Cottonwood Connection

Art and the Native Experience

Season 5 Episode 6 | 24m 57sVideo has Closed Captions

We take a deep dive into native cultural expression through art and other methods.

Aired 10/27/2024

Cottonwood Connection

Art and the Native Experience

Season 5 Episode 6 | 24m 57sVideo has Closed Captions

We take a deep dive into native cultural expression through art and other methods.

We visit with artists exploring the methods and styles of their traditional forms in order to educate and connect with native cultural expression.

Aired 10/27/2024

Cottonwood Connection is a local public television program presented by Smoky Hills PBS

Cottonwood Connection

Art and the Native Experience

Season 5 Episode 6 | 24m 57sVideo has Closed Captions

We visit with artists exploring the methods and styles of their traditional forms in order to educate and connect with native cultural expression.

Aired 10/27/2024

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Culture

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[Music] Art, in its many expressions, can share tradition and culture to both connect to the past and create paths to the future. [Music] (upbeat music) Native American art has been around for a long time in various ways. Native Americans have been in parts of Northwestern Kansas for about 13,000 years. We don't see a lot of prehistoric art in Northwestern Kansas because rock is really soft so they weather away. But other places in the state and other places in the Great Plains, you get petroglyphs, which are rock carvings. And then there was pictographs, paintings on the rock. And then we get into historic times and there's stuff called ledger art. It's called ledger art because they would get ledgers or books for accounting or bookkeeping. A lot of times the pictures are in color, in crayon, or even colored pencil. And sometimes you're just led pencil. The art is very active. You get riders on horses, you get dancers, you get a lot of battle scenes with people. And so there are historical documentation. What is really nice about them from a cultural anthropological view, the people are dressed in what they were wearing at the time, so they're in their war clothes or maybe ceremonial clothes if it's depicting a dance. And as a historical document, some of them are labeled that you can assume the name on people, say we'll just use a simple analogy. If a warrior's name was two birds or maybe two crows, above the person, there might be the pictures of two birds or two blackbirds for two crows. And so there's an identity to that work of the ledger art. The old stuff, that's sometimes the only history we have from the individual. There are a lot of people and a lot of famous people, a lot of famous warriors.

The Native Americans, if they were descendants of these people, know about them. But here we're actually getting something that they did, represented in their interpretation of a certain event and the art and stuff. So they're very good for that and also for historical documentation. So, but it's the only evidence we have of a lot of these people and the story. It is a story form that carries on through the work of young indigenous artists today. My name is Good Warrior Ma'Havitz Deer. I am from the Southern Cheyenne, the Kiowa, the Arapahoe, the Ioway, the Sack and Fox, the Delaware. And I do ledger artwork and Plains Indian regalia, particularly.

My middle name is also my Cheyenne name and it's Ma'Havitz, which means a Red Bird in Southern Cheyenne. Ever since I was about toddler age, I really liked to draw and especially animals. I would doodle on everything, whether it was walls or schoolwork or a table. Going around powwows, you see a lot of native artwork, but the one that would catch my eye was a lot of the ledger artwork, whether it was on a T-shirt or a jacket or it was a print or a piece of actual artwork. And then I remember going into the Gilcrease Museum, I believe it was a field trip when I was, I wanna say fourth, fifth grade, they had ledger artwork on display. And I remember seeing that, I'm like, "Oh yeah, I see that at powwows.

