 Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for coming. I just want to take a second to introduce the moderator here. This is Lulani Arquette, she's the Executive Director of the Native Arts and Cultural Foundation. And just to welcome you here, I passed out some evaluation forms that after the idea form, if you'd go ahead and fill them out and turn them in at the registration desk. And Brian there is passing out some panel bios. So please feel free to take a look at those. And right after the idea form, this is going to go until 3.30. And after the idea form, starting at four o'clock is an art crawl in the Pearl District. So make sure you put on your coat and your umbrella. And we'll give you a math and point you to the right to the right. Take it away. Thank you guys. So I just want to welcome all of you. As Alec mentioned, my name is Lulani Arquette. And I'm with the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. We're moderating this wonderful panel today. And just a little bit about the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. We're a fairly new work, a new foundation. We're located here in the Pacific Northwest. And we are nationally provide support to Native Hawaiian, Alaska, Native and American Indian artists, communities and organizations. So we're really excited to be here. We're really pleased that you all could come. And we can share with you some fun and hopefully intense information today. And I want to thank Olga for a great English up here and the NPN band staff for inviting us to present this panel today. Thank you. So one of the things, I'm going to start, let me start in a kind of an appropriate way. What we call appropriate Native Hawaiian ways. So from where the sun rises at the gates of Tahiti Kuhl in the east, to where it sets in the Red Sea at the gates of Tahiti Moi in the west, from the Venus to the horizon, from the deepest sea to the highest mountain, all love, honor and respect goes to the Creator, to the spirits of the heavens, the seas and the land, and to all those who still watch over us, guide us and protect us, and to our ancestors, those elders who still walk on this plane with us and grace us with their wisdom and presence, and to all those other ancestors who await us in the great beyond and who sleep the long sleep for the winters and the summers. So today we have four Native artists who are going to present, and we actually titled the panel, but we didn't get it in the program apparently, Reimagining Indigeneity. That's what they're going to talk about related to their work and how that is reflected in their work along with other contemporary issues that they may want to bring up. But before we start, I want to provide a little bit of context, and one of the most probably misunderstood aspects about Native peoples today is this myth of one monolithic Native community across the nation that shares the same beliefs and the same cultures. And that is absolutely not true as most of you folks know. And in fact, what's interesting is when you really delve into this, it's very complex, it's complicated. It's complicated in Native Indigenous communities, so I know it's complicated for the broader population. And we always hope to shed some light on that from individual perspectives, but there are actually 562 federally recognized tribes in the United States, and about 200 of those are in Alaska, and the other are spread across about 36 states here on the continent. And that's only federally recognized tribes. Then we have some state recognized tribes where other Native peoples are members of. And then we have those Native peoples that identify as Native that are actually a lot of them living in urban areas and not really affiliated with any tribe, federally or state recognized, but still very much strongly identify as Native. So you can see this gets really complicated. And in Hawaii, we are not, we're state recognized, but we're not federally recognized, and there are 400,000 Native Hawaiians and about half live in Hawaii, and the other half live up here on the continent. So this is a very, this identity issue is a very complex issue. We all individually have multiple identities really, and we explain that in many different ways that you're going to hear today. So I think the most important thing to remember is that each Native tribe and Native group has its very own unique, distinct culture, arts, languages, social, political systems and beliefs and how they also interpret that in living in modern contemporary society. That's the tribe or the Native group, and then within that tribe and Native group all kinds of stuff. You've got all kinds of individual people with all kinds of other multiple identities. So you can see how this can get complicated and we just hope that we found that as Native peoples we're always navigating through those tensions between the past, the present, how we're informed on our cultural beliefs and what we call modern Western ideologies and the racial stereotypes and then who we really are. So it's always a journey that we're all traveling here, but there are artists and there's tradition bearers who are preserving and they are extending their cultural traditions and then thousands of artists who are contemporizing, I would say, use that word, they're artists and they are often taking and venturing into new mediums. They're using sometimes traditions of new ways of expressing themselves through other traditional groups and pop culture and their own exploration. So it's fascinating, it's wonderful to see and the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation we're always surprised about that. So these artists here that you see and the many other Native artists and curators, they are reimagining, they're reflecting, they're resurrecting. They are very much passionately pursuing their creative energy and we really believe that Native contemporary artists are working in a lot of new terrain. It's very exciting and they're adding a really vital contribution to the national discussion and they also can add interdisciplinary conversation, exploration and you can add solutions to some of the many social and economic and cultural problems that we face in this nation. So without further ado, I want to give enough time for the artists. Let's go to our panelists here, I'm going to let them introduce themselves and here. And our first one is going to be Dina. Do you want me to get up or just to introduce you? Would you like to come up here? Sure. Okay. Thank you Lulani. My name is Dina Dart. I'm Coastal Chumash. My mother's family is from the Montecito, Santa Barbara, California area. And at home we say Hakkulu met Chumawish which means hello and let us be healthy in our interactions with one another. Thank you so much Lulani for these beautiful gifts and for the invitation to participate in this very skilled, talented artist and in a group of people, like-minded individuals which is always refreshing and always sort of reinvigorates my passion to do the work that I do. So should I put this one right into it? Awesome. Oh, that's a lot of words. So there are certain... I don't know why that keeps doing that. That's all right. So I've been at the Portland Art Museum since 2012. The Portland Art Museum has an incredible collection of historic Native American art and then it had a very tiny collection of contemporary Native art. And after 12 years of studying the representation of my community in California Indian people and this real sort of public perception of this ethnographic snapshot in time just being, you know, Lulani spoke to that this sort of, the real Indians are a thing of the past and living Indian people aren't really Native anymore or aren't practicing their culture and their traditions. And in California, most of us are largely disenfranchised from our tribal homelands as well. So there's a real need to assert our identity at every opportunity that we get and the museums work against that because they show our lives as pre-contact people and very rarely