First American Art Magazine No. 8, Fall 2015

JOY HARJO-SAPULPA • VENICE BIENNALE • FIRST NATIONS VIDEO ART

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

Art of Indigenous Peoples of the Americas

Christine McHorse Jackie Larson Bread Brent Greenwood Bobby C. Martin Great Plains Pictorial Art Zapotec Day of the Dead

Issue No. 8, Fall 2015

SHOWCASING AT THE 2015 SANTA FE INDIAN MARKET • INDIGENOUS FINE ART MARKET DANIEL WORCESTER

MARGARET ROACH WHEELER

KRISTEN DORSEY

BRENT GREENWOOD

TYRA SHACKLEFORD WALLACE MAYA STEWART

DUSTIN ILLETEWAHKE MATER

SWAIA (INDIAN MARKET): DAN WORCESTER- 329 FR-N MARGARET WHEELER- 285 PAL BRENT GREENWOOD- 778-LIN-E TYRA SHACKLEFORD WALLACE- 768-LIN W MAYA STEWART- 411 WA-E

IFAM (INDIGENOUS FINE ART MARKET): KRISTEN DORSEY- 200 TYRA SHACKLEFORD WALLACE- 566 DUSTIN MATER- 566 THE CHICKASAW NATION DIVISION OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES SEEKS TO CREATE AN AWARENESS, UNDERSTANDING AND ENJOYMENT OF THE ARTS. PLEASE JOIN US AS WE CELEBRATE CHICKASAW ARTISTS AND THEIR WORKS AT THE 2015 SANTA FE INDIAN MARKET AND IFAM.

Shan Goshorn Santa Fe Indian Market Booth 275 PAL

www.shangoshorn.com

A Nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.

Then it is finished, no matter how brave its warriors or how strong its weapons.

—Cheyenne adage

Hearts of Our Women, 2015, Arches watercolor paper splints, archival inks, acrylic paint, and copper foil FAL L 2 0 1 5

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“Magnificent!”

—The Wall Street Journal on the Dugout Canoes exhibit.

EXTENDED BY POPULAR DEMAND OPEN UNTIL SEPT. 27 Explore the world exposed when 101 ancient canoes were found in a dry lake bed. The acclaimed exhibit, with videos, interactive play and canoes, old and new.

Sulphur, OK 580-622-7130 canoes2015.com

Produced by the Florida Museum of Natural History with support from the AEC Trust, Lastinger Family Foundation, State of Florida and VisitGainesville.

UNI_15-CNC-071_Dugout_Canoes_Extended.indd 4

6/9/15 3:14 PM

Blue Rain Gallery’s Annual Celebration of Contemporary Native American Art August 19 – 23, 2015

C A N N U PA H A N S K A LU G E R Artist Reception: Thursday August 20th from 5 – 8 pm

Visit our website for a complete schedule of shows and events

Never, Never Land Series mixed media

Blue Rain Gallery | 130 130 Lincoln Avenue, Suite C Santa C Fe, NM 87501 | 505.954.9902 | www.blueraingallery.com Blue Rain Contemporary | 7137 East Main Street Sco sdale, AZ 85251 | 480.874.8110 FAL L 2 0 1 5

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V i c to r i a

Adams

Santa Fe Indian Market: August 22 & 23 • Booth: 209 PAL-N 505-670-6532 • info@victoriaadamsjewelry.com also showing at: Sorrel Sky Gallery • 125 W. Palace Ave. Santa Fe, NM • 505-501-6555 • sorrelsky.com

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ISSUE NO. 8, FALL 2015 FEATURES

DEPARTMENTS

Ga ni tha, Three Native Women, and the Venice Biennale John Paul Rangel, PhD

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Recent Developments

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The Continuum of Plains Pictorial Tradition heather ahtone (Choctaw-Chickasaw) and Joe D. Horse Capture (A’aninin)

34

Seven Directions Michole Eldred (Catawba Nation-Eastern Cherokee)

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Asleep and Awake: Contemporary Indigenous Video Art and the Politics of Presence Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

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Exploring Native Graphic Design The Artistry of Indigenous Games Elizabeth LaPensée, PhD (Anishinaabe-Métis-Irish)

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Celebrating Life and Death in a Zapotec Village Kevin Simpson

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Ascending New Heights: Four Artists to Watch America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

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Art + Literature: Joy Harjo-Sapulpa (Muscogee-Cherokee) Yvonne N. Tiger (SeminoleMuscogee-Cherokee) Images: Dana Tiger (MuscogeeSeminole-Cherokee)

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In Memoriam Joseph Jacobs (Cayuga) 107 America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Michael “Huzo” Paddlety (Kiowa) 107 Maya Torralba (Kiowa)

ARTIST PROFILES

68

Jackie Larson Bread (Blackfeet) Jean Merz-Edwards

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Brent Greenwood (Chickasaw-Ponca) America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

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Guest Column Everything You Create Is Protected by Copyright Law Kevin R. Kemper, PhD, LLM

Bobby C. Martin (Muscogee Creek) Roy Boney Jr. (Cherokee Nation)

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REVIEWS

Christine Nofchissey Horse (Navajo) Kim Baca (Diné-Santa Clara)

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COVER: Brent Greenwood (Chickasaw-Ponca), Oto Java, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 20 × 16 in., collection of Robert Mirabel (Taos).

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74

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108

Art Exhibit Reviews

86

Book Reviews

94

Music Review

97

Reports

98

MAY 17, 2015–JANUARY 10, 2016

Virgil Ortiz, Tahu, 2012. Clay, slip, leather and wild spinach paint. Promised gift from Vicki and Kent Logan to the collection of the Denver Art Museum. © Virgil Ortiz.

OPENING OCTOBER 4

SUPER INDIAN FRITZ SCHOLDER

1967–1980

Revolt 1680/2180: Virgil Ortiz is organized by the Denver Art Museum. It is presented with generous support from Vicki and Kent Logan, the donors to the Annual Fund Leadership Campaign, and the citizens who support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD). Promotional support is provided by 5280 Magazine, CBS4, Comcast Spotlight, and The Denver Post.

Fritz Scholder, Super Indian No. 2, 1971. Oil on canvas. Promised gift of Vicki and Kent Logan to the Denver Art Museum. ©Estate of Fritz Scholder.

Super Indian: Fritz Scholder, 1967–1980 is organized by the Denver Art Museum. It is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. It is presented with generous support from Vicki and Kent Logan, donors to the Annual Fund Leadership Campaign, and the citizens who support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD). Promotional support is provided by 5280 Magazine, CBS4, Comcast Spotlight, and The Denver Post.

Presented as part of the Denver Art Museum’s ongoing commitment to supporting and showcasing contemporary American Indian art.

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BAHTI INDIAN ARTS a pretty good shop for over 60 years Santa Fe (505) 983-4542 Tucson (520) 577-0290

w w w. b a h t i . c o m

Issue No. 8, Fall 2015 ISSN 2333-5548 (Print) • ISSN 2333-5556 (Online) Owners: America Meredith and Mary Ellen Meredith (both Cherokee Nation) Publishing Editor: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Marketing Director: Barbara Harjo (Cherokee descent) Copy Editor: Rosa Cays (Chicana) Proofreaders: Rosa Cays (Chicana), Jean Merz-Edwards Layout and Design: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Great Basin Representative: Melissa Melero (Fallon Paiute-Modoc) Great Lakes Representative: Kelly Church (Odawa-Ojibwe) Editorial Advisory Board: heather ahtone (Choctaw-Chickasaw) Emily Haozous, PhD, RN (Chiricahua Fort Sill Apache) Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi-Choctaw) Maggie Ohnesorgen (Mestiza) Paula Rivera (Taos Pueblo) Mary Jo Watson, PhD (Seminole) Ken Williams Jr. (Northern Arapaho-Seneca) Advertising Representatives (ads@firstamericanartmagazine.com): Barbara Harjo (Cherokee descent), West Nancy Strickland Fields (Lumbee), East Celeste Worl (Tlingit), Northwest Coast Social Media: Jacquie Archambeau (Cherokee Nation), Staci Golar (Cornish-WelshAmerican), and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) International distribution by Disticor Magazine Distribution Services.

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

Copyright © 2015 by First American Art Magazine, LLC. Cover and contents are fully protected by copyright and may not be reproduced in whole or part by any method without written permission, except those specific images listed with Creative Commons licenses. All reasonable efforts have been made to identify and contact copyright holders, but in some cases, these could not be traced. If you hold or administer rights for materials published here, please contact us. Any errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

First American Art Magazine® is registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

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JackieChessney Sevier andSevier 2015 Show Schedule for Jackie Sevier A Gathering of People, Wind, and Water Rapid City, SD, July 19th Santa Fe Indian Market Booth 715LIN_W, August 22nd and 23rd Northern Plains Indian Art Market Sioux Falls, SD, September 19th and 20th Cherokee Art Market Tulsa, OK, October 10th and 11th

w Nathalie’s of Santa Fe Three Generations Gallery Opening Canyon Road, August 21st

2015 Show Schedule for Chessney Sevier

Santa Fe Indian Market Booth 237PAL_S, August 22nd and 23rd Nathalie’s of Santa Fe Three Generations Gallery Opening Canyon Road, August 21st

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Editor’s Greetings

The easel arts, so-called fine arts, were all present in the Americas prior to contact: tempera painting on woven cotton, marble sculpture, and monumental architecture. Mass production is seen as inherently non-Native, but the Moche, Lambayeque, HE TERMS TRADITIONAL AND and other precontact Andean civilizations mass-produced tens of CONTEMPORARY are as common as nitrogen and oxygen at Native art events, yet these words don’t advance thousands of ceramics using molds.

Why are items made with honeysuckle or Job’s-tears thoughtful discourse about Indigenous art; rather, they deemed traditional when these plants were both imported from cripple it. Separately, they can be misused, vague, or trite—but Asia in the late 19th century? Jennie Ross Cobb (Cherokee, paired together in a false dichotomy, they are insidious.

1881–1959) developed her first photographs in 1887. James Contemporary is our current era in art. If we want to Young Deer (Nanticoke, 1876–1946) directed his first film in advocate for Indigenous arts’ place in the global art world, we 1909. Why are Indigenous photography and filmmaking still have to speak its language. Contemporary art follows modern art,1 and—depending on your perspective—begins in 1989, with struggling for acceptance in the public perception of Native the fall of the Soviet Union, advent of the Internet, and increase art? Instead of following any kind of time frame, the arbitrary designations of traditional and contemporary rely on the in economic globalization,2 or as early as 1945, with the end of World War II.3 Alternatively, contemporary art is defined as art lingering stereotype that Native Americans use plants and don’t made by a living person. “Look around you: contemporary art is use technology. We most—why not all?—of the art that is being made now,” writes Pairing traditional and know this to be untrue; art historian Terry Smith.4 let’s not reinforce these contemporary implies misconceptions.

The English language is rich in antonyms, or binary opposites, such as hot/cold, good/bad, rich/poor, etc. This they are opposites. If Once, I overstructuralist grammatical device influences the logic of English heard a judge declare a contemporary is new, then speakers. Pairing traditional and contemporary implies they are Navajo weaving to not traditional must be old. be traditional because opposites. If contemporary is new, then traditional must be old. A persistent stereotype of Native peoples is that we live in the past. it included red yarn, Anthropologist Beatrice Medicine (Sihasapa Lakota, 1923–2005) despite the fact that first-phase, Navajo chief ’s blankets from the used the term “ethnographic present” to describe how tribes are mid-19th century contain red. The same judge then praised a presented in literature as forever frozen in a pristine past.5 “traditional” tear dress, even though tear dresses were invented in Today Native people may not be stereotyped as vanishing, 1969.6 No “experts” possess working knowledge of the historical but our languages and artistic practices are viewed as on the prec- practices of every single tribe, so the concept of being traditional ipice of disappearing. If Western art is perceived as present and gets applied capriciously. A less arbitrary approach is to organize Indigenous art is past, the message is our art and cultures have no artwork by media and then process. place in the future. Yet, instead of disappearing, many Aboriginal Some artists take great pride in harvesting their own mateart forms are being revived. Shell engraving, ravenstail weaving, rials, e.g., clay, earth pigments, or plants for dyes or weaving, babiche bags sewing, and many other Indigenous art practices are and processing their work using Indigenous methods, such as more common now than 50 years ago. pit-firing ceramics, developed prior to contact. People in the In the larger art world, traditional means established. Modern year 2015 who hand-carve wampum, stone marbles, or steatite art, ca. 1860s–1960s, revolted against established art forms; tobacco pipes aren’t traveling back in time; they are making statehowever, post-modern art of the late 20th century was no longer ments about their cultural heritage, the importance of process, threatened by history. From the 1980s onward, artwork is rich materiality, and the artist’s hand in the work. with historical references.

Native artists who work with techniques that have been handed down work as contemporary artists to keep these From a Native perspective, traditional suggests embodying tribal values, speaking one’s language, participating in ceremonies methods alive. Native artists who work with New Genres or and dances, respecting elders, keeping tribal practices alive—basi- experimental media—but bring cultural philosophies into these forms—are often working with the same cultural accountability, cally what most of us see as desirable traits we wish to embody. a philosophical tenet that transcends chronology or material.

Here, the opposite of traditional would be assimilated.

I hope you enjoy the art—current and historical— How can there be a traditional style or a contemporary presented in this issue of First American Art Magazine. I hope style? Several Native art markets and shows cleave artwork in categories called contemporary and traditional. This implies some you encounter challenging, brilliant Native art during the many Native art events to come. And I hope fresh and accurate terms underlying time frame divides these concepts; however, upon are used to describe the art.

—America Meredith closer examination, this assumption falls apart.

T

1. Cuauhtémoc Medina. “Contemp(t)orary: Eleven Theses.” E-flux. Jan. 2010. May 21, 2010, web.

2. Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009): 1; Alexander Alberro, “Periodising Contemporary Art,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 9, no. 1–2 (2008): 66–73.

3. Peter Osbourne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013): 18.

4. Terry Smith, 1.

5. Beatrice Medicine, Learning to Be an Anthropologist and Remaining “Native”: Selected Writings (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001): 92.

6. Sidney Van Wyk, “Heritage Center Celebrating History of Miss Cherokee,” Tahlequah Daily Press, June 11, 2015, web.

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Letters to FAAM Seven Directions with Jason Asenap The magazine keeps getting better and better. I enjoyed Jason Asenap’s very expansive article “Seven Directions.”

The micro-budget film Chasing the Light looks like it could be really good when it’s finished (IMDb says it’s in postproduction). I wonder where a viewer can see it.

215 S. Muskogee Ave., Tahlequah, Oklahoma 918-453-5728 ar tscenter.cherokee.org

Asenap also covered the Choctaw-Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson who embellishes punching bags with beaded words and complex fringe bustles—inspiring and beyond.

Last weekend my family and I saw some dances from a Rulan Tangen Dancing Earth group member at Yerba Buena Gardens. A woman performed to a spoken-word narrative about being a fifth-generation basket weaver. She weaved her body around the stage. I’m pretty sure she said her dance had been choreographed by Tangen. Amazing.

Terri Saul (Choctaw-Chickasaw-Cherokee) Berkeley, CA Jason’s response: I was just talking to Blackhorse last night about Chasing the Light. He’s doing sound design on it sometime next month in NYC. Next screening around here will probably be Indian Market Friday night. Making films takes forever.

Monday-Friday 9 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.

Saturday 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. (and by appointment)

Solar Map Project Hello, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the wonderful article you wrote on the Solar Map Project. I am very touched by your support of the Pai Tavytera Indians, and all Native Americans, giving them a space and a voice.

Thank you again, and look forward to hearing from you.

Frank Weaver and Family Orlando, FL We welcome your letters to the editor! If we print your letter, we will send you a free copy of that issue of the magazine.

Please email your letters to us at:

info@firstamericanartmagazine.com or­mail letters to:

First American Art Magazine Attention: Editor 1000 Cordova Place, #843 Santa Fe, NM 87505.

What kind of man reads First American Art Magazine?

Osmar Valenzuela (Pai Tavytera, left) is the first person from his village—Tavytera Okenda in the Amambay Department of Eastern Paraguay—to attend college. He studied law at the Catholic University in Asunción and just received a new laptop, thanks to the Solar Map Project. This gift will help him with his new position working for the Paraguayan government’s Indian office. Image courtesy of Solar Map Project (solarmapproject.com).

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Contributing Writers

lifelong journey to deepen her understanding of Shawnee history and culture. She is currently working on a children’s book with her tribal community. Renee’s paternal great-grandmother Lizzie Mahiner Gokey’s Miami name was Ašihiwia. Her great-greatgrandmother Rose Ann was known as Ceenkwihšinka.

HEATHER AHTONE (Choctaw-Chickasaw) is the James T. Bialac associate curator of Native American and non-Western art at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma.

She earned degrees from the Institute of American Indian Arts and University of Oklahoma and previously worked for the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Southwestern Association of Indian Arts, and Ralph Appelbaum Associates. Continuing her work as an independent curator, ahtone has also written for multiple exhibition catalogues and Wícazo Ša Review. She has an essay in the upcoming catalogue, Conversations: Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, 2015.

SCOTT W. HALE is an art adviser and accredited appraiser for Native American Art Appraisals, Inc., with offices in Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Tulsa, and New York City. He pursued his master’s and doctoral studies at the University of Oklahoma, where he taught in the Native American Studies program and lectured in the School of Art and Art History. Hale is a former curator of private, corporate, and nonprofit art collections and has written and lectured for several publications and museums.

JACQUIE ARCHAMBEAU (Cherokee Nation) is a

FRANCI KING HART (English-American) is a free-

community organizer, consultant within the Cherokee Nation at-large satellite communities, and veteran of the US Air Force. She holds a culinary arts degree from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and has worked in many facets of the food world, including writing and teaching. Archambeau learned quilting from her Cherokee grandmother and was a member of an international quilting group when she lived in Singapore. She presently resides in Aurora, Illinois.

KIM BACA (Diné-Santa Clara) is a marketing and communica-

tions consultant and a former newspaper and wire service reporter for regional and national news organizations, including The Santa Fe New Mexican and the Associated Press.

MIRANDA BELARDE-LEWIS, PhD (Tlingit-Zuni), is a mom, independent curator, author, artist, and educator. She holds an MA in museology and a PhD in information science. She spends most of her time gawking at and geeking out about Native art. She lives in the Seattle area with her family.

ROY BONEY JR. (Cherokee Nation) is an award-winning

artist and writer. He holds a bachelor’s degree in graphic design and a master’s degree in studio art. Working in a variety of forms including comic books, paintings, drawings, and digital media, Boney focuses heavily on Cherokee culture and language in his art.

He is currently the manager of the Cherokee Language Program at Cherokee Nation.

SUZANNE NEWMAN FRICKE, PhD (AshkenazicAmerican), wrote her dissertation in art history on 20th-century Native American pottery at the University of New Mexico. She teaches art history at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

In 2012, she along with Beverly Morris (Aleut) and Charlie James curated the exhibit Octopus Dreams: Works on Paper by Contemporary Native American Artists, which traveled to six sites in Russia and to 516 Arts in Albuquerque. In 2014, two museums in Russia displayed another show, As We See It: Photography by Contemporary Native American Artists, curated by Dr. Fricke and India Young, who are preparing an accompanying catalogue. She is currently organizing a third show, which will also travel to Russia.

RENÉE GOKEY (Shawnee-Sac & Fox-Miami) holds a bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology and Native American studies from the University of New Mexico. She is the studentand-teacher services coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian and works in the Partnership and Extension Services Department for the museum’s National Education Initiative, Native Knowledge 360. Mother of two, Gokey is on a 1 4 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

lance writer, consultant, and fundraiser living in Nichols Hill, Oklahoma. Hart earned her bachelor’s degree in English and education from Southern Methodist University and her MBA from Southern Nazarene University. She is an alumna of Leadership Oklahoma and a former columnist of the Daily Oklahoman. Hart reviews music and theater for Oklahoma City Friday and collects Native American art.

JOE D. HORSE CAPTURE (A’aninin) is an associate

curator of collections and research at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution. He previously served as the associate curator of Native American art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He earned a history degree from Montana State University, Bozeman, and currently lives in Washington, DC.

KEVIN R. KEMPER, PhD, LLM, earned his doctoral degree

in journalism and juris doctorate from the University of Missouri, Columbia, and his master of laws degree from the University of Arizona’s Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program. Kemper is a lay provider for the Native American Journalists Association’s Legal Hotline for Journalists, and he is a lay advocate in the Pascua Yaqui Tribal Court. His business, Kemper Consulting, provides agency services for artists, writers, photographers, and other creators of intellectual property. He is not licensed to practice law.

ELIZABETH LaPENSÉE, PhD (Anishinaabe-Métis-Irish) expresses herself through writing, design, and art in games, comics, experimental animation, and other interactive media. Her work can be seen at elizabethlapensee.com.

DOYLE LOGAN JR. has collected rare books for over 58 years—beginning in high school—and specializes in Western Americana, the Fur Trade era, the Southwest, and American Indian books. Doyle and his wife owned a rare book and coffee house in Dallas, Texas. He also reviewed books about the Southwest and American Indians for three years for the Southwest Book Views out of Santa Fe. Doyle has sold American Indian fine art for the last 20 years, has written a book-length history of American Indian painting, and judged at the American Indian Art Festival in Dallas for several years. He now lives in Salina, Kansas.

THOLLEM McDONAS is a peripatetic pianist, keyboardist,

vocalist, collaborator, activist, educator, and author. He has released over 40 albums across the stylistic spectrum on 20 different vanguard labels. He performs throughout North America and Europe as a soloist and in collaboration with musicians, dancers, and filmmakers.

He has written articles for Anthology of Essays on Deep Listening and Full Moon Magazine.

JEAN MERZ-EDWARDS has studied art history since 2000, when she attended her first classes on the subject at Hunter College in New York. She recently earned her master’s degree in art history from the University of Oklahoma and was granted a certificate in women’s and gender studies and the Alice Mary Robertson Award for her scholarship on the life and art of Linda Lomahaftewa (HopiChoctaw). Merz-Edwards teaches art history and English at Kansas Wesleyan University in Salina, Kansas.

Arctic and Indian arts for the 21 century st

26 Maine Street Kennebunkport, Maine 207 967-2122

JOHN PAUL RANGEL, PhD (Mestizo), is a scholar, writer, artist, and designer. He earned his master’s degree in American studies in 2006, and his doctoral degree in education from the University of New Mexico in 2012. He has worked with many Native institutions, including the Institute for American Indian Arts and the Santa Fe Indian Market. He is currently the creative director for his own design/marketing studio, Asphalt Apache Design.

CATHY SHORT (Citizen Potawatomi) is a professional photographer and textile designer. With her husband Hank and son Christopher, she owns Lizard Light Productions, specializing in fine art photography, video production, laser art, and Native-designed clothing and accessories. Short serves on the board of Wings of America. She exhibits throughout the Southwest and is based in Goodyear, Arizona.

KEVIN SIMPSON owns two galleries of Indigenous

Mexican folk art, Peyote People and Colectika. Both follow fair trade practices and are devoted to promoting Indigenous culture.

Simpson graduated with honors and a degree in political science from the University of Western Ontario in 1994. He lives in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico.

MATTHEW RYAN SMITH, PhD, is a freelance writer, independent curator, and sessional professor in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. He is currently the Canadian editor of the Art Market Dictionary to be published by De Gruyter in 2017. His writings have been featured in several Canadian and international publications including Canadian Art, ESSE, Blackflash, and Afterimage. He has also published in several academic journals including TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, the Canadian Journal of Native Studies, and Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. He has recently completed a book chapter on unsanctioned graffiti interventions in Johannesburg for a forthcoming book on public art in South Africa to be published by the University of Indiana Press.

Cape Dorset Annual Print Collection 2015 October 16 Release Sculpture | Prints | Jewelry |Beadwork |Baskets shop online: www.homeandawaygallery.com

NATIVE AMERICAN ART APPRAISALS, INC. SINCE 1936

YVONNE N. TIGER (Cherokee-Seminole-Muscogee) is a

freelance writer who holds a bachelor of arts degree with honors from Smith College and two master’s degrees from the University of Oklahoma: one in 20th-century US history with an emphasis on Native American history, and the other in Native American studies with an emphasis on Native American art history and curating. She currently works for the American Indian studies program at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign.

MAYA TORRALBA (Kiowa) lives in Anadarko, Oklahoma, where she creates her own artwork. She attended the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma in Chickasha. Torralba founded the Community Esteem Project in 2008 to empower local youth, especially Native American girls.

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

CALL EMAIL

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CHEROKEE ART MARKET OCTOBER 1 0

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One of Oklahoma’s most prestigious and largest intertribal Native American art markets CherokeeArtMarket.com • (877) 779-6977 Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tulsa • I-44 Exit 240, Catoosa, OK

Troy Jackson –“The Gift” (sculpture) Shawna Cain –“Grandma’s Gathering” (basket) 1 6 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Opportunity to Purchase and Promote Authentic Native American Art and Craftwork

Wes Willie, Navajo, bracelet, Spirit Mountains, ©2008

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

For more information on the IACB If you are a Native American artist or craftsperson enrolled in a federally recognized tribe, we encourage you to apply for a FREE business listing in the Source Directory. Please visit the IACB website or call toll free, 1-888-278-3253, for application information.

Under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, all American Indian and Alaska Native art and craft products must be marketed truthfully regarding the tribal enrollment and Indian heritage of the artist or craftsperson.

and its programs, please contact:

Indian Arts and Crafts Board U.S. Department of the Interior 1849 C Street, NW, MS 2528-MIB Washington, DC 20240 Toll Free: 1-888-278-3253 Email: iacb@ios.doi.gov Web: www.doi.gov/iacb

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Recent Developments

The Red Earth Native American Cultural Festival returned to the Cox Convention Center in downtown Oklahoma City for its 30th annual Eskimo Co-Operative. These drawings MUSEUMS market. The Grand Award Winner was and prints from Cape Dorset, Nunavut, Jolene Bird. Alberta Henderson received The Autonomous University of Morelos date from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s. the Kathleen Everett Upshaw Award, (UAEM) opened its new Museum and Troy Anderson won the President’s Jim and Nancy Blair donated their of Contemporary Indigenous Award. Division winners were Kristie collection of precontact Mesoamerican Arts or Museo de Arte Indígena art to the Museum of Native American Vann, basketry; Yonavea Hawkins, Contemporáneo (MAIC) in July. beadwork; Margaret Roach Wheeler, History (MONAH) in Bentonville, Wilfrido Ávila García is the director of textiles; Daniel Worchester, cultural Arkansas. Jim Blair began collecting the new museum located in Cuernavaca, items; Anita Caldwell Jackson, diversified Morelos, Mexico. Prior to its permanent pre-Columbian artwork when he was paid for his legal services in Mesoamerican arts; Tonya June Rafael, contemporary home, the MAIC had showcased its jewelry; Jolene Bird, traditional jewelry; collection in traveling exhibits in Mexico artifacts in the 1960s.

Peggy Fontenot, drawings/graphics/ and the United States. photography; Fernando Padilla, oil/ GALLERIES acrylic painting; Merlin Little Thunder, Hallie Winter (Osage) is the new director of the Osage Tribal Museum Quintana Galleries in Portland, Oregon, water-based painting; Chase Kahwinhut Earles, traditional pottery; Karin in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. She earned is closing in August. Rose and Cecil Walkingstick, contemporary pottery; her bachelor’s degree in art history with Quintana founded the gallery 42 years and Troy Anderson, sculpture. a minor in museum studies at SUNY ago in 1972, and the couple’s daughter Buffalo State College and is completing Cecily Quintana served as gallery director The 8th Annual Woodland Indian her master’s degree in museum studies in recent years. The high-end gallery Art Show and Market took place in at the University of Oklahoma. Winter specialized in Northwest Coast art.

Green Bay, Wisconsin. Category winners replaced Kathryn Red Corn, who retired were Dawn Dark Mountain (Wisconsin The Acadia First Nation opened Sipuke’l in the spring. Founded in 1938, the Osage Oneida), two-dimensional; Mark Fisher Gallery in the Old Town Hall cultural Tribal Museum is oldest tribal museum in (Wisconsin Oneida), three-dimensional; center in Liverpool, Nova Scotia.

The the United States.

Wanda Anton (San Carlos Apache), tribally run gallery features Mi’kmaq and Mary Maxon is the new director of the other Acadia First Nations artists alongside functional items and apparel; Betty Heritage Center of Red Cloud Indian artifacts from a nearby site on the Mersey Willems (Wisconsin Oneida), raised beadwork; Cynthia Thomas (Wisconsin School in Pine Ridge, South Dakota.

River, which date back 8,500 years.

Oneida), pottery; and Mercedes Danforth Ashley Pourier (Oglala Lakota) has been (Wisconsin Oneida), youth. First place promoted to curator.

ART FAIRS for the theme Laughter Is Good Medicine The Brinton Museum in Big Horn, was Cynthia Thomas.

The Muscogee Creek Nation hosted Wyoming, opened its new 24,000-squareits Council House Art Market in foot building in June, which showcases Okmulgee, Oklahoma. Best of Show ART SHOWS Native American and Western art. The winner was Scott Roberts (Muscogee museum is located at the historic Quarter The Heritage Center at Red Cloud Creek). Best Muscogee artist was Harry Circle A Ranch, founded by Bradford Indian School in Pine Ridge, South Beaver (Muscogee Creek). Honorable Brinton in the late 19th century. mention went to Randy Kemp (Choctaw- Dakota, held its 47th annual Red Cloud Yuchi-Muscogee). The market was held Indian Art Show. Category winners were The Anchorage Museum in Alaska on the on the grounds of the nation’s Isaiah Stewart (Oglala Lakota), painting; won a National Endowment for the Arts council house, purchased by the tribe in Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho), (NEA) Our Town award. The $150,000 2010 and currently under renovation. drawing; Roger Broer (Oglala Lakota), grant will go toward the museum’s Polar Lab, which connects artists, environgraphics; Tom Swift Bird (Oglala Lakota), Best of Show winner at this year’s mentalists, and scientists in exploring the photography; Angela Babby (Oglala Eiteljorg Museum Indian Market and present and future of the Arctic North.

Lakota), mixed media; Michael Two Festival was Susan Hudson (Navajo).

Bulls (Oglala Lakota), Douglas Two Bulls Lisa Rutherford (Cherokee Nation) and The McMichael Canadian Art (Oglala Lakota), and Molina Jo Parker Melanie Sainz (Ho-Chunk) both won Collection in Toronto, Ontario, will (Oglala Lakota), three-dimensional; and Harrison Eiteljorg Purchase Awards. digitize over 100,000 Inuit works on Sandra Wescott-Gauthier (Wisconsin Martha Gradolf (Winnebago) won the paper on loan from the West Baffin Oneida), cultural items. Bryan D. Parker Helen Cox Kersting Award.

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(Cree-Choctaw-Apache) won the Brother Simon Award purchase award, which means his artwork will be used to publicize the 48th annual art show.

Father-son team Bill and Demos Glass (both Cherokee Nation) won the Grand Prize at the 44th annual Trail of Tears Art Show, hosted by the Cherokee Heritage Center in Park Hill, Oklahoma. Category winners were Kenny Henson (Cherokee Nation), painting; Troy Jackson (Cherokee Nation), sculpture; Shan Goshorn (Eastern Band Cherokee), basketry; Chase Kahwinhut Earles (Caddo), pottery; Stephen Wood (Cherokee Nation), Trail of Tears; Joseph Erb (Cherokee Nation), jewelry; Jeff Edwards (Cherokee Nation), graphics; and Norma Howard (Choctaw-Chickasaw), miniatures.

PUBLICATIONS Publisher Mary Hamilton has announced that the August/ Autumn 2015 issue of American Indian Art Magazine would be its final issue. After 40 years of publication, the Scottsdalebased magazine will cease publication. Subscribers will be refunded for unfilled subscriptions, and many of the 106 back issues are available for discounted purchase.

FILM and VIDEO The Sundance Institute selected projects by Razelle Benally (Navajo-Oglala Lakota) and Randi LeClair (Pawnee) for its Native Filmmakers Lab. The two writers attended the residential lab in Santa Fe and received grants and support to produce short films.

REPATRIATION The San Bernardino County Museum will return 50,000 artifacts and human remains to the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians and potentially five other tribes. These items were disinterred in a 1950s archaeological dig of Temeéku, the Luiseño’s oldest known village that dates back 10,000 years.

PREHISTORIC SITES Peru announced a four-year plan to increase access to Machu Picchu, the 15th-century Inca citadel. More buildings, other sites, and additional Inca roads will be opened to the public.

Controlled grass fires revealed monumental rock alignments at the Henry Smith Site near the Milk River in Northern Montana. While researchers have been aware of the drive lines (large boulders arranged to facilitate bison hunting) since the 1960s, they recently discovered stone effigies of a human and an animal, possibly a turtle. These were photographed with an unmanned aircraft operated by the US Bureau of Land Management.

Indian Market Shows at KESHi 227 don gaspar santa fe 505.989.8728 Zuni Fetish Carvers: August 21–23 Fri. 4 - 6 pm Kateri Quandelacy Sanchez Sat.11 - 1 pm Claudia Peina 2 - 5 pm Eddington Hannaweeke Sun.11- 2 pm Loren Tsalabutie Hiram Peynetsa Brion Hattie

KESHi the zuni connection Antler Bow Priest by Claudia Peina

Under the Antiquities Act, President Barack Obama created the Basin and Range National Monument in Lincoln and Nye Counties of southeastern Nevada on July 10, 2015. This 704,000-acre expanse includes rock-art sites near Mount Irish, White River Narrows, and the North Pahroc Range. Some of the rock art has been dated back to 4,000 years ago.

CRIME and LEGAL ISSUES Daniel Coleman Dargavell was arrested and jailed for driving his truck over a 2,000-year-old Adena burial mound at Serpent Mound State Memorial in Adams County, Ohio. He faces felony charges for his drunken vandalism. After he was identified by security footage of his truck, Dargavell turned himself in to police, spent almost a week in jail, paid over $3,700 in damages, and will perform community service at the site. The tire tracks left gouges in the sod, but the damage is reparable.

The Great Serpent Mound was not damaged.

Terry Lee Whetstone of Odessa, Missouri, is charged with falsely representing himself as a Native American artist, which is a felony under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990. The sculptor, jeweler, painter, and flute maker claimed to be Cherokee but is not enrolled in any recognized tribe. Kenn “Grey Elk” DesCombes of the Northern Cherokee Nation claims Whetstone as a member, but neither the US federal government nor the state of Missouri recognize the organization.

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Seven Directions Michole Eldred

M

ICHOLE ELDRED (Catawba-Eastern Band Cherokee) is a writer, curator, and educator. She received her bachelor’s degree in art and museum studies at the University of Southern Florida and master’s degree in education from Berry College. Much of her work is focused on curating Indigenous art and historical exhibitions. She believes the process of art making and enjoyment of the arts should be accessible to all people. Through interpretive exhibit planning, she furthers her work in writing art curriculum and teaching the arts to people with disabilities.

CENTER. When you live in Florida, the world comes to

you—to bask in the sun, swim in the gulf, and just enjoy life.

Most visitors and even many Floridians are unaware of the tragic history this lands holds. The Seminole Tribe of Florida (STOF) wants to change that. With the US Army Core of Engineers, the STOF is preserving a piece of Florida history by restoring EGMONT KEY. This small island was a detainment center for Seminoles before the US government forced them west in the mid-19th century. They suffered from illness, starvation, dehydration, and even death during their internment, and many were buried on the island. I had the honor of visiting the island and praying there with Bobby Henry, a Seminole medicine man.

