First American Art Magazine No. 46, Spring 2025

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

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

NO. 46, SPRING 2025

CREATING MAYA BLUE

DISPLAY UNTIL JULY 7, 2025

DAKOTA MACE

TLINGIT BUTTON BLANKETS

JARED NALLY

WILD RYE GRASS WEAVING

MELISSA PETER-PAUL

INSTALLATION ART

JONATHAN THUNDER

The The Art Art of of Judith Judith Lowry Lowry and and The The Lowry Lowry & & Croul Croul Collection Collection of of Contemporary Native American Art Contemporary Native American Art ON VIEW MARCH 22 – NOVEMBER 16, 2025 ON VIEW MARCH 22 – NOVEMBER 16, 2025

MAJOR SPONSOR SPONSOR JudyMAJOR and David Collins Judy and David Collins Friends of Nevada Museum of Art Friends of Nevada Art Sandy RaffealliMuseum | Mini ofof Reno Sandy Raffealli | Mini of Reno SPONSORS SPONSORS San Manuel Gaming and Hospitality Authority San Manuel Gaming andPhil Hospitality Authority and Jennifer Satre Phil and Jennifer Satre SUPPORTING SPONSORS SUPPORTING SPONSORS Kathie Bartlett Kathie Bartlett Yvonne Murphy, PhD and Murray Mackenzie Yvonne Murphy, PhD Band and Murray Mackenzie Shingle Springs of Miwok Indians Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians ADDITIONAL SUPPORT SUPPORT BetsyADDITIONAL Burgess and Tim Bailey Betsy Burgess and Tim Bailey

I M AG E : Judith Lowry, Welgatim's Song (detail), 2001. Acrylic on canvas, 68 x 90 inches. Crocker Art Museum, gift of the artist, 2009.

I M AG E : Judith Lowry, Welgatim's Song (detail), 2001. Acrylic on canvas, 68 x 90 inches. Crocker Art Museum, gift of the artist, 2009.

The Choctaw Cultural Center is more than a museum, it’s an adventure. Become an intrepid explorer on a scavenger hunt that takes you through our immersive exhibits; learn how to prepare traditional Choctaw foods and crafts through our hands-on workshops; or just take a quiet moment to listen to our storytellers in the Luksi Activity Center. Whether you’re young or young at heart, the possibilities for fun and learning are endless!

Scan code to learn more.

1919 Hina Hanta Way | Calera, OK 74730

Visit ChoctawCulturalCenter.com to plan your visit.

O’ POWA O’ MENG:

The Art and Legacy of Jody Folwell THE FRALIN MUSEUM OF ART | ON VIEW THROUGH JUNE 15

Exhibition organized by The Fralin Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, with major support from the Terra Foundation for American Art. Co-curated by Adriana Greci Green, Ph.D., Curator of Indigenous Arts of the Americas at The Fralin Museum of Art; Jill Ahlberg Yohe, Ph.D., Curator, Cafesjian Art Trust Museum; and Bruce Bernstein, Senior Scholar, School for Advanced Research. A fully illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibition, enriched with essays and personal reflections by Folwell’s longtime artistic peers, friends, and family members.

155 Rugby Road | Charlottesville, Virginia | uvafralinartmuseum.virginia.edu Image: Jody Folwell, Santa Clara Pueblo/Kha’p’o Owingeh, born 1942. T’ah p-ah sa’ wae (Dad’s Fish), circa 2000. Clay, paint, 13 x 11 in (33 x 27.9 cm). Collection of Jody Folwell, Santa Clara, N.M., Photo by Addison Doty. © Jody Folwell

echoes Selections from the Wheelwright Museum's Permanent Collection FEBRUARY 8 – JUNE 7, 2025 For over fifty years, the Wheelwright Museum has presented the work of emerging and established Native American artists.

Echoes delves into the museum’s permanent collection to invite our visitors to witness the depth and reach of this commitment to honor Native voices through art.

MEMO TO THE MOTHER Bob Haozous’s Messages to Mother Earth

FEBRUARY 8, 2025 – JANUARY 10, 2026 ALSO ON VIEW Carved Stories by Mavasta Honyouti Pablita’s Wardrobe: Family + Fashion For more details, visit wheelwright.org Images: Emmi Whitehorse, b. 1957 (Diné), Detail of Witch Seed I, #1147, 1997.

Oil, chalk, paper on canvas. Collection of the Wheelwright Museum.

505.982.4636 wheelwright.org

PO Box 5153, Santa Fe, NM 87502 702 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe, NM 87505

APR 5 – M AY 1 0 Experience one of the country’s most prestigious Native art shows, and support Native artists in the heart of Cherokee Nation.

The Gallery at Cherokee Springs Plaza 3377 Cherokee Springs Road Tahlequah, OK 74464 Gallery hours: 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Tuesday through Saturday.

“Burial Ceremony: The Four Souls of the Cherokee Being” John Henry Gloyne

2024 BEST OF SHOW

issue no. 46, summer 2025

DEPARTMENTS

FEATURES

Recent Developments

By Staci Golar and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

13

The Artist Who Reconstructed Maya Blue

By Mark Viales

26

Seven Directions

By Hunter C. Old Elk

21

Maya vs. Mayan

By Mark Viales

34

Art+Lit | Eddie Chuculate: Muscogee/Cherokee Novelist & Journalist

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

102

Tlingit Button Blankets: Tailoring Cultural Change

By Kariel Galbraith (Tlingit)

36

58

Art+Lit | Dan Beaver (Muscogee) 105

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

Riding the Waves of History: How Installation Art Reclaims and Indigenizes Space

By Sarah Anne Stolte

Calendar 109

REVIEWS Exhibition Reviews

82

Film Review

97

Music Review

99

Book Review

To Weave with Grass: 44 A Precious Wild Resource

By Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Alutiiq) 50

ARTIST PROFILES 58

100

Dakota Mace: Diné Interdisciplinary Artist

By Heidi K. Brandow (Diné/Kānaka Maoli)

Martha Gorman Schultz (Diné, 1931–2025)

By Christy Hanson (Diné)

106

Jared Nally: Myaamia Textile Artist

By Christy Hanson (Diné)

64

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish-Kootenai/Métis/ Shoshone, 1940–2025)

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

107

Melissa Peter-Paul: Mi'kmaw Quill Artist

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

70

76

Lillie T. Taylor (Diné, 1931–2024)

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

108

Jonathan Thunder: Red Lake Band Ojibwe Painter, Animator & Filmmaker

By Sheila Regan

64

MEMORIALS

70

cover Melissa Peter-Paul (Mi'kmaw), Epekwitk Kitpu, 2022, porcupine quills, birchbark, sweetgrass.

76

Epekwitk is the Mi'kmawi'simk term for Prince Edward Island. Kitpu is “eagle.”

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025 | 7

issue no. 46, spring 2025 ISSN 2333-5548 (Print) • ISSN 2333-5556 (Digital) 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: Amy D. Bergseth, PhD Copy Editors: Rosa Cays (Chicana) with Christy Hanson (Diné) and Angela C. Villa (Chicana) Proofreaders: Rosa Cays (Chicana), Travis D. Day, Staci Golar, Christy Hanson (Diné), and Angela C. Villa (Chicana) Layout & Design: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Social Media: Staci Golar, America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), and Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho) Interns: Liam Hart and Abby Mikalauskas

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) Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer (Hopi/Choctaw) Leah Mata Fragua (yak tityu tityu yak tiłhini 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

Advertising Representative

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

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Copyright © 2025 by First American Art Magazine, LLC. Cover and contents are fully protected by copyright and may not be reproduced in whole or part by any method without written permission, except specific images listed with Creative Commons licenses. Any errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. First American Art Magazine® is registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

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EDITOR’S GREETING

A

D VICE FOR OVERCOMING our current political situation repeats several core themes: rebuild social connection, especially in your immediate local community; support civic institutions; and support artistic and literary expressions. By taking better care of yourself, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, you help build a stronger local community.

During the pandemic, we were advised to stay home, but right now, we have the opposite advice: Go out and connect. I appreciate the marching orders to get out and engage with my local community more, in person. Previously I’ve relied on the excuse that I’m too busy and have too much work to do, but I’ve learned, and likely you have as well, that taking breaks and recharging actually makes you more productive in the long run. Art institutions are a great place to do this, and they need us.

Many museums haven’t recovered their visitor numbers since the pandemic, so they have tried to better reflect and better serve the community.

They host yoga sessions or workshops.

For those being frugal, many arts institutions offer monthly free days for community members. Likewise, opening receptions and commercial galleries are free for the public to visit.

Another way to build (or rebuild) a connection to your community is to find your local mutual aid society and join. After hearing about and following the Red Dirt Collective in Norman, I finally made it to their community meeting and was able to contribute to one of their Mutual Aid Fairs. Kathy Haney (Seminole/Muscogee/Shawnee/ Delaware/Kickapoo) offered a basket

above America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Apple-Shaped Basket, 2024, commercial reed prepared by Kathy Haney (Seminole/Muscogee/ Shawnee/Delaware/Kickapoo), 6 × 51/2 × 51/2 in.

weaving class, so I participated and found weaving to be deeply satisfying.

I’m excited that the Jacobson House Native Art Center finally, after almost a decade, has an executive director, Beto Divino (Chickasaw/Seminole/ Muscogee/Chicano), and I’m grateful he and E.J. Sweetly (Comanche) allowed me to start a monthly open arts and craft session at the Jacobson for a low-stress gathering people can drop by if they want.

I often feel like a complete dork and dread going out alone, especially when I don’t know anyone, but art events are ones where it’s completely fine to go solo. It’s fine to not fit in— that’s often encouraged!

Of course, not everyone is able to attend events in person. Virtual gatherings are another way to connect, and many venues live stream artists’ talks, especially in the Native art world, where many interested people live in far-flung and remote locations.

Years ago, when asked if a particular Cherokee dance was a sacred dance or a social dance, Ryan Mackey (Cherokee Nation/Muscogee/Delaware/Natchez) replied, “The social is the sacred.” If there’s a chance to participate, and you are able, say yes. Go to the talk, the workshop, the opening.

We need each other.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025 | 9

The Persistent Genius of Indigenous Art Now on view IMAGE: Fritz Scholder (Luiseño), Indian 1776 (detail), 1978. Oil paint on canvas; 68 in x 54 in. Denver Art Museum: Gift of Stanley Asrael, in memory of his wife, Evelyn, 2023.540. © Estate of Fritz Scholder Sustained! The Persistent Genius of Indigenous Art is organized by the Denver Art Museum. Support is provided by the donors to the Annual Fund Leadership Campaign and the residents who support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD).

Promotional support is provided by 5280 Magazine and CBS Colorado.

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by Kerry David, Hopi

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12 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

president and CEO, who retired in March 2025.

MUSEUMS

The NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART in Washington, DC, hired Dakota Hoska (Oglala Lakota) as their curator of Native American art. Hoska is a painter and printmaker who previously served as the assistant curator of Native arts at the Denver Art Museum and as a curatorial research assistant at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. She earned her art history master's degree from the University of St. Thomas.

The MUSEO NACIONAL DE ANTROPOLOGÍA in Mexico City opened its new section in January, which recognizes Indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples, cultures, and art. The 45-million-peso ($2.2 million) renovation created five galleries with nearly 6,000 pre- and post-contact artworks and cultural items organized by five themes: “Histories, Identities, and Resistance”; “Peoples, Languages, and Territories”; “Corn, Milpas, Land, and Food”; “Mexican Textiles”; and “Festivals and Rituals.”

The MACKENZIE ART GALLERY released its Digital Exhibitions Toolkit and Art Installation Launcher (DETAIL). This free, open-source, comprehensive resource allows artists, curators, and galleries to create their own interactive digital art exhibitions and is available on their website.

above Monique Fragua, incoming president and CEO of the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. right Dakota Hoska, new curator of Native American art at the National Gallery of Art.

The INDIAN PUEBLO CULTURAL CENTER hired Monique Fragua (Jemez) as its new president and CEO. Fragua has served as chief operations officer since July 2022 and has worked at the cultural center since 2012. She replaces Mike Canfield (Laguna Pueblo), the previous

Specializing in Hopi Silver Jewelry

Choker by Roy Talahaftewa

The very best Hopi Silver jewelry purchased directly from the Hopi silversmiths FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025 | 13

DAWNLAND

FESTIVAL OF ARTS & IDEAS

July 12 & 13, 2025 College of the Atlantic Campus| Bar Harbor, ME

DAWNLANDFESTIVAL.ORG Construction on SALIQMIUT: TUKTUUYAQTUUQ CENTRE FOR ARTS AND CULTURE has begun in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, with a target opening in April 2026. Saliqmiut will serve Canada’s Western Arctic and provide space for a museum, archives, collections, workshops, administration, and visual and performing arts.

ART MARKETS Rebecca Lucario (Acoma) won Best of Show at the 67th annual HEARD MUSEUM GUILD INDIAN FAIR AND MARKET for her intricately painted plate. Classification winners were Benson Manygoats (Diné), jewelry and lapidary; Rebecca Lucario (Acoma), pottery; Quinn Honanie (Hopi), two-dimensional art; Donald Lomawunu Sockyma (Hopi), Pueblo carvings; Kenneth Johnson (Muscogee/Seminole), sculpture; Roy Kady (Diné), weavings and textiles; Jamie Okuma and Sandra Okuma (both Luiseño/Shoshone-Bannock), diverse art forms; and Kathryn Kooyahoema (Hopi), baskets. Benjamin

West (Otoe-Missouria/Southern Cheyenne/Muscogee) won the Conrad House Award (Best of Innovation), Emil Her Many Horses (Oglala Lakota) won the Idyllwild Arts Imagination Award, and Ronald Honyouti (Hopi) won the Indian Arts & Crafts Association Commemorative Award. Aydrian Day (Ho-Chunk/ Anishinaabe/Lakota) won Best of the Youth Art Show.

above Four Seasons & North Star by Rebecca Lucario (Acoma) won Best of Show at the 2025 Heard Museum Guild Fair and Market.

14 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025

J. Dylan Cavin (Choctaw Nation) won the Dana and Terry Brown Grand Award and Merlin Little Thunder (Southern Cheyenne) won the President’s Award at the 39th annual RED EARTH FESTIVAL in Oklahoma City. Victoria McKinney won the Kathleen Upshaw Award. Classification winners were Mary Aitson (Cherokee Nation), basketry; Yonavea Hawkins (Caddo/Delaware/Kickapoo), beadwork/quillwork; Melissa Freeman (Choctaw Nation), clothing/textiles and weaving; Darius Charley (Diné), cultural items; Jeremy Salazar (Diné), digital art and 3D art; Grant Morris (Cherokee Nation), diversified art forms; James Starkey (Cheyenne River Lakota), drawing/graphics/photography; Ray “Duck” Garcia (San Felipe Pueblo), jewelry–contemporary; Avery Aguilar (Santo Domingo Pueblo), jewelry–traditional; Stuart Sampson (Citizen Potawatomi), painting–oil/acrylic; Candace Shanholtzer (Choctaw Nation), painting–water based; Doris John (Diné), pottery–contemporary; and Grant Morris (Cherokee Nation), sculpture.

AWARDS & HONORS Canada is awarding the KING CHARLES III CORONATION MEDAL to 32 Inuit women. These include artists such as fashion designers Victoria Kakuktinniq and Martha Kyak; printmaker Mayoreak Ashoona; singer-songwriter Looee Arreak; singer and dancer Debbie Gordon-Ruben; textile artists/regalia makers Minnie Etidloie, Shirley Elias, and Elisapee Birmingham, and Naulaq LeDrew, an artist, throat singer, and dancer.

The 2025–2027 TULSA ARTIST FELLOWS include blogger Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation) and documentary filmmaker Colleen Thurston (Choctaw Nation). The ten fellowships include a $150,000 grant over three years, studio space, and annual stipends for housing, health, wellness, and studios.

The Ruth Foundation for the Arts, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, awarded one of its four RUTH AWARDS to Theresa Secord (Penobscot), a basketry artist and educator from Maine. This annual award includes a $100,000 stipend.

United States Artists named its 50 USA FELLOWS for 2025, who include Indigenous artists such as Joan Naviyuk Kane (Inupiaq), Bojan Louis (Diné), Sarah Rosalena (Wixárika), Theresa Secord (Penobscot), Tall Paul (Leech Lake Ojibwe/Oneida), X (Coushatta/ CHaromu), and Rhiana Yazzie (Diné).

Each fellowship includes a $50,000 unrestricted award, financial planning, career consulting, legal advice, personal care, gatherings, and publishing opportunities.

Interdisciplinary artist Kent Monkman (Fisher River Cree) received a 2025 CANADA’S GOVERNOR GENERAL AWARD in visual and media arts.

The honor comes with a cash prize of CAN$25,000.

First Peoples Fund (FPF) announced several awards and fellowships for this year. The 2025 JENNIFER EASTON COMMUNIT Y SPIRIT AWARD recipients are Silver Galleto (Cloverdale Pomo), Terrill Goseyun (San Carlos Apache), Janie Verret Luster (United Houma Nation, state-recognized), Julia

Marden (Aquinnah Wampanoag), Sonya Moody-Jurado (Confederated Siletz), Lisa Morehead-Hillman (Karuk/Yurok).

Each artist will receive a $50,000 award that honors their lifelong dedication to cultural preservation and creative work.

The FPF 2025 ARTIST IN BUSINESS LEADERSHIP FELLOWS are Orlando Allison (Hopi/Gila River), Kelly Back (Akwesasne Mohawk), Avis Charley (Spirit Lake Dakota/Diné), Mariah Claw (Diné), Alayna Eagle Shield (Standing Rock Lakota/Dakota/ Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara), Leya Hale (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota/Diné), Ray “Rocky Boy” Janis (Oglala Lakota), Susan Jones (Orutsararmiut Yup'ik), Jaylee Lowe (Seminole Nation/Muscogee), LaShawn Medicine Horn (Yankton Dakota/Lakota/ Nakota), Jackie Fawn (Washoe/Yurok), Kate Nelson (Tlingit), Pamela J. Parker (Diné), Margarita Paz-Pedro (Laguna Pueblo descent), Maya Peña (Santa Clara Pueblo), Kenneth Shirley (Diné), T.J. Keanu Tario (Native Hawaiian), Maggie Thompson (Fond du Lac Ojibwe), and Brittany Turner (Haliwa-Saponi, state-recognized).

JOIN US FOR THE

NATIVE AMERICAN ARTS FESTIVAL WEEK JUNE 16 - JUNE 20, 2025 | IDYLLWILD ARTS CAMPUS

The annual Native American Arts Festival Week is a week of intimate, inperson, free public programming that compliments our Native American Arts Workshops on the Idyllwild Arts Campus. This year’s festival will explore themes of musical, artistic, and cultural confluence through an array of programming, including: • The Native American Arts Center Invitation Exhibition curated by Pamela Peters (Diné) • The Michael Kabotie Lunchtime Lecture Series • A staged reading of Joy Harjo’s (Mvskoke) new play, We Were There When Jazz Was Invented, with special musical accompaniment by jazz great Delbert Anderson (Diné) • 4th Annual Welcoming Home the Birds Event, Artist Marketplace, and Native Book Fair SCAN FOR MORE INFO, OR VISIT: idyllwildarts.org/nativeamericanarts

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025 | 15

DISCOVER THE COLLECTIVE SPIRIT® PODCAST—YOUR WINDOW INTO THE VIBRANT WORLD OF NATIVE ARTISTS & CULTURE BEARERS. JOIN US AS THEY SHARE POWERFUL STORIES ABOUT THE TRANSFORMATIVE IMPACT OF INDIGENOUS ART & CULTURE. LISTEN & SUBSCRIBE TO THE COLLECTIVE SPIRIT® PODCAST TODAY: BIT.LY/FPF-CS-PODCAST

THE PODCAST REFLECTS OUR MISSION TO HONOR AND UPLIFT INDIGENOUS CREATIVITY THROUGH GRANTS, MENTORSHIP, AND CULTURALLY ROOTED PROGRAMS.

+ + + BROUGHT TO YOU BY

FIRSTPEOPLESFUND.ORG | COLLECTIVESPIRIT@FIRSTPEOPLESFUND.ORG

The FPF 2025 CULTURAL CAPITAL FELLOWS are Steven Arrowtopknot (Blackfeet), Kansas Begay (Diné), Cecelia Bernice Bull Bear (Oglala Lakota), Nikki Corbett (Orutsararmiut Yup'ik), Kea Peters (Native Hawaiian), Addelina Lucero (Taos/Yaqui/Chicana), Tiśina Ta-till-ium Parker (Yosemite Southern Sierra Miwuk/Mono Lake Paiute/Kashia Pomo/Coast Miwuk descent), Dylan Sanidad (Haida/Tlingit/Tsimshian), Theresa Secord (Penobscot), Tash Terry (Diné), and Ahnawake Toyekoyah (Kiowa/Caddo/Delaware). Each fellow will receive a $10,000 award and year-long professional development support.

The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation gave its 2024 BIENNIAL AWARDS to 20 artists, including Jordan Ann Craig (Northern Cheyenne), Terran Last Gun (Blackfeet), and Athena LaTocha (Hunkpapa Lakota/Ojibwe descent). These include $20,000 grants.

Ilegvak (Yup’ik) received one of the 2024 ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION ARTS WRITERS GRANTS for his article “Water Protectors: Indigenous Art

as Reimagination from the No Dakota Access Pipeline NoDAPL Movement.”

The Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums chose 21 artists to for its 2025 NATIVE CRAFT ARTIST READINESS PROGRAM (NCARP).

They are Cathy Abercrombie (Cherokee Nation), Bobby Brewer (Inupiaq), Franklin Carrillo (Laguna Pueblo/ Choctaw Nation), Donald Chippewa III (Little Traverse Bay Odawa), Gregory Drapeau (Northern Ponca), Teresa Dunlap (Catawba), Hillary Kempenich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), Kyle Kootswatewa (Hopi), Regina Meredith-Fitiao (Samoan), Golga Oscar (Yup'ik), Reine Pavlik (Tlingit), Harrison Preston (Tohono O'odham), Shelby Rowe (Chickasaw), Lisa Rutherford (Cherokee Nation), Paige Skenandore (Oneida Nation), Frances Soctomah (Passamaquoddy), Kayla Wave (Tlingit), Alica Wildcatt (Eastern Band Cherokee), Jennifer Wilson (Eastern Band Cherokee), Venaya Yazzie (Diné/Hopi), and Shawn Zephier (Onondaga/Cheyenne River Lakota). The program provides training, mentorship, and a $10,000 stipend.

16 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025

Scotiabank and the Canadian Photography Institute gave a 2024 NEW GENERATION PHOTOGRAPHY AWARD to artist and curator asinnajaq (Inuk). This award includes a CAN$10,000 prize and an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada.

The University of Rochester gave its 2024 LILLIAN FAIRCHILD AWARD to G. Peter Jemison (Seneca Nation). This award includes a $3,000 gift.

Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq hosted its second cohort of Inuit ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE including Jamesie Itulu of Pond Inlet, Martha Siqiniq AupaluktuqHickes of Baker Lake, and Andrew Palongayak of Gjoa Haven. All are Inuit from Nunavut.

Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts (CSIA) announced its 2025 FELLOWS. They are Phillip Cash Cash (Nez Perce/ Cayuse), Camas Logue (Klamath/ Modoc), Frank Buffalo Hyde (Onondaga), and RYAN! Feddersen (Colville Okanogan/Arrow Lake).

F I RS T AM ERI C A N FI NE A RT & G I FTS W E D N ES D AY – M O N D AY ( C LO S E D TU E S DAYS ) 1 0 A . M . – 6 P. M .

EXH I B I TC G A LLE RY. C O M | 405.767.8900 | 645 FIRST AMERICANS BLVD. | OKLAHOMA CITY The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe announced that basket maker Auri Poseyesva (Hopi) is their 2025 GOODMAN ASPIRING ARTIST FELLOW. The fellowship provides financial assistance to emerging artists.

GALLERIES EXHIBIT C GALLERY, owned by the Chickasaw Nation, reopened on February 21 at its new location in the Horizons District, adjacent to First Americans Museum in eastern Oklahoma City.

The ARTESIAN GALLERY AND STUDIOS in Sulphur, Oklahoma, reopened in January after being damaged by an EF3 tornado on April 27, 2024. A project of the Chickasaw Nation, the gallery and studios were founded in 2013.

SCHOOLS Robert Martin (Cherokee Nation) will retire as president from the INSTITUTE OF AMERICAN INDIAN ARTS in Santa Fe, where he has worked since 2007.

He has worked in higher education for 40 years, as president of the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, Haskell Indian Nations University, and Tohono O’odham Community College.

ORGANIZATIONS U.S. President Donald Trump removed Shelly Lowe (Diné) from her position as chair of the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES (NEH). Lowe was the first Native American to lead the NEH. The U.S. POSTAL SERVICE is issuing four new stamps with paintings by Mateo Romero (Cochiti). The first-day-of-issue ceremony will be held at the annual Gathering of Nations Pow Wow.

FILM & MEDIA X'unei Lance Twitchell (Tlingit/Haida) won an Emmy for his writing on the episode “Not a Mascot” for the PBS Kids animated show MOLLY OF DENALI. Twitchell is a professor of Alaska Native

Languages at the University of Alaska Southeast, and Molly of Denali is the first national children’s program to feature an Alaska Native child as a lead character.

SUGARCANE, a film by Julian Brave NoiseCat (Canim Lake Secwepemc) and Emily Kassie, was nominated in the Documentary Feature category for the 97th Academy Awards. This is the first film directed by a First Nations filmmaker to have been nominated for an Oscar.

PUBLICATIONS CRITICAL MINDED, a Detroit-based organization, provided First American Art Magazine with a general operating support grant. The Nathan Cummings Foundation and Ford Foundation founded Critical Minded in 2017 to support cultural critics of color. The organization believes, as stated on its website, “that engaging critically with the ideas and images that surround us is a prerequisite for transforming our cultural landscape and preserving democracy.”

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025 | 17

PRECONTACT ART & HISTORIC SITES An archaeological discovery near Sturgeon Lake First Nation in Saskatchewan provides evidence of organized societies in Canada earlier than previously thought.

The ÂSOWANÂNIHK village site, whose name means “a place to cross” in Cree, dates from 10,600 to 10,700 years old.

The First Nation has formed an advisory council to protect the site from further erosion or industrial activity.

A new agreement is transferring SUGARLOAF MOUND in St. Louis to the Osage Nation, marking the first time in the city’s history that it is acknowledging the Osage Nation’s ancestral rights to the oldest human-made structure in the city limits.

REPATRIATION ProPublica, a nonprofit news service, recently updated THE REPATRIATION PROJECT, a public database tracking more than 600 museums, universities, and

government agencies and their compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The law was amended to improve compliance, and 2024 was the third-largest year for the return of ancestral human remains to tribes. Last year, institutions returned 18,000 remains to tribes.

CRIME & LEGAL ISSUES Three men were sentenced for violating the Indian Arts and Crafts Act: Travis Lee Macasaet and Simeon Cabansag of Ketchikan and Jessie Reginio of Seattle.

They were involved in selling hundreds of Philippine-produced products marketed as Alaska Native–made artwork through Alaska Stone Arts and Rail Creek in Ketchikan. In addition to their sentences, defendants must pay restitution to the victims and write public apology letters to both the victims and tribes.

U.S. Senators Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski introduced Senate Bill 254, the “Alaska’s Right To Ivory Sales and

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Tradition Act” (ARTIST Act) to amend the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act to clarify that Alaska Natives may use marine mammal ivory in cultural artworks and clothing if the harvesting is for subsistence.

A federal jury in Albuquerque convicted California-based jeweler Robert Haack guilty of wire fraud, mail fraud, and violating the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, which is a felony. He forged copies of jewelry by Charles Loloma (Hopi, 1921– 1991) and sold them on eBay. The U.S. Attorney’s Office of the District of New Mexico estimated that Haack sold $400,000 in counterfeit jewelry. He faces up to 20 years in federal prison.

A man was arrested in Peru after damaging a 500-year-old artifact from the Inca Ruq'a palace known as the 12-angle-stone due to its perfect 12-angled border. Cuzco’s Decentralized Directorate of Culture says that current regulations would make this vandalism count as an attack on culture and could result in a sentence of up to six years in prison.

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SEVEN DIRECTIONS

Seven Directions

HUNTER C. OLD ELK An Apsáalooke and Yakama curator shares her top seven list

H

UNTER C. OLD ELK (Apsáalooke/Yakama) grew up in southeastern Montana on the Crow Indian Reservation. She is the interim curator of the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming. She is a mother, member of the Big Lodge clan, child of the Whistling Water clan, and member of the Night Hawk Dance Society. Her Apsáalooke name is Bía Basaane (Woman In The Front).

Old Elk holds a master of arts in cultural heritage management from Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor of arts in Native American histories from Mount St. Mary’s University, both in Maryland. Her graduate research focused on the reciprocal relationship between global Indigenous peoples and their homelands, examining how landscapes develop cultural practices and belief systems.

Her work takes a community-based approach, engaging Native and non-Native communities. The most impactful aspect of her work involves overseeing the stewardship and care of sacred and ceremonial items in the Plains Indian Museum’s holdings. She connects tribal sovereigns as equals in museum processes supporting tribal consultation and repatriation through NAGPRA. Old Elk contributes to the preservation and support of Indigenous youth by serving as the vice chair of Native American Jumpstart, a bridge foundation supporting Indigenous college students. She sponsors tribal youth in her home community as an alumna mentor at St. Labre Indian Schools and volunteers on the Little Bighorn College Museum and Cultural Center steering committee.

above Hunter C. Old Elk. All images courtesy of

author unless otherwise noted. below Rylon and Orion Bird photograph textiles for

the Plains Indian Museum, 2024.

ABOVE. Space and stars have always fascinated me in childhood because, in Apsáalooke culture, our origin is told through star stories in the winter. In the spring of 2024, my partner Rylon Bird and I gave birth to our son ORION. Named for the great hunter of Greek mythology, he is the brightest star in our lives. He was born just after midnight and enjoys staying up in the night to visit with his stars. His Apsáalooke name, given to him by his grandfather Buzzy Covers Up, is Bishèe Hèelen Xaalùusheesh (Runs With Buffalo).

Orion was introduced to the arts and gallery work as early as three weeks and has been his father’s second eye on Valley of the Chief ’s Production photo shoots.

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025 | 21

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

EAST. JOSEPH WILLIAMS (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota) is a storyboard artist and former director of the Indigenous programs at the Plains Art Museum in North Dakota. Joe is an accomplished host of the 5 Plain Questions podcast and a U.S. Army National Guard veteran, having deployed three times and served for more than 20 years. Joe’s passion lies in his ability to tell stories through digital media. In 2025, I asked Joe to create a storyboard to accompany a recent Plains Indian Museum acquisition of Jackie Larson Bread’s cradleboard titled A Blackfeet Story of the Prairie Crocus. The cradleboard, created in Jackie’s hyper-realistic bead embroidery style shows the story of early Blackfeet leader Wapee’s vision quest to manhood. The cradleboard and storyboard are now installed in the lower level of the Plains Indian Museum.

NORTH. SEAN CHANDLER (Aaniiih) is a father, visual artist, and president of the Aaniiih Nakoda College on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana. He placed his art career on hold to oversee educational leadership in his community. Chandler invokes abstract elements of Aaniiih, or Gros Ventre, culture with contemporary themes. His figures represent dehumanization, racism, and cultural genocide. Sean also serves on several boards including the Montana Arts Council and was named a 2023 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellow.

BELOW. Below my feet is the floor of my basement office at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. The PLAINS INDIAN MUSEUM has been my professional home since I started as an intern in 2016. I have held many roles but took over as interim curator of the Plains Indian Museum in January 2025. My cherished memories include meeting talented artists while serving as the Plains Indian Museum artist-in-residence coordinator.

