First American Art Museum No. 17, Winter 2017/18

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

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

NO. 17, WINTER 2017/18

GARIFUNA PAINTING

CHRISTI BELCOURT

DOCUMENTA 14

JORDAN BENNETT

KESHI FOUNDATION DISPLAY UNTIL FEBRUARY 15, 2017

WIXÁRIKA BEADWORK

LUZENE HILL PEDRO O. ZEPEDA

THE CHICKASAW NATION PRESENTS THE 5TH ANNUAL

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Meryl McMaster (Plains Cree/Blackfoot, born 1988) Anima (In-Between Worlds series) [detail], 2012 Digital chromogenic print 36 x 36 inches

BUYING OR SELLING

INDIAN ART? KNOW THE LAW

Under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act (Act), all Native American art and craft products must be marketed truthfully regarding the tribal enrollment and Indian heritage of the producer.

For a free Act brochure, contact: Indian Arts and Crafts Board U.S. Department of the Interior Toll Free: 1-888-ART-FAKE or 1-888-278-3253 Email: iacb@ios.doi.gov Web: www.doi.gov/iacb

Oscar Howe, Yanktonai Sioux, Dakota Eagle Dance, 1948 (from the collection of the IACB’s Sioux Indian Museum, Rapid City, SD)

Take Home a Treasure from Indian CountryBuy works produced by members of federally recognized tribes.

REAL INDIANS

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ISSUE NO. 17, WINTER 2017/18 FEATURES

DEPARTMENTS

Benjamin Nicholas & Belize’s Garifuna Painters Peter Szok, PhD

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Indigeneity at documenta 14 Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

28

Jacinto & The Oracular World of Wixárika Beadwork Kevin Simpson

36

The Keshi Foundation: Dreaming Big for the Artists of Zuni Pueblo Staci Golar

42

50

Recent Developments

12

Seven Directions Mike Patten (Cree)

16

Art+Lit Mary Black (Ojibwe) with April Holder (Sac & Fox-Wichita-Tonkawa) Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

86

Spotlight

Navajo Elder Waiting Michelle Lanteri

90

Calendar

93

ARTIST PROFILES Christi Belcourt: 50 Michif Painter Jean Merz-Edwards

REVIEWS Art Exhibit Reviews

74

Jordan Bennett: 56 Mi’kmaq Interdisciplinary Artist Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

Reports

80

Book Reviews

82

Luzene Hill: 62 Eastern Band Cherokee Interdisciplinary Artist Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD

Music Review

85

Pedro O. Zepeda: Seminole Canoe Maker & Ceramic Artist Michole Eldred (Catawba-Eastern Band Cherokee)

Tony Hunt Jr. 92 (Kwakwaka’wakw) America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

56

IN MEMORIAM

68

Don Tenoso 93 (Hunkpapa Lakota) Christina E. Burke 62

COVER: Christi Belcourt (Michif), detail of The Wisdom of the Universe, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 67 1/3 × 111 inches, collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, purchased with funds donated by Greg Latremoille.

Belcourt writes about this painting, “All species, the lands, the waters are one beating organism that pulses like a heart. We are all a part of a whole. The animals and plants, lands and waters, are our relatives each with as much right to exist as we have.”

The entire painting can be seen on page 51.

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WINTER 2017/18 | 5

Artist Residency Program | Fine Print Studio & Gallery | Non-Profit

Issue No. 17, Winter 2017/18 ISSN 2333-5548 (Print) • ISSN 2333-5556 (Online) Publishing Editor: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Literary Editor: Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD Marketing Director: Barbara Harjo (Cherokee descent) Circulation Manager: Talullah Begaye (Choctaw-Chickasaw-Navajo) Calendar Editor: Matthew Bearden (Potawatomi-Kickapoo) Copy Editor: Rosa Cays (Chicana) Proofreaders: Staci Golar (Cornish-Welsh-American), Samonia Byford (Cherokee Nation), & Jean Merz-Edwards Layout & Design: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Design Consultant: Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa) Social Media: Staci Golar (Cornish-Welsh-American), Michelle Lanteri, America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Nina Sanders (Apsáalooke)

Regional Representatives:

Great Basin: Melissa Melero-Moose (Fallon Paiute-Modoc) Great Plains: Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho) Northeast: Kelly Church (Odawa-Ojibwe-Potawatomi) Northwest: Marianne Nicolson, PhD (Dzawada’enuxw Kwakwaka’wakw) Southeast: Michole Eldred (Catawba-Eastern Band Cherokee) Southwest: Holly Coonsis (Zuni)

Editorial Advisory Board:

heather ahtone (Choctaw-Chickasaw) Jonathan Batkin James T. Bialac, JD Teri Greeves (Kiowa) Emily Haozous, PhD, RN (Chiricahua Fort Sill Apache) Linda Lomahaftewa, Hon. DFA (Hopi-Choctaw) Mary Jo Watson, PhD (Seminole) Ken Williams Jr. (Northern Arapaho-Seneca) India Rael Young, PhD

Advertising Representative:

Barbara Harjo (Cherokee descent), barbara@firstamericanartmagazine.com 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 © 2017–18 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. Any errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. First American Art Magazine® is registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office.

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JAMES LAVADOUR This Good Land four-color lithograph diptych total image size 60 x 39.5 inches, edition of 20 hand printed & published at Crow’s Shadow Press, 2017 all proceeds benefit Crow’s Shadow

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EDITOR’S GREETING

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America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), God Gives the World to Arapaho Children, 2004, acrylic and mica on steel, 36 × 16 in., private collection.

HE RELATIONSHIP between Indigenous communities and the nation-state has long been complicated. These relationships rise to the fore in this issue, as do the visual arts being a way for Indigenous communities to engage with international populations.

The Garinagu are an Indigenous society descended from Carib, Arawak, and West African peoples. In the late 18th century, British colonists removed the Garinagu from their homes in the Lesser Antilles to an island north of Honduras. From there, the Garinagu migrated to Guatemala, Belize, and Nicaragua. They are both African diaspora and Indigenous diaspora that meet the challenge of maintaining their cultural identity despite their community spanning several nation-states.

Peter Szok focuses on the Garinagu in Belize to explain how Benjamin Nicholas (1930–2012) and his fellow Garifuna artists have used painting as a strategy to assert their identity both within their own communities and to the outside world.

Just as Indigenous peoples span international boundaries, so does their participation in the art world. Andrea L. Ferber explores world Indigenous artists’ participation in documenta 14, a quinquennial art fair established in Kassel, Germany. This year documenta took the daring step of creating a parallel fair in the beleaguered Greek capital city of Athens. While criticisms have rained down freely upon the organizers, documenta 14 still offers much for us to celebrate. By inviting Candice Hopkins (Carcross/ Tagish) to curate, documenta 14 gave concrete power to an Indigenous voice. As Ferber leads us through the Indigenous contributions to the Kassel and Athens fairs, Hopkins’s choice to feature the late Kwakwaka’wakw carver Beau Dick’s series of masks stand out as an Indigenous artist showing an Indigenous art form on a world stage. This matters, because all too

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often contemporary Native artists are required to conform to the prevailing Western art practices in order to gain access to such a platform.

The humble Indigenous art media of Wixárika (Huichol) beadwork is contextualized in Kevin Simpson’s moving account of his friendship with Jacinto López Ramírez. This Wixárika spiritual healer passed on in 2007, but not before making his contribution to Wixárika art. This unique practice of inlaying glass beads in beeswax has roots in ceremonial offerings, and grew out of the Wixáritari’s need to fund their increasingly difficult pilgrimages to their sacred site of Wirikuta to harvest their ceremonial medicine.

Now an internationally recognized art form, it can be found far beyond the borders of Mexico.

Utilizing the visual arts as a way for Indigenous communities to remain in their homelands and maintain their ceremonial and daily cultural practices is continued in Staci Golar’s article about the Keshi Foundation, a nonprofit organization with a mission to develop “pathways and opportunities to benefit the people of the Zuni Pueblo, NM, through their arts and education.” Zuni is the largest pueblo in New Mexico and Golar writes that seventy percent of the tribe is engaged in the arts as a primary or secondary source of income. While the art market is often viewed with suspicion, or as somehow tainted, the reality is art sales can and do help Native families live on their own land and helps parents provide for their children. To this end, the Keshi Foundation created the Zuni Show, an art market that proved successful in its first year and built on that success in its second. The foundation’s ambitions continue to grow and include plans for the possibility of free Wi-Fi at the pueblo, allowing Zuni people to connect to the world and to provide opportunities for their people on their own terms.

—America Meredith

LETTERS TO FAAM Decentering Durham

Luanne Redeye

I

I

MET MR. DURHAM in London once many years ago and could not detect anything even vaguely First American in his features, but Chuck Norris and Bill Clinton both claimed to have First American blood. However, there are some people who do not have to prove their First American status to anyone because it stands out Axis Bold as Love.

I am African-Caribbean in origin, but ever since [I was] a child, people have always queried whether I have Chinese origins. It’s so strange. I grew up in London in the mid-’50s.

Ten years after the Second World War, as children we played “Cowboys ‘n’ Indians” in the streets of London influenced by the scores of cowboy series on TV. It was a very long time later that I realized that “Indians” were not bloodthirsty savages whose avowed intent was to scalp and kill all “palefaces” and could be killed without any qualms of conscience but peaceful people who respected and loved their environment who were being overwhelmed by a greedy, savage hoard of European migrants.

The same appropriation stunt was pulled on Australian Aboriginal artists in the ’90s, and in the USA during the ’60s and ’70s, many white male fraudsters claiming African origins were given “White guilt” funds to set up “African villages.” Their first act was always to “marry” around five to eight young Black women ’cause that’s what African chiefs do, ain’t it?

Tam Joseph, Artist London, United Kingdom Thank you for reminding us that ethnic fraud is not just a problem in the Native community or just in the United States.

Today, Indigenous people have a variety of appearances; there’s not one Native look. And then in regards to Indians being peaceful, many tribes take pride in their veterans and warriors.

But yes, most Native people don’t have to prove their status, because they are acknowledged by their tribes and are actively engaged with their tribal communities. In the 1990s, the United States experienced a tidal wave of “plastic” shamans, non-Native people impersonating Indigenous spiritual leaders during the New Age craze. Today, claims by Ward Churchill, Rachel Dolezal, and Jimmie Durham speak to an inability of these European-Americans to come to grips with the legacy of European colonialism. Since June when FAAM published Jimmie Durham’s actual birthplace, birth date, and parents’ names—enabling anyone to research his genealogy—no one has come forward with any facts to substantiate his claims to Cherokee ancestry. The art world should be able to distinguish between an empty, romanticized pantomime of resistance and Indigenous self-representation and self-determination.

—America Meredith

WANTED TO WRITE AND THANK everyone involved in the publishing of First American Art Magazine. I’ve been a subscriber for a couple of years and really enjoy reading the articles and learning about artists whose work is new to me or reading about new work from artists whose careers I follow.

I am curator of ethnology and ethnography at the New York State Museum, and we have an annual budget (that doubled this year!) to purchase contemporary art from Native artists affiliated with New York. Last year (my first year at the museum), one of our purchases was Luanne Redeye’s painting, Ageswe’gaiyo, which I learned about thanks to Luanne being featured in your Fall 2015 [Issue No. 8] edition.

Gwen Saul, PhD Albany, New York Thank you, Gwen. Stay in touch with us at the magazine, and we will help you in any way possible. —Mary Jo Watson, PhD (Seminole), FAAM Editorial Advisory Board

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: INFO@FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM or­mail letters to: FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE Attention: Editor 133 24th Avenue NW #126 Norman, OK 73069

Errata We spelled Micheal Two Bulls’s given name incorrectly in Andrea L. Ferber’s review of Horse Nation of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ in FAAM No. 16, Fall 2016, pages 72 and 73.

Sarah Tamashiro would like to thank Dana Lim and Elizabeth Bushong for assisting with the reporting of her review of art by Indigenous people of the Americas at la Biennale di Venezia in FAAM No. 16, Fall 2016, pages 78 and 79.

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CONTRIBUTING WRITERS CHRISTINA E. BURKE is the Curator of Native American and Non-Western Art at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A cultural anthropologist with degrees from the University of Rochester and Indiana University, Burke’s research focuses on Native North America, particularly art and material culture of the past and present.

YVE CHAVEZ, PhD (Tongva), is currently the Andrew W. Mellon fellow at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian where she is working on a major exhibition scheduled to open in 2018. She recently graduated from the department of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation, “Indigenous Artists, Ingenuity, and Resistance at the California Missions After 1769,” aims to place California Indian agency and artistry at the forefront of California mission art studies through close analysis of Chumash and Tongva practices at four of Southern California’s missions.

MICHOLE ELDRED (Catawba Nation-Eastern Band Cherokee) is a writer, curator, and educator. She received her bachelor’s degree in art and museum studies at University of South Florida and her master’s in education from Berry College in Georgia.

Much of her work is focused on the curation of Indigenous art and historical exhibitions. She believes that the process of art making and enjoyment of the arts should be accessible to all peoples. Her work in writing art curriculum and teaching the arts to people with disabilities is reflected in the interpretive planning of her exhibitions.

ANDREA L. FERBER, PhD, is an art historian and independent curator. She presents regularly at conferences and has received numerous grants to support research and exhibitions. She has written for Bruno David Gallery in St. Louis, Missouri, and Art in Print, among other publications. Her most recent curatorial project was Mni Wiconi (Water is Life) for the American Indian Workshop (AIW) at Goldsmiths, University of London, England, July 2017.

SUZANNE NEWMAN FRICKE, PhD (Ashkenazic-American), wrote her art history dissertation at the University of New Mexico on 20th-century Native pottery. She has taught art history at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, the University of New Mexico, and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She has curated three exhibits, Octopus Dreams: Works on Paper by Contemporary Native American Artists; As We See It: Photography by Contemporary Native American Artists; and Woven Together: Celebrating Spider Woman in Contemporary Native American Art, which traveled to sites in Russia, Japan, and the United States.

STACI GOLAR (Cornish-Welsh-American) holds a bachelor’s degree in art, with a minor in sociology and anthropology from Eastern Oregon University and a master’s degree in arts administration from the University of Oregon. After completing an arts management internship at Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts on the Umatilla Reservation, she went on to work for SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and the 10 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Unknown Maya artist, detail of The Tonsured Maya Maize God as Patron of the Scribes, codex-style ceramic jar, 550-850 CE (CC0).

International Folk Art Alliance. She has also served as a public art program and grant panelist, and has helped organize numerous community arts events as a volunteer. Her writing has been featured in the Santa Fean, Native Peoples, Santa Fe New Mexican, Bead and Button, and other publications. A lifelong advocate of the arts and an artist herself, she believes in the transformative power of art and in those who create it.

NEAL McDONALD HAMPTON (Caddo-Chickasaw-Choctaw) is an historian and independent scholar. He graduated in 2015 with honors from the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond with a master’s degree in history. His emphasis was on Native American and Latin American history, particularly that of the Lipan Apaches of south Texas and northeastern Mexico in the 19th century. He is currently finishing a manuscript about Mexico’s Indian policy from the 1830s to the 1850s with regard to the Lipan Apaches.

AURÉLIE JOURNÉE is a PhD candidate in social anthropology and art history at L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, France.

MICHELLE LANTERI is a contemporary art scholar, curator, and doctoral student at the University of Oklahoma. She served as interim director of the University Art Gallery at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. With her thesis focused on Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke [Crow]), Lanteri earned a master of arts degree in art history, a Native American studies minor, and a certificate in museum studies with unwavering support from the departments of art and anthropology at New Mexico State University.

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 earned her master’s degree in art history from the

University of Oklahoma, was granted a certificate in women’s and gender studies, and received the Alice Mary Robertson Award for her scholarship on the life and art of Linda Lomahaftewa (HopiChoctaw). Merz-Edwards teaches art history at Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas.

JAMI POWELL (Osage Nation) is a lecturer in the American Studies department at Tufts University and a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Her research examines the representation of American Indians in museums as well as historical and contemporary creative self-representation. She is currently collaborating with the Osage Nation Museum on the curation of an online exhibit about ribbonwork.

Jerome Tiger Muscogee Creek/Seminole 1941-1967 Limited Edition, Hand-Numbered Prints

CATHY SHORT (Citizen Potawatomi) is a professional photographer and textile designer. With her husband, Hank, and son, Christopher, she owns Lizard Light Productions, which specializes in fine art photography, video production, laser art, and Nativedesigned clothing and accessories. She also serves on the board of Wings of America. She exhibits throughout the Southwest and is based in Santa Fe. KEVIN SIMPSON is the director of Peyote People, a Wixáritari and Mexican folk art gallery and has recently opened another gallery, 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 the curator of the Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant in Brantford, Ontario. He is also a sessional professor in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Smith is the Canadian section editor of the forthcoming Art Market Dictionary and resides on the editorial board of the Yearbook of Moving Image Studies (YoMIS).

STACY PRATT, PhD (Mvskoke), is a writer, musician, and independent scholar. She has a master’s degree in literature from the University of Arkansas and a doctorate in creative writing (poetry) from the University of Southern Mississippi. She has presented research on American Indian and British literature at conferences, and she writes for a variety of publications. She lives in DeRidder, Louisiana.

PETER SZOK, PhD, is a professor of Latin American history at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. He is the author of Wolf Tracks: Popular Art and Re-Africanization in TwentiethCentury Panama.

THOLLEM is a peripatetic pianist, keyboardist, vocalist, composer, improviser, collaborator, activist, teacher, and author.

He has released more than sixty albums across the stylistic spectrum on twenty different vanguard labels. He performs throughout North America and Europe as a soloist and in collaboration with musicians, dancers, and filmmakers. McDonas has contributed articles to Anthology of Essays on Deep Listening and Full Moon Magazine.

The family of world-renowned artist, Jerome Tiger, is thrilled to offer exclusive prints of the artist’s painting Getting Ready.

The edition of 1,500 is printed on the finest archival paper. Each print is 21 × 17 inches large, is priced at $200, and comes with a Certificate of Authenticity.

The Life and Legacy: The Art of Jerome Tiger, with 54 original paintings and drawings

by Jerome Tiger, is on view at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City through May 13, 2018.

tigerartgallery.com/ art-gallery/jerome-tiger-1941-1967 mmarcus1@att.net (818) WINTER606-3731 2017/18 | 11

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS MUSEUMS & ART CENTERS Nunavut lacks a provincial museum, but the Qikiqtani Inuit Association (QIA) hopes to solve that by pledging up to $5 million toward establishing the NUNAVUT HERITAGE CENTER. QIA wants to see it built on Inuit-owned lands in Iqaluit, the provincial capital and largest city, to house, conserve, and exhibit Inuit antiquities. Says PJ Akeeagok (Inuk), QIA’s president, “The Heritage Centre would empower our communities and instill a sense of pride in our culture by allowing more Inuit to gain exposure to the rich traditional knowledge and skills of our ancestors.”

The INSTITUTE OF AMERICAN INDIAN ARTS MUSEUM OF

CONTEMPORARY NATIVE ARTS acquired a collection of more than 250 artworks, documents, and garments created by artist, designer, educator, and IAIA cofounder Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee Nation, 1916–2002). Aysen New, Lloyd’s widow, donated this invaluable collection.

The HEARD MUSEUM in Phoenix, Arizona, hired Erin Joyce as its fine arts curator, a position that had been vacant for years. Joyce earned her bachelor’s degree in art history from the University of North Texas and her master’s in museum studies from Johns Hopkins University. She has written for numerous publications and studied at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. The COLORADO SPRINGS FINE ARTS CENTER at Colorado College

hired Polly Nordstrand (Hopi) as curator of Southwest art. Nordstrand previously served as an assistant curator of Native art at the Denver Art Museum, a research associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, curator for the National Park Service, and curator of collections at the Ah-TahThi-Ki Museum. She has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the University of Denver. She has attended Cornell University for her doctoral degree and earned her master’s degree from California State University, Fullerton, and her bachelor’s degree from Stanford University.

The PEARY-MACMILLAN ARCTIC MUSEUM at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, received a collection of fifty Inuit graphics from Judith and Robert Toll. The collectors’ gift, which includes limited-edition prints and two drawings, marked the museum’s 50th anniversary.

The ANDOVER NEWTON THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL (ANTS), which housed its collection of historic Native American art at the Peabody Essex Museum, donated the collection to the museum. Due to financial troubles, the school had wanted to sell items from its collection, but the sale was halted by the US Department of the Interior since the school had not complied with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). ANTS had neither catalogued its collections nor notified tribes. Peabody Essex Museum is now completing the NAGPRA cataloging and notification process.

Aysen New, widow of Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee Nation, 1916–2016), with clothing designed by Lloyd. Image courtesy of the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe.

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The ABBE MUSEUM in Bar Harbor, Maine, selected its 2017 Wabanaki Artist Fellows: Donna Brown (Penobscot), Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy), and Geo Neptune (Passamaquoddy). The fellowship, funded by Dawnland, LLC, will assist the artists in their participation in local and nationwide art markets.

ART SHOWS The Cherokee Heritage Center hosted its 22nd annual CHEROKEE HOMECOMING ART SHOW open to members of the three Cherokee tribes. The Grand Prize winner was Dan HorseChief (Cherokee NationPawnee). Category winners, all members of the Cherokee Nation, were Jerry Sutton, visual arts; Renee Hoover, contemporary baskets; Lisa BlackbirdForrest, textiles; Troy Jackson, sculpture; David Pruitt, contemporary pottery; Toneh Chuleewah, jewelry; Crystal Hanna, traditional pottery; Roger Cain, traditional arts; and Carolyn Pallett, beadwork.

ART FAIRS Canada has chosen an Indigenous design team to represent the country in the BIENNALE ARCHITETTURA 2018 in Venice, Italy. Douglas Cardinal (KainaiMétis), Gerald McMaster (Plains Cree-Siksika), and David Fortin (Métis) are curating the project titled Unceded. Canada Council for the Arts chose the project through a nationwide, juried competition.

Pat Pruitt (Laguna), Sentinel V1.0, 2017, titanium, zirconium, 14 × 14 × 12 in. Photo: Pat Pruitt.

Santa Fe Indian Market 2017 Best of Show Winner.

Pat Pruitt (Laguna) won Best of Show at SWAIA’s 96th annual SANTA FE INDIAN MARKET. The classification winners were Wes Willie (Diné), jewelry; Angela Yazzie (Taos), pottery; Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), painting, drawing, graphics, and photography; Arthur Holmes (Hopi), wooden Pueblo figurative carvings; Pat Pruitt, sculpture; Lola Cody (Diné), textiles; Jamie Okuma (Luiseño-ShoshoneBannock), diverse arts; Carla Hemlock (Mohawk), beadwork and quillwork; Rain Scott (Diné), youth; Steven Paul Judd (Kiowa-Choctaw), moving images; and Don Johnston (Unangan), basketry.

Angela Babby (Oglala Lakota) won Best of Show at the NORTHERN PLAINS INDIAN ART MARKET hosted by Sinte Gleska University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Jim

Angela Babby (Oglala Lakota), Swept Away (Water Is Sacred, Water Is Life), 2017, glass mosaic on tile board. Northern Plains Indian Art Market 2017 Best of Show Winner.

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PUBLIC ART

Inuksuit sculpted by Kiakshuk (1886–1966) and assisted by Eyesiak Simiga and Egeesiak Peter (all Inuk) at Toronto Pearson International Airport, Terminal 1. The inuksuk at left indicates a location where someone had died or committed suicide. Photo: George Socka (CC BY 2.0).

Yellowhawk (Itazipco LakotaOnondaga) won the Best of Fine Arts, and Kevin Pourier (Oglala Lakota) won Best of Tribal Arts.

Division winners were Henry Payer (Winnebago), oil and acrylic painting; Charles Her Many Horses (Sicangu Lakota), watercolor, tempera, gouache, and casein; Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho), drawing; Roger Broer (Oglala Lakota), printmaking; Janice Albro (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota), 3D, additive process; Alfred Decoteau (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), 3D, subtractive process; Kevin Pourier, jewelry; Todd Bordeaux (Sicangu Lakota), mixed media fine arts 3D; Randall Blaze (Oglala Lakota), pottery; Emil Her Many Horses (Oglala Lakota), traditional-style beadwork; Emil Her Many Horses, contemporary beadwork; Emil Her Many Horses, quillwork; Janyce Trask (Oglala Lakota), quilts; Linda Szabo (Sicangu Lakota), textiles; Cecilia Fire Thunder (Oglala Lakota), dolls; Evans Flammond Sr. (Sicangu Lakota), traditional paintings; Kevin Pourier, mixed media tribal arts; and Jim Yellowhawk, mixed media 3D.

The Best of Show award for the 12th Annual CHEROKEE ART MARKET went to Ric Charlie (Navajo). Classification winners were Bryan Waytula (Cherokee Nation), painting, drawing, graphics, and photography; Bill Glass Jr. (Cherokee Nation), sculpture; Beverly Bear King Moran (Standing Rock Lakota), beadwork/quillwork; Ronni-Leigh Goeman (Onondaga), basketry; Troy Jackson (Cherokee Nation), pottery; Marie Martin (Osage), textiles; Ric Charlie, jewelry; and Beverly Bear King Moran, diverse art forms.

Special award winners were Joshua Adams (Eastern Band Cherokee), Culture Keeper Award; Christy Ruby (Tlingit), Innovator Award; and Chase Kahwinhut Earles (Caddo), Anna Mitchell Award.

Troy Jackson (Cherokee Nation) won Best of Show at the Southeastern Art Show and Market, hosted by the Chickasaw Nation in Tishomingo, Oklahoma. Norma Howard (Choctaw-Chickasaw) won Best of 2D, Troy Jackson won Best of 3D, and Daniel Worcester won the Best of Culture Award.

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An INUKSUK (a navigational cairn in the form of a human) installed outside Terminal 1 at Toronto Pearson International Airport has raised concern among some Inuit. The Canadian government commissioned Kiakshuk (Inuk, 1886–1966) to construct the public sculpture and installed three inuksuit at the airport in 1963. One of them has an upraised arm, which Piita Irniq (Inuk), a commissioner of Nunavut, warns is a marker of a location where a person was killed or committed suicide.

Egeesiak Peter (Inuk) and Eyesiak Simiga (Inuk), who assisted Kiakshuk in sculpting the installation, says it was meant to be a single, giant inuksuk. The Greater Toronto Airports Authority is working with the involved parties to explore a reassembly of the installation.

AWARDS & HONORS The American Academy in Berlin bestowed the 2017–18 BERLIN PRIZE, a fellowship and residency for US artists, researchers, and writers, to Raven Chacon (Navajo).

Chacon, an experimental musician, visual artist, and member of the artist collective Postcommodity, plans to spend his fellowship residency composing a series in collaboration with Native women musicians, writing about sound at the Standing Rock encampments, and creating sound and performance artworks.

The Ford Foundation named 25 artists, including Lori Pourier (Oglala Lakota), Postcommodity, and Joy Harjo (Muscogee-Cherokee), who “have a demonstrated commitment to social justice and reflect a powerful diversity of experiences and creative voices” as 2017 ART OF CHANGE FELLOWS. This fellowship includes an unrestricted stipend of $50,000 for individuals and $75,000 for groups.

The British Columbia Achievement Foundation awarded its 11th annual BC CREATIVE ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS FOR FIRST NATIONS ART to Corey Bulpitt (Haida), Kevin

Cranmer (Kwakwaka’wakw), Steven Thomas Davies (Snuneymuxw), Danika Naccarella (NuxalkKwakwaka’wakw), and Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas (Haida). The foundation honored Delores Purdaby (Secwepemc), a birchbark and pineneedle basket maker, with its Lifetime Achievement Award.

Loren Aragon (Acoma), whose fashion label is ACONAV, was named COUTURE DESIGNER OF THE YEAR at Phoenix Fashion Week, based on excelling during an intensive, four-month fashion “boot camp.” He is the first Native American designer to earn this honor.

PRE-COLUMBIAN ART & CULTURE The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) provided four tribes with a grant to study the cultural landscape of the Lower Gila River. The NEH’s Collaborative Research Grant

provides the Cocopah Tribe, Quechan Tribe of Fort Yuma, Salt River PimaMaricopa Indian Community, and the Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe with $175,000 to fund the LOWER GILA RIVER ETHNOGRAPHIC AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL PROJECT, led by archaeologist Aaron Wright.

The three-year study will integrate oral history and cultural perspectives with archaeological studies.

Hurricane Irma unearthed hundreds of Calusa artifacts on Marco Island in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida’s coast. Members of the Florida Public Archaeology Network searched through the roots of overturned trees on OTTER MOUND, a precontact shell mound dating from 700 to 900 CE, and sent the collected artifacts to the Marco Island Historical Museum.

Betty Osceola (Miccosukee), a cultural and environmental activist, voiced her concerns about the removal of precontact artifacts to WGCU Public Media and advocates for reinterment.

CRIME & LEGAL MATTERS Nael Ali, owner of Gallery 8 and Galleria Azul in Albuquerque, pleaded guilty to felony charges of violating the INDIAN ARTS AND CRAFTS ACT. Mohammad Manasra, a wholesale jewelry supplier, pleaded guilty in October 2016. They were indicted in October 2015 after a federal investigation discovered a conspiracy to import jewelry made in two factories in Cebu City, Philippines, to sell in the United States as Native American-made.

Thieves broke into TOH-ATIN GALLERY in Durango, Colorado, in September 2017 and stole more than 300 items of Native American jewelry.

Most of the jewelry stolen was made

by Navajo and Zuni artists dating mainly from the 1940s and 1950s and is collectively valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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SEVEN DIRECTIONS

MIKE PATTEN

A

MULTIDISCIPLINARY ARTIST and independent curator living and working in Montreal, Mike Patten was born in 1977 in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. He is of Cree and European decent and is a member of the Sakimay First Nation. In 2014, he was the emerging curator for the Curatorial Mentorship Team with the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, a national arts service organization that supports, promotes, and advocates on behalf of Canadian and international Aboriginal curators, critics, artists, and representatives of arts and cultural organizations. In the same year, and in 2016, Patten was the guest curator of the Contemporary Native Art Biennial, which was initiated by the gallery Art Mûr in 2012. The biennial is a long-term commitment to recognize and support living Indigenous art and artists. This recurring event introduces

Mike Patten. Unless otherwise noted, all images courtesy of the author.

a variety of art practices stemming from Indigenous cultures of North America to an ever-wider audience of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Due to its success, the biennial

is now registered as a nonprofit organization to better respond to its increasing scale and popularity. Mike Patten is now a board member of the organization. mikepatten.ca.