It was an emotional experience. Paul Backhouse (Seminole), tribal historic preservation officer and director of the Ah-TahThi-Ki Museum, secured grant funding to provide environmental stabilization to the island and develop education curriculum about the site’s history. We should never forget our own families and past that mold us in to the individuals we are today.

present and future. Participating artists reflect on the fact that their own ancestors were forcibly removed from their homelands.

This traveling exhibition opens on Southeastern lands at Lyndon House Art Center in Athens, Georgia, on August 21 and runs through October 10. Mary Jo Watson, PhD (Seminole) is writing articles for the show’s catalogue. For future locations, visit returnfromexile.org.

Will Wilson (Diné), Auto Immune Response #5, 2004, archival inkjet print, 44 × 109 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

WEST. The work of two different but equally talented

Egmont Key. Image courtesy of Michole Eldred.

EAST. An exciting exhibition coming to the Southeast

is RETURN FROM EXILE. Jace Weaver, director of the Institute of Native American Studies Institute at the University of Georgia, Tony Tiger (Muscogee-Sac & Fox-Seminole), and Bobby C. Martin (Muscogee Creek) are curating the work of 34 Southeastern artists. Return from Exile will be an opportunity to educate and open conversations about how past influences the 2 0 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Diné photographers, WILL WILSON and PAMELA J. PETERS, engage urban Indians and the Relocation Era in their artist practices.

Wilson’s Auto Immune Response series explores how an individual’s physical being and sense of self can transform based on environmental changes. His subjects actively participate in his project Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX) by including significant objects of their own choosing and reinserting personal voices and Indigenous authority to the tintype portraits. Wilson showed at the Museum of Fine Art in Yekaterinburg, Russia, last summer, and this past spring at Texas Tech University. Look for Wilson shooting more tintypes during the Santa Fe Indian Market. willwilson.photoshelter.com Pamela J. Peters shoots photographs and film with the theatrical aesthetic and storytelling of old Hollywood. Peters lives and works in Los Angeles, where she photographs urban Indians in their own environment. Peters has followed five Indigenous tribes and is expanding her short film into a full-length documentary, Legacy of Exiled NDNZ, which was influenced by Kent

BELOW. Why do people value the culture in which they

are born? I ask myself this question many times. Our culture allows us to develop meaningful relationships with people similar to us. Those relationships can develop and strengthen when we are together with others performing routines such as cooking our own culture’s food, sharing language, practicing religious ceremonies, or teaching and learning an art technique. When we are together, bonds grow, our own culture continues, and we value it.

I witnessed this value of culture thriving in Hawai‘i in the art form of LAU HALA. Lau hala is the practice of weaving the hala leaves into utilitarian baskets and mats that originated in precontact Polynesia, but now expanded hats and iPad covers are the useful objects of today. Beauty does not just lie in the woven Pamela J. Peters (Diné), Legacy of Exiled NDNZ, 2014, film still. Image item itself. It lies in the relationship of the teacher and the student courtesy of the artist. and in teaching and learning.

The Bishop Museum in Honolulu showed Nani I Ka Hala, Mackenzie’s 1961 film, The Exiles. Her documentary shares stories Weaving Hawai‘i, a powerful exhibition that unites language, about the participants’ professional lives, home environments, and storytelling, weavings, and science into a single narrative. If identities. The film will unveil some participants’ strong connecyou can’t make it to Hawaii, you can also learn more about lau tions to their tribal reservations while others have sustained a hala in a new exhibit catalogue, Ike Ulana Lau Hala: The Vitality new life for themselves in Southern California. Peters also shoots and Vibrancy of Lau Hala Weaving Traditions in Hawaii, published still photographs of “Indian Alley” and captures images of urban by the Hawai‘inuiakea School of Hawaiian Knowledge and the Indians who transitioned from reservations to Los Angeles to University of Hawai‘i Press. pursue school, acting, art, and work in the film industry. Peters hopes these real-life images of Indigenous people help debunk the stereotypical Hollywood images still perpetuated today. exiledndnz.com and tachiiniiphotography.com

NORTH. For the past decade, one work of art has captured

my attention daily: a large piece by SEAN WHONNOCK (Kwakwaka’wakw) that hangs in my living room. I don’t know Whonnock personally, but if I can enjoy one of his works every day for ten years without getting bored with it, then I am a fan!

I purchased his work in Canada. Another trip must be due, since Whonnock’s carvings are included in the exhibition The Box of Treasures: Gifts from the Supernatural at the Bill Reid Gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia. If you haven’t had the pleasure of visiting the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art, I highly recommend it. The building itself is a work of art, not to mention the many outstanding works of Aboriginal art of the Northwest Coast that it contains. seanwhonnock.com

SOUTH. Directly south of me (albeit not very far) in

Naples, Florida, resides an outstanding emerging artist, JESSICA OSCEOLA (Seminole Tribe of Florida). Osceola’s creativity has developed from a young artist’s search to define her work— and self—to an artist whose work beautifully exemplifies her self-identity and aesthetic style. Osceola characterizes her work as her own personal narrative of identity, culture, place, and hybridity. She currently creates figurative pieces in a variety of media, from ceramics to resins. You can see her work at the South Florida State College Museum of Florida Art and Culture, the City of St. Augustine’s exhibit Tapestry: The Cultural Threads of First America (showing through September 20), and in the upcoming Return From Exile exhibition in Athens, Georgia. jessicaosceolaart.com

Pila‘a Kilani (Native Hawaiian) weaving a lau hala mat, ca. 1913, Pukoo, Molokai, Hawaii. Photo: Ray Jerome Baker (1880–1972).

ABOVE. My full support and admiration goes to University

of South Carolina, Lancaster and their Native American Studies Archive. Established in 2012, this center is for the study of South Carolina’s Native American people and their histories, and offers educational programs about language, folklore, and oral history.

It also houses the world’s largest collection of Catawba Indian pottery. Brent Bergin, the USC archivist, is carefully digitizing thousands of historical Catawba photographs. Currently available to Catawba Nation, these will soon be available online to the public. State schools focus on historical events of long ago and rarely mention the vibrant Native American culture existing within South Carolina today. Thank you, USC Lancaster, for always providing assistance for those that want to learn. facebook.com/nativeamericanstudies FAL L 2 0 1 5

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Exploring Native Graphic Design

The Artistry of Indigenous Games

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AMES ARE A POWERFUL MEDIUM for expression, with their unique layering of play, story, art, and audio brought about through design and code.

As I understand—with gratitude for teachings from my mother Anishinaabe and Métis science fiction scholar Grace L. Dillon, reinforced by Métis-Cree filmmaker Loretta Todd, Blackfoot physicist Dr. Leroy Little Bear, and many others—we have always seen community knowledge in the form of expansive, virtual connections.

Considering that the medicine wheel is dimensional, digital art and game engines simply give us ways to represent our dimensional worldviews.

Expressing ourselves through games could be considered what Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor refers to as survivance—survival, endurance, and resistance—while also being an ideal space for relational art.

As an Anishinaabe, Métis, and Irish game designer, writer, and researcher, I always have my eyes open for Indigenous games. I love playing games, and I’m especially excited to play games made by Indigenous developers. Making our own games can be about more than accurately representing ourselves, although this, too, is vital work. What I’m hoping to show in my own work and share from others is game design.

I believe strongly that the game industry was influenced by Indigenous worldviews early on. John Romero, self-taught coder and designer of Yaqui and Cherokee descent, developed the genre-defining, first-person-shooter game DOOM. This game reoriented perspectives in space and what was possible in games, and inspired and

By Elizabeth LaPensée community permission to adapt into gameplay by implementing Iñupiaq art, language, and teachings. Interestingly, the game rewards players with real videos of storytellers and community members as they make progress through levels. Never Alone reinforces the idea that Iñupiaq culture is living and ongoing, while simultaneously inspiring Indigenous communities locally and worldwide to create games Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishinaabe-Métisas a way to share their worldview.

Irish), We Sing for Healing, 2015, with music by Exquisite Ghost. All images courtesy of the author.

Game design in nondigital games can also be influential. Allen Turner is empowered generations of devela designer and coder of Lakota descent, opers whose first experience with and his tabletop role-playing game game design involved “modding,” or Ehdrigohr is a lexicon of Indigenous modifying DOOM. Indigenous ways game design. Tabletop role-playing of knowing thus contributed to the games facilitate players co-creating foundation of video games. immense experiences through discusIndigenous games and game devel- sions and sometimes the use of paper opers are now getting more recognition and dice. Allen drew from his industry thanks to the release of Never Alone, the experience and traditional teachings to award-winning platform for consoles create a game that playfully yet deeply and PC developed by the Cook Inlet changes the dynamics of most roleTribal Council in collaboration with playing games. He was inspired partially ally game company E-Line Media. The by playing other tabletop roleplaying game weaves a historical-traditional games with Indigenous youth and story—which the developers had observing their discomfort with

Manuel “Maneco” Marcano (Taíno), Treachery in Beatdown City, forthcoming.

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Just as it always has been, our art can be represented as relational and living in games. actions like stealing from tombs. It was important to him to make a game that Indigenous communities could relate to and be able to grow from.

The same could be said for the design of The Gift of Food, a Pacific Northwest Native foods board game that I designed for the Northwest Indian College. The gameplay is built on the values of collaboration, stewardship, generosity, and gratitude. Stealing and backstabbing, which are actions in many other board games, are replaced with inviting other families to go with your family to gather or hunt, or to trade with other families. Players are

Renee Nejo (Mesa Grande Kumeyaay), Blood Quantum, forthcoming.

rewarded for giving back to the land and taking care of it through stewardship tokens exchangeable for food and medicine gift tokens at the end of the game. The winning player is determined not by how many tokens they have but by the diversity of the range of their tokens, further reinforcing traditional values.

Tradition can also be shared through games in the same ways we share it day to day. Singuistics: Anishinaabemowin, developed by the ally game company Pinnguaq with Miskwaasining Nagamojig (Swamp Singers), a woman’s hand-drum group, uses singing as a game mechanic to

Allen Turner (Lakota descent), Ehdrigohr: The Roleplaying Game, 2013.

pass on language and teachings while digitized art by Simone McLeod (Ojibwe-Cree), Shaun Hedican (Eabametoong Ojibwe), Jonathan Thunder (Red Lake Ojibwe), and myself pan in the background during rounds of songs. The art itself, of course, shares knowledge, including menu art I designed for the overall Singuistics game, which opens with a map of the Americas stylized to represent Turtle Island teachings as land knowledge.

Art can also directly inform game mechanics. In Spirits of Spring, developed by ally game company Minority Media in collaboration with Cree filmmaker Ernest Webb, floral art is interactive and an integral part of gameplay. Just as it always has been, our art can be represented as relational and living in games.

Games can be inspired by contemporary experiences as well. While Spirits of Spring adapts the challenges of bullying into game design, Treachery in Beatdown City directly confronts street violence. Inspired by urban face-offs, Taíno programmer and designer Manuel “Maneco” Marcano created the battle system in the beat-’em-up Treachery in Beatdown City as he made a shift from working on AAA games to his own indie games.

As more and more Indigenous people are empowered through self-determined game development, we’re sure to see games with meaningful depth considered art in and of themselves.

Game artist Renee Nejo (Mesa Grande Kumeyaay) is currently working on Blood Quantum, which cleverly uses nonhuman droplet characters and accessible casual game design to make a statement through mechanics about how blood quantum policies contribute to ongoing colonization.

These examples and more show the range in Indigenous expression in all forms of games. The continuation and expansion of this work is directly connected to workshops and efforts like the Skins Video Game Workshops, Ogoki App Development Camps, Initiative for Indigenous Futures, and Indigenous Routes. The more access and education that is offered to youth and established creatives in other areas, the more voices we will have in the robust space of game development that calls on many skills.

For those before us, for those living survivance now, and for those to come, Indigenous game design is a path for expression in many forms. With hope for days ahead with Indigenous game engines and more work from the code up.

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THE RED COLLECTION Beaded Evening Gown

Hand-beaded Silk Organza and Silk Duchess Satin Hand-dyed in Cochineal Photo by Blair Clark

ORLANDO DUGI Santa Fe, NM ◊ www.OrlandoDugi.com

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Please join us...

for a conversation with Juanita Growing Thunder Fogarty and Jessa Rae Growing Thunder

August 18 at 3 pm, at the Ralph T. Coe Foundation. Space is limited.

In addition, visit us at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian!

In partnership with the Wheelwright, we are pleased to announce the exhibition:

Connoisseurship and Good Pie: Ted Coe and Collecting Native Art Opens July 25, 2015 at the Wheelwright Juanita Growing Thunder Fogerty, Assiniboine Tobacco Bag, n.d. Gift to Ralph T. Coe by the artist.

W

Ralph T. Coe Foundation for the Arts Aspen Plaza 1590 B Pacheco Street Santa Fe, NM 87505 www.ralphtcoefoundation.org

Wheelwright Museum

OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

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Ga ni tha, Three Native Women, and the Venice Biennale

By John Paul Rangel The Venice Biennale is arguably the largest, oldest-continuing, and most prestigious art event in the world. While some Native artists exhibited in national pavilions, others, such as the women of Ga ni tha, have carved out their own Indigenous space.

E

VERY YEAR, NATIVE ARTISTS in the Northern Hemisphere prepare and travel to major art shows like the Santa Fe Indian Market and the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market. These fairs have garnered reputations for bringing not only diversity but also excellence in Native North American art. Over the last couple of decades, museums, tribes, and colleges have initiated markets with similar formats that occur throughout the year. These juried art markets provide Native artists the opportunity to exhibit, network, sell their work, and earn a living as a working artist. For many Indigenous artists, these shows are a viable way to represent their art and culture while targeting an audience specifically interested or invested in the production and consumption of Native art. The work generated for these types of exhibitions is often targeted toward the collector.

Art, however, is also produced in the context of the greater art world and represented on a global or international level. Many issues in this discussion

extend beyond the scope of this article, but some address what is being produced for consumption, exhibition format, and identifying as “Native American” or “American Indian” art. What happens when a Native artist exhibits at a national or international level with artists from other countries, other ethnicities, or in another country? How does this affect the production or reception of the work?

How is artwork produced by Native artists in conversation, or not, with artists from other hemispheres?

On the far northeast coast of Italy lies Venice, a city surrounded by water and renowned for its influence on the arts, architecture, and literature. Venice is famous for its canals and gondolas, the Piazzo San Marco, the Rialto Bridge, and of course centuries of art and impressive architecture around almost every corner.

Since 1895, Venice has hosted the Venice Biennale, an international art fair that occurs every two years. Artists from many countries participate and display their work in two main areas, the Giardini and the Arsenale. This show attracts hundreds

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of thousands of visitors. While the official Venice Biennale occurs in two specific locations within national pavilions, other official and unofficial exhibition sites span the city. One of these sites featured three Native American artists in Ga ni tha, an exhibition to coincide with the opening days of the official Venice Biennale.

Art historian, professor, and curator Nancy Marie Mithlo, PhD (Chiricahua Apache) staged a weeklong exhibition featuring Indigenous artists Marcella Ernest (Bad River Ojibwe), Maria Hupfield (Wasauksing Ojibwe), and Keli Mashburn (Osage) at We Crociferi in the Cannaregio district. The exhibition entitled Ga ni tha included photography, performance, and film. Filmmaker Marcella Ernest and photographer Keli Mashburn presented the collaborative photography and film project Ga.ni.tha.

Joined by Brooklyn-based performance artist Maria Hupfield in her newest work Jiimaan (Canoe), this artistic team brought an Indigenous presence to the world’s oldest international arts exposition.

Together they represent a new generation

OPPOSITE and ABOVE: Marcella Ernest (Bad River Ojibwe) and Keli Mashburn (Osage), Ga.ni.tha, 2013, video screenshots.

of Native women artists working across disciplines referencing the body, land, and culture through action, construction, and symbolic representation.

photography at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Having developed film in a traditional darkroom beginning in 1998, Mashburn employs various experimental techniques to produce black-and-white photographic prints from 35mm film. Her A Collaborative pieces “explore the ethereal realm between Film Installation physical place and personal myth.”

Throughout the course of the MASHBURN IN COLLABORAexhibition, the film is projected on the TION with Ernest seeks to transform courtyard wall in the evenings, and the classic landscapes and imagery of the the sounds permeate the space with American prairie through photography, Indigenous presence.

The photographs, video, and sound. “The prairie fire exemvideo, and sound become the installation plifies death and renewal,” says Mashburn.

Ga.ni.tha.

Mashburn’s photographs appear “The tension isn’t so much between earth in the film, which Marcella Ernest uses and sky. The tension is in what happens as a primary medium for contemporary, between them, the cycle of destruction digital storytelling. and rebirth.”

Ernest, an interdisciplinary The filmmakers call the piece video artist, received her bachelor “a performance of sound that weaves of arts degree in Ethnic Studies with language, song, prayer and land with a minor in Film Studies from Mills resonance of the Osage.” The two College, and her master’s degree in converge on the concept of ga.ni.tha, an Indigenous Documentary Research old Osage word dating hundreds of years Methodologies and Film Production whose meaning can signify obliteration from the Native Voices program at the and rebirth, chaos, disorder, and apocaUniversity of Washington.

Currently, lypse. Mashburn explains that a symbiotic Ernest is completing an interdisciplinary relationship exists between the land and the Osage, annihilation and new growth, doctoral degree. Through her research of contemporary Native art through and chaos or disorder and balance. She Indigenous experimental films, digital illustrates this through the metaphor of music, and video performance, she seeks a prairie fire. Mashburn’s large-format to understand how members of colonized photographs are stark and quiet landgroups use video for cultural and political scapes—the prairies in Oklahoma, and expressions of resistance. her home.

Ernest incorporates concepts of Keli Mashburn grew up on a ranch on the Osage Reservation in Northeastern memory, identity formation, citizenship, gender, and family in her work through Oklahoma. She studied philosophy layers of sound and images. For Ga.ni.tha, at the University of Tulsa and at the University of Oklahoma before studying Ernest creates a dynamic and rhythmic

presentation of Mashburn’s photography by interlacing it with dance footage combined with various environmental sounds and Osage Elonska songs. This film is Ernest’s interpretation of the concept inherent in the word ga.ni.tha as she signifies the connection of Osage language, culture, tradition, and memory with the land.

Live Performance Art SCULPTURE AND PERFORMANCE-BASED ARTIST Maria Hupfield’s contribution to this exhibition is a site-specific work entitled Jiimaan, a 20-minute live performance with a nine-foot canoe she handmade with industrial felt. “I use the canoe as a vehicle and metaphor to create new connections to memory, the body, and movement,” says Hupfield. “All areas of the public space are activated from the performer’s body, to surface, altering the site as extended social space of resilience and personal empowerment.” In the days prior to the exhibition, Hupfield created her felt canoe in the form of an Anishinaabe birch-bark, hunting canoe specifically for the performance. Over the three days, she performed with it in the center of the courtyard—next to, around, and on top of a Venetian well, at dusk.

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patterns, red tights, gold sneakers, and a string of ribbons. By the end of the performance, Hupfield creates a relationship to the canoe in different ways and states, “How one sees the object evolves over time and changes based on how I am using it. That speaks to perceptions or assumptions around material culture, material culture outside ourselves; how meaning isn’t always fixed and can be activated together through shared experience.”

While some of the elements can be seen as culturally specific, Anishinaabe references, including Anishinaabe language and song, Hupfield wants aspects of her performances to be accessible and views her work as relevant and relatable across cultures to a broad audience. Central to her work, she also uses sound, movement, and interaction with the audience to activate space in her performances. Hupfield says the canoe changed and became different things: “a body, my body, a big fish, history, culture. Sometimes I had to jump over it, carry it, drape it over my head, suspend it over the well, or sit it on the edge.”

She sees the object and the performance as unexpected poetry to be experienced from several points of entry, not only for her, but also for the audience.

In keeping with the organizing theme for the show, Hupfield says,

response to the paintings of Jaune Quickto-See Smith (Sqelix’u-Métis-Shoshone) at Accola Griefen Gallery in Chelsea, New York. She is represented by Galerie Hugues Charbonneau in Montreal.

Nancy Mithlo. Photo: Keli Mashburn (Osage).

Earlier Native Presences in Venice

WHILE ERNEST AND MASHBURN have collaborated previously, this is the first time these three women have exhibited together. Curator Nancy Marie Mithlo, who has been a driving force I relate to the Osage concept of in creating a contemporary Native art ga.ni.tha through water vessels; jiimaan presence during the Venice Biennale since is the Anishinaabemowin word for 1999, created this landmark opportunity ‘canoe.’ Being from the Great Lakes for these artists. region and home of 30,000 islands, it is Mithlo has worked with many common practice to use a canoe to embody accomplished Native artists in these balance, relate physically to place, recall curated shows that happen during the old memories, and forge new ones. biennale: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Sqelix’u-Métis-Shoshone), Harry Currently based in Brooklyn, Maria Hupfield is originally from Canada Fonseca (Nisenan Maidu, 1946-2006), Bob Haozous (Chiricahua Apache), Frank and a member of Wasauksing First LaPena (Nomtipom Maidu-Wintu), Nation, Ontario. She received a 2013 Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee Nation), Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant and 2014 AIM residency Mateo Romero (Cochiti), Richard Ray Whitman (Yuchi-Muscogee), Shelley at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Her Niro (Mohawk), Lori Blondeau (Creeperformance Contain That Force: 7 Solo Saulteaux), Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk), Acts was presented by the SAW Video Andrea Carlson (Ojibwe descent), John Media Arts Centre in Ottawa for the exhibition Sakahàn: International Indigenous Hitchcock (Comanche), Melanie Yazzie Art. She performed All Is Moving in (Navajo), Marwin Begaye (Navajo), C. 2 8 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Maxx Stevens (Seminole-Muscogee), and Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota).

“The exhibitions I have helped to lead are largely independent. However, we did have official biennale sanction in 1999, 2001, and 2003,” explains Mithlo.

“The University of Venice and the City of Venice hosted us from 2007 to 2013. Our initiatives are known by the Indigenous protocols of being long-term, mutually meaningful, reciprocal, and with mentorship. We recognize that many of the people of Venice consider themselves to be Indigenous and our work with our Venetian colleagues is intended to be exemplary of Indigenous research methodologies.”

After 16 years, Mithlo has collaborated and forged relationships with Italian institutions, curators, and academics, while also mentoring a number of emerging Native artists and scholars.

These initiatives provide Native artists with the opportunity to contextualize contemporary Native art within global contemporary art.

Indigenous presence at the Venice Biennale has a long history. The first appearance of Native Americans at the biennale was in 1932, when the US pavilion hosted artists Ma Pe Wi (Zia), Santiago Cruz (Ohkay Owingeh), Oqwa Pi (San Ildefonso), Tonita Peña (San Ildefonso), Awa Tsireh (San Ildefonso), Julian Martinez (San Ildefonso), Pen Yo Pin (Tesuque), Tse Ye Mu (San Ildefonso), Otis Polelonema (Hopi), and Fred Kabotie (Hopi). The Kiowa Five also exhibited that year at a separate location. Native scholar and curator Gerald McMaster (Plains Cree) curated Edward Poitras (Métis) in the Canadian pavilion in 1995. In 2005, Rebecca Belmore (Ojibwe) exhibited at the Canadian pavilion.

The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian sponsored two exhibitions of Native American artists featuring James Luna (Luiseño) in 2005 and Edgar Heap of Birds (Southern Cheyenne) in 2007. Later this year, Imago Mundi’s Contemporary North American Indigenous Art exhibit will show at a collateral event in Venice.

While official, national representation is significant, Mithlo states, “It is critical to highlight the Indigenous-led

Maria Hupfield (Wasauksing Ojibwe), Jiimaan, 2015, performance art. Photo: John Paul Rangel (Mestizo).

initiatives and to discern between representation at national pavilions, in the biennale-curated events in the Arsenale, collateral pavilions, private galleries, and independent venues.”

These Indigenous-led initiatives provide the artists the ability to represent their artwork on their own terms without conventional restraints of adhering to national or institutional guidelines or restrictions. The Ga ni tha artists independently garnered institutional funding but did not directly represent any particular institution or organization.

The Ga ni tha exhibit is made possible by support from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the Osage Nation Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Autry Museum, Occidental College, and We Crociferi.

Reflections on the Exhibition THE GA NI THA EXHIBITION created a unique opportunity for these three Native artists to showcase their work at an international venue. Mithlo conveyed that the intention with bringing Native artists to the Venice Biennale over the last 16 years involves developing a space for “self-legitimacy and empowerment” while encouraging “communication between artists about art and their role as artists within communities.”

Maria Hupfield says, “Having the opportunity to create and exhibit work outside of my traditional territories, in another continent alongside other artists of the same age who are also Native and female, is a first and a real dream come

true. When we weren’t working on the show, there was always so much to talk about.”

Marcella Ernest reflected on being able to experience the biennale and says, Many of the shows I attended were deconstructing the meanings and values of society … I think very intentionally, the Marxist preoccupation with deconstructing hegemony was present in all of the shows and artists representing. Visiting the other shows and spending time with the installations were very intellectual experiences, whereas the works were overwhelmingly saturated in critiques of capitalist societies.

Such a critique completely motivated me to bring my art to a more political level in a more fearless and critical way.

Keli Mashburn was very happy for her work to reach a larger audience and FAL L 2 0 1 5

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Keli Mashburn (Osage) with her photography installation. Photo: John Paul Rangel (Mestizo).

that ga.ni.tha, although an old Osage word, had universal concepts that people could relate to through their own experience. Mashburn remarks, It’s such a big deal, adding Indigenous voices to the global conversation at the biennale. I feel like finally we are emerging from this dark place where we coexist with fantastical caricatures of what non-Natives believe a Native is or should be. This emergence allows something as simple as self-expression to transcend into something more like a challenge, or opportunity, to counteract the negative effects of such gross misrepresentations. Dr. Mithlo has worked tirelessly for almost two decades to curate Native visions by Native artists for this particular platform, the result being a more dynamic glimpse into the realities that unify us all.

This exhibition culminated in two

symposia that gave the artists the chance to contextualize their work and their roles as artists within their communities.

The first included the three Ga ni tha artists who spoke about their work individually and their participation in the exhibition. The second symposium was an introduction for two Hawaiian artists, Kapulani Landgraf and Kaili Chun, who will exhibit during the 2017 Venice Biennale.

While the Ga ni tha artists were each working from their own cultural specificity, their work reflected universal themes also present in many of the other exhibitions in the biennale and around the city. These themes included attention to material circumstances, memory, chaos, disorder, symbolism, metaphor, the absence/presence paradigm, and erasure, to name a few. As Ernest commented, many of the exhibitions across the city had strong political themes or were tied

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to cultural specificity. The biennale is a celebration of international contemporary art and cultural expression. It was remarkable that, on a global art-making level, people are expressing the same concerns with preserving culture, tradition, memory, and resisting oppression.

It was great to see representation from Indigenous North America among these shows. Ga ni tha is an exhibition of film, photography, and performance by three young, highly talented Native women artists who have made their mark on the international art scene.

Curator website: nancymariemithlo.com

Artists’ websites: marcellakwe.com mariahupfield.wordpress.com kelimashburn.com

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MELISSA MELERO contemporary paintings

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Wishing for Tommo (Winter), 2015, mixed media with willow on canvas, 50” x 50” 3 2 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Nelda Schrupp Pheasant Rump Nakota Jeweler and Sculptor

Peridot Necklace

SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market August 22 & 23, Booth 222-PAL-S

Northern Plains Indian Art Market Sioux Falls, SD, September 17–20

Cherokee Art Market Catoosa, OK, October 10–11

Ruby and Pearl Necklace

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Breastplate Necklace

benjamin harjo jr. american indian artist Santa Fe Indian Market Booth 103-POG Haskell Indian Market Cherokee Art Market

Transformation,

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The Continuum of Plains Pictorial Tradition By heather ahtone and Joe Horse Capture

T

RADITIONAL PLAINS INDIAN STORIES tell us that many groups have occupied the land and lived, loved, and cared for it since the beginning of time. Some of these stories have been passed down through many generations—too many to count. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, many of these stories have been swept away by a storm that has impacted Native people for too long. For a people to be able to adapt to the everchanging landscape of their lives, traditional stories were not historically written down using text and instead were given to the next generation through oral history.

Occasionally, a graphic mnemonic device would be used as a visual guide

when the stories were recounted. In other circumstances, graphic images were created to refer to an important event or pay honor to the Spirit World.

These representations are visual connections to the works our Ancestors created and left for us. They often tell the story of their lives and experiences.

Early Examples Graphic arts were well established on the Great Plains by ancient times, but few examples have survived into the present. Art created with organic materials eventually returns to the earth; however, petroglyphs with imagery of warriors and the Spirit World have survived in key areas across the Plains.

Some of these petroglyphs were carved by the Little People among the A’aninin (Gros Ventre). Their carvings

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could occasionally change shape and predict the future. Today, like long ago, many traditional A’aninin leave offerings to the petroglyphs to not only honor the carvings but also the powerful Little People. Some A’aninin have fasted near the petroglyphs to seek power.

Writing-on-Stone, located in Alberta near the Montana border, is one of the largest and most important petroglyph sites on the Northern Plains. With thousands of carvings and pictographs (paintings on rock), this site provides unique insight into centuries of the important elements of life on the Plains.

Animal and human figures dominate most of the imagery in scenes of hunting and combat with shield-bearing warriors.

Located in the Milk River Valley, Writing-On-Stone provides refuge for plentiful game, with tall grass and unique geological formations not usually found

on the Northern Plains. The hoodoos, naturally formed spires of sandstone, and other factors give a special feeling to the space. Throughout history, many tribal groups such as the A’aninin and Plains Cree passed through the area, each calling it their home, but the Siksika (Blackfoot) historically dominated the region. Each of these groups most likely carved at Writing-On-Stone.

The style at Writing-On-Stone features minimal detail. Because of the composition of the rock, these petroglyphs are carved, not pecked. Human figures are stylized, only showing the outlines of their bodies and a few details that illustrate the person’s accomplishments or identity.

Some possess large shields used before the introduction of the horse, occasionally decorated with the owner’s visionary experiences. The style of portraying a human—a bold outline with an undecorated center and a purposefully drawn neck—remains consistent, with minimal modification, in traditional Blackfeet art through the centuries.

Post-Contact Historical Blackfeet representational painting, mostly on hide or muslin, continues the earlier style of the petroglyphs with basic details and boldly outlined humans with their torsos either completely painted or unpainted.

Creatively arranged figures imply sequential action to reveal narrative details.

Like the Writing-On-Stone petroglyphs, painted Siksika figures were often arranged in a variety of positions, as though the

viewer was seeing the scene simultaneously from the side and from above, while the figures remained in a side-view position.

This multiple perspective can be found in many graphic works across the Plains, especially in the 19th century and in the works of contemporary Blackfeet artists.

Warrior-artists who created early graphic works such as buffalo hide painting and decorated shirts continued this style into the first half of the 19th century. A few paintings of distinction can be found in the collections of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Musée du quai Branly, Paris, France; and the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC. Hide paintings at the Peabody and quai Branly portray graphically charged battle scenes, with human figures portrayed in a style consistent with previously discussed, earlier works.

Interestingly, in these early works careful attention was paid in painting the horse, which is depicted with graceful lines and posture, and a sense of action. Close examination of the drawings reveals that the warrior-artist made long strokes when drawing the curved lines of the horse. The humans remain consistent with earlier petroglyph styles, though they have more implied action. Since it is unknown what hide paintings looked like when petroglyphs were created, understanding the causes of this stylistic change is difficult.

One possibility, which seems most logical, is that carving detailed and anatomically correct figures on stone is challenging. The process is slow and messy.

Painting with a porous bone on a soft buffalo hide is significantly easier. Portable tools such as marrow bones and hair brushes, may have allowed Plains artists to paint more details by changing the thickness of the brush while being in a more comfortable position to work (as opposed to standing next to a rock face on the prairie). This change in media—rock, bone, hide, then the introduction of Western paintbrushes, pens, pencils, muslin cloth, paper, and commercial paints—dramatically changed how Native artists portrayed what was and is important to them.

With the introduction of Western materials, Plains Indian pictorial art increased in quantity and detail. No longer were figures drawn as a series of straight lines but were animated in poses related to their actions. What remained consistent is the power and gracefulness of equine paintings. The horse was central to Plains Indian survival; the artists spent much time observing the lines and movements of the animal, and their careful observations show in their paintings.

Pictorial imagery was applied to other surfaces such as clothing, utilitarian items, and ceremonial works. Some of these items were imbued with power associated with the image. Sacred imagery on ceremonial items energized or honored the Spirit Being represented in the image.

These works, many restricted from publication for good reason, act as agents between this world and the Spiritual World.

Other items reflected accomplishments of the wearer. A man’s shirt was painted with his glorious deeds in battle and marked the number of times he led a war party or enemies he defeated.

Reservation Era

ABOVE: Northern Plains petroglyphs at the Áísínai’pi National Historic Site, Alberta, Canada.

Photo: Matthias Süßen (CC BY-SA 3.0).

OPPOSITE: David Dragonfly (Blackfeet-Assiniboine), Little Calf’s War Record, 2010, collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 268014. Photo: R. A. Whiteside.

Trade brought paper, pencils, and pens to the Plains and spawned a style of drawing referred to as “ledger drawing.” A point of clarification: ledger drawings are drawings on lined paper taken from actual ledger books. Countless historic Plains pictographic works are on nonlined paper, so the term “ledger drawings” for this widespread style is inaccurate.

Although many warrior-artists worked on paper across the Plains, the most well known of these were those incarcerated at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. During their time at Fort Marion (1875–1878), these Southern FAL L 2 0 1 5

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Plains prisoners of the Red River War created a body of graphic works that had a profound impact on the Native American art world.1 The men acquired sketchbooks, pens, and pencils and were encouraged to make drawings to sell to visitors to the prison. The subjects of this artwork included the journey from their homeland to Florida, hunting and battle exploits when they were free, domestic life, and observations during their incarceration at Fort Marion. Because of their graphic skills and acute memory, many of these rank among the most detailed Plains works on paper in existence. Created with bright, bold colors and a strong attention to detail, these drawings are an experience to see in person.

The Fort Marion artists continued classic Plains pictographic conventions.

The action usually moved from right to left, and clothing and accouterments showed details to identify the main figures.

Perspective was generally flat, although in a few cases, hills and buildings were stacked to give a sense of perspective.

Under the restrictions of reservation life, Plains pictographic arts changed. Men no longer raided horses or defeated their enemies but adapted to the rules imposed upon them. Traditionally, women painted, beaded, and quilled abstract designs, but several began adding pictorial designs.

These artworks were created for Native use and were also sold to non-Native people to earn extra income to survive. Often these scenes focused on courtship, domestic life, important events, and unidentified individuals for a newly growing market.

Joseph No Two Horn (Hunkpapa Lakota), attributed, Muslin Painting (detail), ca. 1900, collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 12/2248. Photo: Walter Larrimore.

This painting depicts an attack by soldiers on a Lakota village. Although it is unclear which event this records (possibly the Wounded Knee Massacre), what is evident is the graphic nature of the attack, especially during a ceremony that can be seen in the center.