My home is filled with one-of-a-kind art from friends which include John Hitchcock (Kiowa/Comanche), Robert Martinez (Northern Arapaho/Chicano), Sarah Ortegon HighWalking (Eastern Shoshone/Northern Arapaho), Ben Pease (Apsáalooke/Northern Cheyenne/ Hidatsa), Holly Young (Standing Rock Dakota), and John I. Pepion (Blackfeet).

Each of these artists has impacted my career and broadened my viewpoint through color, storytelling, and passion for their communities. above, left The Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center for the West, Cody, Wyoming.

Photo: Burley Packwood (CC-BY-SA 4.0). above, right Jackie Larson Bread (Blackfeet), A Blackfeet Story of the Prairie Crocus, 2024, velvet, glass seed beads, crystal beads, shell discs, shells, pearls, ermine tails, brass hawk bells, buffalo tuft, collection of the Plains Indian Museum, gift of the Alexander Bodini Foundation in memory of Alexander Bodini, NA.111.72.

Image courtesy of the Plains Indian Museum.

right Sean Chandler, PhD, president of Aaniiih Nakoda College, Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, Montana. opposite, left Joseph Williams (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota), Wapee receiving his vision, 2025, storyboard. Image courtesy of artist.

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SEVEN DIRECTIONS

WEST. COURTNEY LITTLE AXE (Northern Cheyenne/ Absentee Shawnee/Seminole) is the founder and designer of the fashion house ALTRN8V. Inspired and encouraged by her elders, she launched the fashion line in 2021 to create, in her own words, “eclectic, contemporary, and alternative” fashion garments.

Courtney’s passion for spotlighting Indigenous alternative communities has led to her being featured in fashion shows throughout Indian Country. Most recently, she participated in the Native fashion show at the Spencer Museum of Art. Courtney also holds the critical title of NAGPRA Repatriation Coordinator and Collections Manager at the University of Montana. right, top Courtney Little Axe, 2025. Image courtesy of Courtney Little Axe. right, bottom Otakwan (Plains Cree), Arianna Mazzarello, and Isadora Miller model ALTRN8V clothing. Image courtesy of Arianna Mazzarello.

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SEVEN DIRECTIONS

above, left John Hitchcock (Kiowa/Comanche) and author holding an untitled screen print at a live screen-printing demonstration in Cody, Wyoming, 2022. above, right Isabella Old Elk (Apsáalooke) models the Sky-Eagle Collection by Dante Biss-Grayson (Osage) during the Crow Fair Parade, 2024. opposite, above Neta Old Elk (Apsáalooke) exhibiting at the 2024 Montana Folk Festival in Butte. Image courtesy of artist. opposite, below Valley of the Chiefs Productions logo.

SOUTH. JOHN HITCHCOCK (Kiowa/ Comanche) from Lawton, Oklahoma, is a multimedia artist, musician, and faculty member at the University of Wisconsin– Madison. He is strongly influenced by stories told by his late Kiowa and Comanche grandparents. His images are abstract representations influenced by beadwork, land, and culture. John’s work focuses on the long history of social and political commentary within the discipline of printmaking to examine community, land, and culture relationships. He has been an artist in residence at the Plains Indian Museum in 2017, 2019, and 2022 and is invited again in summer 2025, when he will install a mural in the Plains Indian Museum.

CENTER OF MY HEART IS FAMILY. NETA OLD ELK (Apsáalooke) owns and creates CROW BEADS, a line of wearable art and jewelry using innovative twists on cultural bead techniques. She creates one-of-a-kind and handcrafted

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accouterments, taking care to procure increasingly rare materials such as conch shells, dentalium, antique chevron beads, and elk teeth. Her recent work includes beaded hats and decorated wallets. Neta is my clan mother, role model, and matriarch of my paternal side.

ISABELLA OLD ELK (Apsáalooke) is an activist and emerging, full-figure model from the Apsáalooke Nation.

Isabella has worked with designers Dante Biss-Grayson (Osage), Elias Not Afraid (Apsáalooke), Della Big-Hair Stump (Apsáalooke), Chokecherry Creek by Angela Howe (Apsáalooke/Blackfeet), Plains Soul by Carrie Moran McCleary (Little Shell Chippewa), and Rebekah Jarvey (Chippewa Cree/Blackfeet) for Vogue, Native Max Magazine, and Cowboys and Indians. She holds many titles as mother, model, and friend but the title I cherish most is Little Sister. She is my confidant, hype woman, and family fashionista.

VALLEY OF THE CHIEFS PRODUCTIONS is an Indigenous-owned production company by Rylon Bird (Apsáalooke). Opened in 2021, Rylon moved back to his home community in Montana post-COVID from the hustle and bustle of the Sacramento and Los Angeles film worlds.

He saw the need for Indigenous filmmakers to preserve cultural stories. He has created several projects that serve the cultural preservation of the Crow Tribe and released a short documentary The Return, which is about the Apsáalooke connection to Wyoming’s Heart Mountain. Rylon and I share our beautiful son, two stinky dogs, and a home in the occupied Apsáalooke lands of Wyoming.

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THE ARTIST WHO RECONSTRUCTED MAYA BLUE A vivid pigment resists decay over the centuries. Scientists have studied its chemical structure, but how did ancient Maya people create this resilient blue in the first place? One man set out to rediscover their methods.

By Mark Viales

ENDURING LEGACY

W

I THIN THE C ONFINES of an alchemist workshop that combines local plants with natural catalysts, ceramicist Luis May Ku (Yucatec Maya), 49, hopes to rediscover a long-lost formula for the Maya Blue pigment and finally have his eureka moment. The small, stuffy room lined with shelves stocked with test tubes, beakers, and funnels, offers little respite from the suffocating heat and the nearly 100-percent jungle humidity outside. A thin slit in the wall from a single window allows a beam of light to illuminate the makeshift laboratory.

Luis is closer than ever to re-creating the complex chemical recipe his ancient Maya ancestors perfected over a thousand years ago. The tension is as thick as the air as the paint slowly turns into the familiar bright turquoise-blue tone of the nearby Caribbean Sea. “Ki'imak óol, I’ve got it!,” he cries out, pushing past the door into his living room to embrace his wife and two young girls.

It is beyond a shadow of a doubt.

After several years of painstaking research, Luis found the missing link to form a pre-Hispanic pigment lost for more than two centuries.

MAYA BLUE is a testament to the ingenuity and cultural richness of Mesoamerican Indigenous peoples.

Created and used primarily by these communities, it emerged approximately the second century BCE and was used through the mid-19th century.1 This remarkable pigment is found in mural paintings in sacred buildings, ceramic vessels, sculptures, codices, and even oil paintings that reflect a fusion of Indigenous and European influences after the Spanish conquest.

Maya Blue is valued among historical pigments for its extraordinary properties. Its vibrant and enduring color has resisted the effects of time, light, biocorrosion, and moderate heat. Unlike many other dyes, it does not fade when exposed to concentrated acids, alkalis, or organic solvents. Murals painted with it have retained their brilliance and have withstood humid conditions for centuries, a testament to the advanced knowledge of the natural world held by Indigenous artisans.

1. María Luis Vázquez de Ágredos-Pascual, et al., “Multianalytical characterization of pigments from funerary artefacts belongs to the Chupicuaro Culture (Western Mexico): Oldest Maya blue and cinnabar identified in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica,” Microchemical Journal 150 (November 2019), web. Archaeologists have dated Maya Blue found in murals at Calakmul to 150 BCE; however, a team of Spanish and French researchers argue its use can be dated back to at least 250 BCE. —Ed.

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Recognized as a stable, organic-inorganic hybrid pigment, the hues of Maya Blue can range from blue to turquoise to blue-green and reflect the deep connection between its makers and their environment.

Variations in its values from light to dark stem from intentional manufacturing techniques or the use of different materials, which demonstrate the skill and creativity of Mesoamerican artists. The pigment often symbolized spirituality, life, and the cosmos, integral to Indigenous worldviews and ceremonial practices.

INDIGENOUS TECHNIQUES I MET LUIS at his home in Dzán, a small village of 6,000 people in the middle of the Yucatán jungle in southeast Mexico, after he had posted a scientific analysis of his formula on social media on January 9, 2023. Researchers in Italy and Mexico confirmed his formula was genuine, and

he wanted to share this information with those who closely followed his work. I was one of them.

It was the first time the world saw Maya Blue made with ancestral methods in almost two centuries. The significance of an Indigenous artist successfully resuscitating a long-lost pigment with limited resources piqued my interest.

Many believed it had only been re-created in a sophisticated laboratory by scientists following decades of research into the unique composition of the mixture. Yet Luis studied local natural dye creation techniques and gathered Maya knowledge passed down through generations, piecing the puzzle together in less than five years.

“I was ecstatic to rediscover the formula because it was the return of a pigment that had not been seen in the world for almost two centuries in its ancestral form,” Luis tells me.

I was aware of the importance and rarity of blue dye in the Eastern Hemisphere, such as Egyptian Blue, which

The pigment often symbolized spirituality, life, and the cosmos.…

above Luis May Ku (Yucatec Maya) poses with his hands painted in Maya Blue outside his home in Dzán, Yucatán, Mexico.

Photo: Mark Viales. opposite Maya artist once known, Crocodile Whistle and Rattle, 700–800, ceramic, pigment, 2 × 33/8 × 73/8 in., collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, 1979.206.1143 (CC0).

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025 | 27

It took three years and countless conversations with village elders before he stumbled upon a breakthrough.

above Mixtec artists once known, Codex Zouche-Nuttall, 14–15th c., illumination including Maya Blue on parchment. Photo: Einsamer Schütze (CC BY-SA 3.0). opposite, top Wild indigo (Indigofera suffruticosa), ch'oj in Maya, xiuhquilitl in Nahuatl.

Photo: Lauren Gutiérrez (CC BY-ND 2.0). opposite, bottom A clay sculpture painted in Maya Blue made

by Luis May Ku. It’s a portrait of a hooded, elderly woman from his community of Dzán. Photo: Mark Viales.

was used for thousands of years by the Roman Empire but eventually fell out of use. Nevertheless, this prized blue color was plentiful in Mesoamerica because the ancient Maya perfected a complex chemical recipe more than two thousand years ago.

THE MAYA METHOD LUIS HOLDS A CLIPPING of a delicate plant, telling me it is wild ch'oj (Maya for indigo plant, añil in Spanish) or Indigofera suffruticosa, a key ingredient in the iconic Maya Blue pigment. He strokes its soft, sprawling leaves and points to a large concrete vat in his backyard colored in sky-blue paint. He tells me he fills it with water and places ch'oj inside, along with palygorskite (a rare, fibrous clay found in nearby caves) to create a chemical reaction.

“Ch'oj rests in alkaline water, for 24 hours, then I swirl the solution

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vigorously until blue foam forms on top,” Luis explains. He mixes in lime or ash to make the water alkaline, and the chemical reaction from mixing the elements causes the clay to absorb the indigo tint from the plant.

He then ushers me toward a large clay kiln next to his alchemist lab and mentions he built it in the original style of his ancestors. He tells me he must bake the blue clay at around 250 degrees Celsius (482 degrees Fahrenheit) before grinding it into a powder and placing the contents into a vial, ready to sell. Luis taps his temple and forms a wry smile to express the thorough thought process he went through to decipher these ancient techniques.

“These robust furnaces are still used today by ceramicists from the neighboring town of Ticul, which is known as ‘The Pearl of the South’ and renowned for its high-quality pottery and clay sculptures,” he adds, folding his arms and bearing a proud look on his face as he reveals his love of sculpting faces of people with distinct Maya features.

At 17, Luis began sculpting wood while studying Maya culture at the Autonomous University of Yucatán, drawing inspiration from the ancient Maya architecture in his region. Around 20 years later, he followed in the footsteps of Ticul ceramicists, shifted to clay sculpting, and learned the art of decorating pottery with organic pigments. In this vibrant ceramic hub, Luis honed his skills among some of the most renowned artisans in Mexico.

JOURNEY TO REDISCOVERY LUIS’S JOURNEY TO REDISCOVER the secrets of Maya Blue began with old Spanish books and manuscripts that introduced him to the science behind the creation of the pigment. However, most of the critical research was in English, a language he did not know. Determined to fill in the gaps, Luis embarked on a quest across Yucatán in 2018, searching for clues, including the Maya name for indigo. It took three years and countless conversations with village elders before he stumbled upon a breakthrough.

“All knowledge of ch'oj had been passed down as a medicinal plant or for whitening clothes, but its use as a pigment in Yucatán seemed lost forever,” he tells me. An elder recounted how indigo leaves were soaked in water overnight and stirred to whiten soiled clothes. If left too long, the clothes would turn blue instead.

“When the elder told me the Maya name for the indigo plant was ch'oj, I felt a true moment of ki'imak óol,” Luis recalls. This revelation opened the door to a wealth of knowledge from Maya-speaking elders who helped guide his research.

It turned out that the key ingredient for Maya Blue had been hiding in plain sight.

At the time, Luis was a primary school teacher at the Municipal Cultural Center in Cobá, Quintana Roo. He noticed the shrubs his students used as goalposts in the garden behind the school. Those shrubs, he realized, were indigo plants. He asked the Cobá center caretaker, Don Justino, a close friend of his, to rescue the plants. The caretaker

used indigo leaves to treat severe stomach pain and happily fenced off the shrubs to protect and care for them until Luis was ready to harvest them. Eventually, Luis began planting ch'oj seeds, cultivating 30 shrubs in a borrowed plot of land nearby.

In November 2019, with assistance from Cobá locals, Luis mixed ch'oj leaves with palygorskite clay in a large concrete vat filled with water. At first only

white foam appeared, but after an hour of stirring, the water began to turn blue, sparking cheers from the group. However, the hue was pale—far from the vivid turquoise of authentic Maya Blue.

“In Cobá, we had extracted a blue tint, but it was back in my lab—a spare room I converted at home in Dzán— where I found the missing piece,” Luis informs me.

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Failure followed failure—until one day he saw the mixture transform from a soft blue to the vibrant turquoise he had been seeking.

above Maya artists once known, Procession of Musicians, Room 1, Bonampak, mural with a background of Maya Blue, late 8th c., Chiapas. Photo: Pablo Andres Guardia @protoplasmakid (CC BY-SA 4.0). opposite Luis May Ku holds the finished powdered product of Maya Blue pigment in his home in Dzán, Yucatán. Photo: Mark Viales.

Through months of trial and error, Luis experimented with natural additives, freezing ch'oj, letting it decay, and testing different methods. Failure followed failure—until one day he saw the mixture transform from a soft blue to the vibrant turquoise he had been seeking.

He repeated the process multiple times, each with the same stunning result. At last, Luis had successfully re-created the lost color of Maya Blue.

WIDESPREAD USE IN THE ANCIENT AMERICAS WHILE INITIALLY BELIEVED to be exclusive to the Maya region of Yucatán, Maya Blue has been discovered at various sacred and ceremonial sites throughout Central America, including El Tajín, Tamuín, Cacaxtla, Zaachila, Tula, and the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlán.

This widespread use underscores its

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importance across diverse Mesoamerican Indigenous cultures.

One post-contact use of Maya Blue is attributed to the Indigenous artist Juan Gerson (Nahua), who in 1562 painted murals in the Tecamachalco convent in Puebla, Mexico, using this sacred pigment.

His work is a powerful example of cultural resilience, a blend of Indigenous techniques with imposed colonial influences.

Moreover, records indicate that in the late 16th century, the Spanish physician Francisco Hernández de Toledo documented the recipe for Maya Blue’s preparation and transmitted this Indigenous knowledge to colonial authorities. During the Spanish conquest, they seized Maya Blue with other treasures from the lands they sacked.

They controlled the valuable pigment until synthetic alternatives emerged in the late 17th to early 18th centuries. Knowledge of Maya Blue faded over time, only to be rediscovered in the 20th century.

In 1989 researchers in Cuba identified Maya Blue in murals on colonial buildings, where it had been used from

1750 through 1860 under the name “Havana Blue.” The pigment was believed to have been imported from Mexico and illustrates the enduring influence and far-reaching legacy of Indigenous science and visual arts.

SCIENTIFIC SIGNIFICANCE EVER SINCE ITS REDISCOVERY in 1931 on the walls of the Temple of the Warriors at Chichén Itzá,2 Maya Blue has captivated researchers with its enduring mystery. Initial studies of the pigment were stalled due to the disruptions of World War I and the limited availability of resources. Research resumed in the 1960s when conservation scientist Elizabeth West FitzHugh identified palygorskite as a key component of a related pigment.

The source of Maya Blue’s vibrant and

remarkably stable color became a subject of debate. Some scholars proposed that an organic dye was responsible, while others doubted this theory, citing the pigment’s extraordinary resistance to chemical degradation.

A breakthrough came in 1966 when researchers successfully synthesized Maya Blue by combining palygorskite (or its counterpart, sepiolite, a hydrous magnesium silicate with a similar fibrous structure) with indigo, confirming indigo as the source of its color. This process also revealed that prolonged heating was necessary to create the pigment and that nonfibrous clays, such as montmorillonite or kaolinite, could not achieve the same stability. Subsequent studies, such as those

by Robert Kléber and his colleagues at the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage in Brussels in 1967,3 verified the presence of indigo in authentic samples using spectroscopy, further solidifying the findings.

While these discoveries laid the foundation for contemporary research, they also raised new questions. Indigo, on its own, is highly susceptible to chemical attacks, including destruction by nitric acid. Yet Maya Blue remains impervious even to prolonged exposure to such conditions. It suggests that the interaction between palygorskite and indigo forms a unique clay-organic complex that protects the dye. The exact nature of this molecular bond and its role in preserving the pigment’s stability remains a central focus of ongoing investigation.

COMPLEX FORMULA “THE PIGMENT HAS RECEIVED considerable attention,” explained María Luisa Vázquez de Ágredos-Pascual, a professor of art history at the University

2. Herbert E. Merwin, “Chemical Analysis of Pigments,” in The Temple of the Warriors at Chichen-Itza, Yucatan, ed. Earl H. Morris, Jean Charlot, and Ann Axtell Morris (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1931), 355–56.

3. Robert Kléber, Liliane Masschelein-Kleiner, and Jean Thissen, “Étude et Identification Du ‘Bleu Maya,’” Studies in Conservation 12, no. 1 (May 1967): 41–56.

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above Luis May Ku admires a three-sided ceramic face mask he sculpted, adorned with dried palm leaves, and painted in Maya Blue inside his home studio. Photo: Mark Viales. opposite The artist/researcher examines fully-grown wild indigo (Indigofera suffruticosa) plants that he discovered close to his milpa (Maya farm) in Dzán. Photo: Mark Viales.

of Valencia, Spain.“[It’s] because of its peculiar nature as an organic-inorganic hybrid material, its characteristic palette, ranging from a bright turquoise to a dark greenish blue, and its enormous resistance to attack from acids, alkalis, organic reagents and biodeterioration.” During her research, which began in 2000, she and a team of scientists found that the primary colorant in indigo is indigotin, but when indigo is combined with palygorskite clay, the second key ingredient for creating Maya Blue, and heated in an oven, a second colorant called dehydroindigo forms.

While indigotin is blue, dehydroindigo has a slightly more yellowish hue, and the combination of the two produces a greenish blue. This dual composition explains why Maya Blue can shift toward a greener tone as it degrades over time. The proportion of these colorants, influenced by the oven temperature during synthesis, plays a critical role in the pigment’s final appearance.

“Our research, focusing on conservation and restoration, has significantly advanced the understanding of Maya

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Blue,” says Vazquez, whose pivotal studies are conducted at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Institute of Aesthetic Research.

Western studies of this pigment began in 1931, gained momentum in 1946, and have seen rapid development in the 21st century. Vazquez and her team confirmed that the green tones observed in degraded murals are directly tied to the formation of dehydroindigo during heating, which occurs at around 150 degrees Celsius when indigo binds with palygorskite clay.

Additionally, research revealed that greener pigments found in the Maya region were created using sepiolite clay instead of palygorskite. Sepiolite, which contains more iron than palygorskite, interacts with other sediments at higher temperatures to produce these vibrant green hues.

“These findings not only enhance our understanding of Maya Blue’s composition but also shed light on the sophisticated techniques used by ancient Maya artisans,” Vazquez says.

SOLO PROJECT EVEN THOUGH LUIS has received recognition from the scientific community, he claims to have not earned a single peso from the Mexican government to support his project. Instead, he relies on financial assistance from a private institution, the British Museum in London, to continue his research. Luis chooses not to disclose key details of his rediscovery of the pigment, keeping it a family secret. A frown grows on his face, and his shoulders sink as he expresses his frustration over the lack of government funding for his project.

“The British Museum in London has been my only financial supporter,” he claims, before admitting he would have shared the formula with his people if government officials had not used him for propaganda rather than genuinely backing his work.

“The officials took photos of me with some scientists, and they promised my sample would be analyzed at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), but that never happened. The

financial support they promised to advance my research never materialized either.”

Although the method for making Maya Blue was lost for centuries, Luis believes the Maya people on the Yucatán Peninsula never truly lost knowledge of the ch'oj plant.

“These are memories from an ancient past that have endured until today,” he says.

MENTORSHIP AS THE LATE AFTERNOON SUN begins to set, we walk a short distance to Luis’s plantation. He gestures toward three young men, hard at work, slicing through weeds with sharp sickles. Luis explains that ch'oj is a delicate plant, often outcompeted by faster-growing species that overshadow it and absorb most of the rainwater. To ensure ch'oj thrives, the workers clear space around the plants, which can grow taller than two meters when unimpeded. The rapid growth of weeds in the Yucatán jungle, especially during the rainy season from June to late October, makes this task essential.

Among the workers is 23-year-old university student Benjamín Tenreiro Poot (Yucatec Maya) from El Naranjal, Quintana Roo. Taking a short break, he rests his sickle on his knee and shares his thoughts with a bright smile: “Maya Blue represents my roots, and I’m thrilled to be part of a project that honors Maya heritage.”

Benjamín’s professor, Guillermo Talavera (Yucatec Maya), is a huge fan of Luis’s work and conveniently had his phone number. When Benjamín mentioned he was looking for work to help pay for his studies, Guillermo told him about a social media post by Luis, who was looking for workers to harvest ch'oj.

“Luis is well known at our university, and many professors speak highly of him and his incredible discovery,” he tells me, adding he finds it inspiring that a fellow Maya managed to rediscover the knowledge of his ancestors. Benjamín finds it fascinating that the ancient Maya painted stunning murals inside pyramids and other buildings, so to see this important color return to Maya hands, he says, is a great achievement.

“My professor is thrilled to see me involved in this work with Luis,” he says,

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PROMOTING MAYA CULTURAL HERITAGE THE RELATIONSHIP between Benjamín and the two other apprentices is lighthearted and collaborative, but they work hard to help Luis with his project. The labor is intense, but his experience working in the milpa has prepared him for it. While he’s still uncertain about his future, he tells me he wants to promote Maya Blue and its heritage.

“If I work in Yucatán’s tourism industry, I’d love to collaborate with Luis and my professor on future projects,” Benjamín says. “Sharing this remarkable pigment and its history with the world is important to me.”

He tells me his parents are also proud of his involvement in a project that celebrates Maya heritage. His father was especially surprised to learn how significant ch'oj was to his ancestors.

“I feel immense pride in being Maya and in my connection to an extraordinary civilization,” he tells me, noting the ancient Maya were not only experts in nature and astronomy but also masters of shaping their environment to meet their needs. Art and culture were pillars of their society, making them one of the most influential civilizations in Mesoamerica.

Benjamín says it is vital for universities in Yucatán to involve students in projects that celebrate and preserve

MAYA VS. MAYAN Photo: Bruno Girin (CC BY-SA 2.0).

and mentions that Guillermo, too, is fascinated by the plant and the process of extracting the blue dye. Together, they form part of a history, science, and technology club at the university, which Guillermo founded. It was in this club’s workshops that Benjamín first learned about Maya Blue and became interested in Luis’s work.

“It fills me with pride and a deep connection to my heritage,” Benjamín tells me. “To me, Maya Blue represents my roots. It is amazing to learn more about the achievements of my ancestors and how advanced they were. Being part of this project, which honors and preserves Maya heritage, is a privilege.”

Luis’s apprentice says he knew about the ch'oj plant since he was a child. It grows abundantly in the jungle around his village, and he would often see it while helping his father in the milpa (Maya farm). However, he never knew that it was used to extract a blue dye or had such cultural significance for the ancient Maya. He feels that discovering that such a common plant in his region played a vital role in Maya history is extraordinary.

“Growing up, we thought ch'oj was just another weed that hindered the growth of our crops, so we would cut it down whenever it grew near the milpa,” he says, admitting that now that he understands its importance, he has started to preserve it.

Instead of discarding it, he harvests it to support Luis’s work. He hopes that in the future, his community can produce Maya Blue and even use it to decorate homes and buildings with murals, just like his ancestors once did.

THE TERM “MAYAN” is often mistakenly used to describe the Indigenous peoples of Southeastern Mexico and Central America (including Belize, Honduras, and Guatemala), as well as their culture, history, and language. However, the correct usage of “Mayan” is specific to their languages, while “Maya” is the preferred term for all other aspects, such as “the Maya of Yucatán.”

To English speakers, using “Mayan” as an adjective may feel natural, similar to saying “Spanish ruins” instead of “Spain ruins” or “Mesopotamian civilization” instead of “Mesopotamia civilization.” However, archaeologists and scholars of Maya culture consistently use “Maya” as references to the civilization, people, and culture.

In academic contexts, “Mayan” is reserved exclusively for the family of languages spoken by the Maya, both historically and today. The Yucatec Maya language is often simply called “Maya.” “Maya” is used for people, places, and cultural elements, whether singular or plural. Scholars avoid using “Mayas” in writing. Today, approximately six million people in Mesoamerica speak one of more than 20 distinct Mayan languages.

—Mark Viales

Indigenous Maya roots. In addition to Maya Blue, he also participates in projects related to the milpa, focusing on reintroducing plants that were once central to it but are now forgotten. These include medicinal plants, fruits, and vegetables that sustain rural communities.

“We also work with elders in our villages to revive ancient ceremonies that are fading with modernity,” he says. “My professor strongly believes in this, and he has organized ceremonies across various villages to keep our traditions alive. This is why the Maya Blue project is so meaningful to me—it’s more than just a color; it’s a connection to our past and a celebration of our identity.”

Mark Viales is a freelance journalist and photographer working in Europe, Africa, and Latin America. His projects include in-depth features on humanist issues in Mexico, climate change, inclusive sports, and Indigenous cultures.

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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.

Under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, it is unlawful to offer or display for sale, or sell, any art or craftwork in a manner that falsely suggests it is Indian made.

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 FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025 | 35

TLINGIT BUTTON BLANKETS Tailoring Cultural Change

By Kariel Galbraith (Tlingit)

G

ROWING UP IN SOUTHEAST ALASKA, it seemed like everyone had a button blanket. If one wasn’t made for you, the one in the closet your cousin outgrew would be the perfect size for you.

I remember wearing various hand-medowns when I was little so that I could dance with my older sister and cousins in a local dance group. We would perform at the Sheet'ká Kwáan Naa Kahídi, a community building owned by the Sitka Tribe of Alaska. Our group would share dance, song, and culture on stage with visitors in a building that mimicked a longhouse, though it exited through a tribal gift shop. The firepit in the center would be lit, filling the space with the scent of smoke and cedar and warming the cool, concrete floors.

As we turned our back toward the audience at the end of a song, we would create a beautiful wall of regalia with our blankets, beads, buttons, and shells glistening under track lighting. Elaborate clan crests were carefully sewn by the hands of our close relatives. With delicate fingers that once placed each stitch, they were acutely aware that this item would cover and care for someone they love. In stitching, the maker had to consider, How can I keep the tension of my thread loose enough to not pucker beads of fabric while I keep stitches tight enough to not unravel?

Where is the balance?

My grandmother Gooch Tláa, whose English name is Anne Johnson, showed me how to stitch two-hole buttons on a blanket, because four-hole

EARLIER TLINGIT CLOTHING

buttons didn’t quite look right. The way grandmas and aunties can sew up regalia is like magic—they know what looks good and how to place buttons and stitches in the right place every time. Even ripping seams is made elegant by the elders in my life. I remember crisp, mitered corners and equal spacing between every button reflecting the labor of love on the blankets that adorn my family.

At a koo.éex' (potlatch) in the fall of 2023, my great-uncle gave me his button blanket. He is a tall man with a slender figure, and the robe drowns me in itself.

The crest on the back was designed by his brother for our clan, beaded and embroidered neatly by the woman he commissioned to create it. It features hundreds of abalone beads worth hundreds of dollars; it remains a priceless piece of personal regalia. This gift encouraged me to explore the blankets that have been placed on the shoulders of my ancestors for 150 years and the predecessors of this recent regalia practice.

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BUTTON BLANKETS are regalia worn by the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast. Though each Northwest Coastal tribal nation has unique techniques and aesthetics for button blankets, in their simplest form, a button blanket is a large rectangular piece of woolen or felted fabric with a contrasting border, most frequently draped around the shoulders of the intended wearer and secured at the neck with a button or pin. The name “button blanket” comes from the mother of pearl or abalone that lines the edge of the contrasting border of the blanket.

The introduction of button blankets illustrates Tlingit society underwent dramatic change as European traders and eventually settlers arrived in Southeast Alaska. These once-simple trade items have transformed into the elaborate regalia of today. They offer insight into the continual changes made by Alaska Native communities as they adapt to the arrival and invention of new materials. With increasing European interaction and settler encroachment on Native territories in the 18th and 19th centuries, trade and commerce increased, but at the expense of Tlingit lifeways. Historical ways of life were interrupted, changed, and damaged.

Exchange with other tribes and European traders made metal, wool blankets, and other goods more widely available to the Native peoples of Southeast Alaska throughout the 19th century.

Precontact Tlingit clothing was predominantly made from animal hides, animal furs, and cedar bark textiles. Tlingit people in Southeast Alaska made tunics, shirts, and capes from rawhide since it was better suited for the rainy weather of the region. Tlingit people further north and other Northern tribes used tanned hides where the climate was drier. Tlingits value tanned moose hide because of its density and strength. At the Burke Museum, I studied tanned moose hide armor from Tlingit territory that was nearly one-inch thick, rough, unwieldy, and difficult to penetrate.

The Tlingit and many other Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast mastered the preparation of cedar bark and rawhide for wear. Deer hide was most common, as deer are plentiful in the region. Hide tunics and shirts were often constructed by folding a large cut of rawhide in half, creating several slits at the waistline to draw thread or cord through

to secure to the wearer. An armhole was left at the top edge of the folded hide at the wearer’s shoulder. The stitches were neat and precise, often with thread from roots, beaten plant fibers, or sinew. Cedar was treated like hemp: textile workers beat the fibers until malleable and shaped them into a garment through twining or secured them to a wearer with cordage.

Traders’ accounts also offer insight into gendered clothing norms. Prior to widespread availability of trade cloth or trade blankets, Tlingit women and men wore cedar or hide tunics, and women wore accompanying cedar or hide skirts, twined or tied shut with cordage.

Decorations of furs from all creatures of the region adorned edges or created cloaks for people of all genders.

While fur was often decorative, the hide and cedar cloaks of the region helped keep wearers dry. Twined or woven cedar bark or twined spruce root hats would complete the mostly waterproof attire.

above Tlingit artist once known, Button Blanket with Killer Whale Design, ca. 1920s, wool cloth, mother-of-pearl buttons, glass buttons, abalone shell, thread, 521/3 × 687/8 in., Revillagigedo Island, Alaska, collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 23/6180. Image courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian. opposite Mother-of-pearl button in the collection of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Photo: Victuallers (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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These hide and cedar clothes were regular, daily-wear clothes. They were beautiful but not as highly decorated as regalia or at.óow (sacred objects). Their purpose was to be functional. At the same time, Tlingit people also wove extensively intricate naaxein (Chilkat robes), twined garments of cedar, and crafted accessories for various uses. These Chilkat robes often had the same structure as the hide tunics, tied on the right side with the left side sewn closed or folded in half, with space for an armhole.

