelance for a while on West of Sundown, a horror/western … but after a trip to Angoulême and meeting the French publishers of Indio, they convinced me that I need to continue making comics that are personal to me. The idea is terrifying, but if it’s not walking through fear, it’s just walking through comfort, and that doesn’t usually inspire my best work. So onward!

Thank you for the interview, Jim. Thank you so much for asking me to!

Pinagigi!

above Jim Terry (Ho-Chunk), Transdimensional Mayflower, pen and ink on paper. opposite, top Jim Terry (Ho-Chunk), Mother, pen and ink on paper. opposite, bottom Jim Terry (Ho-Chunk), Message to Our Younger Selves, pen and ink on paper.

JIMTERRYART.BIGCARTEL.COM NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 93

CALENDAR October 5–December 31: Port Townsend, WA We Are One at Jefferson Museum of Art and History, 540 Water Street (360) 385-1003 | jchsmuseum.org October 6 & 7: Tishomingo, OK Southeastern Art Show and Market (SEASAM), hosted by the Chickasaw Nation, at the Chickasaw National Capitol campus, near 411 W. 9th Street chickasaw.net October 6, 2023–February 5, 2024: Santa Fe, NM Interference Patterns at SITE Santa Fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta, with Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂) | (505) 989-1199 | sitesantafe.org October 7 & 8: Madison, WI Native Art Market Fall at the University of Wisconsin Arts + Literature Laboratory, 111 S Livingston Street. 10:00 am–5:00 pm | (608) 556-7415 artlitlab.org October 7–December 31, 2023: Cooperstown, NY Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest at the Fenimore Art Museum, 5798 State Highway 80 | (607) 547-1400 fenimoreartmuseum.org/exhibitions October 11–13: Halifax, NS Native American Art Studies Association 2023 Conference at the Halifax Convention Center, 1650 Argyle Street | nativearts.org October 13–15: Catoosa, OK 18th Annual Cherokee Art Market at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Tulsa, Sequoyah Convention Center, 777 W. Cherokee Avenue (877) 779-6977 | cherokeeartmarket.com

NATIVE AMERICAN ART APPRAISALS, INC. SINCE 1936

October 13–December 23: Loveland, CO Woven in Resilience: A Feminine Perspective of Contemporary Indigenous Art at the Artworks Center for Contemporary Art, 310 N. Railroad Avenue | (970) 663-5555 | artworksloveland.org October 14 & 15: Salt Lake City, UT Indigenous Art Market at the Natural History Museum of Utah, Rio Tinto Center, 301 Wakara Way, 10:00 am–5:00 pm | (801) 581-6927 nhmu.utah.edu October 14, 2023–March 23, 2024: Tucson, AZ Pulse: Weavings and Paintings by Marlowe Katoney at the University of Arizona Museum of Art, 1031 N. Olive Road | (520) 621-7567 artmuseum.arizona.edu October 15, 2023–January 21, 2024: Fort Worth, TX Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map at the Museum of Modern Art of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell Street | (817) 738-9215 | themodern.org October 20, 2023–March 10, 2024: Montreal, QC Wampum: Beads of Diplomacy at the McCord Stewart Museum, 690 Sherbrooke Street West | +1 (514) 861-6701 | musee-mccord-stewart.ca October 20, 2023–April 14, 2024: New York, NY Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School at the New York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West | (212) 873-3400 | nyhistory.org October 21: Dragoon, AZ Amerind Autumn Fest at Amerind Museum, 2100 N. Amerind Road (520) 586-3666 | amerind.org

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

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October 22, 2023–January 14, 2024: Minneapolis, MN In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2400 Third Avenue S | (612) 870-3000 | new.artsmia.org October 22, 2023–March 10, 2024: Fargo, ND Oscar Howe: Ikíćiksapa at the Plains Art Museum, 704 First Avenue N (701) 551-6100 | plainsart.org