Early 20th-Century Shift Turn-of-the-century federal policies altered lifestyles, foodways, and education for the Plains peoples. Many traditional arts were maintained within the confines of the tribal community, but American and Canadian schools for Native Americans also included some kind of arts education. In the United States, boarding schools were modeled after the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia, established to educate former slaves. Hampton enrolled Native Americans in 1878 (all of whom were former Fort Marion prisoners) with the intention to help “civilize” tribal

Bear’s Heart (Southern Cheyenne), Work on Paper, 1875–1876, collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 20/6231. Photo: NMAI Staff.

members to participate in an “American” value system. The assimilationist policies at Hampton included arts instruction and were seen as effective methods to resolve social tensions for the underprivileged, non-white students.2 Angel DeCora (Ho-Chunk, 1871– 1919) played a major role in the adoption

of formal art studies within boarding schools, which often promoted the pictorial tradition. Taken from her Nebraska reservation to Hampton in 1883, DeCora began to receive formal art training until her graduation in 1892. She went on to Smith College, Drexel Institute, and Boston Museum Fine Arts School, and

1. The events at Fort Marion have recently been remembered in the currently traveling exhibition Re-Riding History: From the Southern Plains to Matanzas Bay. 2. Elizabeth Hutchinson, “Modern Native American Art: Angel DeCora’s Transcultural Aesthetics,” The Art Bulletin 83, no. 4 (2001): 740–756.

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Unknown Northern Plains artist, Shirt (detail), ca. 1820, Upper Missouri River, collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 029035. Photo: Katherine Fogden (Mohawk).

maintained a professional studio, first in Boston then New York. With Zitkala-Ša (Yanktonai Dakota, 1876–1938) and other activists, DeCora was part of the Society of American Indians, an Indian-led Native rights organization in the United States.

DeCora was hired as the Native American art teacher at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School where she served from 1906 to 1915. Lt. Richard H. Pratt established the school in 1879, which was also based on the Hampton Institute model. Many of its first students were Fort Marion artists.3 DeCora saw art as an important tool for cultural survival, a belief that inspired her instruction. DeCora, given the liberty to establish the arts program as she saw fit, integrated arts instruction with the students’ cultural traditions by encouraging them to make art that helped them remember their home and identity.

DeCora lectured publicly on the value of Indian art, especially the pictorial tradition, and its place in American art for audiences that included the National Education Association, Society of American Indians, Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian, and Quebec’s International Congress of Americanists.4 This model of Native arts education continued with Oscar B. Jacobson and the Kiowa artists who studied art at the University of Oklahoma from 1927 to 1929. Many of these early students painted figures actively engaged in cultural practices, similar to the pictorial

hide paintings of their tribal traditions.

Jacobson promoted their art as a purely American art tradition to national and European audiences by publishing the Kiowa Indian Art portfolio in 1929.

Soon after, Dorothy Dunn established the Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School in 1932. Her first group of students included Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache, 1914–1994) and Oscar Howe (Yanktonai Dakota, 1915–1983), among many Navajo and Pueblo students. Dunn “insisted that her students use Native American subjects and a flat-art style, which she felt yielded authentic representations of Indian culture, free of foreign influences that may have been introduced by traders or by outside training in art.”5 Dunn only taught at the Studio for five years, after which Gerónima Montoya Cruz (Ohkay Owingeh, 1915–2015) directed the program. However, the tenets of the program remained largely unchanged for decades.

Jacobson’s later Native students, including Acee Blue Eagle (MuskogeePawnee-Wichita, 1907–1959, BFA 1934), Woody Crumbo (Potawatomi, 1912–1989; BFA 1938), Dick West (Southern Cheyenne, 1912–1996, BFA 1941, MFA 1950), and Oscar Howe (MFA 1953), received the mainstream art instruction offered by the university. However, after completing their studies, many sought subject matter from their tribe’s pictorial traditions and later encouraged their own

students to develop imagery that incorporated their culture.

In 1935, Acee Blue Eagle established an Indian art program at Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Crumbo and West followed Blue Eagle and served as directors of the art program. They provided culturally guided art instruction that allowed students free choice of media. Through their proximity and participation with art leaders like Allan Houser and Oscar Howe in the Philbrook Museum of Art’s exhibition Indian Annual (1946–1979), an art market was established with an appetite for pictorial imagery. Many artists participated in the Philbrook Indian Annual who worked in the pictorial tradition and contributed to a vibrant discourse on the style, including Blackbear Bosin (KiowaComanche, 1921–1980), Paul Goodbear (Southern Cheyenne, 1913–1954), and even a young T. C. Cannon (Kiowa-Caddo, 1946–1978). Their art affirmed their tribal identity and maintained a market demand through the 1950s into the 1960s.

While many of these artists continued working with pictorial imagery, they also experimented and expanded their audiences, which led to international recognition. Houser received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1949 for his sculpture and painting. Howe’s cultural philosophy inspired him to twist his figures in the vortex that guides Dakota beliefs.

Both artists helped expand the public’s perceived limits of Native American art.6

Resurgence in the 1970s By integrating their cultural philosophies into their artwork, artists defied categorical restrictions of what Native art had to look like and where it could be shown. The Native art market began shifting toward a modernist aesthetic by the 1960s, and many of the artists explored a broader range of expressionistic materials and imagery. This emergence of Native-led, self-representation resulted in two important developments.

The first was the 1962 establishment of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) under the direction of Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee Nation, 1916–2002),

3. Sarah McAnulty, “Angel DeCora: American Artist and Educator,” Nebraska History 57, no. 2 (1976): 143–199.

4. Anne Ruggles Gere, “An Art of Survivance: Angel DeCora at Carlisle,” The American Indian Quarterly, 28, no. 3/4 (2004): 649–684.

5. Bruce Bernstein, “Dorothy Dunn and The Studio,” El Palacio 100, no. 2 (Spring 1995), 11–13.

6. For more on Oscar Howe’s role, see Christina Burke, Impact: The Philbrook Indian Annual, 1946 to 1979 (Tulsa, Oklahoma: Philbrook Indian Art Center, 2014).

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with support from Allan Houser and Fritz Scholder (Luiseño, 1937–2005), a former student of Oscar Howe. Most of the founding faculty was Native American. IAIA replaced the Studio program at the Santa Fe Indian School with an academic arts program for high school and post-graduate art courses. IAIA faculty encouraged students to pursue new expressions inspired by cultural traditions, affirmed a contemporary artistic voice, and expanded market possibilities for Native art.

Early students at the IAIA explored many forms of contemporary artistic expression, but among these were a few whose interests took them back to their cultures’ historical pictorial practices.

George Flett (Spokane, 1946–2013) incorporated images of both his tribal traditions and lived experiences using a pictorial format, often through printmaking. The Santa Fe Indian Market expanded categories for two-dimensional art due to Allan Houser’s insistence.

While some Native artists pushed boundaries and expanded the discourse, others continued their tribe’s pictorial traditions to help preserve their culture.

Both efforts are critically important and result in stronger Native art. What is often unsaid is that cultural traditions were preserved but the art still represented change, as with Sharron Ahtone Harjo’s (Kiowa) entry to the genre of pictorial imagery.

As a Kiowa, Ahtone Harjo had a rich history upon which to draw for narrative images. However, Kiowa gender roles limited women from representational painting. Ahtone Harjo had the full support of her family and encouragement from Dick West, her instructor at Bacone College. Due to outside criticism, she signed her work “Ahtone Harjo” to mask her gender. She continues to paint using a personalized pictorial style while maintaining her traditional, cultural identity.

A few artists participated in national markets in the pictorial tradition through the 1970s. This is likely because of market interest for images that depicted contemporary experiences using expressive styles. This was also a period of political change when federal policies shifted from termination to self-determination, meaning tribes finally regained control over their leadership and economic affairs.

TOP: Sharron Ahtone Harjo (Kiowa), Ledger Artist at the Miss Indian America Reunion, Sheridan, Wyoming, 2013, ink and colored pencil on paper. Imagery courtesy of the artist.

BOTTOM: Chris Pappan (Kaw-Osage-Cheyenne River Lakota), Occupied Territory, acrylic and mixed media on wood, 20 × 30 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

1990s–2000s While the Plains pictorial tradition seemed to abate from the markets, the case was not the same within tribal communities. Artists continued to apply imagery on expressive material culture, and sustained oral traditions and ongoing cultural practices. By the 1980s, many tribes were asserting sovereignty by establishing tribal policies based on culturally guided principals and philosophy. This period of political transition supported a shift in attitudes toward renewed interest and pride in traditional practices amid a Native

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American diaspora, including in the arts.

At this point, only a handful of artists created pictorial art in the market, but with the nascent evolution of a Native American art history canon, scholars and artists began looking at historical painting traditions with specific aesthetic interest. The culmination of these varied interests in traditions resulted in many artists looking to their cultural traditions to guide them forward, this time with a fresh attitude toward application. Artists like George Levi (Southern Cheyenne) captured the attention of collectors

Teri Greeves (Kiowa-Comanche), Indian Parade Umbrella, 1999, glass beads, abalone shell, turquoise, cloth, brass and nickel studs, Indian head nickels, deerhide, antique umbrella armature, 36 × 42 in.

because they recognized the historical significance of the artwork style, which for the artists was a way of continuing the warrior-artist tradition. Their imagery remembered the pre-reservation period but was often infused with a fresh perspective.

Many artists describe the pictorial arts as an important means of conveying cultural pride while perpetuating an identity as contemporary Native people.

To beadwork artist Teri Greeves (Kiowa), pictorial, narrative imagery speaks to both past and future. She had beaded professionally several years before she won Best of Show at the 1999 Santa Fe Indian Market for Indian Parade Umbrella.

Greeves’s beaded parasol is replete with time-honored imagery while it also speaks to the role of traditions in a present-day scene. Her imaginative use of a surface on a rotating axis allows her parade to continue uninterrupted, a conceptual and political metaphor. While several of her figures ride horses, the scene includes cars bedecked in colorful shawls and blankets, a trailer with dancers, and the familiar political

candidate campaigning from the back of a convertible.

Emerging Traditions Continued evolution of art forms is an important dynamic to both cultural heritage and contemporary Indigenous identity. For many, being part of a Native American community carries a responsibility for recognizing and honoring cultural traditions. For many Plains communities, the pictorial tradition remains both a form of communication and a marker of identity. Beadwork artists create the medallions, dresses, and other adornment Native people wear as part of their continued ceremonial practices.

Beaded adornment, though, has not been stagnant. It is common to see a tiny tot dancer wearing SpongeBob or Hello Kitty medallions. Todd “Lone Dog” Bordeaux (Sicangu Lakota) and Marcus Amerman (Choctaw) have received well-deserved attention for the naturalism they achieve in their representational

beadwork as they take the pictorial tradition to a new level. Given the value of the continued practice, it is exciting to see how artists choose to evolve the tradition while addressing identity, heritage, and a vision for the future. Beadwork artists thrive within their local communities and keep the pictorial tradition alive within the tribes and the Native art world.

Some artists bring new interpretations to traditional forms within the Plain pictorial tradition. Chris Pappan (Kaw-Osage-Cheyenne River Lakota) gives representational portraiture a twist through distortion. His distortion of human figures calls attention to the misrepresentation of Native Americans in the historical record and mass media.

Dallin Maybee (Northern Arapaho-Seneca) creates artwork that mixes established Indigenous materials with new forms. He recently showed a beaded Samurai-inspired suit at the 2015 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market that drew quite a few smiles. This kind of mixing has been termed “hybridity” in scholarly literature, but anyone who has studied Native art across time can attest that the most abiding tradition has been the Native community’s capacity to adopt new materials and, through a process of Native fusion, make them Indigenous.

Conclusion As with many traditions, Plains Indians flexed and adapted pictorial arts to their ever-changing world. From early petroglyphs and hide paintings to works on paper and paintings produced for the market, historic Plains Indian artists used their talents to record events important to them. Continuing the tradition passed from their Ancestors, Plains Indian artists of today use ideas and imagery to continue the graphic narrative that spans generations. Contemporary Plains artists are not constrained by a limited choice of media like their forebearers but can now stretch and pull the ideas of Plains art in new and exciting ways and use seemingly unlimited resources. This can challenge preconceived notions that Plains Indian art is stuck in the past. Despite incorporating Western techniques and materials into their work, many of today’s Plains artists express their creative voice with visual fortitude, continuing a practice that has existed for generations.

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Thirza Cuthand (Plains Cree), Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory, 1995.

Asleep and Awake Contemporary Indigenous Video Art and the Politics of Presence

By Matthew Ryan Smith Asleep and awake, I dream about manipulating colors and shapes and sounds and rhythm. I earn my living giving concerts and speeches; when I’m done, my eyes are just hungry for pieces of pure sound and pixels of color, so I take my imagination into my studio, and play with sound, and I paint with light … To me, a Macintosh is a natural and easy-to-learn tool, and it belongs in the hands of our beadworkers and powwow singers, our linguists, our historians.

—Buffy Sainte-Marie1

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ARCROSS/TAGISH CURATOR and writer Candice Hopkins asked an Elder from Arnait Video Productions, a women’s video workshop based in Igloolik, Nunavut, how stories change when they are passed down from the oral tradition to video. The Elder’s answer was somewhat unexpected: “To the women, the stories were not altered by video as their meanings and functions remained the same.” Seen in this way, “Video was merely another way in which to pass stories down. For them, the tradition of storytelling was not threatened by the presence of this new medium, only made stronger.”2 Contemporary, Indigenous video art represents a fundamental shift in the method of telling, recording, and presenting Indigenous storytelling to Native and non-Native audiences. Today, video artists reinterpret dynamic traditions of storytelling while they experiment with its meanings and

functions in the visual sphere, where the events and experiences of their lives are shared with others through exhibitions and screenings. Many Indigenous videographers look to the past in order to rediscover—and recover—traditional stories and philosophies that they view as instruments for cultural understanding and knowing.3 They are driven by the belief that Indigenous videomaking (and filmmaking) is a productive and meaningful way to ensure the continuance of Indigenous stories for the next 500 years.4 Videomaking is storytelling of survivance—bold affirmations of Indigenous presence through creation by harnessing, quite literally, the sacred power of light itself.

Shortly after the invention of the motion picture camera, Indigenous peoples throughout the world were thrust in front of the camera’s cold lens, “their lives and cultures subject to the camera’s apparently indexical relationship to the truth.”5 In

1. Buffy Sainte-Marie quoted in Dana Claxton, “Re:wind” in Transference, Tradition, Technology: Native New Media Exploring Visual and Digital Culture (Banff, Vancouver, and Hamilton: Walter Phillips Gallery, Indigenous Media Arts Group, and Art Gallery of Hamilton, 2005), 35.

2. Candice Hopkins, “Interventions in Digital Territories: Narrative in Native New Media,” Transference, Tradition, Technology, 132–133.

3. Joe D. Horse Capture, “Time-Honored Expression: The Knowing of Native Objects,” in Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art, ed. Karen Kramer Russell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 76.

4. Linda Grussani, “Reviewing Cinema: Indigenous Film and Video,” in Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, eds. Greg A. Hill, Candice Hopkins, and Christine Lalonde (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2013), 36.

5. Wendy Gay Pearson and Susan Knabe, “Globalizing Indigenous Film and Media,” in Reverse Shots: Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context, eds. Wendy Gay Pearson and Susan Knabe (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015), 3.

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other words, what constituted the “truth” of Indigenous life and culture resided more with who was operating the camera than what lingered in front of it. Two of the most incendiary films of this early period are Edward S. Curtis’s silent film Land of the Head Hunters (1914) and Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922). The latter is considered by critical theorists to be a “point of origin,” the “first documentary film, the first ethnographic film, as well as the first art film.”6 While claiming objectivity, these films proliferated unfounded and profoundly stupid myths of primitive, dead, or dying “Indians,” which many Native and non-Native visual artists dedicate themselves to debunking rather than completely and utterly destroying.

Unlike traditional cinema, particularly documentaries, contemporary videomaking maintains a different relationship to colonialism. Linda Grussani writes, What was once a hegemonic representation of Indigenous culture from a Western viewpoint has slowly given way to Indigenous aesthetics and the emergence of Indigenous voices in contemporary film and videomaking.7 Arguably, this shift began in the 1960s. Relatively unburdened by colonialism, video was embraced by marginalized and disenfranchised groups such as women and Indigenous peoples. The introduction of personal video recording equipment such as the Sony Portapak, first released on the commercial market in 1967, was a revelation. Userfriendly and mobile, it offered both amateur and professional videomakers agency to turn the camera back 180 degrees, a mirror to look back at themselves. Cultural authority is projected through self-representation; this power abets in destroying the visual subjugation of Indigenous peoples since Curtis and Flaherty.

In Reverse Shots: Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context, the editors eloquently state, When Indigenous people move behind the camera, even while (perhaps especially while) remaining in front of it, they are in a sense creating reverse shots—that is, films that reverse and revise from within their own perspective the dominant culture’s view of Indigenous people.8 For this reason, contemporary Indigenous video art carries oppositional politics precisely because it attempts to reclaim, not how Indigenous peoples are represented per se, but the Indigenous aesthetic. Filmmaker Victor Masayesva Jr. (Hopi) says, “A Native filmmaker has … the accountability built into him,” and that the Native aesthetic “begins in the sacred … the cumulative experience. …”9 Indigenous storytelling does not reflect conventional European storytelling. Contemporary, Indigenous video does

not reflect contemporary non-Native video art relating to, but not limited to, narrative, beauty, structure, editing, or poetics. This is not to say that Indigenous video art completely dismisses these, merely that “Native art is intended to influence, to change the viewer, to provide clearer and more direct evidence of Native thinking.”10 In this way, Indigenous video art remains partially antithetical to other forms of videomaking, precisely because it demonstrates ways of thinking that simply don’t fit neatly within the Western aesthetic tradition.

Seeing “Native Thinking” Audience is a concern to many Indigenous video artists.

Some, including Dana Claxton (Hunkpapa Lakota), question exchanges with the viewer when the work continues to document, record, and interpret decolonization, in addition to being an expression of Indigenous culture and other social relationships to the state, church, and communities.11 While video art has traditionally served as an apparatus for Indigenous political agency, aesthetic expression, and catharsis, it has also enacted a sense of community. Often this is accomplished by extending participatory frameworks into gallery spaces. In Maria Hupfield’s (Wasauksing Ojibwe) kinetic video installation Survival and Others Acts of Defiance (2012), the artist repeatedly jumps up and down while wearing a pair of self-constructed “jingle boots” similar to those worn in powwows to create a bouncing rhythm of sound and body. A large X drawn on the floor directly in front of Hupfield’s projected image invites viewers to jump in tandem (and in time) with the artist. Part durational performance, part relational aesthetic, Hupfield stages an act of endurance as a powerful metaphor for Indigenous existence.

Like Hupfield’s work, Erica Lord’s (Athabascan-Iñupiaq) video installation work examines critical relationships with her audience through relational gestures. Her two-channel video installation Binary Selves (2007) highlights the split meanings of place. Mirrors sit against looped videos of her father’s Alaskan village and her mother’s Michigan home. Interspersed between these are images of the artist wearing beads and tattoos or wearing everyday garb. Two images of Lord are cut in such a way that they throat sing with each other, resulting in hypnotic whir and peripatetic identity. In these works, Hupfield and Lord cultivate deeper understanding of the self and others by forging meaningful intellectual and emotional relationships with viewers that extend beyond geography and social differences.

Identity politics remain an omnipresent trace that runs through Indigenous videomaking. Heather Igloliorte (Inuk) contends that,

6. Fatimah Tobing Rony quoted in Pearson and Knabe, “Globalizing Indigenous Film and Media,” 3.

7. Grussani, “Reviewing Cinema: Indigenous Film and Video,” 34. [The history of Indigenous filmmaking is beginning to be recuperated. James Young Deer (Nanticoke, 1876–1946) directed films beginning in 1909. Edwin Carewe (Chickasaw, 1883–1940) launched a prolific career in directing and film production in 1915, followed by Will Rogers (Cherokee, 1879–1935), who produced silent films in the 1920s.]

8. Pearson and Knabe, “Globalizing Indigenous Film and Media,” 17.

9. Victor Masayesva Jr. quoted in Grussani, “Reviewing Cinema: Indigenous Film and Video,” 37.

10. Rick Hill quoted in Claxton, “Re:wind,” 24.

11. Claxton, “Re:wind,” 16.

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Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s national event in Vancouver in 2013. Beside this projection is one of Seraphine from the present day, who speaks of daily childhood life and the trauma she experienced at Kamloops Indian Residential School. Seeing her pain cuts deep. This wound is a measure of Seraphine’s story, though ultimately her story is one of strength and renewal. Houle and Stewart, among other things, demonstrate a penetrating dedication to reconciling the past through present experience, thereby framing personal history within the flow of identity.

A sense of location and relationship to the land produce a political statement in the way Indigenous notions of belonging and place transcend colonial apparatuses of legal ownership.13 In recent years, Indigenous videographers have approached the idea of land as a purveyor of life, health, and spirit, an intrinsic component of being that drives creation inasmuch as it facilitates it. Lisa Myers’s (Beausoleil Ojibwe) through Surface Tension (2013) and Suzanne Morrissette’s (Cree-Métis) Score for the Bottom of a Lake (2014) both engage water as a moving spirit that determines place through the fluidity of time.

Greg Staats (Mohawk) and Vanessa Dion Fletcher (Potawatomi-Lenape) navigate the permutations of selfhood through the rhythms of the natural world in dark string repeat Terence Houle (Blackfoot-Saulteaux), Sacred Soaring Bird Woman, 2009, (2010) and Writing Landscape (2011) respectively. Each of these video screenshots. Images courtesy of the artist. works, in their own way, elucidates the idea that the loss of verbal language and senses of place are essentially losses of self; ‘Aboriginal identity’ has been the driving impetus behind that the trauma of displacement doubles as a new search for numerous exhibitions in recent history, and perhaps one of the home. While it’s very much about the topography of personal only major concerns that cuts across the practices of artists from the experience, it also speaks to larger themes of cultural loss multitude of diverse communities, backgrounds and experiences and forced assimilation experienced by Indigenous peoples that [Indigenous people] have in Native North America.”12 since contact. Other videomakers find closeness with the land Over the past several years, Indigenous videomakers have through the animals that roam its soil, water, or sky. Adrian mined the archives of their lived experiences and personal Stimson’s (Siksika) riveting portrait song of a sacred white histories to examine the meaning of Indigenous identity buffalo in Natoiinii - Holy Buffalo (2010) highlights a respect for in contemporary life. Videomakers such as Terrance Houle the presence of the spiritual world in the physical world.

(Blackfoot-Saulteaux) produce new media work that engages The collaborative video installation between Duane de/colonialism with pith and vigor. Many of his video works Linklater (Omaskêko Cree) and Brian Jungen (Dane-zaa) relay a deep love of family and solidarity with community.

Modest Livelihood (2012) finds the artists hunting for moose In Sacred Soaring Bird Woman (2009), Houle returns to Blood in northern Ontario and, although they are unsuccessful, the Reservation (Kainai Nation) to capture a portrait-in-story of footage reveals the instrumental use of Indigenous lands in his mother and her illness set against the blowing grass, flat determining self-sufficiency. Here the killing of an animal earth, and setting-sun backdrop of Southern Alberta. The for food and hide is a sacred mutation of life itself. Their result is a poetic rumination on familial connections, but it’s journey is a poetic mediation on collective experience and also a poignant celebration of Houle’s mother and her role in the good fortunes of camaraderie. Put another way, sense of bringing the artist into being. place can stimulate and invite a spiritual connection to the Krista Belle Stewart (Okanagan) also draws focus to the land that is relevant both to cultural identity and the bonds artist’s mother in her recent work Seraphine: Her Own Story of community.

(2014). Stewart positions images of a Canadian Broadcasting Sex and gender politics has consumed Indigenous Corporation (CBC) docudrama from 1967 that features her videomaking for nearly two decades. For Claxton, because mother, the first Indigenous public health nurse in British of “taboos surrounding sexuality, along with the legacy of Columbia, with personal testimony from the Canadian residential school sexual abuse, Aboriginal sexual pleasure has 12. Heather Igloliorte, “No History of Colonialism: Decolonizing Practice in Indigenous Arts,” in Decolonize Me!, ed. Heather Igloliorte (Ottawa and Oshawa: Ottawa Art Gallery and Robert McLaughlin Art Gallery, 2012), 20.

13. Ernie Blackmore, “Speakin’ Out Blak,” in Reverse Shots, 70.

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been misplaced and needs to be properly reinstated.”14 Thirza Cuthand (Plains Cree) has contributed to this reinstatement.

At the age of 16, Saskatoon-born Cuthand was one of the youngest Indigenous video artists to explore queerness as an expression of identity. Critics and scholars recognize Cuthand for her fascinating take on “lesbian camp” presented through autobiographical modes of visual communication.

Her works comb through complex social issues and cultural taboos surrounding childhood sexuality, intergenerational relationships, sadomasochism, mental illness, and the political consequences of multiracial identity. With Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory (1995), one of her earliest and most cited video works, Cuthand ponders how to locate and embed herself within the local dyke community as a high school student, all the while navigating the triple marginalization of being young, Indigenous, and queer.

While Cuthand speaks in first person singular, Kent Monkman (Cree) invented his alter ego “Miss Chief Eagle Testickle,” a pun on “mischief egotistical,” to procure a reverse shot of European settler history. Evermore opulent and oversexed, Miss Chief is a berdache figure reveling in the bend between male/female genders; she is, as one critic aptly described, “Monkman’s bitch goddess of transgression.”15 Both Monkman’s monumental paintings and cheeky videomaking usurp the sexual suppression of Indigenous peoples under Judeo-Christian dogma perpetrated by settler colonies—the berdaches were among those targeted, namely because their two-spiritedness did not fit within European moral principles and standards of decency.16 In the rollicking video work Group of Seven Inches (2005) Monkman references the diaries of 19th-century American painter George Catlin and his Swiss-German contemporary Paul Kane, to shatter the “noble savages” archetype by reversing the gaze as Miss Chief.

Here she coaxes some hot, white European guys with hard whiskey to become figure models. Eventually, after flirting and stroking, Miss Chief persuades the guys to dress up in “authentic” Eurocentric fashion, exposing their fleshy bits to the camera’s cold eye. A satiric riff on the Group of Seven, the Canadian landscape painters, Group of Seven Inches flips history on its back by inverting the events that came to define Indigenous cultural misrepresentation. Likewise, Dance to Miss Chief (2010) uses the music video format to stage a romantic tête-à-tête between Miss Chief and shots of handsome French actor Pierre Brice. Brice’s series of Winnetou films from the 1960s, based on the writings of German author Karl May, stars the actor as Indigenous. Using savvy editing and montage techniques, Monkman forces return shots whereby Miss Chief and Brice exchange flirtatious gazes resulting in a fit of cinematic foreplay. More than that, it’s a pointed critique of colonial desiring of Indigenous peoples since contact, though this time Miss Chief destroys the gaze by reversing the

shot, forcing Brice to become the object of her queer gaze.17 Cuthand and Monkman’s videomaking boasts a trickster philosophy that can be defined as serious play, the goal of which is a dramatic transformation in the audience’s political consciousness.18 Interjecting Indigenous sexualities into colonial histories is a matter of urgency considering it was so widely suppressed under the Judeo-Christian tradition. While Cuthand and Monkman have laid the groundwork, the work of Kevin Lee Burton (Swampy Cree) and James Diamond (Cree-Métis) represent the next generation of contemporary videomakers whose work positions queer politics against colonial xenophobia.

Lisa Myers (Beausoleil Ojibwe), Surface Tension, 2013, video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

Rigorous scrutiny of colonial violence remains a critical area of concern in contemporary videomaking practices and performs a fundamental role in decolonization. Since the early 1980s, Rebecca Belmore (Ojibwe) has produced a remarkable body of work that includes, but is not limited to, video, photography, sculpture, and performance. Her videomaking disarms audiences by punctuating the trauma registered by colonial-settler societies. Vigil, a video installation based on a documented performance work from 2002, is arguably Belmore’s best-known work. In the video, Belmore calls the names of missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside into the open air after scrubbing these same Eastside streets on her hands and knees. By articulating their presence in face of ignorance and outright denial by the police, Belmore offers each woman or girl life through vigil. A later video installation, Blanket (2011), features a red point blanket Belmore purchased from the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) store in Winnipeg. In the video, performance artist Ming Hon tangles and untangles herself in the red point blanket in the cold snow of Manitoba, symbolizing the burden of the blanket’s position in a history of colonial violence and subjugation as a trade item during the

14. Claxton, “Re:wind,” 25.

15. Sarah Milroy, “Historic Drag: Kent Monkman’s New Show Redresses Colonial Art,” The Walrus (May 2014), 75.

16. Ariane De Blois, “Dancing with the Berdache By Kent Monkman: How to dance differently,” ESSE arts + opinions (68), via e-artexte, web, accessed May 15, 2015.

17. See Pearson and Knabe, “Globalizing Indigenous Film and Media,” 17–18.

18. Allan J. Ryan, The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1999), 5.

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late 19th–early 20th century fur trade era. “For Aboriginal people, the tangled and metaphorical relationships associated with the blanket encompass violence and disease, economic authority, and warmth.”19 More recently, Keesic Douglas (Mnjikaning Ojibwe) tackled the point blanket and HBC’s exploitation of the Northern economy in a series of photographic and video works. Documented through video, Douglas re-created his Anishinaabe ancestors’ 130-kilometer journey by canoe from Rama First Nation in Central Ontario to HBC headquarters on Queen Street in Toronto. At the company offices, he attempted to trade a Hudson Bay point blanket back for beaver pelts.

Other Indigenous video artists engage with de/colonialism in diverse and often dissimilar ways; however, they remain united in their politics. Alan Michelson’s (Mohawk) hypnotic Round Dance series (2013), Danis Goulet’s (Cree-Métis) dystopic decolonization parable Wakening (2013), and Prospector Films and Jeff Barnaby’s anti-assimilation horror epic File Under Miscellaneous (2010) name but a few. Their work is what Jeff Corntassel (Cherokee Nation) deems “everyday acts of resurgence,” intended to regenerate Indigenous knowledge, epistemologies, and ways of life.20 Viewed in this light, steadfast confrontations with historical trauma combined with stinging critiques of the status quo are acts of cultural reclamation and recovery.

When singer-songwriter, visual artist, and activist Buffy Sainte-Marie (Piapot Cree) speaks about using available materials such as computer-generated graphics and illustration

software in the same way as the old masters, she describes the creative will to generate art using new technologies.

Traditional, artistic materials can be maintained alongside the adoption of readily available instruments for writing, recording, and creating that hold the potential for empowerment. The embrace of new media and digital technologies by contemporary Indigenous artists is just another logical step in using the tools at hand; it’s nothing particularly new. What is rather new, however, is the possession of cyberspace by Indigenous artists. According to Hopkins, “Cyberspace has been occupied, transformed, appropriated, and reinvented

by Native people in ways similar to how [Indigenous people] always approached real space. Like video, digital technologies have become a medium for speaking and telling [Indigenous] stories.”21 Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s (Coast Salish) virtual-reality simulation Inherent Rights, Vision Rights (1992) marks one of the earliest and most successful interventions in cyberspace.

Then, Yuxweluptun constructed a virtual longhouse that doubled as a participatory environment for visitors to engage in knowing his Coast Salish ancestry. The vibrating howls of coyotes, pounding of ceremonial drums, and immersive, visceral experience presented new approaches to the meaning of “cultural environment.” On the surface, the work serves a strong pedagogical function, nevertheless, Yuxweluptun mediates the viewer’s perception on his own terms by “[e]mploying technology that in the past has been used against [N]ative people,” thereby usurping available technologies to

Keesic Douglas (Mnjikaning Ojibwe), Trade Me, 2010, video screenshots.

19. Lee-Ann Martin, “Remembering Our Future,” in Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years, ed. Sherry Farrell Racette (Winnipeg: PlugIn Institute, Urban Shaman, and Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2011), 95.

20. Jeff Corntassel quoted in Eric Ritskes, “What Is Decolonization And Why Does It Matter?” IC Magazine (September 12, 2012), web, accessed May 15, 2015.

21. Hopkins, “Interventions in Digital Territories: Narrative in Native New Media,” 135.

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composed of a website (timetravellertm.com), an episodic video series, digital prints, and an action figure. Undercutting the project is its protagonist, Hunter, a young Mohawk man from the 23rd century who turns to the virtual reality glasses TimeTraveller™ out of disillusionment with modern life.

On his vision quest, Hunter encounters the unbent truths of Indigenous historical events such as the 1862 Dakota Uprising and the 1990 Oka Crisis as a way to make sense of the cyclonic present.

Currently, a shift from establishing cyber projects to self-publishing works through proprietary online videosharing websites is taking shape. YouTube and Vimeo have allowed many Indigenous artists and videomakers to circulate and distribute their work while fostering a collaborative virtual space for mutual dialogue, sharing, and critique. The online presence of works by Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit-Unangax), Terril Calder (Métis), Adam Garnet Jones (Cree-Métis), and Amanda Strong (Cree-Métis) is a strong, if not telling, indication of this new direction.

Conclusion Skawennati (Mohawk), production stills from TimeTraveller™, machinima (2008–13). Images courtesy of the artist.

honor the “inherent rights” of Indigenous peoples to spiritual, cultural, and political freedom.22 A critical moment came in 1996 when Skawennati (Mohawk) created CyberPowWow: An Aboriginally Determined Territory in Cyberspace. In effect, CyberPowWow is part website, part “palace” (used for its allusions to royalty, colonialism, and hierarchy) that formed a virtual art gallery and library of texts.

From 1997 to 2004, CyberPowWow transformed into an art event, near to an exhibition opening, where new works were added to the “palace.”23 “[T]he idea that Indians would be on the frontier of a technology is inconsistent with the dominant image of ‘traditional’ Indians,” writes cultural theorist Jolene Rickard. “This time, a group of thinkers called artists are rising from our communities to redraw the boundaries of indigenous space.”24 The CyberPowWow project represents a critical turn in rethinking the permutations of Indigenous sovereignty while securing a (virtual) space for community, cultural production, and social exchange. In recent years, Skawennati has developed a different but related cyber project named TimeTraveller™,

What comes next? Gary Witherspoon has noted that the verb “to be” is unimportant in the Navajo language whereas the verb “to go” has over 300,000 conjugations.

These conjugations emphasize the repetitions, continuations, and revolutions inherent to these forms of verbal communication.25 Witherspoon’s proposal can be a metaphor for the possible futures of Indigenous videomaking. In Canada alone, several exhibitions have already attempted to trace the near future. Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years, staged in several venues throughout Winnipeg, endeavored to reconcile the past with present Indigenous art making for a vision of what lies ahead. Curator Lee-Ann Martin says, “Until now, speculations on the future have not included Indigenous thought, image, and word. We know much about the past; it is a history that Indigenous peoples—and many non-Indigenous academics—throughout the world have analyzed, interpreted, and attempted to reconcile.”26 What exhibitions such as The Next 500 Years do is stage a celebration of now, and the lines of flight of which the “now” consist. This is precisely what numerous Indigenous videomakers and film/video festivals embrace as their mandate.27 Ultimately, the stories will change, but the importance of telling remains the same. Asleep and awake, these flickering images make storytelling stronger.

22. Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, “Inherent Rights, Vision Rights,” in Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments, ed. Mary Anne Moser (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996), 316; see also Jackson 2Bears, “A Conversation with Spirits Inside the Simulation of a Coast Salish Longhouse,” Code Drift: Essays in Critical Digital Studies (April 2010), via CTheory, accessed May 15, 2015, web.

23. See “About,” CyberPowWow, accessed May 15, 2015, web. See also Skawennati Tricia Fragnito, “A Chatroom Is Worth a Thousand Words,” CyberPowWow: CPW 2K, accessed May 15, 2015, web.