NORTH. INDIAN AGENT’s debut album,

MEDITATIONS IN THE KEY OF RED, was released on October 13 via HomeSkillet Records. This new experimental electronic folk music project is a collaboration between visual artists and musicians Yéil Ya-Tseen (Nicholas Galanin, Tlingit-Unangan), OCnotes (Otis Calvin III), and Zak Dylan Wass. The project aims to share peace, light, and vision with the world.

Historically, Indian agents were US government-appointed middlemen who lived among Indigenous communities to help settle disputes with the government and to subdue Indigenous ideology.

In reality, these agents were there to help further colonization by controlling trade and suppressing cultural practices. This system led to human rights abuses and grave consequences for the First Nations. Now, in the name of reappropriation, the title not only calls attention to our troubled past but is also a declaration of resilience and strength. You can preorder Meditations in The Key of Red via indianagent.bandcamp.com.

Indian Agent. Photo: Carlos Cruz, edited by I Want You Studio.

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MIKE PATTEN

Nadia Myre (Kitigan Zibi Algonquin), Slit et Black, from the series Scarscapes 2, 2017, digital prints, 75 1/2 × 43 in. each.

EAST. NADIA MYRE (Kitigan Zibi Algonquin) presented

two new SCARSCAPES in the MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image, September to October, at Galerie de l’UQAM. Nadia Myre is known for her exquisite conceptual beadwork and her large digital prints of the scanned beads. By amplifying the scale of her beaded pieces, Myre’s digital prints immerse the viewer in the perceived texture, thus yielding a physical closeness to the object represented.

The series of abstract patterns in Scarscapes are taken from Myre’s Scar Project workshops. For this connected

Wally Dion (Salteaux), Star Quilt, 2017, computer circuit boards, wire, copper. 68.25 × 63.5 in. Image courtesy IAIA Museum of Native Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Alison Marks, Goonaxh Sá, 2017, digital print, 24 1/4 × 18 3/4 in. Image courtesy of the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Washington.

series, Myre invited volunteers to sew and cut their personal scars (emotional, physical, or cultural) onto small raw canvases. The participants were also encouraged to provide a small text to reveal their motivations. The result is a touching collection of deeply personal and at times heart-breaking confessions. By studying how people visually represented their scars, she recognized recurring shapes that she simplified and beaded for her Scarscapes series in an effort to build a visual lexicon of pain and human resilience.

SOUTH. WALLY DION’S STAR QUILT is on view at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe from July 7, 2017, to January 21, 2018, in Connective Tissue: New Approaches to Fiber in Contemporary Native Art. Wally Dion (Salteaux) makes otherworldly quilt-like, wall-hanging sculptures made from discarded computer circuit boards.

Meticulously stitched together with copper wire, these reconfigured parts reference not only the longstanding practice of quilting, which was introduced by settlers to North America, they also speak of the new types of connections we experience in the virtual world. A predominant feature of Dion’s Star Quilt is the eight-pointed star, one of the most common motifs found in quilting and other ceremonial garments. The geometric design can be interpreted many WINTER 2017/18 | 17

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

Nico Williams (Aamjiwnaang Ojibwe), Thunderbird Red + Black Medicine Ball, 2016, Delica beads, gold thread. Photo: Mike Patten (Cree).

ways, but generally it is seen as a symbol for Venus, one of the brightest objects in the sky at night, which served as a guiding light for navigation for many travelers.

WEST. ALISON MARKS: ONE GRAY HAIR is on view at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle from November 11, 2017, to February 4, 2018. Alison Marks (née Bremner, Tlingit), “indigenizes” mainstream art history with Northwest Coast art. As an example, the artist added a West Coast Native mask on a reproduction of a painting titled Pause (At Rest), by Gabriel Cornelius Ritter von Max (part of the Charles and Emma Frye Collection).

Reworked and renamed to Goonaxh Sá (a Tlingit phrase said after one sneezes), Marks disrupts the male gaze and calls attention to the exclusion of Indigenous art in the canon of art.

ABOVE. To commemorate the 375th anniversary of Montreal and the 150th anniversary of Canada, I was invited to curate a number of window spaces in downtown Montreal with Indigenous art. Spearheaded by Frédéric Loury, the director of Vitrine

sur l’art in Montreal, this project pays tribute to the First Nations and their contributions to mainstream art while reintroducing Indigenous culture on a stolen Indigenous territory. NICO WILLIAMS (Aamjiwnaang Ojibwe) was one of the nine artists with a solo space of amazingly intricate beaded

sculptures. Williams uses Adobe Illustrator to design before committing to the lengthy process of beading these small but intricate objects by hand. By relying on technology, Williams is expanding the possibility of a customary craft. The work also recognizes the history of the craft and how contact with colonizers has altered it. Before contact, quillwork was prevalent in many Indigenous cultures.

Quilled objects were crafted to serve a host of functions, both secular and sacred. During colonization, European trade introduced the use of seed beads, which proved more convenient than quills and gradually replaced them. The exhibition, Spiritual Transformation, bridges the work of our ancestors with Western (post-)modern concepts of art in an attempt to preserve the old while accepting the new.

CENTER. INSURGENCE/

RESURGENCE brings together 29 emerging-to-established Indigenous artists including BRUNO CANADIEN (Dene). In his work, Canadien examines the relationship of Indigenous peoples and Canadians to the land. In Hustle & Bustle/Downriver House,

Bruno Canadien (Dene), Hustle & Bustle/Downriver House, 2016, acrylic, graphite, colored pencil, found images, flagging tape, satin ribbon on panel, 108 × 96 in. Image courtesy of the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

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MIKE PATTEN

Canadien uses ribbonwork, textiles, and floral designs as a reference for love of family and country in Dene culture. The colorful, circular painting is celebrating the survival of the Dene Nation and their continued connection to their land while questioning the health of this relationship today.

BELOW. Every year, BMO Financial Group invites the

deans and instructors of undergraduate-level certificate, diploma, or degree programs in studio art across Canada to select from their graduating classes three students whose ability and imagination place them first among their peers.

After the deliberation of the committee, winners are awarded between $7,500 and $15,000, and their work is presented as part of BMO 1st Art! 2017, held at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery from November 16 to December 16, 2017. This year, the exhibition celebrates the creativity of Métis artist AUDIE MURRAY. In her work, Murray questions the position of beadwork in current times and ponders what beads represent outside of the customary context. She beads common objects that evoke qualities of comfort and intimacy such as a pair of socks, a condom, a tea bag, and a menstrual cup in a manner that disrupts these attributes, thus questioning what forms power, wealth, and importance take, where these concepts reside, and who controls them.

Audie Murray (Métis), Pair of Socks, 2017, glass beads, thread, cotton socks, 21 × in.

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BENJAMIN NICHOLAS & BELIZE’S GARIFUNA PAINTERS

By Peter Szok, PhD

I

N MADE IN BELIZE: Thirty-Three Contemporary Artists, Yasser Musa describes the Garifuna painter Benjamin Nicholas (1930–2012) as representative of a generation of intellectuals who came to age in the mid-20th century and whose literary and artistic endeavors served the cause of independence.1 Belize at the time was a British colony (British Honduras) and was following the familiar, postwar pattern of rising labor strikes and mobilization against continued European governance.

In 1964 the British agreed to home rule while retaining their control over security and foreign affairs. As Belizeans continued on their journey toward the realization of full, self-government, which was finally achieved in 1981, the emerging nation needed novelists, songwriters, poets, sculptors, and architects to build and shape its collective identity.

Many Belizeans were naturally anxious to embrace a more autonomous sense of their country, especially after a long-delayed recognition of Belize’s African and Indigenous heritages. If the British had taken control of the country and had benefited most from its economic activities, others had suffered the hard labor and deprivations, and now these laborers descendants formed the mass of the population. What was essential was a public face reflective of these realities, not what critic Andrew Steinhauer has described as the racist, colonial standards with their “deeply

Man Ray (1890–1976), Xxx (Marcel Duchamp), 1921, gelatin silver print, in public domain.

Pen Cayetano (Garifuna), Fishermen, 2017, oil on canvas. Cayetano Collection. Photo: Ingrid Cayetano. All images courtesy of the author.

ingrained negative conditioning related to African physical characteristics.”2 Nicholas responded to this historical context with a prolonged, productive outburst. From the 1970s until his recent death, he created epic representations of Belize’s Garifuna people—bold paintings that hang proudly in government buildings, in Belize City banks, hotels, and museums, and which offer a Black-Indigenous conception of the nation. Today, long after the achievement of independence, Nicholas’s influence is still evident

and stretches well beyond the national borders, partly as a result of Garifuna history. Indeed Nicholas’s journey and that of other Garifuna painters has always been part of global history.

A Circuitous Past THE GARINAGU (plural for Garifuna) are the progeny of West African, Kalinago (a Carib people), and Arawak peoples who first coalesced in the mid-17th century, when Native Americans in the southern Caribbean assimilated the survivors of

1. Yasser Musa, introduction to Made in Belize: Thirty-Three Contemporary Artists, by Maggie Turner (Belize City: Factory Books, 2007), 6–7.

2. Andrew Steinhauer, “The Countless Gifts of Gabb,” in George Gabb, the Gifted Giant, ed. Andrew Steinhauer and Yasser Musa (Belize City: Factory Books, 2004), 2.

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Benjamin Nicholas (Garifuna), Elejo Beni’s Arrival in Dangriga, 1993, oil on canvas, collections of the Radisson Fort George Hotel, Belize City.

Photo: Peter Szok.

shipwrecked slave boats. Marronage— that is, escaping slavery and evading recapture—and Indigenous raids on European settlements also contributed to the growth of the population. The Garinagu resided on Saint Vincent, a volcanic island in the Lesser Antilles, which the French and the British alternatingly attempted to colonize and to open to plantation agriculture.

The Garinagu contested the European intrusions until their final defeat by the British in the 1790s. In 1796 and 1797, the British solidified their position by implementing a policy of ethnic cleansing. They forcibly removed several thousand Garinagu to Roatán, an island forty miles from the northern coast of Honduras. While roughly half of the transplants died in the brutal journey, the survivors began a long-term process of migrations, which would stretch the ethnicity across the shores of Central America and eventually to places as distant as New York and Los Angeles.3 The Garinagu are a “nation across borders,” as Joseph Palacio has suggested in an

important collection of essays, and as is reflected in the web of taxi boat services that shuttle passengers along the coast of Central America.4 Today there are modest Garifuna settlements in Nicaragua and Guatemala, as well as a remarkable revitalization movement in Saint Vincent. Honduras boasts the largest population, whose exact size is a question of debate, with estimates reaching as high as 300,000.5 The Garinagu arrived in Belize in the early 19th century, and according to the 2010 census, number about 20,000 individuals, or roughly six percent of the country’s citizenry.6 Despite their position as a minority with a history of poverty and social marginalization, the Garinagu have exercised a measure of influence, particularly as teachers in the Belizean educational system.

Interestingly, Nicholas briefly considered this profession before abandoning it to pursue his life as a painter.7 Dangriga is the ethnic group’s most important community, and is located in the central part of the country. The administrative head of the

southern Stann Creek District, the port town has some 10,000 residents and was the longtime home of Benjamin Nicholas.8 Guidebooks commonly refer to Dangriga as “Belize’s cultural capital.” This designation, in no small part, reflects Nicholas’s single-minded and long-term efforts to tie the Garinagu to the national identity, while navigating the realities of the country’s dependent, global position. In some ways, Nicholas was a product of this broader context, of foreign tourism and of the growing networks that connected him and others to international markets. Indeed the “outsider’s gaze” and search for the exotic played a critical role in his development.

Growth of an Artist NICHOLAS GREW UP in the southern Toledo District, about one hundred miles from Belize City, in what remains one of the country’s more remote areas. Nicholas moved intermittently between the Garifuna villages of Boyo Creek, Barranco, and

3. Mark Anderson, Black and Indigenous: Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 3.

4. Joseph O. Palacio, The Garifuna: A Nation Across Borders; Essays in Social Anthropology (Benque Viejo del Carmen, Belize: Cubola Productions, 2005).

5. Rebecca J. Williams, “Background Report on the Garifuna of Honduras,” InnovATE (June 2014), PDF. 6. “Belize Population and Housing Census 2010: Country Report,” Statistical Institute of Belize, 2013, page 20, PDF. 7. The biographical information for this essay comes from Benjamin Nicholas and Aondofe Joe Iyo, Benjamin Nicholas: Painter from Boyo Creek (Belize City: Image Factory, 2003); Mario Velázquez, ed., Stories Color Life: Honouring Benjamin Nicholas (Belize City: Embassy of Mexico, Atlantic Bank, NICH, 2012); and Turner, Made in Belize, 52–53.

8. “Population and Housing,” The Statistical Institute of Belize, 2017, web.

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Benjamin Nicholas (Garifuna), Outdoor Living Is a Common Thing, oil on canvas, collection of the Radisson Fort George Hotel, Belize City.

Photo: Peter Szok.

Punta Gorda. His biographer, Aondofe Joe Iyo, describes his childhood as idyllic, with many hours canoing on the nearby river and doodling pictures of papaya leaves, fruits, and the town elders. Barranco’s town elders apparently did not appreciate this attention and requested that Nicholas’s grandfather put a stop to the activity.

Nicholas was a talented but indifferent student, who excelled nevertheless in school competitions and who shunned sports and other conventional boy activities in favor of a rebellious passion for drawing. At a young age, he began to help his father in fashioning signs for local businesses. His father was a farmer and had spent extended periods employed by the United Fruit Company in Guatemala and Honduras.

Sign making was another of his activities. Nicholas later followed his father’s example and lived for several years in Guatemala. In Guatemala, Nicholas apparently worked as a commercial artist in the nearby banana port of Puerto Barrios. He decorated bars and similar establishments and designed advertisements for political campaigns. Iyo emphasizes the later connections that Nicholas made with foreign visitors, whose enthusiasm for his ingenuity gradually drove him into more exclusive areas of art.

In the mid-20th century, foreign capital began developing Belize’s tourist industry, eventually attracting thousands of annual visitors to experience and gawk at the country’s apparent differences. These economic

9. Iyo, Benjamin Nicholas: Painter from Boyo Creek, 5.

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and cultural changes occurred just as the art world demonstrated a renewed interest in folk or vernacular art in areas outside of Europe. Galleries and museums began to feature “folk artists” while academics and a plethora of amateur investigators continued longstanding efforts to collect and study their materials. Revealingly, Nicholas’s first sale went to “a white tourist in Dangriga,” who had seen Nicholas’s imaginings on the walls of a nightclub and who purchased a depiction of a woman preparing cassava.9 Cassava bread is a staple of the Garifuna diet.

Nicholas began to paint pieces for the growing number of foreigners, who increasingly found themselves poking about his hometown. Occasionally, he displayed them in Dangriga’s open-air

market. Nicholas painted on canvas, but also on wood, and sometimes even on conch and turtle shells. US and European customers became some of Nicholas’s most loyal patrons and helped to fuel his nationalist-Garifuna impulses, encouraged more broadly by the drive for independence, by the period’s wider anticolonial and civil rights struggles, and by what his nephew described as his uncle’s sense of indignation.10 Nicholas was outraged by the injustices that Garinagu had suffered at the hands of British authorities and by the subordinate position they continued to hold in Belizean society. He hoped that his paintings would help foster a nation less shaped by the norms of European colonialism and more by a conscious respect for all people. In this regard, a crucial moment came in the early 1970s.

Between 1970 and 1973, at the height of the Black Power and the American Indian rights movements, Nicholas studied in the United States at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He traveled with the backing of a US collector, who had visited Dangriga on numerous occasions and who had been providing Nicholas with modest assistance. In interviews, Nicholas recognized the benefits of the experience and how it shaped his subsequent development.

He insisted that the classes provided him with new techniques, allowing him to produce more realistic images and to move beyond what he called his earlier caricatures. The Minnesota sojourn also impacted his identity and the choices he would make regarding content. Nicholas was impressed with Minneapolis’ museums and universities, particularly with their large ethnographic collections, but he was also understandably frustrated that he found no materials about the Garinagu. Their apparent absence from US cultural and educational institutions seemed to mirror the situation in his own country. Colonialism had so sidelined the Garinagu from the

Pen Cayetano (Garifuna), Elihatina Gaye (Cassava Baker), 2015, oil on canvas, Cayetano Collection.

Photo: Ingrid Cayetano.

public imagination that they faced the risk of losing their history. Following his return from the United States, Nicholas attempted to address this predicament by becoming what Iyo defines as a “custodian of his people.”11 He exploited the nationalist spirit of the period, as well as foreigners’ fascination with the Garinagu, to create a gigantic body of work that placed his people at the center of Belizean consciousness.

Garifuna Art OVER THE FOLLOWING DECADES, Nicholas documented Garifuna everyday life: festivals, religion, and medicinal practices, and

depicted these things in a fashion that emphasized the centrality of community. Nicholas’s scenes are crowded with human figures whose sinuous limbs stretch toward one another and convey a strong sense of solidarity and interaction. For Nicholas, the village was a place of unity, a place where people came together to prepare their meals, fish, and to cultivate the land. Few lonely moments appear in the artist’s visions. Ironically, Nicholas confessed that he was a solitary individual, and while he enjoyed meeting friends at Champion’s Bar in Dangriga, he also jealously guarded his privacy to pursue his intellectual activities. A self-portrait

10. Arnold Nicholas, foreword to Iyo, Benjamin Nicholas: Painter from Boyo Creek.

11. Iyo, Benjamin Nicholas: Painter from Boyo Creek, 7.

12. Velásquez, ed., Stories Color Life, cover.

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depicts him alone in his studio, barefoot and staring pensively at his easel.12 Despite his experience in Minnesota, Nicholas painted in a style suggestive of a non-academic artist.

This was perhaps in reaction to what he perceived as the inclinations of his clients. Outsiders had long come to Central America, seeking out what they saw as primitive or authentic culture, particularly in relationship to Indigenous people. Nicholas indulged them with bright, alluring colors and with intricacies that rarely faded into the background. There is little shading in Nicholas’s brushwork. Instead, details appear everywhere in the vibrant paintings, pulling the viewer further and further into the image.

Favorite topics included Garifuna drumming, customary meals, and healing ceremonies. Nicholas was also fascinated with the Caribbean. He frequently found inspiration in the routine patterns of the village beach.

In addition, Nicholas dug deeply into history. He retraced the Garifuna links to Africa and Saint Vincent, and spotlighted the group’s long presence in Central America. One of his most famous representations is a portrayal of the Garifuna landing in Belize.13 This event appears in the artist’s visualization as nothing less epic than the Israelites’ arrival to the Promised Land.

For Nicholas, Garifuna history was a heroic journey, which deserved to be part of the Belizean story.

Nicholas was fundamentally a nationalist artist. By highlighting Belize’s Garifuna people, he helped to shape the country’s identity and to move it beyond colonial and Eurocentric narratives, even as he played occasionally to foreign stereotypes. It is notable that while Europeans and US citizens were his earliest and most important supporters, he quickly won over domestic audiences, such that his paintings now grace the walls of many businesses and form part of the National Collection of

Shelton Arana (Garifuna), Jankunu Dancers, 2015, watercolor on paper. Photo: Peter Szok.

Art. Belize’s Atlantic Bank owns nearly four dozen pieces, many of which are proudly displayed in its central offices.14

New Paths & Challenges IRONICALLY, just as Nicholas was receiving this well-deserved recognition for his years of toil in relative obscurity, Belize’s art community was moving in another direction, fast approaching the threshold of a major transformation. This change was part of a generational shift and the consequence of both national and international circumstances. In 1981, Belize achieved its independence from Great Britain, finally becoming a fully sovereign country. In the meantime, the Cold War reached an apex in Latin America and ran its bloody course over the following decade. Simultaneously, the state-centered, populist model of development that dominated the region since the 1930s deteriorated rapidly in the midst of a major financial crisis and US pressure to adopt neoliberal economic policies. The transition from

13. Velásquez, ed., Stories Color Life, 34.

14. Sandra Bedran, introduction to Velásquez, ed., Stories Color Life, 6.

15. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, no. 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18.

16. Musa, introduction to Turner, Made in Belize, 7.

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populism to neoliberalism culminated with the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and with political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s triumphant suggestions that perhaps we had reached the “end of history.”15 Democracy and capitalism, asserted the influential theorist, were likely to face no further, long-term challenges. In the short term, a flurry of free-trade agreements, downsizing, deregulation, and cuts to social programs seemed to confirm Fukuyama’s assertions.

What followed in the 1990s is a period that Yaser Musa associates with cable television, migration, cruise ships, and the rise of the Internet.16 In the context of a more entrepreneurial and globalized society, the perspectives of artists naturally pivoted away from nationalism and other linear narratives toward more ambiguous, open-ended reflections on their confusing and fragmented circumstances. The postmodern influences encouraged them to reject longstanding approaches, training, dogmas, and classifications, and to seek out the incorporation of manifold perspectives. These included

the disparate views of their audiences.

Audiences, which had formerly stood silently on the sidelines, now found themselves enveloped into multidisciplinary performances whose sequences and meanings depended precisely on their reactions. In Belize, Musa’s own Image Factory was at the forefront of this movement, with a plethora of playful installations that jumbled and discarded old canons and idols and which overshadowed, in some ways, Nicholas’s earlier achievements.

Indeed, Nicholas’s straightforward reflections on the Garifuna people can seem almost quaint next to the Image Factory’s initiatives.

Nevertheless, Musa would be the first person to admit the enduring significance of Nicholas’s contributions.

In fact, Musa said as much in the eulogy that he delivered at Nicholas’s funeral, standing before a gigantic mural that the deceased artist had painted in Dangriga’s Sacred Heart Church.17 Revealingly, the mural depicts Jesus Christ ministering to a group of brown-skinned disciples, whose resemblance to the Garifuna people suggests their direct connection to the spiritual, independent of any European mediators. Such interpretations assure that Nicholas remains a touchstone in contemporary Belize, particularly as questions of ethnicity and colonialism continue to be so important in the country.

Independence and neoliberalism did not resolve these issues, and in some ways, only heightened their magnitude. Across Latin America, the neoliberal state ostensibly insisted on multiculturalism while embracing an economic program that was favorable to foreign and national capitalists and detrimental to many Native Americans and African descendants. These groups faced an onslaught of hydroelectric projects, mines, pipelines, and tourist developments, such as the ones that have monopolized the beachfront property in many of southern Belize’s Garifuna villages.

In response, Native Americans and people of African descent

Ludwig Palacio (Garifuna), We Art Gallery Sign. Photo: Peter Szok.

mobilized politically across the Americas. They protested the injustices and hypocrisy of neoliberalism while exploiting the opportunities that it provided to project their identities.

Black and Indigenous culture became more visible with the likes of Belize’s Andy Palacio (1960–2008). Palacio utilized rising transnational networks and the growing popularity of “world music” to introduce Garifuna rhythms to appreciative foreign audiences, while often expressing the deep apprehensions many felt regarding globalization.

Wátina, Palacio’s 2007 album, resonated deeply by Belize’s Garinagu, such that one can still regularly hear its cadences blasted boisterously out of overworked car stereos.

Nicholas’s Legacy IN VISUAL CULTURE, too, there has been continued interest in what might be described as Nicholas’s legacy, his concern for and focus on Garifuna ethnicity and its position in national and international contexts. In Punta Gorda, Garifuna veterinarian Ludwig Palacio, DVM (b. 1963), runs the eccentric We Art Gallery. The gallery, attached to Palacio’s winding residence,

combines timeworn, ethnographic pieces with more recent creations

by Garifuna artists (as well as art by Maya, Creole, and East Indian artists).

A particularly treasured part of the collection is a painting by Roatán’s Marcos Tulio Guillén, which features the countenance of a dignified matriarch watching over her village’s fortunes. While Palacio also paints, his true passion is sculpture. He chisels weighty and abstract carvings from fallen trees gathered from around Punta Gorda.

Across the Amatique Bay, in nearby Livingston, Guatemala, Blanca Franzua (b. 1958) paints in her downtown music club. Franzua is a drummer, choreographer, and community activist who surrounds herself in murals portraying the Garinagu.

Her deceased colleague Luis Arturo Sánchez (1959–2008) left behind a comparable trove of paintings, some of which also hang in local businesses.

Other Garifuna artists are active in many parts of Central America, as well as in the distant points of the diaspora. In Belize, however, the movement is strongest in Nicholas’s adopted hometown of Dangriga.

There, Nicholas’s legacy survives most

17. Yasser Musa, “Eulogy for Artist Benjamin Nicholas,” The Belize Times, May 6, 2012.

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TOP: Blanca Franzua (Garifuna), Club Ubafu Mural. Photo: Peter Szok.

BOTTOM: Isiah Nicholas (Garifuna), Bar Mural, Dangriga, Belize. Photo: Peter Szok.

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evidently in an active cadre of painters who have devoted themselves to chronicling Garifuna life.

Nicholas’s son Isiah (b. 1970) is an important contributor who produces familiar representations of Garifuna culture. Relying on intense, undiluted colors, which are less realistic than those of his father, he depicts things such as the Jankunu, or Christmas-season festivals, fishermen, and lively punta dances. Isiah’s interests are not inflexible, and occasionally he turns to more whimsical topics such as pigtailed girls playing hopscotch or quirky scenes from the United States where he has lived during intermittent periods. A recent work features Tony Vera, a well-known street performer in Venice Beach, California. Vera lifts a seated woman into the air, holding her aloft with nothing but his mouth. Most paintings boast a raggedly engaging text that offers a short explanation of the content. In addition, Isiah is a prolific sign maker, whose eye-catching portraits of Garifuna people dot numerous businesses in southern Belize.

In many homes and public institutions, one can also find the works of Shelton Arana (b. 1973). Like Isiah, Arana is a working-class painter who cannot afford to market himself exclusively in galleries. Instead, his pen-outlined watercolors circulate more humbly, finding their way, through the efforts of the artist, into low-income eateries, residences, and offices. Beautiful examples hang in the corners of Punta Gorda’s tidy library. Arana produces his

Pen Cayetano (Garifuna), Afternoon in Hopkins, 2017, oil on canvas. Cayetano Collection. Photo: Ingrid Cayetano.

images quickly and sells them for too little. Still, none of this detracts from a hard-earned artistic vision: a capacity to capture the emotionality of fleeting moments in cloudy and sometimes luminous colors, with the focus squarely on Garifuna culture. Foreign visitors occasionally find themselves so charmed that they snap up the paintings by the dozen. Directing herself to a similar clientele, Elizabeth Bernardez (b. 1958) is one of Dangriga’s few female painters. Her bright and often lighthearted representations explore the complexities of gender relations.

On one canvas, she illustrates the sometimes tense discussions that can occur between Garifuna couples when, like their car-driving counterparts in urban areas, they debate where to park/land their boats. Doll and quilt maker Mercy Sabal (b. 1955) is another of Dangriga’s important artists. She examines many of the same themes in elaborately sewn patches of cloth.

Benjamin Nicholas’s influence is apparent in many parts of Dangriga: in its textiles, its streets signs, its murals, and in its identity as Belize’s “cultural capital.” But perhaps it has bloomed

no more obviously than in the life of Pen Cayetano (b. 1954). Cayetano is an internationally recognized artist whose paintings form part of Belize’s National Collection. In interviews, Cayetano has related the importance that Nicholas had on his early formation. As a young boy, Cayetano frequented Nicholas’s studio and received some of his first encouragement from the Garifuna master.18 Cayetano later lived for extended periods in Germany, an experience which seems to have encouraged a deep love for landscapes and for less figurative representations. Nevertheless, even as his artwork has become more complex and abstract, it has remained obviously tied to Nicholas’s example, especially in terms of its subject matter.

Cayetano specializes in scenes of Garifuna history and everyday life, evoking the works of his mentor.

Today, Cayetano and his Germanborn wife, Ingrid, live in Dangriga and have opened a gallery and a lively cultural center that provides a good introduction to Garifuna culture.

Studio Gallery Cayetano features exhibitions on folklore and cuisine, as well as Pen’s abundant paintings.

Ingrid is also an accomplished artist, and her elaborate textiles decorate the bright colonial building. Music and drumming are another part of the gallery, with regular workshops and performances by the Cayetano family.

In addition to his accomplishments as a painter, Pen Cayetano is a pioneering musician. Beginning in the early 1980s, he paved the way for the likes of Andy Palacio by fusing Garifuna instruments and rhythms with rock-and-roll influences and electric guitars. The hybrid genre came to be known as punta rock.

Garinagu Crafts and Art Gallery, also in Dangriga, presents other experiences and perspectives. Owner Francis Swaso is a longtime collector, who has traveled the Caribbean coast of Central America and who enthusiastically shares his knowledge of the region.

Garifuna painting is a growing movement increasingly outlined by galleries and publications. Despite living in many different countries, Garifuna artists express their shared cultural perspectives through color-saturated, genre paintings, and younger artists are building upon this rich history.

18. Interview with Pen Cayetano in Stories Color Life: Honouring Benjamin Nicholas, by Velásquez, 12–13. For information on Cayetano, see also Anne Walmsley, Stanley Greaves, and Christopher Cozier, Art in the Caribbean: An Introduction (London: New Beacon Books, 2010), 48–49.

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INDIGENEITY AT DOCUMENTA 14 Founded to overcome the cultural repression of fascism, documenta has expanded to showcase contemporary art from all continents. In its 14th quinquennial edition, did curators do justice to the Indigenous art of the world?

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

I

NDIGENEITY FIGURED PROMINENTLY throughout the 14th iteration of documenta, one of the world’s largest and most prestigious contemporary art events centered in Kassel, Germany, that takes place every five years. Indeed, revered curator Gerald McMaster (Plains Cree-Blackfoot) concluded that “a new critical dialogue emerged among Indigenous artists that sometimes superseded the curatorial logic of the [exhibition].”1 This assessment is cause for celebration, even in the midst of depressing national news and the unfolding financial scandal surrounding documenta itself.

Arnold Bode organized the inaugural documenta in 1955 to expose and celebrate avant-garde culture that had been censored and deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis.