October 24–26: Oklahoma City, OK International Conference of Indigenous Archives, Libraries, and Museums at the Omni Hotel, 100 Oklahoma City Boulevard | atalm.org October 26, 2023–January 6, 2024: Great Falls, MT WITHIN: Louis Still Smoking & John Isaiah Pepion at the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art, 1400 First Avenue N. Two-man show of Blackfeet artists | (406) 727-8255 | the-square.org/within October 27–28: Mendocino, CA Native Arts Expo 7 at the Mendocino Art Center, 45200 Little Lake Street | (707) 937-5818 | mendocinoartcenter.org October 27, 2023–March 4, 2024: Lewiston, ME Exploding Native Inevitable at Bates College Museum of Art, 75 Russell Street | (207) 786-6158 | bates.edu/museum November 1–Early 2024: Warm Springs, OR 30th Annual Warm Springs Tribal Member Art Exhibit at the Museum at Warm Springs, 2189 US 26 | (541) 553-3331 museum.warmsprings-nsn.gov November 2, 2023–February 14, 2024: Buffalo, NY Terran Last Gun at K Art, 808 Main Street. Solo exhibition for this Blackfeet artist | (716) 216-2941 | thek.art November 3: Palm Springs, CA Grand Opening of the Agua Caliente Cultural Plaza and Museum, 140 N. Indian Canyon Drive. 10:00 am–4:00 pm | (844) 772-2224 visionaguacaliente.com November 3–4: Clewiston, FL American Indian Arts Celebration at the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, 30290 Josie Billie Highway PMB 1003. Arts, dance, music, alligator wrestling. 9:00 am–5:00 pm | ahtahthiki.com November 3–5: Durant, OK Choctaw Powwow at the Choctaw Event Center. 3702 Choctaw Road (580) 920-0160 | choctawculturalcenter.com/powwow November 3–December 31: Rock Springs, WY Grounded: Restoring Our World Through a Sacred Harmony with the Earth and Each Other, hosted by Caravan, at the Community Fine Arts Center, 400 C Street | (307) 362-6212 | oncaravan.org/grounded November 4: Cherokee, NC Kananesgi Art Market & Fashion Show at Harrah’s Cherokee Casino, 777 Casino Drive | kananesgi.com November 4: Tahlequah, OK Skasdicon at the Northeastern State University, University Center Ballroom, 2nd floor, 612 N. Grand Avenue. Indigenous comic convention hosted by the Cherokee Nation. Free | skasdicon.com November 5: Roseville, CA All Nations Native Craft Fair at the Maidu Museum & Historic Site, 1970 Johnson Ranch Drive, 10:00 am–3:00 pm | (916) 773-5400 roseville.ca.us November 5–6: Lake Forest, IL Native American Artisan and Craft Fair, sponsored by the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian, 911 Telegraph Road, 11:00 am–4:00 pm both days | (847) 475-1030 | mitchellmuseum.org November 10, 2023–May 26, 2024: Winnipeg, MB ᓯᑯ ᕿᕐᓂᖅᓯᓯᒪᔪᖅ / Dark Ice at the Winnipeg Art Gallery–Qaumajuq, 300 Memorial Boulevard | +1 (204) 786-6641 | wag.ca November 11: Oklahoma City, OK Native Sound Summit at the First Americans Museum, 659 First Americans Boulevard, featuring Khu.éex' | (405) 594-2100 | famok.org NO. 40, FALL 2023 | 95

RICK BARTOW: MOON AND DOG PRESS

November 11: San Antonio, TX Yanaguana Indian Arts Festival at the Briscoe Western Art Museum, 210 W. Market Street | (210) 299-4499 | briscoemuseum.org/events November 11 & 13: Tucson, AZ 25th Annual Tucson Indian Market at the Tucson Expo Center, 3750 E. Irvington Road | (505) 370-3341 | tucsonexpocenter.com November 11, 2023–February 25, 2024: Indianapolis, IN Unsettle/Converge at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 500 W. Washington Avenue | (317) 636-9378 | eiteljorg.org November 11, 2023–March 17, 2024: Boston, MA Marking Resilience: Indigenous North American Prints at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 465 Huntington Avenue | (617) 267-9300 | mfa.org November 11, 2023–April 28, 2024: Oklahoma City, OK Preston Singletary: Raven and the Box of Daylight at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, 415 Couch Drive | (405) 236-3100 | okcmoa.com November 14–December 28: Granger, IN David Martin: Solo Exhibition at the Corvilla Community Art Gallery, 135 E. University Drive | (574) 289-9779 | corvilla.org

December 2023–January 2024

FROELICK GALLERY Portland, OR | 503.222.1142 Strong Spirit, 2000, drypoint etching, 7˝x 13˝, edition of 20, published by Moon and Dog Press

November 18 & 19: Norman, OK 29th Annual Native American Art Calendar Signing & Holiday Market at Tribes Gallery, 512 W. Main Street | (405) 329-4442 | tribes131.com November 25 & 26: Santa Fe, NM Pathways Winter Market at Buffalo Thunder Resort & Casino, 30 Buffalo Thunder Trail, hosted by the Poeh Cultural Center. 8:00 am–5:00 pm (505) 455-5041 | poehcenter.org November 25 & 26: Santa Fe, NM SWAIA Winter Indian Market at Santa Fe Community Convention Center, 201 W. Marcy Street. 9:00 am–5:00 pm. $15/day or $25/weekend (505) 983-5220 | swaia.org/wim22 December 2 & 3: Washington, DC & New York City, NY Native Art Market at the National Museum of the American Indian, 4th Street & Independence Ave. SW and National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye, 1 Bowling Green | americanindian.si.edu December 2 & 3: Oklahoma City, OK Winter Holiday Art Market at First Americans Museum, 659 First Americans Boulevard. 11:00 am–4:00 pm | (405) 594-2100 | famok.org December 2, 2023–TBA: Victor, NY Hodinöhsö:ni' Art Show at the Seneca Art & Cultural Center at Ganondagan, 7000 County Road 41 | (585) 398-6151 | ganondagan.org December 3, 2023–April 7, 2023: Santa Fe, NM Protection: Adaptation and Resistance at the Museum of International Folk Art, 706 Camino Lejo | (505) 476-1204 | internationalfolkart.org December 5, 2023–January 13, 2024: Portland, OR Rick Bartow & Dog Press at Froelick Gallery, 714 NW Davis Street (503) 222-1142 | froelickgallery.com December 9 & 10: Thackerville, OK Hushtola' Art Market, hosted by the Chickasaw Nation, at WinStar World Casino Convention Center, 777 Casino Avenue. Open to all US federally recognized tribes | chickasaw.net

Deer In House Olla, by Carlos Laate, Zuni Pueblo Since 1981 Fetishes Jewelry Pottery 227 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe Keshi.com 505.989.8728

96 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

December 10, 2023–TBA: Los Angeles, CA Reclaiming El Camino: Native Resistance in the Missions and Beyond at the Autry Museum of the American West, 4700 Western Heritage Way (323) 667-2000 | theautry.org

For more events, visit our online calendar at

FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM/ CALENDAR

– Celebrate with us! –

Opening November 3, 2023 aguacaliente.org