show us in the present and never tell the visitors, sometimes they'll do the past and the present but never the story in between, right? And, you know, it'll refer to Native people as being resilient or persistent, right? But what have we actually survived is never discussed. Anyways, and so I came to the Portland Art Museum not only with that personal background and community background but also my dissertation research that looked at those institutions that are continuing to assert those narratives of, you know, either disappearing or disappeared past, you know, centering us in the past. And so my plan as soon as I arrived at the Portland Art Museum was to really develop the contemporary presence, the living art. There's such great, amazing, incredible Native art out there and it wasn't present at the Portland Art Museum. So to do that, I've had to develop relationships with living artists and with the communities that we're representing in our historic works. And one of the things that we talked about as a group in a conference call was that we're grappling, you know, those of us that are working in the field of Native American art as artists and curators and, you know, arts professionals, grant writers, we're talking about a whole spectrum of identity, right? We're talking about people who live on the reservation and practice traditional or customary arts that they learn from their families and there's very little divergence from that all the way to, you know, edgy, modern, even Western-influenced work, hip-hop, and, you know, things that people, other than people outside of the Native community don't think of as Native American art, right? There's this really dynamic spectrum that we're talking about and so... But in order to be able to exhibit that spectrum, I've got to be working with not only the artists but the communities, right, and who inform those historic works that have very little documentation and they'll be restoring connections between the communities and those ancestral objects and in some cases, returning those ancestral objects to the communities so that they can heal and do the work that they were meant to do, right, rather than being on view in the museum. So one of the things that I wanted to do in addition to, you know, making those connections and developing an advisory committee of Native people to inform this work was to create a dedicated space just for contemporary art in the Native American galleries and we opened that space about a month ago with an inaugural exhibit of contemporary-oriented Indian artists and it's incredible and it's this really bright, dynamic space that you cannot leave thinking that Indians are as they know the past or that they're only producing beadwork or, you know, whatever misconceptions they arrive with, they can't leave with those same misconceptions and so it's effective and so the docents are even using it on their tour now. They're bringing kids into that space and talking about how the art is actually developing within the space. So Sarah intends to come and take some of her baskets and take them out gathering and bring them back and put them back on the shelf and while they're gone, there'll be a little sign that says this Huckleberry basket is in use right now and today, right now, actually, Greg Robinson is installing a component onto a piece of art that's in the space so he's going to make wood chips in the space right now luckily they're filming it and install this component and Greg Arshaleta is going to install a component as the sun returns to the northwest over the next couple of months so, you know, the art itself is living in and dynamic and so I'm taking a lot of space this is the space and it now is hung with some of the most incredible Oregon Indian art and here is Greg Robinson, Sarah Seastream and Greg Arshaleta I'd encourage you to get over there if you haven't already it's on the third floor adjacent to the Platon Western Oregon Galleries and then in February, February 6th, we open a show Contemporary Native Photographers in the Edward Curtis Legacy oh, Donna, man you might recognize the two ladies in the center up here on our panel when you read the stars Will Wilson and Zick Jackson will be exhibiting their work in dialogue with the Edward Curtis Legacy so not necessarily in dialogue with Curtis himself but rather the legacy of that body of work and all of its nuances so that opens in February right now this coming year, 2016 Native American art has the main stage for almost the entire year and that has never happened in the history of the Portland Art Museum so it's a really exciting time and a time where these really deep thinking, talented people will be on the main stage speaking to the city of Portland and all the people that come here and then starting in June we're hosting Native Fashion Now which was curated by Karen Kramer at the Peabody Essex Museum 60 Native American designers, artists represented in 100 objects it's a dazzling show opens at the beginning of June 4th and then in fall 2017 the Art of Resilience a continuum of Klingit Art we're really going to talk about the need for ancestral objects to return home and be treated as ah-oo rather than art and really showcasing the contemporary art as a sort of central content so in this way through these through these efforts that are all very different I'm trying to reach that whole spectrum artists that are communicating to their audiences in ways that are very diverse so I see it as sort of my role at the museum to facilitate all of those voices so it's an honor to come here and speak to you about that and on a panel of people who are also committed to doing that so thanks he's going to fix a computer thing right now real quick we're going to do one more Christopher and then we're going to have some questions comments, we wanted some dialogue with you folks so if you have questions after the presenters then just please jot them down and know that we're going to have you do two, one more and then question and answer and some discussion and then we'll have the last two and then question and answer discussion and interaction okay thank you aloha everybody aloha thanks for saying that back to me so my name is Christopher K. Morgan I'm a Washington DC area based choreographer both my parents are from Hawaii I grew up in Southern California and I always come to these things with a plan and then my plan changes and I had wanted to introduce my people to this space I was so moved and thought it was just so mindful and beautiful how the organizers of this conference invited two local native indigenous people to bless the beginning and I just, yeah it really spoke to me so I thought okay great I'm going to do the same thing and then Lulani happened to use this text that she blessed the space within English I was planning on doing something different but I actually know something that's very parallel to that so it's a very non-secular thing you just heard the greeting that she said and this is pretty close and parallel aloha aloha aloha aloha aloha aloha aloha aloha aloha aloha aloha aloha aloha eikimai aynı so it's exactly what she said where the sun rises …and greets us where it sets to go to sleep at night where the sea and the land where all of this came together and we recognized almost like namaste the aloha in you and the aloha back so one of the things that I think is so interesting about the multiculturalism we all face actually there's so much in common and one of the things that I'm so moved by that I'm so moved by as an artist and what I see in other people's artwork a lot of the time is the striving for connecting those things and the connections that we can foster and how it can ripple out so much further than any one of us and address so many of the big problems that we face. Sometimes, so these two awesome women are representing artists, many, many artists in many, many communities. I represent myself and in that there's this huge multiplicity inside of me but I thought it sometimes is easier just