With European traders increasingly entering Alaska in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the hides that Tlingit people used for their clothing turned into currency. Captain James Cook’s 1778 arrival and the mid-19th-century expeditions by the Russian-American Company and Hudson Bay Trading Company brought goods that tribes valued and for which they traded hides and furs. Trade beads, buttons, and shells were highly prized and used to display wealth as adornments on a variety of garments, used as currency, and saved for application on extravagant regalia.

In the accounts of Captain Cook and through research by the Alaskan educator and textile artist Sharol L. Otness, initially the Tlingit people rejected trade blankets and cloth. Tlingit people traded away their hide clothes freely for prized buttons, beads, and shells. Uncomfortable with nudity, European traders were inclined to give Tlingit men a blanket to replace the hides they would trade off their backs.

BLANKETS TRANSFORMED

above, top Tlingit artist once known,

Armor, pre-1902, moose hide, pigment, collection of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, 2182. This armor features painted Yeíl (Raven) design, indicative of the wearer’s crest. The armor has not been attributed to a clan, but was taken from Sitka, Alaska, and acquired by the Burke in 1904.

above, left Detail Tlingit Moose

Hide Armor, at the center fold which would sit on the left side of the wearer. above, right

Detail Tlingit

Moose Hide Armor, showing the seam. All three images courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.

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AS TRADE BLANKETS became more available, Tlingit people gradually became more interested in repurposing them to create new garments. New possibilities showed themselves, and blankets became valuable. Wealthy families could amass hundreds of blankets, store them, and give them away at koo.éex'. With the exchange of items came the exchange of ideas, creating a clash of historical Tlingit aesthetics and the new, foreign European understanding of beauty. Like many people, the Tlingit were drawn

to the new and novel tools, ideas, and clothing brought by the shipload to their homelands. Tlingit people mimicked the style of outfits worn by high-ranking captains. Tlingit tailors cut the fabric and sewed it into European-style clothing or adorned blankets with the buttons and notions of sailors’ clothing. The style moved from imitation toward amalgamation—a new, uniquely Northwest Coast item of regalia that wove Tlingit taste with European materials.

These blankets were used as daily wear first. They kept wearers covered, warm, and mostly dry. The wool did not repel bugs and rot as well as cedar, and wet wool lost its shape if not treated properly. Tlingit tailors measured the wool blankets to fit the wearer and decorated them in accordance with the owner’s wealth. The woolen or felt fabric was as wide as the wearers’ arm span and long enough to hit just at their ankles. Some blankets also had trade cloth in place of felt for the border.

Most button blankets have a dark navy blue or black background with a bold contrasting border on the sides and top of the rectangle. Red is the preferred contrasting color followed by blue, green, or purple.

Tlingit women hand-sewed these early button blankets. As with most at.óow, someone of the opposite moiety1 is commissioned to make the piece of regalia or artwork. Today this historical rule is bent as Tlingit people recognize how the oral histories have been interrupted through cultural, physical, and legal action by settler governments.

Whoever has the skills to make regalia is encouraged to be gracious with their knowledge and production. It is appropriate now to have one’s mother, grandmother, sisters, and aunts make a button blanket for family members. The bending of rules to adapt to the needs of 21st-century Tlingit people also extends to color choice, style, and cut, breathing innovative ideas and personal style into Tlingit cultural representation.

Although personal preference and an individual’s understanding of visual balance create varying measurements, most borders are about five to five and

The woolen or felt fabric was as wide as the wearers’ arm span and long enough to hit just at their ankles. a half inches wide. As different families and teachers offer different preferences and knowledge, the blanket’s corners are finished in a variety of ways. Mitered corners, French seams, abutted seams, and a simple straight stitch with right sides together are all perfectly fine ways to attach borders to one another. This contrasting border, unlike that of most American quilts, entirely overlaps the main fabric’s edge. The contrasting border is sewn in place on the background fabric, right sides together with a straight stitch, French seam, or other stitch preferred by the maker. To finish the remaining raw edge, a maker might, after pressing the seam that was just stitched flat, leave a reasonable amount of seam allowance greater than the border and wrap the border fabric around the edge of the background fabric. A hemstitch or other invisible stitch can secure the border to the wrong side of the button blanket, making the stitching invisible from the right side of the button blanket.

above, top Tlingit artist once known, Chief Shake’s Plain Button Blanket with No Crest, ca. 1920s, wool cloth, cotton cloth, mother-of-pearl buttons, thread, collection of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, 1-1494. Chief Shake (Tlingit) belonged to the Naanya.aayí clan from Shx'atkwáan (Stikine River Region/ Borough) by Kaachxkan.áak’w (Wrangell Island), Alaska. above, right Detail of back of Chief Shake’s Plain Button Blanket with No Crest. Both images courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.

1. Tlingit people are separated into two moieties, Ch'áak (Eagle) and Yéil (Raven). This division promotes cultural balance and reciprocity in ceremony and prevents intermarriage between relatives.

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above, left Tlingit artist once known, detail of Starfish Blanket, late 19th c., wool cloth, cloth lining, mother-of-pearl buttons, Chinese coins, thread, collection of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, 2.5E1356.

This blanket is not currently attributed to any clans in the Burke’s database, but the owners would claim starfish as a clan crest. The blanket is unusual for its coins and wavy, zig-zagging button border. The white selvage of wool blankets has been carefully placed so that the white edge lines up midway of the wearer and at the edges of the blanket; this is mirrored on both sides.

above, right Detail of the border of the Starfish Blanket, featuring a wave of buttons on the contrasting red edge. Some buttons are missing from the border on the main, darker navy blue background of the blanket. below, right Detail of the Starfish Blanket crest design, featuring four-holed motherof-pearl buttons. below, left Neck closure of the Starfish Blanket. Lining was sewn in to improve stability of the wool. The material is suspected to be mattress ticking, though it also matches the striped cotton undershirts of Russian sailors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

All four images courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.

“WHERE DO YOU COME FROM? WHO DO YOU BELONG TO?” THOUGH THE CONSTRUCTION of button blankets is neat, tidy, and impressive, a major draw for many viewers are the crests often placed in the center back of the garment. These intricate Tlingit formline crests identify where the wearers are from and who they belong to and share this information with other tribal members and neighboring tribal nations.

Depending on the family of the wearer, button blankets are adorned in many ways.

Tlingit society is organized matrilineally, meaning that clan rites come from a mother’s lineage. A person with a Tlingit father but not a Tlingit mother does not inherit a clan, though they still would acknowledge their father’s clan in ceremonial spaces. The way for a Tlingit person who has a non-Tlingit mother to receive a clan identity is to be folded in or adopted2 to a clan opposite of their 2. Some Tlingit people are moving away from the use of the term “adoption” for people with Tlingit heritage, as non-Tlingit people are also honorarily “adopted” into clans for assorted reasons. These two forms of adoption mean different things and serve different purposes. In a language class, Sitka Tribe of Alaska Chairwoman Yeidikook’áa shared the term “folded in” to a clan as an alternative for those with Tlingit heritage.

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father’s moiety at a koo.éex'. Until that ceremony is completed, the wearer could wear a plain blanket.

Crests show the wearers’ family ties and increase the worth of the garment in Tlingit cultural understanding.

To give an object relationship and story is to make it valuable. Wealth determines who owns the most elaborate button blankets, though differences in clan wealth were more obvious in the regalia’s early history. More wealth improved access to the necessary materials and the ability to commission artists for button blankets. The creation and ownership of these intricate blankets also increased the wealth of such families—in the Tlingit understanding of wealth. One’s wealth would increase through the showing of at.óow at koo.éex'. As the craft of button blankets grew, they began to be used in similar ways to the exceptionally complex naaxein, even being cut up at koo.éex' and given away to guests as a way to show gratitude, as one might do with a naaxein.

Shortly after their introduction, button blankets moved from daily wear to regalia. More Tlingit people acquired button blankets. Before felt, wool, and buttons necessary to create a button blanket became widely available, not every Tlingit person could have a robe for dancing. Naaxein were owned by the wealthier individuals and clans of Tlingit society.

Increased access to required materials meant more Tlingit people could own button blankets.

THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE TO MEET THE GROWING DEMAND for wool blankets across the West, and to skirt import duties on English wool products, mills formed such as the Mission and Pacific Woolen Mills in San Francisco and the Thomas Kay Woolen Mill in Salem, Oregon. Demand for blankets rose until the 1930s. Several factors prevented

To give an object relationship and story is to make it valuable.

above Shtax'héen Kwáan Tlingit artist once known, Button Blanket with Human, Bear, and Eagle Designs, 1880–1990, wool cloth, mother-of-pearl buttons, thread, 707/8 × 541/3 in., Wrangell Island, Alaska, collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 16/2772.

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above, top Tlingit artist once known, detail of Chief Shake’s Killer Whale Crest Blanket, ca. early 20th c., wool cloth, flannel, mother-of-pearl buttons, thread, collection of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, 1-1490. above, bottom, left Detail of Chief Shake’s Killer Whale Crest Blanket with four-holed mother-of-pearl buttons in two sizes (estimated 3/8-inch and 1-inch) and decorative red flannel on dark blue-black wool. above, bottom, right Detail of Chief Shake’s Frog Crest Blanket, collection of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, 1-1495.

All three images courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.

the continued creation of button blankets.

Alaska at this time was still not a state and would not be until 1959. With their land treated as a United States’ territory, Alaska Natives were not regarded as citizens. Without these rights and protections following the Alaska Purchase in 1867, outsiders extracted resources from Tlingit lands without permission. Active assimilation strategies of this time, like the ongoing missionization of the Alaska Native peoples and Canada’s Potlatch Ban, which took effect in 1885 and made its way across the mountain range that separates Alaskan and Canadian territory, discouraged or outlawed cultural practices that necessitated such regalia.

This was when residential schools took my grandparents’ generation away from their families and discouraged the sharing of knowledge with the next generation.

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The 1930s brought prosperity for many settlers despite the Great Depression. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game reported incredible salmon runs and profits from fishing. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps to create jobs, but these jobs at their inception were only for white people. Kaaxgal.aat, or Elizabeth Peratrovich (Tlingit, 1911– 1958) and the members of the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood challenged the inequality being perpetuated by senators on what was then the Territory of Alaska.

Compelling demands for antidiscrimination laws and the growing interest from white Americans in saving the aesthetics of the Indigenous peoples amidst the myth of a “Vanishing Race” made space for culture bearers to keep culture alive through carving. Many Southeast Alaska Native men dedicated time to restoring and replicating the totem poles of their homelands.

Through the crucial ongoing and unwavering dedication of the Alaska Native civil rights leaders to protect Native sovereignty, after more than a century of battling the American government for equality and respect, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) became law in 1971. Alaska Native peoples gained a voice on the use of their land, meaning they could benefit from the state’s economic growth. These financial resources could be poured into what Tlingit people know to be most important: Haa Kusteeyí. Our culture.

The Alaska Native Rights activists’ work was reenergized by the American Indian Movement, which brought cultural resurgence in Alaska Native communities in the 1970s with the passing of ANCSA. In 1980 the Sealaska Corporation, one of Alaska’s 12 regional corporations, founded the Sealaska Heritage Foundation in Juneau. Now called the Sealaska Heritage Institute, this nonprofit promotes and advances Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian culture through language and cultural classes, lectures, workshops, and other events. Today button blankets are appropriate to wear at a variety of events. As cultural exchanges between Native peoples continue, button blankets can be seen at powwows, Tlingit

NEW EXHIBIT ROCHESTER, NY Hayden Haynes (Seneca, Deer Clan), Reinterpretation 1, 2023.

Curated by Jamie Jacobs (Tonawanda Seneca, Turtle Clan) The RMSC’s newest permanent exhibition is an immersive exploration into Hodinöšyö:nih artwork, past and present. Discover how contemporary Hodinöšyö:nih artists build on traditional art forms represented in the RMSC and Rock Foundation collections to express their identities and address modern issues.

Learn more at rmsc.org

dances, and protests. Individuals may choose to wear a button blanket or opt for a button vest, which is lighter to wear and easier to maneuver in.

For every year that these blankets have adorned Tlingit people, they have also changed and altered at the will of the people. At Celebration, an event held every other year by the Sealaska Heritage Institute, new innovations in regalia are showcased as Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian dance groups share song, dance, culture, and ideas. Today, Alaska Native artists invite new media, like microsuede, screen printing, and stenciling to button blankets. As button blankets shift in form and appearance, they stay true to their origin of adaptability and visual intrigue, inviting visitors to learn more about the crests, design, and culture of the wearer.

Kariel Galbraith (Tlingit, Dakl'aweidi clan) is a writer and fiber artist from Sitka, Alaska, who lives, works, and weaves stories on Coast Salish territory in Seattle, Washington. She is the FAAM Alaska Native Art Writing Fellow, sponsored by The CIRI Foundation.

Gunalchéesh (thank you) to the Burke Museum’s collections staff for their support in the research process.

above Tlingit artist once known, Button Blanket,

ca. early 20th c., wool cloth, mother-of-pearl buttons, thread, 602/3 × 68½ in., Revillagigedo Island, Alaska, collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 23/6182.

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TO WEAVE WITH GRASS A Precious Wild Resource

By Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Alutiiq) “Wangkuta tukuutekaqaput gguq caranglluut. Wangkuta maa-i teguyaraput Yup'igni. Tukuutekluki. / They say these grasses are our riches. We Yup'ik people constantly used them for something. They are our wealth.” —Theresa Moses (Yup'ik)1

W

I L D RY E G R A S S (Leymus mollis) grows abundantly along much of Alaska’s coast. It is a sweet-smelling, tough, long, and extremely versatile plant. Long valued as a material that can be shaped into functional objects, grass has been used as insulation and as material for fish traps,

sleeping mats, room dividers, burial shrouds, and boat sails. It has been used as material to construct goggles, dance fans, respirators, dog harnesses, parkas, capes, bags, socks, boot liners, and dolls.

In some communities, fish are hung from ropes of braided grass. Historically, wild rye grass was sometimes inserted into piercings. To make a seam more waterproof on parkas, grass is sometimes sewn into the hem of the garment. Grass can also add a layer of insulation to clothing to help keep a person dry, as the waxy outer surface of grass provides water-repellent properties. People can even use grass as a guide to tell directions. As Paul

1. Calista Elders Council, “Canegnek Piliat: Things Made from Grass,” Yuungnaqpiallerput / The Way We Genuinely Live, Anchorage Museum, web.

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John (Yup'ik, 1929–2015) from Bethel has shared, “Grass bent by the wind and frozen in place were used like compasses long ago when they didn’t have GPS devices.”2 A growing number of grass-weaving activities have sprouted in Alaska in the past few years. In Unalaska on the Aleutian Chain, the library hosts regular grass-weaving sessions. In Anchorage, the Anchorage Museum, Alaska Native Heritage Center, and University of Alaska–Anchorage offer similar classes focused on grass mats, basketry, and dance fans. The Southwest Alaska Arts Group in Bethel has hosted a series of grass harvesting and weaving workshops, as has the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak.

Grass weaving is also passed on through family and informal mentorships and artist cohorts. In all cases, grass-weaving activities connect people to culture, environment, and each other.

Long before weaving begins, weavers spend hours gathering and processing their materials. This requires an intimate knowledge of the seasonal rhythms to understand the optimal time to pick.

Coral Chernoff (Alutiiq) says, “You have to understand the seasons [when] you harvest the material, how to take care of it, and how to process it. And there isn’t just one way to care for materials. There are multiple ways depending on the result you want. That’s exciting for me.

It’s a steady challenge.”3 In the YukonKuskokwim Delta region, grasses are typically harvested in the fall when nature has already cured the material into a golden yellow. In the Aleutian Chain and on Kodiak Island, weavers often prefer to harvest in late summer while the grasses are green and then cure the grasses by hanging them in bundles indoors.

Weavers learn from experience the best places to harvest. In Chevak, for example, Neva Mathias (Cup'ik) learned where to harvest by returning to places where she picked grasses with her mother. “During the fall time when 2. Ann Fienup-Riordan and Alice Rearden, Ellavut / Our Yup'ik World and Weather: Continuity and Change on the Bering Sea Coast (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 173.

opposite, top Theresa Moses (Yup'ik), Mingqaq / Basket with Cover, 2000, coiled beach rye grass, dye, 15 × 113/8 in., Nelson Island, collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 25/5180. opposite, bottom Field of wild rye grass, Homer, Alaska, 2024. Photo: Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi.

above, top Unangan women weaving grass baskets, Attu Island, 1919, Alaska’s Digital Archives, ASL-P01-3598. Image courtesy of the Alaska State Library. above, bottom Unangax̂ artist once known, Basket with a Cover, pre-1923, twined beach rye grass, silk floss, 4 1/3 × 57/8 × 57/8 in., collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 11/8272.

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above, top June Pardue (Sugpiaq) studying the design of a historic grass parka during a grass weaving workshop, 2024. Photo: Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi. above, bottom Haliehana Stepetin (Unangax̂) practicing weaving techniques with her mentor, Tina Gauen (Unangax̂), Akutan, Alaska, 2023. Image courtesy of Haliehana Stepetin.

Tina (Antoinette) Gauen learned weaving from her aunt Sofie Pletnikoff. She now teaches weaving at culture camps throughout the Aleutian Chain and mentors emerging weavers.

opposite, top Yup'ik artist once known, Dance Fans, 1930–1950, beach rye grass, caribou hair, seal gut, sinew, dye, 14½ × 9¼ × 2/3 in., collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 26/8870. opposite, bottom Coiled grass basketry start by Kelly Lincoln (Yup'ik). Image courtesy of Kelly Lincoln. Yup'ik style coiled grass baskets, known as mingqaaq, are tightly sewn together using a needle threaded with grass. Filler grass in the center of each coil is wound with finer quality grass on the exterior.

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it starts to get cold in late September or October, we go to the sandy dunes near Hooper Bay. The grasses that grow on the dryer parts of the dune are stronger. That is where we like to pick the grass for our baskets.” On the Aleutian Chain, Sharon Svarny-Livingston (Unangax̂) says that women head inland to the hills to gather.

“I am lucky that my mother [Gertrude Svarny] has passed on the art of gathering and curing grass for basket weaving.

It is no longer a common occurrence. I miss seeing women returning from the hills carrying large bundles of grass over their shoulders.”4 Weavers share that gathering grasses is relaxing and provides a chance to connect intimately with the environment. Kelly Lincoln (Yup'ik) explains that harvesting fills her with gratitude. “I am so thankful that there is grass here in Bethel. I really like the Bethel grasses,” she says. “The way it looks and smells is awesome.… It is like fields of gold … I take a blade and I just pull, and it pops off.…

It’s like a renewable resource, and you don’t damage the earth while you’re doing that, and you can pick as much grass as you want.”5 Barbara Shangin (Unangax̂) explains that it is an activity that helps to pass the long days of summer. “It is a fun activity for women to do together. We bring a lunch and spend time outdoors.”

After grasses have been harvested, they are typically sorted by quality and then split into uniform strands using a needle or a fingernail. The outer layers of grass are typically discarded, and the inner parts, sometimes called “babies” or “sons,” are used for weft or warps. Weavers are careful to keep their grass tidy and dry, as any damp grasses run the risk of mold growth. If grasses are kept well, they will stay fresh and ready to use 3. Amy F. Steffian, Marnie A. Leist, Sven D. Haakanson, Patrick G. Saltonstall, and Alutiiq Museum & Archaeological Repository, Kal'unek from Karluk: Kodiak Alutiiq History and the Archaeology of the Karluk One Village Site (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2015), 85.

4. Sharon Svarny-Livingston, “Tix^yux^ – Wild rye,” Unalaska From My Point of View, January 10, 2018, web.

5. Kelly Lincoln, “Kelly Lincoln: Teaching Tradition Through Grass,” KYUK Media, April 24, 2023, YouTube video, 5:12, web.

for decades. When a weaver is ready to start her work, the blades of grass can be moistened with water to become pliable again for weaving.

The most well-known functional objects made from grasses are baskets, which are typically made through coiling or twining techniques. Weavers consider symmetry, balance, and design patterns during the creation process. Some baskets are embellished with dried intestines or esophagus, embroidery threads, or dyed grasses. Berries, alder bark, and wolf moss were historically used for dye. Today many weavers use Rit dye while some continue to experiment with customary dye practices. One variation on the coloring of grass adds decorative elements too.

Risa Causey (Unangax̂) explains: “Beach rye grass cures into a variety of colors.

It is the weaver’s job to pay attention to this and make sure the basket has a uniform color. If they don’t, then they end up with bands of color.”6 Some weavers 6. Risa Causey in discussion with the author, November 2023.

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above, top Unangax̂ artist once known, Socks/Boot Liners, ca. early 20th c., twined beach rye grass, collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 23/181. above, bottom Grass basketry in progress by Taytum Robinson (Unangax̂), 2024. Image courtesy of Taytum Robinson.

opposite, top Grass baskets in the collection of the Anchorage Museum, 2024. Photograph by Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi. Standing in the collection room, the baskets give off a sweet fragrance. opposite, bottom Emily Johnston (Cup'ik) harvesting late summer grasses from Mud Bay in Homer, Alaska, 2024. Photo: Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi. Emily Johnson is originally from Nunivak Island. In 2024, she led dance fan–making classes with the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center and shared her knowledge of grass harvesting.

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know places to harvest where there are variations of minerals in the soil that will give subtle color variations to the grass. Vivianite in the soil, for example, can give grass a subtle bluish or purple tint, as occurs in the highly sought-after Platinum grass.

Grass basketry is made in a variety of shapes and sizes. Tiny grass baskets, sometimes made as earrings, are markers of a maker’s expert ability to work in small scale. Large-scale baskets, some more than two feet tall, are decorative and kept in peoples’ homes.

Some are made as containers for harvesting subsistence beach greens or berries. Martha Demientieff (Alutiiq, 1933–2004) would say that keeping the practice of using baskets for functional purposes helps to connect her to her culture. “If I see a basket that I think was used in the past for berry picking, that’s not enough for me to know. What I do and what heals my spirit and makes my body healthy is to go out and pick berries in a basket, knowing that for maybe ten thousand years my ancestors have been doing this. That activity with that object does something for my body and for spirit.”7 Another role for baskets is to share narratives. According to Neva Mathias (Cup'ik): “Baskets are like telling little stories. The designs are personal. I like to make bird designs.” The late weaver Rita Blumenstein (Yup'ik, 1933–2021) said that a basket is akin to song: “These baskets are not just things to be put in a glass case; they’re like music, like songs; each one has its own melody, its own words, its own rhythm and style.”8 If you practice basketry, you might find this sense of rhythm as your hands find a cadence to the process of twisting and weaving the materials.

I am excited to see what projects grass weavers will bring forward in 2025. June Pardue (Alutiiq) is setting 7. Amy F. Steffian, et al., Kal'unek from Karluk, 81.

8. Suzi Jones, ed., Pacific Basket Makers, A Living Tradition: Catalog of the 1981 Pacific Basketmaker’s Symposium and Exhibition (Fairbanks, AK: University of Alaska Museum, 1983), 36.

out to create a new grass parka based on studying a historical example at the Anchorage Museum. Tanya Lukin-Linklater (Alutiiq) is creating an installation around basketry that will be part of a “Curating the North” gathering in April 2025, also at the Anchorage Museum. The Alaska Native Heritage Center has been offering Unangan and Yupiit-style grass-weaving workshops. Weavers share that they hope more young people will get involved and learn grass weaving so that they can eventually become teachers and continue this artistic practice.

Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Alutiiq), is an art historian and museum consultant based in Homer, Alaska. Her work is focused on supporting Alaska Native arts revitalization, museum sovereignty, and Alaska Native arts documentation. She is a research associate with York University’s “Curating Indigenous Circumpolar Cultural Sovereignty” program and a program director at Native Movement.

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RIDING THE WAVES OF HISTORY How Installation Art Reclaims and Indigenizes Space

By Sarah Anne Stolte

R

ISING FROM THE SANDS of Miami Beach, Seletega (run, see if people are coming / corre a ver si viene gente) by Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂) at Art Basel Miami Beach 2024 reminds one of a Spanish carrack emerging after centuries beneath the earth. This majestic installation exemplifies the critical role Indigenous art can play to dismantle and reconfigure colonial frameworks that dominate the global art world.

Through a synthesis of installation art practices that harness place and historic cultural references activated through use of specific materials, Galanin expands the boundaries of art’s engagement with histories of erasure and reclamation.

He asserts the necessity to recognize our shared environmental responsibilities and collective futures. His work aligns with a broader movement among Native American artists such as Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish-Kootenai/ Métis/Shoshone, 1940–2025) and John

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Hitchcock (Kiowa/Comanche), who similarly employ installation art to interrogate systems of colonial exploitation.

Boats serve as potent metaphors in the works of Galanin, Smith, and Hitchcock. In some historical contexts, vessels were instruments of conquest that transported colonizers, missionaries, and soldiers across oceans to seize land, extract resources, and impose foreign systems of belief and governance upon Indigenous populations. They have been, and continue to be, significant tools in

global commodification and trade, at times causing devastating environmental catastrophes. Yet, boats can also be seen as symbols of resilience, survival, and adaptation. Many Native American artists portray watercraft not merely as modes of transportation but as references to sacred waterways and lifelines.

An iconic example is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People). This mixed-media work utilizes paint, collage, and objects suspended above a large two-dimensional canvas and is one in a series started by Smith in 1992, the quincentennial anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s fateful voyage across the Atlantic. Materiality is foundational to understanding the complexities presented by Smith. She collaged sections of newspaper articles about current events in Native America, gum wrappers, and other ephemera with photographs of deer, buffalo, and Native individuals from history. Layers of white, yellow, green, and red paint over the collage unify the disparate pieces of a near life-size canoe that hovers on the surface at the center of the composition. A collection of stereotypical Native American–themed items dangles above the painting. Industrialized and

manufactured, they signal the current era and the commodification of Indigenous identities in the modern era.

Over the course of her substantial career, Smith transformed her two-dimensional images of canoes— juxtaposed with various objects to signify confrontations between Native Americans and European colonizers— into sculpted, filled, and painted canoes that occupy entire spaces and interact with other works of her art. Her Trade Canoe: Cahokia (2023) is a mixed-media installation that embodies the complex intersections of Indigenous identity, history, and environmental activism. The work serves as both a critique and reclamation of space imbued with layered meanings conveyed through her deliberate choice of materials and arrangement.

The central element of Trade Canoe: Cahokia is the presentation of the frame of a wooden canoe. Suspending the canoe in midair causes subtle rocking motions and creates a sense that the space between canoe and floor is an invisible river. Synthetic sinew fibers dangle beneath the structure like remnant seaweed collected while navigating through muddied waters. Sinew, often associated with Native American

… boats can also be seen as symbols of resilience, survival, and adaptation.

above Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish-Kootenai/Métis/ Shoshone, 1940–2025), Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People), 1992, oil paint, mixed media, collage, objects, canvas, 60 × 170 in., collection of the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk. © Estate of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. opposite Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂), Seletega (run, see if people are coming/ corre a ver si viene gente), 2024, installation on Faena Beach, Florida. Photo: Sarah Anne Stolte.

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“What are we going to build for our collective liberation? ¿Qué vamos a construir para nuestra liberación colectiva?” above Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s son Neal AmbroseSmith (Salish-Kootenai/Métis/ Shoshone direct descent), second from the left, and team prepare Trade Canoe: Cahokia for shipping at the artist’s studio in Corrales, New Mexico, 2023. Photo: © Jon Austria/Albuquerque Journal via ZUMA Press Wire / Alamy license. opposite Digital rendering of Seletega, 2024, by Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂).

Photo courtesy of the artist and Faena Art.

craftwork, becomes an element that critiques the industrialization of natural resources. By integrating the synthetic material, Smith’s work underscores the tensions between cultural continuity and the imposed narratives of trade and exploitation. Items such as beer cans, plastic toys, and other detritus evoke the commodification of Native American cultures and the environmental degradation brought by industrialization.

These objects, often found discarded and floating along watersheds, act as markers of current environmental injustices and contrast the natural and sustainable practices of Indigenous societies with the extractive economies imposed by settler colonialism that continue to dominate. By suspending the canoe within the gallery space at the Saint Louis Art Museum, the artwork transforms the environment into an Indigenous-centered narrative zone.

The title of the piece refers to Cahokia, a thriving hub of trade and cultural exchange from about 700 until 1350 CE near present-day East St. Louis.

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Canoes were vital to navigating waterways, and passengers likely carried with them shells, textiles, and other precious goods. In this context, Smith’s canoe symbolically reclaims the space and challenges the colonial frameworks that have historically dominated museums and galleries.

The placement and orientation of Trade Canoe: Cahokia allow viewers to simultaneously see another impressive piece, State Names Map: Cahokia. This large, mixed-media work asserts the enduring presence of Indigenous peoples by restoring Native American place names to a map of the United States. By recentering Indigenous histories within the geographic framework of colonial borders, the work challenges erasure and highlights the deep connections between land and identity. Smith’s implementation of vibrant colors, layered textures, and culturally resonant symbols activate the gallery as a site of Native American strength and for the reclamation of space and memory. The spatial arrangement encourages reflection on Native

American cosmologies and worldviews and emphasizes interconnectedness and environmental stewardship.

In presenting Seletega on Miami Beach during Art Basel, Galanin reclaims both the physical site of the beach and the largely Eurocentric international art fair as places for Indigenous narratives of resistance and resilience. The land now known as Miami Beach was originally occupied by the Tequesta, who traveled along the coast and into the flooded grasslands of the interior in dugout canoes. The Tequesta established intricate trade networks, practiced art, stewarded the environment, and thrived for more than a millennium. Yet, Spanish colonizers led by explorer Juan Ponce de León in 1513 devastated the Tequesta with violence, disease, and forced labor.

By the mid-18th century, the presence of the Tequesta had largely been replaced by colonial settlements and eventually the commodified image of Miami we know today, complete with rollerbladers, Art Deco skyscrapers, and luxury beachfront housing. One of the few remaining signs of the Tequesta is the Miami Circle

located at Brickell Point: 24 post holes arranged in a circle and believed to be the remnants of a permanent housing structure created by Tequesta builders around two thousand years ago. Pottery sherds and bone artifacts have also been uncovered at the site. Seletega lies eight miles from the Miami Circle, allowing for spatial radiation of considerations of the site as both a memorial and a declaration of continued Native American presence and agency.

Central to Seletega are its imposing sails, monumental in scale and laden with symbolic and material weight. These sails, crafted from heavy, weathered canvas, present viewers with urgent questions in both English and Spanish: “What are we going to give up to burn the sails of empire? ¿Qué vamos a renunciar para quemar las velas y los aparejos del imperio?

What are we going to build for our collective liberation? ¿Qué vamos a construir para nuestra liberación colectiva?” Galanin did not merely paint the text upon the surface of the sails; the words appear to bleed onto and into the canvas fibers, making

his questions an inseparable part of the material itself. This technique suggests the depths to which colonial violence is embedded into the fabric of these instruments of navigation and conquest.

At the same time, Galanin reimagines sails as canvases of protest. The materiality of the sails on the ships he is recalling carries its own history, a narrative embedded in every fiber and stitch.

Sailcloth, made from either linen or hemp before sails began to be manufactured from cotton in the 19th century, was once a critical component of European naval power, which enabled colonial fleets to traverse and dominate oceans. The labor-intensive process of creating these sails often relied on exploited workers and colonial supply chains, tying them directly to histories of oppression and extraction. In Seletega, Galanin’s sails become monuments to these legacies.

Their crisp surfaces will fray and weather with time, symbols of endurance and the wear of centuries of exploitation.