24. Jolene Rickard, “First Nation Territory in Cyber Space Declared: No Treaties Needed,” CyberPowWow, accessed May 15, 2015, web.

25. Gary Witherspoon quoted in Janet Catherine Berlo, “Voicing Individuality, Creativity, Repetition, and Change,” in Shapeshifting, 165.

26. Martin, “Remembering Our Future,” 89.

27. Grussani has listed contemporary Indigenous film and video festivals: The Native American Film + Video Festival, Washington, DC; imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, Toronto, ON; Skábmagovat Indigenous Peoples’ Film Festival, Inari, Finland; Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival, Sydney, Australia; Wairoa Maori Film Festival, Wairoa, NZ; and the Nepal International Indigenous Film Festival, Kathmandu, Nepal. See Grussani, “Reviewing Cinema: Indigenous Film and Video,” 40.

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Celebrating Life and Death in a Zapotec Village

By Kevin Simpson While modern woodcarving styles of San Martín Tilcajete were inspired by an artist in the throes of illness who dreamt of monstrous creatures, one couple reaches further through the centuries to revive their ancestors’ woodcarving style and honor their dead.

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T 7:00 A.M., the community loudspeaker woke us from a deep sleep. Like the town crier of years gone by, in San Martín Tilcajete, Oaxaca, a loudspeaker announces the daily news as well as community events. On this day, Roberta’s house on Calle Progresso had fresh bread available, and it was one little Diego’s birthday. As birthday music played, we decided that it was time to get up. We had a big day ahead of us. We were going to the fields behind the town to pick cempoalxochitl, or

marigolds, to adorn the altars for the Day of the Dead.

Any newcomer living in Mexico for any length of time will notice that the Mexicans love to celebrate. From saints’ days to revolutions, they seem to have a holiday for everything. Life is a fiesta, but every year, one celebration stands out. Instead of mourning the loss of loved ones, it is a celebration of life known as the Day of the Dead.

Its origins date back to pre-Columbian times. The Day of the Dead was initially celebrated the whole month of August, when the corn was being harvested. Mesoamerican cultures believe in duality; there is no life without death— they are interchangeable. In a harvest ceremony, the fruit died and fell from the tree, the people ate the fruit to stay alive, and the cycle continued.

I caught up with Jacobo Ángeles and his wife María del Carmen Mendoza Ángeles, both Zapotec, in their

Jacobo Ángeles gathering marigolds for Day of the Dead.

María del Carmen Mendoza Ángeles. Both photos: Kevin Simpson.

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View from the Grand Plaza of Monte Albán, Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán, Oaxaca, ca. 500 BCE–750 CE. One of the earliest cities in Mesoamerica, Monte Albán was the capital of Zapotec people for thirteen centuries. Its Zapotec name, Danibaan, translates as “sacred hill.” Photo: Greg Willis (CC BY-SA 2.5).

studio in San Martín Tilcajete, a Zapotec village best recognized for its woodcarvings called alebrijes. Jacobo and María were busy carving and painting the copal wood they use for their fantastic animal figures. They didn’t start the woodcarving movement for which Oaxaca—and especially their village—is famous, but they have done something that their fellow artists have not. They have gone back to their Zapotec roots.

The Zapotec culture can be traced back to 1500 BCE, and its languages emerged from the Otomanguean languages. The Oaxaca Valley geographically divided the Zapotec into three distinct groups. The largest settlement in San José Mogote was located north of present-day Oaxaca City. Yagul lay to the east, and San Martín Tilcajete (and Los Mogotes) to the south. These three kingdoms were separated by a neutral area that acted as a buffer amidst them.

Sometime between 700 BCE and 500 BCE, an outside threat is believed to have forced the Zapotec to centralize their power, so the culture consolidated into a new settlement in the formerly neutral area that divided the three valleys.

This new settlement, Monte Albán, was located high atop a mountain, an easier location to defend.

Between 500 BCE and 900 CE, Monte Albán went through three distinct political, cultural, and economical phases while it ruled over the entire Oaxaca Valley. By 100 BCE, its population was 5,200. In a single century, the population surged to 17,000. During the third phase of Monte Albán (200–700 CE), its population peaked at 24,000 people in the city and surrounding areas. Monte Albán ruled

over the central valley of Oaxaca until around 900 CE, when the people abandoned it in favor of living in smaller, decentralized city-states like Tilcajete.

The roots of San Martín Tilcajete date back to 100 CE, when Los Mogotes was the regional center for the Zapotec, second only to Monte Albán. The word tilcajete comes from the word til, which is the dye of cochineal (a small insect that lives off the nopal cactus) and cajete, a mound of rocks similar to what one would find around a water well. For centuries, the tradition of weaving and dying clothes dominated life in San Martín Tilcajete. Jacobo’s mother still sells hand-dyed and embroidered clothes from the region.

In the 1980s, woodcarving became so popular that local artists began to dedicate more time to carved animal figures than to textile arts. The people from San Martín Tilcajete carved ox yokes, toys for children, or religious icons. However, papier-mâché monsters inspired the Oaxacan woodcarving tradition. In 1936, at the age of 30, Mexican artisan Pedro Linares (who used to carve figurines for muralist Diego Rivera) became very ill. During this time, he dreamt of wild creatures chasing him, chanting, “Alebrije, alebrije.” After making a miraculous medical recovery, Pedro set out to re-create the monsters he saw in his visions.

Pedro was originally from Oaxaca and visited an old friend Manuel Jimenez in Arrazola, just outside of Oaxaca City. Pedro explained to Manuel what it was that he was doing in papier-mâché. Intrigued, Manuel decided to try carving the same monsters or fantasy creatures out of the copal wood so abundant in Oaxaca Valley. In San Martín FAL L 2 0 1 5

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Tilcajete, on the other side of the valley, Isidoro Cruz commercialized the new woodcarving movement. Isidoro’s carvings became so popular he had to hire assistants to keep up with the demand. Isidoro provided wood and carving tools to people like Candio Melchor, so he could carve figures while Isidoro was out in the field tending to his goats.

Candio was already known for carving intricate miniature oxcarts, but he became famous for what he called “illusions.”

These carvings of human bodies with animal heads became popular as the alebrije market eclipsed utilitarian jobs like dying clothes or carving yokes.

Jacobo told me that he learned to carve from his father.

When his father passed away when Jacobo was only 15, the young man turned to woodcarving to support his family.

Like everyone else, he began carving dragons and other fantasy creatures. But growing up without a father figure inspired Jacobo to study his family roots and the history of his village. The more he learned the more he became fascinated with his Zapotec ancestry. Most carvers in Oaxaca today wouldn’t consider themselves to be Indigenous but just about all have Zapotec heritage. Today, Jacobo and María are at the forefront of a movement to bring back the Zapotec traditions.

They researched and experimented to learn about the natural pigments their ancestors used in paint. It was absolutely incredible to watch Jacobo create paints from

the natural pigments. Starting with the bark of the copal tree, he made yellow by adding honey and lime, or black by adding calcium, and purple by adding baking soda. The most important and probably most recognized natural pigment is derived from the cochineal, an insect that produces carminic acid and feeds on nopal and other Opuntia cacti. Over 60 different shades and tones of red colorant, or carmine, can be created using the cochineal.

The couple has studied the precontact calendar and its animal symbolism and take great pride in decorating all of their pieces with traditional Zapotec hieroglyphs. Jacobo believes that small animal totems were carved for babies when they were born, so using the Zapotec calendar, he pairs people with the animal spirit of their birthday. These and many other Zapotec traditions were almost lost when the missionaries arrived in the early 16th century.

The Roman Catholic Church worked hard to eradicate the Zapotec traditions. The missionaries were successful in getting the people to adopt Catholic saints instead of their traditional deities. Some missionaries, like the ones in Teotitlán Del Valle, adapted the Zapotec language into the church services, and 450,000 people still speak Zapotec today. In San Martín Tilcajete, however, the language was replaced with Spanish. Three generations have passed since the Zapotec language was spoken.

Jacobo Ángeles (Zapotec) carving, and María del Carmen Mendoza Ángeles (Zapotec), painting, natural pigments, copal wood.

TOP, LEFT: Armadillo. TOP, RIGHT: Xoloitzcuintli Dog. BOTTOM: LEFT: Crocodile. All photos: Kevin Simpson.

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Floral offerings at the Santa Ana Zegache cemetery. Photo: Kevin Simpson.

One Zapotec tradition survived, though: the Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos) celebration. It was so entrenched in the culture that the missionaries could not eradicate it no matter how hard they tried. Every year, ornate altars filled with food and adorned with pagan offerings would be erected despite the missionaries’ best efforts. The church compromised and allowed the celebrations to continue but restricted them to two nights and moved them to November to coincide with All Saints’ Day, which celebrated the lives of angels or children that had passed on, and, All Souls’ Day, to celebrate the return of loved ones that had passed on.

Jacobo explained to me that the Day of the Dead is a special time when the village celebrates its Native roots.

“Since we were kids, our parents taught us to appreciate the Day of the Dead. During this time of year, the smell of the mole sauce cooking on the comal had great significance because it meant that our parents were preparing the food to put on the altars. Days were spent to make the tamales, bread, and chocolate,” said Jacobo. “From an early age, children learned it was a special time as their parents sent them out into the fields to collect the yellow marigolds, whose color represented the festive atmosphere and whose scent would guide the dead.”

One of the most important parts of the celebration is building a traditional altar. Everything about the altar, including its construction, has meaning derived from the Zapotec culture. When excavating in the region, archaeologists have made important discoveries about the Zapotec, who had stucco bas-reliefs, painted murals, and ceramic vessels filled with food; objects just like the ones placed on altars today. Precontact Zapotecs created jewelry, including pectorals, bracelets, necklaces, labrets, and earrings from gold, silver, jade, quartz, pearls, and turquoise. The Zapotec traded with groups as far away as the American Southwest to acquire the turquoise. These traditions of leaving fine offerings for the dead continue today.

Families save money for months to create a special altar to honor their loved ones. These altars can be as simple as a two-step structure or as complex as a huge, seven-tiered construction representing the path to heaven so the soul can rest. Three-step altars designed to represent the past, present, and future are the most popular. Some of the important offerings one finds on an altar are candles, whose light welcomes the deceased. Other offerings include marigolds, whose scent will guide the spirits; copal or pine resin incense that cleans and purifies the spirit; salt, the essence of life; a glass of water, left to refresh the spirit after the long journey; FAL L 2 0 1 5

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TOP: Young woman participating in the Day of the Dead memorial in Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán, Oaxaca, 2014. Photo: Greg Willis (CC BY-SA 2.5).

BOTTOM: Musicians play during Day of the Dead in Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán, Oaxaca, 2014. Photo: Greg Willis (CC BY-SA 2.5).

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are placed on arches that represent the family so they can be remembered by their loved ones. Traditions like the Day of the Dead allow the people to not only remember their loved ones but also the traditions of their ancestors.

At dusk, after the Ángeleses were finished working for the day, we headed to the cemetery. Away from the hustle and bustle of Oaxaca City and not far from San Martín Tilcajete are the cemeteries of Santa Ana Zegache and San Antonino Castillo Velasco. In Santa Ana Zegache, graves overflowed not only with flowers but offerings of fruits and nuts, left on the tombs so the dead have food for the long journey through the Underworld. The glow from the candlelight reflecting off the marigold flowers adorning the graves illuminated the entire cemetery.

Families hovered over the graves of their loved ones as different generations shared stories that served to bring the memories of their ancestors back to life. Bands played favorite songs as families drank and laughed about the good times. In San Antonino, graves were carpeted with flowers. Families spent days creating intricate flower mosaics. Over the years, this has turned into a contest where the villagers today compete to see who can come up with the most intricate adornment over the graves.

In the cemetery of San Antonino, I noticed the skull of a goat placed carefully on the top of a grave. Curious, I went for a closer look. I failed to be Jacobo’s altar in homage to his Zapotec ancestors, 2014. Photo: Kevin Simpson. careful and not get too close or seem too interested, because in the blink of bread, a symbol of the deceased; fresh that celebrates his Zapotec ancestry. an eye, the family corralled me, and fruit to nourish the soul; photos of the Jacobo believes that the sixth day of the before I knew what was going on, I was deceased to remember them; and papel Zapotec calendar corresponds to the eating goat tacos and drinking mescal picado or ornamental cut paper that armadillo, ngùp in Zapotec,1 and is a day with people I didn’t even know. Don’t represents the wind and gives a festive when one can see good and evil. He said worry about being late to this party; it feel to the celebration. it is a special day when the dead, repre- will go all night long.

In his studio, Jacobo erected a sented by skeletons, come back to life.

It may be called Day of the Dead, traditional altar for the Day of the Dead Mosaics of seeds endemic of the region but it is a celebration of life. It is how where he prominently displayed a photo were placed on the altar to represent the Zapotec remember and celebrate their ancestors. of his father, but he also created an altar fertility. Marigolds and other flowers 1. Eugene S. Hunn et al., “A Sketch of Mixtepec Zapotec Grammar” (Seattle: University of Washington, n.d.), 19, pdf.

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Ascending New Heights

W

HAT DO YOU CALL ARTISTS after they have emerged? After they’ve made their initial splash, wowed the public, and are now honing their artistic vision? “Early-tomid-career” doesn’t quite capture the thrill of artists who are finding their voices and refining their skills while still experimenting and growing.

Many art collectors often seek out new talent, yet they want evidence of the artist’s staying power and commitment to professionalism. They don’t want to collect from an artist who, five

Four Artists to Watch

By America Meredith years from now, won’t be creating art; they want to collect from passionate individuals with a lifelong commitment to their craft. Sheer talent launches an aspiring artist, but steadfast discipline and risk-taking turns a neophyte into a professional.

I’d like to introduce you to some artists who are generating buzz right now.

Their innate curiosity drives them to push boundaries and embrace challenges.

They’ve paid their dues, and now these four artists have made names for themselves as they continue to develop their artistic expressions.

Marlowe Katoney (Navajo) holding his miniature Storm Pattern rug. Photo: Mary Walker. All images courtesy of the artists.

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Marlowe Katoney Navajo Weaver

Best known for his Angry Birds Tree of Life pictorial rug, Marlowe Katoney is a fearless weaver—tackling technical and conceptual challenges head-on. A residency at the School of Advanced Research this fall will help him to further stretch the boundaries of pictorial weaving, as he plans to study how to integrate the human figure. “I just want to make a difference in how people see Navajo weaving,” he explains.

Born in Flagstaff, Arizona, Marlowe grew up in Winslow. His paternal grandmother Hazel Whitehair and maternal grandmother Mary Ann Morris were both weavers. “No one on my maternal side of the family learned how to weave,” Marlowe explains. “All my aunts and uncles had jobs, so it wasn’t something that interested them, I guess. My maternal grandmother wanted me to learn.”

In 2009, “my grandmother said, ‘You should learn how to weave.’ We went to her house on the reservation, and she had the whole loom set up for me.”

He had observed her weave throughout his life, but this first rug still took him a year and a half to complete.

His second rug, a Ganado Red design featuring the San Francisco Peaks behind a hogan, progressed more quickly.

His third, an ambitiously large weaving, featured a bird. He took all three to an auction held by R. B. Burnham and Company. The owners, impressed by his ability to weave curvilinear designs, convinced him to weave a landscape rug featuring Utah’s Delicate Arch. He successfully combined a representational arch with abstract elements, and his reputation as a pictorial weaver was secured.

acquired knowledge can take away the foundation of what you once believed.”

Another signature piece, Eye of the Storm, is in the Heard Museum’s permanent collection. “I like the idea of wordplay,” he says. Marlowe juxtaposed a representational human eye with a Navajo storm pattern and made it look virtually three-dimensional. “I wanted it to come across as surrealistic—like a circus. Inanimate objects becoming animated,” he explains. For Marlowe, the weaving “reflects my sentiments about daily life. The black and white within the storm pattern make you think of all the anxieties you have on a day-to-day basis.

‘I have this deadline, I have to go pick up the kids, I have go meet this person, I have to go grocery shopping, I have to do the laundry.’ ” Weaving transformed his artistic practice. “When I used to paint, I painted alla prima. I would do it in one sitting.

Weaving has disciplined me in a different way, because of the patience required.

When you’re weaving, you get some sort of calm that comes over you. It’s like meditation.”

You can see Marlowe’s work online at facebook.com/pages/MarloweKatoney-Navajo-Textiles or in person at SWAIA’s Santa Fe Indian Market booth 533-SF-W and the School of Advanced Research from September to November.

Seneca Painter, Printmaker the mural project in San Francisco. I knew and Beadwork Artist

Marlow Katoney (Navajo), The Acquisition, 2014, wool.

Marlowe’s first artistic inspiration was Charles Loloma, the Hopi jeweler.

“I studied his work; I read everything I could get my hands on in high school.”

He wrote a research paper about the artist. “I did not know that he had passed away. I asked my mom, ‘Can you take me out to Hopi?’ She was reluctant.” He persevered, so she drove him to Third Mesa, where Loloma once lived. There they met his niece Verma Nequatewa.

“We talked to Verma for quite some time.

She was really kind—like a mentor. She told us what he was like and what his inspirations were,” recounts Marlowe.

“I knew that Charles Loloma’s background was painting and pottery. I knew he was in the military and he did

Luanne Redeye

I wanted to see what he saw in order to get where he was. My initial intention was to go into jewelry. As it turns out, 20 years later I started weaving.”

In the interim, Marlowe studied painting at the University of Arizona.

For his public art class, taught by Alfred Quiroz, Marlowe sketched out potential mural designs. Years later, he incorporated those sketched designs in his 2014 weaving, The Acquisition.

“You could say that rug was a long time in the making. I started working on that rug about the acquisition of knowledge and its responsibility, but also the tragedy around the acquisition of knowledge—how sometimes newly

Luanne Redeye is a virtuoso painter.

Her deft handling of paint—whether in naturalistic portraiture or abstract Haudenosaunee floral designs, in drips, splashes, fine mists, calligraphic line work, or perfectly blended, licked surfaces—is a joy to behold.

Hailing from the Allegany Indian Reservation in Western New York, Luanne belongs to the Hawk Clan of the Seneca Nation and is a direct descendant of Cornplanter, the 18th-century Seneca war chief.

As a kid, Luanne draw pictures from images from TV, such as Beavis and Butthead, but “even as a kid, I realized I FAL L 2 0 1 5

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wouldn’t see anyone who looked like me reflected on the screen.” That planted a seed in the young artist who comes from a creative family.

“Although many [of my relatives] haven’t pursued it further than high school, they’re still encouraging of others,” says Luanne. “To have that support from family to choose art trumped the discouragement from faculty and staff in school.” One particular inspiration for the young artist was her Uncle Alonzo H. Redeye, a professional oil painter.

“He lived right next door to the house I grew up in, so I would visit his painting and carving studios quite a bit … Even when I went off to college, this tradition continued, and I would bring my work home to show him,” she added.

“He was definitely an inspiration. Seeing him work and sell his art professionally let me know that being an artist could be a serious career—a path that wasn’t really encouraged by counselors in high school.”

Determined to pursue art seriously, Luanne earned her BFA at State University of New York, Oswego.

College exposed Luanne to new cultures, and she made new friends from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. “But with these good experiences, college also … exposed me to ignorance from white roommates. A lot of ‘did you grow up in a tipi,’ ‘do you have running water,’ and ‘do you pay taxes’ types of questions.

Some would even whoop like they do in movies at me, call me ‘Pocahontas,’ and speak in broken English to me. This was part of the reason why I chose to focus more on painting the Native perspective and experience.”

The persistence and prevalence of gross stereotypes was a catalyst for Luanne, but rather than dwelling on stereotypes, she blasts through them. She paints her community and herself as she sees them—three-dimensional people with complex lives. To do so, she snaps photos of her friends and family in a casual manner. She doesn’t want posed, formal images but images of them going about their daily life. Once she selects her image, the work is loosely sketched and developed through her painting process.

“I prefer seeing the image come together as I paint each layer, which

TOP: Luanne Redeye (Seneca), Ageswë’gaiyo’, 2010–2011, oil on panel. 30 × 24 in.

BOTTOM LEFT: Luanne Redeye (Seneca), Ohiyo’, 2012, acrylic on panel, 16 × 16 in.

BOTTOM RIGHT: Luanne Redeye (Seneca), Small Abstraction No. 19, 2012, oil on panel, 12 × 12 in.

allows me time to think and deconstruct why I chose [a particular] image, any symbols or metaphors, colors, etcetera,” says Luanne. “This does make the process slow, but I was never the type to sketch out, plan, and have a solid idea of what

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the final image would look like before even starting.”

To further her arts education, Luanne relocated almost 1,800 miles for graduate school. “I wanted an entirely different environment and experience

than New York,” she says. Luanne enrolled in the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where she could be near a large, diverse Native American community.

In Albuquerque, her home today, she earned her MFA and began teaching studio and art history classes at Central New Mexico Community College.

“The community is very close and we help each other when we need it,” she says. “Teaching has made me much more proactive in staying current with art news, practices, and contemporary artists that students may find interesting.”

She began painting with acrylic, but once she discovered oil paint, she never went back. Recently, she’s added gouache miniatures to her repertoire.

Printmaking is also a new endeavor.

“I’ve only been working in printmaking for two years, screen printing even less than that,” says Luanne.

Her work can be seen at Booth 784 LIN-W at SWAIA’s Santa Fe Indian Market, on her online portfolio at luanneredeye.com, and on her online storefront for beadwork, BlueRoseRedEye, at blueroseredeye.bigcartel.com. The unusual name is a “combination of my grandmother’s favorite color, favorite flower, and family name. A lot of what I do is in her memory. She raised me so I owe a lot to her.”

siblings and they always need help with beadwork. Most of my family are artists—jewelers, potters, some painters.”

As a young boy, he created beadwork to sell at powwows to earn grocery and spending money.

Sometimes outside forces influenced his artistic direction. “When the market for silver and gold quadrupled in price, I decided to go back to clay, because it’s free raw material,” he says.

Luckily, Jonathan’s artistic upbringing gave him the flexibility. “It’s not something you can jump into; you have to have some experience.”

His aunt Ada Suina and mother Snowflake Flower are both accomplished potters, who specialize in storyteller and singing mother figures. His mother harvested her own clay near La Bajada Mesa. “When I was younger, we used

to go and collect clay with her,” says Jonathan. He learned ceramics “mostly by asking my mom.” Taking the Cochiti clay figurative tradition a step further—into the realm of kinetic sculpture—Jonathan invented ceramic bobbleheads.

“I wanted to make pottery how my mom did, but I wanted to add a twist. I was watching TV one day, and a GEICO commercial came on with that little gecko.

It was jumping up and down—so happy.

The camera moved to why he was jumping up and down. It was a whole bunch of bobbleheads. Then it hit me right there, I can make bobblehead storytellers. Then I was jumping up and down.

“Right after that, the day after, I got my clay together, and I started building it.

It took me a few months to learn how to make the components to make it bobble.

Jonathan Loretto Cochiti-Jemez Pueblo Ceramic Artist

“My journey is one that has never been taken alone,” writes Jonathan Loretto in his artist statement. “It has taken many to help me stay on the path that I’ve ventured on, and I will always be grateful to you all who have helped me along the way and continue to do so.”

Jonathan is a thoughtful and reflective individual. His artistic career has spanned many media—from beadwork and jewelry to culinary art and photography, and finally to ceramics, where he has possibly found his calling.

“I was thrown into art,” he explains. “I was the youngest of the

Jonathan Loretto (Cochiti-Jemez), Coyote Bobblehead, pit-fired clay, mineral pigments, turquoise.

Photo: Jonathan Loretto.

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To paint geometric forms on his bowls, Jonathan harvests beeweed, or Cleome serrulata, for black paint, and mineral pigments from La Bajada for his reds. Always exploring the structural aspects of pottery, Jonathan is now reviving the ancient practice of basket-impressed pottery. He welcomes the challenge. “There’s always cracks. How to pull the clay out without having it stick to the basket. I figured that one out after several tries.”

“It’s a lot of work,” he admits, “but it’s fun.”

Jonathan Loretto’s work can be found at True West of Santa Fe and the Case Trading Post at the Wheelwright Museum. He’ll also have a booth (765 LIN-W) at Santa Fe Indian Market and a residency at IAIA during September.

Shaax’ Saani

Tlingit Jeweler and Fashion Designer As I purchase an exquisite snakeskin-and-labradorite bracelet from Shaax’ Saani, Tlingit jeweler and fashion designer, I ask her where she acquired the snakeskin. Matter-of-factly, she tells me she caught and skinned the snake herself. Clearly this is There’s a spring, foam, a wooden dowel, glue. Experiment and a woman to be reckoned with. experiment. There was a lot of experimenting going on. A lot Shaax’ Saani makes bold statements in fashion and jewelry of make-and-destroy kind of stuff.”

Jonathan works in construction and applied his structural design with Aboriginal materials: abalone, sealskin, walrus knowledge to creating a functioning bobblehead—adjusting the ivory, polar bear fur, deerhide, gold, silver, teeth, and claws. spring tension, the size of the dowels, and the foam cushioning Her work is, as one of her cuffs is titled, “pretty fierce.” that allows the head to move freely. He pit-fires his work Her name comes from the Tlingit language: “I carry a outside. “In the beginning, I lost so much,” he admits. “You just Kiks.adi clan name. Shaax’sáani means ‘lots of little girls’ in learn to go with it. You learn how to humble yourself.” my language and was given to me by my Auntie Mary Perkins After a year of experimenting and once he finally, before she passed away.” Shaax’ Saani was born in Juneau and successfully created a functional bobblehead, he showed it his learned art techniques from observing family members. mother. “She just busted up laughing, she couldn’t believe it. It I grew up watching my grandfather, Amos Wallace, carve totem just makes people laugh.” poles and make jewelry. I spent my summers playing in his cedar A King Residency at the School for Advanced Research chips, following him around the smokehouse, and sitting on a stool in Santa Fe gave him the opportunity to further develop his next to his workbench as he engraved. His patience never faltered bobbleheads. “They’re solid once they’ve been fired,” he says. To as he taught me about Tlingit art and instilled in me the courage to fire outside at SAR, “Well, I had to make space in the parking pursue my own art. lot. I am part of the alumni now. You are always welcome there My grandmother, Dorothy Wallace, put my first beads in my once you have fellowship.” Since, then he has created wolves, angels, coyotes, stories, singers, dancers, and skateboarders. hands. I would sit by her and try to make necklaces like the ones she Jonathan also makes bowls. His distant cousin Diego made, but I wasn’t very good at it. Eventually I started beading my Romero (Cochiti) taught him how to paint pottery with grandfather’s designs. Then a few years ago when my dad gave me 12-karat gold paint. “You have to put on a mask before putting some sealskins, I began experimenting with them and taught myself the gold paint on because it’s highly toxic,” he explains. “You how to make jewelry and purses. I wanted sealskin accessories that I have to pre-fire the pot to get a gloss, then you put the paint could wear all the time. on, then you refire it, but you have to leave the area because the As an Alaskan Native, Shaax’ Saani has the right to use fumes are toxic.”

At the Laboratory of Anthropology, Jonathan researches sustainably harvested sealskin in her artwork, just as her ancestors did. “I feel connected to my ancestors when I work with Mimbres pottery. “The Mimbres were located in an area infested with willow trees. Willow trees are a medicine; you can sealskin,” she says, “and I honor the animal by using all of the chew on the branches to get rid of headaches. It occurred to me parts. Sewing skin is where my heart is, and I’m proud to carry it on and add my own sense of adventure to what is possible they must have practiced a lot of medicine in their village, so I focus on that when I look at their designs. Why are they putting with such beautiful materials.”

“The Marine Mammal Protection Act insures that the all these animals on their pottery? Are they medicine?”

Jonathan Loretto (Cochiti-Jemez), Bird Bowl, pit-fired clay, mineral pigments. Photo: Jonathan Loretto.

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knowledgeable about the art and are open to new interpretations by Native designers.”

“I quickly shifted into working at it full-time and then headed to New Mexico to introduce my fashion to a new scene.” Living in Albuquerque gave the fashionista access to Indigenous markets, such as Santa Fe Indian Market and the Heard Fair, but she’s traveled as far as the National Museum of the American Indian art market in New York to reach new audiences.

“I’m currently living in Anchorage,” says the artist, “which has a diverse community. There is an exciting contemporary art scene that is growing. There is a lot of support for the arts here in Anchorage. First Fridays are popular all year round, even in the cold months.”

Her plans for the future: “I want to continue to follow my intuition and make the art that feels right in the moment.

I enjoy experimenting and learning and pushing myself. I’m happy with that.”

Shaax’ Saani’s artwork is online at Indigenous Princess, at www.indigenousprincess.com, or in person at the Alaska Federation of Natives Customary Art Fair, October 15 to 17, held at the Dena’ina Center in Anchorage.

Conclusion ABOVE: Sarah Valente (Sioux) modeling a hand-batiked, Chilkat-inspired dress with sealskin bodice, bracelets, and beaded, sealskin purse all by Shaax’ Saani (Tlingit)/Indigenous Princess. Photo: Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa), Neebin Studios (neebin.com).

BELOW RIGHT: Shaax’ Saani (Tlingit), Polar Bear Cuff, polar bear fur, sealskin, shell beads, labradorite, fangs.

animals are harvested by the tribes that have traditionally hunted them as a food source,” she explains. “These creatures and the land are respected by Native people and are important in our culture … Hunters harvest from healthy populations of seal—taking what is needed for their families and community.

Our traditions are rooted in this relationship with the land and animals and the life they provide for us. This is our culture.

Native villages are often remote and only accessible by boat or plane and have little economy. When a hunter can prepare and tan a skin to sell to a Native artist like myself, it is a meaningful source of income to support the family.”

She’s not shy about experimenting with metallic leathers or even bullet casings. Her Guns=Food cuff incorporates spent .223-rifle shell casings provided by a local hunter. But she’s equally willing to bead with delicate pearls or Swarovski crystals for a feminine touch to her jewelry.

Her unique vision in skin sewing caught on, and demand was immediate. “Fur never truly falls out of vogue,” says Shaax’ Saani. “Its appeal is too sensual and timeless to resist. Locals are

In the Native American art world, we have the incredible opportunity to meet artists that pique our interest. The proliferation of art markets allows collectors to meet promising artists face to face and to learn about their artwork right from the source. And for serious collectors, the change to meet and directly invest in a rising star is a true privilege. It’s like seeing your favorite band in a small club years before they hit arena status.

What do you call these artists after they have emerged?

Exciting.

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Karin Walkingstick Cherokee Pottery

918.261.5819

walkingstickpottery.com The Gathering, 2015, hand-coiled clay, 15½ × 15 in.

1st place contemporary pottery, Red Earth Festival

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IFAM | Santa Fe Indian Market #285-PAL Haskell Market | CAM | SEASAM

SWAIA indian market 2015 booth no. 225PAL

contemporary printmaking, drawing, & painting

~ ALEX J. PENA work available at

MoCNA Santa Fe Art Collector Than Povi Gallery www.alexjpena.com FAL L 2 0 1 5

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Fortune Huntinghorse Jewelry

Santa Fe Indian Market August 22-23, 2015 Booth #643 in the Plaza

Phone: 971-242-9772

fhuntinghorse@hotmail.com

fortunehuntinghorse.com

Dawn Dark Mountain —Oneida of Wisconsin—

BLEED: To make sure ink coverage to goes the edge of the final trim size extend graphics/artwork to edge TRIM: This is where the page will be cut < SAFETY GUIDE: Text and important images should be within this box DELETE THIS TEXT and THESE BOXES to create your file 6 0 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Native Woodland Watercolors & Prints Visit us this year at the Indigenous Fine Art Market (IFAM) Santa Fe, NM

August 20, 21 & 22, 2015 online at w w w.daw ndark mountain.com or visit Dawn Dark Mountain on Facebook

Feeding the Ancestors Tlingit Carved Horn Spoons

By Anne-Marie Victor-Howe Forward by Rosita Worl Photos by Hillil S. Burger Cover Art by Celeste Worl Published by Peabody Museum Press Feeding the Ancestors is the first scholarly study of traditional feast spoons and a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Pacific Northwest Cost peoples and their art.

Available at Worl Studio.

Please call for an appointment.

WORL STUDIO

www.worlstudio.com | 505.670.3848 FAL L 2 0 1 5 | 6 1

PROFILE

Blackfeet Beadwork Artist

Jackie Larson Bread

By Jean Merz-Edwards

J

ACKIE LARSON BREAD is an award-winning beadwork artist who finds inspiration in historical photographs of her Blackfeet ancestors, material objects, and from other Blackfeet portraits dating from the late 19th century through the early 20th century.

Her naturalistic creations bring together an extensive, historical knowledge of Northern Plains beadwork and a technical expertise in the two-needle appliqué.

Jackie uses her academic training from the Institute of American Indian Arts and the College of Santa Fe in painting and printmaking to support this artistic vision in which she shares what she has “seen and known” all her life.

Jackie became interested in beadwork as a young girl growing up on her father’s remote cattle ranch in Browning, Montana. Jackie remembers a deep connection to specific pieces in her family home that had been beaded by her late paternal grandmother. She often studied these objects, and around the age of five she proclaimed, “I want to learn to do this!”

Her first instruction came from her father, who learned to do “little bags and moccasins” with Jackie’s grandmother through the Blackfeet Crafts Association. The young artist continued to seek knowledge about beadwork techniques by visiting with people and “getting tips here and there.”

At the age of 14, she began working at the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, where her self-education continued and where she returned each summer for the next decade. During this period, her appreciation of the museum grew and her knowledge of Northern Plains beadwork deepened.

Jackie grew up on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, one and a half-million acres bordered by Canada on the north and by Glacier National Park on the west. It afforded her the privilege of understanding her identity in profound ways. This awareness came to Jackie through her first-hand experiences on the reservation and through the oral history conveyed to her by family and community. Today, Jackie’s prized beadwork roots itself in this knowledge and leaves behind a legacy for future generations.

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ABOVE: Jackie Larson Bread. All photos: Scott Photography, Great Falls, Montana. All images courtesy of the artist.

OPPOSITE: Medicine Crow, 2015, glass seed beads, hide, pouch dimensions: 7 × 9 in. All images courtesy of the artist.

How has growing up and living on the Blackfeet Reservation in Northwestern Montana impacted your artistic practice?

You know, I was thinking about that, and I wonder what my art would look like if I had still been a Blackfeet person but not grown up there. What would my work have looked like if I had grown up in New York? It was so darn important to live in Browning and to experience things on a daily basis that speak about being Blackfoot. I experienced everything … people speaking Blackfeet, the way that we look, the way that we dress, the way that we dance, the specific, spiritual things that we did and do. A huge part of these experiences [influence] my work. The location—Glacier National Park—it is absolutely stunning and absolutely beautiful. It has certainly fed my soul.

JACKIE BREAD

Family has consistently been an important part of your life. What role does family play in your creative process?

Oh boy, it’s huge. Family is a lot of the reason that I do what I do, and why my grandmother did what she did. I have an uncle that is a renowned basrelief carver, and I have a cousin who is a renowned painter. My husband is a sculptor, and my children are interested in that same line [of work].

It’s the best.

My son is going to be 25, and I can remember him telling me in high school, “I don’t know what I want to go college for; all I know is that I don’t want to be an artist,” because he had shown with me from when he was about five years old. He said, “I really don’t want to do that.” That’s why he’s evolved to do art in a different way—a very contemporary way. He is a media artist focusing on film. I said, “Ah, I knew you’d be an artist.” Likewise, my daughter, she’s talking about going to college and doing her generals here and then going to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, which is where her dad and I went.