Bode oversaw documenta four times before his death in 1977. Since then a different curator has been appointed each time. This year’s artistic director, Adam Szymczyk, led a team of 17 curators who coordinated exhibitions in two cities that involved eleven institutions in Kassel in addition to 47

sites in Athens, Greece. documenta’s €37 million (US$40 million) budget was split evenly between the two cities.

Athens documenta ran April 8 to July 16; Kassel exhibitions were open June 10 to September 17. More than 220 artists were selected for inclusion.

As a point of comparison, this year’s Venice Biennale showcased 120 artists.

The global range of the exhibition has expanded, especially since documenta 11, which was overseen by NigerianAmerican curator Okwui Enwezor.

Dismantling Eurocentrism is, of course, a long, slow process. In an attempt to describe his curatorial approach and offer audiences a framework, Szymczyk stated that he hopes “we might begin to learn how to see the world again in an unprejudiced way, unlearning and abandoning the predominant cultural conditioning that, silently or explicitly, presupposes the supremacy of the West, its institutions and culture, over the ‘barbarian’ and supposedly untrustworthy, unable, unenlightened, ever-to-be subjugated ‘rest.’ ” In the introduction of The documenta 14 Reader, he continues, “By bringing Indigenous practices

OPPOSITE: Rebecca Belmore (Ojibwe), Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside), 2017, marble, 55 × 78 3/4 × 78 3/4 in., fabricated by the studio of Vangelis Ilias, being installed at the Weinberg Terraces in Kassel, Germany. The sculpture was previously on display in Athens, Greece. Photo: Swen Pförtner, dpa/Alamy Live News.

and techniques of knowledge from all over the world … we aim to question this very supremacist, white and male, nationalist, colonialist way of being and thinking that continues to construct and dominate the world order.”2 What are these Indigenous curatorial practices, and were they implemented at documenta 14? If Eurocentric methods have established hierarchies and faux binaries, such as West vs. East or traditional vs. contemporary, and constructed a curator-as-genius star system, the Indigenous approach has acknowledged the collaborative work of curating, sought out multiple and diverse voices for project contribution, and has complicated art-historical categories—i.e., by juxtaposing Tłingit and German art, creating conversations, and recognizing global culture networks. documenta 14 succeeded on these points.3 Though challenging hegemonic worldviews is par for the course at documenta, artists representing historically oppressed groups often succeed at this most potently. One of the most striking installations

1. Gerald McMaster, “Under Indigenous Eyes,” Art in America (October 2017): 64.

2. Adam Szymczyk, “Iterability and Otherness: Learning and Working from Athens” in The documenta 14 Reader, ed. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2017), 29–30.

3. Many thanks to Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish), documenta curator, who identified participating Indigenous artists for this article.

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Máret Ánne Sara, detail of Pile o’ Sápmi, 2017, reindeer skulls, metal wire, porcelain necklace made from reindeer-bone ash, two photographic light boxes, two vitrines containing the Reindeer Husbandry Act and excerpts of the trials of Jovsset Ante Iversen Sara versus the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food, 118 1/8 × 117 1/8 in. Both photos: Andrea L. Ferber.

Britta Marakatt-Labba, detail of Historja, 2003–07, embroidery, print, appliqué, wool on linen.

was Máret Ánne Sara’s Pile o’ Sápmi (Pile of Bones, 2017), a response to the Norwegian government’s forced reduction of reindeer herds, which are central to Sámi culture. Sara hung together approximately0 reindeer skulls to create a beautifully macabre curtain that both honors them as victims and

serves as a visual remnant of violence and ongoing colonial control. Each skull is marred with a bullet hole.

Behind this the artist displayed the legal documents outlining two court cases brought against the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food by her brother, Jovsset Ante Iversen Sara.

Though the government cites conservation reasons such as environmental destruction and eradication of the highly contagious chronic wasting disease, Indigenous reindeer herders argue the killings infringe on their rights and livelihood. Sara explains, “A myth of overstocking reindeer and the ecological destruction they cause to the arctic tundra has become an official, political truth.”4 The legal cases seek to protect reindeer and Sámi human and property rights, with the second trial notably “among the first to test the articles in the United Nations’ declaration regarding Indigenous peoples in the court of law.”5 Jovsset Ante Iversen Sara won both cases, but they are now being appealed in the Norwegian Supreme Court.

A short distance from this work, also in the documenta Halle, Máret Ánne Sara displayed two photographs in light boxes: on the left, a blackand-white photo from the 1870s documenting a hill of bison skulls; on the right, a color photo showing a pile of reindeer heads with a Norwegian flag at the top, created in protest outside the courthouse when the first trial was underway. The juxtaposition creates a visual continuum from colonial efforts in North America to eradicate bison—killed primarily to control and devastate Indigenous populations—to the present dispute in Norway.

It took Britta Marakatt-Labba four years to complete her epic Historja (2003–07), an embroidered narrative more than 77 feet long, bookended by Sámi cosmology. Unlike the Bayeux Embroidery, this work is not sequential and relays a broad history with reference to some specific events, such as the 1852 Kautokeino Rebellion. The long white linen represents a panorama of the snowy, subarctic landscape, occasionally contrasted against deep-blue night skies.

Hundreds of tiny figures in heavy coats and characteristically Sámi hats build sleds, herd reindeer, ski, and look at the stars next to intricately sewn trees.

The violence and detrimental effects of colonialism are depicted

4. Máret Ánne Sara in documenta 14: Daybook, ed. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk, (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 2017), n.p.

5. documenta 14 wall text.

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Gordon Hookey, MURRILAND!, 2017, oil on linen and mural, 78 3/4 × 393 3/4 in. Photo: Andrea L. Ferber, PhD.

much more dramatically by Waanyi artist Gordon Hookey from Australia in his sprawling painting and mural Murriland! (2017). Hookey leaves nothing to the imagination. The artist intends to educate his audience with graphic illustrations of impaled colonists, shackled Aboriginal people, and didactic texts. History unfolds from left to right, starting with imagery of the land and the Dreaming, then marking moments in the 16th and 18th centuries when Europeans arrived.

An image of four skeletons robed in black planting a British flag, clearly recalling the iconic photograph taken in Iwo Jima, is captioned, “1770.

Cook took the position of possessing ‘Possession Island.’ Thus; taking possession of MURRILAND and the whole continent of ABORIGINELAND by ethnocentrically pricking a stick with a rag on it into the sand of a lil’

island, miles from anywhere.” In the top right corner Hookey painted white men, representing those complicit in the colonial system—military officers, clergy, judges, politicians, as well as effigies of a jester and death—sitting around a large table with an abacus, a symbol of Enlightenment thinking.

It is easy to connect this image of Eurocentric, patriarchal imperialism to so many similar meetings that determined the fate of colonized peoples around the globe (Yinka Shonibare realized this concept as a sculpture in 2003 with Scramble for Africa). In the center of Hookey’s canvas a painted scroll reads, “ ‘Here Ye! Here Ye! Hither.

Yonder, Hither Yon!’ The present day, so called ‘anglo australians,’ occupying Murrilands: Aboriginelands, are the direct beneficiaries, from the horrific, heinous, barbaric, brutal atrocities committed by their forebearers [sic],

on my Ancestors. They have our lands, great wealth, absolute power and control over our lives. We have f—all.

Sweet didally f—en squat.”

While continued anger at historical trauma is absolutely warranted, Māori artist Nathan Pohio presented a different perspective with his billboard-like work, Raise the anchor, unfurl the sails, set course to the centre of an ever setting sun! (2015). For this work, the artist reproduced a 1905 photograph of eleven Ngāi Tahu tribal leaders in full regalia and on horseback, ceremonially welcoming five colonial representatives of Great Britain who sit in a car. Noting the integrity of the Native people, the label for this work states that this show of respect took place even though the two groups were in a land dispute at the time. In Athens, this photo hung inside the National Museum of Contemporary Art, where, WINTER 2017/18 | 31

Abel Rodríguez (Nonuya), Main Trees in the Forest, 2011, ink on paper, 39 1/3 x 27 1/2 in. Courtesy of the artist and the Tropenbos International Colombia’s Archive, Bogotá.

Abel Rodríguez (Nonuya), installation view of selected drawings from the series Ciclo anual en las altas terrazas de la selva tropical (Annual Cycle of the Flooded Rainforest), ca. 2009, ink, graphite, and watercolor on paper, various dimensions. Photo: Andrea L. Ferber, PhD.

on April 7, 2017, the artist performed an excerpt of the welcoming ceremony for visitors. In Kassel, the photograph was displayed in a park-like setting, formally framed within a large semicircle of concrete columns.

Paintings by Abel Rodríguez (Nonuya) were displayed in several locations, including the Naturkundemuseum im Ottoneum

(Ottoneum Natural History Museum), where the green habitat of a resident axolotl provided a complimentary environment. Here, twelve watercolors from the series Annual Cycle of the Flooded Rainforest (2009) depicted a maloca (longhouse) surrounded by a variety of trees specific to the Amazon.

A short distance away inside the Palais Bellevue, more works in this series

6. A large photograph of Belmore’s work was hung in the Palais Bellevue, Kassel.

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were featured alongside handmade fish traps, woven from some of the plants depicted. Notably, Rodríguez does not consider himself an artist and produces the catalogue-like illustrations as a means to share his knowledge of medicinal plants, which he learned from his uncle. Captioned in both Muinane and Spanish, works like these constitute what Szymczyk described as Indigenous “techniques of knowledge.”

The information Rodríguez values differs from that of outside scientists, and they have learned from him.

Two stunning weavings by Marilou Schultz (Diné), Replica of a Chip (1994) and Untitled (2008), made a strong collocation with French modernist painter Yves Laloy (1920– 1999), who was reportedly influenced

by Navajo sandpainting. Schultz works in many styles, though these do seem anomalies in their striking asymmetry and absence of diagonals.

Intel commissioned the first weaving, and its composition, like a computer board, is built from a complex network of lines and rectangles. A table nearby displayed ephemera about the Fairchild Semiconductor plant controversy; however, the artist was apparently unaware of this history, and viewers are left to draw their own conclusions.

Ojibwe interdisciplinary artist Rebecca Belmore’s hand-carved marble tent, Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside, 2017), is site-specific in Athens, on a hill facing the Parthenon.6 The conversation between these structures, representing what are sometimes positioned as opposing cultures, is the crux of this work, and when the piece moved to Kassel at the close of the Athens show, much meaning was lost. At first glance, viewers may see an ivory-colored tent draped with a cloth—a temporary, movable shelter— but when one realizes this work is carved from marble, echoing the permanent architecture from ancient Greece, the message is clear: we cohabit this space, historically and forever.

Twenty-one masks from the series Undersea Kingdom (2016-17) by Beau

CENTER: Marilou Schultz (Diné), Untitled, 2008, wool, 98 1/2 × 47 1/4 in. RIGHT: Marilou Schultz (Diné), Replica of a Chip, 1994, wool mounted on wood, 47 1/2 × 57 1/2 × 7 4/5 in. Photo: Andrea L. Ferber, PhD.

Dick (Kwakwaka’wakw, 1955–2017) collectively represent the narrative of Yola’kwame. Primarily carved from red cedar, most of the masks are painted with formline designs embellished with horsehair, feathers, copper pieces, cloth, and/or faux fur. The world-renowned carver and activist only agreed to participate in documenta if his masks were performed. Though Dick walked on March 27, his apprentices Alan Hunt (Kwaguł-Tłingit) and Cole Speck (Kwakwaka’wakw) honored his memory during the Kassel opening on June 10. LaTiesha Fazakas, Dick’s coordinator for the exhibition, explained that the narrative of Yola’kwame is owned by Chief Robert Joseph. It is not published and is not intended for public consumption; however, Speck was given the rights to share it orally within the context of documenta.

Hunt offered a blessing chant. Many of the Atlakim (1990–2012) masks displayed at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens will be ceremonially burned at the artist’s memorial potlatch.7 Postcommodity (Raven Chacon [Navajo], Cristóbal Martínez [Chicano], and Kade L. Twist [Cherokee Nation]) also created experiential works in Kassel and Athens.

Blind/Curtain (2017) could be easily missed just inside the Neue Galerie.

Like most visitors, I was considering Otobong Nkanga’s Carved to Flow (2017), an interactive installation offering black soap for handwashing, when I noticed the very faint sound of static. A wall label indicated the otherwise invisible work: pink noise, which, like the group’s well-known Repellent Fence (2015), drew attention to borders.

Blind/Curtain was described as “a human dilemma that contains secrets, provides access, creates the illusion of privacy (prevents access), provokes surveillance, and embodies love.”8 Many other works in documenta addressed issues facing Native communities and/or the effects of colonization.

Susan Hiller’s Lost and Found (2016), a thirty-minute video commissioned by the Pérez Art Museum Miami, played at Grimmwelt Kassel. This important and moving work presents recordings of 23 extinct or endangered languages, among them Blackfoot, Comanche, Sauk, Salish (classified as “severely endangered”), Lakota (“vulnerable”), and Lenape/Delaware and Wichita (“dormant”).9 While the end product is incredibly powerful, one curious aspect of its production is why the artist had to rely on some older historical

7. LaTiesha Fazakas, correspondence with the author, August 16, 2017.

8. documenta 14 wall text.

9. Unami, a Lenape/Delaware language, is classified as “reawakening” by SIL International. See: Gary F. Simons and Charles D. Fennig, ed., “Unami,” Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 20th ed., 2017, web. As John Haworth reports, UNESCO considers about half of the world’s 6,000 spoken languages endangered. Their online Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger archives about 2,500 of these. See: John Haworth, “Reading, Writing and Preserving: Native Languages Sustain Native Communities,” National Museum of the American Indian 18, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 26.

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Beau Dick (Kwakwaka’wakw, 1955–2017), Undersea Kingdom , 2016–17, cedar, bark, acrylic, rubber, cloth, faux fur, faux feathers, horsehair, quartz, abalone, hide, mica, copper, wire, plastic action figure, installation view. Photo: Andrea L. Ferber, PhD.

recordings rather than gathering fresh narratives or songs from living speakers, however few there may be.

Certainly many readers of this magazine could have provided sound clips of these Indigenous languages.

Preah Kunlong (The Way of the Spirit, 2017) is a 25-minute, threechannel video by Cambodian artist Khvay Samnang, who worked with the Indigenous Chong people in the Areng Valley “who intuit the borders of their land through a fundamentally embodied experience based on ancestral and oral histories.”10 Khvay portrayed himself as eleven different

spiritual animals that inhabit the forest by donning elegant wicker headdresses and gracefully imitating their behaviors in slow, choreographed movements in the landscape. While the work appears aesthetically and conceptually strong, the artist did not respond to questions about Chong engagement in its creation or how the people benefit from the work’s production. Unfortunately, this refusal to answer leaves open the possibility of exploitation.

Antonio Vega Macotela (Mexican) previously created miniature replicas of mills used by Spanish colonists in Latin America to produce silver coins.

10. documenta 14 wall text.

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According to the artist’s research, there were mills in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia. For documenta, the latter was reproduced full scale. Vega Macotela explains, “Usually such a machine would be propelled by donkeys or oxen, but due to the grim conditions [at this location, about 4,000 meters above sea level], animals died easily and were deemed too expensive and difficult to replace. The solution was to use [Indigenous] slaves as well, since they were used to living in said context.

Despite their endurance it is said that many people died in the production of Spaniard silver coins. These ghoul

Antonio Vega Macotela, The Mill of Blood, 2017, wood, steel, glass, 5 × 8 × 8 in., installed in the Westpavillon (Orangerie), Kassel. Photo: Marco Stetter.

engines consumed physical labor as fuel, literally transforming human lives into coins.”11 Visitors were invited to push Mill of Blood at scheduled times during documenta, producing physical “teios” which in turn creates a digital “cryptoteios.” At the end of the exhibition, the mill will be destroyed. Buyers of the crypto-teios become investors in Macotela’s ongoing project to critique capital and exploitative economies.

The documenta team produced several publications: The documenta 14 Reader is a collection of theoretical texts, historical documents, and images that address broad themes such as (de) colonialism and identity. Szymczyk’s opening essay is particularly poignant.

Candice Hopkins’s (Carcross/Tagish) essay “The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier” relays the Northwest Coast gold rush from a Tłingit perspective and calls for a reclamation to “unleash the potential in other economic systems, in Indigenous social contracts, in Native understandings of debt, wealth, reciprocity, and healing.”12 Daybook offers entries on each artist; however, the images do not often correspond to the works exhibited. Ultimately if one is most interested in learning about the specific artworks in documenta, the comprehensive website is the best source.

At least one critic derided Indigenous representation at documenta, revealing a stunningly limited

(and unfortunately mainstream) view when she wrote “Jimmie Durham was already dismantling [colonial] exoticism at documenta 9 in 1992 …”13 It is astounding to think that anyone would frame the decolonial project as passé, and/or that any single artist could sufficiently speak on behalf of the myriad Indigenous people groups of the world. All the aforementioned Indigenous artists and thousands more, acknowledged and yet-to-be acknowledged, will only continue to have a stronger voice and a larger presence in the art world and beyond. Even the staunchest critics cannot ignore powerful art.

11. Antonio Vega Macotela, “About,” The Mill of Blood, 2017, web.

12. Candice Hopkins, The documenta 14 Reader, ed. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2017), 248–49.

13. Susanne von Falkenhausen, “Get Real,” Frieze (June 7, 2017), web.

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JACINTO & THE ORACULAR WORLD OF WIXÁRIKA BEADWORK It doesn’t matter if my clothes are torn and my hat is old; if my heart is good and pure then I will be converted into the mirror reflection of the gods.

—Wixárika proverb, author unknown

By Kevin Simpson

A

S I WALKED OUT of my apartment one afternoon in Puerto Vallarta, someone caught my attention: an elderly Native man walking off the bus in full regalia. From what he was wearing, I could tell he was a Wixárika,1 but he didn’t have the superfine, embroidered suit or any feathers in his hat like the kids wore. There was something about this particular man, however—an allure or an aura that made me stop and do a double take. He carried a huge, handwoven bag. I noticed he had a wooden bow and deerskin quiver. I thought to myself, Wow, if he’s carrying a deerskin quiver in his hand, I’ve got to see what’s in the bag.

The fellow began walking away at a brisk pace—a man on a mission.

Before I knew what I was doing, I was chasing after him. It took me a couple blocks to catch up. Out of breath, I tried to explain in my broken Spanish that although I didn’t know who he was and he obviously didn’t know who I was, he looked like he had a story to tell. I didn’t want to offend him, but if he was interested I would make dinner and buy all the art that he had brought to town if he told me his story.

With no real plans or place to stay, my new friend, Jacinto López Ramírez, decided to take me up on my offer.

That night, and for many nights after, we would hang out until the wee hours of the morning with Jacinto telling me stories of how Kayumarie, the blue deer, taught the Wixáritari how to make offerings or what it was like to partake in the 300-mile pilgrimage to Wirikuta.2 I ended up working with Jacinto for almost ten years, marketing the bead art and yarn paintings his family made up in the Sierra Madre. The highlights of our friendship, besides listening to his stories, were our trips up into the Sierra to visit his family. We would fly to San Andrés Cohamiata, the ancient

ceremonial center, at least twice a year.

Sometimes we would participate in ceremonies or rituals and other times we were busy planting corn or attending the school graduation of one of his grandkids.

I fondly remember one of our very first trips. We took the midnight bus from Puerto Vallarta to Ixtlán del Río.

There was a small airport there, and the night watchman was kind enough to open the hangar so we could sleep on the floor. At daybreak, they woke us up, weighed our equipment, and threw us in a small, four-seat Cessna.

The flight was spectacular, taking off from the foothills of the Sierra Madre Mountains where we passed the hydroelectric dam, Aguamilpa. It felt as if the ground fell out; rolling hills turned into jagged peaks as we entered the Wixárika territory. When we arrived in San Andrés, we went straight to the harvest ceremony at one of Jacinto’s relatives’ ranches. It wasn’t until this past spring, 19 years later, that Jacinto’s son Florencio told me that the Traditional Government at the time wanted to throw me in jail for not signing in upon arrival. Apparently there was a heated discussion, but it was decided

1. Wixárika (pl. Wixáritari) is what Huichol people call themselves.

2. Wirikuta is where the Wixáritari collect the peyote. It is part of the desert below the old mining town Real de Catorce, San Luis Potosí.

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ABOVE: The López Ramírez family in front of their home. Jacinto is at the far left. To his right are his granddaughter, Myra, and grandson, Arturo. Behind them in the doorway is their mother Mikaela. Author Kevin Simpson is at the far right. All images courtesy of the author unless otherwise noted.

OPPOSITE: Jacinto López Ramírez (Wixárika, d. 2007), spiritual healer, beadwork artist, and yarn painter.

that because I was with Jacinto, I would be spared the embarrassment of being locked up in a Wixárika jail for a day.

Whenever we were hiking in the Sierra, Jacinto would point to a part on his body and then to a plant and say “if this hurts, eat this flower” or “dig down a couple inches and you’ll find a bulb that will cure stomach ailments.” His knowledge of plant medicine was exceptional. Unfortunately, it was dealing with Western norms that Jacinto struggled with at times. I asked him once if he wanted me to teach him the alphabet.

I naively thought that it might help his mobility if he could read a street sign or knew what bus to take. Jacinto stared blankly at me, he scratched his head, and motioned with his hand for me to come closer. As I leaned in, Jacinto

berated me by saying, “I am a shaman, I can talk to God. Why do you think he would want me to write him?” and stormed off. It was this type of interaction that reminded me I was dealing with someone who was very special and just didn’t think like me.

Jacinto was born on the 18th of December, 1931, to Patricio López Ramírez and Venacia Ramírez López in San José, annexo San Andrés Cohamiata in the municipality of Mezquitic, Jalisco, Mexico. At the time, outsiders knew very little about the Wixáritari.

One of the first accounts about them was written in 1900 by Norwegian explorer Carl Lumholtz: “In spite of the missionary work of the past, to-day there is no priest among them, the churches are in ruins, and the Huichols

are living in the same state of barbarism as when Cortés first put foot on Mexican soil.”3 In 1934 when Robert M. Zingg made his historic trek into the Huichol Sierra, he was only the fourth outsider to study the tribe. Sponsored by the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the University of Chicago, Zingg spent just over a year in Tuxpan de Bolaños, Jalisco. Using Lumholtz’s work as a reference in 1938, Zingg wrote, “Huichol art has changed so little in the last forty years that my collection of this material for the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, is practically identical with Lumholtz’s material.”4 At age twenty, Jacinto married fifteen-year-old Angelita Carrillo from Mesa del Venado. They lived for a few

3. Carl Lumholtz, Symbolism of the Huichol Indians, Vol. 3, Part 1, Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History (CA: University of California, 1907), 5.

4. Robert M. Zingg, Report of the Mr. and Mrs. Henry Pfeiffer Expedition for Huichol Ethnography: The Huichols, Primitive Artists (Millwood, NY: Kraus Reprint Company, 1977), 420.

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Jacinto López Ramírez creating a yarn painting.

years near the ceremonial center of San José before moving to another ranch in the state of Durango, Mexico. Jacinto always liked living in Durango; he said it was the solitude. But the three-day hike to San Andrés for tribal meetings was overbearing, so they moved back to Jalisco in 1954 and settled between San José and San Andrés on a ranch they called Rosas de San Juan.

In 1968 a council of elders known as the Kawiteros chose Jacinto to be governor of San Andrés Cohamiata.

Jacinto successfully petitioned the federal government of Mexico to build a road into the Sierra to connect San

Andrés with the rest of the world. An airstrip existed that the government used, but it was far too expensive for the Wixáritari to fly out of the Sierra. Before the road was completed in the early 1970s, it was a five-day hike out of the Sierra to the first mestizo town. Jacinto was extraordinarily proud of the new road, although he never had a driver’s license or a truck himself. He liked to say that everyone driving up into the Sierra owed him a ride into town.

Jacinto’s influence on the art that the Huichol created began in 1968 when he was on a pilgrimage to Mexico

5. Florencio López Ramírez, Huichol Traditional Government document, September 4, 2000.

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City. According to Jacinto’s family, he was with Daniel Castro and Antonio Bautista leaving offerings in the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe where la Virgen appeared to San Juan Diego in the 16th century. Representatives from the Museum of Anthropology approached them and asked if they would recreate their offerings for them.

Although lowland Wixáritari had already begun to sell yarn paintings in places like the Basílica de Zapopan, the Wixáritari in the highlands of San Andrés hadn’t yet made the distinction between their ceremonial offerings and their “art.” One of the interesting things about the artifacts that the Huichol use in ritual today is that they are identical to the pieces collected at the turn of the century. Jacinto and I would spend hours studying the artifacts that Lumholtz and Zingg collected, and there wasn’t a single piece in either collection that he couldn’t explain in great detail or recreate himself.

Jacinto spent most of his life serving his community. His abilities as a singing shaman and healer were legendary. One of the most interesting documents I have ever read was written by his son when he was the municipal delegate back in 2000. It explains that “Jacinto was someone whose profession was shamanism, and thanks to the power of God, he could sing in relation to God and at the same time could retire bad spirits and has had favorable results.”5 Jacinto was the cantador or singing shaman in the temple of San José for five years, the cantador in the temple of Cohamiata for ten years, and for five years he served as cantador in the temple of Las Guayabas. He has been alguacil or sheriff of San Andrés, as well as juez or judge, just to mention two other important positions he held in the community besides governor.

In the mid-1970s, Jacinto befriended Peter Collings, a foreigner who was living in San Andrés. Jacinto was the cantador for the temple in Las Guayabas at the time and invited Peter to go with him to Wirikuta on the pilgrimage for peyote. It was a grueling,

three-hundred-mile trek by foot that took forty days to get there and back.

New fences and private property were making the original route the Wixáritari walked almost impossible. Recognizing how difficult it becoming to make the pilgrimage by foot, Peter thought that if Jacinto and his family would fill their gourd bowls and other offerings with beads, he could take them to town to sell them. The original idea was to use the money they made from selling their art to pay for the bus to take them on the pilgrimage; the ceremonies would continue. This was undoubtedly the beginning of what has become known as Huichol bead art.6 At the beginning, Peter was instrumental not only in getting the Wixáritari the supply of beads they needed to create their art but also in the marketing of it in the city. They worked well together for a few years. But one day, Alejandro Carrillo, one of Jacinto’s son-in-laws, physically followed Peter to Puerto Vallarta. Alejandro figured out where Peter sold their art and eventually cut Peter out of the picture by marketing their art directly to the galleries.

In the late 1970s Jacinto was one of the most photographed Wixáritari, thanks to Peter Collings. One day we were looking at the book, Art of the Huichol,7 and Jacinto pointed to a photo and said jokingly, “Man, that is one ugly Wixárika.” I didn’t get the joke at first but then it hit me: it was him; he was in the book, and more than once.

Several pages feature photos of Jacinto from the pilgrimage he did with Peter.

He also appears on the cover of Huichol Symbolism by Ramón Mata Torres, is in several photos in The Huichol of Mexico and even more in the follow-up book, The Huichol of Mexico: The Shaman by Peter Collings.

In early November of 2007 I got a phone call from Jacinto’s son, Florencio.

His father had passed away and he wanted me to come to the funeral that weekend. I was in shock; I had just participated in the harvest ceremony with Jacinto and his family a few weeks before. Completely numb, I dropped

TOP: Morelia Lopez Carrillo (Wixárika), Armadillo, 2017, beads, beeswax, papier-mâché, 20 in. L. BOTTOM: Morelia Lopez Carrillo (Wixárika), Eagle Bowl, 2017, 11° Czech glass beads, beeswax, hand-carved mahogany bowl 12 ½ in. diameter.

everything and headed to the airport the next day to fly up to San Andrés to be with his family. When they were about to start the funeral, Florencio came over and asked me to get my video camera out. “Video camera?” I asked, “I didn’t bring my video camera.” I had no idea they wanted me to film the

funeral or take photos of them with the dearly departed. We obviously had very different cultural norms when it came to funerals. Florencio was not impressed.

“You filmed my father’s ceremonies, why wouldn’t you film his funeral?” he denounced, shaking his head as he walked away.

6. Susana Eger Valadez was studying for her master’s degree in San Andrés Cohamiata and worked with Jacinto’s family during the same period.

7. Lowell John Bean and Kathleen Berrin, Art of the Huichol Indians (San Francisco, CA: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1978).

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Florencio Lopez Carrillo (Wixárika), Jaguar, 2016, glass beads, beeswax, wooden base, 5 × 4 in.

Jacinto and Angelita had six daughters and one son. Maria, Cecelia, Leonarda, Ramona, Yolanda, Teresa, and Florencio have all taken on important roles in their community over the last ten years. Some have served in the Wixárika Traditional Government while others have taken on leadership roles as singing shaman and healers.

The art also seems to be in their blood. Teresa, Jacinto’s youngest daughter, was a fantastic artist but more importantly recognized that she could use her artistic talent to help her get ahead in life. For years she worked with us at Peyote People, beading figures for the funds she needed to get through college. Today she works as a nurse in the government clinics in the Sierra and is an inspiration to other Wixárika women. Teresa is currently mentoring Morelia Lopez, Florencio’s daughter, who is studying nutrition at the university in Tepic, Nayarit.

Luis de la Cruz López, the son of Ramona and Guadalupe, was recently commissioned by the WBC to bead a belt that was given as a gift to the winner of the Julio César Chávez Jr. vs. Canelo

Álvarez boxing match on May 5, 2017.

The popularity of that project led him to collaborate on another belt for the match between Álvarez and Gennady Golovkin on September 16, 2017.

Another grandson, Octaviano Villa López, is working on a very exciting project together with Dutch artist Vincent Mock. Vincent acquired a 20,000-year-old deer fossil, Megaloceros giganteus, commonly known as Irish elk.

It is considered to be the largest deer that walked the earth, and Octaviano is going to bring it back to life by beading it. The finished piece, almost 12 feet wide, will be shown in Holland and hopefully other parts of Europe to educate people about the plight of Wirikuta, the sacred land where the peyote grows. Sadly, this land is threatened by a Canadian mining company despite being designated as a world heritage site.

In the ten years since Jacinto’s passing, his family’s greatest accomplishment has undoubtedly been the election of his son, Florencio, as governor of San Andrés Cohamiata, fifty years after his father had served as governor. Florencio

was always a bit of a politician. When I first met him almost twenty years ago, he was the municipal delegate to the federal government. From 2004 to 2007, he served as alguacil, or sheriff, one of the most important positions in the Traditional Government as it involves the tribe’s land claims.