Furthermore, the gigantic sails are not static objects. They interact with the elements, fill with wind and shift with

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above John Hitchcock (Kiowa/Comanche) in collaboration with the Dirty Printmakers, Epicenter/Epicentro: Re Tracing the Plains, 2011, installation of serigraphy on felt, on the Zattere promenade in Venice, during the Venice Biennale. Image courtesy of the artist.

the ocean’s breeze. Their movement, like Smith’s floating canoe, serves as a metaphor for the persistence of Native American narratives, never fully still, always able to adapt and resist. Galanin’s inclusion of both English and Spanish on the sails underscores the fraught legacy of colonial languages and simultaneously reclaims them as tools for solidarity. By positioning these sails along the oceanfront, Galanin transforms the space into an immersive confrontation with the past and a meditation on the future. The sails appear to be historical artifacts as well as living, breathing symbols of a struggle that continues into the present.

In contrast, John Hitchcock’s 2011 installation, Epicenter/Epicentro: Re Tracing the Plains, created in collaboration with the Dirty Printmakers of America, a diverse group of printmakers known

for eclectic approaches to the medium, settles on the ground. In much the same way that Galanin uses sailcloth in Seletega, John Hitchcock uses felt in his installation. Exhibited along a quiet canal at an Italian university during the Venice Biennale, Epicenter/Epicentro questions colonial and military power structures.

Black felt cut into the shapes of buffalo skulls, deer heads, and army tanks reference the U.S. military presence at Fort Sill in Oklahoma near his childhood home.

As a material, felt carries its own weight in these narratives. When colonial and military authorities distributed felt blankets to Native American communities, the colonizers sometimes intentionally infected people with diseases, transforming what should have been objects of comfort into tools of biological warfare.

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Thus felt, as Hitchcock employs it, becomes a tactile connection to histories of survival and trauma. Its soft texture contrasts sharply with metallic ink printed on the surface that defines its brutal cut-out shapes as tanks and skulls. The material’s pliability and resilience echo the adaptability of Indigenous cultures in the face of relentless colonial violence.

Hitchcock arranges the felt forms into the silhouette of a ship rising from the walkway along the waterfront—a direct visual parallel to Galanin’s sails. However, where Galanin’s sails rise into the sky, Hitchcock’s felt forms seem anchored to the earth, speaking to the weight of history and memory. The felt shapes invite viewers to physically and emotionally engage with the installation. Unlike the towering sails of Seletega, which dominate the horizon, Hitchcock’s felt pieces are crafted at a smaller scale and are closer to the ground.

In addition to its historical connotations, felt also absorbs sound, softens light, and

creates an intimate atmosphere. These qualities make Hitchcock’s installation feel less like a distant monument and more like a shared space of reflection and dialogue.

The materials used in Trade Canoe, Seletega, and Epicenter/Epicentro are not incidental elements in these works but central pillars of their meaning. The synthetic sinew, weathered cotton, and soft felt are not neutral substances; they are active participants in their installations’ narratives.

The sails carry the scars of wind, salt, and sun, and represent the endurance of both the material and the people it represents. The felt carries weight—literal and metaphorical—as both a comfort and a burden. The synthetic sinew references industrial changes to materials used in artistic production. In the context of their respective installations, these materials become conduits for memory and communicate the stories of those who have been marginalized, silenced, and erased.

Galanin, Smith, and Hitchcock disrupt elite spaces of power and privilege with their installations. Their inclusion within prestigious exhibitions and exhibition spaces signifies a critical shift in the art world’s engagement with anticolonial narratives. The size and scope of these international art shows allow Indigenous artists to enable cross-cultural dialogue, challenge entrenched hierarchies, and reach global audiences. Their installations physically and symbolically reclaim spaces and transform them into arenas of resistance, dialogue, and healing.

Nicholas Galanin’s Seletega serves as a powerful testament to the transformative role Native American installation art continues to occupy in decolonizing global cultural spaces. By situating his work within the colonial history of Miami Beach and in conversation with the practices of Indigenous mentors and peers like Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and John Hitchcock, Galanin reshapes narratives of exclusion and erasure. His intervention challenges audiences to recognize that Indigenous people are not relics of the past but vital forces shaping both our present and future.

Through his art, Galanin reclaims Miami Beach as a site of Native American memory and agency; urges viewers to acknowledge the histories underpinning the global art market; and inspires a vision of an inclusive and equitable art world where Indigenous voices are celebrated as essential contributors to cultural and social change.

Sarah Anne Stolte, PhD, is an associate professor of art history for Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin. She earned her art history doctoral degree from the University of Wisconsin– Madison. Interested in curatorial practices and museum studies, Stolte has worked for the Dallas Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and a variety of academic galleries.

She co-curated Air Land Seed (2013) at the 55th Venice Biennale. Her writing has been published in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal and in books such as Wisconsin in Watercolor and Recasting Commodity and Spectacle in the Indigenous Americas.

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025 | 55

NELDA SCHRUPP NAKOTA JEWELER, SILVERSMITH, SCULPTOR & TEXTILE ARTIST

Left: SISTERS BOLO, sterling silver, chrysoprase, green aventurine eyes, yellow citrine in flower with leather rope.

Middle: HALO BRACELET, sterling silver, 6 carnelian bullets on sterling silver halo, carnelian cabochon.

Right: TURTLE ISLAND BELT, sterling silver, chrysoprase, garnet eyes, 2-inch leather belt.

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

JACK SABON Handmade Drums

www.sabonart.com nerak194@gmail.com

56 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025

KARMA HENRY

OWENS VALLEY PAIUTE

Paewa tongoyaga-ti nanagima-ti Nüü (I Hear the Rain and Thunder Coming), 2024, acrylic on canvas, 12 × 36 inches

Threads of Tradition Nevada Art Museum Reno, NV Saturday, April 26, 2025

Where My Eyes Have Walked: Karma Henry Stewart Indian School GBNA Gallery Carson City, NV Through May 2, 2025

Bernalillo Indian Arts Festival

Sid Cutter Pilots Pavilion, 4900 Balloon Fiesta Pkwy. NE Albuquerque, NM May 3-4, 2025

Native Elements Santa Fe Convention Center Santa Fe, NM May 23–25, 2025

KarmaHenry.com

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025 | 57

PROFILE

Diné Interdisciplinary Artist

DAKOTA MACE

By Heidi K. Brandow (Diné/Kānaka Maoli) Textile Collection at the Center of Design and Material Culture and uses her platform to elevate Indigenous narratives.

As she prepared for her first museum solo exhibition, DAHODIYINII – SACRED PLACES, at SITE Santa Fe, on view through May 19, 2025, we sat down to discuss her evolving practice and how, through collective memory and the exploration of trauma, she carves a path toward healing and regeneration.

D

AKOTA MACE (DINÉ) grew up between two societies in New Mexico: the bustling cityscape of Albuquerque and her family’s homeland in Torreon, a quiet Diné community where cultural practices shape daily life.

Moving between these spaces, she was immersed in the teachings of her ancestors while also navigating urban life. This duality shaped her artistic perspective and influences how she understands materiality, storytelling, and process.

Now based in Madison, Wisconsin, Mace is a multidisciplinary artist whose work translates Diné history, memory, and beliefs through various processes and techniques. With an MFA and MA in photography and textile design from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a BFA in photography from the Institute of American Indian Arts, she challenges perceptions of Diné culture while centering themes of family lineage, community, and identity.

Beyond her studio practice, Mace engages in critical conversations on cultural appropriation and Indigenous design. She is an MFA faculty member at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She works as a photographer for the Helen Louise Allen 58 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025

HKB: Your work serves as a bridge, one that not only connects generations but also strengthens the bonds of community through the stories you tell. How does this aspect of your practice shape your vision of reclaiming and preserving Diné culture?

DM: Photography has always been more than just a medium for me. It’s a lens, both literal and metaphorical, through which I navigate and make sense of the world. It’s the first language I learned to articulate my thoughts visually, the tool that allowed me to capture not just images but the complex layers of memory, identity, and history. But photography isn’t neutral. It’s a medium that has historically framed Diné people—and many Indigenous communities—through narrow, often distorted perspectives, shaped by stereotypes and misrepresentations crafted by outsiders.

When I entered graduate school, I became acutely aware of how these external narratives lingered, influencing the assumptions people carried about my culture. There was an unspoken expectation that my work should either conform to those stereotypes or exist in reaction to them. That realization ignited something in me: a desire not just to create art but to actively challenge those imposed narratives. I wanted to tell stories that reflected the complexities, contradictions, and beauty of my own experiences, stories that couldn’t be reduced to a single frame or caption. This commitment extends beyond the images I make; it’s embedded in how I write and speak about my work, and how I position myself as both the subject and the storyteller.

Much of what I create is deeply personal. My work often unfolds in the first person, woven with threads of memory, family history, and the landscapes that have shaped me, from the red earth of New Mexico to the expansive skies of Wisconsin.

Storytelling is not just a technique; it’s the heart of my practice.

It allows me to map connections between past and present, between the intimate and the collective. Each photograph, each narrative, becomes part of a larger tapestry of reclamation—a way to assert continuity in the face of historical erasure.

I’ve always been cautious about the word preserving. It implies that our identities are relics, something static to be locked away and protected from change. But Diné identity, like all Indigenous identities, is not fixed in time. It’s dynamic,

DAKOTA MACE

above Helen Nez–Diné Elder Dahodiyinii (Sacred Places), 2021, digital archival print, 241/2 × 30 in. framed, edition of 3. opposite Dakota Mace. All images courtesy of the artist.

fluid, and responsive to the environments we inhabit, whether that’s on reservations, in urban centers, or across digital landscapes. Our cultures are not vanishing—they are evolving, adapting, and finding new forms of expression.

This evolution doesn’t diminish our authenticity. It’s a testament to our resilience and creativity.

Through my art and my words, I aim to make visible the ways our presence endures; not just in history books or museums, but in the everyday stories we tell, in the languages we speak, in the images we create, and in the countless ways we continue to define ourselves on our own terms.

HKB: In the work that you’re creating, you incorporate materials like chemigrams1 and archival photography in your practice. Can you share how these materials communicate beliefs and histories and why they are essential to your storytelling process?

DM: My grandfather once shared a lesson with me that has quietly shaped the foundation of my artistic journey. I was sifting through our family archives when I stumbled upon a photograph of my third great-grandmother. It was preserved in

the National Archives, a simple blackand-white image that captured her in the act of spinning wool. I asked my grandfather about the photo. He paused as he remembered sitting with her as she worked, where she shared something that stayed with him and now stays with me: “As makers, we are not meant to create in excess. We must respect our materials.

Making is about balance, not endless production.”

That wisdom resonates deeply, especially in a world that pressures artists to create quickly. In a world that often measures success by output that demands constant creation and rapid turnover, her wisdom feels radical. It taught me to resist the pressure to produce for the sake of producing and to instead embrace a slower, more intentional process.

This philosophy guided me when I spent four years studying cochineal, the tiny insect whose vibrant red dye has traversed continents and centuries. I wasn’t just learning how to extract color; I was learning patience. I observed how temperature shifted its hues, how light deepened or faded its intensity, and how something as seemingly insignificant as the pH level of water could alter its essence. This wasn’t just scientific

experimentation: it was a relationship.

The cochineal taught me that materials are alive with their own stories, and if we rush, we miss the chance to listen.

Photography, much like textiles, is about relationships: between light and shadow, subject and frame, material and maker. When I recognized this connection, something clicked. The boundary between these disciplines dissolved, and I began to merge them, weaving visual narratives that are as much about texture and process as they are about image and form.

Beyond technique, my work is rooted in storytelling—not just from a postcolonial lens, which often confines Indigenous identity to responses against erasure, but through precontact histories that affirm who we’ve always been. Materials themselves carry these histories. Take cochineal: its journey from Zapotec communities in Oaxaca to Diné weavers in the Southwest isn’t just a story of trade; it’s a testament to cultural dialogue. Just as Diné designs influenced Zapotec artisans, Zapotec techniques left their mark on Diné practices. This isn’t history frozen in time. It’s an ongoing conversation, an exchange of knowledge, aesthetics, and meaning that defies borders and timelines.

1. Chemigrams are unique prints created through chemical reactions on photographic paper. Belgian artist Pierre Cordier innovated the process in 1956. —Ed. Pierre Cordier, “Chemigram: A New Approach to Lensless Photography,” Leonardo 15, no. 4 (Autumn 1982): 262.

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PROFILE

“I began to ask, Why? Why don’t we talk about these histories?”

above Ruth Lewis-Diné Elder Dahodiyinii (Sacred Places), 2021, digital archival print, 24 × 30 in. framed, edition of 3 plus 2 artist proofs. opposite Béésh Łigaii I, 2022, chemigram series of 40, 5 × 7 in.

That movement—that interwoven history—continues to shape my practice. It reminds me that art is not just about what we create, but how and why we create. It’s all part of the same story, unfolding with each intentional mark— each act of making—grounded in respect, balance, and connection.

HKB: Your work often centers on themes of resilience and the rights of nature. How does DAHODIYINII – SACRED PLACES address ongoing conversations about Indigenous sovereignty and cultural survivance, particularly within the framework of Diné history?

DM: Dahodiyinii is rooted in the concept of sovereignty, not just political sovereignty but the sovereignty of our stories, the power to shape our own representation, and the right to define who we are on our own terms. For me, this work emerged from a place of profound

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grief. It was conceived during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time marked by devastating loss, especially within Indigenous communities where our elders—our knowledge keepers and storytellers—were among the most vulnerable. Their absence created an aching silence, a void where stories once lived and thrived.

I found myself questioning: What happens when those stories are no longer passed down? What becomes of a people when the threads that connect us to our histories, our languages, and our places begin to fray? And perhaps more urgently: What narratives rush in to fill that void?

Too often the assumptions made about Indigenous people, especially Diné, are shaped by the absence of our voices, distorted through the lens of outsiders who define us by what they think we’ve lost rather than what we’ve carried forward.

The title, Dahodiyinii, loosely translates to “sacred places,” but its meaning

DAKOTA MACE

goes deeper than that. It’s not just about geography; it’s about presence, about the act of sitting with a place, acknowledging its weight, its history, and the echoes it holds. It’s about listening, not just with our ears but with our whole being, to the land as both witness and teacher. This project became a meditation on history, a reflection on the pivotal moments that have shaped not only our present but the very way we understand who we are.

For me, the starting point was Bosque Redondo. Growing up, it was the place we didn’t talk about—the place we were warned against visiting. There was an unspoken rule: Don’t go there. Don’t speak of it. As a child, I never questioned that silence. But during the pandemic, with the world itself paused, I began to ask, Why? Why don’t we talk about these histories?

Rather than turning away, Dahodiyinii leans into these sacred, painful places, not as sites of defeat, but as spaces of remembrance and potential healing.

The land doesn’t forget. It holds our stories even when we can’t bear to speak them. It bears witness to both our suffering and our survival. Through this work, I wanted to recognize the land not just as a backdrop but as an active participant in our histories, a guide helping us navigate the complexities of our past and the possibilities of our future.

Jennifer Denetdale’s scholarship on Diné history profoundly influenced this project, particularly her exploration of how we, as Diné, understand time. In Western thought, time is linear, a straight line stretching from past to present to future. But in Diné philosophy, time is not a line. It’s a series of layers, movements unfolding simultaneously. The past isn’t something distant or detached. It’s woven into the present, and the present is braided with the future. That understanding shaped the very structure of Dahodiyinii. The exhibition isn’t chronological; it’s cyclical. It moves through land, memory, and the cosmos as interconnected threads, each informing and shaping the other.

At its core, Dahodiyinii is an act of reclamation. It’s a return to Diné ways of knowing, a recognition that we come from the land, and one day, we will return to it.

But it’s also a story of resilience. Despite the attempts to erase us, to sever us from our histories and our sacred places, we endure. Our stories endure. The land remembers, and through it, so do we.

This work is not just about looking back; it’s about carrying forward. It’s a call to remember, to speak, to listen, to honor both the grief and the grace that come with being part of an unbroken lineage.

In the end, Dahodiyinii is a story of continuity, a reflection on the cyclical nature of our existence, and an affirmation that even in the face of loss, our presence remains sacred.

HKB: Do you see this series as just the beginning? Have you thought about expanding it to other sacred places in future work?

DM: Yes, I’m actively expanding this exploration, focusing on honoring our matriarchs and the knowledge they’ve passed down. While Dahodiyinii touches on this, I want to go deeper. The women in my family have always been my teachers, whether through crocheting, weaving, or sharing stories. Their contributions are often overlooked, and I want to bring them to the forefront.

This next phase of my work explores memory, not just personal memory, but how our bodies function as archives of ancestral knowledge. I’m experimenting with new processes, like using cedar smoke to create photographs and incorporating hide-tanning techniques into quilting to form abstract landscapes shaped by the materials themselves.

At its core, this work is about cultural sovereignty, honoring the histories of our matriarchs and the women in our

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“…in Diné culture, red is medicine. It is the earth, my clan, and a part of me.”

above, left Dahodiyinii (Sacred Places), detail, 2022, cyanotypes dyed with cochineal, 7 × 5 in., 232 of 2,000. above, right Dahodiyinii (Sacred Places), detail, 2022, cyanotypes dyed with cochineal, 7 × 5 in., 253 of 2,000. opposite Tséyi (Among the Canyons), 2023, archival pigment print with glass beadwork, 24 x 36 in.

communities. It’s about seeing materials not just as media for art but as pathways to deeper connections with our identities, histories, and places within our communities.

HKB: In this series, the land is more than a setting—it becomes an active participant in storytelling. How do you approach engaging with the land as a memory keeper?

DM: For me, storytelling has always been essential to honoring history, culture, and identity. That’s why I centered this exhibition around the color red, not just because it has been used to stereotype Indigenous people or is often tied to violence, but because in Diné culture, red is medicine. It is the earth, my clan, and a part of me.

This exhibition began with that understanding: red as healing. It became a way to explore how stories hold the potential for transformation, shaping how we think about Diné epistemologies and how they continue to evolve.

Our elders’ stories influence how we

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imagine the future, though defining what the future means is complex. At its core, this exhibition recognizes land as the ultimate memory keeper. What we think of as lost stories are still present, waiting to be acknowledged. That’s why it ends in the Star Room. We’re often told that the songs of the stars have been lost in Diné culture, but I don’t believe that. I believe they still exist in the land, in the spaces around us. We just need to listen—to be present in our relationship with the world—to hear them again.

HKB: You mentioned that through this process, your work has made you question how we think about the future. In many ways, it feels like you’re peeling back layers and revealing glimpses of what that future could be. Do you see your work as pointing toward a possible future, or does it exist within that space already? How do you see yourself situated in this exploration of the future through your art?

DM: That’s a great question and something I’ve had to sit with for a while.

DAKOTA MACE

The exhibition itself is designed to challenge the idea of a linear future. When you enter the space, the first thing you encounter is an earthen wall, a collaboration with former grad student Keyah Henry (Diné), whose work explores his relationship with the land. It’s also a nod to Diné medicine men and women who create sand paintings, emphasizing the ephemeral to understand the world.

In Western thought, the future is something ahead of us, separate from the past and present. But in Diné philosophy, time is layered. Everything exists simultaneously. The photographs in the exhibition are arranged to mirror the structure of a hogan, reinforcing this idea. Stories return to the earth, yet history revives itself in new forms, creating a continuous cycle.

My work abandons the Western notion of time and embraces a natural progression, where objects and images evolve, informed by both memory and the present moment. There’s no singular

answer to what the future is. It’s shaped by those who engage with the work.

Whether they see reflections of their past, present, or future, everything is interconnected, circling back in an ongoing cycle. Just as we are born from the earth and eventually return to it, the stories, the histories, and the land itself hold and renew us again and again.

AS DAKOTA MACE continues to push the boundaries of materiality and artistic practice, her work remains deeply rooted in community and collaboration. Textiles, particularly Indigenous textile practices, continue to inspire her approach.

“The biggest collaboration for me is building relationships with Indigenous

textile communities,” she shares. “I’ve been fortunate to work with incredible friends and community members in Oaxaca. I want to continue exploring these connections—tracing trade routes, the movement of materials like dye, and the processes behind traditional designs.”

For Dakota, this research goes beyond technique; it’s about how stories are embedded within textiles. Much like photographs, designs are imprints— visual records of history, culture, and identity. Each pattern and weave carry a story, evolving with every iteration.

“The designs are there, the stories exist. It’s just a matter of sitting with them and listening to what they have to say.”

DAKOTAMACE.COM

Heidi K. Brandow (Diné/Kānaka Maoli) is an artist and the associate director of communications at First Peoples Fund. She is a mentor in the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) studio arts MFA program and an artist liaison for the Coe Center for the Arts.

She earned her BFA degree from IAIA, studied industrial design at Istanbul Technical University, and earned a master’s degree in design studies from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she cofounded the Harvard Indigenous Design Collective.

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Myaamia Textile Artist

JARED NALLY

By Christy Hanson (Diné) pass down knowledge to the next generation and how to take care of themselves in specific places,” he says. Nally graduated from Haskell in 2021, with his commitment to Myaamia weaving since recognized. He took home Best of Show for his twined panel bag entry at the 2021 Eugene Brown Memorial Art Show hosted by the Myaamia Heritage Museum and Archive in Miami, Oklahoma.

EEMAMWICIKI: REAWAKENING

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ARED NALLY’S IDENTITY as a Myaamia fiber artist has become a catalyst for connecting to his people and their history as a diaspora tribal citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. He is revitalizing twined panel bags and other textile arts. “I see textiles as a way of bringing my interests and pulling me into the community,” he says.

Nally was raised in Colby, Kansas, as part of a Myaamia diaspora, and had not been raised in his culture or exposed to the rich textile history of his people.

His interest in fiber arts began in middle school art class with knitting.

Nally’s strong interest in connecting with his heritage and culture, the broader Indigenous community, and the natural world guided him to Haskell Indian Nations University in 2019. There he founded the Haskell Hand Weavers, a student club far from the average knitters’ circle since its mission was to allow students to explore and share Indigenous

fiber arts techniques. Nally connected with a weaver and workshop instructor named Cindy Warrington (Ho-Chunk) who changed the course of his fiber journey by teaching him to fingerweave. This experience stuck with Nally and provided a foundation to connect with Myaamia historical textiles held in museum collections. “That was a really fun, pivotal journey, both with my education in Indigenous studies as well as starting a journey with textiles for our community. COVID19 happened while I was at Haskell, and it kind of derailed getting to have a community to get together around textiles.”

Nally had previously learned to spin and dye natural fibers, such as wool and linen, and also learned to weave on a floor loom, experimenting with several styles of weaving and fiber spinning. “When I became more interested in connecting culturally with different aspects of heritage, I started to see that culture was a way for communities to

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IN 2024 NALLY GRADUATED from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, with a concentration in applied ecology and conservation to work toward preserving natural flora found in place-based Myaamia textile arts. “After graduating from Haskell, I was still interested in our community textile traditions, how that knowledge gets passed on, and what kind of knowledge is embedded in the practice,” he says. “And talking with some of our community members, I was encouraged to get a master’s degree in environmental science up at Miami University.… It took me out of this intertribal context, where I was a Miami person among a bunch of peers from different nations, and put me in an academic space, where I was around my community. I transitioned from discovering who I am in our culture among other cultures, to who I am as a community member within this community context.

“And that might seem like a weird, stray path from textiles, but I think for a lot of people in Native communities, we understand that that knowledge is tied to environmental practices.”

Nally received the Aanchtaakia Graduate Fellowship at Miami University,

JARED NALLY

which partners with the Miami Tribe and houses the Myaamia Center on campus.

This allowed him to become an artistic “change maker,” what aanchtaakia translates as, by furthering his stewardship of Myaamia cultural resources, knowledge of weaving, and ecology. Since few historical examples of the tribe’s textiles were preserved, he began studying textiles held in museum collections.

The museum pieces influenced Nally’s weaving practices and revitalization efforts. He became particularly interested in the similarities and differences between various Myaamia textile techniques and materials, such as fingerweaving, twining, and bulrush textiles, and how they

related or contrasted with design elements in textiles from other tribes or on a broader scale, looking to internationally known textile weaving techniques. Nally presented his work and a reflection of his fellowship during Miami University’s 2024 Myaamiaki Conference, a convening that focuses on ongoing activities that support the revitalization of Myaamia language and culture.

Nally now serves as the deputy tribal historic preservation officer for the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma in their cultural resources extension office in the Miami Tribe’s historical homeland in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he works to protect Myaamia cultural resources. “That

above Beaded twined bag, 3¾ × 5½ in., atop a twined panel bag, 8¾ × 11 in. Nally created both and was inspired by historical Myaamia items 24/2631 and 2/7973 in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian collection. Photo: Jared Nally (Miami). opposite Jared Nally at a Miami Tribe Cultural Resources Extension Office (CREO) event in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He holds a twined bag destined for the Indiana State Museum’s Angel Mounds State Historic Site, 2024. Photo: Jonathan Fox, Miami University. All images courtesy of the artist.

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gave me an opportunity to move to my family’s 1826 reserve land,” he says. “I think it is really cool to move back to a place where I have so much community and family history.”

above Nally’s twined bag, 8¾ × 11 in., which received Best of Show at the 2021 Eugene Brown Memorial Art Show hosted by the Myaamia Heritage Museum and Archive in Miami, Oklahoma. Photo: Jared Nally (Miami). opposite Nally weaves a wool sash at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. Photo: Karen Baldwin (Miami).

EEMPAAPIIKINANKI: PICKING UP THE THREADS THE MIAMI TRIBE’S CULTURAL REVITALIZATION WORK is expressed in the metaphor and language of eemamwiciki or “they awaken.” Nally says, “That kind of story starts with how we talk about the cultural dormancy of our community. I use ‘dormancy’ because too often it’s portrayed as a loss and a

loss that can’t be recovered. That’s just not true. There are times when those strings of cultural practices get set down and become dormant. Revitalization is picking those threads back up.”

As with many Native communities, the boarding school era took its toll on the Myaamia language, among other stressors from assimilation. It’s believed the community lost its last fluent speaker around the 1960s.1 However, the 1990s were pivotal to the Miami Reawakening, as Congress moved to begin preserving tribal languages. “You have a lot more resources going into cultural revitalization as there’s a shift in temperament around Indigenous cultures in the U.S.,” Nally says. “At that shift, we have community members who were starting to take

1. “Myaamiaataweenki ‘Miami Language’ FAQ’s,” Aacimotaatiiyankwi, web.

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JARED NALLY

on this practice of language revitalization to reawaken the language. Our community can use it again with that language reawakening. A lot of other community practices are able to be reawakened alongside it. I’m coming into this textile practice a couple of decades into this reawakening period.”

The Miami Reawakening in the 1990s had been a renewed effort by tribal citizens to delve back into their identities, learn their language, and uphold their collective narratives that had been suppressed by the federal government’s ongoing efforts to assimilate the tribe since forced removals2 of tribal citizens started in Indiana in 1846.

“If I want to become a weaver of bulrush (alaansooni) or if I want to make bags with basswood trees (wiikapimiši), it’s not just knowing how to do the harvest and to do the processes, but it’s also what kind of stewardship relationship comes along with that weaving practice,” Nally says. “So many of our ecosystems that we’ve been cultural stewards of for generations now experience invasive species,

habitat fragmentation, all these conservation issues. It’s important to also engage with the other tool sets our community has; engage with Western sciences and bring that back to our cultural understanding of place and how that supports me as a weaver in the community.”

Nally’s work with Myaamia textiles has also heavily relied on resources built for the tribe’s language revitalization.

“Part of how language revitalization has supported my work with textiles is our community’s Indigenous Languages Digital Archive (ILDA),” he says. “It’s a software tool that allowed us to input nearly 300 years of Miami-Illinois language materials, whether that’s [from] the missionary dictionaries or ethnographers that came into our community.

“Those databases, while they’re still undergoing analyses on the linguistic side, are searchable for those entries.

I can search for some of the old French words for, let’s say, spindle or fiber. Even though we might not have the modern language or spelling necessarily entered for those words yet, there are all sorts of

cultural insights.”

Nally described how 17th-century missionaries recorded several types of fiber used in making accessories worn

by Miami people at the time. “They are recording animal fibers like opossum, bison, and bear hair being spun on spindles to make garters and sashes,” he says.

“We don’t necessarily know what technique was used for the weaving of those.

They weren’t preserved. If you look at one of Marquette’s entries, he was gifted several of these as he went from house to house, but he didn’t keep them. So why aren’t some of those 17th-century Miami-Illinois weavings in institutions?

Well, they weren’t valued by the people who were gifted them, but we still have the language of how those fibers were being spun.”

Though methods of fiber spinning had been recorded, in the wake of colonization, these methods are also being revitalized and taught. “[In] utilizing a Bulgarian spindle or a Navajo spindle … as ways of connecting with the knowledge of spindle-spinning and what might have

2. “Removal Commemoration,” Aacimotaatiiyankwi, August 10, 2022, web.

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been the techniques to … spin these types of hairs, there are benefits to each style of spindle, whether they’re more conducive to long-draw [spinning] or whether they spin faster for short-staple fibers,” he explains.

“It’s an exploration on what implement is going to give me the yarn that I need to make the thing I want to make. That has been a really fun journey. But alongside that spindle knowledge and understanding is that our community used spindles to spin Indigenous animal fibers. They’re talking about using and spinning plant fibers another way. There’s knowledge of these really long fibers that you get from basswood that they’re being thigh spun.”

Nally explains that spindles did not necessarily replace other forms of spinning in Myaamia fiber arts. “There’re two different knowledges that weavers are carrying on how they produce fiber. I think a lot of times people view technology on this linear spectrum of once you get a tool, it is more advanced than the other things that came before it, and so it displaces it.

“And I think that rhetoric comes into play a lot with archaeologists looking at spindles and assuming that it was the only spinning technology at the time.

And then the spinning wheel displaces the spindle, but the spindle displaced the thigh spinning or the splicing cordage styles.

“That’s not really true. A lot of this knowledge coexists, and it exists because of a specific reason. I think there’s a lot of information in the fact that our community spun these long plant fibers one way and chose to spin animal fibers the other way and that [the spindle] didn’t displace that knowledge.”

Each of Nally’s revived woven pieces is unique, and it would be difficult for a weaver to follow a specific pattern. Variations in spun fiber and a weaver’s dominant style also influence the outcome of a woven textile. Revitalization efforts and private commissions guide his work. “A lot of what I’ve made in the past is serving a specific function, whether it is a piece that was intended as a gift for a community member or whether it’s an educational tool. Since we’re at the beginning stages of revitalization, a lot of these pieces are being made for examples for our community. Some have gone to museums and other institutions 68 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025

JARED NALLY

that our community members can visit, and people can get exposure to these styles of textile work. A lot of what I’m making has been dependent on a purpose that it’s going to be used for or how it serves the community.”

When Nally weaves twined bags, aesthetic choices tie in with the Myaamia beliefs. “They typically have two different designs on the front and back. And these designs either use an abstract representation or an even more simplified geometric representation of our spiritual beings, whether that is ciinkwiaki, the Thunder Beings, or lenipinšia, the Underwater Panther. Those two beings come and represent those earth and sky realms.

One being tends to be on one side, and one being on the other to represent that

whatever you’re putting in that bag is kept between those two realms,” he says.

“There is a lot of thought of, How am I going to depict this? How am I going to keep that bag in balance?”

Nally has several pieces in museums and private collections. The Indiana State Museum purchased a piece of his artwork for display at the Angel Mounds State Historic Site. The Great Council State Park in Ohio now owns a woven bag.

The current exhibition featuring some of Nally’s textile work in a collaborative Miami bandolier bag was at First Americans Museum. An upcoming exhibition featuring Nally’s work, City on the River, at Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Bloomington will open May 30, 2025.

above Myaamia Twined Bag, 2024, linen and wool yarn, 141/5 × 21 in., collection of the Indiana State Museum and on display at the Angel Mounds State Historic Site in Evansville, Indiana. Photo: Jared Nally (Miami). opposite, top Detail of a fingerwoven wool strap with glass seed beads that was part of a Myaamia artist collaboration which produced a bandolier bag for First Americans Museum's exhibit, Mended: the Language of Myaamia Ribbonwork (2025). opposite, bottom Jared Nally harvesting wiikapi (basswood bark) to process into fibers for spinning. Photo: Claudia Hedeen (Miami).