That makes me feel so good, and I love working with them. In the summer when we get ready for Indian Market, it’s such a fun time—we all sit together and listen to the same music or just sit and visit and work together or just have quiet time. It’s awesome. Working together is a unique way and a bonding way of living. I really like those aspects of family and creativity.

Your formal education included studying painting and printmaking at the Institute of American Indian Arts. While there you also focused on museum studies. What drove this pursuit?

Working at the Museum of the Plains Indian. It was a magical place for me because it had so much history and it FAL L 2 0 1 5

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War Shirt Honoring Chief Curley Bear (Blackfeet), 2013, wool, horsehair, smoked deerhide, otter fur, glass seed beads, brass beads, brass tinklers, collection of C. M. Russell Museum, Great Falls, Montana.

was multilayered. I grew up on a ranch, and I loved living out there. It was a ranch where we had horses and cattle. All through high school, I wanted to be a veterinarian; a largeanimal vet. Right up until April of the year I graduated from high school, that was the plan. I would go to an instate school and that’s what I would focus on: veterinary medicine. Then I heard about the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and I went to my counselor and I told him, “I want to find out more about this; I think this is what I want to do. I know it’s late in the game, but I think this is what I really want to do.” So, I did a whole 180-degree turn and went to Santa Fe. I originally went there for museum studies because I loved our museum so much. I’d always done drawing and painting, and so I really loved printmaking and painting at the IA. I really got into it and that was surprising … It showed this whole other side of me I needed to explore.

You have achieved significant, professional success.

Since 1995, you have earned nearly one hundred awards, including the Best of Show at SWAIA in 2013.

Your work is housed in over ten museum collections, including places such as the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, and the Museum of Art and Design in New York City. Yet, it seems these accolades are the byproducts of your art and not the driving force behind your desire to create. What is the driving force behind your prolific body of work?

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They’re really nice, the collections and the awards. It’s nice to be validated; everyone likes to be validated. But what is really behind any artist is that need to “do.” A lot of my things are just the way I feel and view our people. I’m not trying to make an incredibly profound statement. I’m just telling you about what I know. I’m telling you about what I’ve seen all my life. Essentially, it sounds simple, but that’s just really it. I’m not out there to make huge political statements or anything like that. I am just telling you the stories that I heard all my life, and the things I’ve seen all my life. I am doing it for myself. For my kids and myself. I want my kids to know what makes us so special, so singular.

And we talk about that when they do their art, so they can speak from a place that is knowledgeable. That’s important to me. It’s my real need to keep these stories I’ve heard all my life intact.

It’s wonderful that my pieces get to be preserved at places like the National Museum of the American Indian. That’s like icing on the cake. But, I like telling about who I am. If you want to listen, yay, and if you don’t that’s okay, too.

In your current work, you transform photographed portraits into pictorial beadwork. How did you come to work in this way?

After I graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts, I saw Marcus Amerman, and he had just started experimenting with photographs. I went to his home, I saw

JACKIE BREAD

I’m just telling you about what I know. I’m telling you about what I’ve seen all my life.

Canteen Purse Honoring Little Plume (Blackfeet), 2014, glass seed beads, smoked deerhide, French oval brass beads, brass hawk bells, 7 in. diameter, private collection.

the works he was doing, and I thought, “This is interesting.

I love beading, and I love painting portraits and using that high color,” and I thought, “Yeah, I want to try this.” That was about 1983. At that time, I really focused on Blackfeet geometrics and Blackfeet florals and just playing around with that and being more adept with my technique of beading. Probably around 1986–87, I got into doing the portraits and went from there. I love challenging myself. I love that I can get that painterly quality via the beadwork.

I guess painting-wise, I could have kept challenging myself, seeing how far I could take that, but this [beadwork] satisfies everything inside of me. With painting, I don’t find that joy that I got 25 to 30 years ago. I will try every once in a while, and it’s just not as fun as it used to be. I really, really like the rhythm of beading.

Is there a certain period and type of photograph that inspires you?

Oftentimes, I’m looking through my photographs of family photographs and Blackfeet people and I think, “Oh, I remember my dad telling me something specific about this person,” or I remember my mom telling me something specific. A lot of it is spending time with that person and thinking about those things I was told about them. Some of the photographs are of family, and some are photographs that were taken probably in the late 1880s to probably the 1930s, maybe 1940s. I focus on that period … when we were still visually recognizable as Blackfeet people—how we dressed, how we wore our hair, and the accessories we carried. Everything that made us really unique, really FAL L 2 0 1 5

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ABOVE: Necklace Bags, 2013, smoked deerhide, glass seed beads, pony beads, French oval brass beads, 3 × 4 in. each.

OPPOSITE: Trapezoid Pouch Honoring Little Plume (Blackfeet), 2014, hide, glass seed beads, ribbon, brass hawk bells.

singular. We were stylistically kind of peaking at that time. We had a unity of design because we had gotten all the things (like trade items) that we were going to get.

We just “went to town” doing some unifying, awesome Blackfeet designs. I like that we were utilizing trade items in a specific way that only we used them. In that sense, it was identifying.

Are there any hairstyles, regalia, or anything else from this period that you particularly admire?

Oh, it’s pretty much everything, including the way we did beadwork. The designs and the style of beadwork were not unique, but we used it consistently, and that style or technique is a two-needle stitch. This is where things are stitched down flat and where they are not echoing the lazy stitch or echoing quillwork in lanes. Our beadwork was flat and smooth and really time consuming. I like to convey that in my contemporary work. Ninety-five percent of our beadwork was done in this stitch, which is also called a flat stitch or an appliqué stitch. I like working in this style, because there’s so much you can do with it. You can get intricate with it. Certainly many other tribes used the flat stitch almost exclusively, and other tribes used a lazy-stitch 6 6 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

style. It really spoke of where you were and who you were and showed a unity of your people. So, it’s not just the images I am portraying, it’s also the technique I am using to express the identity of the Blackfeet people.

The assortment of objects you bead range from small pouches to horse collars and wool blankets. How do you choose your projects, and what informs these decisions?

Some things are just straight-up traditional, like the example of the blanket strip at the Smithsonian. Those things were actually used. We did them in a unique way, and I wanted to speak about that. But, I also do other projects. One example is when I saw a metal lunch box in the store and I thought, “Oh, my goodness, I want to do a lunch box,” because it would be an interesting vehicle to show my work. I was thinking about how kids buy lunch boxes with images, and this is something important to me.

The title of the lunch box is My Heroes Have Always Been Indians, and I put people from all three components of our Blackfeet Confederacy on the object. That is what I would like to have taken to school when I was a kid.

JACKIE BREAD

I do fun, experimental things and step out of doing just a traditional bag, or a traditional blanket strip, or a traditional horse collar. I step out and update it a bit. I also like to go to antique stores and find things. I’ve seen the contemporary things that were at hand in the late 19th century and early 20th century, like the Victorian high heels. The high heels were taken, embellished with beads, and made our own. People were thinking outside the box back then. I think it’s interesting today to take contemporary things and embellish them, make them our own, and to speak about who we are today.

Making art out of found objects is so interesting. Could you expand on your idea of “art?”

Art is not art per se as how we think of art today, like “let’s hang this painting on the wall.” I really love that Native American Blackfeet traditional arts were things that were used every day, yet they were also [displayed] for their beauty. In the same regard, if I create a bag, I certainly want whoever purchases it to use it for what it was intended, but then I like that they hang it up on their wall for art. One thing I’ve kept consistent throughout my entire career is that I like the functionality of art.

Finally, you have met with so much success, not just personal, but also professional. What advice would you give to a young person today?

Just be true to yourself and what makes you ultimately happy. I think that’s why I’ve had such longevity. I’ve done this all of my life, and I’ve just been true to what I like. And as I’ve said, if you want to listen, yay, but if you don’t, that’s okay, too, but I’m going to do my thing. I think that’s important: Do your thing and you’ll be happy.

Jackie Larson Bread will be on the Plaza this year for SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market.

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Chickasaw-Ponca Painter

Brent Greenwood

By America Meredith

A

N UNDERSTATED ARTIST, Brent Greenwood brings his easygoing manner and selfdeprecating sense of humor to all his endeavors.

As a painter, singer, dancer, husband, father, and educator, Greenwood is committed to the intertribal Native community of his home state, Oklahoma. He was born in Midwest City and currently lives in Edmond with his wife Kennetha and their two children, all of whom are artists.

Recognizing the family’s cultural activism, the Oklahoma Council for Indian Education named Brent and Kennetha Indian Parents of the Year in 2008.

Brent earned his AFA degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 1994, and his BFA degree from Oklahoma City University in 1997. He has won numerous awards for his paintings and last year took Best in Show at the 22nd Annual Coors Western Art Exhibit in Denver, Colorado.

While Brent creates exquisite pieces at live-painting events in the span of an hour or two, he is notorious for building layers upon layers into his paintings when left to his own schedule.

His richly textured works are loose and painterly with a range of brushstrokes and marks, including scrapes back into the paint. Brent often incorporates mixed-media elements into his artwork, from decorative, handmade papers and vinyl lettering to coffee beans. His sociopolitical messages are often subtle and humorous. They go beyond preaching to the converted to reach new audiences who may not have yet come to grips with the United States’ history with Native Americans or current political realities. Other works are personal and remain enigmatic, such as his portrait of a young Plains boy in regalia with Napoleon Dynamite.

Your father is Chickasaw, and your mother is Ponca. Do you want to talk about how your upbringing influenced your artwork?

There have been more Chickasaw influences lately … but let’s start with my Ponca side. Being raised within my culture, I was more concerned about cars and girls when I was growing up. I wish I had paid more attention.

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Brent Greenwood. All images courtesy of artist.

direct but indirect. In my teens, I realized this was important.

Most Plains families, they get their kids dancing as soon as they can walk. They’re ingrained in that lifestyle, that powwow culture. For me, it wasn’t that way. I was around it, but I wasn’t dancing; I wasn’t singing at a young age. In my teens, I felt this was important. I wanted to start dancing. It wasn’t until I was 18 when I got roached. I was roached by one of our elders, Paul Roughface. We were related through marriage. My dad’s sister, who is fullblood Chickasaw, married a Ponca, too. Because of that relationship, we had that connection through marriage to the Roughfaces. So not only did I have that direct Ponca link through my mom’s side, the Buffaloheads, we had that other side through marriage.

Ponca have seven clans, and each clan used to have their own ceremonies and dances. For instance, the tail dance or Hethuska, that’s a Ponca warrior society. The clans had their own form of that warrior society dance. This particular dance was from the Osage clan, when my Uncle Paul first roached me.

Redhawk Messenger, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 24 × 30 in., private collection.

Prior to that, when I was 16, I started singing. I gravitated towards Ponca singing, but I didn’t know our language. So, I started singing general powwow songs, intertribal songs.

I was going out with friends, I was caught up in the social aspects of powwows, and what happens after the powwow, which everyone knows is the 49. Actually the first songs I really had a grasp of were 49 songs, but from there I learned Ponca songs. In my later teens, I started singing and dancing Southern Straight Dance.

Those early influences kept me going in that direction. I wanted to be more of an active participant in my culture. My parents encouraged me, but they didn’t want to force it on us; they let us find our own path. My own kids, as soon as they were able to walk, they started dancing. We impressed on our children its importance, because I thought about all the things I missed out on at a young age, things I wished I paid attention to, so we got our kids dancing and speaking

parts of the language. All that has made them well rounded and culturally aware.

I also knew about the Chickasaw side, but I wasn’t an active participant in their dancing. I’ve been to stomp dances, but back then it seemed like it was more for exhibition purposes.

I didn’t go to stomp dance grounds. If I had, my perceptions would have been different.

Your wife Kennetha Greenwood works for the Otoe-Missouria language program. How is language important to your family and your art?

Language is very important, especially for our kids. It is a challenge, because we’re in a household where I’m teaching my son Ponca songs. I’m creating paintings with Ponca and Chickasaw text in them. And then my wife is a facilitator for the Otoe-Missouria language. My kids mainly know Otoe.

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Going to Town, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 3 × 3 ¾ in., private collection.

As time has passed, there are fewer and fewer speakers on my Ponca side that I can talk to. I used to have guys I could call up, but they are no longer here. I still have some resources I can count on, but you know when you have a relationship with someone and you can just call them up at the drop of a hat and they’ll tell you what you need to hear and tell you more than you need to hear? If I were going to learn Ponca at this stage in my life, who would I talk to?

everything you can to keep those languages alive.” Ponca only has a handful of speakers left. Otoe is the same way. So I think that’s who we need to focus on.

I got acquainted with a Mississippi Choctaw guy who could speak Choctaw, and he asked me, “How much do you know in Chickasaw?” I said, “Not enough.” He asked what other tribe I was, and I said Ponca. He said, “For Chickasaws and Choctaws, we have a lot more resources today. We have more fluent speakers. I would focus on your smaller tribes and do

Incorporating our language into our art keeps it visible. I see more Oklahoma tribes doing that, too. Around tribal communities, you might see stop signs with the word stop in their own language. Tribes are integrating their languages into everyday items. We need to see it to get it ingrained in our minds. As artists, we can integrate the language into our

What are some ways artists can use their artwork to help with language revival?

For me, integrating the language into the visual. One of my paintings’ titles, Chikashshaat Ilokchina’, means, “The Chickasaw are well.” The painting revolves around a healthy I told Kennetha, I should just learn Otoe; I have no one to lifestyle and has a stomp dance circle that includes young talk Ponca to. Some of our old, old tribal members could speak both languages; they could speak Otoe and Ponca. And people, people in Chickasaw dress, people in Western clothing—a guy in a business suit, a kid wearing a Kevin Iowa, too. They could all understand one another. If most Durant jersey. There’s a movement saying our culture and of my household is speaking Otoe, then I’m going to take it our language are here; it’s not just something in the past. upon myself to learn as much as I can.

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BRENT GREENWOOD

I was around my peers with similar upbringings—rez Natives, urban Natives from different tribes—but we all had the same commonalities that brought us together.

Bringing Up the Sun, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 12 × 24 in., collection of Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate (Chickasaw).

art, or even take it a step further and title pieces in our tribal languages. Those are small ways we artists can address the language issue.

This helped us tap into ourselves and express ourselves through these creative means of painting, printmaking, poetry, sculpture, video, whatever it was. It was like a saladbowl effect; you have all these different classes to create How did you first get interested in the visual arts? one, great, final product. IAIA really set me on the path to The visual arts have always been a part of me. I’ve been telling my own narrative—from my instructors to my fellow drawing since I can remember. We all start out drawing the students. I made some great friends, full-time artists who I’m same basic forms. All kids are artists, but then where do those still in touch with today. technical skills, that draftsmanship come in? Being able to draw what you see, and draw what you don’t see.

Did you have instructors or fellow students that you really didn’t agree with? And did that help shape your I was in an eighth grade art competition for Indian education. views?

They kicked my painting out of a show because they said I traced it. My Indian education director went to bat for me, The only thing I didn’t agree with was the way they were and said, “I saw him draw that.” Going back to the Kiowa introducing concepts to me. Being young and naïve—being Five, Flatstyle, that was my first influence as far as style goes. a kid, you think you know it all. They were trying to help First I went to Oklahoma City University, then fall of 1992 me think out of the box, but being stubborn, I wasn’t always accepting of their methods. Looking back, I realize I’m using I enrolled at the Institute of American Indian Arts. That was obviously conducive to my art. I was around my peers their techniques today. Today in my own teaching, if you can with similar upbringings—rez Natives, urban Natives from pull one thing from a class or workshop that can make you a different tribes—but we all had the same commonalities better artist, it makes it all worthwhile. that brought us together. We were like one big family. Our instructors helped us connect, because they were Indian, too. Do you teach youth art today at the Chickasaw Summer They helped us understand who we were.

Arts Academy?

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Sardis Lake, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 12 × 20 in., private collection.

I teach a studio course. Now it’s just called the Chickasaw Arts Academy because they want to move to yearround instruction. I mentor youth through instruction, small workshops, and presentation. I get them to realize for themselves their potential.

Who are the Urban Indian 5 artists?

Currently, we are a collective group of artists. The concept originally came from Gerald Cournoyer. He wanted to tap into the local arts community.

Gerald is very spiritual and is involved with the Sun Dance. He thought, why not healing through art? So, let’s work in our own community and partner with the Oklahoma Indian Clinic.

At that time, it was Gerald, Marwin Begaye, Tom Poolaw, Kimberly Rodriguez, and myself.

We wanted to work with the clinics.

We were tired of seeing the same old posters on the walls there. Let’s show art that will put patients at ease. Let’s introduce some Native aesthetics to

the clinics that give our people a sense of attachment. While they are here at the clinic, let’s give them a sense of place and a sense of community through our art.

Steve has taken over management and networking for the group. We just have to create art and make public appearances to discuss our work. The Little Axe Clinic commissioned some of us to create site-specific pieces. We’re open to bringing in other artists who want to address the art of healing.

Some artists out there are art therapists and counselors.

We didn’t think we’d maintain the same group of artists, because things change and evolve. Other artists have expressed interest. Currently we have Gerald, Tom, Holly Wilson, Shan Goshorn, and me.

I find it impressive that this group was initiated by artists and it is for urban We’ve gone through some changes. and rural Native communities. Once We aren’t affiliated with a single clinic you leave Oklahoma City and Tulsa, anymore. A former employee at the some of these rural communities are Indian Clinic named Steve Barse—he’s underserved in the arts.

Kiowa and Wichita—has taken the project under his wing to keep the The clinics are receptive. It’s more than mission going. The overall mission is hanging pretty paintings on the wall. still there. He established the Urban We want to provide art with substance.

Indian 5 as a 501(c)(3) and is working Part of healing is laughter. Why do with Absentee Shawnee clinic in Little you think humor is such an integral Axe, Oklahoma, and the Kickapoo component of Native art? clinic.

Every one of us has our own professional career, so it’s great that

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Humor has gotten us through the bad times. We have so much negative stuff

BRENT GREENWOOD

Burke—I’d love to hear what her answer would be on that. I’m not out and about as much as others, but I still do several art markets a year.

Here in Oklahoma, you can still go to any travel stop and see this romanticized version of what Indian people are. The public perception here is still skewed, because they still see feathers, mandalas, dreamcatchers, wolves howling at the moon, and that thunderbird design that’s everywhere. Stuff being labeled as Cherokee pottery that looks like Pueblo pottery. That stuff is everywhere and it perpetuates the stereotype of what Indian art is. Here in Oklahoma, it’s rampant.

Public perception overall might not have changed much, but once you go beyond that surface layer, people are more educated.

Do you think curators and collectors would be more open to different media from Native artists?

Don’t Squeeze the Shaman, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 24 × 18 in., private collection.

in our history, and humor has helped us get through to see another day.

Not necessarily to laugh it off, but help us survive. Sometimes it’s hard to explain—you have to be around the Native community to get it, because sometimes non-Native people just don’t get it. The way you say something, the kind of slang you use. A couple of my paintings have been tongue-incheek, but at the same time I’m trying to make a relevant point, too, which I hope people understand. I don’t want to throw it in their faces and make them

feel guilty. I’m asking viewers to put themselves in our shoes.

Have you seen public perceptions of Native American art change during your lifetime?

Oh yes, I have. I think the public is becoming educated and more aware, especially about contemporary art and what we as Native artists are saying today. Our good friend Christina

I would hope so [laughs]. They are the ones in the know. They are up on what’s happening, and how art is evolving, new ideas of expressing our culture and heritage. Everything is evolutionary, and they need to be open and receptive to new ideas and ways of expressing our heritage and cultures.

Where will you be showing in the near future?

I’m showing at the Indigenous Fine Art Market [Santa Fe, August 20–22].

I’m doing the Chickasaws’ art market, called the Southeastern Art Show and Market (SEASAM) in Tishomingo, Oklahoma, during the first weekend in October.

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Muscogee Creek Printmaker

Bobby C. Martin

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By Roy Boney Jr.

OBBY C. MARTIN (MUSCOGEE CREEK) did not set out to become an award-winning artist and professor, but his hard work got him there. His unique style of combining printmaking, painting, and graphics has won him numerous art awards in Indian Country over his career. These include a Best of Division in Printmaking at Santa Fe Indian Market, a Best of Division in Drawing at Cherokee Art Market, and many awards at the Trail of Tears Art Show and the Five Civilized Tribes Competitive Show, just to name a few. His work has been broadly exhibited, internationally and across the United States. He sums up his attitude by quoting the photorealist portrait artist Chuck Close: “Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.”

His Story Martin came to art by way of rock and roll and cartoons.

Though he developed an interest in drawing at a young age, it would be a while before he seriously pursued a career as a visual artist. When he was a boy, he remembers his father ordering books for a correspondence course on cartooning. While his father lost interest in the books, Martin looked through them and started drawing the cartoons himself. “It seemed very cool [to me as a kid] that you could make pictures with just a pencil and paper that people could recognize and enjoy,” says Martin.

Later on in junior high, he and a friend drew hot rods and monsters and sold them to classmates for a nickel each. “That’s when I became a professional artist, I guess,” Martin jokes.

In high school, Martin lost interest in drawing. His creative interests became geared more to music. As a member of bands like Grand Slam and Live Wire, Martin performed original songs, but mostly the bands stuck to Top 40 rock covers and country because, as he says, “We needed the gigs!”

He opened a recording studio in Tahlequah for a while and pursued music publishing, but eventually felt the need to go in a different direction. “I decided to bail on that career and pursue something equally lucrative—art.”

In 1989, he enrolled at Northeastern State University (NSU) in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, as a nontraditional student in his early thirties. He had been out of school for 13 years.

He felt no strong personal relationship to any existing Native art tradition. Very little of what he saw connected with him.

He did not want to paint subjects or work in expected styles that some people might consider “Indian art.” His desire was to represent his lived experience, not the ones based on popular misconceptions held by the general public and those found in skewed history books. He double-majored in fine art 7 4 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Bobby C. Martin with his painting Uncle David (Killed in Action, 1944). All images courtesy of the artist.

and American Indian studies because of his earlier interest in drawing and his desire to learn more about his tribe’s history.

He felt his tribal heritage was something he took for granted up to that point, so it was his responsibility to learn and honor it. He was also married with a family of his own by this time, further deepening his interest in his family story and legacy.

Martin found his artistic direction in the stories from his family’s photographs. Whether they came from his grandmother, parents, aunts, uncles, or other family members, they all were part of the narrative he felt needed to be told.

Photos of Natives riding motorcycles, pews from old country churches, a young man proudly posing in his navy uniform, an elderly couple stealing a quick kiss—these are the types of images he uses in his exploration of the shared experience of Native families in Indian Territory and in Oklahoma. Martin describes two specific items that had a profound impact on him as an artist:

BOBBY C. MARTIN

Apr 55, 1994, acrylic and graphite on canvas, 30 × 45 in., collection of Gilcrease Museum.

“One was an old copy of the Dawes Commission Index and Final Rolls for the Creek and Seminole Tribes in Indian Territory, which listed my great-grandfather and grandmother and other relatives as original allottees. The other was a tattered, pocket-sized hymnbook in the Muscogee Creek language that belonged to my grandmother. Her handwritten notes and Scripture references were scattered throughout the margins of the little book.” Martin takes such items and synthesizes them into striking narratives of imagery and text.

Martin’s professor R. C. Coones introduced him to printmaking as an undergraduate. Coones, a longtime faculty member at NSU, has mentored other artists including IAIA alumnus Burt Russell and artist Robert Lewis (CherokeeNavajo-Apache). Martin took all his academic studies very seriously, but the printmaking process was what captured his imagination the most. “The art and craft of making an image, creating a matrix from that image, and transferring it to paper using these archaic methods and pieces of heavy machinery was fascinating to me,” he says. “After I graduated from NSU in 1992, I wanted to pursue more printmaking, and the natural route seemed to be grad school.”

He applied to the MFA program at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, but he was turned down on his first try. UA was the nearest school to Tahlequah with an MFA program, so having no alternative plan, he applied again. His persistence paid off and he was accepted on the second try.

Martin threw himself into a two-and-a-half-year period of

intensive exploration of the various techniques of fine art printmaking. “Grad school was great—an intensely focused period of time where all you’re expected to do is make art and hopefully figure out your path in the art world, which I sort of did in a roundabout way. The formal training was helpful, but the time spent really digging deep into what it meant to me to be an artist—practically, emotionally, and spiritually—was the most valuable thing about grad school.” He cites his graduate school advisor John Newman as being a positive influence. “[He] was a great mentor in a very hands-off, relaxed way. He would just set me on my way and was always around to guide me back on track when I started to veer off.”

While at Arkansas, Martin was awarded a Professional Development Fellowship from the College Art Association.

This led to his taking a position at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa in 1995. The opportunity was fitting, as museum founder Thomas Gilcrease was Muscogee Creek himself—a connection between a collector and artist that spanned across generations.

Martin served as graphic design coordinator at the museum.

His main responsibility was to create signage and printed materials for publication. While he primarily spent his time there learning to be a graphic designer, he says the experience showed him the behind-the-scenes part of the art world. “I think how Gilcrease influenced my art making was in seeing how museums actually worked. It was a great eye-opener to see how art was professionally handled and displayed and FAL L 2 0 1 5

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Indian on an Indian, encaustic, collage, and oil on panel, 48 × 60 in.

how exhibitions were organized and publicized. While there, I also met a lot of curators and art professionals who are friends to this day and have been wonderful connections over the years.”

In 2000, Martin left the Gilcrease to return to NSU as an assistant professor of art. His old professor and friend Coones was once again there to help him.

“I got to know him as a colleague, which was an interestingly different mentoring experience compared to my student days,” Martin explains. In 2003, Martin was named art program coordinator. He continued climbing the ladder in the university and was promoted to associate professor in 2005. Martin mentored many students as an art instructor and program coordinator. In the fall of 2008, he left NSU and accepted a position of associate professor of visual arts at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. He currently teaches printmaking and studio art foundation courses at JBU.

His Work Martin’s process always begins with photographs, whether they are formal portraits or intimate snapshots.

He then combines the images with important cultural items such as his grandmother’s hymnal or a nod to his longtime musical interests. The elements all become statements on family, culture, and political history. Martin elaborates further: “The humanity of the photos and the hymnbook seemed polar opposites of the stiff, official lists of names and numbers contained in the Dawes census book. On the one hand, you had real Indian people captured in the midst of real Indian lives. On the other hand, you had the official government definition of Indian identity in stark black and white—an identity, by the way, that even today determines who can and cannot be considered eligible for many tribal benefits like health care, housing, and educational scholarships.”

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Martin also finds much inspiration in his faith, as evidenced by the personal importance of his grandmother’s hymnbook, and he also includes elements from the Bible in both the Muscogee Creek and English languages. As he explains in his online artist statement, “These images of close kinfolk and distant relatives are icons for me, symbols of a Native American identity that is not seen as ‘traditional’ but is just as valid and vital to me—a tradition of Indian Christianity and mission schools that has been a part of my family history for generations.”

One singular element of printmaking is the ability to produce a series of the same image—although each is unique. While every image may seem to be a copy of an original, each print has its own imperfections that give it its own character. This allows an artist to explore ideas in the images by making statements on mass culture or on celebrity, for example. Martin’s take on

BOBBY C. MARTIN

Proverbs 22:6, encaustic, oil, and collage on panel.

repeating imagery transforms unknown faces and figures into the familiar before the viewer’s eyes. He describes the change from historical anonymity to personalized, recognizable moments.

“The photographs have very personal meanings for me as the artist, but I have also found that there is an almost universal recognition among viewers of a sense of history and identity, evoking memories of their own family’s past.”

His etching Indian on Indian is a prime example of this. Etching is a method of printing from a metal plate with an image incised by acid. The incised plate is inked and pressed upon a surface such as paper or board to reproduce the image. In this etching, a

young Muscogee Creek lady sits astride an Indian Motorcycle® manufactured in the United States until the company went bankrupt in 1953.1 Layered into the background, a Bible passage shows through with text in English and in Muscogee Creek. Another subtle layer of text reveals a roll list of Muscogee Creek citizens. The image is framed with a stylized, Southeastern border motif.

Viewers may identify this woman as someone they potentially know.

Martin takes this story further.

Another version of the Indian on Indian image is rendered in encaustic. The sepia tones of the encaustic mimic the aged family photograph from which Martin drew his inspiration. Martin describes what drew him to the medium.

“Encaustic is an ancient technique, dating back to the Egyptian Fayum portraits—amazingly lifelike faces painted onto sarcophagi over 2,000 years ago. It caught my attention when I got the opportunity to view one of Jasper Johns’s Flag encaustic paintings up close, and noticed all the newspaper clippings and other bits and pieces that were trapped within the wax surface.

It was a light-bulb moment—actual physical layers, which I had been trying to accomplish digitally with Photoshop.”

Martin sees the building up of layers as “a physical and metaphorical representation of the effect of time and memory.”

The technique consists of working with a mixture of beeswax, resin, and pigment. This is heated to a liquid state and applied to a surface by pouring, dripping, or brushing. Martin brings the process into the 21st century by starting with a digital sketch. He uses the digital workspace to plan the placement of the design elements. The physical layers are printed through various means on Japanese washi paper and adhered to the surface with wax. The thinness of the Japanese paper causes the layers to become transparent, and the images appear to be floating within the layers.

Once the layers are cooled, Martin carves the surface with a drypoint needle and draws the image with oil sticks, which push the pigment down into the carved lines, resulting in an engraved or etched look. Glazes are added to give final depth and detail to the piece. The end result is a striking image of ethereal quality made possible by merging old and new processes. “I really enjoy the flexibility of the digital manipulation of layers combined with the old-school application of paint and wax.”

The tactile nature of Martin’s processes is strongly conveyed in his piece Generations Across the Divide.

This large panel features three family photographs in encaustic. Each one has sections selectively colored in soft hues resembling hand-tinted photographs.

In the center, offsetting the snapshots of peaceful family moments, is a rusted steel plate with the names of Muscogee

1. Indian Motorcycles were manufactured in the United States from 1902 to 1953; however, Indian Motorcycles was purchased in 2011 by Polaris Industries, which is now manufacturing them.

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Creeks taken from the Dawes Roll, each name cut sharply from the steel.

The dried wax from the encaustic has settled in drips along the sides of each of the photographic panels, and the wax pooled on the steel plate could be symbolic of blood. The piece works as a stark reminder of the negative effects the Dawes Act had in Indian Territory.

These effects are still reverberating in Indian Country today, impacting issues like tribal sovereignty and identity. The steel plate perfectly encapsulates the harsh impact and burden of federal policy on tribal history. Despite all this, families such as Martin’s have persevered.

Martin’s efforts transcend simple viewer-artist relationships. He encourages the public to create their own prints at events called “Print Actions,” which have proven to be quite popular.

They have been held at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, the Cherokee Arts Center in Park Hill, and the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, among other places. He and other artists set up screens and teach attendees the basics of screen printing, and participants leave with a greater appreciation of the art form. Christina Burke, curator of Native American and non-Western art at Philbrook, helped schedule some of these Print Actions.

“His influence is unique and wide ranging because it is threefold,” says Burke. “First, through his own creative process … he explores printmaking techniques combined with collage and painting, including encaustics, to produce his characteristic, layered works of art.

Second, he encourages and facilitates partnerships with other Native artists, printmakers or not, whom he hosts at his home at 7 Springs Studio. Third, he works with other artists, especially those involved in the Southeastern Indian Artists Association, to curate exhibitions for galleries and museums in Oklahoma and beyond.”

Curatorial Practice As Burke mentions, Martin has added curation to his résumé. Martin feels one of the prime jobs of an artist is to tell stories. His interest in curating shows stems from his desire to give

Pursuit of Civilization #6, encaustic, oil and collage on panel.

contemporary Native artists more places to exhibit and tell their stories.

He creates venues that open dialogues and get Native art into the public eye.

“Yes, there are some great museums with amazing curators that champion Native art and artists, but it still feels like opportunities to showcase our artists are few and far between.”

He has curated a handful of shows so far, including Indian Ink: Printmaking from the J. W. Wiggins Collection of Native American Art in 2012 and the upcoming Return from Exile traveling exhibition that will open in Athens, Georgia, in August 2015. Indian Ink is a playful allusion

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to the India ink used in printing. The exhibit was displayed at the Sequoyah National Research Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, which is home to the Native art collection of renowned collector J. W. Wiggins. Martin felt curating the show was important for him because of the level of interaction it promoted.

“I was able to invite several of the artists out to my studio to make prints specifically for the show. Most printmakers crave collaboration, so the curation and the creation of a lot of the art in the show satisfied that craving very well.”

For the Return from Exile exhibition,

BOBBY C. MARTIN

The Kiss, 2013, encaustic, collage, oil stick and oil on panel, 7 × 10 in.

Martin has found an artistic compatriot in painter and mixed-media artist Tony Tiger (Sac & Fox-Muscogee-Seminole).

The artists often collaborate on artwork and are co-curating the Exile show. This national, traveling exhibition features 34 Native artists of Southeastern tribal heritage. The Cherokee Heritage Center and Southeastern Indian Artists Association (SEIAA), an artist advocacy nonprofit organization for which Martin serves as president, are sponsoring the exhibit. According to Martin and Tiger, not many group exhibitions featuring Southeastern Indian artists have been held, let alone ones showing contemporary artists. Their goal in co-curating this show is to be the drivers of change rather than waiting for those in positions of power to initiate the movement.

“As an artist, I think taking steps to change the status quo is crucial,” says Martin. “In my case, it means trying to

use my experience in the art and museum worlds to start organizing shows with other artists.” Martin is looking forward to the opening of the show for many reasons, one of which is to display some of his new artwork. He and Tiger have created a large installation for the exhibition, which the artist describes as the most ambitious piece he has worked on thus far.

Conclusion Martin’s 7 Springs Studio sits on the property that was once part of a wagon trail. The trail ran down to a valley behind the studio. At the bottom of the valley were seven live springs.

People came from all around to draw water from the springs that provided a much-needed community resource.

Martin’s studio continues to be a similar gathering place.

He’s facilitated many artist collaborations at the studio, and the work emerging from these collaborations has become an integral part of the Native arts scene in Northeastern Oklahoma. His work is breathing life into 21st-century Native art and ensures the stories of his family will be shared and remembered for generations. As a professor, he teaches a new generation of artists to tell their own stories. His role as curator provides opportunities for other Native artists to exhibit when they might not otherwise be able. No matter where Martin’s career takes him, the nourishing spirit of those springs lives on through his work as artist, advocate, and educator. It is a story that would make his family proud.

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Navajo Ceramic Artist and Sculptor

Christine Nofchissey McHorse

By Kim Baca

T

O SAY THAT there have been transitions in Christine Nofchissey McHorse’s artistic life, in any artist’s life, is trite. Some transitions are born from passion or the exigency to explore for growth. For McHorse, it was a natural revolution, a progression toward somewhere unexpected.

The first exploration began at 14 when McHorse left Morenci, Arizona, to follow her siblings to the new art school for Native Americans in Santa Fe. Her original intent of learning how to blow glass at the Institute of American Indian Arts gave way to a dropped class and the study of clay and plastics.

Later, after meeting her husband at the school and learning how to work with micaceous clay with the help of his grandmother, she moved from selling silver jewelry and small, utilitarian clay pots with her husband for more than 20 years, to complex, freeflowing ceramics.