to let the artworks kind of speak for itself. So I'm going to show a little something and then I want to explain why I chose to do that as my initial sharing what I'm going to show. I'm guessing, thank you, oh there it is, thank you. This was to tell you, I was to push, I don't know if there's audio. The distinct lack of grass and coconut shell bras, there was one moment of headband or any ornamentation. It's so interesting and challenging to embrace all of who I am and I think I'm not alone in that. I've been thinking a lot about labels, Hawaiian, German, Irish, Japanese, Chinese, those all exist in this blood flow. Queer, married, educator, dancer, choreographer, all the names people call me on the streets which I won't repeat in this room. All of those things exist here and so many more layers and I think one of the things that's interesting and challenging for artists of all shades is how quickly and easily a label can become a trap and to be an emerging artist, to be a mid-career artist, to be an established artist and then that affects which grants you apply for and which grants you get booted out of. To be at a moment at advantage because my racial and ethnic makeup diversify a funding and applicant pool, create a programmatic roster that's to my advantage thankfully right at this particular blessed moment in time which is a moment in time that can pass just as quickly as it creates my life. All of these things are really complex and we are not alone in facing this but we have a unique invisibility that I think is worth discussing and bringing up here today and so I'm really moved by the efforts that the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, NPN, since its founding have been making and it's really an important discussion to have and it's not comfortable, it's not comfortable to me to say to a funding organization that funded me very beautifully that maybe I can recognize that I bring diversity. Is that what I want to be doing? I really chose that strategically not to have a lot of grassroots and hula in it even though I'm deeply invested in that too but it's just one aspect of who I am and I think that's a fascinating subject for all of us to have to unpack and discover and analyze and as Lulani was already identifying you know sometimes I wonder am I Hawaiian enough and my cousins at Grip and Hawaii often tell me that I'm not they call me Hali all the time which is you know a word for foreigner but sometimes it means it was something a little more derogatory than that but it's you know it's just this interesting tension that we all live in and as I was developing this work that I did receive my creation fund for Ohaku we had a production residency grant supported by Nathan last summer at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center Colleen Furukawa is here and you know Colleen and I about once every three days of the two weeks that I was there we would check in and I'd go into our office she'd come by our rehearsal she'd say you know all the points are coming be ready making your skin and we got a wonderful response which I think was you know fantastic and there was support of that but it's true we're proving ourselves to each other just as much as we're trying to make ourselves be seen by the outside world I thought I would finish my presentation I have no idea what that elapsed time means but I'm just going to finish this last little bit with some footage from the development of this work Ohaku that happened during our residency last summer this work is looking at Ohaku is a Hawaiian word for stone and it's looking at an integration of many things these identities that I find and feel inside myself stories and the representation of stones in my particular culture which have powerful residents in many cultures throughout the world but especially here in North America and I think the unique role that I have as a contemporary Native artist to bring and share that story with audiences that may not necessarily know about it it's just a series of images it won't give you the full effect but from the comments about the anything you have from the first two panelists or anything just open up some discussion here yes you showed there were like two and you I just want to be clear you I wasn't understanding if you said that those were being returned to or no not all of them I'm just going to grab my notes no not everything is being returned however there's going to be a pretty significant component of the show that's going to discuss and make transparent the Native American Grades Protection and New Patriot Act there are currently 18 active claims on uh klingit objects and so um that's going to be part of the show and we're hoping that there will actually be a repatriation ceremony where the the museum will transfer ownership to the clans of wrangle at the opening ceremony um so it'll be a component but those particular tunics are not they don't have active claims on them they're they're not going to be repatriated pop there are 18 claims as I said and the the one we're repatriating first is a clan hat and so that's the object will be repatriated if not before the show at the show and then the other 18 will work into result so um it's really once we repatriate them it's really not um our our business what happens to them afterwards the clans you know reintegrate them into their living culture and the clan hats are especially important um in order to maintain their the social structure and the political the political life of the klingit so um what will likely happen is that the the object will be housed at the um at the museum in wrangle and so that the clan can check it out anytime that they need it um but again it's not that's not something that they have to disclose to us when we when we transfer ownership it transfers into the hands of the clans any other questions comments yes I think one of the greatest things that happened was and calling who's right next to you can probably speak to this even better is um they're a venue they're an amazing venue probably like a lot of your venues that have to meet a lot of different needs within the community and present everything from the challenging and avant garde to the familiar and and um I don't know what's a good word for an audience of family friendly um and so she's got you know trying to fill that demand and one of the things that we talked about is perhaps this work that was taking some traditional native Hawaiian hula and chant with modern dance and storytelling infusing it in a somewhat unique way I wouldn't call it terribly unique might help bridge the audience and at our work in progress showing that concluded the event for which she was preparing it to have about 50 people we had 276 show up and it was um to my purview a real mix of people that would have been attending hula shows and people that might have been coming more for you know concert dance or music it was just a really eclectic mix so I think that was the number one kind of testament to that but then in the um post-show discussion that happened afterwards one of the things that I was hopeful for and did hear more than once was that even though it was a very particular story the story of me and my family the decision of my parents to leave Hawaii and what that's created afterwards it reflects many things that are going on still there for the people that haven't left the identity questions the tensions that they feel questions around you know racial conflict that still exist in these very diverse islands so I think that was one of the things it's true I still need to work on my hula and get stronger and better at it I've had less time in the studio doing that than I have had other physical practices that are in my body but that's going to be the case my whole life because I should be dancing cool into my 80s anyway thank you other questions or comments and I wanted to ask Christopher anybody who wants to speak to it a little bit more about what you were saying about how it feels to understand you are