Last March Florencio invited me to go on the pilgrimage to Wirikuta with him. I was always saddened by the fact that I never had the opportunity to go with Jacinto, so when Florencio invited me I knew this was my opportunity to catch up with his family and reminisce about my old friend.

On the way to the desert, Florencio and I spoke at great length about what it was like to travel to Wirikuta to get the peyote with his father. The first time he went on the pilgrimage he was very young. It was in the mid-1970s and they made the trek by foot. A lot has changed in the world since then, and even though the Wixáritari do the pilgrimage today via buses and trucks, the spirit is still there.

Just like the accounts Barbara Myerhoff wrote about in her book, Peyote Hunt,8 I was blindfolded before I stepped out of the truck and was led by hand to the first sacred water hole, Tatei Matinieri.

As they took my blindfold off, I was stunned by the sheer beauty of the place.

It was just as Jacinto had described in his stories. This was one of the many stops of the Wixáritari after hiking for weeks from their homes deep in the Sierra. As we went from one sanctuary to another, I was moved as I watched Florencio leave offerings in the very same places that his father had taken him to forty years before. As a shamanic culture, the Huichol believe that to walk in the footsteps of their ancestors is to walk on the enlightened path. For Florencio, it was especially emotional: not only was he following in the footsteps of his father on the pilgrimage to Wirikuta, but as governor of the tribe, he was making the ultimate sacrifice for his community.

8. Barbara G. Myerhoff, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974).

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Luis de la Cruz López, Jacinto’s grandson, in the center, flanked by officials from the World Boxing Council and holding his beaded championship belt, Toluca, Mexico, April 24, 2017. Photo: EFE/Sashenka Gutiérrez. Used with permission.

BELOW, LEFT: Octaviano Villa López, Jacinto’s grandson, posing with a 20,000 year-old Megaloceros giganteus fossil.

BELOW, RIGHT: Octaviano beading the fossilized Irish elk skull.

The next day, we were up at the crack of dawn. Florencio joked, “If my father was here, we would have left before the sunrise. You’re lucky I let you sleep in.” At the gates of Wirikuta, we stopped to thank the gods for guiding us, and then the hunt began. Under the

blazing sun of the desert, we searched in several spots for the sacred peyote plant with no luck. I remembered Jacinto saying that peyote was a funny thing: it only shows itself to those who have a good heart. While we were driving to another spot, the truck ahead of us blew a tire. As we were waiting for the tire to be changed, Florencio suddenly jumped up and pointed, “Look, there it is!” It was everywhere, like the stars in the sky coming out after dusk. We spent several hours carefully cutting the cacti like his father had taught him so it would grow back. “No, those are too small,” or “No, that one is too old—it’s our grandfather, leave it.” These were words of wisdom that I knew Florencio could only have learned from his father.

As we danced into the night, and Jacinto’s granddaughter Mikaela sang her heart out to great Grandfather Fire, I couldn’t help but think of Jacinto. He might be gone but the customs and teachings that he left us are still going strong.

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KESHI FOUNDATION DREAMING BIG FOR THE ARTISTS OF ZUNI PUEBLO

By Staci Golar

O

N A SUNNY SUMMER afternoon, I meet Robin Dunlap at a bakery in downtown Santa Fe. She arrives wearing tall riding boots and apologizes for having to meet me a bit “horsey,” as she calls it. She has just finished riding, something she can do more now that she’s retired from owning Keshi: The Zuni Connection,1 a retail store in Santa Fe that sells Zuni-made art such as jewelry, stone carvings, and pottery. It quickly becomes apparent that retired is a word that doesn’t sum up her current place in life, however, as we start to discuss her newest role as cofounder and board member of the Keshi Foundation and one of its newest endeavors, the Zuni Show. Knowing what is involved in organizing a major event, I don’t have to ask about the time she and other volunteers must be devoting to this.

Just what has inspired her to add more to-do lists to her life, and how has all this new energy spent assisting the artists of Zuni Pueblo come together?

The answers to these questions hearken back to 1981. The Pueblo of Zuni, largest of the 19 Pueblos of New Mexico, situated in the northwest part of the state, decided to split off from being part of the Gallup-McKinley school system and became the Zuni Public School District to ensure their culture and language would be adequately presented in their children’s educational experiences. Dunlap had been teaching sixth grade at the Zuni

Edaakie dance group at the Zuni Show, Santa Fe, 2017. All images courtesy of the Keshi Foundation.

OPPOSITE: Zuni Olla Maidens dance troupe at the Zuni Show, 2017. Photo: Will Keener.

school for about a year when she and a group of teachers and Zuni silversmiths founded the original Keshi, Ltd., as a cooperative to make certain Zuni artists were receiving fair remuneration for their work. Unfortunately, the stories of Native artists being taken advantage of by unscrupulous dealers were (and still are) all too familiar at Zuni. Dunlap recounts just one example where a dealer expressed interest in ordering several of the

same pieces from a Zuni jeweler. The dealer offered a certain amount per item, and then, only after the order was finished, reneged on the original amount, offering much less per piece.

This left the artist with two unattractive options: say okay to less money or keep an unsold bulk order. The cooperative sought to counterbalance this all-toocommon experience. They paid artists fairly for their creations and offered high-quality work to the public at the

1. Keshi is a Zuni-language word that translates to hello or welcome.

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Zuni artists at the 2nd annual Zuni Show. LEFT to RIGHT: Carver Claudia Peina, woodcarver Robert Cachini Jr., and jeweler Amy Wesley.

same time.

After several years of success, Keshi, Ltd., began taking up more and more of the teachers’ and members’ time, so they decided to transition it to a retail business model. In the late 1980s, Dunlap was approached by the Keshi board and became its first owner.

The shop thrived and continued to pay people fairly, promote their work, and educate the buying public about the importance of all of the above. For 22 years, it was located at the Santa Fe Village shopping complex on Don Gaspar Avenue in Santa Fe, and in 2003 it moved to a bigger space on the same street. Shortly thereafter, Bronwyn Fox, Dunlap’s daughter who spent many formative years at Zuni Pueblo while Dunlap taught there, took over as owner. She now serves on the Keshi Foundation board, too.

Although Dunlap has remained involved with the store, even after stepping away as the owner, a few years ago she felt called to help Zuni in a different and more expansive way. She and others wanted to promote Zuni artwork to a larger audience and assist Zuni people with other projects and needs. And so in 2016, after organizing a group of volunteer board members, gathering seed money, and filing the

appropriate paperwork, the Keshi Foundation, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, was born.

The Keshi Foundation aspires to only take on projects that are guided by and clearly benefit the people of Zuni, and they indicate this very explicitly in their mission. The foundation website says, “With seed money from Keshi, Inc., and other donors, the Keshi Foundation Board and Advisory Committee review relevant and culturally appropriate projects and support and channel funds to those causes. With utmost respect for the Zuni People and with their vital input and collaboration, the Keshi Foundation acts as an outreach organization, which receives, considers, and selects individual and group needs in the pueblo and then assists in meeting those needs.”

While many nonprofits exist to serve populations with different ethnic or cultural backgrounds than their founders, board, and/or staff, embracing the voices of those being served, is, unfortunately, not always the norm. It’s refreshing to see it so clearly delineated in the foundation’s guiding statements. Dunlap says, “We don’t want to do a project that isn’t wanted

by Zuni.” She adds, “We have a lot of

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plans. Not a lot of money, yet, but we are blown away by the enthusiasm around it.”

The biggest project to date has been the Zuni Show. Held the same weekend as the world-famous Santa Fe Indian Market in August, it finished its second year as an annual event in August 2017. Dunlap notes that deciding to produce this show evolved organically.

“We’ve always been able to help individuals when someone needs something right away. We’ve often provided emergency funds.” Dunlap says. “We help with funeral expenses, for example, maybe before the tribe can even help.” So when word began to spread that renowned Zuni artists such as Milford Nahohai (a potter who, along with his family, is credited with a revival of Zuni pottery) weren’t being accepted into the Santa Fe Indian Market, the Keshi Foundation decided to step in.

Dunlap explains, “We kept seeing all the good we did at Keshi, and we wanted to fill the need that was happening here. We had done shows at the store for about six artists who hadn’t been able to show at the Indian Market and decided to do something more. We were struggling with the

where, but then the Scottish Rite Temple was suggested.” It sits on the corner of an intersection just blocks away from where the Indian Market is held. “I went to look at it and it all just clicked.”

While the foundation wants the Zuni Show to be a financial boon to artists, Dunlap is clear that the board doesn’t want the show to be focused only on sales. “It’s also about educating and helping and being part of the community. The Zuni Show has panels and films about Zuni culture, for example. We want the show to expose visitors to what the language sounds like—to give a glimpse into the entire community.” The show is not juried because, Dunlap notes, “That is not the Zuni way … We know everyone, and when I worked at the store, I can tell you that 99.9 percent of the work that was brought in was perfect.” In an interesting twist, “the first person that sold out at the first Zuni Show was an artist who didn’t get in to the Indian Market,” Robin recalled. That person was Milford Nahohai.

“My entire family, my nephew Jaycee, my brother Randy—we have worked a lot with Keshi, and they did really good in representing the whole family,” Nahohai says in an interview from his home at the pueblo. Milford created pottery with his family off and on while growing up. He left Zuni to attend college in Fort Lewis, Colorado, where he received a bachelor’s degree in education and then returned to the pueblo, where his mother Josephine was already well known. He and his brother Randy (who has since passed on) began to help her, and they refined their work along the way. The family was invited to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in the mid-1980s, and, on the day the participants in the festival were invited to go to the White House, Milford’s family opted out. They had heard about the pottery collection at the National Museum of Natural History, which includes work taken out of Zuni in the early 1900s, and took a day to visit that collection instead. He says it was a turning point for their

family, and they started to bring back and reinterpret many of the old designs they saw for the first time that day.

Nahohai worked for years as a manager in a tribally owned Zuni gallery, so he knows firsthand the importance of having more selling options for Zuni artists. “I was glad Keshi came out and did the show.

They’ve been good in representing the whole family, and once we didn’t get in to Indian Market, that is when we decided to do this new show.” To Nahohai, the Zuni Show in Santa Fe feels like the Zuni Festival hosted by the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff and the Heard Museum Guild Fair in Phoenix, Arizona, where “they pay more attention to the craftsmen.

It feels like we are dollar signs to the organizations elsewhere.” Nahohai says, “I will support whatever they are planning on doing. The people I know who are part of that foundation … I think that they have a heart for Zuni and that is why they really want to help out.”

Dunlap points out there were fifty percent more (153 total artists) who participated in the 2017 Zuni Show than the inaugural 2016 fair, and nearly 4,000 people attended over the show’s two days. Some artists and visitors complained about the interior portion of the show being so cramped one couldn’t walk around (perhaps this is a good problem to solve, as it means the event was busy), though outdoor booths were also added this year. It is estimated that sales totaled approximately $340,000, and artists took all of that home. One post-show artist survey says, “It was wonderful to sell our items for what they are actually worth.”

Artist exhibitors pay a space rental fee to help cover some of the expenses associated with the show, but all other operational costs are paid for by the foundation via fundraising.

Art collectors can donate Zuni-made work and the foundation will sell it on their site to benefit the organization.

Businesses and individuals also donate time and money toward the show, and the Pueblo of Zuni has lent their support to the foundation and the Zuni Show as well.

“The current Zuni Tribal Council has discussed ways to help our Zuni artisans showcase, market, and sell their exquisite artwork outside of our Zuni Pueblo, and it just so happened that Robin Dunlap contacted us in 2016 announcing the Keshi Foundation’s first project, the Zuni Show!” tribal councilwoman Virginia Chavez shares in an email. “We were thrilled to hear about this new venture and this great opportunity for our Zuni artisans, so we supported it wholeheartedly. The Keshi Foundation has done an outstanding job promoting and supporting the artwork of our Zuni people as well as sharing our Zuni culture with the general public.

It is because of the hard work, commitment, and dedication from Ms. Dunlap and the board of the Keshi Foundation, as well as the participation and enthusiasm of our Zuni artisans

Cheryl Sandy, one of the original founders of the Keshi, Inc., co-op in Santa Fe

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TOP: Robin Dunlap, president of the Keshi Foundation, carrying loaves of bread to the horno.

BOTTOM: Ceramic artist Milford Nahohai (Zuni) and Bronwyn Fox, owner of Keshi: The Zuni Connection.

and the generous contributions from the donors and volunteers, that have made the Zuni Show a success! We truly appreciate this collaborative effort among all parties.”

With two successful Zuni Shows behind them, what’s next? “We have big plans that involve some kind of an educational incubator, that would maybe include a retail/wholesale

shop in Zuni owned and operated by Zunis,” Dunlap says. “Visitors want to buy directly when they visit Zuni, but currently few of the stores at the pueblo are owned or operated by tribal members. And, since we have done this type of work for 36 years with the store, we know how to do it and teach about it. We’d like to teach people about marketing, selling online, promotion,

and branding. We can only help as many people as we can in the store, but we’re hoping we can help Zunis help themselves by asking, what do you need, what do you want, and how can we help?” Dunlap says.

A 2014 study by the University of New Mexico’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research suggests that the arts not only provide primary employment for roughly forty percent of the population at Zuni, but that they “also serve as an important secondary income source for the Zuni community, with roughly seventy percent of survey respondents reporting engaging in arts or crafts production for economic gain, whether it be a primary or secondary income source.”2 Over half of these artists sell to stores at Zuni, making it all that more important to encourage the development of a Zuni-owned outlet for artists and empowering Zunis to sell work themselves rather than relying on outsiders.

“We’d love to be able to keep these jobs at Zuni,” Robin affirms.

Peter Kahn meets me on another sunny afternoon in Santa Fe to talk more about how the foundation would like to do just that. Prior to a career in real estate, Kahn worked as a commercial photographer in New York, served as the executive director of the environmental group Citizens for Clean Air, and had a series of galleries in Maine and New Mexico. He is a photographer and graphic designer and happens to be Robin Dunlap’s husband. He met Robin in 1992 when she needed some photography work, and eventually they got together and later married. He was pulled into the Zuni Pueblo world via this relationship and hasn’t looked back.

Though Kahn isn’t a full board member of the Keshi Foundation, he has devoted countless hours to its work by helping with just about everything, but especially its promotion and graphics. He likes that it always presents a creative challenge. Like Dunlap, Kahn is passionate about the work and

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

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The Zuni Show in full swing, Scottish Rite Temple, Santa Fe, 2017.

mission. He says, “I agree with Noam Chomsky. We need to pay attention to the Indigenous people of the world, because they are trying to tell us how to save the planet.”

He points out that the foundation is “looking for pathways that create sustainable opportunities focusing on Zuni artists, but not exclusive to Zuni artists. For example, the FAA is bringing a new airplane runway to Zuni to use primarily during the fire-fighting season. There will be a microwave tower there. If we can get a relay in the village, we can bring Wi-Fi to the pueblo, and Wi-Fi would allow people to work from home in a variety of ways with the right training.” It’s estimated that there are about 11,000 Zuni tribal members, but 3,000 live away from home in large part due to lack of employment opportunities.

Kahn has been conducting his research and eagerly shares just a few more of the long-term projects the foundation is envisioning. He mentions a nonprofit on the West Coast that has been using technology to train certain at-risk populations to become computer programmers, allowing them

to work from home. “If we can’t bring all Zunis to Cupertino for training, how do we bring dot-com people to Zuni?” He becomes animated when he continues, “Suppose we get to a place where we can open up training modules in Zuni, and we have Wi-Fi, and then our students can partner up and have new people do trainings.

Then we have tech-savvy young people.

Then what other things can be done?”

Kahn questions. “We could go around and compile information and get websites together for every artist in the village. Or, how about a high-tech way to authenticate Zuni jewelry? We could begin to build a database, one piece at a time, with a unique URL address, a unique QR code, and educate the buying public. We could talk to all of the artists and their families and assign provenance to existing pieces.”

Zuni has been victim to illegally copied and fraudulently made jewelry, most infamously by the town in the Philippines that renamed itself Zuni, so that “Made in Zuni” labels could be placed on pieces its factories were creating.3 “Ultimately,” Kahn says, “we are hoping to provide tools to allow

Zunis to stay attached to their community and be able to support themselves.”

When Dunlap ponders it all, from landing in Zuni as a new teacher more than thirty years ago to thinking about bringing tech companies to the pueblo, one of her favorite full-circle moments comes from the first Zuni Show. Cheryl Sandy, a Zuni tribal member who was involved in the co-op when it began and who now volunteers her time at the art market, walked around telling the artists about Keshi’s origins. Many didn’t know the entire story. She’d say, “I’m volunteering here because we believe in you, and we want the best for you, and always have.” One of the artists hugged her and replied, “Keep dreaming for the Zuni People.” With their unwavering dedication to the pueblo, and no shortage of big ideas, it seems like this will be no problem for the Keshi Foundation and all who are involved in its journey.

Learn more about the Keshi Foundation and even more of its plan by visiting thekeshifoundation.org or by following them on Facebook at facebook.com/keshifoundation.

3. James Brookes, “Sales of Indian Crafts Rise and So Do Fakes,” The New York Times (August 2, 1997), web.

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JOANNA BLACKBURN BLACKBURN ART STUDIOS Located at the ARTesian Gallery & Studios Sulphur, Oklahoma

www.jblackburnstudios.com Water Jar, 48 inches, bronze

Karin Walkingstick Cherokee Nation

918.261.5819 walkingstickpottery.com Grandma’s Garden, 2017, hand-coiled and incised clay bowl, 12 × 15 × 15 in.

MELISSA MELERO-Moose contemporary paintings

w w w. m e l i s s a m e l e ro. c o m www.GreatBasinNativeArtists.com A Basket’s Journey, 2017, mixed media on canvas, 30” × 40”

benjamin harjo jr. american indian artist eye of the hunter, 2017, graphite on Arches watercolor paper, 17 1/₂ × 23 inches

benjaminharjojr.com

MICHIF PAINTER

CHRISTI BELCOURT

By Jean Merz-Edwards JME: You devoted this past weekend to painting two water protection murals in Edmonton and Ottawa. Could you share a little more about this project and how it came into being?

My people will sleep for one hundred years, but when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back.

—Louis Riel (Métis, 1844–1885)

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HROUGH ACRYLIC AND STAINED GLASS, through beads and silkscreen, through birchbark and any other medium that might mobilize action, Christi Belcourt creates art as a vehicle for change. Her inspiration grows from a deep respect for the earth combined with a deep respect for the history and cultural knowledge of her people.

Driven by these forces, Belcourt blazes new trails as a herald in the Mother Earth Revolution.

This organic transformation manifests in Belcourt’s visual art through Michif—or Métis1—floral designs as celebrations of beauty in the natural world. Belcourt’s large-scale paintings, inspired by beadwork, hang in permanent collections of places such as the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Gabriel Dumont Institute in Saskatoon. Christi has also authored books about beadwork and Métis ethnobotany, while her accolades and influence range from the Ontario Arts Council Premier’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts (Individual Artist of 2016) to designing a clothing line with the Italian fashion house of Valentino.

Known widely in both Canada and the United States for her role in bringing about the community-driven Walking With Our Sisters to honor murdered or missing Indigenous women, Belcourt exemplifies the power of people collaborating at the grassroots level. Together with artist activists Isaac Murdoch (Serpent River Ojibwe) and Erin Konsmo (Métis-Cree), Belcourt formed Onaman Collective, an “Indigenous grassroots,

Christi Belcourt. All images courtesy of the artist.

land-based art initiative sharing traditional knowledge and language with youth.” The collective got their name from the red ochre paint, onaman, which has been used by Anishinaabeg and Cree people for millennia.2 According to Belcourt, the most important focus for her right now is Nimkii Aazhibikoong (Thunder Mountain Place Where People Live).

Closely allied with the goals of Onaman Collective, Nimkii Aazhibikoong is a space for an intergenerational sharing of Indigenous languages, knowledge, and cultural arts in the bush. This community practices Inaaktagewin, Aboriginal governance, which comes from the land and waters.

What follows here are segments of the illuminating conversation I had with Christi Belcourt during her journey from a community project in Ottawa back to Nimkii Aazhibikoong.

CB: Isaac Murdoch, Erin Konsmo, and I formed the Onaman Collective. We are like-minded individuals who see what is happening to the climate and the earth. We care about the future generation and know that there is a sense of urgency that Indigenous people are feeling all around the world—the need to do something, the need to act.

We see the decline of our languages because the knowledge of the Elders is not being transferred on a full-time basis to apprentices. There is a lot of knowledge from the ancestors that needs to be passed down. There is a real sense of urgency, because we believe the knowledge that is coded in the language and the knowledge our ancestors carried for thousands of years help us walk in balance with Mother Earth. That information can really benefit the world.

So, we try and create ways for youth and elders to come together for land-based activities and art activities and language activities to create space for those things to happen. The Water Is Life murals are part of that. It’s important to build community at the grassroots level and help people understand that their voices are powerful. It’s a matter of coming together because where we have our strength is in unity.

Your artist statement says we are in the “era of water.” Could you expand on how we got to this era, what preceded it, and what comes after?

What is happening is people are realizing water is more precious to them than oil. I think that as the resource

1. Michif commonly refers to the language spoken by Métis communities, but the term is being reclaimed to refer to the people, culture, and language.

2. See: Onaman Collective online at onamancollective.com.

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CHRISTI BELCOURT

The Wisdom of the Universe, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 67 1/3 × 111 inches, collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, purchased with funds donated by Greg Latremoille.

extraction industry and multinational corporations pollute more and more community water sources, communities are becoming awakened and want to act and want to speak out. This is happening more and more around the globe. We are entering this era of people wanting to protect the basic, most fundamental right to clean water.

We are living on a giant ball of water that circles a ball of fire in outer space.

It is the most mysterious and amazing life that we have. We are literally living in spirit. We are here for a reason and, of course, that is all part of the great mystery. We can never fully understand it, but it would be a mistake to think that water or this earth can be commodified. We have this belief system as Indigenous nations completely at odds with the belief systems and the actions of countries that run their government on economy that commodify the earth.

I think that non-Indigenous people are also waking up to this as well. They are not satisfied with their government ruining their water sources like in Flint,

Michigan, and I think water is the most important, pressing thing right now.

Water itself is medicine and the water has spirits in it. We need the oceans, the lakes, and the rivers, which are the blood of Mother Earth. We need water to be clean or we will not survive and we will take everything else with us. There is not one drop of water or one molecule of air that has not cycled the planet. The air that you breathe is what I breathe.

The water you drink is the water I drink. We need to be able to erase these borders and erase this idea of economy ruling the world, and it must be what people move toward in the future.

Your vision for Walking With Our Sisters (featured in FAAM No. 7, Summer 2015) premiered four years ago and is still impacting individuals and communities as it travels through Canada and the United States. Since its opening in 2013, how has the dialogue about missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls changed?

The dialogue was already changing in the sense that families who were

crying out for justice for thirty years were finally starting to be listened to. The media was beginning to stop questioning whether it was true that an epidemic of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls existed in the country, and they started to report on it. It was driven by families and advocates and friends and loved ones of those who are missing or who were murdered. It was driven at the grassroots level for years and ignored until finally it kind of broke through from understanding with the broader public. Walking With Our Sisters (WWOS) came at a time when this was happening. So, WWOS itself didn’t do anything in the sense of creating awareness to the broader public. It was the families and the loved ones themselves and the people on the ground who broke it through to the public, and WWOS came about the same time all that was happening.

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you just let people do what they want to do and encourage them because lots of people have good ideas.

I did a callout for the vamps [upperparts of moccasins to represent the unfinished lives of the missing and murdered women] on Facebook. It is a crowdsourced project, so over the course of the year, all the vamps were coming in. I wanted 600 pairs and I got 1,700. Now we have over 2,000.

They came in from all over. As they arrived, I photographed and posted.

People were getting together in beading circles in community centers, people’s living rooms, and at kitchen tables.

They were doing these beading circles and then they would host these events in their communities, and it became quite a thing. It was in the media about murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, so people were aware of it but feeling really helpless as to how they can show that they care.

The only requirement for this commemoration was not are you an artist, but are you a caring human being. If you are a caring soul, then send in a pair of vamps. That is it. I didn’t say they had to be Indigenous or non-Indigenous.

Speaking of art and activism more broadly, what is the relationship between your art and your activism?

Water Is Life (Pregnant Woman Banner), 2016, digital art based on painting, dimensions variable.

and the loved ones of those women— and having no other goal than to honor them. That was the entire goal. It was less about the art. The art became the vehicle by which the honoring could happen … to say that their lives were valuable.

People say it is my project, but all I did was ask people to help and everybody came and helped. It is a commemoration, but it has a heavy ceremonial component to it, and we are very observant and respectful of the ceremonial protocols in each region or territory that we might go into. WWOS is organized

on the ground in each community, which works with their own Elders to make sure that when they put it on in their community, it is done according to their own protocol. That means what happens is that in each community, we might have thirty people and then we might have twenty people on the national collective. So far, thousands of people have been involved in organizing it. It is not a top-down approach. It is very much a bottom-up approach, and that is what I think makes it work.

When you are trying to organize at the grassroots, you let everybody bring their strengths and their gifts to the table, and

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One of the most interesting things I was asked to do recently was attend a talk on the state of the world sponsored by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) radio in Toronto. They invited four artists of different nationalities to come and speak about world issues. It was the most amazing thing because most artists are driven by something other than art. They are driven to create art that is an expression or a reflection of their thoughts and their beliefs and their passions and their desires. To have a conversation about art for me is one of the most boring things we could ever do.

Let’s have a conversation about what drives people’s art or what is the statement they are making with their art and we’ll have that conversation rather than the art itself. In that sense,

CHRISTI BELCOURT

everything that drives me right now is what the future is going to be like for the coming generations of all species. In 500 years, will there be water to drink? Will these souls, these spirits of the animals and these humans that will be coming to this earth from the stars as spirits, coming to have their own journey in a thousand years—the cycle of life never ends—will they have what we had? Will they have what our ancestors had? Will they have clean water? Will they have fresh air? Will they have freedom? They have a right to this. We need to make sure that we leave a perfectly beautiful earth for them, even better than the way we found it. That is the way to be the most respectful guests we can be, here on this planet.

I look at the prophesies of Indigenous people within our nations. The prophesies all speak to a time when there’s going to be a lot of suffering and not everybody is going to make it through.

That’s a very scary thought because it is within our lifetime or if not ours, then our grandchildren’s for sure. Every single prophecy and Elder and spiritual person has been saying the same thing: that we are at this time now. I worry— what are we going to do now?

It’s more important to be for something than to be against something. This is a driving philosophy for me. You have to act—physically act—and you have to do something that is for something. There’s a certain energy, an unstoppable spirit, that is really beautiful to be around when it has to do with being for something—to be for the language, be for the children of the next generation and act in that way, and don’t put your energy into those things you are against.

Of course, we must at some point say, “No, we do not want that pipeline,” and “No, you cannot drill here,” and “No, you cannot pollute these waters.”

Someone might say, “You are acting against the pipeline,” but the thing we put our energy into is what we are for.

We are for water. We are for the future generations. So, we have to focus on what we are for.

Mother Earth Revolution (Indigenous Mother Earth), 2017, digital art, dimensions variable.

How has growing up with a dad like Tony Belcourt,3 who has spent his life as an activist for Métis rights, affected who you are and what you do?

My dad is an amazing leader in the sense that he is incredibly generous.

He dearly loves our people, and that is always reflected in the way he acts with people. He is so respectful to all the Elders. I just have so many good things to say about my dad. The other thing is that he is relentless. Younger people have a hard time keeping up with him.

He just works all the time. That has really influenced me.

Another thing I saw growing up: he was involved in the organization. He started one. Other people started some at the same time in the ’60s and early ’70s, and these organizations began out of nothing. They did things like register as nonprofit corporations and take money to do programs and to organize themselves. So they started to take money

from government. Now these organizations are very powerful. They have many employees. They sit down across from government. They are the ones that are the go-to for governments when they need to ask questions. But, the problem is that in the end, when I look at these organizations, I see that nothing has changed for our people.

These organizations have become institutions, and they keep themselves afloat very well, but in the end, they betray our people because they do not listen to the grassroots. They listen to themselves.

They make decisions based on what they want and what they believe, and they do not listen to the grassroots. That’s not to say they don’t care. It’s just that when you are set up as a nonprofit corporation, you’ve got a board. That’s not the way our people do things in terms of traditional governance. So, this is what I observed, and it didn’t matter how hard you worked or how good you did things or how relentless you were or how

3. Tony Belcourt, a leading activist for the rights of Métis, served as the founding president of the Métis Nation of Ontario in 1993.

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you envision after the revolution, and how long do you think it’s going to take us to get there?

Offerings and Prayers for Genebek Ziibiing, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 inches.

generous you were or how much you gave to your people in those institutionalized situations, you can’t accomplish as much working inside of them as you can accomplish working outside of them.

My dad gave me an impeccable sense of integrity, honesty, and a strong work ethic. His experience with the disappointment of not having our land back in the end made me determined not to go down that route. We need something different now. Those organizations were only meant to be temporary anyway. They weren’t meant to be our government.

When I was a kid, climate might have been changing, but it wasn’t widely known and we weren’t aware of it. You

could pretty much swim everywhere.

You could drink the water almost everywhere, and in just 30 or 40 short years it’s changed. The planet is different, and it’s time to act. We can’t do things the same way we have for the past 40 years. I believe Indigenous people are going lead the way to the water revolution. I believe we already are.

Last year you gave a keynote address, which you said will be your last.

Titled, “The Revolution Has Begun,” you say, “All good stories end in a revolution. … We need a revolution for Mother Earth, for our languages, for our future generations.” What do

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Indigenous people have never been selfish. The original treaties, the original agreements were to share the land, not to give it all away to the newcomers. No one is expecting non-Indigenous people to go anywhere in a sense to move back to Europe. That is unrealistic. They are Canadians and they are Americans now.