INSTAGRAM @JAREDNALLY Christy Hanson (Diné) is a writer, knitter, weaver, and yarn spinster who is based in Tohatchi, New Mexico.

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Mi'kmaw Quill Artist

MELISSA PETER-PAUL

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD decades-long repatriation project, many of these important objects are expected to be returned to the Mi'kmaw people.

Later this year, she and the Quill Sisters are participating in an exhibition at the Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University, in Sackville, New Brunswick.

G

ROWING UP IN A FAMILY of Mi'kmaw basket makers, Melissa Peter-Paul began making regalia and beadwork from an early age. A member of the Abegweit First Nation on Epekwitk (Prince Edward Island), her family and community’s cultural teachings recently led her to quillwork, a practice that her maternal grandfather’s family was recognized for.

In 2015 Peter-Paul entered an apprenticeship program for Mi'kmaq quill art where she conducted research in galleries and museums, learned protocols related to the harvesting of quills, and studied customary quill insertion techniques.

Since the completion of her apprenticeship, Peter-Paul has been instrumental in educating the next generation of Indigenous artists about quillwork and has established numerous community-based learning initiatives. This includes the Quill Sisters, an Epekwitk-based artist collective that endeavors to restore historical quillwork practices in Mi'kma'ki territory,

and features Kay Sark (Mi'kmaw), Cheryl Simon (Mi'kmaw), and Peter-Paul.

Since her first solo exhibition in 2019 in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Peter-Paul’s work has shown in several major exhibitions, including at the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, Art Mûr in Montreal, and the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor. In 2023 she won the Atlantic Indigenous Artist Award and the Leo Cheverie Cultural Connector of the Year Award. She has also given many workshops and talks about Mi'kmaw quillwork throughout Canada and the United States, notably as the Indigenous artist guest speaker at Nike World Headquarters as part of Native American Heritage Month.

In January Peter-Paul visited the Cultural Resources Center at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in Suitland, Maryland, where she cleaned, identified, and spent time with Mi'kmaw art and artifacts housed in the collection. Part of a

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MRS: Can we begin with your family and basketmaking? How were you introduced to Mi'kmaw cultural teachings?

MPP: Harvesting natural materials was a big part of our life. Our family all worked together collecting the materials needed for basketmaking, and each family member had their own jobs in the process. Early on I knew that it was a tradition that I wanted to pass on to my family.

MRS: I understand your grandfather Francis Jadis and his family are well known for their proficiency in quillwork. Can you describe it and how it has influenced you?

MPP: My maternal grandfather’s family was well known for quillwork in Nova Scotia. While those members had passed away before I was born, I’m still able to learn from them. I had the opportunity to visit the museum where their work is housed to see their designs and get inspiration for my work.

MRS: You live in Scotchfort on Epekwitk and my mother lives about 40 minutes away, in Bay Fortune. Can you talk about the island itself, the land, and how it resonates with your work?

MPP: The land is what ties me to my work. The sweetgrass and most of the birch bark that I harvest are from the island. I remember in my childhood going

MELISSA PETER-PAUL

to sites with my mom and grandmother harvesting plants for medicines. I feel a strong connection when I’m standing on the land that my grandmother, mother, and other ancestors have harvested from.

These are the same places that I take my children to, because without the land I cannot make my art. The land and quillwork can’t be separated.

MRS: You apprenticed with Mi'kmaq quill art beginning in 2015. Who were your mentors and what did you take away from that experience?

MPP: My cousin Cheryl Simon taught me so much about how to make quillwork.

She shares what she knows about the teachings and history behind it. My aunt Judy Clark is another mentor who introduced me to the love of the art form and how it was part of our family. I realized how important it is to learn this work and pass the teachings to other generations and the public.

above Mary Jane, 2019, porc u p i n e q u i l l s , b i rc h b a r k , sweetgrass, 5 × 5 in. opposite Melissa Peter-Paul modeling one of her quillwork medallion necklaces. All images courtesy of the artist.

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historical Mi'kmaw art and material.

Can you explain what this process entailed, what you encountered, and what was most memorable?

MPP: We went to various museums, like the Museum of Natural History in Halifax, Nova Scotia; the DesBrisay Museum in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia; and around the region to see historic pieces that have been collected. I learn so much when I’m able to see and handle the actual pieces in person and examine how they were made. When pieces are older, they’re often falling apart. You wouldn’t think it would be helpful, but it lets us see how

the designs were transferred to the bark and the technique for sewing the pieces together with spruce root. They become teachers, and it feels like I’m sitting there with my ancestors having tea with them.

They’re showing me how they did quillwork. I feel their presence and am able to use that experience when I’m creating my own work.

MRS: The cultural protocols involved in harvesting materials from porcupines are rarely discussed. I know that you cannot share certain details with the uninitiated like me, but can you

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share why these protocols are in place and their larger significance?

MPP: There are a lot of teachings about how we need to share the land with the plant and animal beings who we live with.

To put it simply, it’s about acknowledging and respecting the natural world. We take care of the land, and the land will take care of us. It’s our job to keep things in balance, which is a worldview that is reflected in how our quillwork always has mirror images in the designs.

MRS: Mi'kmaw quill workers are celebrated for their technical proficiency,

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dynamic color selections, and intricate geometric patterning. How would you describe Mi'kmaw quillwork to someone who hasn’t encountered it?

MPP: I would say that our art is dynamic and colorful, just like we are!

The materials that we use reflect our deep connection with our territory and the designs are based on our cultural teachings.

MRS: You’ve participated in many classes and workshops that pass down your knowledge and understanding of quillwork. How important are these initiatives and why must they continue to be supported?

MPP: There was quite a gap [in years] between my learning quillwork and my great-grandmothers. Many generations missed out on that opportunity to learn.

I’m now teaching Indian residential

school survivors, Sixties Scoopers, 1 and many Elders who never had the opportunity to learn when they were young. It makes me so happy, and their faces just light up when I see them finally getting the chance to learn. It makes it all worth the long days of doing prep work. It’s the same way with kids when they learn about quilling or harvesting.

They are so interested and want to know more. It’s amazing to know that the kids are learning from a young age. It’s how everyone should have been able to learn.

MRS: That is such rewarding work.

Several years ago you cofounded the Quill Sisters artist collective in Epekwitk with Kay Sark and Cheryl Simon. How did the group start, how often do you meet, and what insights have you gained from each other?

MPP: Shortly after my apprenticeship,

“…our art is dynamic and colorful, just like we are!”

above Three eight-pointed star medallion necklaces, porcupine quills, birchbark, sweetgrass, cut crystal pony beads, hairpipe beads, thread.

Photo: Brady McCloskey Photography. opposite Summer Solstice, 2020, porcupine quills, birchbark, sweetgrass. Photo: Misiksk Jadis (Mi'kmaw).

1. The Sixties Scoop was a mass removal of Indigenous children from their families by Canada that accelerated in the 1960s. Many children were placed in Euro-Canadian families or even Euro-American families without the consent of their birth communities or Native communities.

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I had a job where I was visiting local Indigenous artists in Epekwitk. I was able to spend some time with a group in Lennox Island where Cheryl was teaching quilling. Kay was one of her new apprentices, and we all started to collaborate on ideas. Over time we continued to check in with each other over pricing and designs, things like that. We bonded over quills, and I started calling them my quill sisters!

The name stuck and we decided to make it formal. We talk a lot in our group chat and help one another with any questions or obstacles or just offer any kind of support. We really like to exhibit together to showcase our different styles, [which allows] us to show people how dynamic the art form can be. We’re getting together soon for some quill retreats, and we’re excited to see what comes out of that time together. They are my sisters.

MRS: I was fortunate to write an article on contemporary quillwork practices for First American Art Magazine in 2020. It featured an image of your extraordinary work.

How has your work evolved over the past five years? Where do you see it heading?

MPP: I’ve learned so much in the past five years and have grown so much. I still can’t believe I get to do what I love every single day. I’ve collaborated with Manitobah and been the guest speaker at Nike’s world headquarters for [Native American] Heritage Month.

I’ve had many group exhibits, have a quillwork clothing line at Indigenous PEI and several special projects, and won two awards! I’m just grateful that I get to do this with my family, my sisters, and my community. The quills have had such a positive influence on my family and me. I’m grateful every single day for this journey.

MRS: I know you’re involved in individual commissions and exhibitions, so what are you currently working on?

MPP: As I mentioned earlier, the Quill Sisters have some upcoming retreats planned. We’ll be designing and creating our pieces in the same 74 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025

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space, which has not happened since before the COVID-19 pandemic. We have some upcoming shows that will feature these new pieces.

MRS: What do you want the future to hold for you?

MPP: I don’t know where quillwork will take me in the future. I’ve already had

many amazing opportunities that I never could have imagined, so while I know there will be more to come, I can’t even begin to say what the future might hold.

MRS: Thank you very much for speaking with me, Melissa.

MPP: Wela'lin, thank you.

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

above First House on the Left, 2022, porcupine quills, birchbark, sweetgrass.

This piece draws inspiration from the orange house that belonged to Melissa PeterPaul’s maternal grandfather Chief Frank Jadis (Mi'kmaq, 1908–1986) in the Abegweit First Nation. opposite Detail of quillwork.

Photo: Brady McCloskey Photography.

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PROFILE

Red Lake Band Ojibwe Painter, Animator & Filmmaker

JONATHAN THUNDER

By Sheila Regan

T

HERE’S A LOT GOING ON for Jonathan Thunder in 2025. As he sat down for an interview over Zoom at his studio in Duluth, he was getting ready to move his work from Kruk Gallery at the University of Wisconsin–Superior to the Watermark Art Center in Bemidji, Minnesota. The Loaded exhibition features work by Thunder and fellow artist Robb Quisling about their struggles with addiction. Also in January, he completed a painting and sent it off to the Minnesota Marine Art Museum to be included in a group exhibition, Once Upon a Shore, curated by Heid E. Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe).

Themed around water and lakes, the show will be open through January 4, 2026.

And that was just the start of the year. His 2025 schedule also includes a solo show at Gamut Gallery in Minneapolis, Sovereignty of Joy: A Solo Exhibition

by Jonathan Thunder, and another solo exhibition at the University of Minnesota’s

Quarter Gallery, Jonathan Thunder: The Artist As Storyteller, April 29 to May 17, curated by Howard Oransky.

Thunder talked to me about his process as a visual artist who works in paint and other media. He shared how he incorporates the world around him and his internal life to create his vivid, fabulous works. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

SR: What made you decide to move to Duluth in 2014?

JT: I had been working independently as an artist and I was taking my independence a little too far. I was just living a little too fast and a little too hard, and friends of mine from the art community started to reach out to me and say, “Hey, you should probably slow down a little bit.” After you hear that enough times, you start to take it seriously. And I told all my commissions I gotta go. So I gave up my apartment, my car, and put everything in

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storage, and checked myself into a rehab for three months. And then at the end of those three months, when my program was up, they said, “We want you to try this program in Duluth, Minnesota.” And I was like, “I’m not from Duluth. Why would you send me there?” But that was the point: to go somewhere where it’s new. All my old haunts aren’t around the corner. I had done some shows up here before, a couple in Superior and one in Duluth. It’s a nice town. So I did a threemonth, medium-intensity program, which is at a sober living house in Central Hillside, and just decided to stay because I got a sweet apartment at this Artspace building called the Washington Studios.

I was taking commissions almost right away. A lot of my usuals followed me, and I’ve been here ever since because I was able to make a living and do it remotely if I needed to. And I love the lake.

SR: How would you describe the arts community in Duluth?

JT: The arts community is like a big family here, as far as I’m concerned. I got welcomed in right away by some locals. I would say it’s healthy. It’s vibrant, it’s vast, and it’s a lot of fun.

SR: Have you been doing art basically your whole life, or was it something you discovered at some point?

JT: I’ve always been interested in art, since elementary school, high school. The career counselor gave me the advice that I should go to college for art. I didn’t even know that was a thing. That’s how much I knew about the arts. I just knew I liked drawing and writing stuff. I’ve always been focused on whatever’s in front of me. When I decided to go to school for the arts, that was the only plan that I had.

I got into the [classical] arts, like painting, writing, and sculpting, but I wanted to

JONATHAN THUNDER

explore storytelling and computer-based arts too. Then I went to school for visual effects, screenplay writing, motion graphics, animation, and stuff like that.

SR: Where did you get your degree?

JT: At a little school in downtown Minneapolis called The Art Institutes International Minnesota. Prior to that, I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and that’s where I studied the [cultural] side of the arts. I was only at that school for a little over a year, but I stayed in Santa Fe for about three years. Then my mom asked me to come home and fix up the house that I grew up in. So I left.

SR: You’re from Minneapolis?

JT: Yeah, I grew up in Brooklyn Center.

SR: Your work can be quite fantastical.

Where do you get your ideas?

JT: Music, cinema, books, life. A lot of the life stuff creeps in intuitively. I just try to put elements from all of those facets into the work so that it looks a lot like the things in life that excite me.

SR: What would you say is your primary medium right now?

JT: I would say lately it’s been acrylic on canvas, but I do digital illustrations and animations as well.

SR: Do you start with a drawing when you work in painting?

JT: A lot of times, yes. I’ll sketch something either onto the canvas or on a piece of paper or in my iPad, and that’ll be the seed for the canvas painting.

SR: How much of your technique is a particular school of painting—or are you experimenting every time?

JT: People have said Surrealism. I like Surrealism. I like Cubism. I’ve liked a lot of the Baroque period—mixing mythology with sociopolitical content.

When I was developing my style around 2000 to 2003, I was inspired by movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Cool World. I was studying animation at that time, so I think the two may have gotten mixed up a little bit. And to me, that’s always been part of the recipe. One of the movements that I paid the closest

attention to, I would say, is the Lowbrow Pop Surrealists, who are common in [magazines like] Hi-Fructose and Juxtapoz because they are tongue in cheek and sometimes serious. They aren’t afraid to throw things in their work that people might find immature or offensive. That seems to be the closest language to the one I like to speak.

SR: Do you have any favorite artists or people that you feel have influenced you a lot?

JT: Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dalí were some of the first books that I was given to look at art, and I think that stuck with me. David Lynch, for his style of storytelling, which is a lot of what the canvases

“They aren’t afraid to throw things in their work that people might find immature or offensive.”

above Echo from Another Planet, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 20 × 16 in., private collection. opposite Jonathan Thunder.

All images courtesy of the artist.

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PROFILE

“…my usual form of storytelling … is a little salty and a little sweet, a little medicine, a little drop of poison, and a lot of color.”

above Now and Then, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 12 × 16 in. opposite, top My Grandma and Your Grandma, 2021, 6-panel m u ra l i n st a l l a t i o n , Twe e d Museum of Art, University of Minnesota–Duluth. opposite, bottom Hypnagogia, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 36 × 24 in.

“Deer Woman is visited by a jewel thief who has stolen something very special.” —Jonathan Thunder

are. Ice Cube has had a huge impact, and Public Enemy gave me a little bit of my temperament when it comes to some of my imagery.

SR: Have you ever been featured in Juxtapoz or Hi-Fructose?

JT: I bought an ad space in Hi-Fructose.

SR: What was your ad?

JT: It was a painting. It was a two-page spread, and the painting took up both sides. I was just announcing my new website. I think it just had, like, my URL or something like that.

SR: You do a lot of murals. How is that work different from the other things you do?

JT: I’ve always been a fan of muralists, and it wasn’t until I did my first big mural that I realized how hard they were. But I’m excited by big painting. So it’s the kind of commission that I'm interested in. I’ve always thought that big art—panoramic

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art—was something that excited me. So I do try to reel in mural commissions.

Techniques that I use in those mural commissions have come back to the studio after I’ve gotten comfortable with them.

SR: In 2024 you were part of Together, a group show at the Minnesota Museum of American Art curated

by Emmett and Kit Ramstad that featured artists collaborating with their children. How was that experience?

JT: Emmett and I were part of the same McKnight Fellowship class, and they asked me if I’d be interested in exhibiting there. Mino, my son, was probably one at the time. And I said, “Well, what’s the theme?” Emmett said, “You have to make a piece of artwork with your kid.” I was like, “Well, my kid’s one, so I don’t know what I’m going to do with him, but we’ll think of something.” Over the course of a

ARTIST2

year, I would prop Mino in front of the canvas with a crayon or colored pencil, and he would make some marks, and then I would make some marks. And over the course of a year, we figured out how to make something. It was amazing because being a parent-artist is one of those magic tricks.

You have to connect with other parent-artists to feel like you have community. And it was nice for me to connect with all those parent-artists for that show and their families and have Mino be a part of that experience.

SR: The Twin Cities has such an incredible Native art scene. How has Duluth been in comparison?

JT: I would say about the same, except on a smaller scale.

We have a nice art community here. One of the best galleries in town is at the American Indian Community Housing Organization, and they put on most events that I’m interested in. It’s pretty healthy. Some of the artists that I’ve met there like to call it like their second home because it’s so welcoming.

SR: If you’re going to just make art for yourself, how would it be different than your commissioned work?

JT: Well, that would be for the exhibits. For the exhibits that are opening this year, I like to take my usual form of storytelling, which is a little salty and a little sweet, a little medicine, a little drop of poison, and a lot of color. And just make images that try to talk about what’s important to me at the time and using story with characters that are, like you said, fantastical. My adapted renditions of mythology, cartoon characters, movie scenes, things like that. I try to walk the line between literal and more like on the interpretive, dreamscape scale.

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PROFILE

SR: For your shows in 2025, will these shows be new work, or already completed pieces?

JT: The work that went to the Regis Center for Art is already completed.

That work was produced over the last five or six years. The work that’s going to the Gamut Gallery is a body of work that was produced in the last six months. I was already making that work when they approached me for the show, and they became interested in that body of work.

The piece for the [Minnesota Marine Art] Museum in Winona is something that I’m doing for that exhibit.

SR: Did you talk to them about what you wanted to do?

JT: My painting is called Night at London Road House. In my painting, a mythological character of the lake is pouring water into a bath where another character is taking a bath.

The show is curated by Heid E. Erdrich, and when she called me to ask me what my piece was going to be about, I told her that, and she said, “That’s crazy.

I was just pouring water into my bathtub before I called you.…” And I was like, “Well, I guess it must be the right piece for the show.”

SR: For the Regis show, can you describe that exhibition?

JT: It’s a wider collection of work that ranges from simple scenes or vignettes to sociopolitical commentary pieces that I’ve created within the last five or six years. A couple of them might be older than that.

SR: And how about the show at Gamut?

JT: Gamut picked up a body of work that’s centered around humor, togetherness, double entendre, sexual innuendo— scenes where people are interacting in a flirty way, and some relationship humor.

My painting One More Game (2024) is part of that body of work. I was spicing it up a little, I suppose. The pool table scene was something that I thought of post-pandemic because I realized how hard it was for me to go out and be together with people. I remembered the pool table as being a place where people hung out, having a good time together. So that became an element in my work—to show a couple having a date night or something in this scene. And they’re obviously into each other.

SR: Is there a specific mythological character you’re referencing in that particular piece?

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JT: The stylized antlers that I’ve been using go back to the deer-person character. I did a body of work around that character at one point and modified the look from being literally a deer head to trying to create more symbolic imagery.

SR: Do you feel you’ve got mentors who have helped you?

JT: Yeah, I’ve definitely been smart enough to listen to advice. I’ve looked up to people who had more time in the arts than I had and have. I find what I think would work for me.

SR: Any particular people you’d want to mention?

JT: Gordon Coons was one of the first people to shoot me some advice years ago, in 2003 or 2004, when we had our first shows together in Minneapolis. Heid Erdrich has definitely encouraged me to keep going and supported my vision and my work. Jim Denomie, he was always a big supporter when I would make work that took bigger chances.

SR: Can you give an example of a piece that you were scared to release to the world because of how people would react?

JONATHAN THUNDER

JT: I work in cultural taboos sometimes.

Owls are one of those cultural taboos for some tribal cultures. [The owl] scares the sh— out of them. They don’t want to have anything to do with any owl imagery. So to me, that just made it an interesting conversation. People would say, “What are you doing making those images?”

And I drew some criticism for that, but I also found a lot of people who were in love with those images and had different thoughts, outside of old superstition stories.

SR: Are you very involved in the sober community?

JT: When I first moved to Duluth, I was pretty active, doing work with friends, making events that were geared toward people who were trying to find sobriety or recovery from alcoholism and addiction. I did that for a number of years. I haven’t much lately, but I do live a sober life, and I still practice a lot of the tools that I learned early in recovery, including staying in touch with people who are also in recovery or have recovered from alcoholism and addiction.

My friend Robb Quisling and I— we actually decided to do an exhibit about being an alcoholic. That show is the voice of two professional artists who have recovered from severe alcoholism.

So we wanted to put together a body of work that was not necessarily anti-alcohol propaganda but more graveside humor, tongue-in-cheek commentary on what that experience looks like through our practice. So I created a body of work that is these containers. You can’t see what’s inside of them, but you can guess. And I think what I was going for is that you can put whatever you want into that container. You can stick some booze in there, or you can stick some blended-up frozen fruit and some milk or something, or whatever you want.

Rob and I talked about how people don’t talk about this. We’re going to be just coming out like a couple of old drunks.

One of the things that I learned is that you share your experience. You’re kind of an example. I got an email from a colleague who said, “I would never say this publicly, but I have 35 years of sobriety, and I still remember my first meeting,” and I was just like, “Amazing, thank you.”

JONTHUNDER.COM

Sheila Regan is a Minneapolis-based writer. Besides past contributions to First American Art Magazine, she has recently contributed to Craft Magazine, Bomb, and The Art Newspaper. She’s an arts columnist for MinnPost, regularly writes for The Star Tribune, and The Pioneer Press, and contributes radio pieces for KFAI’s Minneculture program.

“People would say, ‘What are you doing making those images?’”

above One More Game, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 48 × 60 in. opposite Night at London Road House, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 180 × 84 in.

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EXHIBITIONS

BENTONVILLE, AR

Knowing the West: Visual Legacies of the American West Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

W

HO KNOWS THE WEST? How do they know it? How do material forms cultivate understandings of place, region, identity, and culture? Co-curators Mindy N. Besaw and Jami C. Powell (Osage) craftily pose these questions to visitors of the exhibition, Knowing the West, which recently completed its run at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. With thematic focus on origins, authority, persistence, nation building, and rethinking, the curators propose that various communities and cultures—from White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian-Americans to Native Americans—had and have stakes in and specific knowledge of the West. “It’s complicated,” the curators assert.

With a team of curatorial collaborators advising on the show, including Chelsea M. Herr (Choctaw Nation), Scott Manning Stevens (Akwesasne Mohawk), Kirsten Pai Buick, Michael Grauer, Laura F. Fry, Michael Hartman, and Christina E. Burke, along with the museum’s curator of Indigenous art Jordan Poorman

Cocker (Kiowa) and assistant curator Larissa Randall, the pluralistic and multivocal show takes great care to not only include Native American art throughout the exhibition but also to show that Native American cultures, regional identities, and systems of making are themselves a plurality. They impress upon viewers that Native Americans do not all know the West in the same way, as people of other backgrounds, regions, and ethnicities also know the West differently.

Careful choices and placement of Native American art throughout the exhibition alongside thoughtful commentary produce a thread within the larger show in which both checklist choices and curatorial decisions highlight Native American makers and belongings. In this environment, Native American art and cultural authorities shine; the curators emphasize the artists’ authority and autonomy, eschewing settler society’s fascination with authenticity. Resisting temptation to insert the work of living Native American artists into historical exhibitions, the

curators bring to the foreground the work of ancestral Native American artists and practices. The curators also recognize and design according with what Chickasaw and Choctaw curator heather ahtone has described as the ontological distinctions between objects and belongings, pointing implicitly to distinct needs of display for material forms that are kincentric and animate nonhuman relations.1 Anchoring the exhibition entrance is a painting on muslin by Hunkpapa Lakota artist Hé Núƞpa Waníča (Joseph No Two Horns, 1852–1942). The drawing follows the Lakota practice of annual counting, charting the years 1785 through 1922 with mnemonic devices often distilled into a single symbol. The artwork participates in ways of knowing that are dialogic within Lakota community but also with White settlers, as implied by the suggested viewing fee marked on the upper right of the muslin: “Please pay $2.50 to see this map.” Beginning with this artwork frames the exhibition through Indigenous perspectives.

In Knowing the West, the preference for a wide array of media enables regalia and beadwork to be shown to have equal or greater visual authority than painting and sculpture. Standouts are a Lakota saddle cover (1920) entirely covered with beads, mainly in luminous

1. heather ahtone, “Considering Indigenous Aesthetics: A non-Western Paradigm,” American Society for Aesthetics Newsletter 39, no. 3 (Winter 2019): 2; heather ahtone, “Shifting the Paradigm of Art History: A Multi-sited Indigenous Approach,” in The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada, ed. Heather Igloliorte and Carla Taunton (New York: Routledge, 2022), 42–52. On belongings, see Lorén Spears and Amanda Thompson, “‘As We Have Always Done’: Decolonizing the Tomaquag Museum’s Collections Management Policy,” Collections 18, no. 1 (2022): 31–41.

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REVIEWS

white, and a Lakota beaded gun case (1885) that sparkles in the light like the glinting surface of snow. The expansion of media also highlights the work of women makers who represent most of the artists in the exhibition. Besaw and Powell point out their deliberate attempt to “counter the overwhelming masculinity associated with the American West” and note in the catalogue that “the invisibility of women artists in both art history and the public imagination can only be countered by highlighting and celebrating their stories.”2 The curators also use installation strategies to highlight the conceptual interventions of the show. Baskets by Evelyn Lake Potter (Pomo, ca. 1908–1952) and Louisa Keyser (Washoe, 1829–1925) are placed on high pedestals before Albert Bierstadt’s large-scale painting, Sierra Nevada Morning (1870). With metal rods forbidding viewers closer access to the painting, the exhibition design wittingly makes it impossible to view Bierstadt’s painting without seeing it through the filtering lens of the baskets. The painting loses some of its monumentality by the scale of the curatorial furniture and thwarted access. This is a productive and evocative interruption, as it implies both Bierstadt’s unacknowledged dependence on Indigenous knowledge and redresses the frequent erasure or minimization of Indigenous people from his pictures.

Basket makers’ ways of knowing become coeval with Bierstadt’s visual authority; the label accompanying the baskets smartly discusses them on their own terms, not through the lens of the Bierstadt painting.

I wonder if this stimulating intervention could have been more effective with more direct labeling to bring the visitor into the disruption and its implication. Both Besaw and Herr were explicit about their intentions in the discussion panel on the occasion of the opening. But the wall label by Bierstadt’s painting more lightly poses to the viewer, “How does your view of the landscape change when you see Native American baskets with this painting?” This open-endedness produces a sleight of hand that does not do enough to articulate the deliberate curatorial

provocation. Furthermore, Besaw’s assertion at the opening panel that this placement also alludes to Bierstadt’s collection and display of Native American belongings in his studio (materials now in the American Museum of Natural History) implied that curators replicated Bierstadt’s studio practice rather than developed a placement to incite viewers to new ways of perceiving. I wished the label owned their intervention.

Another productive intervention with the placement of Native American art occurs two galleries later, where the visitor is introduced to ancestral practices of Native American nations in the Southwest, including Pueblo and Diné artworks in pottery and weaving. Most of these works are placed without plastic cases bonneting them. Here they breathe, recognized as animate relatives and nonhuman relations rather than as inanimate objects. Curatorial overtness may have also helped visitors understand the importance of this installation. One visits with all these artworks before coming to White settler depictions of the Southwest from the Taos Society of Artists and others. This placement gives Native American makers authority to self-define rather than have definitions imposed by settler artists. The representations that follow, Ernest Martin Henning’s Pueblo Indians (early 20th c.) and John Sloan’s etchings

One of the most intimate belongings imaginable produced by family for an infant, the cradleboard “mimics the womb” in Cocker’s terms, offering a protective source for the child as well as a signal of the baby’s future trajectories.

above Installation view of the cradleboard display in Knowing the West: Visual Legacies of the American West. Both images courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. opposite Hé Núƞpa Waníča, Joseph No Two Horns (Hunkpapa Lakota, 1852–1942), Winter Count, ca. 1922, ink, watercolors, and crayon on muslin, 36 × 93 in., collection of Jo Anderson.

Photo: Jeffrey Wells.

2. Mindy N. Besaw and Jami C. Powell, “It’s Complicated! Cultural Entanglements and Intersections in Art of the West,” in Knowing the West: Visual Legacies of the American West (Bentonville: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in association with Rizzoli Electa, 2024), 19.

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from the Tia Collection, The Black Pot (1937) and Indian Detour (1927), point to exoticized constructions of Pueblo makers and the engagement of the settler-tourist industry in the region responding to Southwest art practices that raise questions about how cultural authorities come into contrast in this space.

The effect of displaying Native American belongings without bonnets peaks in the display of cradleboards. One of the most intimate belongings imaginable produced by family for an infant, the cradleboard “mimics the womb” in Cocker’s terms, offering a protective source for the child as well as a signal of the baby’s future trajectories.3 Mohegan playwright Madeline Sayet refers to belongings as “sacred relations” that “hold space on their own,” often exceeding material properties.4 Applied to the cradleboard display of Knowing the West, this ethos produces space for these animate forms to exist without tight enclosure.

Knowing the West raises the conundrum around naming that bedevils art history’s attempts to tell more inclusive stories. What to do with makers whose

names are not known to curators? The curators here take up “artist once known” and describe on a wall label that the phrase “recognizes highly skilled individuals who were once known to their families and communities, but whose names are no longer known to us today.…

Further research and conversations with community members may someday recover this knowledge.” This phrase is surely an improvement from institutions that do not list a maker’s name at all, as if the belonging wrought its own existence. At the same time, however, the “once” reinforces a linear construction of temporality of past-present-future that imposes on many Indigenous modes of temporality, in which time can be cyclical or in which past and future are entwined with one another. Furthermore, this is a tricky claim because it implies that no one may know an artist’s name, producing a problematic assuredness. As the catalogue essay by Christina E. Burke and Tipiziwin Tolman (Standing Rock Dakota/ Lakota) points to, deep intergenerational knowledge remains within communities.

Settler-colonial histories of extraction

above Nimiipuu artist once known, detail of Saddle Blanket, ca. 1885, wool, glass beads, Chinese coins, 37 × 59 in., collection of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. Image courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

3. Jordan Poorman Cocker, “Pahn-tdope: Kiowa Cradleboard,” in Knowing the West, 194.

4. Madeline Sayet, Where We Belong (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), 41.

5. Besaw and Powell, “It’s Complicated!,” 39.

6. Chelsea M. Herr, “The Invention of the West,” in Knowing the West, 69.

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have incited reasonable resistance to sharing, so assumptions of knowability do not accommodate for the history that shapes how and on what terms intergenerational or community knowledge is shared. Noting the shifting of these semantics as perpetually imperfect, my present preference, following work ongoing at the University of Oklahoma by faculty and students working in Native American art, is to list tribal nation as known along with the word maker.

Through the Native American art on display, alongside multivocal text and artworks by a variety of makers, the exhibition achieves its goal to build “a more inclusive American art history.”5 The exhibition also highlights artworks that speak to transnational dialogues, including those outside of settler society.

