ATHABASCAN GATHERING

Separated by thousands of miles, Northern and Southern Athabascan peoples can still understand some of each other’s languages. The Heard Fair is a place where they come together to rekindle ancient connections.

BY MARTINA DAWLEY, PhD (HUALAPAI-NAVAJO)

Untold Centuries

AGO, the Southern Athabascan peoples split off from their Northern Athabascan kinfolk in Western Canada and the interior of Alaska and migrated south. Some settled in along the West Coast, but the majority moved further south and inland to become the Navajo and Apache peoples of the Southwest and Southern Plains.

Set near Navajo and Western Apache lands on O’odham land, far from Alaska and First Nations lands, the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market has become something of an Athabascan reunion, a place to celebrate their shared stories.

These stories, also known as the oral tradition, are the cultural values and histories that complement the written word. They are passed on to maintain and preserve their people’s histories, beliefs, and technological ingenuities. For many artists, oral tradition plays a significant role in cultural preservation. The stories inspire their art.

Indigenous artists worldwide are revered for their craftsmanship, creativity, and culture. From long lineages, they have taken it upon themselves to share their people’s histories and knowledge through art. These Athabascan artists are perfect examples of cultural stewards.

The name Athabascan |ath-a-bas-can| comes from the Cree word Aðapaskāw, pronounced \ahdhapask-a-w\. It describes the shallow end of a lake “where there are plants distributed in a net-like pattern” or “grass here and there,” and has since become the name of a large lake at the border of Saskatchewan and Alberta in Canada, Lake Athabasca. The linguist Edward Sapir first identified the Athabascan language family, which includes Indigenous languages spoken in Alaska, Canada, and the mainland United States’ Northwest and Southwest regions. For many Indigenous communities, the spoken word is a strong identity qualifier; therefore the Northern Athabascans acknowledge their relationship to the Navajo and Apache through language. More than 40 languages fall within the Athabascan language family, with Navajo being the most widely spoken.

Keep in mind that the Indigenous groups did not always refer to themselves as Athabascan; instead they had their own names that usually translated to “the People” in their languages. This holds true for the names Apache, Ingalik, and Navajo, who refer to themselves as Inde, Deg

Hit’an, and Diné, respectively—all translated to mean “person, People from here, and/or the People.” The Kaska Dena refer to themselves as the Dena or Dene, meaning “the People.”

Artists Glenda McKay, Ingalik Athabascan from Alaska; Sho Sho Esquiro, Kaska Dena-Cree from Canada; Lindsey Shakespeare, Mescalero Apache from New Mexico; and Penny Singer, Navajo from New Mexico and Arizona, share stories of ceremony, family, loss, matriarchs, and survival.

Glenda Mckay

BORN IN ANCHORAGE, Glenda is Deg Hit’an or Ingalik Athabascan. Ingalik is a Yup’ik term that generally refers to “any other Indian.” She is an award-winning beadwork artist and doll maker. She shares her people’s culture and history through her dolls and says, “All the dolls have a story as [to] why they were made. Either they are made [because] of someone I met through life that’s touched my heart or stories that were told to me from my culture.

“I try to use all the Indigenous materials of Alaska just like they used hundreds of years ago,” Glenda says. “I even have my own ivory needles.1 If I had to put down in writing what every doll meant, it would be a full book of my history.”

Growing up, Glenda heard stories about the Russian hostilities in her region. “The Russians hit the coastal areas. The Athabascans gathered in Denali and made weapons for two or three years, and they had what they call the War of Kenai,” which was between the Russians and Native Alaskans in 1797. Glenda continues, “The Athabascans attacked the Russians and ran them out of Alaska, and that is when they didn’t want anything to do with us. They called us headhunters, which we are not.

“My grandma thought that the Russians would come back and invade us, even though it had been a long time,” the artist continues. “We learned how to snare animals, small squirrels and rabbits and such, and how to skin and brain tan.” Her grandmother taught her “all the medicinal plants, what we could eat, and what we couldn’t eat. [She] just wanted to make sure we could survive.”