But why is it that we cannot have our own territories and our own governance and our own laws? As a people, just as Americans have a right to their own laws, and Canadians have a right to their own laws, we as Indigenous nations have a right to our own territories and our own laws. That means being able to set up our own forms of education that might not look anything like the institutionalized educational systems. It means that we have a right to do whatever we want in our territories and govern ourselves. We have a right to do that as free human beings from the Creator of this earth. I do not know how long it’s going to take to get there, but that’s what we need. It begins with land, because they coveted the land, they exploited the land, and they pushed us off and tried to kill us to get the land, and so it will always come back to land. We need to have our territory, and we need to have good portions of our territories to govern ourselves.

I don’t know how we are going to get there, but when we do get there, then what I want to see is a restoration of everything that was lost in the last 150, 200, 400 years: a restoration of our languages, a restoration of our ceremonial ways, a restoration of our governance structures. And it doesn’t mean going back. It means going forward, because that way is the way to walk in balance with Mother Earth and that way doesn’t destroy anything.

CHRISTIBELCOURT.COM

CHRISTI BELCOURT

Untitled, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 40 × 30 inches, commissioned by Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm (Nawash Chippewa).

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MI’KMAQ INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTIST

JORDAN BENNETT

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

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VISUAL ARTIST FROM STEPHENVILLE CROSSING, KTAQAMKUK (Newfoundland), Jordan Bennett examines historical and popular culture, new media, customary expressions, politics, and Mi’kmaq cultural practices through his artwork.

Bennett recently completed a master of fine arts degree from the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, with special attention to Mi’kmaq and Beothuk art, visual culture, and histories. During the process of earning this degree, Bennett made concerted attempts to revisit sites of Beothuk and Mi’kmaq settlement across the Canadian province of Ktaqamkuk by both physical and aesthetic means. What he found was that most of the historical documentation pertaining to the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq peoples he encountered was mired with conventional colonial-settler narratives, which tended to obscure the objective truth surrounding his ancestry and cultural heritage. In response, Bennett’s work in recent years has dually scrutinized these and other colonial narratives while contributing to the unfolding histories of Beothuk and Mi’kmaq peoples in Ktaqamkuk.

Bennett’s 2016 thesis exhibition, Mniku, which translates to island in Mi’kmaw, featured several hand-carved items in addition to paintings, drawings, and interactive sound installations. Here, each work fundamentally represented the island of Ktaqamkuk and appropriated known Mi’kmaq and Beothuk iconography and design to deconstruct entrenched European notions of “time and space.”1 In effect, Mniku sought to shift conventional narratives surrounding Mi’kmaq and Beothuk peoples by translating various historical-visual materials into present-day artistic discourse, thus reanimating them with new life.

The history of the Beothuk people of Ktaqamkuk remains an underdeveloped area of study and is often misrepresented in the historical record, particularly because of its encounters with colonial-settler source material. That being said, some believe that Beothuk communities may have violently clashed with European settlers as a result of encroachment on traditional territory, or died from exposure to new diseases and illnesses brought from Europe. Bennett’s research bluntly states that the Beothuk were looked upon with despondency, even pity, by European settlers who recognized the myriad ways that led to the suffering of their communities. He is also quick to note how, as often occurs, other Indigenous communities were blamed, in this case the

Jordan Bennett. Photo: Candace Kennedy. All images courtesy of the artist.

Mi’kmaq, who were said to have hunted down the Beothuk, yet no credible evidence for this exists today.2 Nevertheless, today, Indigenous peoples of Newfoundland are wholly involved in reclaiming colonial narratives to make better sense of the historical record of their people.

Bennett’s work has been shown extensively across Canada and internationally, in venues such as the Museum of Art and Design, New York; the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe; the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; l’Institut du monde arabe, Paris; and the Vancouver Art Gallery. In 2015, Bennett was one of two artists to represent Newfoundland and Labrador at the prestigious Galleria Ca’ Rezzonico during the Venice Biennale in Italy. He has also been long-listed twice for Canada’s Sobey Art Award, in 2015 and 2016. Moreover, the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council presented Bennett with its Artist of the Year award.

I had the pleasure of corresponding with Bennett this past fall.

MRS: Thank you for being open to this interview, Jordan.

I’d like to begin with the first time I ever saw your work in the flesh, so to speak. I was writing an exhibition review of Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop, and Aboriginal Culture at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto for Blouin Artinfo Canada. It was certainly one of the

1. Jordan Bennett, “Ktaqamkuk: Remembering and Re-Imagining our Relations,” (master’s thesis, Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2008).

2. Ibid.

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JORDAN BENNETT

Turning Tables, 2010, sound installation, walnut, oak, spruce, electronics, 8 × 36 × 16 in. Photo: Mark Bennett

strongest shows I’ve ever seen. During my walkabout, I stumbled upon Turning Tables, a 2010 work comprised of turntables made from different woods with a needle that plays tree rings through speakers, in addition to a recording of you attempting to speak Mi’kmaq words and phrases. It was a clear standout among exceptional works.

I was struck by how you translated the material of another being—in this case, a tree—into soundwaves using a contemporary instrument.

What is your aesthetic philosophy—what guides your work?

JB: Thank you for taking the time to interview me, Matthew.

My work is guided by multiple influences depending on the work, its purpose, audience, and location it is being shown.

A starting point for much of my work is to find a common thread between my own visual aesthetics and the message I want to visualize through my work. Most often it is rooted in home, Ktaqamkuk, and our strong visual culture as Mi’kmaq people. My art forms span multiple materials, but they always stem from home.

From these early works to today, how has your work changed and evolved? I ask because it appears that you’ve begun to incorporate current design elements with

established, more conventional sculptural techniques.

These appear less influenced by pop culture and more informed by Mi’kmaq and Beothuk cultural knowledge.

For example, in the exhibition Mniku at the Vernon Public Art Gallery, you carved and painted works in yellow cedar that represent the island of Newfoundland. As I understand it, these works take Mi’kmaq and Beothuk visual material and accelerate them into the present day.

I would say that it has grown and evolved to include a wider arrangement of visual forms and aesthetics. The work you mention in the exhibition Mniku—although it does look quite different than my earlier sculptural work, it’s still strongly rooted in my research and my overall practice that aims to find new ways to understand my familial and ancestral history as a Mi’kmaw person. Pop culture is still a strong influence for me. I draw inspiration from it daily and try to blur the lines between my pop culture influences and influences that date back hundreds, if not thousands of years through our visual culture. I have new works that I have just completed and others that I am working on that blur the lines even more between my past work and my more current painting-based works.

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Mawpile’n (Tie it Together), 2016, acrylic on aluminum panel.

you are engaging with Mi’kmaq and Beothuk histories.

Particularly, how are you conducting research and translating it into the stuff of aesthetics?

My work is deeply rooted in research, but also, I spend a great deal of time and energy engaging in hands-on practices, learning art forms, analyzing color theory, and studying mark-making techniques in historical objects. I’ve been very honored to have had opportunities to visit cultural objects from Ktaqamkuk in various museums across Canada, and to spend valuable time with them. Getting the time to visit these objects from home gave me a chance to study the similarities and differences between Mi’kmaq and Beothuk visual culture, research that I am building on with each and every piece that I create.

Playing with shapes, designs, and motifs from each respective nation is allowing me to see the untold and sometimes forgotten shared histories of the Mi’kmaq and our relations with the Beothuk.

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It’s interesting to hear artists speak about their relationship with the specific localities and regions where they grew up. I assume this is an important element in anyone’s identity, something that they carry with them regardless of how near or far they exist to that seminal place. Do you ever consider the ways in which growing up in Stephenville Crossing [a coastal town of 1,950] plays into your work? Newfoundland is clearly an influence, but what is it specifically that calls you?

Where I grew up influences much of my work. I loved growing up there. It was a rough town and is still known that way today. I had a great childhood, and in turn I feel that the experiences I had there are what fuel a lot of my current work. Growing up in a community where going out ice fishing, moose hunting, and being on the land is just a normal thing leads you to take it for granted as a universal experience. As an artist, I like to explore those relationships with where I grew up, by creating, transforming, and bringing those experiences into an art gallery for others to engage.

JORDAN BENNETT

Ice Fishing, 2014, multicomponent installation: multichannel video, parabolic speakers with audio, sculptural installation, 3D animation. Produced with the National Film Board of Canada, imagineNATIVE Film, and Media Arts Festival. Contributors: Jennifer Moss, Dana Dansearu, Dru Kennedy, Mark Neary; Amy Malbeuf, Vincent McCurley, and G. Bennett. Photo: Dru Kennedy.

In sticking with this theme of identity, of community, and of place, I’d like to ask you, who is your audience? Perhaps, who is your ideal audience?

I think my audience is anyone that wants to take the time to visit with the work. When I create a new work, I always have in mind our youth, the future generations of Mi’kmaq, our future artists. I hope that the work I am creating and the research that I am doing will make it just a little bit easier for them to create work without needing to justify that the visual culture that they are using is ours. I really enjoy working with youth and giving them the opportunity to explore new possibilities, new ways of seeing the world, and in turn helping them in some small way see more open doors for their future.

As a curator and educator, the question of community (and particularly youth engagement) is always at the forefront of my work. As an artist who engages with various forms and tropes of popular culture—hip hop, social media, DJ-ing, and so on, what are the ways in which art and visual culture can inspire youth and get them interested in the world?

Art can have such an amazing impact on youth, and through tools like hip hop, popular culture, and social media, it can be an outlet, an entry point to really grab their attention.

Being able to engage in artistic dialogue by relating to something you are seeing, to see yourself in the artwork, can be the first step to truly feeling like you belong or that you can share your own voice through these tools. Art has always been a means of asserting our identities in the world as Indigenous people; it allows us to reach back into time and communicate with our ancestors.

What’s the best advice you ever received?

Wow, that’s a big one. I would have to say that it’s to treat everyone the way that you wish to be treated. To walk lightly on the earth in order to move forward in a good way.

As someone who is currently curating exhibitions of contemporary art produced by Indigenous artists from Canada, it would be wonderful to have you say a few words on where you think Indigenous art in Canada is heading. Where do you perceive its trajectory into the next 100 or 500 years?

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Artifact Bags (Giant Tiger), 2013, pyrography on moose hide, sinew, 10 × 12 × 6 in. Photo: Tony Mamer. Giant Tiger is a Canadian chain discount store.

You’re throwing down some good ones here, Matthew!

Indigenous art will continue to grow and allow us to grow.

Our people will keep making work that positions us as living, growing, and ever-changing cultures, not something to be viewed as stagnant. We will keep breaking down the stereotypes that have been placed upon our people for the past centuries, and we will play our part in changing the world through creating, learning, and knowing that art, language, and [cultural practices] are inseparable from one another.

Our art will continue to lead the way, our people’s names will be common household names, and our messages through art will resonate far past 500 years. I have huge hopes for the future of Indigenous art in Canada and its impact.

Artists, like other professions, don’t exist in a vacuum.

The impact of that which comes from outside cannot be ignored. It’s a question that’s not asked enough: Who are your key influences? What music or books or artists are informing your life and work right now?

My key influence can vary from day to day. I am constantly drawing inspiration from other artists like Lori Blondeau, Rebecca Belmore, Adrian Stimson, Amy Malbeuf, Dean Hunt, Jerry Evans, Amanda Strong, and so many more. I recently finished my MFA at University of British Columbia, Okanagan, where I was introduced to countless inspirational 60 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

texts and amazing Indigenous writers. Over the past year or so, I have tried my hardest to just visit with others and not get stuck into text too much. Music is a constant influence.

I listen to music that spans from hip hop to powwow, from contemporary Indigenous artists like Tanya Tagaq and A Tribe Called Red to Louis Armstrong or Parliament. I’m really all over the board and open to anything that catches my ear. I always have music on when I’m creating.

I often ask artists this because it’s often one of the most revealing questions pertaining to their practice, and sometimes even to their life more generally: What do you struggle with most in your practice?

Staying in one place and slowing down. I’ve been working nonstop, and it’s difficult to take time away from art and art-related things. I’m learning to do this more and more.

Now, somewhat of a different approach: What do you feel is the most successful work you’ve created? Is there or can there be such a thing? Is failure part of the success?

Dang, I don’t know what that would be.… I don’t know if there is one, but I feel that each time I make a new work, I learn more about myself. I know that I always feel most proud of works that I make that involves my family. Failure is definitely part of the success. Some artworks break me down

JORDAN BENNETT

Nisqunamu’k Kmtn (Purple Mountain), 2016, acrylic on carved wood panel, 36 × 36.

physically and emotionally, because I put so much of myself into them, but it always seems that the next time I create a work, it’s just a little easier.

Lastly, I’m curious to know of your current projects.

What are you currently working on, and where is it being shown?

I just opened a couple of shows and did some new performances. I did a performance recently called Samqwan/Niply in collaboration with Lori Blondeau in Mi’kma’ki [historical Mi’kmaq territory], Prince Edward Island. We held a feast on the last day of the Artist-Run Centres and Collectives Conference, Flotilla. We collected water from the ocean to cook lobster for everyone. It was a beautiful experience.

Another piece that I just completed was a new mural in the city of Winnipeg as part of the exhibition Insurgence/

Resurgence at the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Wall-to-Wall Festival. At the same exhibition, I performed as part of the Earthline Tattoo Collective alongside Amy Malbeuf and Dion Kaszas. We did Indigenous tattooing in the gallery.

That show is open until mid-2018.

I just finished another commissioned piece titled Aosamia’jij (Too Much Too Little) that is en route to the National Museum of the American Indian [George Gustav Heye Center] in New York City. It’s a new sculptural, sound, and photo installation that will be part of an upcoming exhibition, Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound. I will also have my artwork Herd: Heard as part of the exhibition at MAC VAL [Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne] in Paris, France. It’s been a busy couple of months!

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EASTERN BAND CHEROKEE INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTIST

LUZENE HILL

By Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD

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EAUTY AND UGLINESS, trauma and healing, life and death. More than adjacent, they coexist in the work of Luzene Hill. Executed in a range of media, Hill aims to jolt the viewer into a state of awareness, to wake up her audience and reveal ignored truths. Elegant and lithe, Hill embodies her artistic sensibilities. Hill studied art at Georgia State University and then finished her BFA and MFA degrees at Western Carolina University. She combines drawing, painting, sculpture, mixed media, installation, and performance to encourage her audience to have a direct, aesthetic experience.

With an Eastern Band Cherokee father and a non-Native mother, Hill was named for her Cherokee grandmother and spent most of her life away from her Native relatives. “I didn’t grow up in a Cherokee community, but I visited my Cherokee family on a regular basis. Intellectually, I was conscious of being Cherokee though I wasn’t raised in that culture.” Her primary exposure to customary Cherokee art forms was through her grandmother’s baskets. When Hill was born, her “grandmother made a beautiful nest of baskets for me using honeysuckle …”1 Hill remembers her childhood fondly. She grew up an only child and an only grandchild, mainly in Atlanta where she described her childhood as nurturing and idyllic.

But when Hill was ten years old, her parents divorced, so she lived with her mother and grandparents.

Hill’s father served as a paratrooper in World War II and the Korean War. Hill spent several formative years in post-war Germany when her father was stationed in Mainz just

Luzene Hill performing Enate, 2017, at Portland Art Museum, Oregon.

outside of Frankfurt. Hill remembers the beautiful historic buildings in rubble. “Living in Germany in the 1950s when I was seven, eight, and nine gave me exposure to art and to something more cosmopolitan. I remember the museums and cathedrals. It was a stark change from growing up in Atlanta in a small, homogeneous environment. I had great teachers at the military school. We had a more elaborate, rich school environment than I had had in Atlanta … we put on plays and saw art.” Mainz “was full of beautiful castles and cobblestone streets like in old movies, but the town was bombed out and people were still living in demolished buildings.”

While in Germany, Hill began to study ballet at the local opera house, which was still standing. She continued when she returned to Atlanta. “I studied ballet for nine years. That exposure to dance contributes to my

1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from Luzene Hill, in discussion with the author, September 30, 2017.

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work as a visual artist. In ballet, I would see images. I had ballerina pictures in my room. I loved the costumes, the classical music, the colors, and the theatrical imagery. When I’m working in the studio, I move a lot. I feel better making work when I’m physically into it. I’ll play music and I’ll dance.”

Studying ballet prepared Hill for the structure and rigor of learning about art. “Everything goes back to drawing—in the same way that everything goes back to the first-position plié at the barre in ballet.

“I had an amazing drawing instructor, Soteris Sam Roussi,” Hill says. “I list him, along with my grandparents and parents, as one of the seminal people in my life. I don’t think I would be making art if it had not been for him.”

As a young mother, Hill enjoyed decorating her house, “which is really three-dimensional design. I was going

LUZENE HILL

Untitled, 2017, ink, gouache, charcoal on paper, 11 × 14 in. All images courtesy of the artist.

to get a degree in interior design.…

When my daughter was old enough to be in school full time, I decided to go back to school. I’d stopped college after two years to get married, then I went back to Georgia State University in Atlanta. I took my first class, Drawing 101, with Sam Roussi. After two weeks, I had fallen in love with drawing and with fine art. I abandoned any idea of going into interior design. All I wanted was to draw and paint. I took all his classes. I took life drawing more than once. He started with rendering and training your eye to see.

“At the end of the Drawing 101 class,” Hill continues, “we did a self-portrait. I still have it because I love that drawing. I started off drawing a very precise rendering. Roussi pushed me toward abstraction. In the end, it was all dark shading with squiggly

lines for hair. In a painting class, we were working with acrylics, and he asked us to copy a Renaissance work.

I chose the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald. Having to look at it and copy it taught me so much about composition. I kept going over it again and again until the piece ended up almost all black.”

As an undergraduate student, Hill began studying Indigenous Central and South American cultures. “The Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University has a precontact collection and I fell in love with it. I was drawn to the Aztec codices and the Mayan glyphs.”

Looking at the work, Hill wondered what the artists could have been feeling at the time, and how they were expressing it. “I felt such a connection … as though I know these artists. I hope some were women. I first saw

[an] Inca khipu at the Carlos Museum; it was described as a counting system. I immediately thought, how can I use it in my art? Five or six years later, it was what I needed when I was thinking of Retracing the Trace.”

Hill loves to plunge into research.

Last summer, she had the “tremendously satisfying” experience of examining the khipu collection at the Peabody Museum at Harvard where she read new theories about the ancient encoding technique. “It is not just a number system but also a three-dimensional language. That added another layer to the khipu cords in Retracing the Trace, because not only were they numbers, but they were speaking out.

This was a language.”

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PROFILE

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LUZENE HILL

illustrated Cherokee-language books written in the syllabary created by Sequoyah in 1821.

She moved to North Carolina in 2006 to spend more time on her art and to immerse herself in Cherokee culture. And she decided to go back to school at Western Carolina University to finish her BFA. “I went to the Cherokee studies department at the university and asked if they had any part-time jobs. They said, ‘We need illustrators for our language instruction books.’ I had been moving away from rendering to abstraction, so I said, ‘I don’t do illustrations. I do expressive, abstract drawings. Do you have something else I could do?’

Hill ultimately illustrated three books for the language program using cutouts and collage.

“I love to cut out shapes, move them around, and replant them someplace else. My work with the syllabary engaged me with my Cherokee background.”

Hill learned about her culture’s folktales and myths, such as Spearfinger, a shapeshifting, female monster with a spear for a finger. She worked with the Native speakers in Cherokee, and, though she didn’t learn the language, she did learn about the structure of the language and about the clothing, activities, and houses so she could depict them accurately with her cutouts. “It impressed on me how important language is when expressing culture. When a language is lost, the worldview is also lost, and the Native worldview is so different from the European worldview. It was inexplicable to the people who moved to the Americas from Europe.”

In a series of abstract drawings executed from the millennium to today, Hill has experimented with pure form. The works are untitled, because, as she explains, “I don’t like to give titles because I like the viewers to be open to interpretation. It forces the viewer to interact with it. They can dislike it or not understand it and walk away, but they can’t stand back detached, looking at something on the wall.

They have to work and engage.” Hill describes the work as “automatic” drawings: “I just start making marks on paper, without a plan or image in mind. Most often I drop down ink or tea stain, let it slide around, then respond to

the shapes with pen or charcoal. I let images emerge. It’s always about stopping (less is more).”2 Using the element of chance, these works are unrelenting and commanding, forcing the viewer to consider shapes and lines without the easy appeal of color or figuration. Instead, the artist considers the idea of vulnerability, which is “a recurring theme in my work. Drawing is relinquishing control … smudging charcoal and pastels, ink or tea stains spilling over the paper … the random, spontaneous occurrence that provokes me to make a mark.”3

When a language is lost, the worldview is also lost, and the Native worldview is so different from the European worldview.

Inspired by her interest in Mesoamerican cultures, Hill created her own version of a codex, The Pilgrimage Ribbon (2005), a title taken from the Spanish name for the Codex Boturini or Tira de la Peregrinación. She organized her drawings into books. As the Boturini tells of the Aztec migration from their place of origin to Tenochtitlán, The Pilgrimage Ribbon illustrates the artist’s personal journey through her life. She used red ink since “red ink appears as I confront life; its ambiguity, paradox uncertainty, passion.”4 She used 484 strips of paper that she used to create 484 manuscripts.

The Pilgrimage Ribbon was displayed in the gallery at the Western Carolina University Fine Art Museum.

The theme of vulnerability repeats in Hill’s work, “both personal vulnerability—an attack on someone’s person—and cultural vulnerability, in contrast to cultural and linguistic sovereignty. All of those things are part of Native experience.” This is personal for Hill: she was brutally attacked and raped in January 1994. She explored this subject when she won the prestigious Eiteljorg Fellowship in 2015, which comes with a $25,000 award and an exhibition at the museum. For her exhibition,

Retracing the Trace, 2015, cord, ink, pastel, dimensions variable, performance view at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, Indiana.

2. Luzene Hill, email message to author, September 2017.

3. Luzene Hill, “Work: Drawings,” Luzene Hill, web.

4. Martin DeWitt, “Luzene Hill (Eastern Band of Cherokee): Free Falling Up,” in Conversations: Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship 2015, ed. Ashley Holland and Jennifer Complo McNutt (Indianapolis: Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 2015), 49.

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Retracing the Trace, 2015, cord, ink, and pastel, dimensions variable, performance view at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hill decided to create an installation based on her MFA thesis from Western Carolina University, Retracing the Trace.

She wanted her show to be immersive for the audience. “I like how the format of an installation forces the viewer to be in it. It’s around you and it changes as you move and move around it.”

While her untitled drawings intentionally eschew color, here Hill employs a bright, blood red, a reference to the color of sacrifice as seen in historic works, including the Isenheim Altarpiece. This work is based on the khipu. Hill knotted red silk cords inspired by the Inca system to represent the numbers one to 3,780, the estimated number of unreported rapes that occur every day in the United States. “I use material volume as a device. I love to work with numbers, to present numbers. This is part of the process for me since it allows the work to be repetitive and meditative, like when I was knotting the cords, writing down the number that it represented, then going to the next one. That happened over quite a while. It took months.”

The artist lay on the floor and had the cords piled on top of her, then she stood up and left a negative silhouette

in the cords. Marking a 24-hour interval in stencils across the walls of the gallery, she picked up the cords one at a time and attached them to the wall, slowly forming a red ring around the room. She attached the first group of cords on the wall between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m., the time of her attack. As she moved the knotted cords from the floor to the wall, their physical presence cast a dark, ghostly double on the wall, “a shadow aspect of the cords,” says Hill, suggesting their meaning could be multivalent.

Cords resonate through Hill’s life. Cords were important in tying her ballet shoes to her feet, in tying her father’s parachute, but also in her attack. “I wanted to make something more about violence against women, but I was also trying to go within myself. When I was attacked, I was strangled by the cords that were in my hood.” Oddly enough, the streaks that crisscrossed Hill’s neck were red, not blue like bruises. They stayed on her neck for six months. “I didn’t think they were ever going to go away. I thought it was from the trauma, a physical thing. It was disturbing. At that point, I was newly divorced. I didn’t have a lot of money, so I couldn’t go

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to the doctor and get an explanation. I lived with it for six months. I thought it would be there always as a constant reminder of that trauma.

“As I was trying to express the trauma, I was also deeply interested in Ana Mendieta. I was attacked in January. I went back to the spot where it happened the next day to look for clues, because the attacker wasn’t caught. I looked down at the ground and saw my blood among the leaves and mud. About ten years later, I was looking at Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas, and I saw what I had seen looking down at the ground where I’d been attacked.

And that was profound to me in terms of the power of her art and the power of how she used her body in her art.

My reaction to it went straight into my body and took me back to the vision of the mud.”

The silhouette of the artist’s body in the cords in Retracing the Trace was influenced by Mendieta’s Siluetas, but became more personal for her in the process. “When I looked back down at the cords, they were chaotic, all over the place. It was what I had seen on the ground. When I moved the cords to the walls, the gallery became a metaphor for my body. The cords marked the

LUZENE HILL

The Pilgrimage (detail), 2005, ink, charcoal, paper, on museum board, 11 × 132 in. (extended). Photo: Matt Haffner.

assault, with the marks on my neck and the memories, and it was a coming to terms for me.”

In 2017, Hill combined installation and performance in Enate, made possible by the Native Arts and Culture Foundation at the Portland Art Museum. Following her interest in Mesoamerica cultures, Hill dyed silk taffeta a bright red with cochineal, which comes from the female insect of the same name and is the weapon she uses to deter predators. The dye is used by Indigenous peoples in Central America, Mexico, and tropical South America, where textile artists create bright garments for ceremonies.

The brilliant colors appealed to the Conquistadors, who exported the dye back to Spain where it became a popular trade item.

Hill cut the dyed silk into 6,956 figures based on the shape of a Valdivia figure. “In my research, I looked for the earliest female images in the Americas and I found the Valdivia Goddess, little sculptures from the coastal region of Ecuador. They’re all similar, with their bodies in a straight figure but with their legs separated, unlike Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas where the legs are together.” The number 6,956 represents the average number of Native women who are assaulted every year, a number that is probably much larger since so many assaults go unreported. She sewed figures together in bundles of three to represent that Native women are three times more likely to be

assaulted than other women and 90 percent of the assaults are by non-Native men. These figures were sewn onto a body-length cape. The act of creating the garment connected the artist to the art made by her grandmother. “The repetitive cutting out of the goddess figures for the cape in Enate is like traditional Native art creation, work that is repetitive.”

Hill brought performance into the project. Incited by the shapeshifters of Native stories, like Spearfinger, Hill used the cape to cover her entire body.

She animated it, moving and rising up, and eventually revealing her face and then her body. The performance was captured on video, allowing viewers to continually participate in the transformation. Allowing herself to be seen, the artist brought the issue of her attack into the open. “Sexual assault is shrouded in silence … it is a very personal violation. I want to provoke dialogue and conversation because until this happens, it will continue.

That is why I do the work.”5 Hill continues to create and to apply for fellowships and awards, including the 2015 First People’s Fund Artist in Business fellowship that helped her continue to create books written in the Cherokee syllabary, like The Grouchy Old Lady from 2007 and Spearfinger in 2008. In 2016, she won a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship. Hill will be part of the

Eiteljorg Fellowship’s 20th-anniversary events in November 2017.

Hill’s art continues to evolve.

“I have a plan for a new work using the khipu knotting system in a more abstract way. I’m still working with the Valdivia goddess image. I’ve been making new, larger, very loose drawings, using ink to capture the goddess silhouettes. I’ve been thinking about doing printing on the wall—making handprints and silhouettes of the goddess figure.”

In all her work, Hill tries to move the viewer into a more open experience of the world. “When Sister Wendy [Beckett] was interviewed by Bill Moyers, she talked about life from her religious viewpoint. She believed that the worst thing is to go through life as a zombie, to not be influenced by what you’re experiencing. That stuck with me because that’s what I believe. That’s all that there is: how you experience the world. If you’re insulated from it, if you’re protecting yourself and you’re not feeling it, then you’re missing everything. Vulnerability is inherent to the human experience—being physically vulnerable as a woman, as someone aging, as a child. I’ve come to terms with it and I embrace it. People who isolate and insulate themselves may feel less vulnerable, but they are missing the experience. That’s all. Just absorb. Be in the moment.”

LUZENEHILL.COM

5. Luzene Hill, “Portland Art Museum Interview,” YouTube (Portland: Portland Art Museum, September 10, 2017), web video.

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SEMINOLE CANOE MAKER & CERAMIC ARTIST

PEDRO O. ZEPEDA

By Michole Eldred

W

HEN MANY PEOPLE THINK OF FLORIDA, they think about the white sandy beaches and warm waters of the Gulf Coast, or perhaps catching a wave and surfing on the Atlantic side. Sipping mojitos on glamorous Miami Beach may come to mind, or perhaps oranges, alligators, and hurricanes. Of course, Florida does have all of these things. But it holds so much more when one is willing to look deeper.

Within its borders, Florida has an extensive history of Indigenous people who have developed a culture of survival from hundreds of years of resistance, which led to one of the costliest Indian wars in which the United States engaged.

The Seminole Wars are officially divided into three separate conflicts. The first of these began in 1814, with battles and skirmishes erupting until the year 1858. The wars and the forced removal of most of the tribe to Indian Territory left a decimated Seminole people with just over two hundred still living in the state of Florida. The remaining Seminole did not have it easy after the war.

Survival was difficult.

Around the turn of the 20th century, the Seminole began trading with non-Natives on the outskirts of the Everglades. The Seminole textile artists learned to make patchwork clothing and saw a market for their creations in the tourists who had begun entering the state. Tourist camps were set up so people could come to watch the Seminole wrestle alligators, buy crafts, and purchase postcards with images of the Seminole. In 1957, with money provided by the Seminole cattlemen of Brighton, Seminole tribal leaders traveled to Washington, DC, where they were legally formed into the Seminole Tribe of Florida. Today, the tribe is a leader in tourism enterprises, gaming, and various other successful industries.

The Seminole Tribe of Florida’s trek of survival has not deprived the Seminole of their true culture and historical knowledge. One such keeper of culture is Pedro O. Zepeda.

Zepeda continues to study Seminole history, language, art, and culture. Not only does he immerse himself in his culture, but he also shares it with others through discussions, lectures, and his artistic abilities.

I first met Zepeda about ten years ago. He was a young man fresh out of college with art degree in hand.