adding diversity to a say you know a cohort of grantee sort of the the complications around that for you as artists we're established explicitly to fund I don't really love the word diversity but for a shorthand we'll say that and at the same time I recognize that identifying artists in one way or another you know in categories like that is is inherently problematic so just exploring those thoughts okay um I think it's so complex I so you saw everything there that's still there Christopher K Morgan that came about when I first entered one of the unions and there was already a Christopher Morgan agma I think was the first union that I joined performing arts union then when I went in to join equity there was already Christopher K Morgan so I spelled out kawi this goes to things about structural racism that are so deep that I couldn't even chart it as a young man myself I did not know until my 20s that Hawaiian first names were banned starting in the late 1800s so everyone took Hawaiian middle names which is a tradition that still could exist in many places today and my parents named all of my brothers and sisters and myself with Christian first names and Hawaiian middle names and so as I started to embrace that at a certain point in my professional career I thought this is really interesting this is a bit of a long-winded answer I'm sorry and so that just you know started unpacking all of these kind of historical things that I didn't even understand just in choosing a name to join the union and so when I interestingly the K stuck because it just came a little sooner in the advent of my professional career and I just kept using it and using it and then it was in written correspondence and people would call me that all the time so it just stuck and I actually tried for a little while to do the whole Hawaiian middle name and it it didn't stick so I was like okay whatever that's who I am I'll embrace it and then a couple presenters kind of earlier in my career as a choreographer said why don't you put the whole Hawaiian name down it would be to your advantage and in that moment I resisted I said no I want the work to be what it is and to stand on its own whatever that means and so there was this just internal dialogue intention that I had around that it's one of those really challenging things where you know I encourage people all the time if you see the opportunity jump in and take advantage of it you know the other thing that I know is my zip code 20852 it's not one of the 100s New York City versus all these other places that is also to my advantage probably I've sat on enough grand panels to know the reality of that and I think that's an important good thing in order to make the invisible visible from the top down we have to be inclusive and make efforts and I fully support that it just feels complex and there's no getting around that and I don't think it's a bad thing and part of me identifying that and owning it is helping to be more comfortable with it I don't know if I'm really answering your questions but I felt Rosie lean forward no you're doing great so there are over 562 federally recognized tribes it isn't possible I mean there's diversity within diversity and so as an artist who is also native living in that world that two worlds it's very complex because in one moment it feels like it's one moment it feels like who I am is being consumed or commodified in a particular way for particular use which is not one that I can control nor is it something that I necessarily want so I have a lot more to say I don't know I don't think that answer your question I'll bring one more thing to light as the conversation Rosie and I have we blessedly met on the native arts and cultures foundation we were co-fellows and dance in 2013 and she sent me an email I was like hey fellow and and now I feel like she's a friend and mentor and partner in crime sometimes all of us have to be so diligent about how our our brand is represented in a marketing sense and I remember about a year or so ago we were talking and she was saying gosh I just have to be on top of this language that's going out in relationship to I think it was for we wait in darkness and how the native aspect of this work is being represented and so as much as the opportunity as a blessing it comes with an extra responsibility to create a template that allows other people to follow in the footsteps and whether that's a completely different type of identity but a template that allows people to self-identify clearly and assertively so that whatever the marketing materials are whether from the grantor or the presenter or representative of what the artist is trying to convey and I understand that there's a lot of tension in that and how you're trying to gain audiences and all those things and you know self-producing sometimes have to do that too but I think that was one of the things that was really important to me is um you know that I don't falsely advertise that I'm doing hula actually had someone at this conference last year in Tulsa introduced me at a party as the guy that does hula and if any hula person ever said that they'd be able to talk amina from party foundations that I would be more defied like embarrassed because I'm not a traditional practitioner and I don't possess the knowledge and in two sentences I could remedy that and laugh about it and it was totally fine but what if I hadn't actually been there in that moment what if someone said oh there's that guy that does hula oh my gosh like I'm you know I'm not completely ignorant about that form but I cannot say that it is my form so that's one of the many ways that like due diligence is really necessary and kind of layers into all of that and I think this demonstrates really some of that I mean this is really a very complex issue with uh indigeneity uh multiple you know really who we are as native peoples who we are as human beings and um the all the things that we've been to be in a native artist we find out at the native arts and cultures foundation and we're trying to be attentive to all of the the indigenous population across the nation alaska and hawaii and from more contemporary ethnographic historic art artists to more contemporary um artists that are doing really edgy innovative work and and the the the impetus for people to want to kind of categorizing all of us all of us have an you know we want to put things in categories to try to help create meaning and understanding to talk about them but in a sense that's what's creating you know a lot of the difficulties around in particular the indigenous peoples are facing so I want to I want to move us on I saw my little the timekeeper over there and rosy so you're next so you can talk more about okay whatever you want and here what are you from here I think so of course I can't do any that's everything I do is complicated so I'm rosy seamus I am on the waga um in english that is Seneca we are a part of the kutimoshoni confederacy which is uh Seneca is known to them as keepers of the western door we're also known as the people of the great hill so yes complicated right oh you can't hear me sorry I'm also heron clan um our people are matrilineal we get our identity and our clan and our inheritance from our mother grandmother our great grandmother um so I grew up in between two cultures like I said before um in a very urban Indian very political family um going to ceremonies and powwows and then I also um was very much um dedicated to my theater arts high school that I attended and so I had these sort of like two polar um opposite lives as I started to enter arts um before I show any images um maybe a dysfunction I'm going to talk to you do I have to click on my name no click just a ear hole okay yes yes okay so over the last 23 years I've made work dealing with a wide range of subject matters from the iraq war to black holes one of my favorite pieces that I've made to my grandmother's boarding school experience and for many reasons which I'm going to talk about in the next seven minutes um my