McKay is proud of her grandmother’s endurance and strength on the famous Iditarod trails. Iditarod \hidedhod\ is a Deg Hit’an and Doogh Qinag word meaning “distant” or “distant place.” “Grandma did the original Iditarod long before” it became a competitive dog sledding race, says Glenda, because she delivered “medicine and everything else by dog team. She’d run medicine and supplies up and down the rivers in the summer on rafts and dog team in the winter.”

Sho Sho Esquiro

BORN AND RAISED IN THE YUKON, CANADA, Sho Sho Esquiro is Kaska Dena and Cree. She is a fashion designer who began sewing at a young age and puts her cultural attributes into each piece. “When I was a kid, there was snow for eight months out of the year,” says Esquiro, “so I learned how to sew from my mom and my aunties as a young child. We never had … TV or anything like that.” Instead, her artist mother encouraged Sho Sho to create and placed a strong emphasis on meticulous work. “It is very important to sew quality things, such as moccasins or hats or gloves. When you sew something for somebody, and outside it is 30 to 40 degrees below and they are out on their Ski-Doo, they could lose a finger if you haven’t sewn something with care and quality.”

Sho Sho was adopted as Tlingit in her youth and learned many of their customs, but felt the need to return to her father’s people. “It wasn’t until I was probably in my late teens that I became curious about my blood dad’s family, my tribe, so I went back there,” she explains.

“If you were to Google Kaska Dena art or Kaska Dena clothing, you’d probably find my stuff come up and my uncle’s, too. There are not a whole lot of things that I can reference,” Sho Sho says. “It’s left me, as an artist, an open area to be experimental. There are not a lot of people that can tell me, ‘That’s not how we did it’ or ‘that’s not Kaska.’ The reality is I’m a Kaska woman making things in survival of Kaska art.

“I want to honor the ancestors, because there are certain things we believe; like you don’t sew angry or you will put that into your sewing.” She’s aware of her responsibilities to her community. “I feel that anything I do is our legacy that I am leaving.”

Sho Sho says, “Native fashion has been around forever,” and her idea of cultural preservation is expressed through her ancestor’s sewing. “There is a beautiful Dena dress in the Alberta Museum that is more than a hundred years old, and it’s just exquisite! So, it’s just crazy when people tell me what I am doing is innovative. I’m just doing what my people have been doing for thousands of years. I’m just privileged to have other materials available.”

Lindsey Shakespeare

THIS MESCALERO APACHE ARTIST draws inspiration from her culture’s origin stories for the dolls she creates, especially the Mescalero Gaa’he or Crown Dancers. As a woman, Lindsey was initially told that she could not replicate the Gaa’he dancers in any form because it is an all-male society. She respectfully agreed, but through her family and a head caretaker of one of the six Crown Dance groups, she was granted permission to create her dolls. She tells the Mescalero Gaa’he origin story:

Mescalero [Apache Crown Dancers] hardly ever go to schools or museums to show, because they only come out during the nighttime. In Three Rivers, there was a cave. There was a blind man and a crippled man. They [were] placed in that cave because, once again, that whole tribe was on the move running away from the enemies. They were in there; all of a sudden they heard these noises, these chants, the songs. And for four nights the crown dancers came out, blessed them, sang to them, and they got healed, cured. So that guy got to walk again. That guy got to see again. And they caught up to the rest of their [community] members, and they were wearing all these fine, buckskin clothes, outfits, and had the finest bows and arrows, and they said this is what the [Gaa’he] wore, this is what they sounded like, this is what they carried, so that is how the origin story of the Crown Dancers came to be. So it is somewhere in Three Rivers [mountain] side.

Penny Singer

NAVAJO FASHION DESIGNER AND PHOTOGRAPHER

Penny Singer did not grow up on the reservation; instead her family moved every four years since her father served in the air force. She did, however, recognize that home was with her grandmother, her family’s matriarch, who lived in the Navajo Nation. A cultural trait of Athabascan peoples is having matriarchal societies.