I was working as curator of collections at Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Museum on the Big Cypress Reservation in Florida. We were in the process of curating an exhibition of working Seminole artists. He presented some of his ceramic

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Pedro O. Zepeda. All images courtesy of the author.

pieces to be included in the exhibition. These simplified human figures in clay curved smoothly into a sketch-like flow. They were not historical in form, but they retained Seminole cultural references by emulating a Seminole mother and her daughters. The hair on the mother was reminiscent of the elaborate, rolled hairstyle of the early 20th century. (Women did not wear their hair down until a much later time.) I was impressed with Zepeda’s technical abilities and artistic process.

Not much later, a position overseeing what was then called the Traditional Arts Program opened up, and I thought Zepeda would be a perfect match. He was. He spent his time at the museum demonstrating art forms that had long been established within the Seminole Tribe. Museum visitors were especially curious about his carving techniques.

Zepeda expanded his role into an outreach position. His knowledge about Seminole history and culture allowed him to openly share with many communities much of the information he had absorbed while growing up.

As time progressed, Zepeda seemed to outgrow his role as outreach coordinator. He was flourishing as an artist and a person. Today, I see Pedro Zepeda as a loving husband and father. He spends much of his time with his wife, Kaleena DeLand-Zepeda, and their three children, Amelia, Colton, and Kyle. Pedro works steadily at his art, which includes the Seminole form of the dugout canoe. It is important to Zepeda that he instill his knowledge of Seminole culture and history in his own children and others willing to learn so that it may always exist.

PEDRO O. ZEPEDA

Pedro Zepeda carving cypress dugout canoes. Photo: Amelia DeLand-Zepeda (Seminole).

ME: What can you tell us about your personal and cultural background?

PZ: I was fortunate enough to spend a lot of my childhood at my Seminole grandmother’s camp. My greatgrandma and grandma lived there, as well as my aunt and uncle and several of my cousins. They still had the traditional chickee huts [opensided wooden buildings with thatched palmetto roofs], and my grandmas would cook outside under the cooking chickee several times a week. Those are very fond memories for me that I think were also very formative. I didn’t have to seek out my culture. I was lucky.

My family still embodied the culture.

It was just a part of everyday life. At the time I suppose I didn’t really even realize that everyone didn’t grow up the way I did, being cumulatively raised by my parents, grandmothers, aunts, and uncles. I think it makes a person much more whole that way to learn from everyone’s life experiences.

What inspires you to create?

Since childhood I’ve had the strong desire to create, but I also have a desire to maintain the cultural traditions of my tribe.

What mentors have been important to shaping your creative life?

My grandmother Tahama Osceola, Ingram Billie Jr., my brother Brian, the late painter Guy LaBree, and the late sculptor Brad Cooley.

You mentioned the artist Guy LaBree.

Pat LaBree, Guy’s wife, told me about the first time Guy met you. She told me that you were seven years old.

Guy was exhibiting at a museum and your father, Lee Zepeda, brought you to meet Guy. You had all your little sketches on notebook paper ready to show him. He told you to keep working hard and to keep doing your art. Guy thought you were a very talented young man.

That was Guy, always really nice and encouraging. He was always dropping hints and tips to help my artwork.

How did Brad Cooley inspire you?

I knew Brad since I was a young child, maybe nine or ten years old. He demonstrated and sold his sculptures at a powwow my uncle had organized.

He had an unformed clay head, and he let me sculpt on it. I must have been there hours sculpting on that head. He showed me how he added the features of the face. After that my parents helped me get the same type of clay Brad was using, and I created a bust that I could work on at home. About nine or ten years ago, I was able to visit his studio in Lamont, Florida. He and his son, Bradley Jr., were so willing to share their art knowledge with me.

Did your grandmother and Ingram Billie Jr. inspire you through their art or did they instill cultural values and knowledge in you?

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PROFILE

Mother and Daughters 3, 2005, ceramic stoneware, collection of the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, Clewiston, Florida, #2010.10.3.

Mother and Daughters 1, 2005, ceramic stoneware, collection of the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, #2010.10.1.

LEFT: Untitled, ca. 2005, clay, collection of the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, #2014.21.1A.

I think maybe it was one and the same. When I was very young, I didn’t realize that everyone didn’t grow up the same way I did. For my grandmother and her siblings, English wasn’t their first language; it was our Miccosukee language, and family conversations were in the Native language. My grandmothers cooked outside regularly under the chickee hut.

While my parents worked, before I started school, I got to spend the days in my grandmothers’ camp. They’d sew traditional Seminole clothing most of the day. They’d also do beadwork occasionally. I’d travel with my grandma to other family members’ camps to visit or pick up traditional medicine. So, I think from an early age, I was pretty well immersed into our arts and culture, and it continued as I became a teenager.

That’s when I became interested in woodcarving. Ingram Billie Jr. took the time to show me how to collect wood for carving and how to carve different things like toy alligators

and canoes, and sofkee spoons [a specialized ladle for sofkee, the staple corn drink]. When I was around 19, I began learning to carve full-size dugout canoes from my older brother Brian. He had been learning from our elder Henry John Billie. I also started attending Stetson University for art.

I had focused on hand-built ceramic sculpture while I was there. I graduated, but it wasn’t the most pleasant experience, as me and art professors at the time couldn’t really agree on what my art should be. I knew where I wanted to take it, but my two professors both had their own ideas that also differed from each other. I think the experience ultimately helped me in that I learned to better understand myself and define my art.

I see a common theme of women in your ceramic sculptural pieces. Most prominently, the Seminole Corn Lady is depicted. What is the Seminole story of the corn lady?

The women in my life—my mother, grandmothers, sisters, and aunts—have

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all played major parts in my life. I’ve been fortunate to be raised in the matrilineal way. I think maybe that’s why I featured women so heavily in my visual arts, as it was just part of my life. My grandmother first shared the corn lady story with me. It’s our telling of where corn originated. In Betty Mae Jumper’s book, Legends of the Seminole, she has a version of this story. But basically our corn originated from a single woman who sacrificed herself to feed the people of her adopted son.

What drew you to this story and made you want to create her in clay?

In the story the corn actually comes from her body, her legs specifically.

I just thought this would look really interesting visually. I added a hairstyle used by Seminole women in the 1940s and ’50s. It’s a very dramatic fan form that the hair was draped over. I used clay because that was my main medium at the time, and I really enjoyed pushing the limits of ceramic to see how large I could make these sculptures.

PEDRO O. ZEPEDA

Pedro Zepeda teaching his son, Kyle, how to use the adze on a cypress dugout canoe. Photo: Amelia DeLand-Zepeda (Seminole).

What people and sources do you currently look to for inspiration?

Since canoes haven’t been in heavy use, I do look a lot to historical photos and museum examples of our canoes from when we were using them regularly (before the 1970s). There’s also been a large resurgence of Native arts across the globe that I find to be inspiring.

Groups like the Polynesian Voyaging Society or the Tribal Canoe Journeys in the Pacific Northwest.

What art projects are you working on now?

Community canoe projects and the Tribal Arts Project. The Tribal Arts Project is an endeavor of the Upper Room Art Gallery collective of artists and designers. Cultural arts are paired with urban renewal projects in the heart of Old Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Paddle Up on the Himmarshee Canal, an annual water-based cultural event

staged by the gallery, is a winner of the Knight Art Challenge Grant, from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

You mentioned that you are involved in community canoe projects. Do other tribal members assist in carving canoes? Have many other tribal citizens shown an interest in revitalizing the canoe?

Shammy Tommie has probably helped work on the canoes the most. He was already a good craftsperson and worked on airboat hulls for a number of years. So, he has a good eye for the lines of the canoe and skill and muscle memory for carving with the hand tools. My uncle, Leroy Osceola, who has more experience making canoes than me, helped on several also. I learned a lot from him. When we would work on the community canoes, there were some who came by pretty often, some who worked on the

canoe maybe once or twice, and some who just liked to come by and chat or share stories. It was great to see people in all their levels of involvement.

There has been interest from other Native communities who have begun their own journeys in learning about dugouts. I have ideas on how to bring the dugout canoe to more prominence within our tribe in the 21st century. I’ll just have to see how far I can go with it.

Can you tell me a little about the process of Seminole canoe making?

Today I source the logs either from storm-fallen trees or river-recovered sinker cypress.1 Most of Florida’s old-growth cypress was logged out by the 1960s, and since the trees I use are 250 to 300 years old, they don’t grow back terribly quickly. That’s why I source the logs the way I do, to preserve the remaining old-growth cypress.

1. Sinker cypress is old-growth cypress preserved for many years, and sometimes centuries, under water.

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PROFILE

That’s where I learned how to pole canoes. Most often the water is shallow in southern Florida, so a paddle isn’t needed. This past spring I put one of my canoes in the water for the first time at Wekiwa Springs in central Florida. It was a bit nerve-racking—not knowing exactly how it would float, or if it’d float at all! But it sat in the water beautifully and level.

Historically the Seminole used the canoe as a mode of transportation.

What are some of the routes and places they would go using the dugout canoe?

Pedro Zepeda with a model dugout canoe with sail. Photo: Amelia DeLand-Zepeda (Seminole).

Once I have the log, I use a combination of chainsaw and axe to shape the outside of the canoe. Once the outside is about 90 percent carved, I start on the inside of the canoe, also with a combination of chainsaw cuts and clearing with an axe. The last inch or two of wood I carve with my adzes.

A good portion of the canoe can be carved out with a chainsaw and axe.

I use the chainsaw mainly to make crosscuts to make it easier to carve away the excess wood with the axe.

When it gets to carving away the last

inch or so, I switch to using hand adzes.

These tools are designed for carving concave surfaces. There’s not really any modern substitute for them. I also do a lot of measuring before I make the first cut, all the way till finishing.

You have put the carved dugout to use. What dugout canoe experiences have you been on?

When I was in high school, I worked at our tribe’s Ah-tah-thi-ki Museum. They have a 28-inch-long fiberglass replica of an original in the collection. I used that on the canals around the museum.

In our oral histories, we sailed to Cuba and the Bahamas.2 Today, there is a historic community of Black Seminoles on Andros Island in the Bahamas that left during the Seminole Wars in the 19th century. At the turn of the 20th century, we traded at numerous trading posts across frontier Florida. Smallwood’s trading post in Chokoloskee is one of the few that is still standing and still owned by the same family but run as a museum these days. I organized a float down the Turner [River] to the Smallwood store a few years ago. I chose this route because we had several camps along the river that many of our Elders remember living in or visiting. Many of them traveled the river in their youth to the trading post. I’m glad it survived Hurricane Irma recently.

How could you see people using the dugout canoe?

Hopefully on the water! But seriously, I’d like to see them become cultural ambassadors of sorts to the world at large and within our own tribal communities. I hope to be able to regularly create canoes in our Native communities and promote their use as a way to strengthen our people.

Living in Florida makes water issues relevant to us. What water issues concern you?

2. William Bartram, William Bartram on the Southeastern Indians, ed. Gregory A. Waselkov and Kathryn E. Holland Braund (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 60. American botanist William Bartram recorded Florida Indians traveling to Cuba and the Bahamas in dugout cypress canoes in the 1770s.

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PEDRO O. ZEPEDA

Pedro Zepeda, left, and Everett Osceola, right, paddle through Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in their dugout canoe, 2012. Photo: Diana Stone.

I think, like most, that it’s important to have clean water and enough of it.

Florida’s environment can only sustain so many people before it begins to fall ill. This can already be seen in things like the condition of the springs in Central Florida, as well as the large and numerous sinkholes that appear the water table from overuse.

In the southern half of the state, we are seeing an increase in algae blooms in the waterways and beaches from human impact. Water has been such an important resource for the Seminole for generations, from its use as a tactical advantage during the Seminole Wars to being surrounded by it in the Everglades.

I often see you wearing patchwork.

Do you create any patchwork clothing yourself?

Yes, I do. I learned to sew from my grandmother. I learned to sew when I was about 14 because I had started getting involved with living history events and wanted to make the correct clothing of the period. Later on as my grandmother wasn’t able to sew anymore, I began making Seminole patchwork

clothing, mostly for my children.

What is the difference between much of the patchwork being created today and the styles we see in historical images?

Like any other style of clothing, Seminole clothing has changed over the last hundred years. So patchwork from its earliest form around 1915 is different than patchwork from 1940 through to today. Every decade new patchwork patterns were being created

by Seminole seamstresses, and in the last thirty years by a few men as well.

I see you creating and working on art with your own children. Why is this important to you?

For me growing up, being Seminole wasn’t just something that was done on weekends or just during ceremonies. It was in the everyday things my family did with me. For me it’s important to share this style of upbringing with my children, as well as the cultures of my wife. So creating traditional arts with my children is just an extension of this.

We have known each other for about ten years. When we met, you had

just graduated from college and were beginning your career. How have you evolved as Seminole Tribal citizen and an artist since then?

I feel I’ve gone from simply making the arts to understanding the deeper cultural meaning of our arts.

What are your artistic goals for the future?

I would like to see a resurgence of our Indigenous watercraft from making to use.

As we end this interview, what would you tell young Native artists who are just starting their own creative course?

I think, like life, art is a journey. I’ve really tried to do each of the stages of my artistic journey to the best of my ability, with humility, and to do my best to honor my family and others whom I’ve learned from with the work I do.

The different media I create in allow me to speak in different ways. So I would say embrace what you are doing with great respect and honor for those that helped you get there.

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Drawing on Tradition: Kanza Artist Chris Pappan The Field Museum

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N AMERICAN INDIAN ARTIST, a curator, and a professor walk into a natural history museum … . Although this may sound like the start of a bad joke, in reality it was the beginning of a collaborative, curatorial project that resulted in the clever and thought-provoking exhibition Drawing on Tradition: Kanza Artist Chris Pappan at the Field Museum. Chris Pappan, Alaka Wali, and Justin Richland make up the collaborative team.

Chris Pappan (Kanza-OsageCheyenne River Lakota) is a Chicago-based ledger artist. Pappan’s distorted portraits of American Indians on historic ledgers and maps of appropriated lands raise questions about the misperceptions of American Indians, and the ways American Indians sometimes conform to these expectations. By working in a style that is recognizably “American Indian,” Pappan is able to push boundaries and challenge his audience in provocative and subversive ways.

For Drawing on Tradition, Pappan worked with Alaka Wali, the Field Museum’s curator of North American anthropology, and Justin Richland, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. The exhibition opened last fall alongside Full Circle/Omani Wakan: Lakota Artist Rhonda Holy Bear, which was in the museum’s Webber Gallery—the same space that held the exhibition Bunky Echo-Hawk: Modern Warrior (reviewed in FAAM No. 5, Winter 2014/15).

Unlike the Holy Bear and Echo-Hawk exhibits, however, Drawing on Tradition occupies space in Hall 8, the Field Museum’s permanent

exhibition hall for the North American Indian collections.

This solo show features 17 original drawings and paintings and a multimedia installation. The main corpus of Pappan’s original work is located near the center of Hall 8 and marks a clear intervention in the permanent exhibition space. Reproductions of his work were enlarged and placed on the glass of the exhibition cases throughout the rest of Hall 8, with panels inviting the visitors to “take a closer look” at the images that have been layered on the museum’s existing displays.

These semi-opaque images obscure the objects behind the glass and draw the visitors’ gaze to the ethnographic artifacts. On the case featuring “Copper Tools and Weapons of Early Northern Hunters,” for example, a map from one of Pappan’s pieces blocks the descriptive text. The image of Pappan’s ledger drawing, Thank You, Grandmother (2009), impedes the visitor’s ability to see the points and arrowheads displayed in the same case. Here, Pappan’s work disrupts the narrative of the 20th-century museum and the lasting image of the American Indian as hunter-gatherer. He doesn’t

fully block these representations of the past, but asks visitors to take a closer look at the people supposedly represented by these objects.

Another successful intervention in the exhibition emerges from the multimedia installation that hangs from the ceiling. For this, Pappan worked with musician and interdisciplinary artist Santiago X (Coushatta) and photographers Adam Sings In The Timber (Crow) and Debra Yepa-Pappan (Jemez-Korean) to create an immersive, audiovisual experience. Utilizing sampled footage from W. K. L. Dickson’s film, Buffalo Dance (1894), audio from a 1983 powwow in Macy, Nebraska, and photographs of contemporary American Indians and music by Santiago X, this multimedia piece can be heard and seen throughout Hall 8.

Just as Pappan’s drawings are layered over the artifact display cases, the photographs of contemporary American Indians are layered over the ethnographic film. The historic footage of the dancers comes in and out of focus as vibrant images of smiling, confident, and pop-culture-savvy American Indians obscure the black-and-white footage. The footage of the dancers does

Reproduced details from Pappan’s artwork obscure a vitrine of precontact copper tools in the Field Museum. Photo: Jami Powell (Osage Nation).

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Chris Pappan (Kanza-Osage-Cheyenne River Lakota), The Martyrdom of Princess White Deer (Imatio Esther), 2014, graphite/pencil, gold leaf, and map collage on ledger paper, collection of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection, Norman, Oklahoma.

not disappear, once again challenging the audience to dig deeper, to go beyond the binary of the past versus the present.

A nearby text panel reveals Pappan’s thoughts regarding these interventions: I want to remind visitors that we will not be relegated to the past nor be considered mere victims of historical trauma. We are a thriving people, and we have not abandoned the things that make us unique in the world.

Our culture isn’t stagnant, it changes

with the times and is a living thing.

Cultural change is a consistent theme in this show and throughout Pappan’s artwork. Cultural adaptation and transformation are also emphasized in a digital reading rail in the exhibition that explores ledger art within the broader historical context of Plains narrative art. The interactive display invites visitors to explore the changes within Plains narrative art, the development of ledger art, and the work of other living ledger artists such

as Linda Haukaas (Sicangu Lakota), Dwayne Wilcox (Oglala Lakota), and John Isaiah Pepion (Blackfeet).

For Pappan, cultural change is essential for Indigenous survival. He explores this issue in The Martyrdom of Princess White Deer (Imatio Esther), a mixed-media portrait featuring Mohawk vaudeville performer Esther Deer (ca. 1891–1992). Deer, who performed with the Ziegfeld Follies and in wild west shows with family members in the early 20th century, is depicted in triplicate wearing an eagle feather headdress. Gold leaf on the painting creates a stage ambiance in the portrait of the “princess,” who was, in fact, royalty due to her six-month marriage to a Russian/Polish count. Pappan sees Deer as more than a performer; he sees her as a martyr. He states, “She adopted a type of ‘Indian’ persona that was palatable to the general public, but she had to sacrifice part of her identity to do that. I can relate to her struggle for cultural survival.”

In this piece, and others, Pappan raises interesting questions about the ways Native Americans perform and distort themselves to meet mainstream expectations about what it means to be an American Indian in the past, present, and future. Pappan urges the audience to reevaluate preconceived notions, and works to shift expectations.

Although Drawing on Tradition makes an important intervention within the Field Museum’s Hall 8, the North American Indian collection is the oldest permanent exhibition at the museum, with many of the cases originally installed in 1950. The reinstallation of the Native North American collection is long overdue, and this, Holy Bear’s, and Echo-Hawk’s exhibitions highlight the possibilities for contemporary artists to engage in fruitful dialogue within the Field’s historical collections. Drawing on Tradition challenges visitors’ expectations about American Indian experiences and opens up space for continued dialogue as the Field Museum approaches the larger reinstallation project.

Drawing on Tradition: Kanza Artist Chris Pappan will be on display through Sunday, January 13, 2019.

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Finding the necessary questions can be as difficult—and as messy—as searching for the answers.

SANTA FE

Broken Boxes form & concept

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URING THE WEEK of SWAIA’s 96th Santa Fe Indian Market, form & concept gallery in Santa Fe launched Broken Boxes with three days of events designed for interaction and conversation between art, artist, and visitor.

Broken Boxes is a multigenre project centered around a podcast of the same name created and produced by sound and performance artist Ginger

Tania Willard (Secwepemc), Waspology, 2017, waxed and laser-cut cardboard with found European wasp nests, gold leaf, laser-cut satin ribbon, and tipi canvas.

Dunnill. The podcast features extremely open, conversational interviews with “Indigenous artists, activist focused artists, Queer/Trans/NonBinary artists, women identifying artists, artists of color and mixed/lost/stolen heritage artists,” according to the Broken Boxes website.

Opening events began on Friday, August 18, with a birthday celebration in honor of White Earth Ojibwe activist Winona LaDuke of Honor the Earth, who was in attendance. The Art of Indigenous Resistance traveling exhibition was installed downstairs with the Broken Boxes exhibition upstairs.

Indigenous Resistance features a selection of artwork along with posters and other archival items that document the group’s 31 years of activism. For this event, they installed pieces relating to the Buffalo Field Campaign, which works to protect the buffalo herd at Yellowstone National Park. Honor the Earth organizer Kim Smith (Navajo), whose collaborative piece with Makai Lewis provided a backdrop to the opening activities, curated the exhibition.

Saturday’s gathering moved outside the gallery for live painting and papercutting by several participating artists, including Ian Kuali’i and Yatika Starr Fields (Osage-MuscogeeCherokee). The opening concluded on Sunday with an artists’ roundtable discussion.

The idea behind the Broken Boxes exhibition is to explore the many “boxes” that attempt to contain/restrain art and artists, both personally and creatively; from metaphorical ones imposed by stereotypes or institutional practices to literal ones like gallery walls and the boxes and crates in which artwork is transported from the studio.

All artists in the exhibition have been guests on the podcast and were asked to incorporate the flat rate priority mail box in which they shipped their entries into their work for the show.

One striking example is Navajo artist Nani Chacon’s wall-sized piece, Between

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a Black Cloud and a White Cloud He Found Her, which incorporates flattened cardboard boxes. Several artists present works outside their usual style, such as painter Yatika Starr Fields, whose mixed-media piece Home Is Where the Heart Is, Sometimes That’s a War Zone is composed of an unstructured tent suspended above a collage composed on the inside of an unfolded cardboard box.

Visual, auditory, textual, and textile pieces are presented alongside paintings and photographs. Some pieces are meant to be handled, such as Miyuki Baker’s these walls are fabric, which provides viewers with markers and hanging tags with which to add descriptions of their own “boxes” to the fabric hanging; zines are meant to be picked up and read.

Without context, some pieces in the exhibit can appear haphazard, so it does pay to understand the intent and background of the exhibition. A statement posted just inside the gallery reminds visitors that all Broken Boxes events and projects are meant to “hold space” for people of all identities to express complicated and challenging questions.

At the artists’ roundtable on Sunday, multimedia ceramicist Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan-ArikaraHidatsa-Lakota) said, “We don’t have answers, and I don’t think we should be expected to give the answers. I think it’s a process that we all engage within our learning. We don’t know, but we’re willing to learn.”

When it comes to art and activism, finding the necessary questions can be as difficult—and as messy—as searching for the answers. This exhibition asks visitors to take time to engage in that messy work alongside the artists.

Through playful and serious pieces, the exhibition reveals the same free-form style that makes the podcast such an open and generous forum for listeners and guests.

—Stacy Pratt, PhD

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SANTA FE

Conception, Abstraction, Reduction: The Art of Dan, Arlo, and Michael Namingha Santa Fe Botanical Garden

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AN NAMINGHA AND HIS SONS Arlo and Michael each produce their own specific style of art while at the same time maintaining a coherent relationship to each other’s work and to the Hopi-Tewa cultural background they share. In his 48 years of art making, Dan has established himself as a respected sculptor and painter.

Much of the Naminghas’ work deals with the environment, balance, and tribal symbolism. The imagery in their art often incorporates nature, making the Santa Fe Botanical Garden the perfect setting. While Arlo’s work is a highly abstract version of what nature is about and how it connects to his culture, Michael’s represents social commentary and graphic expression.

Dan’s studio was always open to his sons, and he never pushed them in any direction.

The Naminghas represent the sixth generation of artists related to Nampeyo (Hopi-Tewa, ca. 1860–1942). Taking their art very seriously, the Naminghas usually install their own work at exhibitions and run a family gallery, Niman Fine Art in Santa Fe. The eighteen pieces in this outdoor exhibit have been carefully sited along the gracious, meandering paths in the garden, surrounded by verdant trees and a variety of flowers, with the Sun and Moon Mountains visible in the background. At the garden’s entrance stands one of Michael Namingha’s pieces: a white, powder-coated steel sign that says You Are Here. A reminder to live both in the day and the place, it serves as an apt introduction to the entire exhibit as it helps focus viewer attention before walking further into the garden.

Figurative bronze sculptures by Dan, Maidens III and Palhik Mana, and Arlo, Cloud Maiden and Hano Mana I, line the central walkway and bring their prayers for water to the garden as one walks from the entrance to the Goede Family Orchard Garden. Along the way is Arlo’s Fifth World, a Texas shell-stone

sculpture that relates Hopi cosmology to current issues. Close examination reveals fossils of ancient marine life in the shale.

Approaching the Hendricksen Pavilion, the exhibition continues to the left up the Dayton-Curless Art Trail. Each curve on the path brings the surprise of a new bronze sculpture, starting with Arlo’s Dance. Sun and Moon I by Dan comes next, followed by Chanter I by Arlo. Chanter, a figurative piece with the face of a katsina, has a warm patina suggestive of stone or wood. Chanter evokes the movement of wind and pollination and the ceremonial songs that bring rain for the crops.

Dualities and Vertical Forms, bronzes by Dan, illustrate his journey from figurative to abstract to more minimalistic art as he continues to seek out the core of an image or object. In these sculptures, Dan breaks down the parts to achieve the simple contour of a place, image, or figure to get his point across with very little detail, and to express the twofold nature and continuum of reality. Arlo’s Strength and Equality, sculpted from Indiana limestone, is a versatile piece that can be positioned in a few different ways.

Further along on the trail is Arlo’s

Arlo Namingha (Hopi-Tewa), Sand Hills, 2008, bronze, 36 × 17 × 11 in., edition of four.

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Sand Hills, which depicts a specific location at Hopi behind First Mesa and evokes shifting sand dunes. It relates to the four cardinal directions and to the windows and doors of Hopi dwellings.

The cylinder on top of the “dunes” represents the sun that rises and sets and yet changes over time. Arlo began his art career carving highly representational katsina figures. Finding it artistically repetitive, he broke down the imagery and played with form and texture, light and shadow. Arlo’s sculpture, Butterfly, reveals how katsina-carving remains a foundation for his work.

The exhibition concludes with AWOL, an installation by Michael. The catalyst for his work was the Oxford Junior Dictionary’s decision to replace words relating to nature in favor of words relating to technology, which were seen as more pertinent to the younger generation. Thus, words like blog and MP3 player superseded words like pasture and willow. Michael selected ten of the dropped words and “planted” them in the garden in the shape of a zero, indicating their supposed lack of value. Starting and ending Conception, Abstraction, Reduction with Michael’s pieces underscores the distinction of his artwork from that of his father and brother.

Clayton Bass, CEO of the Santa Fe Botanical Garden, has been a strong supporter of bringing the Naminghas’ art into the garden’s natural setting to create a multi-sensory outdoor experience and a sense of place against the backdrop of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Dr. Letitia Chambers, president of the board of directors, curated this exhibition, and it is the second she has curated at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden. The first was Power of Place. She previously curated Courage and Compassion: Native Women Sculpting Women (2014) at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. Her close collaboration with the Naminghas successfully highlights the sculptures and blends art with nature.

Conception, Abstraction, Reduction: The Art of Dan, Arlo, and Michael Namingha will be on view through May 13, 2018.

—Cathy Short

SANTA FE

Connective Tissue: New Approaches to Fiber in Contemporary Native Art IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts

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HE ARTWORK in this powerful exhibition confront stereotypical perceptions of Native American and First Nations fiber arts and identity. In her first major installation as chief curator at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MOCNA), Dr. Manuela Well-Off-Man challenges viewers to question and reconsider the role of materiality in art and everyday life.

Prior to arriving at MoCNA in 2016, Well-Off-Man served as assistant curator at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Her extensive curatorial experience and knowledge of Native American art is evident in Connective Tissue. Well-Off-Man has brought together 22 artists from throughout the United States and Canada at various stages of their artistic careers.

By placing the work of emerging artists alongside established masters, Well-Off-Man draws our attention to the issues that connect Indigenous communities across space and time.

These issues are underscored through explanatory wall text and a beautifully illustrated exhibition catalogue that features essays by Well-Off-Man; scholar, artist, and curator Lara M. Evans (Cherokee Nation) and curator and IAIA visiting faculty Amber-Dawn Bear Robe (Siksika); English and Native American studies scholar Molly McGlennen (Ojibwe descent); and artist and independent curator Tania Willard (Secwepemc), with an introduction

by MoCNA director Patsy Phillips (Cherokee Nation). As the introductory panel states, this exhibition revives, innovates, and distorts fiber art practices. By engaging natural and

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synthetic materials, the artists subvert colonial narratives and gender roles while emphasizing community values and ancestral knowledge.

This exhibition of contemporary Native fiber arts speaks to Native and non-Native audiences through works that respond to current-day politics and popular culture—a common theme in the mainstream art world. While some of the pieces incorporate recognizable motifs, like the popular app depicted in Navajo weaver Marlowe Katoney’s Angry Birds–Tree of Life (2012) and the insoles from Nike Air Jordan sneakers that Brian Jungen (Dunne-za) stitched together in 27th Street (2016), other pieces address challenges unique to Indigenous communities. Visitors willing to engage with the artwork will learn about the ongoing challenges Native peoples continue to face.

Explanatory wall labels are quite helpful in providing context for conceptual pieces, but that is not the case for all the work. Visitors interested in learning more will benefit from consulting the exhibition catalogue.

The basketry, textiles, sculpture, and mixed-media installations in Connective Tissue celebrate the survival of Indigenous cultures while exposing the ongoing effects of colonization on Native peoples. When visitors walk through the glass doors from MoCNA’s gift shop into the main gallery space, their attention is captivated by Salteaux artist Wally Dion’s vibrant, green, yellow, and red star quilt made out of computer circuit boards. The choice of circuit boards contrasts the feeling of softness and comfort we typically associate with quilts. It also raises awareness of the impact globalization has had on Native American peoples.