A key example is the Nimiipuu saddle blanket (ca. 1885), that incorporates Chinese coins traded from the immigrant communities who built railroads, which appears on the advertising card for the exhibition. Here the material forms amicably coexist. This relationship may be a microcosm of the exhibition as a whole—the ways that people know the West might coexist, even as they are incommensurable and often in conflict with each other. Yet the discordant coloring of the geometric forms on the walls in the gallery perhaps discomfort the viewers and catch them unprepared to accept these coexisting and coeval multiplicities the curators assemble. At the same time, through the array of voices and diversity of makers, the exhibition brings together the ongoing relevance and need for continued discussion about what it means to “know” the West. As Herr probes, “Is the West something we can know? Or at least approximate? Or is it something we must continually attempt to define, to envision, to circulate, because it will only ever be an intangible invention?”6 The exhibition continues on to the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida, and the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.

—Emily C. Burns, PhD

REVIEWS

EVANSTON, IL

Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak/ Chicagoland Block Museum of Art

A

G ROU P E X H I B I T ION, Woven Being includes more than 30 artists and seven administrators from Northwestern University and the Terra Foundation. Northwestern is an elite academic institution located in the North Shore Chicago suburb of Evanston, a notable university in the local Native American community due to its Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR) established in 2017.

This center has become a hub of unity and support for Indigenous students at Northwestern University as well as the local American Indian community.

The Block is a free public museum with high-reaching ceilings and wooden floors. The exhibition text includes multiple themes such as regional artists, relationships to land, and a focus on the perspective and influences of Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe descent), Kelly Church (Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Tribe Potawatomi/Ottawa/Ojibwe), Nora Moore Lloyd (Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe), and Jason Wesaw (Pokagon Potawatomi).

These four artists were additionally asked to collaborate with administrators to select art that represents Chicagoland.

Upon entering the doors, viewers stand beneath Jason Wesaw’s installation, The Breath of Life…The First Song. Before seeing the introductory credits and exhibition text for Woven Being, 13 artworks are on display, ranging from large-scale installations that reference sound and water to digital paintings on aluminum.

After officially passing the introductory credits, viewers walk into a large gallery packed with art from ceiling to floor. The quantity of artwork and lack of emphasis or flow make it difficult to know where to begin. I start with Kelly Church’s Honoring Our Children: Never Forgotten, an installation of suspended braids of sweetgrass wrapped in thin copper wire. Central to the artwork is a transparent photo you must squat in

above Jason Wesaw (Pokagon Potawatomi), Water Carries Memory, 2025, installation. Photo: Holly Trevan (Gun Lake Potawatomi)/Block Museum. Image courtesy of the Block Museum.

order to see. As the smell of sweetgrass hits my nose, my eyes are taken by Church’s corner on the right side of the gallery, work that includes multiple masterfully woven black ash baskets in close proximity. This style of presentation in a vitrine reminds me of how natural history museums display Indigenous “artifacts.”

Each handmade item loses value in the decision to bunch them together. The baskets are shown in a manner that makes it difficult to appreciate the time, commitment, and mastery that customary Native American weaving methods entail.

This has implications for contemporary Native American artists negotiating how they want their work to be treated by art institutions and curators.

Sharing the wall with a large number of Church’s works is Jason Wesaw’s installation, Water Carries Memory. His use of ribbon and cowrie shells is reminiscent of powwow regalia and the Lake Michigan shoreline, an abundance of sand and streaming blue ribbons of water.

Adjacent to Wesaw’s immersive work is She Brings the Light by Avis Charley (Spirit Lake Dakota/Diné), an oil painting of a Native American woman wearing a vibrant ribbon skirt in front of a Chicago skyline. The composition evokes Japanese block printing with a rising sun in the shallow background. The text for Charley’s work explains her interest in propaganda that encouraged Native American relocation to urban centers such as Chicago. This historical reference to printed material sets a space to include

printed artifacts. Not far from Charley’s work is a collection of printed materials documenting Cherokee language lessons in local Chicago publications.

A critical oversaturation point in the exhibition is a wall that includes a salon-style display of 2D work that includes mostly Native American artists except for a small print from Agnes Martin (Euro-American) and a work by Josef Albers (German). The triangular arrangement of art is topped with a small vibrantly colored drum by Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee), like a cherry on a sundae sitting atop the hierarchy.

Nora Moore Lloyd’s audio recording and letters provides a direct and unfiltered view into the palpable generational trauma that is held in some contemporary Native American homes, taking form in family letters written in cursive and her familial tongue, Ojibwe. This work could benefit from a content warning; it impacted me physically. I felt the same nausea as when I read a headline about the graves at state-run boarding schools.

In a hidden nook, Andrea Carlson’s work directly confronts White Earth Ojibwe painter Frank Big Bear’s The Walker Collage, Multiverse #10. The two works are large-scale rectangles with an underlying grid system communicating about architecture, history, oversaturation, and virtual spaces. This nook featuring additional grid-like compositions from other artists such as Debra Yepa-Pappan (Jemez/Korean) and Chris Pappan (Kaw/Osage/Cheyenne River

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above Chris Pappan (Osage/

Kaw/Cheyenne River Lakota), Howageji Nizhuje Akipé (Where the Rivers Meet), 2023, triptych, graphite and gouache on Rives BFK paper, 44 x 30 in. ea. Image courtesy of Blue Rain Gallery.

Lakota), holds the most coherent thread, playing with weaving the dense vocabulary of American visual culture and multiple iterations of history.

The exhibition encompasses more than 80 artworks made by 33 artists including the highlighted four artists: Carlson, Church, Lloyd, and Wesaw. Many of the installations and masterworks by the highlighted four artists leave an impression on one’s body and grasp multiple layers of Native identity via scale. Yet it is difficult to find any visual flow in the curation of the work. The exhibition lacks visual composure and prioritizes the quantity of Native American artists. There were many missed

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opportunities to juxtapose contextual if not formal relationships between artworks.

There is a non-Indigenous cultural hierarchy at play in Woven Being. This conclusion can be drawn by the inclusion of artists like Agnes Martin and Josef Albers, as well as the emphasis on artists highly collected by museums moving to purchase from contemporary Native American artists. The tone of the exhibition text assumes the viewer has no knowledge of Native American art, let alone intimate connections to Chicago. In fact, of the highlighted artists, only Carlson lives in Chicago. She is currently experiencing a surge in her career, exhibiting at institutions across the United States including the Whitney, and her work is the only piece to claim a wall to itself. The space requirements for the label for Carlson’s The Indifference of Fire and the accompanying text were so greedy, that the gallery security guard had no place to stand. I had to lean in to view a small, dark, low-contrast work of George Morrison (Grand Portage Ojibwe, 1919–2000), which shared a corner with Carlson’s work. The security guard uncomfortably shifted, so as not to interrupt my view. I smiled, a little embarrassed. He responded by commenting on how there wasn’t enough room for him to stand and apologized. I broke the tension by asking the young security guard if he had ever heard of Fred Wilson. He promised he would look him up after work. I do not take any issue with Carlson’s work being emphasized. However, it does reiterate a hierarchy when it comes to success in the art market.

Some artists in the exhibition have limited or transactional relationships with Chicagoland. Then the show anticipates the viewer as a non-Indigenous person. This is no surprise since the Block Museum is housed in Northwestern University. The heavy hand of a university administrator is visible in the curation of this exhibition. The voices and statements of each artwork are drowned out by the tight layout. Some artworks are difficult to view solely because you can’t stand back far enough for the large-scale works. The artists who contributed to the show provided compelling work. However, this exhibition did not serve them justly.

Woven Being remains open through July 13, 2025. —Noelle Garcia (Klamath/ Northern Paiute)

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GRAND RONDE, OR

Transgressors Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center

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N TRANSGRESSORS, curators Anthony Hudson (Grand Ronde/ Siletz) and Felix Furby (Grand Ronde/ Chinook) create a vibrant and deeply meaningful showcase of queer, Two Spirit, trans, and non-binary Indigenous artists.

The exhibition challenges boundaries and celebrates identity, resilience, and beauty through a diverse array of works, each piece reflecting the artists’ personal and cultural journeys.

Anthony and Felix challenge the idea that transgression is inherently negative. Instead they liken it to the archetype of the Changer from their people’s stories: that to move through a boundary proves its flexibility. Boundaries can shift, expand, or dissolve entirely, much like borders that may not truly exist at all.

Chachalu Tribal Museum and Cultural Center is designed like a plank house and built on the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde reservation, about a 30-minute drive inland from the Oregon coast. Chachalu tells the story of the tribes and bands of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde community of Oregon. The Yamhill Kalapuya people called this place Chachalu, which translates to “place of the burnt timbers.” A massive forest fire burned through the Grand Ronde Valley shortly before the time of the tribe’s relocation in 1856.

One of the first pieces visitors encounter is White Cindy, a large lightbox illustration by Steph Littlebird (Grand Ronde/Kalapuya/Clatsop Chinook) that commands attention with its radiant colors and dynamic storytelling. The piece honors White Cindy or Musksamse Lapli (Klamath, ca. 1830–1940), a transfeminine medicine person whose life was as colorful and uncontainable as her attire.

According to the exhibition label, she was a messenger in the Modoc War and made money selling baskets; she also worked her medicine and posed for snapshots with those who would pay—Klamath’s O.G. influencer. She was called “White Cindy” because she wore all-white flowing skirts and dresses that she adorned

with brightly colored ribbons. Known for her defiant spirit, White Cindy stands as a powerful ancestor who embraced her identity with pride and purpose. She would ride her horse at high speeds, unencumbered by her billowing attire or the judgments of outsiders. White Cindy stands as a powerful presence who refuses to be confined by the world or the expectations imposed by colonizers—truly a transgressor by the curator’s definition.

Across the room, Littlebird’s Two Spirit Trading Co. sticker machine adds an interactive and playful element to the exhibition. During the opening night, this piece became a crowd favorite as visitors eagerly turned quarters into unique stickers designed by the artist. Followers of Littlebird’s Instagram were able to watch as she brought this vision to life, sharing the creative process behind both the sticker machine and her equally engaging Wisdom Machine. The

machine, a tangible symbol of joy and representation, resonates with Littlebird’s mission to bring positive, authentic portrayals of Indigenous and Two Spirit people to the forefront.

Littlebird has six pieces featured in the exhibition, each one highlighting her signature blend of vibrant storytelling, cultural dignity, and artistic innovation.

“The intention of my work is to bring joy, pride, and positive representation

of Indigenous people to the world. As a young Native person growing up in the ’90s, there was very little authentic representation of Indigenous people, let alone Two Spirit people,” writes Littlebird on the exhibition label. Through her work, she challenges outdated narratives and celebrates the beauty of multifaceted Indigenous identity.

In a glass display in the middle of the exhibition sits When I felt unsure about how top surgery would affect the relationship I have with my sumix so I beaded it up and felt better ixi? by Roin Morigeau (Flathead Salish descent). It is a deeply personal and evocative work. Their intricately beaded compression bandage speaks to themes of self-love, healing, and the power of creating art as a way to process complex emotions. Morigeau’s craftsmanship transforms a functional object into a piece of emotional resonance that celebrates the intersection of identity, art, and personal growth.

above Steph Littlebird (Grand Ronde/Kalapuya/Clatsop Chinook), White Cindy, 2024, illustration on light box. Photo: Mandy Yeahpau (Comanche/ Cherokee/Tarahumara descent).

White Cindy, Musksamse Lapli, was a transfeminine medicine person of the Klamath Tribes, who played the important role of a messenger during the 1872–73 Modoc War in Southern Oregon and Northern California.

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It is rare to see a chest binder displayed in an art exhibition, let alone one that has been so meticulously and skillfully adorned. Morigeau embellishes the garment with glass beads, horsehair, braintanned deer hide, metal cones, abalone, mother-of-pearl, metal clips, thread, and shell—materials rich in cultural and symbolic significance. These elements elevate the binder beyond its practical purpose and infuse it with deep personal and artistic meaning.

While chest binding is a practice that anyone of any gender may engage in, for many trans and non-binary individuals it is a vital tool in alleviating gender dysphoria. By transforming this deeply personal garment into a work of art, Morigeau highlights the profound relationship between body, identity, and self-expression, and offers a poignant meditation on the ways we shape and affirm ourselves through both material culture and artistic practice.

Positioned directly across from Morigeau’s piece is one by Geo Soctomah

Neptune (Passamaquoddy), Fabanaki Flint Corn, a master class in basket weaving and storytelling. Made from black ash and sweetgrass, the piece reflects Neptune’s unique style, shaped by their experience as a Two Spirit artist and Passamaquoddy Tribal citizen.

These five intricately woven and colorful bright orange, yellow, blue, purple, and pink ears of corn are a feast for the eyes, adorned with a mischievous woven crow.

The work reflects the interconnectedness of ancestral knowledge, personal growth, and spiritual journey. The crow, inspired by the real-life birds that steal corn from Neptune’s garden, adds a playful yet poignant touch to this stunning work.

What Indigiqueer exhibition would be complete without something by Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee)? Gibson made headlines last year as he represented the United States at the 2024 Venice Biennale, the first Indigenous artist ever to have a solo exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion. For the biennale, he brought Transgressors curator Anthony

above Roin Morigeau (Flathead Salish descent), When I felt unsure about how top surgery would affect the relationship I have with my sumix so I beaded it up and felt better ixi?, 2024, binder, glass seed beads, shell beads, horse hair, metal cones. Photo: Mandy Yeahpau (Comanche/Cherokee/Tarahumara descent).

Hudson and their performance persona, Carla Rossi, to serve as the biennale’s drag clown in residence.

Gibson’s most prominent piece in the exhibition can’t be missed: a 16-minute video looped on a large, curved projection screen that takes up an entire wall in the exhibition. TO FEEL MYSELF BELOVED ON THE EARTH (2020) anchors the exhibition with its meditative

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and powerful exploration of identity and community. Filmed during the tumult of the pandemic and civil unrest, the video features six performances set to a rhythmic and ambient soundscape. Each movement captures the transformation of chaos into stability and offers viewers a sense of harmony amidst tension.

Gibson’s work underscores the healing power of art and collective expression through dance and movement by subjects in Gibson’s signature palette of vibrant color and patterns.

Prominently lit and hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the exhibit between Gibson’s video projection and Neptune’s woven corn is Since the Beginning and End of Time (2024), a breathtaking indigo-dyed kapa garment

by Lehuauakea (Native Hawaiian). Intricately hand-embroidered and adorned with shell buttons reminiscent of a rich and infinite night sky, this kapa piece transcends labels and affirms selfhood.

As a māhū artist, Lehuauakea weaves their Native Hawaiian identity and lived experiences into this wearable art, sharing their journey as a diasporic and queer cultural practitioner. Māhū in Native Hawaiian and Tahitian cultures are people who embody both male and female spirit. Kapa, an Indigenous Hawaiian cloth made from the bast of the paper mulberry tree, was considered a lost art for almost a century. The art form was revived in the 1970s during the Hawaiian cultural renaissance. Since the Beginning and End of Time represents cultural lineage and personal empowerment and allows the artist to reclaim their narrative.

Transgressors is more than an art exhibition; it is a celebration of belonging, joy, pride, and resistance. Each piece defies colonial constraints and affirms the beauty and power of Indigenous queer identities. In a time of political and social pushback against non-binary and trans people, this exhibition boldly declares, “We are here today, ride with us, with White Cindy, with past and future ancestors, and with your relatives today, and ask yourself: What does a future look like with us in it?”

Transgressors will run through April 26, 2025. —Mandy Yeahpau (Comanche/ Cherokee/Tarahumara descent)

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HANOVER, NH

Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light) Hood Museum of Art

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HIS IS THE FIRST MAJOR solo exhibition for photographer Cara Romero (Chemehuevi). She couldn’t be more thrilled. As she said at its press preview, “This is a poignant moment in my life.” Her joy has several sources, not least of them a career retrospective that may raise her professional profile even higher. Backed by a major institution, the exhibition will travel extensively in the coming years, and features several new pieces created during a residency at Dartmouth, which very much fits Romero’s collaborative approach, one in which she doesn’t so much direct her subjects as share an imaginative process to create multilayered images.

Comprised of five sections, Panûpünüwügai is loosely a thematic and chronological tale of Romero’s career thus far. With more than 60 photographs, one major installation piece, and several smaller displays, what it is not is a quiet assemblage of photographs. What it is, is a brash, visually assertive presentation that fills a big space with big imagery.

The first section, “California Desert & Mythos,” introduces viewers to “where my bones are from” in Romero’s phrasing: the Southern California Mojave Desert, Joshua Tree National Park, and the place she grew up on the Chemehuevi Reservation. The exhibition’s journey begins with landscapes, technology, human bodies flowing in movement, women negotiating life in America, and Romero’s deepening mastery of fine art photography.

The first section’s culmination is the exhibition’s first monumental piece.

Evolvers (2019) spans a hallway and features, in the artist’s words, “a science fiction landscape” deposited on ancestral lands, one of her personal favorites. In the foreground, four Chemehuevi boys run with unbridled joy, sporting feather headdresses, loincloths, and shades worthy of Top Gun or Terminator, with

innumerable wind turbines and rugged mountains behind them. Among other things, the image exemplifies Romero’s technical use of clothing and objects as aspects of visual storytelling, a hallmark of one of her inspirations, photographer Annie Leibovitz.1 “Within photography there is this incredible adaptability of the medium to create visibility and awareness,” Romero says. “I am always creating images that show how contemporary and diverse we as Native people are—always combating that one-story narrative.”

Moving upstairs, the next section, “(Re)Imagining Americana,” captures not only the themes Romero explores but also her development as a technician. Its centerpiece, TV Indians (2017), anchors not just this second section but the entire exhibition. This photograph was the first of now several pieces of Romero’s work in the Hood’s permanent collection.

TV Indians features four Pueblo people, one holding an infant—grey clouds sweeping the sky behind them— gathered in front of a stack of TVs, whose screens are filled with well-known stills of Native American portrayals from TV shows, movies, and commercials. Their gaze, directly at the viewer, is rightly described as “defiant” in the piece’s label. The piece clearly speaks to the Hollywood legacy of portraying Native peoples in shallow and stereotypical roles.

For (Re)Imagining Americana, an installation of more than a dozen vintage televisions, creates a Pop Art gravitational well around the exhibition. The TVs run loops of outtakes from the shooting sessions of several pieces in the exhibition.

This embodies the deep vein of popular culture that is as much a part of Romero’s palette as her Native heritage.

TV Indians also demonstrates the power of a career retrospective. When the Hood purchased the photograph in 2017, it was, culturally speaking, focused on the past; perhaps Romero’s own. But less than a decade later, after Reservation Dogs, Dark Winds, Rutherford Falls, and Lily Gladstone’s historic speech after winning the Best Actress Golden Globe for Killers of the Flower Moon, it somehow has new meaning and brings to mind a publicity-shoot scenario of rising film auteurs of the rez, something akin to a portrait of a young Spike Lee around the time Do the Right Thing came out.2 This vibe may have something to do with a photograph nearby, Don’t Tell (2021), featuring Gary Farmer (Grand River Cayuga), who played Uncle Brownie on Reservation Dogs.

Two other pieces that overlook the TV Indians installation underline Romero’s artistic journey, which began as a photo documentarian and grew to a deepening embrace of fine art photography. 17 Mile Road (2019) is an obvious homage to the iconic Beatles album cover

above Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), TV Indians, 2017, archival pigment print, edition 7, 42 × 61 in.

1. Alexis Celeste Bunten, “Cara Romero: Chemehuevi Photographer,” First American Art Magazine, no. 18 (Spring 2018), 72.

2. Jesse Frohman, Spike Lee, “Portrait of a Nation Prize Winner,” National Portrait Gallery, web.

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above Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Gaea, 2021, pigment print on archival photographic paper. Model: Crickett Tiger (Muscogee/Cochiti). Regalia by Leah Mata Fragua (yak tityu tityu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash).

of Abbey Road by Scottish photographer Iain Macmillan.3 Like the Fab Four in 1969 London—this time in a desert tableau—four boys anchor the simple act of walking in a straight line across a road, described on her web page as representing “time-traveling spirits from the oral traditions of Chemehuevi mythos.”

Likewise, Two Virgins (2013) interprets another canonical Beatles image, Leibovitz’s legendary Rolling Stone cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, shot only hours before Lennon was murdered.4 In Romero’s version, a Native woman wears the simple jeans, black sweater, and emotional ambiguity of Yoko while the

Lennon figure, masked by a buffalo head and wearing a loincloth, gently wraps his body around her.

While Romero’s thematic emphasis on Native cultures is obvious throughout Panûpünüwügai, her homage to photography’s virtuosos also runs through the exhibition. Later, this is subtly apparent in Paso Robles (2021), a portrait of her daughter Crickett Tiger (Muscogee/ Cochiti), part of a series shot during the COVID-19 lockdown. Robert Mapplethorpe’s formidable, loving portraits of the writer and “Godmother of Punk” Patti Smith whispers from this portrait.

Like Smith, in dramatic black-and-white

tones, her subject looks directly at the camera, jaw up and shoulders back, with a beautiful—yet unbeautified—womanly gaze directed forward.5 The exhibition’s other three sections, “Rematriation: Empowering Indigenous Women,” “Environmental Racism,” and “Ancestral Futures,” all dive into Romero’s intellectual and spiritual themes, from how Native people are, in Romero’s words, “astute in pop culture” to the broader realities of women in today’s society and why it is important to have, as Romero puts it, “a Native woman behind the camera.”

Many pieces in Panûpünüwügai display the depth of Romero’s eye. One is Gaea (2021), which captures her technical fluency and breadth of storytelling. In it, a female figure, once again her daughter Crickett Tiger, is captured en pointe, her toe dug into the sand of the Pacific’s shore near Los Angeles. According to the label, her ballet “corset [is] made of feathers and adorned with hand-cut abalone, a Russian-style skirt made of willow bark, tule cordage straps, and pointe shoes painted with red ochre,” created in collaboration with the artist Leah Mata Fragua (yak tityu tityu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash). The label quotes Tiger: “Growing up, all I’ve seen were ballerinas that didn’t look like me. Being one of the only Indigenous girls at my school, it was hard at times. I wasn’t chosen for swans or anything like that.…”

Here we have a common enough Native experience told through imagery rooted in ballet, an art form that first coalesced in Renaissance Italy, was transported to France by Catherine de Medici when she married King Henry II in 1533, and eventually embraced by Russia to such an extent that the art form is now synonymous with its national psyche.6 And here it is, centuries of world cultures colliding later—as they do in greater Los Angeles—during a global pandemic, taken a few months after Italy declared the first nationwide COVID lockdown in March 2020. A powerful and beautiful image that captures a layered, intimate story steeped in both deep history and the current world.

—Peter Letzelter-Smith

3. “The Scot who took The Beatles’ Abbey Road photo,” BBC, August 8, 2019, web.

4. Annie Leibovitz, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, National Galleries of Scotland, web.

5. Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith (1975), Tate, web.

6. Ballet’s popularity in the United States comes in part from the Five Moons, five Native American ballerinas from Oklahoma. —Ed.

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REVIEWS

MINNEAPOLIS

Smart Wars by Rory Wakemup All My Relations Arts

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HIS EXHIBITION continues Divest or Die, a series by Rory Wakemup (Bois Forte Ojibwe). and is a tongue-in-cheek exploration of culture versus controversy through sculpture and installation. According to the exhibition brochure: “His exquisitely designed outfits are meant to subvert and amuse while tackling social, political, and climate issues, infusing traditional methods and materials. Wakemup’s regalia is designed for 21st-century Indian warriors in the battle to reawaken Indigenous ancestry on planet Earth.”

All My Relations Arts is located inside the Powwow Grounds Coffee Shop in South Minneapolis. The building also houses offices of the Native American Community Development Institute (NACDI), which supports the gallery.

This building is a prominent cultural hub for the urban Minneapolis American Indian community.

As I enter the gallery, I imagine being on an intergalactic ship traveling through space to and from planet Earth.

I found the four themes that assert Native identity, resilience, resistance, and coexistence with planet Earth throughout the works around the room. Wakemup’s mixed-media sculpture and ongoing alter ego, Darth Chief the Mascot Hunter, and his Imperial Guards were poised in their positions ready to protect the ship. These three sculptures are collectively titled Kill the Idiot, Save the Fan. Wakemup addresses the issue of misrepresentation with sports teams. His artist statement reads, “While I am aware that there are many serious issues to combat, equality and respect for Indians will never be attained until we are recognized as living people in today’s society and not relics in the same category as pillaging Vikings and pirate raiders.”

Darth Chief epitomizes the idealized warrior leader. Body size doesn’t appear to show his power as much as his attire demonstrates it. The headwear above the Darth Vader-esque helmet

above Installation view of Darth Chief by Rory Wakemup (Bois Forte Ojibwe). Photo: Dan Ninham, PhD (Oneida Nation).

includes cultural designs such as upright feathers and bear claws pointed upward, a futuristic Ojibwe chief as the ultimate leader. The Darth Chief mask has a cultural design on each side of his mouth, as does his full-length cloak, which is also decorated with sections of fringe from top to bottom and black feathers at the hem. Ankle bells are wrapped around one black boot, which rests atop the head of a Cleveland Indians mascot head. Darth Chief is raising a large cartoonish feather in his left hand. The Imperial Guards are uniformly dressed in mostly dark red with black feathers protruding out of their helmets and trimming their floorlength cloaks. Black-feathered fringe trims the chest plate and black and red fringe hangs on the cloak.

There are 14 standing figures, four masks either on the floor or suspended from the ceiling, and a sculpture hanging on a wall, made from materials including papier-mâché, a moose skull and large antlers, and blue cut-out garbage cans that suggest shields ready for use in battle. A large wall installation in the shape of a medicine wheel with “MMIW” printed on it is comprised of facial masks in white, yellow, black, and red with red handprints across each.

Most of the sculptures have feathers, fringe, empty bullet shells, and plastic

armor, but the Wookie character, Chewtanka, is formed from buffalo pelts with a bandolier of buffalo horns and bullet shells. The sculpture, MMIR, incorporates faux fur, bullet shells, and a bandana.

Grandma Yoda wears a porcupine roach and feathers, a brown T-dress, and Plainsstyle German silver concho belts, and holds a staff of wire, polyester, and plastic.

A common fixture on a few of the sculptures is a red bandana inscribed with the words “FOR MISSING AND MURDERED INDIGENOUS WOMEN” or “RESPECT OUR EXISTENCE” and an inverted image of Sitting Bull (Hunkpapa Lakota, ca. 1831–1890).

I noticed three sculptures standing about five feet from each other titled from left to right: Street Medic, Buffalo Thunder Trooper, and Rabble Rouser, warriors with porcupine quills elaborately adorning their helmets and body armor. Of particular interest was Rabble Rouser, with his black-feathered headdress/helmet, bullet shells, small triangle designs of orange porcupine quills across his armor, and a large biohazard symbol on his chest. Each of these three figures had a powwow dancer bustle hanging nearby on the adjacent wall.

Wakemup and Angela Two Stars (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota), NACDI

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OKLAHOMA CITY

Cheyenne Ledger Artists of Fort Marion National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum

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above Installation view of Rabble Rouser by Rory Wakemup (Bois Forte Ojibwe) with quillwork. Photo: Dan Ninham, PhD (Oneida Nation).

vice president of arts and culture and All My Relations Arts director, organized the exhibition. At the opening reception, Wakemup addressed the strategy of “funktavism” that includes all people finding their cultural ways on planet Earth. Two Stars stated at the opening reception, “We are honored to showcase Rory’s immense skills as an artist. His work with community and activism is displayed here and continues to disrupt narratives through his ‘funktavism’ and asserts Native presence, resistance, and resilience.”

Smart Wars by Rory Wakemup looks to continue its show of futuristic/ historical science fiction and pop culture in another art collective in another galaxy in the future—but not too far away.

—Dan Ninham, PhD (Oneida Nation)

HE NATIONAL COWBOY AND WESTERN HERITAGE MUSEUM hosted a special exhibition this winter in cooperation with the Southern Cheyenne tribal nation. Co-curated by Gordon Yellowman (Southern Cheyenne) and Eric Singleton, Cheyenne Ledger Artists of Fort Marion spotlighted the works of the Cheyenne leaders who were imprisoned at Fort Marion after the Red River War (1874–75). The war, fought mostly in the Texas Panhandle, was the only war in the United States where humans fought to save the lives of another species: the bison.

After the surrender of the Comanche, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Cheyenne, many of the leaders were relocated by federal command to Fort Marion in San Augustine, Florida, where many of the Native warriors kept the practice of Plains pictorial art alive through drawing on ledger paper. Ledger art is recognized worldwide as a Native American genre, and historical examples are highly sought after.

According to Singleton, the museum’s curator of Native American art and ethnology, the seed for the exhibition began with the goal to combine archival research and tribal knowledge to interpret ledger art as historical sources, not just art. “It’s a pictographic writing system,” Singleton told me. “We can tell which [warrior] societies and people by the colors and the heraldry on their shield, and on the tipis, you can tell who made the tipi and who’s using the shield.”

Singleton and Yellowman studied the ledger art to see if they could translate its iconography. They had heard someone claim in a virtual meeting that ledger drawings were not knowable. Singleton refuted this: “We said, ‘Oh yes, they are!’ and we started looking at more and more, which led to the exhibit.”

The exhibition is divided into two rooms: pre- and post-incarceration at

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Fort Marion. The exhibition shows both the world that the Cheyenne made on the Southern Plains and the world the Cheyenne prisoners-of-war were brought into through Fort Marion. Included in the first half of the exhibition are Southern Cheyenne artifacts predating imprisonment and ledger drawings that depict life before the Red River War. “We’re also telling the story of what led to Fort Marion, and that includes the 1868 Massacre,” said Singleton, referring to the Washita River Massacre.

One item made in Indian Territory is a hide shield decorated with an eagle, believed to have belonged to Little Rock (Southern Cheyenne, ca.

1805–1868). On a day called the Battle of Washita Creek, Custer led his cavalry in an attack on a Cheyenne camp near present-day Cheyenne, Oklahoma. After the attack, Custer collected the shield as a trophy of war. After his death at Little Bighorn, his widow donated the shield to the Detroit Institute of Science, now the Michigan Science Center. It was loaned to the Cowboy for this exhibition, with the permission of Little Rock’s living descendants. “It’s the first time this has been back in Oklahoma in 166 years.”

The Little Rock Shield from the Washita Creek Massacre and historical Cheyenne war shirt and leggings illustrate artistic depictions of real people and their equipment. “What the people are drawing is real. They’re not making this up; they’re drawing what would exactly have looked that way in real life,” said Singleton.

“This is the first time that the Cheyenne has curated the [Fort Marion] story through a ledger art exhibit,” Singleton said. “Usually it’s done through an art historian or an anthropologist. We had primary documents, oral histories … about what these drawings meant to them.” Singleton acknowledges that the Fort Marion legacy is a complex topic, particularly when the Cheyenne incarceration gave Colonel Richard Henry Pratt the impetus to found Carlisle Indian Industrial School to assimilate Native people.

Pratt provided ledger books and art supplies to the warriors, and the money they made from selling artworks to tourists was spent in Saint Augustine or sent back to Oklahoma. Singleton sees this as an early commercial sale of Native art.

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One of the Cheyenne ledger artists leaves a uniquely surprising story. Making Medicine (1847–1931) was a warrior and inmate at Fort Marion. He was also one of the most prolific artists. While in Florida, he was baptized in the Episcopal Church and adopted the name David Pendleton Oakerhater. Pendleton’s descendants collected ledger books from Fort Marion.

Making Medicine eventually returned to Oklahoma as a pastor, where he continued to serve the Whirlwind Mission congregation and was canonized as a saint in the Episcopal Church after his death.

For an exhibition of two adjacent galleries, the curators made judicious use of space. The show’s pre- and post-Marion content is divided by a massive wall lacquered with high-definition photographs of the fort’s wrought-iron gates. The gate divides the two rooms: before and during incarceration. Singleton said, “We want the visitors to walk through the same gates.” The vinyl reprint of Fort Marion’s gate is a stark, imposing reminder of how dwarfed one individual can feel inside an advancing empire fueled by locomotives, armies, and industry. The exhibition includes floor-to-ceiling maps and interpretive panels that give context to the Southern Cheyenne warrior societies and life before Fort Marion. Furthermore, the winding trail of exile across the South shows where the warriors were transported from Oklahoma to Florida.