work now examines cultural political and identity issues of native people but so is it just this is not me oh that's me is my a movie is that yes yeah okay so but I can bother so this uh so this beautiful that didn't work oh okay so I'm going to improvise I'm just going to talk over the video okay so this beautiful picture is of my third great grandmother this is this is not going to work for me um this is a poem okay thanks no I meant that yeah so so the the why is the picture significant so I wanted to talk about where my work comes from um and that's very very important to me because I think that um I'll get labeled very much as a like political artist or a native artist and identity is a big issue for me so so my work is very personal and um this piece that I created that still touring we wait in the darkness um started with this picture so this picture um by third great grandmother on my grandmother's side and when I when I've had a pain on my wall since I was a child and I asked my mom like who is this person I realized I actually didn't even know she didn't know no one in my family knew and um I was completely devastated I come from a matrilineal people this person is a key to my identity so um I spent a lot of time doing research and I found this poem and I started this dialogue with my grandmothers um who were doctors and were son of the doctors um they're gone but I was in the mountains and um I just started talking to them and so I started to uh investigate things so we can just show some of the images and I can just play so I went back home um and uh this is an on on dugout and this is me and um this is where my mother learned how to swim and as a child um and this let's pause here is the Allegheny reserve this is Kendo Dam um my ancestors are buried underneath this water and so all of this culminated into a piece this is corn planter this is my fifth great grandfather I included this image because um he was the key um it always helps to be related to something famous if you're trying to do any kind of genealogy and so although I know tons of my grandfather's side of the family um I did it on that side of my family and so that portrait you can go see it in new york it hangs above george washington's portrait um this is the a relocation map um over well to say all synacos were um displaced by the flooding of our lands this is a relocation so all of this uh became a piece and it became an exhibit that's just what I'm playing um paper and fabric and all of this came into becoming something that um was an expression of this search um for my grandmother and my conversations with the people in my family who are gone this was at all my relation parts in minneapolis objects my grandmother made in my extensive map collection of cynical lands and the diminishing of cynical lands over the last five years this is the set now I'm just going to let the video play so this is a photo of my cousin robert who died when he was 93 and we were very close he was on he was on a dog and his children although also from one white parent and one native parent are not native and I am native so this is part of our complex identity and I want to share with you two videos of a piece called redskins um and then talk about how this picture of my cousin and uh this dance which I'm currently developing are related to where you actually do This piece, Redskins, was two dance studies that were performed at the Talking Stick Festival in Vancouver, which is an amazing native performing arts festival that I think all of you should go to. But it was sort of my first exploration into this complexity of native identity. And then I got to go to the Santa Fe Museum of Contemporary Native Art and do a residency there. And I got to come in contact with this amazing object, which is a seal-gut jacket. And from that, I'm going to stop, actually. So I'll just show a couple of things planned to say. Well, I'll come back to you afterwards. He's been made inspired by the object. Hi everyone. Thank you for having us. My name is Wendy Redskar, and this is Beatrice Wendy's artist-owner. So I wanted to talk about, because then we're talking about indigeneity. And I wanted to talk about my collaborative work that I've been doing with Beatrice. And as an artist, well, as a human being, my life changed like eight years ago when I had my beautiful daughter. And that also affected everything in my life, including my art practice. And I was very much inspired. Like, I did a lot of sewing. I started to do a lot of sewing based because of Beatrice and other things. So one of the struggles of being a parent is, you know, how do you include your kid or that guilty feeling you get when you're not able to, you know, work. They have to stay home or those kind of things. So like, for instance, when you bring them to a panel, you're worried that people will judge you because your kid's going to, you know. So there's always that kind of feeling. But something kind of magical happens. In 2014, I had a solo exhibition at the Portland Art Museum called Medicine Corral in the 1880 Crokeys delegation. And I wanted to focus on this chief who I grew up with, his descendant. And I kept seeing him when I would, after I left the reservation, when I turned 18. And, for instance, I was just at Dartmouth not too long ago, giving a lecture and walking down the street. And there was this one again on a bargain wholesale. And so when I got the opportunity to show at the Portland Art Museum, I decided I need to investigate this. Because another interesting thing that happened to me was in graduate school, I used to go to Whole Foods and just get Honest Tea because this image was also on Honest Tea. And I was like, well, people keep appropriating this image. And they see him as this handsome chief. But what happened to Medicine Coral when he decided to sit down and take that photograph? What's the story behind that? And I wanted to expose that. So the long story short is that Medicine Coral at age 36, along with six other chiefs, went to Washington D.C. to talk with the government because they wanted to put a railroad through a large chunk of our hunting territory. So that's why he was there. And then the main V.I.A. Barrow Indian Affairs chief photographer took his photo. And as the case is, most tribal nations, they would get their photograph taken. So that's what that was about. But while working on this, I decided it was really important for me to humanize who these chiefs were and let people know what they were about, not just this really striking image, but what their output meant, the significance behind it. And basically they're showing their war honors and what they did. So I would break that down. And then Beatrice would come up to me. I'm working at night. My studio is in my living room at my house. And I had a deadline. I had to get this done. So I had a bunch of Xerox copies. And I said, well, here you go, Beatrice. I'm going to just give you a bunch of these. And you go do whatever you want with them in your room. And I didn't even think about it. And so I continued to work. And then Beatrice came back with this. And I thought, well, this is what this exhibition is about. It's about the next generation and then not stereotyping or appropriating those images. And she needs to be in this exhibition because she needs to represent that voice. So I got really excited. And I decided to take extra copies. And I could go ahead and let Beatrice go ahead and speak. You understand? Talk about your process. I would like to say that I would not be here today if I did not have a mom like Wendy. And when I made that picture, I was in my room and I wanted to just tell you something in because the real part is she only gave me that medicine phone. She gave me the whole stack for this part. So I wanted to actually use it because I had nothing to do. And I had gone this new box of this new art kit, which is where you're living in the picture that my grandpa sends me. And I decided to use it. And I covered it in different things so