Native peoples are increasingly connected with the rest of the world through computers, yet they continue to produce art that is rooted in their communities. Similarly, Kelly Church (Odawa-Ojibwe-Potawatomi) uses natural and synthetic materials such as photos, vinyl blinds, copper, silver, and brass to produce innovative black ash baskets that address the devastation global trade has wrought on her

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community’s natural resources. One of her pieces, Surviving EAB–Fibergé Egg #12, is a response to the 2002 infestation of the emerald ash borer that arrived in Michigan from China through untreated wood pallets. She uses local and introduced materials to highlight the challenges of harvesting black ash and to share her weaving knowledge with future generations. Church’s Treaty Hat (2017), also on display within the entrance to the exhibition, serves as a reminder of the 1836 Treaty of Ottawa that protects her community’s hunting, fishing, and gathering rights.

The hat, which is emblematic of the non-Native colonists who signed the treaty, functions as a poignant transition to other pieces in the exhibition that engage fashion and garments as modes of self-representation.

Ashley Browning (Pojoaque-Santa Clara Pueblos) created Paper Doll to fill a void she experienced as a young girl when dressing paper dolls.

By photographing a friend as the model and giving her interchangeable Pueblo-style garments, Browning rejects non-Native, Western stereotypes of femininity and beauty. Meanwhile, Charlene Vickers (Wauzhushk Onigum Ojibwe) used beer cartons to make moccasins she decorated with Ojibwe beadwork. Vickers, like Browning, makes community-based attire to confront substance abuse and to celebrate her ancestors as symbolically remembered in the moccasins placed in a circle on the gallery floor. Anita Fields (Osage-Muscogee) is another artist who uses unconventional materials to create garment-like pieces that embody cultural beliefs and customs.

She made a mixed-media bust and skirt with text and patterns that represent Osage concepts. Whereas a human face appears in Browning’s Paper Doll, Fields and Vickers present their garments without human figures, calling to mind the dehumanizing effect stereotypes have on Indigenous populations. This exhibition shows that Native artists utilize unique materials to create art that

Kelly Church (Odawa-Ojibwe-Potawatomi), Treaty Hat, 2017, black ash, sweetgrass, copper, white cedar bark, etched birchbark, deer hair, porcupine hair, tobacco, yarn, cloth, Rit dye, treaty with the Ottawa map. Image courtesy of the IAIA Museum of Native Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe.

celebrates their Indigenous heritage.

This approach fits within the shift in exhibition practices that celebrate innovation over the outdated approach of placing Indigenous peoples and their art in the past.

Well-Off-Man strategically placed Meghann O’Brien’s (Haida-Kwakwaka’wakw) Chilkat-style blanket at the end of the exhibition where it reminds visitors that young contemporary artists are vital to the survival and revitalization of ancestral techniques. O’Brien learned the complex Chilkat weaving technique from master weavers Sherri Dick (Haida) and William White (Tsimshian).1 Accomplished performance and multimedia artist Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit-Unangan) also apprenticed with his elders. In his piece, The American Dream Is Alie and Well (2012), Galanin

has replaced the body of a taxidermy polar bear with the American flag and bullets instead of claws to draw our attention to the sense of disenfranchisement Native peoples feel in the United States. Meanwhile, O’Brien’s blanket reminds us that no amount of colonial trauma can separate members of the living Native community from our ancestors.

While some pieces could benefit from explanatory wall text, the curator’s decision to limit lengthy labels also allows the viewer to focus attention on the work and think critically about the messages being visually conveyed.

Connective Tissue is a significant exhibition that provides valuable exposure for young artists and creates a space for raising awareness of the ongoing fight to protect Indigenous rights.

—Yve Chavez, PhD

1. Meghann O’Brien, “Meghann O’Brien,” in Connective Tissue: New Approaches to Fiber in Contemporary Native Art, ed. Manuela Well-Off-Man (Santa Fe: IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art, 2017), 116.

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REPORTS LONDON

American Indian Workshop 2017 Goldsmiths, University of London

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HE 38TH ANNUAL AMERICAN INDIAN WORKSHOP (AIW) convened this year at Goldsmiths, University of London, under the theme “The Art of Resistance and Resurgence.” Over 120 attendees representing numerous European, tribal, and North American nations met for three days of lively interaction and exchange. Thirty-two panels addressed how cultural production in the forms of literature, visual arts, film, and museum display intersects with processes of decolonization.

Celebrated writer Margaret Noodin (Ojibwe descent) was joined by sisters Jill and Julie Doerfler (White Earth Ojibwe) at the opening, and all three offered a song in Anishinaabemowin.

Mike Zimmerman (Pokagon Potawatomi) gave a prayer, also in Anishinaabemowin. Noodin presented the opening keynote, “Miikawaadad Nanaakongaade (Beautiful Resistance): Aapii Mazinibiigejig Anishinaabemowaad (When Artists Speak Anishinaabemowin).”

Many papers contextualized the NO DAPL struggle centered at Standing Rock in relation to a global, Indigenous resurgence focused on land rights and climate change. Roy Boney Jr. (Cherokee Nation) outlined how Cherokee language and history have appeared in graphic novels. Citing Mohawk artist Skawennati’s TimeTraveller™ as an ideal example, Jessica Janssen asserted that new media technologies may be the most efficient means to educate youth and advance Indigenous sovereignty. Fantasia Painter (Salt River Pima-Maricopa) positioned reservation graffiti as “signs of self-fashioning”

Print Action with Roy Boney (Cherokee Nation), front center; Marwin Begaye (Navajo); and Jacob Meders (Maidu), American Indian Workshop. Photo: Candessa Tehee, PhD (Cherokee Nation).

as opposed to derelict marks of gang violence, as hegemonic culture often frames it. Indeed, much graffiti (“Rezs war Alcohol” [sic], “My heroes have always killed cowboys”) reveals poignant and critical awareness of historical trauma and continued effects of colonization.

Nearly 30 artists showed work in conjunction with the AIW. Most of these were printmakers; many attendees responded to Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania, with soil sample from Fort Marion, St. Augustine, Florida (2017) by Emily Arthur (Eastern Band Cherokee descent). Gina Adams (OjibweLakota descent) displayed her Fort Laramie 1851 Broken Treaty Quilt (2017).

Adams wore another quilt in this series while reading part of the treaty during a panel with printmakers Jacob Meders (Maidu) and Marwin Begaye (Navajo).

Bobby Martin (Muscogee Creek) and Tony Tiger (MuscogeeSeminole-Sac & Fox) shared the story of their incredibly successful foray into curating the exhibition Return From Exile, which has been touring the United States for three years. One of the best aspects of smaller conferences is the opportunity for genuine socialization, and a particularly enjoyable event at AIW was the Print Action generously hosted by Begaye, Meders, Martin, Tiger, and Boney, during which the artists screen-printed on paper, bags, shirts, and—once—a briefcase.

One of the most deeply moving parts of the conference was a call-and-response reading of a poem from a recently released chapbook written by LeAnne Howe (Choctaw)

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and Doireann Ní Ghríofa. “Singing, Still: Libretto for the 1847 Choctaw Gift to the Irish for Famine Relief ” was read and sung in Gaelic, Choctaw, and English by Marion Kirwan and Padraig Kirwan.

Another notable and innovative collaboration that unfolded during the AIW (but was not officially connected with the conference) was an interactive work by poet Janet Rogers (Mohawk-Tuscarora) and multimedia artist Jackson 2bears (Mohawk), who created Making Reservations for Future Mohawks by hiding cultural packages throughout London to be discovered later by others in their nation.

The closing keynote by Gerald McMaster (Plains Cree-Blackfoot) addressed the progress made in some Canadian museums to include Indigenous arts and culture into exclusive, dominant narratives.

McMaster was brought in as Fredrik S. Eaton Curator of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2005 to raise the visibility of women and First Nations artists. The artist/curator reminded his audience of our collective responsibility to learn the history and identity of objects and to continue to challenge ethnographic museums about ethics of display and inclusivity.

Padraig Kirwan and David Stirrup did a fantastic job organizing a seamless conference that encouraged interdisciplinary discourse and cordial networking. Readers can stay connected with AIW on Facebook and LinkedIn or subscribe to receive email updates.

The next AIW will be hosted by Ghent University in Belgium, April 2018.

—Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

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PARIS

Gardiens de la Terre (Keepers of the Earth) Orenda International Art

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INCE NOVEMBER 2016, after returning from the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, I wondered how I could share this impressive experience, share the photographs I shot there, and help this protest continue.

Traveling from Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the AIM New Mexico’s van driven by Diné painter Monty Singer, I met some wonderful people who were Water Protectors and artists.

Upon arrival in the Oceti Sakowin Camp, I visited the art tent and realized how art reinforced the power of this historic protest. Banners and flags were everywhere, full of colors and amazing designs. Art was a way to share a message and a peaceful weapon to show the world that what was going on there were contemporary forms of racism and colonization.

Back in Paris, after the evacuation of the camps, I believed that curating an exhibition about Standing Rock would permit French audiences to get a glimpse of what contemporary Native arts can be and how the arts can raise political and social issues. The idea was to show that the movement born at Standing Rock was historic, not only because it brought hundreds of different Native American and First Nations communities together, but also because this movement concerns everyone and needs to be continued with the support of international allies.

The exhibition Gardiens de la Terre (Keepers of the Earth) opened on October 5 at Orenda International Art in Paris. Gallery owners Joëlle and Nicolas Rostkowski made this exhibition possible with the help of their daughter Edith-Laure and the unconditional devotion of the CSIA–Nitassinan, an

association created in 1978 that supports Native American, First Nations, and other Indigenous movements looking for self-determination and rights in the Americas. This show was one of the first in Europe to focus on the artwork created at and about Standing Rock.

The show displayed more than 20 works made by Native American, First Nations, and Chicano contemporary artists.

Christi Belcourt (Michif), Water Is Life— Protect the Sacred (White Buffalo), 2016, digital art based on ink drawing, dimensions variable.

French visitors were introduced to the powerful works in different mediums—drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, and video— made by George Alexander (Muscogee Creek), Ricardo Caté (Kewa), Demian Diné’Yazhi (Zuni-Diné), Jackie Fawn (Yurok-Washoe), Ka’ila Farrell-Smith (Klamath-Modoc), Keith Haines (Mescalero Apache), Dylan Miner (Métis), Erica Pretty Eagle Moore (Osage-Otoe-Missouria-Pawnee-Sac & Fox), Isaac Murdoch (Serpent River Ojibwe), Monty Singer (Diné), Ernesto Yerena Montejano (Chicano), Roben White (Cheyenne-Oglala Lakota), and Cannupa Hanska Luger (MandanArikara-Hidatsa-Lakota), and Christi Belcourt (Michif), profiled in this issue [see page 50].

It was an exceptional occasion to see the works of recognized contemporary Indigenous artists but also a chance to discover less known ones.

Cannupa Hanska Luger, co-creator of the mirror shields used in a performance in intervention at Standing Rock, traveled to Paris for the opening reception. He shared his powerful presentation, “Our Existence is Resistance,” and conducted workshops in collaboration with La Vox des Rroms, an association that supports the Rromani community in France.1 Gardiens de la Terre took place during October, the month dedicated to the celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day. At this occasion, the CSIA-Nitassinan also welcomed Nataanii Means (Oglala LakotaDiné-Omaha), Mike “Witko” Cliff (Oglala Lakota), Tufawon (Dakota) and Alas (Xicana), all Water Protectors who were at Standing Rock. Their hip-hop music tour through Europe, from October to November, begun in France, will cross other countries such as Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, and Switzerland, to end in Bonn, Germany, at COP23, the 2017 UN Climate Change Conference.

To highlight the importance of this event, Bruno Serralongue, an important French contemporary artist who just returned from South Dakota and Louisiana, documented the opening reception through photography.

The artists presented in this exhibition are the Keepers of the Land, of the Water, of the Future. While the protest at Standing Rock is over, this show was an occasion to talk about all the other pipelines against which Indigenous communities are still fighting across the United States and Canada (like the Keystone XL Pipeline).

Finally, it was an occasion to show that the dichotomy between “tradition” and “modernity” is no more relevant as soon as art empowers the universal and timeless capacities of protest.

Mni Wiconi, Water is Life!

—Aurélie Journée

1. The Rromanis come from the eastern part of Europe, mostly from Romania, and are one of the poorest and most discriminated communities there. Rromani youth were very supportive of the Standing Rock protest and shared selfies and messages of love on social networks.

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BOOK REVIEWS

Baskets of Time: Profiles of Maine Indian Basket Makers David Shultz Home & Away Gallery, 2017

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RITTEN FOR AUDIENCES both newly acquainted and familiar with Wabanaki basketry, Baskets of Time: Profiles of Main Indian Basket Makers provides an intimate look at an enduring Indigenous art form.

The Wabanaki Confederacy includes the Abenaki, Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot. These four tribes share the art of brown ash (also known as black ash or Fraxinus nigra) and sweetgrass basketry.

Baskets of Time profiles 17 basketmaking individuals and families and includes an introduction, family trees, a glossary, and a brief but fascinating historical overview of Wabanaki basketry written by Gretchen F. Faulkner, director of the Hudson Museum in Orono.

Faulkner explains how burden baskets and fish traps predate the arrival of Europeans to what is now Maine. Basket making emerged as a major livelihood for the Maine tribes throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, when 90 percent of the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation was involved in basket production. Men

primarily wove sturdy, utilitarian baskets for Maine’s robust potato industry as well as the fish-scale industry. Women wove “fancy baskets” with decorative embellishments.

Photographs of historical tools—an ash splitter, a splint scraper, wooden basketry forms, splint gauges, a sweetgrass braider, and a sweetgrass comb—reveal the complexity and integrality of basket making.

Individual profiles are listed alphabetically, so tribes, genders, and generations are intertwined. The first artist is the recently departed David Moses Bridges, who made small birchbark containers incised with Passamaquoddy symbols but was primarily known for his functioning birch canoes. This begs the question: What is a basket? As a functional enclosure with great aesthetic value, a canoe could indeed be a basket.

Each profile list mentors and protégées. Some of these relationships are within families, but some span different tribes. Most of the artists work in brown ash and sweetgrass, but others work in cedar bark, antler, and birch.

Shultz explains, “One of the themes most often mentioned was the deep gratitude younger artists felt toward the generations of basket makers who kept the art alive through many decades of adversity, poverty, and racism, and for the living artists who generously shared basket-making knowledge with them.”

These weaving mentors include Clara Neptune Keezer, Sylvia Gabriel, Theresa Neptune Gardner, Madeline Shay, and Molly Neptune Parker.

The Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance (MIBA), cofounded by Kathleen Mundell, folklorist for the Maine Art Commission, and Theresa Secord (Penobscot), who served as the first director, played a major role in reviving interest in basketry, which has had far-reaching effects beyond the art world. Throughout the book, Shultz uses the term basket maker instead of basket weaver, because weaving is only a small part of the lengthy process of basket making. Fred Tomah (Maliseet) describes making canoe trips as a youth to scout out good basket trees in the forests, a challenge in itself. Once an appropriately tall tree with a straight

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trunk has been spotted, usually several people harvest the tree and drag the log out of the forest, then with a dull axe head or other blunt tool, a strong individual pounds the ash splints apart. Then the splints are scraped down to a fine thinness. If they are to be dyed, dyestuffs must be gathered and processed, then the splints soak in dyebaths. When the prepared splints are ready for weaving, they must be soaked to maintain suppleness. Sweetgrass, which must also be harvested, cleaned, and dried, can be braided and integrated.

Baskets of Time caters to the visual learner, especially with family tree charts.

Four Color Planet designed the polished layout. Shultz shot most of the abundant and gorgeous photographs of the baskets and artists. Other, earlier photographs of elder basket makers lend the book the air of a beloved family album.

The incredible diversity the artists achieve in their baskets celebrates the versatility of the natural materials. One can also appreciate these as sculptural forms. The materials are culturally significant and bind the community together and to their ancestral homelands. While the basket makers have moved in many directions, they are all grounded in core concepts.

Throughout the book, the author’s voice is transparent. David Shultz doesn’t insert himself into the narrative but instead places the artist in the fore. The level of trust between the basket makers and Shultz is strong, as evidenced by several candid accounts of how basketry was integral to battling addiction and achieving sobriety.

While basketry is the focus, the significance of Indigenous languages is mentioned. Sadly, Madeline Tomer Shay, one of the profiled elder basket makers, was the last fluent speaker of Penobscot, but Malecite-Passamaquoddy and Mi’kmaq are still spoken. Specialized words encoded knowledge about plants and techniques; language revival and basketry energize each other.

Of course, what the book cannot provide is the aroma of Wabanaki baskets—the healing scents of ash splints, sweetgrass, or birch from woods and wetlands—so the next step would be to go out and experience Wabanaki basketry firsthand. —America Meredith

BOOK REVIEWS

Colonized through Art: American Indian Schools and Art Education, 1889–1915 Marinella Lentis University of Nebraska Press, 2017

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N STUDIES OF COLONIZATION, one often encounters a lot of jargon. In Colonized through Art, Marinella Lentis provides a fresh perspective on colonialism in an American Indian context without using technical language. When Lentis earned her doctoral degree at Arizona State University in American Indian Studies, her dissertation was titled “Art Education in American Indian Boarding Schools: Tool of Assimilation, Tool of Resistance.”

In this book’s introduction, Lentis delineates the theory and practice she uses to understand the colonialist terms of art education as a “civilizing” effect on young American Indian students throughout the United States. Two concepts derived from anthropologists and social theorists serve Lentis well in her discussion of the techniques used to assimilate Native Americans by means of education at the turn of the 20th century. First, non-Indian educators colonized the consciousness of Indian

children through art education. Second, these administrators and teachers produced a hegemonic pedagogy, or teaching strategy, to motivate American Indian students to want to mimic the actions of whites.

Lentis divides her argument into three parts. She first discusses the art curriculum in American Indian schools and Native arts and crafts within the course of study as proposed by education commissioners and superintendents. The purpose of art classes was to indoctrinate the children within a “fine” art or Eurocentric perspective.

Rules involving drawing in particular emphasized white standards of beauty.

Superintendent of Indian Schools Estelle Reel, however, suggested the adaptation of Indian artistry to the plan of study. She suggested the employment of American Indian women to teach children, particularly Indian girls: basketry, weaving, and pottery techniques.

In the next two chapters, the author concentrates on two examples of schools that implemented the cultural policies of the Office of Indian Affairs: the Albuquerque Indian School (AIS), and Sherman Institute in Riverside, California. The AIS taught drawing with an emphasis on mechanical and industrial uses. While Diné students used chairs as looms for weaving rugs on their own time, the AIS actively discouraged the teaching of American Indian arts and crafts. While experiencing a high turnover rate in principals of the school, most of these heads of school opposed instruction in Native arts. In spite or because of the celebrated weaver Elle of Ganado (Navajo, 1850–1924), her husband and freighter Tom Ganado (Navajo), and Native artists who sold their rugs and silver jewelry at the train station in downtown Albuquerque, the Albuquerque Indian School distanced itself from including Native American art instruction.

Sherman Institute encouraged students to develop their study of Native American arts and crafts. These educators saw the benefit of selling Native American baskets, rugs, and pottery to tourists. Teachers at Sherman transformed the handiwork of young American Indians into items for sale.

The course of study included Native arts only while Chief Wilson Tawaquaptewa (Hopi, ca. 1873–1960) visited between the years of 1907 and 1909. The leaders of the school wrote about the inclusion of “Indian” designs within basket weaving without specific tribal designations.

This “inclusion” contributed to the development of a pan-Indian influence in the children’s lives.

Lentis concludes her argument in the last two chapters with a discussion of Indian school exhibits at both art expositions and Indian education conventions. In these chapters, the author ponders the effect of still-life drawings by Indian students and Native American arts and crafts in exhibits throughout the nation.

Wild West shows and the meticulous technical skill that went into the crafting of American Indian rugs, baskets, and pottery drew mainstream crowds more than the Indian children’s drawings of the American flag and still lifes of fruit, which proved emulation of white civilization. The difference between these fairs and Indian educational conventions consisted in the type of audience. Even at the meetings of the National Education Association, observers engaged more with the artwork when it featured Indian themes compared to when it had European themes of “fine” art.

Winnebago artist Angel De Cora (1871–1919), a graduate of Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute and Smith College and the art teacher at Carlisle Indian Industrial School during this time, curated most of the Indianthemed exhibits. Her role emphasized a softening of the rules against tribalcentered artistic expression.

Lentis has an excellent eye for gleaning information from the historical photographs. Her methods and interpretive strategies consist of carefully thought-out observations of representations of the Native and European-themed drawings and other visual arts, along with a number of printed materials from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and Superintendent of Indian Schools that had been given to the principals of the various Indian boarding and day schools.

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BOOK REVIEWS

The author also brings her arguments in line with other scholarship about the value of art courses in a public school curriculum during this time period. The added emphasis in her writing and research consists of recognizing the cultural difference children of various tribes brought to the Indian boarding and day school experiences. This book proves essential to academic study emphasizing colonial attitudes in Indian education in the 1890s and early 20th century.

—Neal McDonald Hampton

Oaxacan Stories in Cloth: A Book About People, Belonging, Identity, and Adornment Eric Sebastian Mindling Thrums, 2016

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ERPETUATING THE MYTH of the “Vanishing Indian” is a danger inherent in a book like Oaxaca Stories in Cloth: A Book about People, Belonging, Identity, and Adornment. Titling the sections “Living Threads” and “Last Generation” doesn’t help. Nor does front material that, while it extols the Oaxacans’ “ancient, living culture” describes it in the next sentence as “this vanishing world.” Fortunately, the overall book gives voice and image to actual Oaxacan weavers, who are very much alive and whose artistry is prevalent enough to be in constant danger—not of “vanishing” but of being

appropriated by mainstream designers.

The book features over a hundred full-color, full-page portraits accompanied by vignettes about the weavers and textiles pictured. In all, the book represents 151 people and 57 villages, and Eric Mindling points out that even more live in this region.

Mindling is a photographer, writer, and tour guide who has lived in Oaxaca since 1992. He describes in the preface how he used elements of commercial photography such as lighting and computer touch-ups to create portraits of the weavers of Oaxaca “mainly to give people who have been told for five hundred years that they are worthless a reflection of themselves through eyes that see their great worth.”

Mindling writes that he discussed the purpose of the project in public and individual meetings with all the people he photographed. All were compensated for their time, and he hand-delivered professionally printed photographs to them after he finished the project.

For much of history, Indigenous arts such as textiles have been recorded without the names of their makers. The vignettes in the book, combined with the photographs, attempt to individualize the weavers who produce the famous Oaxacan textiles. They combine Mindling’s poetic description and narration with interviews, and for the most part they avoid sentimentality and nostalgia. The knowledge of the weavers is deeply respected, and the effects of modern history, such as the loss of land to reservoirs in the 1950s, is as much a focus as ancient artistic practices. In the vignettes, Mindling situates himself as a grateful outsider rather than falling into the patronizing voice that is a danger with this type of book.

But the rich inner material is preceded by a problematic foreword

by Martín Prechtel. According to his web page, Prechtel is “a leading thinker, writer, and teacher in the search for the Indigenous soul in all people.”

He leads workshops that attempt to help people of all ethnicities and backgrounds find their “Indigenous soul.” According to other biographical information online, he was raised on a Pueblo reservation (though it doesn’t

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specify which one). His mother is described as “First Nations Canadian” (no specific nation given) who taught at the reservation school, and his father was a Swiss paleontologist. In his twenties, he traveled to Mexico and then to Guatemala where—stop me if you’ve heard this one—he met a shaman who claimed that he had seen Prechtel in visions and that he was meant to carry on the ancient shamanic ways of the Tz’utujil Maya. For several years, Prechtel trained with the shaman, married, and had children. He returned to the United States during Guatemala’s civil war, and he now lives and teaches in New Mexico.

Needless to say, it is problematic that his, rather than a Oaxacan’s, is the voice to introduce the book. Prechtel writes, “Eric Mindling reminds us he is not an anthropologist or any kind of textile expert, implying of course that he is an artist …” Prechtel writes, “great artists … make gifts, gifts of grief-derived beauty to liberate, infuse, and above all nourish, not themselves, but what they love.”

The grief from which Prechtel contends that Mindling’s photographs derive is for the vanishing Oaxacan connection to the “indigenosity,” which Prechtel writes is “a spiritual thing that cannot be killed, nor does it really disappear … .” And, he goes on to write, “A person’s teemingly complex indigenousness is visible only from the cultural vacuum of a nonindigenous viewpoint.” Did he really just say that only non-Indigenous people can see indigeneity, implying that if Indigenous people notice it in themselves, they must not have it? He did.

Mindling explains that the weavers represent the diversity of Oaxaca: “On the whole, these images capture expressions of creative genius, collective wisdom, and unity that represent some of our most valuable human traits. The individuals portrayed here are representatives of the shared heritage of their communities. Together, the photographs and text create a symphony of human diversity, uniqueness, and union.”

Ultimately, the book does indeed create that symphony, despite its problematic framing.

—Stacy Pratt, PhD

MUSIC REVIEW

MUSIC NEW YORK

Buffy Sainte-Marie, A Tribe Called Red, and Iskwé Rumsey Playfield, Central Park

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decades, she also sang a few from the ’60s and ’70s with equal impact. She did not record from 1976 to 1992 when she was supposedly blacklisted by the authority of the FBI, as were other Native and activist-artists. Her set list included many of her stirring classics like “Universal Soldier” and “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.”

“Until It’s Time for You to Go,” she proclaimed, was Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s song. Elvis and many other well-known artists sang it, making it one of her most famous compositions. I love this song because it balances simplicity, profundity haunting sentimentalism, and staunch realism. The opening lines are “You’re not a dream/You’re not an angel/You’re a woman/I’m not a king/I’m a man/Take my hand/ We’ll make a space/In the lives that we planned/And here we’ll stay/Until it’s time for you to go.” In just one stanza she shatters our illusions of stereotypical romantic fantasy and undying devotion, perhaps to a dying partner and evokes a widespread human experience.

She ended the concert with an encore and sang the powerful “Starwalker,” which she originally recorded in 1976 on Sweet America, as well as her 1992 comeback album, Coincidence and Likely Stories. Its chorus is well known, and I cannot imagine it not sending shivers up and down the spines of all who were there that evening.

As I left at the end of the show, it was clear everyone felt as though they had experienced something inspiring and life affirming—a defiant spirit that we all carried with us into the night.

—Thollem

A Tribe Called Red. Photo: Thollem.

ENTRAL PARK SummerStage hosted a concert of three Canadian First Nations popular acts: Iskwé (Cree-Dene), A Tribe Called Red (Nipissing, Mohawk, and Cayuga) and Buffy Sainte-Marie (Cree). Joyful anticipation ran through the crowd of 3,000 people leading up to this free concert.

Iskwé opened with electronic dance songs that mix influences of her Cree and Irish identities. Iskwé , her adopted name, means Blue Sky Women in Cree. With her formidable voice and stage presence, accompanied by a violinist, keyboardist, and drummer, she sang of Native and female empowerment. Though her songs are written, introduced, and performed with great conviction, I’d love to hear her lyrics developed further.

She ended her set with an homage to missing Indigenous women called “Nobody Knows.”

A Tribe Called Red hypnotized us with beats and video, a raucous celebration of existence as a revolutionary act and resistance to cultural appropriation. Based in Ottawa, the group consists of Ian “DJ NDN” Campeau (Nipissing), Ehren “Bear Witness” Thomas (Cayuga), and Tim “2oolman” Hill (Mohawk) who replaced original member Dan “DJ Shub” General (Cayuga) in 2014. As soon as the trio’s needles touched the vinyl, the entire audience was on their feet in ecstatic solidarity. They were an imposing force of fun and played tracks off their three albums: A Tribe Called Red (2012), Nation II Nation (2013), and We Are The Halluci Nation (2016), leaving it all on the stage and in the molecules of our bodies, setting it up

perfectly for Buffy and her band to take the stage as the sun set on the horizon.

The evening was stylistically eclectic, yet each set complemented the other. I couldn’t help but think it would have been interesting to hear the sets in opposite order. Anyone who knows Buffy Sainte-Marie knows what an indelible influence she’s been on musicians and popular music for the past five decades. If they had scheduled her first, then A Tribe Called Red and Iskwé would have performed in the immediate context of all she represents and in which these younger performers have developed. Of course, this is not a criticism but a curatorial fantasy; it was also perfect the way it was.

Buffy Sainte-Marie is one of the greatest and most under-appreciated songwriters of the past fifty years. Her songs have been sung by the likes of Willie Nelson, Johnnie Mathis, Barbara Streisand, Neko Case, Helen Reddy, Neil Diamond, Roberta Flack, Janice Joplin, Elvis Presley, Joe Cocker, and many more. Her songs have that rare ability to be equally timeless and timely, and they deeply explore what it means to be human. With glowing warmth and charm, she is committed to everything she expresses before, during, and after each song—whether it’s about romantic love, the military-industrial complex, spirituality, or philosophy. She sings about her accomplishments as shared experiences that she clearly believes help lift everyone’s lives. She reminded us “we are only here by the skin of our teeth” as she sang “Carry It On.” Though Sainte-Marie sang mostly songs from albums of the last three

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ART + LITERATURE: OJIBWE ACTOR & POET

MARY BLACK

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

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SOCIAL WORKER based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Mary Black has emerged as a powerful voice for justice.

In October 2015, Black recorded and posted her slam poem “Quiet” on social media. Several weeks later, the poem had garnered hundreds of thousands of views. “Quiet” emerges from Black’s refusal to stay silent on the complex experiences of Indigenous women. She wrote and recorded the poem in response to media reports of domestic violence in Winnipeg. Since the video was first posted online, it has spread through widening circles of diverse audiences. In 2016, Black performed “Quiet” at the IWW Cabaret of Monologues: Stolen Sisters, hosted by Sarasvàti Productions for International Women’s Week.

MRS: Where did your journey into writing poetry begin?

MB: I began writing when I was very young and used it as a tool to cope with the difficult life that I lived. I truly believe that if I didn’t have writing and performance, I would be dead. It was a method of release for me that helped me to cope with abuse, addictions, violence, sexual assault, and many of the other things I witnessed and experienced while growing up Indigenous in Winnipeg.

What philosophy drives your spoken word poetry and hip-hop performance workshops?

Art can save our people. Not just Indigenous, but all people—and what I teach is healthy coping mechanisms through art, such as spoken word poetry or the development of music.

Everybody needs an outlet. I know, I would be dead if I didn’t have mine!