“I’m pretty much an urban Native,” Penny volunteers. During her father’s temporary assignment, the family would move to the reservation in Teec Nos Pos, Arizona, and live with Penny’s grandmother for a few months at a time. “Then he would transfer for four years to an air force base, so we would settle for four years, then go back home on the reservation.” Her parents didn’t speak Navajo to her as a young child, so she is not fluent. “Being young it was hard. I spoke English and on the reservation all the kids talked Navajo.” The family moved to Japan at one point. “My childhood was not your average Sesame Street toddler years.”

The transition from city to reservation was abrupt, “because back then there was no water, no electricity. It was living on the rez: we had to do everything by hand. I’m grateful that they did that,” Penny says, because she now knows how to live without running water or electricity.

Heard Fair

SO, what will these four Athabascan women bring to this year’s Heard Fair?

Glenda McKay says, “I will be bringing a new doll named Athabascan Fiddler. After Russian contact, we loved the music and we made our own fiddles and went from village to village and played.” She studied the playing posture of her friend, a prominent violinist, and studied his Stradivarius for her fiddle. “The doll has a sealskin tuxedo, modeled after Everett Zlatoff-Mirsky.

“I used polar bear hair for the string on the bow; the bow is made of walrus ivory with whale baleen inlays,” Glenda explains. The miniature violin’s tuning pegs actually turn. “They were so tiny to carve out of baleen, I probably carved about 24 of them just to have four finished pegs. It took me about a year to make the piece.”

Sho Sho Esquiro’s collection will honor her grandmother, Grace McCallum, who, the designer says, “was the most significant person in my life as far as fashion. She was so fashionable.” Her grandmother suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, so Sho Sho helped cared for her for the final nine years of her life.

“Her favorite thing to do in the world was to shop, so we would go to secondhand stores,” recalls Sho Sho. “One time we went into a fabric store and found raw silk. She loved it! She wanted me to have so many meters of it, and we ordered it. I just kept it and never used it. So, that fabric was the basis and inspiration for this whole collection,” which began last year with her award-winning Heard entry (see page 17). “It has lynx paws at the top of the shoulder and it has that fabric in it. On the back, beaded in 24-karat gold, is my language that says, ‘Remembering and honoring our mothers and grandmothers.’ It was the first piece that defined the whole collection for me.”

The last year has been challenging, and Sho Sho admits, “for this collection, I don’t know where I’d be if I didn’t sew my emotions away. It’s just a reflection of my grandma, and I know if she was here, she would love it.”

Lindsey Shakespeare is considering incorporating photography into her work. Last summer she was asked to create dolls to be used for trophies, which she plans to build upon. “I was asked to make them for second place, [but] they saw what they came out to be, and they were promoted to firstplace trophies.” Each of the trophy dolls “comes with a crown dancer. You can always tell the first crown

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Heard Museum Guild Fair & Market March 4 & 5, 2017

Booth K-04 dancer because of the pollen bag. The young maiden and the medicine people would bless the crown dancers before they would go out and dance. There is a total of four crown dancers and then two clowns.” Six dolls became trophies, but Lindsey’s bringing the seventh doll to the Heard Fair. “Number eight is still in the works.”

“I plan on bringing a Navajo collection,” announces Penny Singer. “I’ve been working on a new design—a very simple design that people can distinguish me as the Navajo woman. I am planning on bringing jackets, maybe some skirts, and blouses. I might do some research and try and make a piece to tell a story about the Athabascan, to the Apache, to the Navajo. I have ideas.” She continues, “The Heard Museum was where I first debuted my jackets. I am thinking of collaborating with a good friend of mine, John Whiterock from Tonalea, Arizona. I was going to have him create some clay buttons with Navajo designs on it.”

THE KINSHIP felt by Athabascan-speaking peoples lives on today. As Penny says, “I believe we are all one, no matter the science and everything. I could just see the resemblance in the way we think of Mother Nature. We are close to the earth, and we are just very humble people.” ?