I could make the picture really colorful and stuff. Because I didn't want to make it have the original colors because they were sort of bland. And then I made like 36 of them or something. And now they went into the art museum. And I got my class in and talked about them. And then I had the very picture of my class with me in front of the picture of all the cheese. Thank you. My poor people. So this was incredible because so we did the opening and I'm like here's the work. I have no idea what she's going in. I have no control what's going to come out of her mouth. But she wanted to talk and she talked and she did an excellent job. But she said I talked way too much. And then we set up her school to come because it was November. It was Native Americans Heritage Month. And so that was really great. Because I could never connect to these kids like she could connect with them. And she talked about the entire exhibition and really owned it. And then Oregon Art Beats picked us up and did a little statement on us. And then we were in several different magazine publications together with various work. But since then the interest and I have worked with the Seattle Art Museum. We've worked with the Tacoma Art Museum. We're going to be working again with the Portland Art Museum in February for the Curtis show. And she's also got into Kansas City with me. And then just the experience of her sitting here on this panel and getting to see all of these artists and curators talk about Native contemporary work has been really incredible. And part of my thing is also getting institutions used to having mothers or parents bring their kids. And allow them to be part of their practice. She's very much part of my practice and she's very professional. And I want to continue working with her as long as she thinks it's good and cool. And when she doesn't then that's just the natural process of it. Thank you. Thank you. This is just so, I would say, but you can see I don't want to sound like it's categorizing too much. But it is so Native. How do we raise up the next generations? I mean this is a question all of us, we're all considered, but certainly in our indigenous Native communities. How do we raise up the next generations? How do we help them to expose them to the kinds of things that are really important for children? And especially as she says, as a contemporary visual artist and a mother, what better way than to bring your child into the process. So it's really, really beautiful. I want to thank all of them for presenting. What I want to do before we end and we have some more time here today is to open up and let's engage in some more discussion with any of the four in the last two that you just heard. But let's just open it up now for full anymore questions, comments, thoughts. I also encourage you to ask tough questions. One of the things that I have, it's sort of a pet peeve I have. One of the concerns about it more personally, about the kind of discussions that we're having in our civil society today is the fear of asking the tough question. The fear of being politically incorrect. The fear of being misunderstood. The fear of being categorized into a box if I ask that question and make that comment. Is those kinds of things that are really important as really distinct, unique human beings that we all are to be able to have that kind of civil discourse, to be able to ask the tough questions, to be able to explain when something you may think is a question will be offensive or something or you may seem ignorant or whatever. I just say ask the tough questions, the comments, things you don't understand. I encourage you to do that. So let's open it up. Thank you guys for doing this. This is really fantastic. I especially want to thank Lulani who just got into this and really made it happen. So thank you so much for doing it. I guess I don't know that this is necessarily a tough question, but one of the projects that I'm helping to raise money for is there's a very internationally renowned Samoan choreographer. I shared the information with you. His name is Lemi Ponifacio and they categorize him as the Samoan Bob Wilson or something because they can't figure out his work. It's just so fantastical. He is working now with Mapuche Indians in Chile. The question that I have is that there's so little support in the United States for cultural exchange with other countries. It seems like when native people, even if their experiences and cultures are radically different, there seems to be a real desire and need for them to share their experiences and their art forms, etc. And I'm just wondering, it almost seems like hearing you guys that the way the fund, going back to your question, some of our very funding mechanisms limit the amount of opportunity for first peoples to get to know each other and to work together. And you know, Lulani, when I first started telling her about this extraordinary artist, Lemi Ponifacio, she's like, yeah, but we can only fund, we can't even fund Canada. And it seems like we're imposing national borders, which is almost like double the cloistering effect. I'm just wondering, you know, what is your experience working with people, native people outside the United States context? And anybody can answer it. So, recently, well, when talking stick festival, that takes place in Canada, right? So you have represented probably over 50 different nations, which is how we refer to ourselves. And I applied to an unnamed foundation that supports international festivals. And I was invited to go to this festival. And they said, well, there's only two countries being represented. Canada and the US. And I said, well, that's not true. There are over 50 nations being represented at this festival. And you are imposing not only borders, but your ideas. They never responded to my email about that. But this is actually quite a large problem. It's not so, I wouldn't say that all of us are super interested in engaging with other tribes, but it is in a way, or nations, it is in a way kind of inherent in us to want to, especially, Christopher and I are two native choreographers who work in the contemporary arena of less than five maybe in this country. So for us to share is so important for us to be more visible. We're going to keep talking about invisibility and visibility. But I think that you're absolutely right in terms of like, one of the main, that is a big part of invisibility is just the fact that there are a lot of systems that don't even recognize the fact that we are so many, even, you know, on Turtle Island. We are so many different nations. Interesting if some tribes put together some of the differences, but it's also really interesting to have all these different tribes who do different things and none of them are alike. So it's also a good thing that no tribes are squished together in different things. But some tribes can share different things that the same tribe does, and like with certain kinds of dances and outfits and ideas for like what you wear. But I think it's actually very good to have all these different tribes because there's been just different things to experience if you ever went to any of the other tribes. I've had a couple of cultural exchange experiences, one as a graduate student and then one that I got to run at the University of Washington. There's more funding for indigenous groups to come together under the arts umbrella than there is coming together under any kind of solidarity movement or political, right? There's very little funding for that. So in my experience working with the Maori and helping to facilitate an exchange between the Maori and the Oregon Indian folks. And then at the University of Washington we did an exchange with the Ainu of Northern Japan and the Puget Sound Native people. And under this sort of umbrella of the arts there were all of this fascinating and really empowering dialogue around political strategies, right? The Ainu had just recently been recognized by their national government. And so connecting them with