The artwork of Cheyenne artists Making Medicine, Squint Eyes, and Bear’s Heart chart their experience before and during the Fort Marion imprisonment.

The exhibition’s division into the eras before and after is clear through the sharp change in the artists’ styles as they reflect their surroundings and the mood of their living conditions. With ink and pencils, the works on paper that depict pre-Marion scenes leap with colors and focus on the details of individual figures.

In contrast, the post-Marion works show larger scenes and environments with an emphasis on scale and size, in many cases dwarfing the human form.

Outside of buffalo hunt depictions, the pre-Marion scenes are mostly static, with riders frozen in mid-canter or a procession stopped flat. For example, Two Men Courting Women by Bear’s Heart shows the elaborate regalia of two

above St. David Pendleton Oakerhater, Making Medicine (Southern Cheyenne, ca. 1847–1931), Making Medicine, ca. 1875–78, graphite, colored pencil, ink on paper, 61/2 × 73/4 in., collection of the National Cowboy and Heritage Museum, Arthur and Shifra Silberman Collection, 1996.27.0541.

men on horseback with headdresses and an umbrella as they face two women wrapped in detailed blankets. The artist’s focus is on the specific symbols of the figures’ accoutrements, not the environment. Only one pine branch separates the courtiers and the ladies from the paper’s yellowed background.

This limited background is common for the pre-Fort Marion scenes, with either no background or a very subtle border that resembles parfleche paintwork. The celebration of the pre-captivity scenes highlights the vivid colors and unique patterns of individual people, their horses, tipi, and regalia. The visual language depicts which figure is a member of which warrior society.

The style changes dramatically with the subject matter’s movement to post-Marion figures. The artists depict new environments and creations, as well as their military routine throughout their imprisonment. Bear’s Heart’s landscape of Anastasia Island and mechanical profile of Steamboat and Making Medicine’s multiple depictions of trains include no human figures at all; the new landscape and structures have swallowed up the individuals in the new themes. Sailing by

Squint Eyes has a similar effect. The massive sailboat conquers the whole frame, with the Cheyenne sailors barely rising over the rails of the boat. Each man has the same coat, hat, and hairstyle. The jarring transition from vibrant, unique regalia into bland inmate uniforms hauntingly shows the instant transition in the world of the Cheyenne artists.

The second section includes a ledger drawing made by Gordon Yellowman. His work is the only contemporary piece in the exhibition. The work pays homage to the style and the legacy of the Fort Marion artists, portraying Cheyenne people today with the ghosts of their ancestors at Fort Marion looming over them. As a Cheyenne peace chief in the Council of Forty-Four, Yellowman’s expertise and input were vital to the exhibition.

In addition to the groundbreaking and heartbreaking early instance of commercial Native art, Cheyenne Ledger Artists of Fort Marion is an impressive use of limited space. Furthermore, the interpretive nature of artistic renderings paired with original regalia is illuminating. As a gallery show and as a historical narrative, the exhibition packs a punch well beyond its size. —James G. Bland

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TAOS

Taos Pueblo Painted Stories Taos Art Museum at Fechin House

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ROM JANUARY 14 THROUGH MARCH 2, 2025, Taos Pueblo Painted Stories, a retrospective of Taos Pueblo artist Jonathan Warm Day Coming’s paintings and works on paper, was on display at the Taos Art Museum at Fechin House. The location of this exhibition holds significance for Warm Day Coming since his maternal grandfather, Pedro Mirabal, or Beaded Shirt (Taos, 1893–1958), posed as a portrait subject for Russian artist Nicolai Fechin (1881–1955) and helped to build his house, the current site of the Taos Art Museum. Exhibited in Fechin’s former studio building, Warm Day Coming’s works of narrative-driven scenes and portraits offer a kaleidoscopic perspective of Taos Pueblo through a tracing of his familial relationships.

Well known for his signature expressive paintings, Warm Day Coming shares core elements of his identity through his artworks. Water for the Corn (1995), an acrylic painting with micaceous clay on canvas, grounds the exhibition in an embodiment of creation. A portrait of a Taos Pueblo woman, it visually communicates the parallel between mothers and corn as creators of life. The matriarch carries a micaceous olla, or water jar, on her head, cornstalks in front of her. The artist includes a swath of the yellow used for the cornstalks across the woman’s face to emphasize this foundational concept to his understanding of self within the Taos Pueblo community. Moreover, Warm Day Coming’s highlight of micaceous clay in the portrayal of the pot establishes the deep connection between the people of Taos Pueblo and their home in the northern Sangre de Cristo Mountains where the clay resides.

A Dance for Plenty (2024), acrylic on canvas, features a black-and-white clay pitcher from ancestral times alongside a gourd rattle. Here, Warm Day Coming allows his artwork’s title to give viewers a

window into his line of thinking. Reflecting on the relationship between Pueblo dances and creating dialogue with the people’s ancestors, the positioning of these two objects calls attention to the different means of survival for the Taos Pueblo community. The vessel suggests the trade of black-and-white pottery throughout the region during the early first millennium while the gourd rattle conveys a sense of the recent past and present day as a constant in Pueblo dances. The people’s prayers for rain and snow in their homelands in the alpine desert hold presence in Warm Day Coming’s painting.

Two portraits of the artist’s grandfather Beaded Shirt, one in embossed

paper (1996) and an acrylic-on-canvas painting (2021), engage the artist’s family tree with the exhibition space. Beaded Shirt’s daughter and Warm Day Coming’s mother, Eva Mirabal, or Eah-Ha-Wa, “Fast Growing Corn” (Taos Pueblo, 1920–1968), painted everyday scenes of Taos Pueblo, drew a comic strip during her years in the U.S. Women’s Army Corps, and designed murals for public spaces. These relatives provided the footsteps for Warm Day Coming to follow a path of storytelling and community representation.

In his two portraits of Beaded Shirt, both in profile view, Warm Day Coming honors the customary Taos tied-back hairstyle with his grandfather’s collared shirt, bringing together the notion of

above Jonathan Warm Day Coming (Taos), Water for the Corn, 1995, acrylic, micaceous clay on canvas, 31 × 26 in. framed. Image courtesy of the artist.

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community legacy with individual style.

The relief portrait in embossed paper creates an affinity to marble sculpture, implying stateliness, while the painting draws the association of belonging, with Beaded Shirt posed in front of Pueblo Peak. Both artworks create a stark contrast to Fechin’s portrayal of Warm Day Coming’s grandfather in a colorful, expressionistic style. Fechin’s painting does not include the specific indicators of the Taos Pueblo community as Warm Day Coming’s portraits do.

Red Willow Serenaders (2023), an acrylic on canvas painting, depicts an evening scene of three Taos Pueblo men singing, standing with a dog on a log bridge over the river. A Pueblo woman seated at the river shore with a blackware olla, a prevalent Pueblo pottery style, faces the men. The moonlight and stars, complete with a shooting star, a common sighting in Taos, illuminate this scene of Taos Pueblo life. Warm Day Coming’s use of deep blue in the sky and river at the top and bottom of the composition visually balances this painting and emphasizes the people’s belonging to the land. The singing men may represent a village pastime for Taos Pueblo community members.

The artwork’s title calls attention to the description of Taos Pueblo as the place and people of the red willows, the people’s basketry material that grows abundantly along the riverbanks.

On one wall, a group of three drawings in colored pencil on early 20th-century ledger paper carries a theme of cultural exchange. At the left, Peyote Bird (2024) speaks to the spread of the Native American Church to the village of Taos Pueblo, which has long been known as a trade hub between the tribes from the Great Plains and desert regions for both cultural practices and materials. The painting features a water bird, anhinga, with a peyote button design at its center; its elongated form echoes the long and narrow ledger paper. The bird overlaid on the ledger’s text creates a metaphor for multiple kinds of exchange happening at once in the early 20th century, after the peyote religion emerged in Oklahoma in the 1880s. It also offers a familial context for the artist. His paternal grandfather,

Geronimo Gomez, Star Road (Taos, 1885–1965), a model for the Taos Society of Artists painters and a Taos Pueblo governor, joined the Native American Church in the early 20th century after a trip to Oklahoma.1 The ledger paper, with its edges left frayed and curled, gives material presence to the Southern Plains connection to Taos Pueblo.

At the center of the wall, Remembering Autumn (2024) depicts a blackware olla holding tree branches. Overlaid on top of a church listing of names, the drawing of the pottery and yellowing leaves suggest San Geronimo Day, Taos Pueblo’s feast day that occurs every September 30 when community members receive arrangements of tree branches. The feast day is a time of renewal, trade, and reflection on all of the events that made this day an annual celebration following the Spanish designation of San Geronimo as the patron saint of Taos Pueblo.

To the right, Echoing Drum Beat (2024) is a self-portrait of Warm Day Coming. He holds a drumstick and drum in his hands as he celebrates the heartbeat of the village and the importance of sharing Taos Pueblo stories with the world. Drawn on a list of payments with amounts, parallels between different senses of value come to the fore of this composition. The bright colors of the portrait and front-facing pose suggest the artist’s footsteps into the future as a success story of survival in generations following the turmoil and violence of the late 1880s. With confidence, the artist follows the sounds of the drum.

This exhibition provides a window into Taos Pueblo community life through artist Jonathan Warm Day Coming as narrator. He guides viewers into his paintings through people, objects, and places that weave a visual narrative of home.

The vibrancy of his artwork draws us closer, to hear the voices, the rustlings, the drumbeats, and the footsteps of the Taos Pueblo community. His artwork pays homage to his family and a sharing of culture that brings audiences together on a common ground: the place of the red willows, Taos Pueblo.

—Michelle J. Lanteri, PhD

1. Lois P. Rudnick with Jonathan Warm Day Coming, Eva Mirabal: Three Generations of Tradition and Modernity at Taos Pueblo (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2021), 16.

below Yatika Starr Fields (Osage/Muscogee/ Cherokee) and Anita Fields (Osage/Muscogee), WAR CLUB, 2021, glass tubing, neon gas, and electrical elements. Photo: Abby Mikalauskas.

TULSA

WAR CLUB: Native Art and Activism Philbrook Museum of Art

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OUNTED ON A CHANNEL of fire-engine red walls, WAR CLUB: Native Art and Activism greets its audience with a call to arms. “An answer to an echo, a response to red power, a whisper in a canyon, a secret buried with the ancestors,” WAR CLUB is a testament to the past, present, and future generations of Indigenous visionaries who fight for power and resist ongoing settler-colonialism. Curated by mother-son duo Anita Fields (Osage/Muscogee) and Yatika Starr Fields (Osage/Muscogee/Cherokee), WAR CLUB opened October 5, 2024, and runs until June 29, 2025, in the Helmrich Wing of the Philbrook Museum of Art. A war club—a symbol and combat weapon used by many communities in the Plains and Eastern Woodlands throughout the 18th and 19th centuries—is the fulcrum the exhibition rests upon. Through the use of a war club, both metaphorically and figuratively, Anita and Yatika highlight the “ongoing fight for cultural sovereignty” and how art can be “used as a tool to investigate, inform, and empower all in the pursuit of human rights,” as stated in the wall text.

Spread throughout interconnected galleries, the art, photography, mixed media, beadwork, sculpture, and fashion,

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above Yatika Starr Fields (Osage/Muscogee/Cherokee) and Bob Haozous (Fort Sill Chiricahua Apache), War Clubs, 2018, installation of wooden clubs, acrylic paint, aerosol paint, hide, ribbon, metal brads, hawk bells. Photo: Abby Mikalauskas.

along with archival materials, introduce its audience to events, topics, and movements integral to the history and future of Indigenous communities throughout the United States. Movements that address issues such as missing and murdered Indigenous relatives, Red Power, #LandBack, NoDAPL, as well as others, are all visually and metaphorically connected, creating a lineage of Native American activism.

After passing through the channel of red walls adorned with WAR CLUB’s opening decree, the exhibition opens into a small, airy gallery. A clear display case acts as the focal point for this introductory section. Filled with memorabilia and artwork from integral moments related to Native American activism such as the Trail of Broken Treaties (1972) and the Wounded Knee Occupation (1973), the case provides critical background information for audience members not familiar.

As a complement to the center display case, the left side of the first gallery’s walls are decked with different artistic variations of the metaphorical and literal focal point of the exhibition: war clubs.

Made by Yatika Starr Fields and Bob Haozous (Fort Sill Chiricahua Apache), these clubs, these “exhibitions of power,” through their varying color, size, shape, and adornment, speak to the multiplicity

of Native American activists and serve as an appetizer to the succeeding pieces in the exhibition. Richard Ray Whitman’s (Muscogee/Yuchi) Fallout Shelter and a mixed-media collaboration by Julie Shunatona-Winans (Pawnee/Otoe/Wyandotte), Carmen Marie Richardville-White Eagle (Muscogee/Pawnee), and Dante Biss-Grayson (Osage) are on display on the right-hand walls of the first gallery.

After walking through an antechamber-style space, viewers enter a rotunda, the LaFortune Mezzanine Gallery where the majority of the pieces are.

Photography and mixed media line the rotunda’s walls. The placement of the pieces follows the natural curvature of the architecture, providing the perfect literal and metaphorical “full circle” ending to the exhibition.

Walking around the mezzanine, visitors are positioned face-to-face with portraits of key figures fighting for Native American rights and sovereignty.

Part of a series by Yatika that highlights artists, activists, and cultural bearers, these portraits directly challenge their audience to think critically about the topics at hand. The sitters, including Richard Ray Whitman, Amber Morning Star Byars (Choctaw Nation), Former Principal Chief Jim Gray (Osage), and

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Former Tribal Chairperson Della Warrior (Otoe-Missouria), to name a few, face the camera holding one of the war clubs made by Yatika Fields that adorn the left wall of the first gallery.

A gift to the sitters for their work in their communities and the exhibition, the inclusion of the war clubs in the photographic series fluidly demonstrates “where we were then and where we are now.” For those not familiar with the sitters, the curators also include brief descriptions alongside the portraits, giving the audience needed insight into the visionaries along the walls. Outside the rotunda, other mixed-media installations and a mounted TV with a continuous loop of an interview between Yatika and Anita complement the portrait series inside.

A culmination of seven years of collaborative work, WAR CLUB: Native Art and Activism serves as a microcosm for Native American resistance and the ongoing fight for sovereignty. Through the combination of mixed-media art, archival documents, photography, beadwork, fashion, and sculpture, WAR CLUB demonstrates how art can be used as a catalyst for unity, working toward cultural sovereignty for all Native American communities across the United States. By situating their work within the historic lineage of Native American activism, the exhibition not only effectively highlights this ongoing battle but becomes an active participant in it. —Abby Mikalauskas

REVIEWS

FILM Rez Ball Directed by Sydney Freeland 2024

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HE LONG-ANTICIPATED film Rez Ball dropped on Netflix last fall and immediately shot to the top ten for the streaming service, due in no small part to the creative team that brought it to the screen.

Director Sydney Freeland (Diné) and co-screenwriter Sterlin Harjo (Seminole Nation/Muscogee) are now household names, thanks to the international sensation Reservation Dogs. The filmmaker phenoms have partnered in past projects and bring their Native wit, wisdom, and heart to the small screen.

Based on the true story of the Chinle High School basketball team, the film follows Jimmy Holiday, played adeptly by newcomer Kauchani Bratt (Quechua descent/Mestizo), as he navigates the challenges of living on the Navajo reservation.

Based on Freeland’s youth as a basketball player, the strength of this film is its clear depiction of what rez life is like.

The film touches on familiar challenges to tribal nations such as teen pregnancy, suicide, drug and alcohol use, missing and murdered Indigenous women, and incarceration, but the heart of the film beats strongest when it breaks through “rez porn” and looks at the strengths of the community.

The film follows a boys’ basketball team that starts out a sloppy mess and relies on star player Nataanii Jackson, played by Kusem Goodwind (Coeur d’Alene/Nez Perce), to carry the weight of winning. After Nataanii’s unexpected loss to the next world where he joins his mother and sister, handled well by the filmmakers, apathetic basketball player Jimmy Holiday has to step into Nataanii’s shoes. Led by basketball coach and former WNBA star Heather Hobbs, played

by Jessica Matten, the team needs help to heal and to find motivation by any means possible. After cajoling former assistant coach Benny Begay, played by

above Rez Ball, 2024, film poster, drama, 1:51, produced by LeBron James and Sydney Freeland (Diné), Netflix.

Ernest David Tsosie III (Diné), back to the team, Hobbs and Benny embark on a journey to reconnect the boys with their rez ball roots.

The boys are tested in a fast-paced, entertaining scrimmage with the Chuska girls’ varsity team who handily trounce the unorganized boys. Coach Hobbs lectures them on the basics of rez ball: shoot the ball in seven seconds or less and play with speed. Run the opposing team into the ground.

To continue the team building, Hobbs loads the boys on the bus for a visit to her grandma’s sheep farm. In an amusing exercise corralling the herd, the boys finally start working as a team. Jimmy’s coworker at the local burger joint, Krista, played by Zoey Reyes (Afro-Indigenous), inspires him to use their Diné language on the court to throw off their opponents. Krista is inspiring as a language instructor, first for Jimmy, then for the rest of the team. Her relationship with

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Jimmy blossoms as he begins to be more connected to his community through language and through leading his team to the state finals.

The state finals tournament pits Chuska against rivals Santa Fe Catholic High, who had defeated them in an earlier game. The coach and players are initially dismissive of the Diné team. With their secret weapon taken away from them by the Catholics, who have also learned calls in Diné language, the Chuska boys have to tap into their own inner warriors to get the job done. To watch Jimmy wrestle with his personal insecurities during the final free throw is a scene that many of us can understand.

The stars of the show are perfectly cast and directed.

Jessica Matten as the boys’ coach and Julia Jones as Jimmy’s struggling mom play a remarkably effective tug-of-war over Jimmy, bringing in their own personal challenges to the situation. Matten shines as the coach overcoming her own failures, and Jones brings a beautifully nuanced performance to what could have been a one-dimensional addiction story.

Kauchani Bratt, Devin Sampson Craig (Pyramid Lake Paiute/Yakama), River Rayne Thomas (Saulteaux), Jojo Jackson (Diné), Avery Hale (Mandan/Hidatsa/San Carlos Apache/ San Felipe Pueblo), and Hunter RedHorse Arthur (Diné) bring fresh energy to this Native-themed film. Their individual performances, and as a team that goes from rags to riches, are entirely believable, honoring a script that highlights the importance of community during rough times on the rez.

Even with the mature themes featured, this is a movie you can sit down and watch with the whole family. Kids will love the basketball action, teens will enjoy the young actors in their element, and elders will love the gorgeous scenery and spy familiar faces, including Ryan Begay (Diné), Kiowa Gordon (Hualapai), Sarah Natani (Diné), Morningstar Angeline (Chippewa Cree/Blackfeet/Shoshone/Mexican-American), Amber Midthunder (Fort Peck Nakoda/Lakota/Dakota), Ernest Tsosie III (Diné), Cody Lightning (Samson Cree), and Dallas Goldtooth (Mdewakanton Dakota/Diné). Ryan Begay as a father who has lost everything, yet who takes the time to help Jimmy’s mom turn her life around, is a standout performance in the movie.

Particularly charming are the scenes at the burger joint that witness the budding romance between Krista and Jimmy and the parade of characters from the rez. As the popularity of the team grows, so grows their customer base and sense of community.

Rez Ball is a heartfelt film about a life that most people know little about. It takes a realistic look at the joys and sorrows on the rez and leaves the door open for more tales about the characters. What exactly happened between Hobbs and Holiday during their basketball years? How does Dezbah Weaver (Midthunder) balance teen parenting with being a talented baller? Can we get a full episode of the Tso brothers doing commentary for more than just basketball? Let Netflix know that if they keep giving us room for these stories, we will keep watching.

—Angela Startz (Inupiaq), Reel Indigenous podcast

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MUSIC

FLAGSTAFF

Horizons Northern Arizona University

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HISTORIC CONCERT took place on January 31, 2025, at the Ardrey Auditorium on the campus of Northern Arizona University (NAU). In conjunction with NAU’s office of Native American and Indigenous Advancement, department of Applied Indigenous Studies, Kitt School of Music, and Ensemble Flageolet, they and a host of individuals presented a panel discussion, lectures, and a program of compositions written by three generations of Diné composers: Raven Chacon, Michael Begay, and Sage Bond (Diné/San Carlos Apache).

Formed in 2010 and directed by NAU Professor Bruce Reiprich, Ensemble Flageolet focuses solely on playing chamber music of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Paul Hostetter conducted each piece of the Horizons program, which inspires an exploration into the rest of the composers’ work and where they will go from here.

I experienced the concert through the livestream still available online. The audio on the video is low, so it’s necessary to boost the volume quite a bit. Otherwise,

above Ensemble Flageolet performing at Horizons, 2025, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff.

this is an enriching and enjoyable way to spend an evening, or many. I am grateful that Ensemble Flageolet programmed this concert; their dedication to realizing the full expression of the composers was evident in the quality of the performances, the response of the audience, and of the composers themselves.

The concert began with the world premiere of a quintet by Michael Begay called “Four Coyotes,” conducted for two violins, viola, cello, and the composer on electronics. The piece begins with brilliant microtonal glissandos on each of the instruments fed through a delay that Begay was controlling in the back of the theater. He told me, “Some of the inspiration came from watching Westerns with my late father as well as an animated series called BraveStarr that took place in this futuristic, cybernetic wasteland, with the only Native character on TV—plus heavy metal, Western music, and coyotes, who are very important to Diné culture.

Always a lesson to be learned.”

The second performance was of Raven Chacon’s “Biyán” written in 2010 and commissioned by the classical music collective Chatter based in Albuquerque.

Also a conducted quintet, this composition calls for flute, clarinet, violin, cello,

and percussion. Biyán means “song” in the Diné language, and as Chacon writes in the program notes, “Moments of this composition repeat in the way that a song might if it were sung all night.” In fact, the music conjures a quiet rural night, with sounds resembling wind, leaves rustling, and perhaps a rusty gate swinging open and closed. The song utilizes a variety of extended techniques devised to aid in the exploration of any instrument, often in creative disregard of convention.

After the brief intermission, Sage Bond spoke briefly about the premiere of her composition “Cloak” for strings, brass, woodwind, piano, and guitar. All of the composers were present to talk about their works, and the experience for the audience was deepened through these personal introductions. Bond later told me that “Ensemble Flageolet did such an amazing job bringing my piece to life.” A recent graduate from the music program at NAU, Bond said she was still a student when she started “Cloak” and that it became one of her favorite compositions. “The meaning behind the title is [about] my connection to writing music,” she expressed. “When I’m most vulnerable with my emotions and sitting with a guitar, I play exactly what I’m feeling. My heart is

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on my sleeve when I present this music to an audience, and I’m always glad when I get to share this healing with them.”

This piece complemented the more abstract pieces of the program in its tonality and lyricism. “Cloak” also felt very personal, which is emphasized

by Bond’s statement about the piece. The orchestration masterfully allowed for clear roles between the instruments, all the while creating a cohesion of individuals. I loved the interplay between them based on their unique characteristics.

The performance was also enhanced by Bond’s participation. She decided to play the harp part on acoustic guitar. I have had the pleasure of hearing her in a large improvising ensemble and also as a solo singer/songwriter with her acoustic guitar. She is a gifted instrumentalist and vocalist and has played various genres and approaches over the years, a long history of punk and heavy metal included.

The program concluded with Raven Chacon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning “Voiceless Mass” for flute, clarinets, percussion, organ, strings, and sine tones.

There is a wealth of writings about this work, and it continues to be performed by significant ensembles throughout the

country. Its relevance reaches into many historical and cultural dynamics, particularly the Catholic Church regarding the acoustic architectural properties of their churches as well as their impact on Native people. Conceptually this work is extraordinarily broad in implications and deeply nuanced in expression. Please take advantage of both the opportunity to hear this performance of “Voiceless Mass” as well as any opportunity to experience the work in person, and particularly in a cathedral, which expresses the ultimate intention of the composer.

This concert is an opportunity to recognize the two and a half decades of work by the Native American Composers Apprenticeship Project (NACAP), which, since its inception in 2001, has been providing opportunities for Native students to gain skills and insights

into the compositional process while working with master teachers and professional chamber ensembles. Raven Chacon began teaching there in 2004 and mentored Michael Begay, who in turn mentored Sage Bond. “It has been gratifying to witness the fruits of our labor during the concert, where we could see NACAP’s impact firsthand,” said Begay.

“I cannot overstate the impact NACAP and the dedicated teaching composers have had on my journey. I also believe it is crucial to incorporate a greater representation of Native repertoire within the contemporary Western classical music scene. Embracing and showcasing diverse Indigenous works not only enriches the artistic landscape but also fosters a deeper understanding of various cultures and traditions that honor a broader spectrum of the human experience.” —Thollem

BOOK REVIEW Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing: Documentation, Administration, and the Interventions of Indigenous Art Danielle Taschereau Mamers Fordham University Press, 2023

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above Raven Chacon (Diné) speaking during the Horizons concert, Northern Arizona University.

ANIELLE TASCHEREAU MAMERS’S Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing examines the intersections of settler-colonialism, bureaucracy, and Indigenous artistic strategies. Through visual analysis, political theory, and media studies, Mamers synthesizes a challenge to the conventional understanding of documentation as a neutral record, illustrating that bureaucratic documents are embedded in the power structures of settler-colonialism. She pushes for an understanding of the ways individual First Nations and Métis artists employ visual strategies that refuse Canadian colonial definitions and offer pathways for decolonial methodologies. The result is an intervention against dominant modes of seeing and knowing that sustain settler-colonial authority.

At the heart of Mamers’s book is the idea that settler-colonialism is not just a political and economic structure but an aesthetic one. Settler-colonialism is built

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on the systematic creation of documents— legal texts, land agreements, and status certificates—that materialize state power and assert control over Indigenous peoples. She explores how documents, while often treated as transparent and immediate representations of legal authority, are in fact “mediated representations that bring together many modes of inscription” that are more often seen through than truly read. These documents are the result of various processes of encoding, abstraction, and inscription that shape the ways the settler-colonial state perceives and categorizes Indigenous peoples.

Mamers’s study takes this theory across four discrete examples of documentation and artistic strategy as an analytical lens of critical disobedience.

The first three chapters cover the Canadian Indian Act, the Indian Register, and Certificates of Indian Status, each engaging a particular work of art that deconstructs, reveals, or transforms

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visual, administrative anti-Indigeneity.

The last chapter focuses on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) and the work of counter-documentation that has been employed by Indigenous activists to make this crisis legible. The book pairs an analysis of juridical documents with a study of the artwork of contemporary First Nations and Métis artists who use the practice of marking up settler documents to subvert administrative control. Incorporating these documents into their practice as media, they refuse the alienating gaze of settler-colonialism and demand new ways of seeing that affirm the sovereignty and identity of Indigenous peoples of Canada.

Métis artist Robert Houle’s Premises for Self-Rule series, through which Mamers introduces her thesis, exemplifies this refusal of settler-colonial visibility. In Houle’s works, Mamers shows, bureaucratic documents such as legal texts, land deeds, and policy papers are reinterpreted through a lens of Indigenous experience.

Mamers describes how Houle’s use of saturated colors and gestural strokes over texts, such as the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982, center his own experiences and identity while drawing attention to the ways that legal texts obscure reality through their apparent transparency.

The act of drawing attention to these documents is not simply a critique of the colonial state but a reclamation of the space these documents attempt to erase with their creation. Houle’s paintings make it impossible to ignore the contingent nature of colonial power and insist that these legal texts are not universal or inevitable but rather the product of a specific colonial agenda.

In analyzing these artworks, Mamers brings in the concept of “extra-rational” potential, a term coined

by Métis artist and curator David Garneau. This concept refers to the ability of art to transcend the rationalized logic of colonial bureaucratic structures, to create spaces for alternative ways of seeing and being. For Mamers, such Indigenous art operates outside the realm of bureaucratic rationality and offers alternate ways of seeing and knowing that disrupt settler-colonial narrative and logic. In doing so, Indigenous artists create a visual

language that contests the very categorization and surveillance inherent in the colonial state apparatus. By painting over settler grids and statutes and “exercising opacity,” these artists eschew visibility as a refusal of the alienation of settler-colonial ways of seeing while demanding context, locality, and agency. This space is not simply about resistance but about creating a new framework for understanding Indigenous existence and sovereignty outside the confines of settler-colonialism.

The book’s analysis is not limited to the artworks themselves; it also interrogates the wider political implications of how documents and visuality intersect within settler-colonial archives, such as with the case of the MMIWG crisis. Mamers traces the relationship between state-sponsored archives and Indigenous knowledge systems and argues that settler-colonialism attempts to render Indigenous ways of being and knowing invisible or illegible within these documents. In their subversion of the colonizer’s gaze, Indigenous artists confront these archives and reframe the question of what is made visible or invisible in the process of documentation. The bureaucratic forms that seek to control and define Indigenous peoples are thereby reimagined as sites of resistance, where opacity and the obscuring of forced (in)visibility are integral to the assertion of Indigenous existence.

Of particular note in Mamers’s work is the refusal to present a straightforward or idealized path toward reconciliation or reform. Rather, the work encourages a more complex engagement with colonial archives and artworks, one that challenges the very basis of colonial seeing. Mamers writes on page 5, “The hope of this book is not to correct or reform settler colonial seeing, but to cultivate strategies of looking and thinking disobediently, in ways that challenge state authority and denaturalize its classifications.” This focus on disobedient looking—seeing through the lens of Indigenous sovereignty rather than through the framework of colonial power—recasts the role of the viewer.

Instead of passively accepting the colonial archive as the authoritative frame through which to understand Indigenous peoples, Mamers asks her readers to engage with these materials in a manner that acknowledges their partiality and works to unsettle the colonial systems they support.

Through a combination of archival research, visual analysis, and theoretical exploration, Mamers offers a compelling critique of both the colonial project and the ways in which art can subvert it.

She does not simply offer an analysis of how Indigenous art reacts to colonialism but rather demonstrates how it actively reshapes the very structures of visibility and knowledge that sustain colonial power. Nor does she attempt to claim authority over her findings, and instead she amplifies the work being done by her artistic interlocutors—work that requires active attention over the passive receiving of information. By turning to Indigenous artistic strategies as an analytical frame, Mamers presents to readers tools for understanding how visual practices can serve as forms of political intervention.

Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing contributes to the fields of Indigenous studies, art history, and media studies. Mamers’s emphasis on the extra-rational potential of Indigenous art provides a vital framework for thinking about how artworks can resist, subvert, and ultimately transform the colonial gaze. By pulling all of these pieces together, Mamers not only foregrounds the power of art as a form of resistance but also offers a redefinition of what it means to see and be seen in the context of settler-colonialism. —Ruth Thomas

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025 | 101

ART+LIT

Muscogee/Cherokee Novelist & Journalist

EDDIE CHUCULATE

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

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ORN IN CLAREMORE, OKLAHOMA, in 1978, Eddie Chuculate was raised in Muskogee and began his writing career as a sports journalist and copy editor. He later attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and earned a degree in creative writing. Stanford University awarded him a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and he attended the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he graduated with a master of fine arts degree in 2013. His short stories, inspired by facets of his Muscogee and Cherokee heritage, have appeared in numerous publications including Mānoa, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, and World Literature Today.

In 2010 Black Sparrow Press in Boston published Chuculate’s debut story collection, Cheyenne Madonna. The book received immediate critical praise. Author Ursula K. Le Guin responded to it by saying, “The tone of Chuculate’s narration is serene and buoyant, a rare mood at present. Mozart might be a useful model to think of. Every sentence is unexpected, yet infallible.” In addition, for the first story in the collection, “Galveston Bay, 1826,” Chuculate received the O. Henry Prize.

The success of Cheyenne Madonna led to a 2014 literature fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. More recently, Scholastic Focus published Chuculate’s autobiography, This Indian Kid: A Native American Memoir, which portrays his early life in Oklahoma.