“We talked oftentimes—she told me that she was getting tired,” said Jan Musial about McHorse. Musial is an Arizona-based, longtime wholesale dealer who specializes in Navajo art.

He often purchased, sold, and collected her early works. “She got tired of doing what she called the same thing, although they sold wonderfully. I knew it was coming for a period of time.”

He was drawn to her early work not only because as a Navajo potter she was using micaceous clay, a material often used in Taos Pueblo pottery, but because it was polished and refined.

“Christine was above the rest of the pack,” Musial recalled. “She had wonderful designs … She was very

Christine Nofchissey McHorse at work. Image courtesy of Clark + Del Vecchio.

creative with the appliqué she did on pots, and they were very delicate and had thin walls. When you picked one up you could tell it was hers, even with your eyes closed.”

Musial recalls the transition around 2002 or so, when McHorse showed him one of her new transitional forms.

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Though they were wonderful pieces, he wondered how he was going to sell her new, exploratory art, thinking about his museum gift shop and gallery-owner clients who gravitated toward work that was more customary. Eventually Musial stopped buying McHorse’s pottery as she pushed forward in this new direction.

CHRISTINE McHORSE

understand her work. She had taken it away from the traditional. Hers was entirely different,” Clark said.

After Clark met with McHorse and her family in Santa Fe, she agreed to be represented by Clark and Del Vecchio.

In her inaugural show in New York, her work sold incredibly well “at high prices, but it sold to people who collected contemporary art, not just ceramics,” says Clark. “What it did is give Christine the freedom to work in the direction she was going and become even more experimental.” Clark and Del Vecchio also represent Cochiti artist Diego Romero.

Nautilus, 2006, micaceous clay, 18.5 × 10.5 in., collection of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio Collection. Photo: Addison Doty.

With frustration mounting in finding a new audience, McHorse’s career took a turn when she was featured in a New York City exhibition, Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation, at the American Craft Museum, now known as the Museum of Art and Design. It was there that art dealers and former gallery owners Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio discovered McHorse and other Native artists.

“We thought her work was amazing,” said Clark, who with his

When Clark and Del Vecchio first encountered her work, it was already becoming quite complex in terms of structure. Her designs involved intertwining tubes, which they jokingly call “inner plumbing.” McHorse can take up to three months or more to complete a piece, and her artwork has grown even more complex over the years. Previously she sketched out the finished form, but she has since begun precisely rendering a piece on graph paper before she begins working with the clay, and follows it as if it were an architectural blue print. She decides what the shape and composition is going to be and doesn’t want the clay to change the composition, according to Clark.

In 2005, McHorse gave up her booth at Santa Fe Indian Market, with the intention of creating pieces that were more of her evolving self in what Clark calls a changing collector’s market for Native ceramic arts.

partner specializes in contemporary, international ceramics. “We saw these two absolutely spectacular pieces by Christine McHorse. That name didn’t mean anything to us, which wasn’t a surprise because we didn’t follow Native “There are fewer collectors now than there were in the past. The people who arts specifically. collect now collect differently,” he “At that stage, she was having difficulty said. “It comes down to two things: because she had been doing more Christine represents one solution, traditional work, even though her which is being able to sell your traditional work looked a bit different. work outside Indian Market to reach She didn’t want to do Indian Market contemporary art collectors. Virgil Ortiz does the same thing, and Diego anymore because people didn’t FAL L 2 0 1 5

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ABOVE: Untitled (Buffalo Pot), 1993, clay, collection of Jan Musial. Image courtesy of Jan Musial. Won first place at the Museum of Northern Arizona’s Navajo Festival of Arts and Culture.

OPPOSITE: Vesuvius, 2006, micaceous clay, 15.5 × 11 in., collection of Ann Kaplan and Robert Fippinger. Photo: Addison Doty.

Romero does the same thing. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of Native potters who are going to be able to take that route.

It’s a very, very, highly selective market …”

grandmother and watched her shear her sheep, card, spin, and dye her wool to weave rugs and saddle blankets. At the end of the day, we fell asleep to traditional songs. Today, my family of artists weave, paint, work gold and silver, play guitar, act, compose, sing, carve stone, and bead.

So what’s next for the evolving artist? Clark mentioned her desire to do monumental work, shifting away from ceramics toward large-scale bronze and outdoor sculpture. McHorse is About what time frame did you start immersing currently working on a three-piece bronze with one segment yourself in clay and your art? When did that turn into a full-time passion? close to seven feet high. An announcement will be made about the piece in the fall.

I am a first-generation potter. Five and a half years after Until then, McHorse will do what she enjoys as far as she can high school and post-graduate classes, I married Joel P. McHorse of Taos Pueblo in 1969. Joel’s grandmother, Lena take it, as she reveals in this interview.

Archuleta, introduced me to her clay, and I was hooked. It is You followed your siblings to IAIA. Are your siblings still the only type of clay I use. In our mountains, eons of intense weathering of mica-rich, old rocks produced micaceous clay. artists? Are there other family members who are artists?

Mica, being a natural temper, strengthens the clay, making it I have two older sisters, two older brothers, three younger very plastic when wet and waterproof when fired. Mica gives brothers, and one sister. I am fifth in line. Three of my micaceous cookware a high, thermal shock value, thus the siblings also attended IAIA. At home, previous to art school, ability to survive repeated heatings and coolings. I learned our parents taught us to be creative and imaginative. If we from Lena to appreciate the intensive labor of digging, didn’t have it, we made it. We entertained ourselves and hauling, processing, building, finishing, and firing my own clay. The return is great satisfaction. were never bored or idle. We spent our summers with our 8 2 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

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Linkage, 2005, micaceous clay, 12 × 9 in, private collection. Photo: Addison Doty.

Do you recall your first artistic pieces? What were your influences during this initial creative period? How did the transition in your work go from traditional to abstracts or free-flowing forms, or however you define your work now?

Looking back through the years, I am amazed by the countless pieces I’ve made and find it difficult to point out my “first artistic pieces.” I believe I was born with artistic ability, gifted to me through my Navajo parents and heritage.

At IAIA, I was young and impressionable and absorbed much about traditional art, contemporary art, international art, music, and drama. Instructors important in my formative years include Allan Houser, Charles Loloma, Ralph Pardington, and Fritz Scholder. I gained worldwide influence and innovative instruction, with no boundaries in sight. How 8 4 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

could you not be passionate, creative, and productive with such tools?

Early in our marriage, Joel and I began selling our silver jewelry and small clayware in his grandmother’s curio shop within Taos Pueblo. I took notice of other potters, the collectors, and the markets. My first pieces were small bowls, turtles, and owls, then functional cookware. Lids were added with ornate handles and applied coil design in relief.

Wedding vases and melon bowls followed. My first year selling at the Santa Fe Indian Market was in 1983, and 2005 was my 23rd and last year. It was a slow, inevitable evolution and transition to making larger, well-balanced pieces with thinner walls. I got orders and commissions for specific types that pushed to the point of monotony. To change pace, I modified, blending shapes to make them more interesting,

CHRISTINE McHORSE

Spine and detail of Spine, 2010, micaceous clay, 27.75 × 13 in., collection of Barbara and Bill Weldon. Photo: Addison Doty.

sometimes incising intricate line design, or using none at all for a strong but minimal impact.

disappearing walls, and projecting surface needed further planning to determine starting points in construction. My clay has approximately six- to nine-percent shrinkage on Upon leaving my booth at the Santa Fe Indian Market ten drying that also must be addressed to successfully build a years ago, I felt ready. I ventured off a well-worn path into strong structure and to maintain sketched proportions. In new territory where I am sovereign, ecstatic to push ahead. It the past, I loved drawing with India ink and charcoal. As for is about product, focusing on the present and the future. My new medium, I am working on life-size and monumental work will continue to evolve and I will have more to look sculpture. New metal and micaceous pieces will round back on and forward to. As I work, I need certain aids to out my touring exhibit, Dark Light, that will go to the help me along. Sketches remind me that I love working with Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in line, shapes, and shades. Color takes a back seat and is evident January of 2017. It will be up for a year. in my clay work. I prefer earth tones—black and white What other exhibitions are you currently in or will have included. One day something I may try is porcelain. in the future?

Through my 45 years of experience working with micaceous clay, I’d say I’ve gained confidence and sweet fusion. I’ve used Presently, I am represented in another exhibit, Pathmakers: Women in Art, Craft and Design, Midcentury and Today at the other types of clay, but none compares to the natural clay.

Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. It will be What is there not to like about it? It is my life. up until September 27 and then will travel to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. It opens As I understand, your current, three-year traveling October 30 and runs through February 28, 2016. show, Dark Light: The Ceramics of Christine Nofchissey McHorse, also has a published catalogue. The exhibition It is thrilling, and I am honored to be considered one who also includes sketches. How did these particular sketches has impacted the arts and crafts world. come about? Are there other media with which you enjoy working?

Christine McHorse is represented by Clark + Del Vecchio, formerly Garth Clark Gallery, in Santa Fe. I came to realize that to sketch and then build accordingly required great skill, and the test was to set the goal and achieve it. Also, the pieces I imagined with internal tubes,

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designers themselves. Seeing the differences in regional clothing exhibited in one place is eye opening. The skillful beauty of Métis beaded elk hide pants (1870s); Mitchell Museum of the a woven wool dress for a young Navajo American Indian girl (ca. 1940–1960); a Native Alaskan infant’s fur parka, mittens, and boots (20th NDIGENOUS PEOPLES, like in century); and a Florida Seminole cotton, many cultures, are passionate about patchwork skirt and blouse (1960) all what they wear. The yearlong exhibit illustrate tribal and cultural designs, Native Haute Couture at the Mitchell available materials, and the history of Museum of the American Indian brings each region. to life the history of Native peoples by American Indians enthusiastically virtue of their garments and spans from traded for exotic materials to use for their precontact times to the present. Through personal adornment. Long-distance trade the ages, garments and accessories, initially flourished prior to European contact. made from local materials and later Macaw feathers and copper bells were from imported fabrics acquired through brought to the Pueblos from Mesoamertrade, have kept their cultural Indigenous ica. After European contact, glass beads identity alive. started to replace some quillwork, and The exhibit is rich in historical infor- manufactured metalwork, such as butmation for visitors to read and samples of tons, appeared on garments. The sewing late 19th- and early 20th-century garments machine arrived in the 1850s, and by the from the Mitchell Museum’s collection and 1880s, American Indians were using it to private collections, and many contempocreate not only traditional clothing but also rary pieces on loan from collectors and the new designs. When the Florida Seminoles

Native Haute Couture

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Plains women’s dresses and Seminole patchwork ensemble. Image courtesy of the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian.

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obtained sewing machines in the early 20th century, they took their characteristic patchwork appliqué to dazzling new levels.

While the exhibit highlights precontact clothing, it also features contemporary creations by designers such as Orlando Dugi (Navajo), Bethany Yellowtail (Crow-Northern Cheyenne), Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti), Patricia Michaels (Taos), and Dorothy Grant (Haida). On loan are recent creations that include an exquisite cowl knitted from the downy-soft underwool of the Arctic muskox and a featherlike scarf by Project Runway designer Patricia Michaels.

During my visit of the exhibit, I had a chance to speak with curator Janelle L. Stanley (Navajo-Acoma). She was very generous in answering questions and offered additional information on the crafting processes not readily apparent from viewing the finished item. She spoke of how different regions used distinctive beading stitches, such as the “lazy stitch” used on the Great Plains (there is nothing lazy about it—lane stitch is the preferred term); how function was added into garments, like a “fireman’s flap” in long johns, and other details. Stanley said she was most drawn to the display of accessories, as was I. Hats, bags, purses, sashes, belts, arm and ankle cuffs, crowns, and jewelry all enhanced traditional clothing and also reflected status and wealth.

All the items in the accessory display were beautiful and significant; however, a few pieces really stood out to me. Copper mined in the Great Lakes Basin was a highly valued item traded thousands of years prior to European contact and was used to complement garments. The exhibit includes a tapered copper collar found in Oklahoma, ca. 1600. Decorative shells gathered from riverbanks, creeks, and oceans were plentiful and used for garment decoration, jewelry, and currency. Also on display was a pendant made from abalone shell, found at Kings Mound, California, from ca. 1000 CE. Native Haute Couture has garnered so much attention that the Mitchell Museum is excited to bring designer Patricia Michaels to the museum for an exclusive fashion show in the fall. More information is online at mitchellmuseum.org.

—Jacquie Archambeau

REVIEWS

Phoenix

Accomplished as a painter and challenged the boundaries of media and ceramist, Charles Loloma truly excelled techniques. Even his signature on pottery, at jewelry making. In the early years, he paintings, and jewelry progressed over faced difficulty getting his jewelry accepted time, ending up in the stylized jewelry by shows focused on established American hallmark that became so familiar.

Indian art forms. Despite this temporary Pardue explained Loloma’s long Heard Museum barrier, Loloma assumed a leadership role association with the Heard Museum, in modernizing American Indian jewelry. which began with the artist demonstrating HARLES LOLOMA (Hopi, He changed the way it looked and the way his skills at the museum’s Indian Fair and 1921–1991) had a lifelong collectors looked at it.

Market in 1959. Later he transitioned love of drawing as a form of Curator Diana Pardue connects to exclusively making jewelry using relaxation and inspiration, and Loloma’s quick sketches, used as references, atypical techniques, innovative designs, he approached design through drawing. and fine line drawings of precise jewelry and unusual materials, such as pearls, Loloma: Expressions in Metal, Ink, and Clay designs. These studies provide significant malachite, charoite, lapis lazuli, and gold. is unique in its display of so many of insight into his conceptualization process.

He had a solo exhibit at the Heard in 1971, Loloma’s drawings and associating them He even used his accidents: A coffee stain on with his ceramics, metalwork, and jewelry. a drawing became a pendant for a necklace; and in 1978, the museum had a retrospective show of his jewelry. He was one This exhibit, curated by Diana Pardue, unfilled holes in tufa castings became of three jewelers featured in The Cutting highlights the Heard’s extensive collection homes for colorful stone inlays.

Edge: Contemporary Southwestern Jewelry and of Loloma art. Pieces from the Eugene By 1975, Loloma’s jewelry featured Metalwork in 1997, an exhibit also curated B. Adkins Collection at the Philbrook wood and stone inlays of various heights,

by Pardue, that emphasized the changes Museum of Art in Tulsa and the Fred Jones mirroring the mesas of Hopi. Drawings in American Indian jewelry during the Jr. Museum of Art were also loaned to the on display show plans for the heights and second half of the 20th century. The Heard for this one-man show, which have placement of the stones. His technique Heard Museum offered a comprehensive not been previously available for display of adding stone mosaics on the inside of outside of Oklahoma. rings and bracelets inspired other jewelers. look at Loloma’s jewelry and its influence on other jewelers in an exhibit on loan When he was only 17, Loloma Wall text shares Loloma’s thought from a traveled from his home in Hopi to help 1978 interview with Erin Younger, Heard from the Wheelwright Museum of the paint murals at the 1939 Golden Gate Museum curator: “A piece of art should be American Indian in 2006. The catalog from that show, Loloma: Beauty is His Name International Exposition in San Francisco. full of surprises, like a person. When you

by Martha Hopkins Struever, is available at The mural at the Heard Museum exhibit look inside you should find excitement. the Heard Museum bookstore. entrance is thought to be his largest surThere is beauty in a piece of art, a person The artistic influence of Charles viving mural. He painted this impressively can absorb it and become more beautiful.” detailed work of life-sized Hopi Buffalo Loloma, in jewelry as well as his drawings Loloma opened doors for other Dancers around 1940 for Hopi High artists by creating the freedom to explore, and ceramics, stands the test of time as an School in Oraibi. Later removed and left inspiration to American Indian artists and experiment, and not be confined to one in four pieces, the mural was given to the —Cathy Short particular style or materials. He constantly collectors alike.

Heard Museum, where it was restored and now serves as a worthy introduction to the art of Charles Loloma.

The exhibit shows how Loloma balanced his traditional Hopi life with his ability to absorb and express new ideas in his artwork. While the influence of his world travel can be seen in his art, it is happily blended with his Hopi subject matter and palette. The rugged mesas and high desert of his home, with their textures and bands of variegated colors, show through in his paintings, pottery, metalwork, and jewelry. A number of the drawings in the exhibit are from the early 1980s, about a decade before his death.

Ranging from corn, weavers, katsinam, architectural drawings of both exteriors and interior spaces, and abstract landscapes, the drawings illustrate how profoundly Charles Loloma (Hopi, 1912–1991), Ring, 1975–76, coral, pearl, 14-karat gold, collection of the Heard Loloma’s culture influenced his work.

Museum, gift of Dennis and Janis Lyon, 3540-1.

Loloma: Expressions in Metal, Ink, and Clay

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Phoenix

recognizes how much pottery making has use them to tackle serious issues facing those meant to many Pueblo families through living on reservations today. time, while proving that “pottery power Captain Paiute, the Indigenous Avenger packs a punch.” Folwell’s interest in the of the Southwest by Theo Tso (Las Vegas powerful women of Pueblo tradition is also Paiute), is a book about Luther Pah, who seen in her bowl featuring Buffalo Woman, gains superpowers after an acid spill in his who brings the gift of rain. college chemistry lab and returns to the Heard Museum Interest in superheroes among Native rez to defend the sacred lands and lifeways. art spans generations, as two collaborations Tso explains that he created Captain Paiute ATS OFF TO THE HEARD between parents and their children illusafter seeing the need for a Native American MUSEUM for making it the trate. Jason Garcia features Green Lantern superhero dealing with Native issues on go-to place in Phoenix for on a jar while his son, Jacob (Santa Clara) and off Western reservations. families during the hot summer portrays him on a silver ring. Lisa Holt Jeffrey Veregge (Port Gamble months. This exhibit conjures fond (Cochiti) and Harlan Reano (Kewa) are the S’Klallam) cites a lifetime love affair with memories of days spent dreaming about artists behind the superhero team, Pueblo comic books, TV, and film blended with being just like those comic book superheWarrior Trio. Their daughter Dominique his Native perspective as his inspirations. roes who defend the good and vanquish the Reano (Cochiti-Kewa) moved the popular His dramatically colored and action-packed evil. Or it can revive your love of all things Powerpuff Girls to New Mexico in her giclée prints of a handful of distinctly pop culture. The exhibit reveals younger Pueblo Powerpuff Girls.

Native versions of familiar superheroes American Indian artists’ deep appreciation Many Native artists grew up with reflect his culture and creativity. for the mythology of superheroes. pop-culture icons but want to incorporate In (Su)perman, Tom Farris (Otoe– The show explores superheroes more culturally significant superheroes in Missouria-Cherokee) depicts a Native from every possible direction: pop culture, their own art. American Indian stories often American superhero with the Cherokee Native American oral histories, animal contain superheroes—animals, humans, syllabary glyph Ꮝ on his shield rather companions, and larger-than-life historical or magical beings—who teach life lessons. than the well-known letter S. “I sought figures. Director of curation and education In Arigon Starr’s (Kickapoo-Muscogee) to take an iconic character and make Ann Marshall explains the Heard MuseSuper Indian, Hubert Logan, a janitor at small changes, so that at first glance he um’s overarching goal for this summer the Leaning Oaks Reservation Bingo Hall, is instantly recognizable but definitely experience as an effort “to create a place develops super powers by accident when he Indian,” he explains. This written where children and adults can talk together (and his dog) eat commodity cheese tainted language is still a vibrant part of Cherokee about what makes a superhero, meet some with “rezium.” Super Indian has grown be culture, as demonstrated by Roy Boney familiar and some new superheroes, and a nationally broadcast radio comedy series, Jr.’s (Cherokee Nation) Sequoyah, a graphic think about how people can find the super- an online comic book series, and printed novel about the man who invented the hero in themselves.” The exhibit opened graphic novels. syllabary. (Su)perman t-shirts are available with a costume contest for kids, although Several Native artists in the exhibit in the Heard Museum bookstore, as are more than one caped and costumed adult have developed comics and graphic novels graphic novels, comic books, and other was also seen. with American Indian characters. Tribal items related to the exhibit.

Jay Odjick (Kitigan Zibi Algonquin) Force, created and written in 1996 by Jon Superheroes often need an animal signed his graphic novel Kagagi: The Raven Proudstar (Yaqui-Maya-Jewish-Latino) companion with complementary strengths.

(Arcana Comics, 2011) at the opening and drawn by Ryan Huna Smith (ChemeThe exhibit has included a special reception. Based on Algonquin stories, huevi-Navajo), features an all-Indian team section to the exhibit that honors this the book’s star character Matthew Carver, of superheroes and incorporates American tradition. It was created by four members a Westside High School student, inherits Indian cultural histories and stories. Tribal of urbanSTEW, a Phoenix-based arts the powers of the Kagagi in order to kill Force, granted their powers by Thunderbird, collective dedicated to inspiring and the evil Windigo and his followers. The raven appears in many Native cultures as a creature of daring and superpowers.

Mainstream superheroes familiar to the public—Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Batman, and Spider Man—rendered in traditional Native art media, launch the journey. The Wonder Woman Bracelet and belt buckle by Marcus Amerman (Choctaw) show off his naturalistic beading style, while Wonder Woman, a ceramic jar by Jason Garcia (Santa Clara) brings a fresh look and voice to Pueblo pottery.

The Pueblo Girl Bowl by Susan Folwell and Tom Farris (Otoe-Missouria-Cherokee), (Su)perman, 2014, acrylic on canvas, collection of the Heard Autumn Borts-Medlock (both Santa Clara) Museum.

Super Heroes: Super Heroes: Art! Action!

Adventure!

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expanding the relevance of digital arts in the community. Sheep are not typically considered superheroes, but Jonesy the Sheep is. Jonathan Nelson (Navajo) created this largely pictorial story of a high-school-educated sheep living on the Navajo Reservation, shearing himself and selling his wool while trying to decide what to do with the rest of his life.

Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa), a charming and beautiful video game, features an Iñupiaq girl, Nuna, and her Arctic fox companion who try to rescue her homeland from an endless blizzard.

Shaped by Alaska Native artists, elders, hunters, storytellers, and teachers, and based on a traditional story, Never Alone is an innovative way to teach young people the Iñupiaq language.

Among the superheroes are historic individuals who overcame significant setbacks while fighting for their beliefs.

Maria Tallchief (Osage), one of the leading American ballerinas of the 20th century, is drawn by Arigon Starr and painted on ledger paper by Lauren Good Day Giago (Arikara-Hidatsa-Blackfeet-Plains Cree).

The story of the code talkers of WWI is told in the graphic novel Annumpa Luma— Code Talker by Arigon Starr, part of “Tales of the Mighty Code Talkers” by the Indigenous Narratives Collective (INC).

Also in the exhibit is a photograph of Sarah Winnemucca (Paiute), who founded a bilingual school for Paiute children, taught in English and Paiute and included their own knowledge of their culture and traditions. Po’pay (Ohkay Owingeh), celebrated for leading the 1680 Pueblo revolt against the Spanish, is the hero of Jason Garcia’s Pueblo Revolt, August 10, 1680 and Tewa Tales of Suspense.

Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti) bridges the historic and futuristic in his wall mural of limited-edition Revolt series prints, and clay and textile creations that feature the return of Po’pay and his Spirit World Army in 2180. His goal, Ortiz says, is “to preserve my culture and inspire our youth to accomplish whatever it is they dream to be.”

Jim Kristofic and Nolan Karra James (Diné) co-authored The Hero Twins, a bilingual Navajo and English book based on the ancient stories of the monster slayers who protect the Navajo from the naayéé, or monsters.

Superheroes shines a bright light on

an amazing group of Native artists who portray superheroes in their own media with wit, skill, and intelligence.

—Cathy Short

Santa Fe

War Department: Selections from MoCNA’s Permanent Collection

Jean LaMarr (Paiute-Achomawi), Untitled (Cover Girl Series), 2013, lithograph, collection of the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.

Museum of Contemporary Native Arts

Vietnam with the US Navy informed his understanding of war and evil as almost commonplace. His use of an intaglio print, a technique used in the Italian Baroque HE EXHIBITION War Departprints the artist studied, adds to the gravity ment: Selections from MoCNA’s of the piece and suggests Columbus’s ships Permanent Collection explores hosted sailors but also the evils that would how late 20th-century to early come.

21st-century Native American artists Heidi BigKnife (Shawnee Tribe) respond to living within a bellicose culture. offers a more ironic exploration of this This show offers a wide interpretation of topic with her multimedia installation The the topic, from humorous and ironic to sad Night After Columbus from the quincenand bitter, and it contains a range of media tennial year 1992. BigKnife constructed including printmaking, paintings, jewelry, a threadbare Christmas tree decorated and sculpture. with portraits of the artist wearing a Santa Dr. Lara Evans (Cherokee Nation), suit.

Standing in poses that are sometimes an associate professor of Native Amerhumorous, sometimes serious, the artist ican art history and department chair portrays Columbus as Santa Claus, though of Museum Studies at the Institute of in this case it is a figure clearly more American Indian Arts, guest curated interested in taking than in giving. the exhibit. In War Department, Native Images of dances do not at first American artists reflect on events from the last 523 years: the arrival of Columbus, the glance seem part of the theme of war, yet they were often considered a military US government’s official policy of Indian removal in the 19th century, the Wounded threat by the US and Canadian governments. In her War Dance (1967), Gerónima Knee conflicts in 1890 and again in 1973, Cruz Montoya (Ohkay Owingeh, 1915– the Oka Crisis between the Mohawk 2015) commemorates the tumultuous people and the Canadian town of Oka in history between the Ohkay Owingeh and 1990, and others. Dr. Evans approaches Comanche, who raided and traded with war not as it appears in news footage or in prints but how it affects all areas of life. each other. Though the conflicts ended War Department juxtaposes the personal and over a century ago, the war dance is still celebrated. the impersonal, where war is depicted as Red Meridian (2012) by Mateo both a powerful, anonymous force and an Romero (Cochiti) depicts the Corn Dance everyday presence. from Kewa Pueblo in a large painting in The 1990 Deceptus Magus—October which a line of dancers wait as two war12, 1942 by Floyd Solomon (Laguna-Zuni, 1952–2008) depicts the arrival of Christo- planes fly overhead. The violence in the pher Columbus to the Americas. Solomon sky so near the calm of the dancers below creates a dynamic juxtaposition. re-creates what looks like an antique map The pervasiveness of warplanes, at first sight, yet integrates images of the soldiers, and guns within the images three ships next to fantastical forces such suggests the presence of violence, or as a red demonic figure, skeletons, and even Death personified. Solomon’s own at least its potential, even in the most history of having served two stints in peaceful of landscapes. Warplanes fly in

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the blackness above a reclining Native woman on the blue earth in Jean LaMarr’s (Paiute-Achomawi) lithograph, Untitled (Cover Girl Series) from 2013. In Jack Malotte’s (Western Shoshone) lithograph Screaming Eagle Blues (2013), fighter jets fly in formation over mountains, with the silhouette of an eagle in the foreground sky leaving tracers in its wake. Helicopters and stars fly around the head of former president George W. Bush in the 2003 monotype War Makers Back in Town by Charlene Teters (Spokane).

The lead image for this exhibition is the childlike monotype Education (1992) by Melanie A. Yazzie (Navajo), in which a white man is telling a red man the history of war. In the serigraph Life on the Eighteenth Hole (1990), David Neel (Kwakwaka’wakw) refers to the 1990 Oka Crisis.

Soldiers, too, are represented in stereotype and as human. The lithograph On Drinking Beer in Vietnam (1971) by T. C. Cannon (Kiowa-Caddo, 1946–1978) and the painting My Father Was a World War II Warrior (1979) by Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (Diné-Seminole-Muscogee) shows them as individuals while Soldier Boy Ring (2013), a wearable bronze piece by Teresa Kaulaity Quintana (Kiowa), considers the impersonal nature of the uniform and gun.

All war is divisive as illustrated in the oxymoronic mural Civil.War. (2012) by Nani Chacon (Navajo) and Jaque Fragua ( Jemez), installed above the entrance of the museum.

In War Department, many of the pieces depict inner and outer struggles.

Given that Native Americans join the military services at a much higher rate than the US population at large, these portraits are personal and reflect conflict between soldiers as historic enemies and soldiers as friends and family.

With the continuation of skirmishes, actions, and peacekeeping missions over the past century, war has become a permanent state, though the far-reaching implications remain largely unexamined.

The power of War Department is in its ability to overlay the conditions of war and not-war, combining the personal and the political to suggest the state of contemporary culture.

—Suzanne Newman Fricke

Seattle

Bunn-Marcuse mentioned that the ability to create a piece as exquisite as the original is an important part of the artistic continuum and a vital aspect of the current art market. The Burke strives to represent Burke Museum of Natural as many points on the continuum as it can through the exhibit, to provide an accurate History and Culture reflection of the art being created now.

Haida master weaver Evelyn HAT IS THE PURPOSE Vanderhoop eloquently informs visitors of ethnographic museum that learning from the pieces is an extension collections? Do they exist of the artists’ apprenticeship, no matter as evidence of a prior time, their stage in their career. One of the more pristine in culture than each genermany strengths of the exhibit is the quotes ation since? The Burke Museum doesn’t from the artists included for each piece. think so. Well, maybe it does a little (it is, The quotes explain, in the artist’s words, after all, a state museum), but there is a very why they created the piece and give us an different attitude in the Bill Holm Center insider’s view of their creation process. for the Study of Northwest Coast Art. A number of participating artists The Bill Holm Center (BHC) bring a contemporary translation of the celebrated the 50th anniversary of Bill historic pieces in message or medium, Holm’s iconic book Northwest Coast Indian sometimes in both, as in works by Sonny Art: An Analysis of Form and the center’s Assu (Ligwilda’xw), Joel Isaak (Kenaitze), tenth anniversary with Here & Now: Native Lisa Telford (Haida), and Alison Bremner Artists Inspired. The Here & Now exhibit (Tlingit). Telford’s PocaHaida is the striking features 30 new works by 15 artists, each cover image for the exhibit. The body-con, one a BHC grantee. More than 90 grants one-shoulder dress of pounded cedar is at in the first decade of the BHC’s existence first glance a masterful working of tradihave funded artists and researchers who tional materials into a sexy and modernhave studied the Burke collection, as well ized silhouette. After digesting the title of as workshops and events related to the the piece, the viewer can begin to absorb creation and study of Northwest Coast art.

Telford’s powerful social commentary on Katie Bunn-Marcuse, PhD, assistant the expectations of women to conform to director of the Bill Holm Center and curaa Western-defined, ideal body shape and tor of Here & Now, wrote that a major goal for Native women to be available as sexual of the BHC was to “gauge the real-world objects of historical fantasy. Telford’s effects that our grants had on recipients.” molding of traditional Haida materials She remarked that many arts and nonprofit and techniques into a contemporary style granting organizations have a hard time exemplifies the message of Here & Now. quantifying what their grant money In other words, the pieces in the Burke actually does. When the BHC surveyed collection inspired the artist, researchers, past grantees and asked what they made as a and teachers to create new works informed result of their research visits, their answers by materials and techniques of the artists’ sparked the idea for the exhibit. ancestors, yet created in a manner that Some of the new works are replicas reflects the current artist reflection of the of historic pieces in the collection and are world they live in and have inherited. displayed side by side with the inspirational Bremner drew inspiration from piece. This form of display is not a new coppers and button robes in the Burke concept when it comes to exhibiting collection. She transferred an image of the Native art. However, for this exhibit, the one-dollar bill onto a large copper shield, pieces in the collection are directly related or tin.áa. Tin.áas were used in potlatch to the new works, and in some cases the ceremonies to signify the wealth of the grantees wanted to create a replica of a host; the bigger the copper shield, the Burke piece. Tsimshian carver David A. greater the wealth. Acknowledging the Boxley came specifically to learn from the role copper has historically played in the pieces and created a stunning replica of a economics and trade networks of Tlingit and other Northwest Coast communities, giant feast dish most likely from his home Bremner’s piece Big Money is a hilarious of Metlakatla, Alaska.

Here & Now: Native Artists Inspired

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they were able to decode some of the messages in the pieces. They began to understand and appreciate the vast amount of knowledge in each piece and noticed more with each visit to the Burke. Local gallerists in Seattle have noticed that their clients who visited the Here & Now exhibit return to buy Native art with an enhanced understanding about the historical role of the piece they are buying, and a renewed appreciation for the art process itself.

My original question about the purpose of museum collections is clear in this case: The works in the ethnographic collection at the Burke Museum are living a second or third life, acting as teachers for this generation of Native artists and Native art researchers. Bill Holm opened the doors of the Burke collections for Native artists 40 years before the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 obliged museums to tell us what they had.

Holm studied and consulted with Native carvers, weavers, and artists, and he built relationships with Native peoples up and down the Northwest Coast. RegardLisa Telford (Haida), PocaHaida, cedar bark less of where one stands in the muddy dress, collection of the Burke Museum #2014cultural politics of white guys making 50/1. Photo: Richard Brown. Image courtesy of the Burke Museum. and teaching others how to make Native art, it’s hard to argue with the fact that and contemporary statement on how a Bill Holm’s legacy of access to museum cash economy has replaced coppers as collections places him squarely in the realm the currency, or how gaming is affecting of ally. That makes the Here & Now exhibit tribal nations today. One has to be “in the a tangible manifestation building on that know” to grasp why this smart piece is legacy of access. The exhibit is a tribute funny, even though on the surface, the din- and a celebration of what can happen when ner-plate-sized tin.áa with its one-dollar we as Native people and major museums bill face is impressive on its own. work together. —Miranda Belarde-Lewis This past year, I taught a hybrid Native art class at the University of Washington. The class, entitled Indigenous Knowledge Visualization, explored the Toronto many layers of historical, spiritual, ecological, genealogical, and scientific knowledge embedded in each piece of Native art.

My students and I visited the Here & Now McMichael Canadian exhibit several times, and each student Art Collection chose a piece to explore. For their final, I asked them to research the context of the pieces—what community they came from HE PROFESSIONAL and their cultural role in that community— NATIVE INDIAN ARTISTS and they were asked to research the message INC. (PNIAI) emerged from or story being conveyed by the artist. Most contentious events and expeof my students were non-Native, and very riences surrounding Montreal’s 1967 few had any prior contact, let alone deep International and Universal Exposition knowledge of Natives or Native art.

(Expo 67) and the 1969 Statement of the The class was a success, and the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, research done by my students showed otherwise known as the “White Paper.”

7: Professional Native Indian Artists Inc.

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Visitors to the Indians of Canada Pavilion at Expo 67 were greeted with the now-famous dictum, “You have stolen our native land, our culture, our soul …”—explosive truths that sought to challenge status quo ideology while responding to crooked policy reforms of the White Paper that further weakened Indigenous rights in Canada.

In 1973, Jackson Beardy (Anishinini, 1944–1984), Daphne Odjig (OdawaPotawatomi), and Alex Janvier (Dene Suline-Saulteaux) found themselves together as part of a group exhibition called Treaty Numbers 23, 287, 1171 at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. The title of the exhibition stood as a direct reference to the numbered treaties of their bands. Treaty Numbers was considered a critical success and contributed to a push for including other Indigenous artists into the canon of contemporary art practice in Canada. The colonial philosophy of categorizing Indigenous painting, sculpture, and illustration as “craft” was strongly curtailed in the wake of their presence.