" I started reading the descriptions and I really liked the way it looked, the way everything was so detailed yet so simple. And I remember even my mom and my dad telling me, this is how we used to tell our stories. There's a lot of ledger artwork that depicts our way of life and it's one of the ways we can connect to our old way of life through that. So since then I had taken a liking to it and I had started trying to do my own versions and over the years it's kind of evolved into what my artwork is today. So ledger art has its beginnings in hide paintings on hides and blankets and teepees. Because if you look at the old hide, the old hide and teepee paintings, it's the same kind of the same simplistic art style that's on the ledger paper. So it began on hides, how it is on shields. Then as settlers came west around the 1800s, they brought a ledger book. Sometimes they would bring ones that were full of writing. Sometimes they would bring some that were just empty. They were really popular trade items and really popular items that we would go and buy at a trading post or general stores. The art style from the hides transitioned over to the ledger papers. And the same storytelling element with it transferred onto the paper too. The other things that I like to do, aside from ledger artwork is beadwork, sewing. I work with a lot of parflesh and rawhide, but my absolute favorite thing has to be beadwork. Up here I have some examples of Southern Plains Indian beadwork. Only one of them is Cheyenne, which is this one right here. It's a fully beaded knife sheath that has Cheyenne designs. The rest of them are Kiowa. On these three items right here, those are all antique and old stock German, French and Italian beads, particularly cobalt, the white heart and the really rare greasy yellow beads. The ones on this side, the beaded items, are ones that belong to my mother that I made for her for her regalia when we go and dance or do any cultural activities. These designs that are on here are some of her family designs, some of them are more common tribe designs. Up here on the wall are several shields that I've done the past couple of years. These are just my personal shields that I've made. My brother uses some of these too. This one right here is my newest personal one that I did back in winter of 2022. And then along with this one I did for my brother, this is his shield. I haven't got all the decorations on it yet, but these two shields, they tell stories of me and my brother. I kind of based them off of pictographic shields. There's a couple of Southern Cheyenne shields that depict battles or buffalo hunts on it. Whereas most other shields, you'll only see them with maybe a design of an animal on it and a couple geometric designs on it. This headdress in particular has two eyes in the front and then the beadwork looks like teeth. Within our Southern Cheyenne culture, we have a being, a being we call the man-eater buffalo. That's what this headdress represents, with the eyes and the beadwork that looks like the teeth, it represents our man-eater buffalo being. It means a lot to me. It's actually the first piece of big regalia that I had made other than leggings or little beaded items, but this is really the first thing I had ever made. I also wear it whenever we go to powwows, I dance in it. This headdress was seen in a couple other productions. More notably, I was wearing it in a TV show called Echo on Disney Plus. So it's seen a lot of productions. It's wherever I go, it goes with me. It gets hard as a young Native person, trying to keep these ways alive and trying to juggle two realities and two lives. I do know that a lot of our warriors for our Cheyenne people, they were held in high regard, especially if they were artists because they were able to tell the story of a particular battle or an event or ceremony or a significant event within the tribe. And they were one of the only ones that were able to put it down on paper or hide or anything like that. And they were held in really high respect too. Good Warrior Deer was the featured artist for Fort Wallace's 2023 History Expo, Native Tribes of the High Plains. Other frequent contributors at Fort Wallace, are Native educators Joshua and David White. I'm a teacher. I'm an art teacher. I teach at Meadolark Elementary in Cheyenne. There's a lot of creativity with those kids. Do you ever bring some like Native American culture into the art class? So I do like to bring, so fifth graders are working on a Native American unit. My first year teaching the class, we made teepees, just little maquettes. And then the students were able to decorate them. So each decoration, if there was a round part of the, that was painted, that means it was a hill. If they put a line that wrapped around, that was the plains. And if they made little points on the bottom, that means it was from the mountain tribe. So I let the students pick what they wanted to be, where they live, tell me something about themselves. Do you like to go hunting? Do you like to go fishing or anything like that? And you could paint anything that represents themselves on a teepee. For him, if he had a teepee, he probably would put a bear on it for representing a little bear. Ever since I was named the little bear, I ran it, I go hunting, and all the bears always come to me. I had the bear poke its head in my tent once, that was fun. That he could draw, paint himself on the teepee, standing against some bear. So, and that's how I incorporate the art in their into the Native American side of it. So when we started in high school, I mean, we knew a little bit from history class, but now we know a lot more about the history of trying to reproduce what the Native Americans wore and what they used as weapons or tools. The story is getting lost, and there's people out there who are trying to, but the people who are trying to are elders. They do try to talk to the young kids, but are they really going to reciprocate that back to everybody else? For us, we want to try to go out and let everybody know how they lived and what they wore, how did they create a piece, like a tool and whatnot to use. Carrying on the Native story is part of the work of the Art Department of Haskell Indian Nations University, connecting students with tradition while exploring other forms of artistic expression. So my name is Rhonda Lavaldo, I'm the Dean of College of Humanities and the Arts. And so we recognize our students are really talented artists and it provides an outlet for them, especially a healthy one. And so we've been giving them more opportunities with drawing and painting and other art classes that they can do. I'm David Titterington, I've been an art instructor here since 2015. I teach drawing, painting and art appreciation. And I've found that my job isn't just to provide a classical art education, we encourage students to reconnect or even strengthen their connection to their own nations, their own tribes. A lot of times our students, because of boarding schools, you know, their parents, their grandparents may have been told not to do those things, traditional things. Because, you know, once they were going to school, they wanted to take their culture away from them. Not only cut their hair, but dress them. And so that wouldn't have been allowed probably. And so they've lost their language, they've lost their heritage. And they come here and they relearn those things. They can go back and look at stuff that has been done within their own tribal nations, because each tribe is different. They have different types of styles and techniques. A series that we did over the summer, Drawing One Students, where we were donated these prints of early 20th century, late 19th century photographs, and