MRS: Many of your interviews talk about your personal history and how that affects your writing, but I want to get away from that and get into the act of writing itself. What drew you to sports journalism and copy editing?

EC: My baseball coach at Muskogee High School was also a journalism teacher and made me take his homeroom class. He saw I had talent and pushed me to pursue sportswriting, in effect telling me my baseball days were numbered. He was right.

MRS: My baseball days were numbered around that age too. Can you break down how journalism and copy editing affect your short story writing? Do you see a connection?

EC: If anything, it would be the self-editing aspect of chopping unnecessary words, striving for brevity, remembering you can cut that nine times out of ten. Also, in journalism you tend to tell rather than reveal. So it’s kind of an inside-out approach.

In literature, things that are revealed to a reader rather than bluntly told have a longer-lasting impact. Readers become aware of something through sudden realization rather than being bombarded and hit over the head with facts, stats, and numbers.

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MRS: Why the short story instead of the long-form novel?

Both have advantages and disadvantages, yes?

EC: I like the sudden impact a short story can have. A win by knockout rather than a twelve-round split decision. More nomadic in my younger years, the brevity and focus demanded were more fitting to my lifestyle. I carried hard-copy versions of my work in progress. Now I don’t even worry about a printer.

MRS: Can you give readers a glimpse into the process behind writing your short stories? I’m thinking in terms of structure, symbolism, characters, etc.

EC: My PEN/O. Henry prizewinner, “Galveston Bay, 1826,” I wrote in about six hours over two days, start to finish, two threehour sessions. Others took years. So the idea that short stories are easier because they’re “short” is wrong.

ART+LIT

MRS: Is rejection or heavy revision from an editor important to a writer? What can be learned from it?

EC: Only afterward, after you have a complete draft of a work finished. At that point you can either accept or discard editorial intrusion. It’s your work. That being said, you can become so close to your work (seeing it every day and living with it in your head) that you become tunnel-visioned and overlook potential possibilities and outright structural problems that only an editor who’s as dedicated to the work as you are can pinpoint. So yes, it’s a two-way street of give-and-take that only you as the writer have final say.

MRS: There’s clearly a balance between protecting your creation and being open to insight from others. Can you talk about the process of researching your stories and memoir? What did you find to be useful? What was unhelpful?

EC: Relying too much on research can constrict the imagination, but granted, some research can fire it. This is strictly personal preference, but I always refer to the Emily Dickinson poem, “I Never Saw a Moor”: I never saw a moor, I never saw the sea; Yet know I how the heather looks, And what a wave must be.

above This Indian Kid: A Native American Memoir (Scholastic Focus, 2023). Image courtesy of the author. below Dan Beaver (Muscogee), Ball-Headed War Club, 2025, wood, stain. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Eddie Chuculate. Image courtesy of the author.

MRS: I agree. Looking back at the success of Cheyenne Madonna, what lessons have you taken from that book that you applied to your recent memoir, This Native Kid? EC: I tried to apply fictional techniques. Rather than a strict chronological telling, I sought to dramatize parts of my childhood in sort of a mosaic that I hoped at the end would come together and form a complete picture.

I never spoke with God, Nor visited in heaven; Yet certain am I of the spot As if the chart were given.1 [It’s useful] to lean on intuition more than facts in a book put down by someone else. If you believe it in your mind, it creates its own reality, its own world.

MRS: Why did you choose to write This Native Kid? EC: It was an idea from my agent to write about aspects of my childhood from a nontraumatic view. I wasn’t beaten, abused, or mistreated, nor did I fight in a civil war or make an epic hike. A way to combat stereotypes people have about Native Americans.

No, I didn’t live in a tipi, ride horses, put my ear to the ground to listen for trains or distant hoofbeats. I ate at Dairy Queen and played Donkey Kong.

1. Emily Dickinson, Poems by Emily Dickinson, Issue 1 (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892), 126.

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025 | 103

ART+LIT

MRS: What were the emotions that you experienced during the writing of This Native Kid, and how did you translate those feelings into words?

EC: Joy reliving and examining the way I was brought up by both my mother and my mother’s parents, and sadness that my grandparents a re g on e .

I was able to see how difficult it was for a single mother during those times to raise children on her own. I was constantly making these realizations that in my youth I took for granted or overlooked. So in that aspect, it was personally beneficial. Joy and sadness but mainly a driving desire to memorialize those people who are responsible for who I am today, for better or worse.

MRS: That’s a good segue into asking: Can you explain the importance of publishing stories

by Indigenous authors and poets, particularly in today’s world?

EC: Very important in that humanity can get a glimpse of how intricate and complex Native life is. To get a fuller picture, rather than reverting to the same stereotypes from just a few voices.

MRS: You’ve been a professional writer for more than 25 years now. What has changed for you? What has stayed the same? Is your approach to the empty page similar?

EC: I’m focusing on longer forms now. I think my short story era is over. Any idea of a short story now is how can I make it into something longer. The fundamental aspect of trying to capture something is still there, but the goal now is to assemble them into a kaleidoscope you keep shuffling until the picture you want to portray comes into focus.

MRS: What are you reading right now? Any recommendations?

EC: I just read a book on DNA technology in policing and court systems across different countries called Genetic Justice.

I found it engrossing. Last year I binged on the writer Evan S. Connell, who wrote Son of the Morning Star, an account of George Custer and the Little Bighorn. A nonfiction account 104 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025

but written with such insight, empathy, and obvious singleminded dedication that it blows you away. A must-read. And reading that led me to Connell’s novels and other works that are fantastic. So I’m a big fan of his, and you should check out his work. He lived on Artist Road in Santa Fe and later died at an assisted-living home in Santa Fe across from Salvador Perez Park. In fact we lived in Santa Fe at the same time, but at the time I was unfamiliar with his work.

MRS: That’s incredible! So what comes after your memoir? What projects do you have planned for the future?

EC: I’m working on a novel about growing up in the family of a renowned American Indian artist. We had a Mercedes convertible, a Lincoln, a Corvette, a swimming pool, tennis court—all due to the vision and work of an Indian artist in Oklahoma. How living under an atmosphere of art rather than a nine-to-five typical worker household totally turned this Native teenager inside out. The atmosphere [is] very communal and laissez-faire, and I think very fertile and original material, something I have to whip into shape. But at its core, [I’m] showing Native American people in a way totally flip-flopped from reader expectations.

MRS: Thank you for speaking with me, Eddie.

EC: You betcha, as they say in Minnesota, and thanks for reaching out.

left Dan Beaver (Muscogee), Spiral Gunstock War Club, 2024, wood, acrylic paint, steel blade, brads, cones, horsehair. Both images courtesy of the artist. right Dan Beaver (Muscogee), U.S. Marine Corps Gunstock War Club, 2024, wood, acrylic paint, steel blade, brads, cones, horsehair.

ART+LIT

DAN BEAVER

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F THE FUSWVLKE, or Bird clan, Danny Beaver (Muscogee Nation) is a member of the Tuckabatchee tribal town, one of the four Mother towns of the Muscogee people, originally located near the Tallapoosa River in Alabama and now located in Oklahoma.

Historically, the people of Tuckabatchee were Upper Creeks who valiantly fought to sustain their tribal culture and spiritual practices in the early 19th century. They were known as the “Red Sticks” for their painted war clubs.

Today Beaver continues the Red Sticks’ efforts to share Muscogee lifeways with future generations through his artwork.

His studio is Redhand Designs, and he specializes in woodwork, in particular, gunstock war clubs. These clubs were initially repurposed gunstocks, but they evolved into a unique Native weapon carved in a graceful shape. They are also used in dances.

Beaver himself is an accomplished Northern Traditional powwow dancer. Beaver makes his own dance regalia.

A self-taught artist, Beaver makes his signature war clubs with and without metal blades. He allows the natural beauty of the wood grain to show through as he carves, stains, and paints designs. He creates new imagery inspired by the Southeastern motifs of his precontact Muscogee ancestors. These are found in ceramics as well as copper repoussé plates, shell, and stone.

He combined these images with his observations of the natural world: birds in flight, coiling serpents, turtles, paw prints, and even delicate florals.

above Dan Beaver. Both images courtesy of the artist. below Dan Beaver (Muscogee), Turtle Plaque, 2024, incised wood, stain.

While he is best known for his gunstock war clubs, he also carves the far more ancient ball-headed war clubs, which harness the strength of burl wood. He sculpts maces, wood plaques, mortar and pestles, ballsticks, and ornate cedar boxes used to store feathers and other ceremonial items, but Beaver makes them into works of art in their own right. His boxes are often emblazoned with Native American Church iconography such as waterbirds, feathers, and bison skulls.

He has served in law enforcement with the state, U.S. Marshals, and the Muscogee Lighthorse police officer. He conducts workshops for Muscogee youth. His artwork is in museum collections internationally and across the nation, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and the Museum of Mississippi History. He exhibits at the Artesian Art Festival, Mvskoke Art Market, and other venues where his striking artwork has garnered numerous awards.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

INSTAGRAM @ REDHANDDESIGNS FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025 | 105

MEMORIAL

MARTHA GORMAN SCHULTZ May 15, 1931–February 21, 2025

above Martha Schultz (Diné), Storm Pattern Textile, undyed wool, aniline-dyed wool, collection of the Heard Museum, gift of Anita and Kenneth B. Baldwin, 4948-4. Photo: Craig Smith, Heard Museum. Image courtesy of the Heard Museum.

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HE FAMILY FLOCK of NavajoChurro sheep was long gone when Martha Gorman Schultz learned about the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. As a mother—and grandmother to 35 grandchildren, Martha had given pause. Her family had seen challenging times before. During those times, her weaving skills provided for her and her family.

Martha was raised in Leupp, Arizona, during the Great Depression. She was one of five children who Jasbah (Mary) Gorman Clay raised along with their sheep. Through Jasbah and her ancestral grandmothers, she was of the Tábą́ą́há (Water’s Edge) clan, born for her father’s clan, the Tódích'íí'nii (Bitter Water). Her family relied on their sheep for meat, skins, and wool. The family moved throughout the year and traversed

the area between Leupp and Chinle using mules and donkeys. Martha could recall herding sheep and camping at Canyon Diablo with her sister Helen.1 Martha’s family supplemented their income with goods from trading posts, after exchanging or selling Jasbah’s handwoven rugs and blankets at local trading posts. Jasbah was raised to be resilient during periods of adversity. She would do the same for her family. When the Federal Livestock Reduction Act took effect in 1933, all Navajos were forced to reduce their flocks. With Martha being only two years old, Jasbah could not give up weaving. She taught her children how to herd and care for their flock from an early age. When Martha was eight, Jasbah introduced her to weaving. By this time, the young girl already knew how to shear and card wool—and her mother taught her well. Martha’s first woolen textile, made with her handspun singles sourced from her mother’s flock, was a 30-inch square saddle blanket.2 She did not get to keep it for herself. It was sold to the Leupp Trading Post for two dollars (worth about $46.00 in 2025). The money immediately went toward food and necessities.

When Martha was about ten years old, she was to attend Leupp Boarding School. She mentally prepared herself to live apart from her family and her flock.

To Martha’s disappointment, the school closed in 1942 due to being on a floodplain. In 1943 the Federal government converted the school into an internment camp for Japanese-American detainees.

During World War II, Martha and her family received food rations and continued herding sheep. She never learned to speak, read, or write fluent English.

Despite the war and its impacts, Martha mastered Crystal, Wide Ruins, and Two Grey Hills patterns. She devoted much time to her Storm techniques, and it soon became her specialty. Many of her Storm textiles have dazzling diagonal and

serrated motifs in natural, blended, or hand-dyed woolen hues.

Martha gave her children opportunities to learn how to weave, much like her mother and grandmother had done for her. As her children grew acclimated to increasingly modern lifestyles, Martha’s textile sales remained integral to her children’s education through college. Of the 13 children she raised with her husband, Billy Schultz, daughters Marilou Schultz and Lola Cody and granddaughter Melissa Cody were exceptionally talented and later forged their paths with their groundbreaking, abstract designs.

“My mom was at home with us kids growing up, she always had that loom up,” Marilou Schultz told Hyperallergic. “A lot of times she had her loom outside under the shade, and she would be out there listening to the birds and weaving alone in the early morning.”3 Martha made a name for herself.

She took home Best of Show at Santa Fe Indian Market in 1990 with her almost queen-size, Two Grey Hills rug that had taken her months to weave. As her works gained recognition, so did Martha, along with her ancestral weavers of the past, many of whom were never photographed.

Martha won awards at the Heard Fair in Phoenix and other art shows.

In 1996 the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts awarded Martha a fellowship. Martha taught the public about her Navajo culture and her generational, homegrown textile weaving.

She gave many public weaving demonstrations at Northern Arizona University.

Martha’s weaving legacy enriched Arizona and New Mexico with lessons and stories of overcoming hardship and building resilience. She was a matriarch who held her family’s histories, trials, and tribulations in her memory, imbued with generations of weaving knowledge she passed down to her children and grandchildren. —Christy Hanson (Diné)

1. Lynda Teller Pete and Barbara Teller Ornelas, “Martha Gorman Schultz,” in Spider Woman’s Children: Navajo Weavers Today (Loveland, CO: Thrums Books, 2018), 53.

2. Teller Pete and Teller Ornelas, “Martha Gorman Schultz,” 53.

3. Rhea Nayyar, “Martha Gorman Schultz, Influential Diné Weaver, Dies at 93,” Hyperallergic, February 26, 2025, web.

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MEMORIAL

JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE SMITH January 15, 1940–January 24, 2025

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OYOTE AND AMOTKEN have called home a great warrior. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was an artist and cultural worker of the highest caliber, driven by genuine love for others and the land. A citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Jaune was born on the Flathead Reservation in Montana but lived most of her life in New Mexico. She excelled at painting, printmaking, and sculpture. She also wrote poetry. Her work is included in most major American art museum collections.

Early in her career, Jaune organized Indigenous artist collectives Grey Canyon (established 1977) and Coup Marks (established 1982) to foster support and coordinate exhibitions.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in art education from Framingham State College and a master of arts degree from the University of New Mexico.

Jaune curated dozens of landmark exhibitions including Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar, and Sage: Contemporary Art by Native American Women (1985–87) with Harmony Hammond; The Submuloc Show/Columbus Wohs: A Visual Commentary on the Columbus Quincentennial from the Perspective of America’s First People (1992); and The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans (2023–24). Her last curatorial project, Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always, opened at the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Jersey on February 1, 2025.

Numerous arts and cultural organizations as well as environmental and human rights campaigns benefited enormously from Jaune’s drive for Indigenous visibility and equality on the global stage. Petroglyph National Monument, the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, and many more establishments would not exist in their current form if Jaune had not advocated for their creation and improvement.

Social media lit up with condolences and personal memories of Jaune’s brilliance as an artist and kindness as a friend.

IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts director Patsy Phillips (Cherokee Nation) called her “one of the most consequential artists in the contemporary art world.” Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee) posted: “She changed the world. That’s simply true. She was always kind, generous, intentional, and just a fierce advocate for all of us. She will be sorely missed but her spirit will continue to live within many of us.”

Maria Hupfield (Wasauksing Ojibway) shared: “A real-life fairy godmother, this woman would grant wishes I didn’t even know existed. She was a radical artist who picked up a paintbrush to break new territory when she was told women had only two options: weave or make pots. A warrior land defender before we had words in English to describe anticolonial and social justice, she witnessed Native Americans come into fashion twice

above Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Photo: Thomas King.

in her lifetime. I remember the stories of her hitting the streets during her visits to NY and walking galleries [from] door to door on the hunt for representation in anticipation of the day the Whitney would knock on hers.… She was a force!”

Jaune’s exemplary life and work continue to teach us, mentor us, and guide us as we persist in our art and community engagement. She shared knowledge freely, created opportunities for others, and never wavered in the face of adversity.

Her final email to me, sent just five days before she walked on, conveys her deep sense of peace as she prepared for her journey: “From here I will go to the mortuary up on the mesa, and in the spring Neal and Andy will take me home to put my ashes in the songbird pond next to my Long House where I will be in my forever home with my beloved relations, the grizzlies, coyotes, lodgepole pines, magpies, wood ticks, spiders and ancestors; we’ve been there for 80,000 years or since the creation of time.”

A memorial scholarship fund has been established at the Institute of American Indian Arts to honor Jaune’s legacy.

—Andrea L. Ferber, PhD FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025 | 107

MEMORIAL

LILLIE T. TAYLOR February 15, 1931–November 5, 2024

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ORN IN TÓ HAHADLEEH (“Dipping Water”) or Indian Wells, Arizona, Lillie Thomas Taylor lived in that small Diné community in the Navajo Nation for most of her life. Her father, Frank Thomas (Diné), died when she was still young.

She helped her mother and siblings tend the family’s sheep and learned to weave at age five by observing her mother and other relatives. She sold her first rug for $5 at the local trading post. She attended Leupp Boarding School, 51 miles east of her home, but only through third grade.

She remained a fluent, first-language Diné bizaad speaker throughout her life.

Lillie married Carl Taylor (Diné), a medicine man and silversmith in 1944; they had eight children. Her daughter Rosie Taylor (Diné) wrote that her mother sold to the same trader until Lillie’s youngest daughter Diane entered high school.1 By then she had mastered weaving and began seeking new venues as her exquisite weavings found homes with collectors and museums. She also had extensive knowledge of local plant dyes. For example, she created deep reds and browns from the roots of wild rhubarb (Rumex hymenosepalus).

Rosie wrote that her mother wove from dawn to dusk and was “the most patient woman I have ever known.”2 Lillie exhibited at the annual Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market through 2022, where she often won awards.

She also showed at the Santa Fe Indian Market and exhibited in First Nations: Fine Weavers (1997), curated by Kathy M’Closkey, at the Burlington Art Centre and the Woodland Cultural Centre in Ontario in 1997. In 2000 the State of Arizona named her a Living Treasure.

She participated in Weaving is Life (2005–07) at the Kennedy Museum of Art at Ohio University in Athens, curated by D.Y. Begay (Diné) and Jennifer McLerran.

Lillie’s daughters Diane and Rosie and her

above Lillie T. Taylor with her weavings at Santa Fe Indian Market, 2012. Photo: Paul Niemi.

granddaughters Amber Gene and Twyla Gene, all Diné from Indian Wells, Arizona, were also part of Weaving is Life.

The Kennedy Museum acquired Taylor’s In the Path of the Four Seasons (2004), a striking weaving of natural white, grey, and black wool with electric orange aniline-dyed wool.

Several of her children and grandchildren are artists, both weavers and jewelers. Her daughter Rosie wrote, “My mother Lillian Thomas Taylor is a master weaver and a loving friend, providing guidance to all people throughout the world.”3 —America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

1. Rosie Taylor, “Lillie Taylor Thomas: Navajo Master Weaver,” Heard Museum Native American Artists Resource Collection (November 17, 1992), 1.

2. Rosie Taylor, “Lillie Taylor Thomas,” 1.

3. Rosie Taylor, “Lillie Taylor Thomas,” 2.

108 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025

CALENDAR April 2–June 13: Oklahoma City, OK Innate Connections: Eric Tippeconnic at the Red Earth Art Center, BancFirst Tower, 100 North Broadway Ave., Suite 110 | redearth.org April 3–May 17: Arcata, CA Undammed at the Goudi’ni Native American Arts Gallery, Cal Poly Humboldt, Union Street, BSS 104. Celebrating the historic removal of dams from the Klamath River humboldt.edu/art-film/galleries/goudini-gallery April 3–May 24: Albuquerque, NM Walls of Resilience: Indigenous Wisdom Confronting Planetary Crisis at South Broadway Cultural Center, 1025 South Broadway Boulevard SE | cabq.gov April 4–TBA: Phoenix, AZ Bob Haozous: A Retrospective View at the Heard Museum, 2301 N. Central Avenue | heard.org April 4–September 21: Saskatoon, SK Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch at the Remai Modern, 102 Spadina Crescent E. Retrospective for this Mohawk photographer and filmmaker. Curated by Melissa Bennett, Greg Hill (Mohawk), and David Penney | remaimodern.org April 5–May 10: Tahlequah, OK 54th Annual Trail of Tears Art Show at the Gallery at Cherokee Springs Plaza, 3377 Cherokee Springs Road. Hosted by the Cherokee Nation, open to all tribes | trailoftearsartshow.com

Lapis Rabbit by Loren Tsalabutie, Zuni Pueblo

Since 1981 Jewelry Carvings Pottery 227 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe Keshi.com 505.989.8728

April 5, 2025–March 15, 2026: Fargo, ND Jaque Fragua: Ghost Writing at the Plains Art Museum, 704 First Avenue North | plainsart.org April 12–May 3: Gallup, NM Cultural Crossroads: The Good, the Bad, and the Unseen at Art123 Gallery, 123 W. Coal Avenue. Curated by Jerry Brown (Diné) galluparts.org/art123gallery April 12–August 3: Indianapolis, IN Radical Stitch at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 500 W. Washington Avenue. Curated by Sherry Farrell Racette (Timiskaming Métis/Algonquin), Michelle LaVallee (Nawash Ojibway), and Cathy Mattes (Michif); organized by the MacKenzie Art Gallery | eiteljorg.org April 18–June 8: Santa Fe, NM Species Pending: Effigia okeeffeae at Axle Contemporary Mobile Artspace. Featuring Jamison Chās Banks (Seneca-Cayuga/Cherokee) and Animkeewa White Eagle (Grand Traverse Odawa-Ojibwe/ Kiowa) | axleart.com

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April 19: Escondido, CA First Annual Southern California Indigenous Culture and Art Festival at Grape Day Park, 321 N. Broadway. Hosted by the City of Escondido and San Pasqual Band of Diegueño Mission Indians of California. Free. 10:00 am–4:00 pm | socalindigenousarts.com April 19–August 10: Brookings, SD The Founding Gifts: Benjamin Reifel at the South Dakota Art Museum, 1036 Medary Avenue. Historical Plains artworks from the collection of U.S. Congressman Ben Reifel (Sicangu Lakota, 1906–1990) | sdstate.edu/south-dakota-art-museum FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025 | 109

April 20–August 17: Denver, CO Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors at the Denver Art Museum, 100 W. 14th Ave Pkwy. First major U.S. retrospective for this Fisher River Cree painter | denverartmuseum.org

May 1–June 14: New York, NY Jaune Quick-to-See Smith at Garth Greenan Gallery, 545 West 20th Street | (212) 929-1351 | garthgreenan.com

April 24: Oklahoma City, OK Edgar Heap of Birds: Neufs for Oklahoma Autumn at Campbell Art Park, 1146 N. Broadway Avenue | oklahomacontemporary.org

May 2: Oklahoma City, OK Mskwabek: Where Earth Meets Sky, annual gala, at First Americans Museum, 659 First Americans Boulevard. Keynote speaker: Sterlin Harjo (Muscogee/Seminole) | famok.org/gala

April 25–27: Vonore, TN “The World’s Longest Native American Women Painting” at the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum, 576 TN–360. Mural by Daniel Borja Ramirez (Saginaw Chippewa descent) | sequoyahmuseum.org

May 3: Salamanca, NY First Annual Ohi:yo’ Art Market at the Seneca Allegany Casino and Resort, 777 Seneca Allegany Boulevard. 10:00 am–5:00 pm senecamuseum.org/ohiyo-art-market

April 26: Reno, NV Threads of Tradition: Celebrating 25 Years of the Great Basin Native Basketweavers at the Nevada Museum of Art, 160 W. Liberty Street.

10:00 am–4:00 pm, free and open to the public | nevadaart.org April 26 & 27: Tulsa, OK Fourth Annual Mvskoke Art Market at River Spirit Casino Resort, 8330 Riverside Parkway. Hosted by the Muscogee Nation, open to all tribes (918) 549-2434 | muscogeenation.com/mvskokeartmarket April 27: Novato, CA Grand Re-Opening of the Museum of the American Indian, 2200 Novato Boulevard, Miwok Park. 11:00 am–4:30 pm | marinindian.com April 29–May 17: Minneapolis, NM Jonathan Thunder: The Artist as Storyteller at Quarter Gallery, Regis Center for Art, University of Minnesota, 405 21st Avenue South. Artist talk: Tuesday, April 29, 12:00 pm. Reception: Thursday, May 8, 2025 cla.umn.edu/art

May 3: Gallup, NM Spring Friends of Hubbell Auction at the Gallup Community Service Center, 410 Bataan Veterans St. 9:00 am–6:00 pm | friendsofhubbell.org May 3 & 4: Albuquerque, NM 8th Annual Bernalillo Indian Arts Festival at Sid Cutter Pilots Pavilion, Balloon Fiesta Park, 4900 Balloon Fiesta Parkway NE. 200 juried artists.

9:00 am–5:00 pm | (505) 867-9667 | bernalilloindianfestival.com May 3–October 19: Banff, AB The Ancestors Are Talking: Paintings by the Indigenous Seven at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, 111 Bear Street. Showing 77 works by the Professional Native Indian Artists Inc., curated by Joseph M. Sánchez (Mestizo), Dawn Saunder Dahl (Red River Métis ancestry), and Christina Cuthbertson | whyte.org May 10: Santa Fe, NM 2025 Pueblo Fiber Arts Show at the Buffalo Thunder Casino Resort, Pueblo Ballroom, 30 Buffalo Thunder Trail. Hosted by Poeh Cultural Center. 10:00 am–4:00 pm | poehcenter.org

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110 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025

May 10 & 11: Zuni, NM Zuni Pueblo MainStreet Festival at the Zuni Tribal Fairgrounds, NM-53. Arts, food, and social dances | (505) 782-7237 zunipueblomainstreet.org May 17 & 24: Oklahoma City, OK Threads of Untold History at the Oklahoma Indian Territory Museum of Black Creek Freedman History, 8625 S. Walker Avenue.

11:00 am–2:00 pm. Beadwork portraits of Freedmen by Jennifer Saenz and Vicky Watson (both Cherokee Nation) cherokeebeadwork.com

Explore the Plains art collection of Benjamin “Ben” Reifel, the first Sičháŋǧu Lakota elected to the U.S. Congress. Originally loaned to the South Dakota Art Museum in 1977 and later gifted by his family, this founding gift shaped the Museum’s Indigenous art collections. The exhibition showcases artworks from Reifel’s personal collection, alongside Oscar Howe paintings he helped bring to the Museum.

May 17–June 22: Garrison, NY Rise: Scenes of Resistance at Garrison Art Center, 23 Garrison Landing. Solo exhibition for Jeremy Dennis (Shinnecock). Artist talk and reception: Saturday, May 17, 3:00–7:00 pm | garrisonartcenter.org May 23–26: Santa Fe, NM Native Elements Art Festival and Market at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden, 715 Camino Lejo, and Santa Fe Community Convention Center, 201 W. Marcy Street | visitsfbg.org/native-elements May 30–TBA: Bloomington, IN City on the River at the William Mathers Gallery, Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 416 N. Indiana Avenue.

Curated by the Angel Mounds Exhibition Advisory Council in collaboration with the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology iumaa.iu.edu June 1–July 13: Seattle, WA Indigiqueer Exhibition at the Tidelands, 55 University Street thisistidelands.com

Oscar Howe, Yanktonai Dakota The Singer, c. 1955 casein on paper

SouthDakotaArtMuseum.com Get Inspired.

June 7–August 10: Pine Ridge, SD The 57th Annual Red Cloud Indian Art Show at the Heritage Center at Maȟpíya Lúta, 100 Mission Drive. Opening reception: Saturday, June 7, 12:00 pm | (605) 867-5491 | heritagecenter.mahpiyaluta.org June 2, 2025–March 2026: Santa Fe, NM Makowa: The Worlds Above Us at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, 710 Camino Lejo | indianartsandculture.org

June 7 - August 10, 2025

June 5–28, 2025: Seattle, WA Masks of the Pacific Northwest Coast at the Stonington Gallery, 125 S. Jackson Street | stoningtongallery.com June 5–September 7: Greenwich, CT Jeremy Frey: Woven at the Bruce Museum, 1 Museum Drive.

Traveling retrospective of work by this Passamaquoddy basket maker, organized by the Portland Museum of Art | brucemuseum.org June 5–September 14: St. Paul, MN Queering Indigeneity at the Minneapolis Museum of American Art, 350 Robert Street North. Group show of LGBTQ2S+ artists from the Upper Midwest | (651) 797-2571 | mmaa.org

Call for Entries Due by May 16, 2025 more info at www.redcloudart.show

June 6–July 11: Norman, OK The Yellowhair Brothers Art Exhibition at the Jacobson House Native Art Center, 609 Chautauqua Avenue. Reception: Friday, June 6, 6:00 pm | jacobsonhouse.art June 7 & 8: Los Angeles, CA 34th Annual American Indian Arts Festival at the Autry Museum in Griffith Park, 4700 Western Heritage Way | theautry.org June 7–September 28: Redcar, England, UK Arctic Expressions at the Kirkleatham Museum. Featuring works from the British Museum collection, including work by Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich (Koyukon Dené/Iñupiaq) | britishmuseum.org

Wade by Gene Swallow (Oglala Lakota), fiber arts

Pine Ridge, SD 605.867.8257 FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 46, SPRING 2025 | 111

June 9–27: Idyllwild, CA Native American Arts Workshops at Idyllwild Arts Native American Art Center, 52500 Temecula Road #38 idyllwildarts.org/nativeamericanarts June 12–September 14: Norfolk, VA Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass at the Chrysler Museum of Art, 1 Memorial Place | chrysler.org

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June 16–20: Idyllwild, CA Native American Arts Festival Week at Idyllwild Arts Native American Art Center, 52500 Temecula Road #38. idyllwildarts.org/nativeamericanarts June 20–22: Iqaluit, NU Alianait Arts Festival at Nakasuk School, 601 Queen Elizabeth Street and various locations | +1 (867) 979-6000 | alianait.ca June 21–October 26: Shelburne, VT Making a Noise: Indigenous Sound Art at the Shelburne Museum, 6000 Shelburne Road | (802) 985-3346 | shelburnemuseum.org June 26–28: Oklahoma City, OK Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) Conference at the Omni Oklahoma City Hotel, 100 Oklahoma City Boulevard | naisa.org June 28: Dolores, CO Four Corners Indigenous Art Market at the Canyons of the Ancients Visitor Center and Museum, 27501 CO-184 | swcocanyons.org June 28 & 29: Flagstaff, AZ Heritage Festival of Arts and Culture at the Museum of Northern Arizona, 3101 N. Fort Valley Road | (928) 774-5213 | musnaz.org June 28, 2025–January 4, 2026: Spokane, WA Preston Singletary: Raven and the Box of Daylight at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, 2316 W. First Avenue northwestmuseum.org June 28, 2025–TBA: Toronto, ON Surusilutu Ashoona at the Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas Street +1 (877) 225-4246 | ago.ca June 29–October 12: Sacramento, CA Cara and Diego Romero: Tales of Futures Past at the Crocker Art Museum, 216 O Street. Organized by the Figge Art Museum crockerart.org July 3–July 31, 2025: Seattle, WA Raven Skyriver and Kelly O’Dell at Stonington Gallery, 125 S. Jackson Street. Tlingit and Euro-Canadian glass artists | stoningtongallery.com July 12 & 13: Bar Harbor, ME Dawnland Festival of Arts and Ideas at College of the Atlantic, 105 Eden Street. Hosted by the Abbe Museum. Saturday, 9:00 am–4:00 pm. Sunday, 9:00 am–4:00 pm | dawnlandfestival.org July 12–September 14, 2025: Tacoma, WA 20th Annual In the Spirit Contemporary Native Arts Exhibition at the Washington State Historical Society, 1911 Pacific Avenue washingtonhistory.org July 12, 2025–January 10, 2026: Chicago, IL Sight of Resistance at the Center for Native Futures, 56 W. Adams Street #102 | centerfornativefutures.org For more events, visit our online calendar at

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