Coast Salish people who have a greater sense of autonomy because they have access to half of the fish catch the Washington Tribes do. Bringing them together to share their art forms and also to share their art practice was incredible. But what happens is these other conversations about identity and about sovereignty and about indigenous law and the kinds of conversations that really do need to happen. And I mean the Ainu are so isolated because of the language barrier. It was so enriching for them to be able to. And we wore our translators out of course over the course of the year exchange. But it was really valuable on so many levels even though we came together around the arts. So I mean I agree that we have as indigenous people had to find ways around those rather rigid parameters that funding agencies have or that organizations have or that our institutions have. I mean just as a curator of Native American art that's right. I'm entirely pigeonholed and there's a certain set of expectations that comes along with that. So yeah it would be nice if all of those labels would sort of dissipate and allow us to be people working with other people. I'll just say because even at this table this is actually for me an international exchange. So just to give some idea. You want to know the question? Yeah I was going to wonder does it sound like there's a possibility when you were castrated as a Native artist you feel it couldn't diminish your reach or your ability to actually get to a wider audience. Because you wouldn't seem to be pigeonholed and people didn't really know what they were against. I mean how does this. It's complicated. Is it a benefit or is it some ways it helps and how does this. That's a really good question. That's actually one of the questions that I asked them all to consider and address. So you brought it up. I think yes it's incredibly complicated. It is a pigeonhole. It's also who I am. And one thing that I was thinking about is you know I purposely chose not to show too much Native looking work because it's ingrained in who I am. The values of how my parents raised me are greatly influenced just like anyone by where they come from and who their ancestors were. And so no matter what I do it has the print of Aloha and I can't get away from it. And so I think that's an interesting thing that that identity you know is ever present. It makes me think about even as you were just saying and as you were somewhat asking like how we categorize things. There's huge aspects around kind of Native funding that I don't even know about because I'm kind of more from a concert modern dance idiom primarily. So I know about how to apply for those kinds of grants. If I were doing politicized work, if I were doing work that was really trying to bridge gaps in that particular community I might be investigating different things that I don't know about. So one of the things that resonates with me is how do we start creating a more fluid exchange, a more porous atmosphere for these funding streams that look at how art is social justice. You know that's so in vogue right now. Art's always been social justice. Hello. Like just because there's a $100,000 grant out for it now doesn't mean that it hasn't always been there. It's always been there. That's you know especially in the United States it's been like one of the primary roles of art. So it's just interesting like when that happens and when things become porous again, artists as social justice and activists as community builders, as people engaging their family and multi-generational work, how can porous structures happen and how can we slide through that more gracefully and then allow or transmit the knowledge that people know about those things and how do we get that information out. I was so moved I was able to sit in on a town hall meeting that the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation convened in Hawaii a couple years ago and all these people that I think really do not know about grants and how to apply for them showed up. And one of the biggest things that the program officer at that time, the amazing Reuben Rukundi who's here from Hula right now, did was he kept talking about and Lulani as well but how can we reach out to the people that need this type of funding to embrace them. And so I'm kind of thinking about both of those things right now but it's very interesting to think about the structures that we live in and then how do we dissipate those to get to people because it's all there, it's just how we find them and embrace them, each other. I just wanted to add that as a Native artist, things are already put on us but that wouldn't be put on like a white artist. There's like a white artist playing campus, you can do anything you want but as a Native artist, let's say I don't do anything about my cultural background. People are always going to ask me like why don't you do something about your cultural background, you know, when they would never say that to a white artist. So I really do think things are put on us as a Native artist, an artist of color as a female artist. So those are all things that unfortunately we're in this position that we have to deal with all the time. And to me it really isn't about me, it's about whoever is putting it on me and how I want to negotiate that. So I think that is really important to keep in mind. We live in a colonial state. I found it so interesting when some people laughed when Shiloh claimed her Irish and Scottish clans today. I thought that was really telling, that's a big part of who she is, why did that create a ripple of laughter in the room? As much as her Native American Indian tribe did, I just, I was really, I really noted that. I just had a question for Rosie about, you made a comment for a moment about, I'm just interested in getting a little deeper into the identity, like how we understand identity. So you made a comment that your cousin's child is not Native and I was wondering if that meant legally or racially or culturally or what exactly you were indicating there? Well we have a very, we have very complex identities. We are inter-tribal, interracial and the system of identifying Native people by the U.S. government is mainly blood quantum, which is just basically a systematic genocide of indigenous people over time. Because with that, with forced assimilation, or you could call it voluntary relocation, those two things together change our makeup. So I'm interested in how do we identify each other in the future, which is what my next piece is about. And I really want to, through my next work, celebrate the beauty, the complexity, the tragedy in all of that. And that's why that piece says that to me because my cousins are not Native when I am because we belong to a matrilineal tribe. We actually don't, our tribes do not use blood quantum for reasons that we don't have time to explain. But just going back to the other question for a second, one of the things that I've learned through this tour of this last work is how the desire to consume my work and sensationalize my story in a particular way by certain audiences. And I'm trying to find ways to get around that by having a real discourse and not whatever this monotonous thing is that we're having between each other, between Native artists and non-Native people. Art is consumed without us existing for the most part. Native people for the most part are invisible in this country, contemporary living Native people. But our art and our culture are consumed and appropriated at a mass scale. And so when you separate the art from the person, from the living, you have something different going on here. So I say this and people don't understand it, but I'll say it anyway. So I author my work for other Native people. And I do that because that's who I want to share these stories that I'm talking about with. But I also want to share it with everybody else. And I think through that sort of genuinely offering as opposed to educating or edutainment or whatever you want to call it, that