the students drew on top of them. Well, when you provide a background that's already developed, it sort of allows the student to relax, and now they get to play in a space that's already been sort of constructed. It allows students to free up some of their creativity when they get to collaborate with another image. This one, we've got this snaking form made out of stone and text. And then the artist drew in their own landscape, their own tribal symbols, and their own eyes into the stone. You definitely get a feel that each artist was able to connect with something personal. Likewise, whenever we're drawing still life, or when we're painting a landscape, we encourage them to look into their own symbolism and their own tribes' visual vocabularies and pull from there. And the one thing I know is if a student didn't know that background, they quickly learn it and have these great opportunities within the art department. We have an art show at the end of the semester, and we even have our students who take their art to a bigger conference called American Indian Higher Education Consortium. And they can take their art there, and they can even sell it. So it's an opportunity for them to see and recognize their talents. I had a former student who picked up weaving skills here, and now he's doing all these demonstrations about weaving that is relevant to his tribe. He actually just got his master's degree. And so, you know, seeing him when he first came to school here and then where he's at now, he's this talented artist, and he's making things for museums. So it's typical here. I'd probably say about 30% of our students may not know their background, but they come here and they learn it. We invite guest speakers to come talk to the students about weaving or beadwork, ledger workshops, printmaking workshops. They're given opportunities to learn how to make dresses, skirts called ribbon skirts. We give them the material to do this and they can work on it. For our young men, we have drum-making workshops so they can learn how to make a drum and then learn how to sing. It really depends on what the student is seeking. Some students are reconnecting and they are really seeking the traditional arts, what we might call the traditional arts, although it's hard to define what's tradition when it's living. Doesn't just mean from the past. Yeah, this mural by Rebecca Estron, Haida artist from Alaska in a very specific style of drawing called form line design. Extremely difficult style. Follows a lot of rules. Talk about reconnecting. This student, Yvonne, comes from a family of potters. She wanted for her final project to create a work of pottery. And so she dug the clay, a very specific type of clay that's well known in her tribe. And then she covered it in orange hand prints to represent all of the children who went missing at the boarding schools. And then as she fired the clay, the hands turned white, which is kind of an interesting accident. Other students really wanna learn Western art history. They wanna learn more about Picasso and Vincent van Gogh and all of those more classical Western heroes. Part of the mission of the school is to experiment with other types of pedagogy. And one way to do that is to center native voices always. In our art appreciation class, we always talk about indigenous artists, contemporary and past. Well, and a lot of our contemporary artists are influenced by Picasso or by Impressionism or Dadaism or whatever art movement is not native. So it's our doorway into maybe these more European art movements is through an indigenous perspective. My name is Trina Tsinnie and I'm from the Dinee tribe. And I'm a junior and majoring in business administration. I'm doing art because I stopped for a while and then I wanted to get back into it. This one was through like my perspective, They called it mis in a beam. It's a little bit more fun than the traditional one point and two point perspective drawings we do an Ernst Mach inspired first person perspective. And it's as Trina was saying, "mis in a beam" or the dropped into the abyss where you have a copy of the image inside of the image. So when you draw your perspective and then you go into your drawing and it just keeps going in. Yeah, I did four, it's a tiny one. I've always struggled like, because like I'm not traditional like other students here. And a lot of students will put their culture or like some kind of tradition or inside their art pieces. I like doing landscapes and its usually landscapes of where I live on the reservation. So that's where I usually put in there. Sometimes I feel like it's not native art, but then there's people that will say that it is because it's created by an indigenous person. So it's kind of like a struggle for me cause like I am in the middle in both worlds. So I have to balance that. Haskell students are amazing. They arrive already full of knowledge. There is so much just to learn by working here. I mean, I consider this to be the most diverse place on the planet. We have over 140 tribal nations represented. And so it's a perfect place to learn and teach. So within the arts, we have music, of course theater, and then of course the regular art classes and then media art. And so students will make videos, they've done podcasts. We of course have the Indian leader, which is the oldest Native American student newspaper in the country. And so they're continuing on that tradition by writing. And I think for the most part, I always see our students are they're storytellers. And so that's a tradition of our people is to be storytellers because in the past, you pass those stories down through the oral tradition. And so they're continuing that by writing stories, by making movies, by doing podcasts. And seeing our students do stuff like that is really amazing. My generation are the ones that are gonna grow up and be, we're filling in the spots that our parents did and our parents are filling in the spots that our grandparents did. And it's a big, big shift. We're doing what we can to keep all of this going, to keep everything alive. My way of doing this is through ledger artwork and like I said, Plains Indian Regalia. Every time I come to this building, I always see everyone's art pieces and I'm like, "Oh, I wanna do that. I wonder what kind of medium they use. I wonder how long that took. How did they get that picture?

" And it just makes me think and I end up missing it like a lot. You know, having those opportunities for our students, I think a lot of other colleges don't see the humanities as an important degree, but for us, it is. Our students, they can build a life with that. And then of course, passing on their traditions. So if we're doing that for our students, that's really awesome and great. That's what we wanna do. I always encourage the younger kids, even ones that are my age, that are wanting to do not just ledger art, but our cultural regalia, our traditional regalia and our traditional ways. What I always tell them is seek out one of our elders. I'm not the one to be asking about guidance for this, I'll help you, but go to one of our elders that have lived. I also urge them to go to museums because that's one of the main places where I had become inspired to pursue all of this. Throughout our lives, we're gonna always be learning and obtaining new knowledge. And that's just a part of living, but it's an even bigger part, being a part of our culture because you can be an old man and you'll still learn things from other relatives or other tribes. And when we have our own children, we'll be the ones that teach them. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]

Cottonwood Connection is a local public television program presented by Smoky Hills PBS