In 1974, Beardy, Odjig, and Janvier joined Eddy Cobiness (Ojibwe, 1933–1996), Norval Morrisseau (Bingwi Neyaashi Ojibwe, 1932–2007), Carl Ray (Sandy Lake Cree, 1943–1978), and Joseph Sanchez (Tewa descent) at an informal meeting at Odjig’s Winnipeg home to discuss ideas, strategies, and directions for the group, and share a few laughs. Following this meeting, the newly founded artists collective sought to make their relationship official (and legal) by incorporating their name as the Professional Native Indian Artists Inc. Although they were officially composed of seven, Bill Reid (Haida, 1920–1998) was looked upon as the unofficial eighth member, namely for his camaraderie with the collective and for his participation in several group exhibitions.

In Canada and the United States, the PNIAI is often referred to as the “Indian Group of Seven,” a nickname Winnipeg Free Press reporter Gary Scherbain affixed to the group. Indian Group of Seven is an obvious allusion to the Group of Seven, a non-Native artist collective based in Canada, active in the 1920s and ‘30s, who employed the Canadian landscape as the primary subject matter of their work.

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the myth of Canada as a land untouched by man and therefore void of Indigenous life. Scherbain’s correlation between the PNIAI and the Group of Seven points to a numerical similarity only. In effect, affixing the moniker “Group of Seven” to the artists degrades their individual and group accomplishments while strategically positioning them as Other, as non-white, as different. Moreover, it attempts to embed the PNIAI below the Group of Seven in a hierarchy of art from Canada, thus hinting at the presence of systemic and structural racism toward Indigenous peoples during the 1960s and ‘70s.

While critics and curators often attribute the style of the PNIAI to the Woodland School (a visual language usually identified with heavy black lines, vibrant color palettes, and x-ray perspectives), the artists’ individual aesthetics and subject matter are dissimilar, eclectic, and even antithetical. The exhibition 7: Professional Native Indian Artists Inc. at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection is a triumph of the group’s artistic legacy and a celebration of their enduring impact on Indigenous visual culture and social activism in North America. Curated by Michelle LaVallee (Ojibwe) and originally exhibited at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, the McMichael show represents the fourth manifestation of 7: Professional Native Indian Artists Inc. Until the exhibition at the MacKenzie Art Gallery, the last one that featured all seven members was held at Dominion Gallery in Montreal in 1975. The reunion of these works, and, in several cases, the living artists and their families, emends their life and work in light of new research and fresh curatorial directives.

The work of the PNIAI marked new ways of thinking about, and thinking through, Indigenous visual art in the context of the “contemporary.” For many critics, their work appeared as a strange paradox caught somewhere between a culture embedded in tradition and the vanguard of art practice in North America. In the face of such past wrong interpretations, their work speaks for itself as an exultation of Indigenous art and life amid a history of violence, reservization, and cultural loss.

Certainly Morrisseau’s deceptively somber work, White Man’s Curse (1969), exists in

this vein of suffering. It’s a statement on the Christianization of Indigenous peoples since contact, and the suppression of Indigenous spirituality under their dogmas of “decency.” For Morrisseau, Judeo-Christian beliefs held no authority in Native life. He once wrote, We as natives believe in the following saying: Our God is Native.

The Great Deity of the Five Planes is so.

We are neither for nor against.

We speak not of Christ nor of God. We say, ‘Let them be.’

We follow the Spirit on its Inward Journey of Soul through attitudes and attentions.1

Carl Ray (Sandy Lake Cree, 1943–1978), Medicine Bear, 1977, acrylic on canvas.

Elsewhere, several works engage the spiritual world through sacred legends, specifically Ray’s exceptional Medicine Bear from 1977, painted a year before the artist passed away in Sioux Lookout in Northern Ontario. Here, in a state of delirium, Medicine Bear siphons an ailment from a seated figure resting inside a kosapishcikan (shaking tent). The earth-tone patterns and shapes of Medicine Bear and of the land juxtaposed with the sallow blue of the background sky, a visual signature for Ray, confirm a mastery of composition and color arrangement.

The intrepid Ray tragically remains one of the most underrated figures in the canon of contemporary Indigenous art in Canada.

Odjig’s trademark lyricism and gentleness of spirit is present in pieces such as So Great Was Their Love (1975). Massacre (1971), an oil pastel work on paper, affirms that the legacies of colonialism should never be far from the collective consciousness. Janvier, too, holds strong to a lyrical abstraction that is both idiosyncratic and captivating. In his piece Exodus from the Soil (1978), he pulls from the shadows of existential crisis to ruminate on the loss of spirit. The painting

rests as a watery exegesis of the human condition.

Beardy’s famous two-tone yellow and orange is ever-present; so too is his delicate simplification of form harnessed to accentuate both balance and harmony.

His dancing curves and circularity of line breathe life into otherwise two-dimensional animals and bodies.

Sanchez and Cobiness were the only members of the group born in America.

Sanchez’s work flows between windswept abstraction and quiet dreamscapes. His stone lithograph Ghost Shirt (1979–80) is one such example. Peering out from what appears to be a cave, a cacophony of sinuous faces and bodies arrested in a topography of ruins return our gaze. The result is a conversation with the specters of the past, a solemn reflection of a death that stays present in the objects that surround us.

It is Cobiness’s scenes from daily life or the animal world that offer a visual language predicated on the humble presence of line. These mostly pen-and-ink pictures render not only the minutia of physical details but also the flashlight glimpses of experience itself.

The PNIAI did not produce a manifesto per se; however, they directed their attention toward supporting contemporary Indigenous artists in North America through consultation, dialogue, instruction, and friendship. Their support of emerging Indigenous artists in North America helped to establish a pattern for strong leadership, self-organization, and artistic excellence.

While Shirley Cheechoo (Cree), Blake Debassige (M’Chigeeng Ojibwe), and Martin Panamick (M’Chigeeng Ojibwe) were influenced by the PNIAI early in their formation, it could be argued that the work of later Indigenous artists including Rebecca Belmore (Ojibwe), Sonny Assu (Ligwilda’xw), Jordan Bennett (Mi’kmaq), Keesic Douglas (Mnjikaning Ojibwe), and Christi Belcourt (Métis) are descendants of the PNIAI’s use of oppositional politics to shatter cultural stereotypes by demanding critical recognition for Indigenous artists as artist-professionals. Theirs is a telling story of self-determinacy, of pushing against a contemporary art world that quietly promotes the status quo while publicly condemning it.

—Matthew Ryan Smith

1. Norval Morrisseau, “I Actually Went into the Astral Heaven,” in Extraordinary Experiences: Personal Accounts of the Paranormal in Canada, ed. John Robert Colombo (Toronto: Dundurn, 2004), 33.

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Tulsa

the Choctaws and the Irish initiated by the Choctaws’ gift of corn, money, and blankets to the Irish during their devastating potato famine of the 1840s.

Sense’s work explores the fundaHardesty Arts Center mental act of weaving, with folded-over and loose splints visible behind translucent RTISTS Shan Goshorn (Eastern sheets of paper. Her bamboo paper echoes Band Cherokee) and Sarah Sense use of river cane, the only species of (Chitimacha-Choctaw) are both bamboo indigenous to the Americas. Her Southeastern photographers use of “rice paper”—actually made from who independently began weaving their mulberry trees—echoes Southeastern photographic images on paper in designs women’s historical use of woven mulberry inspired by their respective tribes’ basketry. bast as supports for painting. Translucent, This two-person show demonstrates how ancestral, photographic portraits haunt her they pushed their weaving in very different pieces. Her work culminates in the mondirections and how vital this media can be. umental, eight-by-twelve-foot Her Story, For this exhibit, Sense primarily Our Legacy, woven in situ by Sense and Kim shows two-dimensional pieces floating in Rice, a Tulsa visual artist. frames. In her 2013 art project, Weaving the Shan Goshorn, who grew up on her Americas, she traveled from the Chitimacha North Carolina reservation where basketry Nation’s homeland in Louisiana down is the prime art form, taught herself how through the Caribbean, Central America, to weave paper splints by examining a douand into Chile in South America. Across the ble-weave, river-cane basket. Double-weave two continents, she met with Indigenous is essentially intertwining two baskets weavers to find commonalities in their prac- together in a continuous weave so the tices and perspectives. She shot photography interior design can be completely different of the lands and wove disparate landscapes than the exterior design. together.

Goshorn began weaving treaties and Her work has considerably matured her own photographs and also accumulated since Weaving the Americas. The pieces for a range of historical documents through her Intertwined incorporate Chitimacha and anthropological research. Goshorn prints Choctaw basketry patterns and speak to multiple archival prints of her images and ancestral memory imprinted upon the land- text, cuts them into slits, and weaves them scape. She frequently juxtaposes two differ- into various forms of utilitarian Cherokee ent landscapes in an ethereal effect that calls baskets. The newly reconfigured words take to mind some Southeastern medicine men’s on the quality of Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist, ability to bilocate, or the effects of memory cut-up poetry. Goshorn’s extensive research, overlaying the present. Currently living in particularly at the National Anthropological Ireland, Sense presents an extensive series, Archives, provided her with a wealth of paying homage to the relationship between found images and inspiration for topical

Intertwined: Stories of Splintered Pasts

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Shan Goshorn (Eastern Band Cherokee), Invited to the Table of Deceit, 2014, Arches watercolor paper splints printed with archival inks, acrylic paint, 11 × 11 × 8.5

baskets. She is also now crowdsourcing, for instance, calling for images of the Indian women posing with dance shawls in her piece, Reclaiming Our Power, which addresses the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).

Invited to the Table of Deceit is a series of double-woven baskets with treaty text and pipe designs. The Cherokee woven-pipe designs clearly symbolize tobacco pipes smoked after making formal agreements, but Goshorn takes the Cherokee symbolism further. While the eternal designs are yellow-gold, a priestly or religious color, the interior basket designs are of pipes outlined in black, the color of death, and the West, where many tribes were forced to relocate.

Goshorn challenges herself with new forms, such as her Cherokee Burden Basket in which the form becomes a metaphor for the burden of historical trauma. Splints woven in four of the Cherokee directional colors symbolize the grounding and orientating aspects of culture and religion.

Hearts of Our Women includes the crowdsourced names of our 700 Indigenous women leaders. Ten smaller baskets with historical photographs of Indigenous women from a range of tribes encircle a central, partially woven basket emblazoned with a photograph of a fire. The loose splints are brown-black on one side and orange-red on the other, and create an astonishingly successful illusion of a sparking fire. The fire basket, with a four-sided square base surrounded by figures, calls to mind a Muscogee Creek square ceremonial ground oriented around a sacred fire.

Innovating a marriage between photography and basketry, these two artists push the medium in diverse and rich directions. Curator heather ahtone (Choctaw-Chickasaw) charts this newly developed territory in a catalogue still available from the Hardesty Center with essays by the artists, program director, and Max Carocci, PhD, lecturer at the University of the Arts, London. This complex and nuanced exhibit crosses boundaries of medium, time, and oceans.

The artists use their community’s splintered pasts as raw material in their quest for collective healing. While historical trauma is discussed frequently in Native communities, Sense’s and Goshorn’s artwork expresses historical resilience, the ability of an individual or community to adapt and transcend historical adversity.

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Book Reviews

Collection at the Peabody Museum and to reveal some of the origins of the Sikyatki Revival.” This specific thesis is achieved through a multifaceted approach of visual Art History analysis, biography, and history, and In Search of Nampeyo: through mainly primary sources such as historical and contemporary photographs, The Early Years, oral history, and fieldwork. Elmore also 1875–1892 refers to secondary sources.

Overall, the book overwhelms its Steve Elmore main argument due to broad and thorSpirit Bird Press, 2015 ough content, making it clear that Elmore has been thinking about this topic for the past 25 years. A credible foundation for the conversation, the text begins with a forward by Nampeyo’s granddaughter Rachel Sahmie (Hopi-Tewa). Sahmie, an artist in her own right, carries on the legacy of her family by using the same techniques in pottery as her mother and her grandmother. Elmore’s relationship with Sahmie connects through the art itself. In addition to owning pieces by Nampeyo, according to the text, he has been “buying pottery from Rachel’s mother Priscilla Namingha since the late 1980s as well as from Rachel.” It logically follows that Sahmie accompanied Elmore to visit the Keam Collection as part of KEEN INTEREST in Hopi the fieldwork. Sahmie understands the pottery led collector and gallery technical aspects of Nampeyo’s work at owner Steve Elmore to spend a level that makes her a leading expert. the past quarter of a century researching the life and work of the Hopi- Subsequently, before Elmore begins the first page of his argument, Sahmie writes Tewa artist Nampeyo (ca. 1856–1942). In his new, self-published monograph, Elmore an emotionally moving forward, which conveys her belief that a large portion of sets out to document these findings from his studies and subsequently make his con- the ceramics in the Keam Collection are tribution to the field of art history. Focused indeed by her grandmother.

Consistent with Sahmie’s inclusion on a time frame from 1875 to 1892, the in In Search of Nampeyo: The Early Years, author fills the gap in current literature 1875–1892, the strength of this book is about the early life and work of artist and the position from which Elmore engages potter Nampeyo, which in turn disrupts the world.

By writing from a place that the existing narrative of the Sikyatki focuses on the art, Elmore is deeply allied Revival. While the author achieves what with the artist who creates the work. In he set out to do, challenges remain within the text that undermine the significance of turn, he cares enough about the outside this work based on its confusion about the world to share these objects with them.

In other words, Elmore’s perspective as intended audience. a self-described trader positions him as From its start, the monograph’s narrow thesis and broad approach position mediator between different worlds, which adds great value and credibility to the its claim successfully. The first lines of text. Additionally, the way he seeks and In Search of Nampeyo: The Early Years, 1875–1892 state Elmore’s main argument: shares information contains less inherent bias. The result is a publication that “My purpose is to reclaim for Nampeyo provides a surprisingly well-written and authorship of a large body of her early ceramic work in the Thomas Keam organized piece of literature documenting

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Nampeyo’s early professional life, the context for when her career was established, and the significance of these early years. This period predates the excavation of Sikyatki by anthropologist Jesse Fewkes and disrupts the current narrative that Fewkes was a driving force for the revival, thus solidifying the young Nampeyo as the founder of the “modern” Sikyatki Revival.

While the text is successful, a few challenges prevent it from being a scholarly masterpiece. From the outset, Elmore makes it clear that he intends his monograph to be an academic work by situating In Search of Nampeyo within the current literature and by providing an extensive discussion of his methodology in chapter one. However, the lack of properly documenting secondary sources challenges the validity of Elmore’s work as an academic piece. This move includes not documenting most secondary sources and not using the standard style for this genre of literature in the rare instances when these sources are cited. The decision to self-publish rather than work with a university press further underscores this point. In other words, these choices position In Search of Nampeyo: The Early Years, 1875–1892 in the precarious position of not having a clearly identified audience.

That being said, the content of the publication reaches far beyond its specific claim, and achieves something much larger, mainly due to Elmore’s extensive expertise and experience of working with Hopi pottery and Hopi potters. In addition to being a collector and a professed trader, in the past 15 years, Elmore has visited 25 museums to study works that he suspected might be connected to Nampeyo or her family. In these pursuits, Elmore’s fascination with Nampeyo’s early life and work propelled him forward because, according to the author, “the more I inquired about Nampeyo and her pottery, the more I met mystery.” The end result is that Elmore does indeed “find” Nampeyo at the Keam Collection, and in turn he writes a book that documents the artist’s early work and life, which ultimately affirms Nampeyo as a woman on par with the other masters solidly situated within the canon of art history.

—Jean Merz-Edwards

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Art History

exposed to other Native traditions and got to interact with students from other Indian Country: reservations.

Author Valerie Verzuh uses BradThe Art of David ley’s Pictures at an Exhibition as an example Bradley of a typical Bradley tableau. This work, glorious in detail, color, and especially Valerie K. Verzuh humor, includes stereotypical characters Museum of New Mexico Press, 2015 from the Santa Fe art scene, Salvador Dali, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera. The Lone Ranger and Tonto enter the exhibition together, and Sister Malvina and St. Francis dance in the foreground. These seemingly disparate elements make one laugh, study, and think. The work’s provocative nature is both appealing and fascinating, and Bradley’s genre art scenes reflect the heyday of 1980s Santa Fe, when the American Indian art market was booming.

According to Verzuh, Bradley uses his art to campaign against American Indian stereotypes, skewed historical accounts, and the exploitation of Native AVID BRADLEY (WHITE art. Bradley, who by the 1980s was EARTH OJIBWE) believes achieving his own success, joined other that “art is about expressing Indigenous artists to form the Native your feelings freely, following American Artists Association (NAAA) your heart.” He describes his narrative to promote their rights. This group’s paintings as very detailed and uses his advocacy was partly responsible for the work to “vent about issues” and spin his Indian Arts and Crafts Art of 1990, which stories “with a healthy dose of humor made it illegal for non-Natives to sell and irony.” their artwork as Native American.

With a superficial, passing glance at Because of his activism on the some of Bradley’s work, one might conissue of Indian authenticity, Bradley was sider it charming folk art. Its accessibility threatened by some artists and critics. draws one to it. After even a brief study, He was viciously targeted by Ward one finds fascinating detail upon detail, Churchill, who used to show as a Native and satirical or humorous statements American artist. Bradley’s Land O’ Fakes, about identity and sociopolitical issues.

Land O’ Bucks (Museum Currency) was Bradley grew up in poverty. He created in answer to this. The work is a was adopted by a non-Indian family and spoof of the Land O’Lakes butter logo removed from his culture during his early (redesigned by Patrick DesJarlait in the childhood. He briefly studied prelaw 1950s) with a skeletal mask in place of the at the College of St. Thomas before he Native woman’s face, money and a feather became hooked on art. Bradley met one balancing the scales, a warrior depicted of his mentors, abstract expressionist as a puppet—and the artist hanging from George Morrison (Grand Portage Ojibwe, a tree. The words Museum Currency are 1919–2000), while at St. Thomas. written across the top and bitter is written Patrick DesJarlait (Red Lake Ojibwe, along the bottom. Bradley does not back 1921–1972), a modernist painter with down from a challenge. social-realist influences, also inspired Georgia O’Keeffe as Mona Lisa Bradley’s work. But his most positive is rich with detail. In this work, the educational experience came from his iconic modernist of Abiquiu is dressed time at the Institute of American Indian in her usual outfit and wears Mona Lisa’s knowing smile. A calla lily and cow skull Art (IAIA). It was there that he was

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pay homage to O’Keeffe’s paintings, and she sports a golden pin of her artist’s hallmark. The pastel landscape is O’Keeffe-esque. Yet, the work is definitively Bradley. Is he honoring O’Keeffe, slightly mocking her, or both? He leaves that up to the viewer to decide.

According to Verzuh, Bradley’s works include a primary story and a “simultaneous” narrative. The paintings are constructed in accord with the Native American storytelling tradition, where the story is seldom linear, chorological, or thematically fixed. His Sleeping Indian series, based on The Sleeping Gypsy by French artist Henri Rousseau (1844– 1910), is a good example of this.

The first of this series is Poet’s Vision. A Native woman sleeps on a bed in a Rousseau-esque pose, surrounded by books, a black cat, an electrical outlet, and a large ceramic jar painted like a globe outside the window. Each detail suggests a different story. Why is the cat scratching the mattress not waking her? What are the books? Is the view out the window reality or her dream? So many options to choose from make Bradley’s work enigmatic and a pleasure to work out.

Visions Quest (Chippewa Sleeping Indian #2) appears to pay homage to the artist’s Minnesota roots. The Ojibwe man slumbers beside a serene lake. A bear sniffs him. A tiny owl is in the foreground and a birch-bark canoe is off to the side.

The serenity of the mountain lake with a moon reflection is lovely, until one sees the hazy outline of a metropolitan city in the background. While this one seems serene, the threat of the city is very real and ominous.

Indian Country: The Art of David Bradley, with its 71 color plates, chronicles his work and growth as an artist, activist, and voice of his people. As Bradley explains, “My art suggests and comments on situations, but does not resolve them.”

He goes on to say, “If I try to explain too much, I only put limitations on my ideas and I’d rather they remain less finite to the viewer.” This retrospective catalogue and accompanying exhibit at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture are a testament to this artist’s influence and rich career.

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ranch jobs. I am personally familiar with old-fashioned sheepherding with dogs Laguna Pueblo: A on the free range just north of El Prado, New Mexico. In Marmon’s works, New Photographic History Mexico clouds provide a sense of place.

Many of Marmon’s photographs, Lee Marmon and Tom Corbett especially the dancers, achieve an almost University Of New Mexico Press, 2015 three-dimensional quality. This is managed through his masterful angles, shadows, and backgrounds. Understanding they were taken in the 1960s, before digital cameras, these are truly works of art and are as current and crisp as if they were shot today.

This handsome volume is divided into 15 chapters showcasing the history of the pueblo. The fine introduction describes the 50-year friendship between Marmon and his coauthor Tom Corbett.

In the mid-1870s, the Marmon brothers from Ohio became part of what Corbett referred to as the “Anglo infusion” migration. These men married into the Laguna tribe and became involved in tribal affairs, “infusing new cultural HAT CAN ONE SAY values.” During this time, the Laguna that has not already been people integrated the Roman Catholic said about Lee Marmon faith of the Spanish conquistadors into (Laguna)? If you know his their Native religion. In 1880, Marmon’s photographs, you can fill in the superlagrandfather Robert G. Marmon became tives. If you do not, get ready for a photo the first white man elected governor of discovery of your life. His photos may the Laguna Pueblo. He has been one of not portray subject matter any differently the few to hold that position in New than other Western premier photograMexico. In 1886, Robert’s brother Walter phers, but Mr. Marmon puts each photo was also elected governor. and individual situation into historical Because Laguna was not on top of context. a mountain, off the beaten path, as were One highlight of this book is the many of their neighbors, they were more 1992 photo of Lee Antonio (Laguna) and closely connected to the rest of a growing his motorbike. Antonio was in the Battle America. By being located on the railroad of the Bulge, lived alone at a sheep ranch route in the 19th century and historic trying to adjust to civilian life after World Route 66 (I-40) in the 20th century, War II, and periodically rode his motorLaguna was one of the few pueblos bike eight miles to town for supplies. constantly in touch with the outside Marmon said he traveled to Antonio’s world. Corbett speaks of job creation, home to take his picture and found him which helped many in the pueblo to alone reading his Bible. This is a fine advance financially. Some families left example of Marmon’s narrative for each the pueblos when they could afford it, of 81 photos—offering humanity to each including Marmon. individual. You will not find the anthroMarmon was born in Laguna pological depiction of a people here.

Pueblo, 45 miles west of Albuquerque, The portrait, Bennie at Sheep Camp in 1925. Henry Anaya Marmon and (1984), provides a haunting view of an Lily Ann Stagner raised their son on the elderly gentleman with a long, grey beard Laguna Pueblo. He worked at his father’s in a summer cowboy hat posing with trading post and, at his father’s suggeshis horse and sheep. The work shown tion, began taking photos of the people and places of the pueblo. in this photo would soon shift from a His Spanish, German, and Laguna solitary livelihood into salaried farm and

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parentage informs Marmon’s photographic perspective. He spent eight years as the chief photographer for the Bob Hope Desert Classic golf tournament, the groundbreaking for the Betty Ford Center, the Eisenhower Medical Center, and the grand opening of the Annenberg Center for Health Sciences. Anyone interested in how this came about will have to look further than this book. His history of his people had just begun and continues today in this wonderful volume.

Coauthor Tom Corbett, a physician, enlisted in the US Public Health Service for two years and was assigned to Laguna Pueblo in 1965. There he met Lee Marmon, who lived next door to the housing provided by the health service.

Corbett practiced medicine at Laguna for two years and during that time realized the value of the history Marmon was uncovering with his stories and photographs. He encouraged him by listening to his tales. This firsthand history from the 1870s to today, with photos of the people sharing their personal histories, is amazing. Complementing the narrative are historical photos shared from archives and individuals. Corbett’s idea for this book took four decades to realize when the University of New Mexico accepted his proposal and opened the archives of over 100,000 of Marmon’s photographs they had recently acquired.

The history presented in this book of the Laguna people is brief and mostly ignores the negative accounts.

The less-desirable effects of outsiders on Laguna culture—diseases, uranium mines, railroads, and Route 66—are not recounted in depth but were profound influences on the Laguna Pueblo.

Laguna Pueblo is governed by its constitution, which was first written in 1908 and unified the six Laguna villages.

This constitution preserves the traditional laws, customs, and practices of the Pueblo orally passed down through the centuries.

Part of the preamble to the constitution is the recognition of President Abraham Lincoln and his pledges to the Laguna people. Canes with the president’s name engraved on the handle were created for each of the 19 pueblos in 1863 and were presented in 1864. These canes continued the tradition started in 1620 under Spanish rule. The Lincoln cane to this day has become the symbol of the

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office of governor of the pueblo and is handed down to each succeeding governor. Marmon has included in the book portraits of two past governors holding the symbolic cane for which the priest in the mission performs a blessing ceremony.

Many stories and legends appear in the book. One of my favorite deals with the first car in Laguna. A gentleman who ran a local trading post won a new 1915 Buick in a contest run by the Albuquerque Journal. He drove it home via the only road available from Albuquerque south to Los Lunas and west to Laguna. Because there was no bridge at the Rio San Jose, people had to drive through it. This is one reason wagons have such large wheels.

Yes, the car got stuck, and the people waiting to see it had to pull it out of the river with a team of horses.

Through stories and photography, Marmon shares the unique history of his community. He links his photos to life at the Laguna Pueblo through his personal connection to the people and place.

—Doyle Logan Jr

Music Review Postcommodity We Lost Half the Forest and the Rest Will Burn this Summer Light in the Attic Records, 2014.

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SMELL THE DESERT in this music; I taste the soot in the air. This album is genius in its ability to simultaneously exist purely on the abstract depths of sound/noise/music as well as on a visceral level that transports this listener directly

into the scene, sensually, and emotionally.

The array of timbres and textures on this recording is startling: blown-out distortion squeezing shards of frequencies through the asphyxiating smoke. Strings, vocal chords, brass, and drums grind through their self-described “Southwestern-rasquache electronics,”1 creating a pressure cooker seething underneath, just barely able to contain its contents.

Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary arts collective based in the Southwest that includes Raven Chacon (Navajo), Cristobal Martinez (Xicano), Kade Twist (Cherokee Nation), and Nathan Young (Delaware-Kiowa-Pawnee). For this recording produced at the Banff Centre in Alberta this past winter, Postcommodity gathered an international ensemble of inspiring individuals for this album from Canada, Israel, and Spain: Marc Sabat, violin; Nico Dann, percussion; Cecilia Bercovich, viola; Achiya Asher Cohen Alloro, piano; Aaron Bannerman, trumpet; Dory Hayley and Ilana Dann, voice.

This limited-edition release of only 200 copies is the collective’s third full-length recording. The 16-song concept album is “recounting the ever-cycling decay of a desert drought from the view of its flora and fauna … dirge through the only path to the end.” The jackets are each one-ofa-kind prints embossed with ashes.

At a time of drastic ecological change, political upheaval, tremendous human global suffering, and loss of habitat and species, I deeply admire Postcommodity’s ability to respond to real-world events and dynamics. The perspective of artists is crucial to creating any semblance of a healthy community and society. This collective’s work is always deeply satisfying to me in subject matter, perspective, medium, technique, and quality, significant both on a personal and universal level. With this approach, it is evident that their intended audience is not any one specific group but everyone.

For listeners, knowing the purpose of Postcommodity’s existence strengthens appreciation of this album. It is deep and encompassing. Their online artist’s statement clarifies: Postcommodity works to forge new

metaphors capable of rationalizing our shared experiences within this increasingly challenging contemporary environment; promote a constructive discourse that challenges the social, political and economic processes that are destabilizing communities and geographies; and connect Indigenous narratives of cultural self-determination with the broader public sphere.

I appreciate the relationship between the orchestral instruments and rasquachismo. The concept of rasquachismo is an important contribution to music/art throughout the world, particularly in areas where new technologies are not easily acquired. Presently, much of the first world is pushing an arms race of new musical technologies, both in instruments and recording. Fortunately, many have pushed back against this compulsion and have made inspiring music using old and often discarded equipment. On this album, the direct contrast is tangible: high-quality traditional instruments of Western symphonic orchestras are literally and symbolically distorted by the rasquache electronic equipment that Postcommodity brought to the collaboration.

This album should also be experienced within the historical context of what is generally referred to as noise music. Most people think of music specifically consisting of melody, harmony, and repetitive rhythm, and therefore expect specific forms and predictability.

Noise expresses both the fundamentals as well as the most complex aspects of sound, and often deliberately avoids commonly expected elements in order to focus distinctly on the rich experience of abstractness. Its historical origins hark back to Italian Futurist artist Luigi Russolo’s noise music concerts from 1913-14. Russolo observed the musical world moving toward ever-greater complexity, as was the rest of society, and this was his contribution. It was met with disdain and misunderstanding.

Unfortunately, often the same is true today, a century later.

This album is a good gateway to sound art, as well as an important work of art engaged in the reality of our world.

—Thollem McDonas

1. Rasquache translates to “crummy.” Chicano cultural critic Tomás Ybarra-Frausto coined the term rasquachismo, which he described in his 1991 essay as “an underdog perspective” and “the worldview of the have-not.” Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility,” Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, eds. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano (Los Angeles: UCLA Wight Art Gallery, 1991), 156.

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Miami, Oklahoma

in Myaamiaataweenki. During my two evidence that the Myaamia had indeed days at Eewansaapita, many young people shared a rich sugaring tradition on their proudly shared their personal Myaamia homelands along the Wabash River names with me, which were beautiful and near Fort Wayne, Indiana. Guided to hear. These were some of the most gently by cultural knowledge bearers, memorable moments of our time together. students learned their ancestors were more Interestingly, I learned that many Myaamia interested in making blocks of sugar than names refer to trees and plants, an example maple syrup, which was hard to store Not the “Last of the Miamis” of the abiding relationship that Myaamia before glass containers became cheap and have with the land, which is eloquently widely available.

S PART of the National carried on through the language.

Some of the most profound learning Museum of the American To build upon their learning moments during the videoconference Indian’s National Education experiences, Myaamia Eewansaapita occurred when the students shared Initiative, the Partnership and educators collaborated with the NMAI their observations about the historical Extension Services team had the pleasure to identify objects in the museum’s photograph titled The Last of the Miamis of working with the Miami Tribe of collections that connected to the camp’s 1810–1910 Kil-so-quah and son. The Oklahoma. The Miami—or Myaamia in theme and could be shared with students. students posed questions of Penney their language, meaning “downstream Myaamia youth explored selected that related to cultural and historical people”—are originally from the Great historical objects with David Penney, inaccuracies they saw in the staged Lakes area. Today, Myaamia families are PhD, NMAI’s associate director for photograph. For instance, a tipi is shown found throughout the United States and scholarship, and along with tribal leaders in the background rather than the are working diligently to revitalize their and other community members, gathered traditional Miami home, a wiikiami. Other language and culture through annual in a classroom to share with Penney what inconsistencies, such as the title, drew educational gatherings and cultural events. they had learned of their maple sugaring considerable laughs from the room when They use technology to bring the geosomeone pointed out that 40 Miami people graphically disparate communities together. tradition. In preparation, the students had read, for example, the passage that sitting together in a classroom, using a One of the most significant annual describes sugaring in the primary source smart board, with a live videoconference events is the weeklong Eewansaapita A Mission to the Indians, from the Indian to Washington, DC, were direct evidence (Sunrise) Summer Educational ExperiCommittee of Baltimore Yearly Meeting, to Fort that Kiilhsoohkwa and her son were not ence, held in Miami, Oklahoma, where Wayne, in 1804.

They posed questions they the last of the Miamis!

Myaamia youth, ages 10 to 16, participate had formulated from carefully examining Dr. Penney used stories and in cultural experiences. The National a maple-sugaring sap bucket made from anecdotes to explain that in the early 20th Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) elm bark in the museum’s collection.

This century, Native people often dressed up was able to virtually bring some of the bucket featured one of the two historical in ways that supported other people’s museum’s Myaamia tribal collections photographs from the museum’s archives expectations of what “real Indians” to the people at Eewansaapita through the students had discussed during the should look like, exemplified by the long simple videoconferencing technology. videoconference, which was tangible wig and Plains-style headdress worn by Despite a thousand miles of physical separation, the sense of the students’ pride in their culture was palpable.

In keeping with the event’s theme, mihtohseeniwinki ašiihkionki (living on the land), the Myaamia explored and strengthened their relationship with plants important to their culture, reaffirming this relationship and learning from elders and senior counselors. Cultural and educational activities such as hiking through prairie and wooded areas were grounded in the use of Myaamiaataweenki (the Miami language) to reaffirm their Myaamia culture and identity, and to strengthen community bonds.

During one hike, students learned to identify the pahkohkwaniši (elm tree).

They handled the bark, drew sketches of the striation of dark and light bark in art Unknown Miami Artist, Moccasins, ca. 1825–1835, deerhide, wool, silk, cotton, glass beads, paper, Indiana, collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 20/2176. journals, and recorded their observations

Eewansaapita (Sunrise) Summer Educational Experience

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The Last of the Miamis 1810–1910 Kil-so-quah and son, 1910, Indiana, collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, P00532. Photo: L. M. Huffman.

In this staged photograph on the right, Waapimaankwa’s leggings and moccasins, with their eye-dazzling ribbonwork, are beautiful examples of Myaamia artistry.

Myaamia traditional clothing was probably incorporated into the staged photograph because it looked “exotic,” especially paired with a long wig and Plains-style headdress to meet people’s expectations of what an “authentic Indian” should look like in the early 1900s.

The display of traditional cooking methods and tools (such as the maple sap bucket at her feet) and Waapimaankwa’s farreaching gaze add to romantic ideas of the “vanishing” Indian that were popular at the turn of the 20th century. These features, coupled with the title The Last of the Miamis all reinforce stereotypes of the time.

Kiilhsoohkwa’s son Waapimaankwa.

During adolescent years, young adults invariably explore their identity and stereotypes, trying to reconcile popular ideas of what they “should” look like as contemporary American Indians and their daily experiences that may not fit into people’s expectations.

Both historical photographs were taken in 1910 by L. M. Huffman, who had a studio in Laud, Indiana, and who became well known (according to NMAI) for his photographs of Kiilhsoohkwa and her family members. Kiilhsoohkwa herself was certainly better known than Huffman inside her own community. She was an important midwife in Indiana and carried plant knowledge related to childbirth and labor. In fact, some of the youth at the videoconference were related to her, and one counselor explained that Kiilhsoohkwa had delivered his great-grandmother. She also gave the baby her Myaamia name after the delivery.

A conversation between Native youth and museum staff about items in the museum’s collection is an engaging way for knowledge of Myaamia history, language, and culture to be practiced and internalized by a younger generation— and for the museum to add to its own store of knowledge. Additionally, with a continued focus on 21st-century skill building in America’s classrooms, young people benefit from developing critical thinking skills and using technology in

educational formats. The NMAI is proud to have been able to support the Myaamia in nurturing their culture and honored to have this opportunity to share information, especially given that museums are still resented by some Native communities for the unethical collecting practices of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Through dialogue, listening, respect, and practicing the Myaamia

term neepwaantiinki—learning from each other—the National Museum of the American Indian and Native communities can continue to find ways to ensure that cultural objects are seen by youth, and that the stories they contain are preserved.

—Renée Gokey Note: A previous version of this article appeared on NMAI’s blog.

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Santa Fe Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian

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OR ALMOST A CENTURY, museums in Santa Fe have celebrated objects of pottery, baskets, and textiles.

Now, jewelry is among that pantheon of Native artistry.