Regardless of age, race, or any horrific event that has ever happened to an

individual—or any horrible crime they committed—they are capable of healing. We are all capable of happiness, of love, of peace with the self, and forgiveness. And I believe the greatest starting point on that journey of healing is finding an outlet.

Where have your workshops taken you, and what do you hope to achieve through them?

I have been all over the place. Mostly in communities in and surrounding Manitoba and Ontario. If I can help just one person, I have done what I am here to do. The greatest gifts on this journey have been the messages of hope that I get from people. Young people, elders, people who survived residential school—the list goes on and on. I can’t believe the strength of the people who have reached out to me and the lives they’ve endured. Their message is what keeps me going and fighting the good fight.

Who is your audience?

Everybody! I write for the uneducated, the educated, the poor, the rich, the sick, the healthy, the weak, the addicts, and those on their journey of sobriety.

I write to tell my story and to speak for those who cannot. Mainly I write to educate and raise awareness for people who are unaware of Canada’s true history and the current condition of our Indigenous communities. I believe art is a method of bridging a gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, and helps us to communicate efficiently and effectively.

What, if anything, do you struggle with when writing?

The only things I really struggle with are barriers. I want my message to be delivered to all in a way that is

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inoffensive, because if somebody feels offended by what I write or the message I am sending, many times they will just stop listening or shut it off. I struggle to find ways to get the messages across—messages that are often heavy and painful—in a way that is not going to hurt people or offend them. But with my most recent poem, I took a risk and I wrote it in a very aggressive and challenging way. That poem was directed toward Indigenous men, and there have been many mixed responses to it.

Since it was first uploaded in 2016, your slam poem “Quiet” has garnered hundreds of thousands of hits online.

It was written and recorded in less than an hour, yet it continues to touch people well over a year later.

This is a powerful work that derives from a place of anger and frustration and suffering. Can you tell me where “Quiet” emerged from and why you chose to write, record, and post it?

Honestly, I just needed to vent. I was very upset about another young Indigenous mother who had been murdered by her partner, and she had asked for a no-contact order but was denied. These stories are all too common for Indigenous peoples, and I believe these deaths are preventable.

But many times, corruption within the system leads to such tragic outcomes.

I wrote it as a rant. I didn’t edit it at all.

I just wrote it, recorded it once, and uploaded it. I didn’t realize at the time that it would have gotten the attention that it did.

Can you talk about how you translate anger into art?

It is impossible within a society such as this, with thousands of missing

ART + LITERATURE

and murdered Indigenous people, with violence, addictions, disease, and suicide plaguing our communities, homes, and families, to not feel angry.

Anger lives in us all and it must be handled in a way that is not destructive or toxic. I myself was stuck in destructive cycles of anger using drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism. With art, you are able to take the anger you feel and create something positive and beautiful from it. I use my voice, so instead of yelling or screaming, I can project my words and use my diaphragm to deliver a message to the world. I can use my body to tell a story instead of smashing something. The anger is still released, it is still coming out, but now instead of being destructive it has been given a purpose.

Social media has been an effective means of reaching out to Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences with your poetry. Why do you choose social media to present your poetry and music?

Social media is an effective way of reaching out to our young people who do not otherwise have access to resources. When I was young and I was a lost child, I turned to the media to figure out who I was supposed to be and wound up receiving all the wrong messages and directions. There are 11,000 children in care, 85 percent of which are Indigenous [in Manitoba, alone]. If those children do not have supportive families or access to stories, teachings, or positive role models, social media is a perfect way to reach those young people and possibly even save lives.

What are the differences between reading a poem online and publishing a poem on a blank page? What is lost, what is gained?

I believe what is gained by viewing a poem online or in a video is the message can be delivered exactly the way you want it to. You can use your voice and your body to create a

Mary Black. Image courtesy of the poet.

story and tell it exactly in the way you envisioned it. What is gained from reading a poem is the reader can create the pictures in their mind. The words of the author create the outline but the reader creates his/her own picture and can take what he/she chooses to.

As an actor, your performance of slam poetry reconciles two of your interests, acting and poetry. How does acting influence your poetry practice (and vice versa)?

Acting has given me tools to create and tell a story with my entire being—my body, my mind, my heart, my voice, the words—I can capture the true depth of every emotion within the story because of my experience as an actor, and bring to life the love, the sadness, the joy, the despair. The tools I have from acting are what give birth to the beauty in the poetry.

What have you been writing lately?

Do you have any projects planned?

Well, I just play it by ear. I believe the Universe brings the right situations, events, and people into your life at the right time, and I trust Creator has a plan bigger than what I can see in this moment. I recently wrote a poem challenging Indigenous men to stand with women and beside women on issues such as domestic violence and what society refers to as “women’s issues,” and that poem has garnered a lot of attention as well, with over 80,000 views. I wrote it in an aggressive and challenging way, on purpose, and it has gotten very mixed responses. Some are beautiful, some are angry, some are cruel, some are compassionate, and some are downright life changing. I am looking forward to the potential partnership with a couple different resource centers for youth in my city: one that works with homeless youth and another that works with students seeking their post-secondary education. That would be very exciting!

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ART + LITERATURE

Quiet I will not be quiet we, as Indigenous women, have too much to lose to exist in silence while our people drown themselves in booze Trying to erase the memory of a damaged generation but it’s easier to stay quiet than to heal an entire nation so we suffer

April Holder (Sac & Fox-Wichita-Tonkawa), A Day in the Life, 2016, acrylic, embroidery floss, archival glue on panel. Image courtesy of the artist.

APRIL HOLDER (Sac & Fox-Wichita-Tonkawa) is a painter and mixed-media artist based in Shawnee, Oklahoma. She earned her BFA degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and taught studio arts at Sinte Gleska University in Mission, South Dakota.

She has shown throughout the United States and in Italy, and her work garnered the 2014 Power Award and the 2011 Purchase Award at the Red Cloud Indian Art Show in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Holder’s first solo exhibition, April Holder: Full Spectrum, is on display at the Sioux Indian Museum at 222 New York Street. Rapid City, South Dakota, through January 18, 2018.

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I will not be quiet our families were forced to keep their mouths closed and until we choose to speak the outside world cannot begin to know how deeply and badly we still feel the pain How the patterns strain my brain leave me feeling insane cuz I carry a world of hurt on my shoulders and the heaviness only increases as I get older So I will not be quiet or try to hide the cycles of repetition that our families and communities have been perpetually living in I refuse to carry the guilt or the shame from being sexually abused by the system in place that was created with the intention of ‘keeping us safe’ No I will not shut up And I will not sit down until our 1,200 missing sisters are found, I will scream I will scream and I will yell because they have been silenced I will fight this silent battle with our women against violence And the most violent or benevolent being could not keep me from speaking the true meaning of “Free” I will not be quiet As the system steals our babies and keeps us living with less The genocide isn’t over, it just has a new name—C.F.S. When they told us they’d keep us safe, they lied If this was the case—then WHY? Why are there so many suicides?

Why did my best friend suffer so deeply inside that he felt the need to take his own life When he hadn’t even lived yet

ART + LITERATURE

Why do our parents carry so much regret Why has so much damage come to our women Why, at the age of 12, did I become a victim of sexual assault And not just me, but so many of my friends and my family Women and girls who are beautiful beyond explanation—their bodies to become used and abused, Just another violation on an Indigenous Woman See, the system was designed to have us take our own lives To keep the blood stained hands of the guilty clean And keep the death on the hands of our children and our babies And as long as we are idle and silent Our children will keep dying because they are surrounded by violence Violence and addictions—confused by the abuse And how badly they must hurt, to want to tie a noose around their neck or stick a gun to their head when at the same time some children lay peacefully in their beds while our babies are dying While our children are crying Until we speak and stand up as a family we are going to keep losing our girls to the streets And our lives will be conquered by the blood that we see and instead of the knowledge our children will seek to erase the history of our grandparents deceased Who died enraged at the people that we would turn out to be Because without our knowledge, our stories and our traditions, we have become the ones who cage us in this Hell that we are living in.

April Holder (Sac & Fox-Wichita-Tonkawa), String Theory #4, 2016, acrylic, embroidery floss, archival glue on panel. Image courtesy of the artist.

So no. I will not be quiet —Mary Black WINTER 2017/18 | 89

SPOTLIGHT

NAVAJO ELDER WAITING Navajo artist Monty Little’s painting honors elders and the need to give them good care. The exquisitely wrinkled skin of these valuable persons bears a rich, visual metaphor akin to their stories.

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INÉ ELDERS take a frontand-center presence in much of Monty Little’s work. His fascination equally stems from their intricate faces, hair, and expressions, and their participation in and transmission of Navajo language, ceremonies, and songs.1 In his “glitch” paintings, like Navajo Elder Waiting, Little comments on the denigrating misinformation that pervasively undermines the social status of seniors within their own Indigenous communities.

A second-year Tulsa Artist Fellow, Little, originally from Tuba City, Arizona, uses a glitch style to engage powerful narratives that question the motives and outcomes of interferences and interactions between generations within Indigenous cultures. Inspired by the aesthetics of paused VHS tapes, this style serves as a bridge between Little’s memories of the past and present. The artist’s compositions also create a space for him to ruminate on the video titles from his family’s collection and the ways his video-watching experiences during this particular time and place intersect with his current art practice.

Little cites some of his artistic influences as Neo Rauch, Francis Bacon, Brad Kahlhamer (Native American descent), Kei Imazu, and Kent Monkman (Cree).

SHOWN FROM AUGUST 25 through September 22, 2017, at the FaraHNHeight Fine Art gallery in Taos, New Mexico, Navajo Elder Waiting marks the beginning of a new series for Little. In this work, he refers to the older man’s skin as “drapery on his face.” This statement implies

that the artist locates beauty in this ornate texture and is just one of many phrases that Little conjures to show his overt respect and concern for his elders, in direct relation to how they are portrayed in his paintings. The artist holds a deep appreciation for their wisdom earned through experiences in earlier times. Keenly aware of the important knowledge they carry, Little looks up to older tribal members and highly values any teachings shared by them. Elders “hold a lot of information,” he explains.

Thus, the parallel between the artist’s subjects and the VHS tapes begins to make itself much more apparent. In following this line of thinking, the fragmented, linear glitches become the artist’s visual representations of community members’ misperceptions of their elders, reflecting two of Little’s main concerns: that older generations are being dismissed as irrelevant within their cultures and that communities are not honoring their knowledge.

Through Navajo Elder Waiting, the artist points to the inevitable aging of humans, calling attention to their temporality in this world. By highlighting the fleetingness of life on Earth, Little asks for viewers of this painting to give this venerable Navajo man some of their time.

The artist sketches his portraits in Photoshop in order to think through their forms clearly. This digital platform functions as a mock-up space where Little experiments with composition and places the glitches as defacing interventions within his portraits. At the completion of this study phase, Little prints a template and uses it as a guide to

OPPOSITE: Monty Little, Navajo Elder Waiting, 2017, oil on board, 18 x 18 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

implement each painting. In his process, the artist covers the painting support with layers of gesso, which he follows by a sanding process and the application of oil paint. The result yields smooth and rough patches in the surface of the painting, which, according to Little, gives his portraits more identity.

During his time at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Little began to focus on the narration of his paintings. As a BFA double major in creative writing in poetry and studio arts in printmaking and painting, he created works based in visual language and accompanied them with a surreal style of lyricism. This gave way to a meditative place for the artist to consider multiple levels of meaning that continue to be available for reinterpretation as time passes and his life conditions change.

Little describes the city of Tulsa as offering “lots of energy.” For the past two years as a Tulsa Artist Fellow, he has been able to make art during eight to ten hours of most days. Little enjoys the camaraderie of the fellowship and finds himself working harder as an effect of being around other renowned artists from the region and other parts of the United States. In 2018, Little will begin his third year in residence as a Tulsa Artist Fellow.

—Michelle Lanteri

1. All information obtained from a September 15, 2017, interview with Monty Little and September 23, 2017, email from Monty Little.

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SPOTLIGHT

It is difficult now to speak of reflections of myself. It is not precisely the question of clarity,

While, oiled hair nestles in a cylindrical throat of a rifle and singes to whispers in a darkened treeline.

until now.

Each second weakens the minute,

A clock’s muted ticking is the length of a prayer,

and I find myself tracing tracer fire over rooftop motifs.

adjacent to the argument of gunfire in a person’s peripheral.

A blind boy is left turning pages backwards while people sleep with their heads facing north.

One would have to tell what happens of an immediate morning,

Outside is a season of absence

the vibrating floor, dust building and escaping, while the neighbor’s house crumbles towards my feet,

It’s unquestionable—the city’s warm breath, heat that whistles the tea kettle’s trajectory of mortar fire on grandma’s stove.

a whole city glistening of brass, war, infertile of winters.

—Monty Little WINTER 2017/18 | 91

MEMORIAL

DON TENOSO October 16, 1960–August 12, 2017

Don Tenoso with three of his dolls, Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC, 1992. Image courtesy of the author.

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ONALD BLAINE TENOSO (Hunkpapa Lakota, enrolled at Cheyenne River) died suddenly in August. He was a descendant of Sitting Bull through the One Bull family and he was an award-winning artist who created culturally specific dolls and lectured widely on Lakota culture and art.

He enjoyed the challenge of working with such diverse materials as hide, horsehair, glass beads, quills, bone, and

metal to create clothing, jewelry, and regalia.

Born in 1960, Don moved often because of his father’s military service.

He studied at the University of New Mexico and the Institute of American Indian Arts before moving east in the 1980s. In the early 1990s, he moved to Washington, DC, initially as the first Native American artist-in-residence at the National Museum of Natural

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History (NMNH) and then for a series of consultations with the Smithsonian Institution. In 1992 he was commissioned to create his Iktomi (Trickster) puppet for the collection. He was also the first artist-in-residence at Native American House of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005.

Tenoso’s work is in many public collections, including the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, Journey Museum in Rapid City, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, and the British Museum in London. His art traveled in exhibitions such as Gifts of the Spirit: Works by Nineteenth-Century and Contemporary Native American Artists (1996–97), Lost and Found Traditions: Native American Art, 1965–1985 (1986), and Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 2 (2006) that featured his One Bull Chess Set, whose theme was the Battle of the Little Bighorn during which his great-great-grandfather fought General George Custer.

“As a Lakota doll artist, I have used both traditional and nontraditional themes in my dolls, drawing from my experience with my own and other Native cultures. I see beauty in the enduring nature of our traditions in transition. We have gone from hunting buffalo to raising them, from a pre-horse society to a horsepower society, from craft to art, but still the roots of our traditions in transition thrive,” Tenoso shared in 2005.

He was preceded in death by his beloved wife, Gaye L. Tenoso (Citizen Potawatomi), an attorney with the Justice Department and tireless advocate for tribal rights. He is survived by his parents, Cecilia Rose Tenoso and Paul Tenoso Sr., siblings Paul Tenoso Jr., and Deborah Sharpfish Rock, daughters Chanté and Olówan, and many family and friends.

—Christina E. Burke

MEMORIAL

TONY HUNT JR. December 4, 1961–October 12, 2017

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NTHONY EUGENE HUNT JR. was born into and left this world from Victoria, British Columbia, but he kept ties to his family’s ancestral home of Tsaxis, or Fort Rupert. He was from the Kwagu’ł branch of the Kwakwaka’wakw people.

His family stands out as formidable master carvers, even in a region of exemplary woodcarvers. His father Tony Hunt Sr. was a carver, as was his grandfather Henry Hunt, and his great-grandfather Mungo Martin (1879–1962). Martin’s stepfather was Charlie James (ca. 1867–1937), and James and Martin are credited with keeping Kwakwaka’wakw carving alive during its darkest days and innovating styles that continue to influence carvers today.

Tony Hunt Sr. inherited the title of chief through his mother Helen Hunt’s familial lines. It was hoped that Tony Hunt Jr. would follow in his father’s footsteps to serve as chief to his community. Tony Jr. was initiated into the Hamatsa society and was active in potlatching, and danced with the Kwa Gulth Dance Group.

Even though his life was cut short by illness, Tony Hunt Jr. led a full life as a Northwest Coast artist. “He was a brilliant, talented, humble young man and loved by his family,” the artist’s uncle and dear friend, Stan Hunt, told the Times Colonist. “He made a huge contribution to the art world.”

The young man was exposed to woodcarving through his father and two uncles, Stan and Richard, and began carving in earnest at the age of thirteen. His father, who has carved more than one hundred totem poles, opened a gallery and workshop, Arts of the Raven, in Victoria. Through a special arrangement with his high school, Tony Jr. split his school days

between academic courses and carving cedar in his father’s studio.

Hunt and his relatives carved the first Big House to stand in Fort Rupert in seventy years. He primarily carved masks, with bold colors and strikingly expressive eyes and mouths.

He first exhibited his artwork at the Legacy Ltd. in Seattle in 1978 and was part of historic events such as Expo 86 in Vancouver and Chiefly Feasts: The Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch, which traveled to the Royal BC Museum, the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).

For the 1991 opening of Chiefly Feasts at AMNH in New York, Tony Hunt Jr. carved a ’Namgis Sea Monster mask that was danced by fellow Kwakwaka’wakw sculptor Kevin Cranmer. The extraordinary mask, with copper eyelids that can open and close, now resides in the permanent collection of the Royal BC Museum.

Tony Jr. also carved monumental totem poles. He collaborated with his father to carve the Hosaqami pole that replaced the pole his father carved with Mungo Martin in 1959. Hosaqami was installed at the Government House in Victoria facing the Salish Sea. Most recently, Tony Jr. carved a pole for the Vancouver Island School of Art in 2013, one at the First Metropolitan United Church in 2014, and one at Quadra Elementary School in honor of its 100th birthday in 2015.

After an illness, Hunt passed away at the Royal Jubilee Hospital.

Hunt is survived by his adult son Bryan and ten-year-old son Robert.

Elaine Monds, director of Alcheringa Gallery, set up a GoFundMe campaign in memorial of Hunt to create a trust fund for the artist’s youngest son.

“Tony’s imagination was populated by the many spirits of his Kwakwaka’wakw ancestry,” Monds

Tony Hunt Jr. (Kwakwaka’wakw, 1961–2017) and George Wilson Jr. (Nuu-chah-nulth), Quadra Pole, 2015, cedar, paint, installed at Quadra Elementary School, Victoria.

wrote on the memorial campaign’s page. “These could be seen to greatest advantage within the plethora of masks that appeared from his hand as if by magic.”

—America Meredith WINTER 2017/18 | 93

CALENDAR

CALENDAR November 1, 2017–February 25, 2018: Bristol, UK Native Color at Rainmaker Gallery, 123 Coldharbour +44 117 944 3101 | rainmakerart.co.uk November 3, 2017–July 1, 2018: Phoenix, AZ Awa Tsireh: Pueblo Painter Metalsmith at the Heard Museum, 2301 N. Central Avenue | (602) 252-8840 | heard.org November 10, 2017–January 6, 2018: New York, NY Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound at the National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center, One Bowling Green (212) 514-3700 | nmai.si.edu November 10, 2017–January 28, 2018: Indianapolis, IN Native Art Now! at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 500 W. Washington Street | (317) 636-9378 | eiteljorg.org November 10, 2017–February 4, 2018: Seattle, WA Alison Marks: One Gray Hair at the Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Avenue (206) 622-9250 | fryemuseum.org

appraisals for Insurance, Estates, Donations, Divorce Identification of Items • Inventory of Collections appraisals of rugs, basketry, pottery, jewelry, paintings, sculpture, graphics

Leona M. Zastrow, PhD 505-466-8581 ✠ epicinc@earthlink.net americanindianartappraising.com

November 10, 2017–June 24, 2018: Portland, OR Interwoven Radiance at the Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Avenue (503) 226-2811 | portlandartmuseum.org November 11, 2017–February 28, 2018: Oklahoma City, OK In Their Element: a Showcase of Native Photographers at Exhibit C, 1 E. Sheridan Avenue, Suite 100. Opening: Saturday, November 11, 2:00 to 5:00 pm | (405) 767-8900 | exhibitcgallery.com November 11, 2017–March 4, 2018: Albuquerque, NM Spirit Lines: Helen Hardin Etchings at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, 2401 12th Street NW | (505) 843-7270 | indianpueblo.org November 14, 2017–April 1, 2018: Paris, France Before the Incas: Gods and Kings in Ancient Peru at the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, 37 Quai Branly | +33 1 56 61 70 00 | quaibranly.fr November 16, 2017–May 27, 2018: Cartersville, GA Zoë Urness: Keeping the Traditions Alive at the Booth Western Art Museum, 501 Museum Drive | (770) 387-1300 | boothmuseum.org November 17 & 18: Mount Pleasant, MI Circle of Indigenous Arts, market and competition, at Ziibiwing Center, 6650 E. Broadway Road | (989) 775-4750 | sagchip.org/ziibiwing November 17–19: Albuquerque, NM 4th Annual Pueblo Film Fest at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, 2401 12th Street NW | (505) 843-7270 | indianpueblo.org November 18 & 19: Santa Fe, NM Poeh Cultural Center Winter Arts Market at Hilton Buffalo Thunder Resort, 20 Buffalo Thunder Trail | (505) 455-5041 | poehcenter.org November 18–December 23: Minneapolis, MN Julie Buffalohead at the Bockley Gallery, 2123 W. 21st Street | (612) 3774669 | bockleygallery.com November 19, 2017–April 15, 2018: Vancouver, BC The Fabric of Our Land: Salish Weaving at the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, 6393 NW Marine Drive.

Opening: Sunday, November 19, 12:00 pm | +1 (604) 822-5087 | moa.ubc.ca November 23–December 17: Nuuk, Greenland Naja Abelsen at Katuaq, Imaneq 21 | +299 36 37 70 | katuaq.gl November 24–26: Collinsville, IL Native American Holiday Market at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, 30 Ramey Street | (618) 346-5160 | cahokiamounds.org November 25: Albuquerque, NM 5th Annual Pueblo Market at Isleta Resort and Casino, 11000 Broadway Boulevard SE, 9:00 am to 6:00 pm. More than 180 artists, free

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CALENDAR Contract Ron Martinez Looking Elk at (505) 250-5996 | isleta.com November 25: Victoria, BC Performance as Medicine: Indigenous Performance Art Symposium at the Royal BC Museum, 675 Belleville Street, 9:00 am to 5:30 pm.

Symposium: $15, panel discussion and performance: free +1 (250) 356-7226 | royalbcmuseum.bc.ca December 1 & 2: Missoula, MT Convening Indigenous Voices Forum II at the Missoula Art Museum, 335 N. Pattee Street. Artist reception: Friday, December 1, 5:00 to 8:00 pm, gallery talk at 7:00 pm. Panel discussion: Saturday, December 2, 11:00 am to 1:00 pm | (406) 728-0447 | missoulaartmuseum.org December 2: Kodiak, AK Alutiiq Museum Holiday Bazaar at the Alutiiq Museum, 215 Road, 10:00 am to 4:00 pm | (844) 425-8844 | alutiiqmuseum.org December 2: Victor, NY Native American Winter Arts Festival at the Ganondagan Historical Site, 7000 County Road 41, 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, free with museum admission (585) 398-6151 | ganondagan.org December 2 & 3: Anchorage, AK Alaska Native Holiday Bazaar at the Alaska Native Heritage Center, 880 Heritage Center Drive | (907) 330-8000 | alaskanative.net December 2 & 3: New York, NY, & Washington, DC NMAI Native Art Market at the National Museum of the American Indian, NYC: 1 Bowling Green. DC: 4th St. SW & Independence Ave. | nmai.si.edu

JOAN CABALLERO SANTA FE APPRAISAL CREDENTIALS

ISA & USPAP

N AT I V E A M E R I C A N A R T (505) 690-8482 joancaballero@msn.com www.collectorsguide.com/jcaballero

December 4: Santa Francisco, CA Bonhams Native American Art Auction at 220 San Bruno Avenue (415) 861-7500 | bonhams.com December 9: Santa Fe, NM IAIA Annual Holiday Market at the Balzer Gallery and painting studio, IAIA Campus, 83 Avan Nu Po Road, with more than 70 artists, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm | (505) 424-5704 | iaia.edu December 9 & 10: Phoenix, AZ 41st Annual Pueblo Grande Museum Auxiliary Indian Market at the Pueblo Grande Museum, 4619 E. Washington Street, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm (602) 495-0901 | pueblogrande.org

January 19–May 13: Norman, OK Fluent Generations: The Art of Anita, Tom and Yatika Fields at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, University of Oklahoma, 2401 Chautauqua Avenue | (405) 325-1600 | samnoblemuseum.ou.edu

December 9, 2017–March 31, 2018: Park Hill, OK Cherokee Warriors at the Cherokee Heritage Center, 21192 S. Keeler Drive (918) 456-6007 | cherokeeheritage.org

January 20–April 15: Santa Fe, NM Recent Acquisitions at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 704 Camino Lejo | (505) 982-4636 | wheelwright.org

December 9, 2017–October 31, 2018: Tucson, AZ Life Along the River: Ancestral Hopi at Homol’ovi at the Arizona State Museum, 1013 E. University Boulevard (520) 626-8381 | statemuseum.arizona.edu

January 20–April 29: Victoria, BC Form as Meaning: First Nations Prints from the Pacific Northwest at the Art Gallery of Great Victoria, 1040 Moss Street | +1 (250) 384-4171 | aggv.ca

December 10, 2017–July 7, 2019: Santa Fe, NM Lifeways of the Southern Athabaskans at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, 710 Camino Lejo | (505) 476-1269 | miaclab.org December 16 & 17: Santa Fe, NM SWAIA Winter Indian Market at La Fonda on the Plaza, 100 E. San Francisco Street. $10/day, $15/two days | (505) 983-5220 | swaia.org December 19–21: Vancouver, BC 2167: An Indigenous VR Project, sponsored by imagineNATIVE, at grunt gallery, 350 E. 2nd Avenue, No. 116 | +1 604-875-9516 | grunt.ca January 5–March 4: Joplin, MO Native American Contemporary at the Spiva Center for the Arts, 222 West Third Street | (417) 623-0183

January 23–April 13: Aurora, IL Rick Bartow: Things You Know But Cannot Explain at the Schingoethe Center of Aurora University, 1315 Prairie Street. Opening: Tuesday, January 23, 5:00 to 6:30 pm | (630) 844-7843 | aurora.edu/museum January 26–28: Fountain Hills, AZ Fountain Hills Indian Market at Fountain Park, 12925 N. Saguaro Boulevard, 10:00 am to 5:00 pm | (480) 488-2014 | carefreeazfestivals.com January 26–March 16: Las Cruces, NM The Maniacs (We’re Not the Best But We’re Better Than The Rest) at New Mexico State University, 1390 E. University Avenue. New art by Wendy Red Star (Crow), curated by Michelle Lanteri | (575) 646-2545 | uag.nmsu.edu

January 9–March 16: Davis, CA Holly Wilson at the at the C. N. Gorman Museum, University of California, 1 Shields Avenue #1316 | (530) 752-6567 | gormanmuseum.ucdavis.edu

January 26–April 8: Norman, OK Generations of Modern Pueblo Painting: The Art of Tonita Peña and Joe Herrera at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, 555 Elm Avenue (405) 325-3178 | ou.edu/fjjma

January 20–22: Cave Creek, AZ Cave Creek Indian Market at Stagecoach Village (623) 734-6526 | vermillionpromotions.com

February 2–April 20: Minneapolis, MN Bring Her Home: Stolen Daughters of Turtle Island at All My Relations Gallery, 1414 E. Franklin Avenue | (612) 235-4970 | allmyrelationsarts.com WINTER 2017/18 | 95

CALENDAR

NATIVE AMERICAN ART APPRAISALS, INC. SINCE 1936

February 2–September 30: Phoenix, AZ Symmetry in Stone: The Jewelry of Richard I. Chavez at the Heard Museum, 2301 N. Central Avenue | (602) 252-8840 | heard.org/exhibits February 10–May 13: Copenhagen, Denmark Remains: Perlehænder skifter hænder at the Nordatlantens Brygge, Strandgade 91 | +45 3283 3700 | nordatlantens.dk February 17 & 18: San Rafael, CA American Indian Art Show | Marin at Marin Center, 10 Avenue of the Flags, hosted by Object of Art Shows. Saturday:10:00 am to 6:00 pm.

Sunday: 11:00 am to 4:00 pm Sunday | (949) 280-6551 | marinshow.com February 27–May 28: New York, NY Golden Kingdoms: Luxury & Legacy in the Ancient Americas at the Met Fifth Avenue, 1000 Fifth Avenue | (212) 535-7710 | metmuseum.org March 1–3: Fairbanks, AK 45th Annual Festival of Native Arts at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, 1731 South Chandalar Drive | (907) 474-6528 | fna.community.uaf.edu March 3 & 4: Phoenix, AZ 60th Annual Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market at the Heard Museum, 2301 N. Central Avenue | (602) 252-8840 | heardguild.org March 8–April 20: Vancouver, BC Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa at grunt gallery, 350 E. 2nd Avenue, No. 116 +1 604-875-9516 | grunt.ca

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

March 9–11: El Prado, NM 6th Annual Taos Pueblo Art Winter Show at the Millicent Rogers Museum, 1504 Millicent Rogers Rd. | (575) 758-2462 | millicentrogers.org

For more events, visit our online calendar at FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM/CALENDAR

ADVENTURE AND INTRIGUE FROM COVER TO COVER. What You’ll Learn May Surprise You. • “Cherokee Newspapers, 1828-1906: Tribal Voice of a People in Transition” • “Records of the Moravians Among the Cherokees” Volumes 1-7 • “The Development of Law and Legal Institutions Among the Cherokees” • “The Life and Times of Reverend Stephen Foreman” Enjoy these and many other hard-to-find books on Cherokee history and culture.

21192 S. KEELER DR., PARK HILL, OK 74451 (888) 999-6007 • CHEROKEEHERITAGE.ORG © 2017 Cherokee Heritage Center. All Rights Reserved.

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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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Also on Exhibition

A Universe of Meaning Through April 15, 2018

Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry Permanent Exhibition Bridles and Bits: Treasures from the Southwest Through December 30, 2017

Support for this exhibition is provided in part by the Enivar Charitable Fund in Memory of Nancy Florsheim; Leo and Donna Krulitz; Richard and Willa Sisson; New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts; the FRIENDS of the Wheelwright Museum; and several other donors. Photo: Neebinnaukzhik Southall.