In June, the Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe opened its doors to reveal three groups of people and their remarkable accomplishments: the celebrated artists, the collectors, and the board and staff responsible for the center’s creation.

Founded in 1937 as the House of Navajo Prayer, the museum was a collaboration between Mary Cabot Wheelwright, Arthur and Frances Newcomb, and Hastiin Klah (Navajo, 1867–1937) to promote Navajo religion before becoming the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art, a moniker it held for almost 40 years. But in 1977, the institution repatriated its ceremonial holdings to the Navajo people, changed its name to honor its founder, and shifted its focus and collections. Since 1990, the museum has broadened its scope to present rotating exhibits with historic and contemporary artworks by Native artists in multiple media from around the country.

Reinventing itself once more, the museum has begun showcasing its voluminous jewelry collection and archives. This required almost 7,000 square feet to be added to the historic William Penhallow Henderson building, which was mostly unaffected by the new annex. The integrity of the hooghan influence also remains intact, with visitors required to enter through the original structure. The new wing designed by Jeffrey Seres provides two additional galleries, one permanent with recessed displays, and one with flat walls that will allow for rotating exhibits. In addition to the new building, the museum also acquired new gates, improved parking, and expanded its famous gardens, all of which enhance the visitor experience. But for as impressive as these new features are, it is the collections that will leave the most lasting impact.

Native people had long practiced self-adornment before the arrival of the Spanish in the 15th century. But it was not until the 19th century that Natives in the Southwest began to create jewelry from metal. The Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry provides examples in materials such as silver and turquoise, gold, platinum, diamonds, and other gems, in forms ranging from necklaces, bracelets, earrings, and rings, to pins, bolos, belts, spoons, and boxes. All employ various construction methods including stone carving and

drilling, hammering, stamping, casting, and eventually stoneto-stone mosaic and channel inlays, and other techniques like plique-à-jour.1 The center’s collection features exceptionally early examples, including buttons, bridles, and canteens, and jewelry by pioneers like Slender Maker of Silver (Navajo, ca. 1830–ca.

1918). Among the encyclopedic, 20th-century holdings are pieces from luminary artists like Fred Peshlakai (Navajo), Frank Vacit (Zuni), Victor Coochwytewa (Hopi), Mark Chee (Navajo), Preston Monongye (Mexican-Mission Indian), Joe H. Quintana (Cochiti), Leo Poblano (Zuni), Charles Loloma (Hopi), Kenneth Begay (Navajo), Morris Robinson (Hopi), Julian Lovato (Kewa), and Lewis Lomay (Hopi).

The 21st century begins its representation with works

by Denise Wallace (Chugach), Mike Bird-Romero (Ohkay Owingeh-Taos), Lee Yazzie (Navajo), Keri Ataumbi (Kiowa-Comanche), McKee Platero (Navajo), Perry Shorty (Navajo), Angie Reano Owen (Kewa), Norbert Peshlakai (Navajo), Liz Wallace (Maidu-Washoe-Navajo), Sonwai (Hopi), and the tandem of Gail Bird (Kewa-Laguna) and Yazzie Johnson (Navajo). The center also houses the most important collection of Zuni fetishes in the world, with examples from Leekya Deyuse, David Tsikewa, and Teddy Weahkee.

For all the identifiable artists, it is the works that have yet be attributed that present the center with its evolving challenge:

TOP: Crowd scene at the Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry at the opening reception.

BOTTOM: Bracelet display. Both photos: Scott W. Hale.

1. Plique-à-jour is an technique in which translucent enamel panels are fused in metal filigree cells. It resembles miniature stained glass.

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to collect, research, exhibit, publish, and hopefully identify early works aided by scholars like Washington Matthews, John Adair, and David L. Neumann, whose archives are housed at the center. It will be in its capacity as a research institute that the center will be able to transform these unknown craftspeople into known artists.

The Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry also honors those who helped create these world-class collections through their market participation, and three parties are presented distinct recognition. The center bears the names of Jim and Lauris Phillips, whose gift of their renowned collection catapulted the museum’s holdings to unprecedented numbers.

The permanent gallery is a tribute to the dealer-scholar-impresario Martha Hopkins Struever, who directly recruited donors for the center and continues to influence generations of artists and collectors. And the rotating gallery salutes connoisseurs Sid and Ruth Schultz, whose collection has yet to be completely gifted because they continue collecting. In a record-setting art market, museums cannot always afford to purchase new acquisitions, and gifting becomes the only avenue through which they can collect. Because of these five people, the center has an abundance of jewelry—and future exhibits—for years to come.

Such an addition, however, would not be possible without the commitment of a group of dedicated individuals comprising the Wheelwright’s board and staff. The constraints of a report

do not permit proper gratitude be afforded each individual, but special attention need be paid to its director, Dr. Jonathan Batkin. It may be by coincidence that a director celebrating his silver anniversary at the museum would open a new building celebrating such a precious metal, but “building a building” is a notable accomplishment for any museum director. Considering this is Batkin’s third successful capital campaign (he raised funds for an elevator in 1997 and for the tunnel adjoining the library and curatorial center in 2000, and he created an endowed curatorial position in 2014), he is one of the most effective fundraisers in the local museum community. Combined with his scholarship and longevity, Batkin ranks among the elite museum directors of recent memory, those who have left indelible impressions on their respective institutions, including Philippe de Montebello, Peter Marzio, and Ralph T. Coe, whose collection of Native arts is displayed at the Wheelwright.

Longtime Santa Feans may remember when the Wheelwright Museum had lost its luster. But for the next century, the city’s museum visitors will treasure the jewelry legacies still under construction at the Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry.

The Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian is now open Monday through Sunday, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

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ART + LITERATURE

Making Her Own Kind of Music

Joy Harjo-Sapulpa

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By Yvonne Tiger

OY HARJO-SAPULPA is a prolific and all-around multitalented Mvskoke woman and artist. She is a tribally enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, currently residing within her nation’s jurisdictional area in Northeastern Oklahoma. Her life has many layers, as a mother, grandmother, partner, community member, and an artist. Most recently, she celebrated her marriage to Owen Sapulpa, also Mvskoke. She is continually in motion with constant travel, performances—be it poetry readings or solo/ band performances—or being present for her community and family.

Harjo-Sapulpa is a multi-award-winning musician, composer, author, and a poet. She’s published a book for children, one for young readers, and numerous volumes of poetry. She is also a well-respected professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her memoir, Crazy Brave,1 has earned her many accolades. She has won numerous awards, including PEN USA Literary Award for best creative nonfiction; the American Book Award for outstanding literary achievement for the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community (twice); and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, which will enable her to pen her second memoir, Songline of Justice.

I began my interview with Harjo-Sapulpa by asking her a fundamental question: Who are you? What would you want us to know about you?

I am Mvskoke, born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I left home in high school to attend the Institute of American Indians Arts in Santa Fe, which was then a BIA-operated arts school at the Cerrillos Road campus. I was accepted in two-dimensional art, but by second semester I became a theater and dance major. Our troupe, made up of mostly postgraduates, went on tour to the Pacific Northwest. Afterward, I went home as a pregnant teenager, a secret I kept from nearly everyone. I lived hard for a few years until I made it to the University of New Mexico as an undergrad, and wouldn’t have made it to the front door without the help of a northern New Mexico organization headed by Ramos Suina and Joe Abeyta. First I was a pre-med major, then art, until I found my way to poetry—or rather, it found me.

Joy Harjo-Sapulpa. Image courtesy of the author.

that later in her career she, too, would be considered an important figure in this Native American literature movement.

As a person who is formally educated in the literary arts, having received your MFA from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1978, and as one who teaches in this field, do you think higher education is a necessary component to becoming a successful artist? Is there room for the self-taught artist?

I don’t believe one has to attend a writing program to be a writer or a poet, or a music program to be a musician.

Ultimately, the art teaches you. Every book or music project Harjo-Sapulpa received her bachelor’s of arts degree from teaches you. You always learn something new. With music I University of New Mexico in 1976. As a college student, she found am primarily self-taught, though I have taken lessons when I herself influenced by prominent Native writers such as Leslie have been in some new place. It is a constant learning process. I Marmon Silko (Laguna) and Simon Ortiz (Acoma), members of am taught when I read the poetry of someone who is making a the Native American Renaissance movement. Little did she know fresh path in the art.

1. Harjo translates from Mvskoke to English as “crazy brave.”

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ART + LITERATURE

As someone who teaches creative writing, I am essentially assisting the writer in the student to find and take care of his or her own unique direction. My classes include reading poetry from the world poetry canon, and incorporating techniques and knowledge that tests and inspires. This is something that most artists do naturally on their own, if they are truly artists.

I found an MFA helpful because it gave me time to study and write, which would have been nearly impossible if I worked full-time in a service industry job with young children. I also worked part-time as a student. There are many paths to an education. Many universities and other teaching institutions have become more business focused, less education driven.

I like the mentorship/apprentice-type model for arts education. That model goes way back.

You are a university professor. I have met and talked to a few of your students. They adore you, are very inspired by you, and were truly moved by their experience in your classroom.

What is it that you bring to your students that makes such a deep and lasting impression?

The first teaching I did was as an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico. I did some Poetry in the Schools gigs under the mentorship of one of my poetry professors there, [the late] Gene Frumkin. I was shy but loved bringing the magic of poetry to students.

Those whom the teachers warned me against as too rowdy or undisciplined wrote the best poetry. My first academic teaching was as a graduate student at the University of Iowa. I was not awarded any assistance by the writer’s workshop, but Ray Leal from the university office that assisted Native and Latino students (Chicano, then) scrambled and got me a job teaching a course every semester in American Studies.

I taught American Indian literature. I panicked over every aspect of assembling and preparing the class, yet, once I got into the actual teaching, I found the process utterly compelling. My struggle with the panic over teaching hit the wall at UCLA, when a student came to my office and said that my teaching was not

anything like my poetry. It was not a compliment. It was hard to hear, but she was right. At UCLA I had become tight, even defensive, in response to experiences I had there.

I’ve had some difficult challenges along the way in my teaching career, but those difficulties have come more from departmental and university politics, usually not from students. After the UCLA experience, I decided to teach the way I wanted to teach, because after all, I was hired because of what I bring to an institution and its students. So, what do I bring? A kind of insight and style that has to do with being an indigenous/Mvskoke poet, saxophonist, playwright—I was/am always inspired by listening to people like Phillip Deere, Oren Lyons, Wilma Mankiller, and others, who were/are fine teachers.

community in mind, but each work of art is essentially a conversation with all the poets of past and present, all the singers, the saxophonists.

Native languages tend to paint a picture of meaning with their words. For example, in the Mvskoke language, the months are descriptive and instructional—they talk about times to harvest, times to plant, and describe the weather. Do you think the English language allows for the same form of expression as Mvskoke?

Each language is different. I know English best because that’s what I heard as a child. Mvskoke and Cherokee were not spoken in my home for the same reason it wasn’t spoken in the homes of many of my generation. Yet, in my nation, there are more Native speakers than in many other tribal nations. I spent years In your work (music and writing), in New Mexico and learned Navajo pretty who is your audience? Who are you well, until I was even dreaming in it. primarily writing for?

I’ve lost most of it, can still speak what I call “baby-Navajo,” which is pointing at I have often been asked the question, something and naming it. I used to speak “Who is your audience?” and through the decently and could understand much years I have had many different answers. better. I don’t know Mvskoke well enough Who does the artist listen to, respond to answer. I do know the languages are to? It’s something primal and absolutely much different, and I have sat in circles stunning—the source of creation where Mvskoke language is being spoken itself. Of course, your culture, your and taught, to learn. Each word is a personhood, your maleness or femaleness, virtual explosion of ideas, connections, and that social experience enter in, as well and place. So I try to learn. It’s easier as the land and where you live. to do here when I hear it spoken more frequently than when I lived elsewhere.

My audience has been the dark after a thunderstorm, a cricket, my children, Regarding your CD, Red Dreams, and for a poet, writing and publishing.

Trails Beyond Tears, can you talk about It’s anyone who reads your books, your why you chose to use the Mvskoke poetry. And for a performer, it’s listeners. language?

That voice that is my poetry comes directly from my father’s people, the Mvskoke. It is old. It is larger than me.

Maybe I should say it finds an expressive home in the energetic field and meaning of my Mvskoke people, because I am not sure of the source, except that I know it is a living thing. My experiences as an Indigenous woman growing up through the late fifties, sixties, and early seventies—and all that political activity then—shapes it.

Each book is different, and each CD album is different. I write always with my

I’ve used Mvskoke in some of my songs as a way to honor it and to learn how to use it. I would love to get to the place of dreaming it, though I have heard people speaking Mvskoke in my dreams.

Our language is our encyclopedia of knowledge. We all need to assist in keeping it alive. It will in turn, keep us alive.

In January, we spoke a little of your current project—writing a musical.

What can you tell us about your project now? What can you reveal about the plot?

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ART + LITERATURE

I am writing what I think is a musical. It’s my own version of a musical. I am in the middle of it, so I can’t say too much about it, as it is evolving. But the protagonist is a young Mvskoke musician who is wondering about his place and the place of his people in the creation of music. He hears stomp dance in the blues, and blues in the stomp dance. He starts making his own kind of music, gets a band going, and then loses everything, including his collaborator and singer, a woman from an Oklahoma Plains tribe who has her own gifts. She ODs on heroin. He cannot save her. At the beginning of the play, he is standing on the Mayo Building in downtown Tulsa about to jump. The story is about him finding his way to healing by traveling the Trail of Tears, which is also the trail of blues and jazz.

Currently, Harjo-Sapulpa is in the process of writing the script and score of the musical.

What are the challenges?

The challenges are many. I have to come up with what exactly the protagonist is writing and playing that makes his music unique, and it involves some DJing, which I am learning.

What does your experience as a poet bring to the process of writing a musical?

Drama and music are directly related to poetry. They are all sound related, though with drama you need story. Actually, with any art something needs to happen.

So there are arcs of what happens, to whom, to when, and how—it’s quite complex, this project. I am finding I have so much to learn (historically, etc.) to write it, and I am learning blues bass, guitar, etc.

Given the nature of tribal communities and our responsibilities to our families and traditions, do you find that there is knowledge or information that is off limits or taboo?

Yes, there is much that is off limits or taboo—that is, you don’t write about anything that belongs in ceremony. I remember an Anishinaabe friend of mine, who in the very early eighties was

told not to write at all by her uncle who was also one of the traditional leaders.

She quit writing and went to work at a government agency. I always wondered about that—it always seemed like there was something else at work there.

A former Pueblo student wrote an article for the New Mexico Magazine and was sanctioned by an all-male traditional circle for writing. The article contained no direct references to anything within any ceremony. It was a personal essay about her family. Their response seemed overreaching to me, from where I stood. I had the sense they didn’t want her writing about anything at all. It’s interesting that the only cases I’ve heard about are circles of men, or men silencing women’s voices.

I can see, however, where some of the resistance might come from, in that we as Indigenous people are often misunderstood and what we say is often misconstrued, especially when it appears outside of place and time. There are differences in understanding between a traditional Pueblo person reading an article and a non-Pueblo person from the East Coast reading it.

I always feel limitations of some sort—I do not feel entitled to enter any space I want to any time I want to—some spaces are not meant for everyone.

The ceremonial circle has its own meaning, which is beyond time, even beyond place. It’s a connector point.

To try and put that into English would be impossible, and even a dangerous endeavor. And why? Because anthropology students might want access?

For someone’s degree of study?

And then there’s writing about things that have happened that were violent and disturbing. If you write, do you give that thing power again, or do you disperse the power it has to cause harm? There’s a way to write for each of these directions to take place. I had to wrestle with that when I wrote my memoir Crazy Brave.

Do your music and your poetry come from the same place within you?

It’s the same voice.

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The music came when I was about 40 years old. That’s when I picked up a saxophone, a King Super tenor that was loud and uncompromising. That horn taught me to stand up and sing. The roots of my poetry writing go back to music, to my mother singing in the kitchen and writing songs on the kitchen table in Oklahoma.

In 2009, Harjo-Sapulpa won a NAMMY for Best Female Artist of the Year for her work on Winding Through the Milky Way. Her talents are truly the culmination of the many experiences of her life.

In reading your work, and listening to your music, I feel the deeply personal nature of your work. It feels very private, and that I am being voyeuristic.

I wonder if my older work, written when I was younger, feels more personal.

There is a move against the personal appearing personal in contemporary literature, though the motivations are always personal in some manner of being.

And what appears to be personal in many of my writings may tend toward the fictional, or should I say, imaginative?

There is an assumption that what poets write emerges from the private, because of the contemplative nature in the character of poetry. It’s not always so, and there are many kinds, styles, and manners of poetry.

How does it feel to have your work interpreted by others—by non-Natives?

As an artist of any sort, once your art is out there, it’s out there. The artist has no control over the response, so it had better be in the form you intend. There have been many misinterpretations of my work. For instance, what the horses mean in She Had Some Horses. But, at least there is an audience. This leads me back to the fact that the reader and buyer of most of our Native art isn’t our people back home, but non-Natives. Much of my audience is university students, yet, people at home know my work and connect me with home, and that matters to me. The newest poetry collection, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings will make it even more so.

ART + LITERATURE

How do you feel your art forms stand up to scrutiny compared to other art forms, such as painting or contemporary, customary arts, such as basketry and pottery?

Writing and music don’t have the presence in the Native art community as do basketry and pottery … traditional music, perhaps, but it’s generally not seen as contemporary, though there are new songs being created daily in traditional forms. Hip-hop breaks through, and the electronic powwow of A Tribe Called Red has risen to the top. When I’ve taught, and at Indian school, I noticed that the students who came up through strong oral cultures loved poetry. It was familiar to them. They understood the power of words.

I am interested in families who have generation after generation of artists.

Your daughter Rainy is immensely talented in beadwork design. What would you tell your daughter and other young artists coming into their own who feel they have a set standard to meet?

My daughter Rainy is a wonderful poet.

She has a major gift in poetry. She has turned toward the poetry of beadwork.

Her designs are original and startlingly beautiful, which are the same qualities she brought to her written poetry.

She has found her own path and it has empowered her.

We all have a standard to meet, and that standard is something we set within. If you believe you can do the best, you will.

If you expect the worst and head in that direction, most likely that’s what will happen. I have stories that can prove it!

Harjo-Sapulpa is a woman who lives spherically—being true to herself, her family, and her people on many different levels. Layers. She is constantly learning and teaching.

Inspiring. Personally, when I think of her, I think of the smoke from our sacred fires: She continues to rise, leaving behind a feeling of power and endurance. Mvto, Joy. Afv’cketv.

joyharjo.com

Dana Tiger (Seminole-Muscogee-Cherokee), Joy, 2014, acrylic, 36 × 26 in.

REMEMBER Remember the sky you were born under, know each of the star’s stories.

Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the strongest point of time. Remember sundown and the giving away to night.

Remember the moon; remember the dark.

Remember your birth, how you were given breath.

You were given laughter; you were given crying.

Remember the earth whose skin you are: red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth brown earth: we are earth.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them; listen to them. They are alive.

Remember the winds. Remember their voices. They know the origin of this universe.

Remember you are all people and all people are you.

Remember you are this universe and this universe is you.

Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.

Remember. Remember. —Joy Harjo-Sapulpa FALL 2 0 1 5

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ART + LITERATURE

Eagle Song To pray, you open your whole self To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon To one whole voice that is you.

And know that there is more That you can’t see, can’t hear Can’t know, except in moments Steadily growing and in languages that aren’t always sound But other circles of motion Like eagle that Sunday morning Over Salt River Circled in blue sky, in wind Swept our hearts clean with sacred wings We see you see ourselves And know that we must take The utmost care and kindness In all things Breathe in knowing we are made of all of this And breathe, knowing we are truly blessed because we were born and die soon within a true circle of motion.

Like eagle, rounding out the morning inside us We pray that it will be done In beauty, in beauty —Joy Harjo-Sapulpa

DANA TIGER (Muscogee-Seminole-Cherokee) is

a resilient woman and talented painter. Born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, Tiger is the eldest child of Peggy Richmond Tiger and renowned artist Jerome Tiger. She was only five years old when her father’s life was cut short. As a child, she entered art shows and often won. She built on this success at Oklahoma State University and in competitive shows including those hosted by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and the Five Civilized Tribes Museum, which named her a Master Artist. Tiger was also inducted into Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame and named a Newsmaker Honoree by the Women in Communications of Tulsa. She founded Legacy Cultural Learning Community, a nonprofit that promotes health and wellness and brings together Native elders and youth to preserve traditional knowledge, art, and language. In 1999, Tiger was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, but she transformed this tragedy into a challenge and says, “I am painting for survival.” tigerartgallery.com 10 6 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Dana Tiger (Seminole-Muscogee-Cherokee), Bow Maker, 2015, gouache on matboard, 4 × 10 in.

IN MEMORIAM

Joseph R. Jacobs, CM, DLitt 1935—May 2, 2015

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ORN INTO THE BEAR CLAN of the Cayuga Nation, Joseph Jacobs lived on the Tuscarora Indian Reservation in Niagara County, New York. He was born in Lockport to Ellwood and Ellen Jacobs.

Jacobs became in important member of the community. His art brought pride to his home and inspired the next generation of Haudenosaunee sculptors. Today, Jacobs’ works are on public display at the Native American Museum of Arts, a private museum founded by the entrepreneur “Smokin’ Joe” Anderson (Tuscarora).

After his construction career suddenly ended with a catastrophic fall from a roof in 1974, Jacobs taught himself to carve stone with handmade tools. In the first year, Jacobs finished 40 sculptures. He developed a flowing, representational style of carving bas-reliefs and in the round.

Jacobs was renowned for his ability to convey complex narratives from Haudenosaunee oral history, such as Sky Woman’s descent on the earth, into single sculptures.

His intricate Salem limestone and steatite sculptures seldom spanned larger than three feet across, but in 1981, Jacobs

received a monumental commission: to convey the founding of the Great Law of Peace and the Haudenosaunee for the Canadian parliament’s House of Commons. Entitled Creation, the frieze consists of limestone five-panels, which span 13 feet 5 inches long and took over four years to carve. Coiling, twisted snakes emerge from the head of Atatarho in the central panel. He is flanked by unfurling wampum belts and totem animals, and vertical panels with masked healers and the Tree of Peace. His superb carving is simultaneously both beautiful and grotesque.

For this and his many other accomplishments, Jacobs was bestowed with an honorary doctorate degree from Trent University in 1983, given the Iroquois Arts Award in 1985, admitted to the Order of Canada in 1989, and given the National Aboriginal Achievement Award in 2005. His work can be seen in many public collections today in Canada and the United States. Jacobs is survived by his wife Patricia, their four children, ten grandchildren, and one great-grandson.

A devout Baptist, he is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Sanborn, New York.

—America Meredith

Micheal “Huzo” Paddlety November 13, 1960—June 16, 2015

A

LTHOUGH THE KIOWA COMMUNITY and the art world knew him as Huzo, I knew him as Michael. In my Kiowa extended family, he is my uncle. His father, David Leroy Paddlety, and my grandmother, Agatha Paddlety Bates, were brother and sister.

After we moved from Hopi, I would not see him until my early twenties. By then, he was a well-known artist. His work was all over Anadarko, including murals downtown and as a t-shirt design for the American Indian Exposition. Seeing his work influenced the use of acrylics in my own paintings.

We both lived on the Hopi Reservation in the late eighties.

My father was principal of Hopi High School, and Michael’s father was a preacher at a Baptist church on the reservation.

My family and I were happy to know that other Kiowas and family were nearby. I often wonder if the colors he used in his paintings were memories of Hopi sunrises.

For me, to view his artwork is to experience it. I feel the movement of the images that are floating, flowing, connected to an ethereal and spiritual sense of place. These images of scissor-tailed flycatchers, mothers, infants in cradleboards, and singers carrying rattles are not just on a canvas or on an outside wall. They are traveling. They are going somewhere.

Michael was young then, and he worked at a gas station near Keams Canyon along with his brother Patrick. My parents often stopped there to visit them. My favorite memories of Michael are when he brought us candy and cold pop to our car as we filled it up.

I know this is where Michael is. He won’t live on through his work; Michael lives in his work. He is within the vibrant colors and fluid images.

Aho, Michael, for letting us see a glimpse of the Spirit World. —Maya Torralba FALL 2 0 1 5

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Everything You Create Is Protected by Copyright Law

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JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND how they can get away with it!” exclaimed Misty, an artist, to Ima, her attorney.

Ima looked out the window of her small office, wondering if Misty will ever listen to her. Misty had painted several landscapes, but then photographed and uploaded high-resolution copies of them on her website.

Someone then downloaded the JPG files and printed postcards from those images. Misty, understandably incensed, has not seen any credit or money from those postcards.

“Misty, do you remember when you began your art business?” Ima asked. “We incorporated your business under state law. Then I told you very directly that you have to protect your art through wise use of copyright law. Why didn’t you use low-resolution images online?”

Misty sighed. She loved to create all kinds of art, especially art that reflects her tribal culture. She uses various media to express her deep belief in traditional tribal values so she can relate to other Indigenous artists around the country.

By Kevin R. Kemper She just didn’t know how to protect her work and tribal culture and then maximize her profits.

Ima poured cups of coffee for each of them and then asked Misty to move her chair so she could see the computer screen. Ima went to copyright.gov, the main website for the United States Copyright Office, a department of the Library of Congress. Ima told Misty to etch the following basic concepts into her brain so she can navigate copyright law for her own benefit.

1. Everything you create is copyrighted the moment you create it.

Ima showed Misty a federal statute, which says: (a) Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. Works of authorship include the following categories: (1) literary works; (2) musical works, including any accompanying words; (3) dramatic works, including any accompanying music; (4) pantomimes and choreographic works; (5) pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works; (6) motion pictures and other audiovisual works; (7) sound recordings; and (8) architectural works. 17 U.S.C. § 102.

Ima explained to Misty, “This means that artists have a copyrightable work when they create original works, even if it has some elements of the copyrightable work of others.

[We will discuss those exceptions in later columns.] Thus, when you sit in your studio to paint a sunset outside your west window, a copyrightable piece of art has been created.”

Misty just nodded, as this was simple enough for her to understand.

2. The US Constitution guarantees that intellectual property like copyrighted art will be protected.

Illustrations by Roy Bony Jr. (Cherokee Nation). © 2015 Roy Boney Jr. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

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Ima showed Misty the US Constitution. “Article 1, Section 8 says, ‘The Congress shall have Power … To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.’ ” “Note a few principles here,” Ima said. “First, the US Congress creates the laws like the Copyright Act. Secondly, the idea of the arts is embedded in the consciousness of the

framers, who had known that the value of art grows when protected. Thirdly, note that protections are for ‘limited times,’ which means that copyright will expire before going into the public domain for anyone to use. This does not help tribes much when they want to protect their cultural arts forever, but this does help artists and their families who do not want personal work to be stolen and misappropriated by others.”

“So, I do have protections!” Misty exclaimed.

“Yes and no,” Ima replied.

3. You cannot enjoy all of the protections unless you register your intellectual property with the US Copyright Office.

Ima looked Misty straight in the eye and said, “Just because you created a copyrightable work does not mean you immediately receive all of the federal protections for copyright. Anyone can go to copyright.gov/eco and register a copyright. However, there are a few drawbacks if you do it yourself. First, the form looks simple, but the instructions are not that simple. You may not understand certain terms. Hiring an intellectual property attorney may seem cost prohibitive.

But attorneys have to eat, too!”

Misty laughed and cringed at the same time.

Ima continued. “The fees—like those listed at online at copyright.gov/about/fees.html—are generally less than $100. So, if your work is worth less than that, it might not be financially wise to spend the money. Then again, perhaps you are undervaluing your art, a common problem among artists.

Sometimes agents will register copyrights for clients as part of paid services.”

Misty knew exactly what Ima was saying. She had not felt comfortable demanding a lot of money for doing what she loves. Ima pressed further her points.

4. If you have registered, you cannot enjoy all of the protections unless you assert your rights through the law.

money to pay costs and fees. Publishers might not be worried about artists filing copyright infringement suits if the art is not that valuable, and thus it would not be worth the money to fight.”

Misty did not feel much better about her situation after Ima’s explanation. Ima had warned her about posting high-resolution images of unregistered and copyrightable work online without using protective software and filing for copyright protection. She also knew her work had suffered lately, and so she was not certain whether the value of those landscapes would warrant fighting for them.

Misty asked Ima if she would call the other party and ask nicely but firmly about collaborating on the postcards and perhaps more.

“Here is where things can get expensive,” Ima said.

“Suppose you have to file an action in federal court to stop someone from infringing your copyright. Private attorneys like me can range from $175 an hour to over $1,000 an hour.

Then there are filing fees, deposition costs, the list goes on and on. Suppose you win. Federal law does allow ‘recovery of full costs,’ which might include ‘a reasonable attorney’s fee.’ The person who stole your copyrighted work may not have the

Many copyright disputes can be resolved outside of court, and a strong letter from an attorney could make all the difference. But there are other issues. Misty is an enrolled member of her tribe, but the other party is not American Indian. Does this create more legal difficulties for Misty? For instance, she would likely need a contract with the other party, but that would cost more money to have Ima draft it. We will explore those questions and more in subsequent issues.

Editor’s Note This column provides important information to educate readers about the laws of copyright and other intellectual property, art, media, and more. The fictional character of Misty as a Native American artist will encounter and overcome unique challenges with federal, state, and tribal law. Her fictional Native attorney, Ima, will guide and educate Misty. Along the way, we hope you learn the basics of copyright law, business law, art law, privacy, and more. Nothing in any of these columns should be construed as legal advice. You are encouraged to seek the advice of an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction if you have a specific legal question. Any resemblance to these fictional characters is merely coincidental.

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THINK CHEROKEE FROM COVER TO COVER. What You’ll Learn May Surprise You. Nine historical titles are now on sale.

Recently added “A Guide to the Cherokee National Museum Newspaper Collection,” “The Life and Times of Reverend Stephen Foreman,” “The Teachers of the Cherokee Nation Public Schools” and “The Development of Law and Legal Institutions Among the Cherokees.” “Records of the Moravians Among the Cherokees” volumes one through five provide insight into daily Cherokee life as told by white missionaries.

Enjoy these and many other hard-to-find books on Cherokee history and culture.

CALL NOW TO FIND OUT ABOUT OUR SALE PRICES. 21192 S KEELER DR, PARK HILL, OK 74451 (888) 999-6007 • CHEROKEEHERITAGE.ORG

America Meredith ᏣᎳᎩ ᏗᏟᎶᏍᏔᏅᎲᏍᎩ

Kelly Church

distinctly innovative & traditional black ash art artcove@hotmail.com | woodlandarts.com

Santa Fe Indian Market 229-PAL-N ᎠᏂᏣᎳᎩ ᏗᏟᎶᏍᏔᏅᎲᏍᎩ ᏅᎾᏓᎾᏅᎢ, ᎦᏚᏌ, ᎣᎦᎳᎰᎹ

americameredith.com | ᎠᎭᎴᏂᎠ .com

Santa Fe Indian Market #LIN 738-E | Aug. 22 & 23 Cherokee Art Market, Catoosa, OK | Oct. 10 & 11 Kelly will represent First American Art Magazine at the Autry Indian Arts Market, Los Angeles, CA | Nov. 7 & 8

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Advertiser Index Victoria Adams | victoriaadamsjewelry.com

5

Antique American Indian Art Show | antiqueindianartshow.com 110 Bahti Indian Arts | bahti.com

10

Blue Rain Gallery | blueraingallery.com

3

Cherokee Art Market | cherokeeartmarket.com

16

Cherokee Heritage Center | cherokeeheritage.org

31

Cherokee Heritage Press | cherokeeheritage.org

111

Chickasaw Cultural Center | chickasawculturalcenter.com

2

Chickasaw Nation, Division of Arts and Humanities chickasaw.net interior front cover Kelly Church | woodlandarts.com

111

Mel Cornshucker | dragnfly58@aol.com

32

Dawn Dark Mountain | dawndarkmountain.com

60

Denver Art Museum | denverartmuseum.org

9

Orlando Dugi | orlandodugi.com

Classified Ads Advertise in First American Art Magazine! Classifieds provide affordable advertising solutions for art professionals and service providers. Contact us today: (505) 473-0149 or ads@firstamericanartmagazine.com.

ARTWORK Cherokee Woman Online Boutique, www.cherokee-woman.com.

We carry Authentic Native American Art, including jewelry, pottery, carvings, etc. Our mission is to support and promote Native American Artists and bring the highest quality art to our customers. Get 20% OFF your first purchase at www.cherokee-woman.com — use Code “NEWORDER” at checkout.

ORGANIZATIONS The Southeastern Indian Artists Association is a Native American-run, not-for-profit organization whose mission is to promote and educate about the arts and artists of tribal peoples. SEIAA, while a network of primarily Southeastern tribal artists, is supportive of all federally recognized Native artists. Visit www.seiaa.org for more info.

Great Basin Native Artists, collective of Native American professional artists in Nevada and Eastern Sierra Nevada range providing support through our online directory, image gallery, exhibiting opportunities, art business workshops, forum for Native artists, and interested community members to connect and interact, and an online presence for rural Native artists. For more info, contact Melissa Melero at (775) 424-3159 or gbnativeartists@ gmail.com and visit www.greatbasinnativeartists.com.

INTERN/VOLUNTEER Internships at First American Art Magazine, LLC available through IAIA or independently. Writing, graphics, or business focus. Volunteers needed for tabling/events. Contact us at: info@firstamericanartmagazine.com.

1 1 2 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

24

Exhibit C Gallery | exhibitcgallery.com

25

Shan Goshorn | shangoshorn.com

1

Benjamin Harjo Jr. | benjaminharjojr.com

33

Babe and Carla Hemlock | babeandcarlahemlock.com

6

Home & Away Gallery | homeandaway.gallery

15

Fortune Huntinghorse | fortunehuntinghorse.com

60

Indian Arts and Crafts Board | www.iacb.doi.gov

17

Keshi the Zuni Connection | keshi.com

19

Melissa Melero | melissamelero.com

32

America Meredith | americameredith.com

111

Native American Art Appraisals, Inc. | naaainc.com

15

Noksi Press | noksi.com 112 Objects of Art Santa Fe | objectsofartsantafe.com

110

Alex J. Peña | alexjpena.com

59

Ralph T. Coe Foundation | ralphtcoefoundation.org

25

Clarissa Rizal | clarissarizal.com

58

Jack Sabon | sabonart.com

59

Nelda Schrupp | neldaschrupp.com

33

Sealaska Heritage | sealaskaheritage.org

4

Chessney Sevier | chessneysevier.com

11

Jackie Sevier | northernplainsstudio.com

11

Spider Gallery | artscenter.cherokee.org

13

Treasures of the Southwest | treasuresofthesouthwest.com

10

Trickster Company | trickstercompany.com

7

Karin Walkingstick | walkingstickpottery.com

58

Kathleen Wall | kathleenwall.com

exterior back cover

Wheelwright Museum, Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry | wheelwright.org interior back cover Crystal Worl | cworl9.wix.com/crystalworl

61

Worl Studio | worlstudio.com

61

Lyle Toledo Yazzie | ltydesign.com

59

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Wheelwright Museum OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

www.wheelwright.org 704 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe, NM 87505 • 505-982- 4636 or 1- 800 -607- 4636

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Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry An Essential Santa Fe Experience The first museum space anywhere devoted permanently to the past, present, and future of Native American jewelry and related traditions.

Support for this project is provided in part by the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers’ Tax; New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts; and many private donors nationwide.