people who are not Native can have a different experience of my work that isn't so much about trying to consume a story about me. And that's what I can do on my end. We'll see what other people do. That's an interesting question. Let's ask the audience. I don't know if I'm clever enough to pull that off in a way that it would really work. No. That counts as a challenge. Yes, that's a very good question. It's a good question. It's a challenge. The notions of contemporary Native and kind of contemporary versus traditional and the kind of, I come from Australia originally and there's a pretty rich Indigenous and much more, it feels like a much more visible performance culture from contemporary Indigenous artists. And there's a more fluid conversation between what contemporary and traditional and how that works. I'm wondering why it doesn't seem like there's that same kind of dialogue that is at least visible here and what we can do about it. So first you have to define traditional and you have to define contemporary, right? So in my limited view of the history of my people and we have always been contemporary and contemporary is always responsive to the here and now. So what we perceive as traditional was at one time contemporary. So it depends on what is your goal? What are you? What are you? Do I dance in the longhouse? Yes. Do I do that on stage? No. Does it mean that I'm not traditional? No. But the whole sense of why can't traditional contemporary exist in the same like continuum. And this is part of where I think that this perception of us as this like historical people of the past that are somehow romanticized in these ideas, you know, projected by Edward Curtis and other people are a part of what our invisibility is. So I don't talk about traditional for a part of that reason and I know I'm just complicating your question and not really answering it, but I think they probably have a better answer for Wendy. Well, I was just going to offer one thought from kind of the Hawaiian community's perspective. I think and a lot of ethnic traditional dance forms and performing arts forms I think have similar parallels. It's partly a kind of culture that's fully integrated so that the family is doing the dancing and the singing and it happens in casual and communal environments and that the groups that are practitioners of that work often are getting together in community settings and are not necessarily part of a funding circle, a presenter circuit, they tend to be renters and venues. And so there's a kind of different cultural practice around that that's again separating, so this is where I think the porousness becomes interesting, separating it from the consumable culture that is funded, produced, presented and quote unquote professional. And one of the things that I think is super challenging about the work that the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation is doing is it's trying to reach out to practitioners, cultural practitioners who are not in that conversation and I think if those two conversations could merge a little bit more there could be more of this dialogue at least in the environments that I am around and I see. How do those things start to connect? Let's have one more question. Can I just speak to that? Just really quick, just a very, I'm just curious, you know, as we all have spoken to this idea of invisibility all of the Australian Aboriginal folks that I've ever spoken to feel completely invisible in Australia. So I would be really interested to hear what Australian Indigenous people feel about the visibility or the sort of richness of the performance art in Australia. I mean I think the same could be said for the US or for New Zealand. No matter what the public's perception is, there's still a sense that we have about it. Does that make sense? Totally. I mean someone who runs the contemporary performance art center, we've done one work by an Indigenous artist who's been in 11 years, which is my bad as the artistic director obviously. But at the same time, you know, one of the major festivals there in New Zealand or in Australia and if you were to put on a season with our work by Aboriginal playwrights or using Aboriginal performance it would be equivalent to doing a purely all white kind of male season here and people would call you on it. And yet that doesn't seem to happen. If it would happen with African-American, what key of it it doesn't happen with Indigenous? Kate Lynn, right there in the back. Christopher, you mentioned that some of your family members think that you're not native enough. So I guess I'm curious from all of you how much pressure you feel from within your own communities to be sort of representative of Native cultures? I think it's really interesting because I think any person of color goes through identity struggles like I said just because we're a colonized nation, you know, we've been assimilated, you know, people want us, the whole thing was to erase and make us white. So I don't know, I've reached the point where I'm very comfortable and when I raise Beatrice, I want her to be comfortable and just own who she is at any point of her life and I know she's got her own identity struggles that she's going to go through but for me it's just, it's sort of pointless because it breaks down to, again like I said, colonization if someone's going to point a finger at me, I can point a finger at you and say why you're not such and such either. So it really doesn't matter, what matters is what you believe in and how you feel and then I think that will show. So of course, you know, Crow, I guess it's a maturity thing and when I think about back home and that pressure I didn't have it. When I was in fifth grade, I was embarrassed to be white. I wouldn't walk with my mom and I was just talking to my dad yesterday on the phone and he said, oh, do you remember that time when you would, if your mom was walking, if you were walking with us and your mom was walking by your side, you'd like go around me and walk on my side and he was like chuckling about it and I said, yeah, I do but I just think, man I must have been being harassed or something at school and it kind of makes me sad to think about it because now I totally embrace every part of myself being half white and that's what makes me mean. So yeah, it's your own personal journey and everybody goes through it. If you love this part of yourself but then you have a different part that you don't love as much, I think you should still love both of them because even though I really love my pro side, but I still have a more white side that sometimes I think about it and I wonder how that happened and why it happened but I think that everybody should be happy that they're themselves and be glad that they're here with everybody else today. Really quick, I'll just say I come from a very, very strict reservation community and I was terrified but I presented this work within like a 10 mile radius like the closest I could get to and I interviewed elders and people came to the show and I was just like, oh my God, this could be excommunicated and it was the complete opposite and I was stunned and I understand that there is some times that tension between this idea of who is and who isn't because I myself have had a lot of spiritual dilemma about my own ideas of recognizing who is native and who isn't, who is traditional, who isn't, who is really native, how much native are you, that whole kind of thing and I think that we're figuring that out, I mean not just as artists but as people how to recognize each other and how to hold each other up in different ways. We have to if we want to survive. Right everybody. Last few notes, through the last few comments here, I just want to say that I again think that NBN and Van for inviting us, I'm really happy that you all came and we took the time and it is difficult topics but we have some, I want to thank each of our panelists, Christopher and Tina, and also just acknowledge I have some staff here, John Andre, who's been the timekeeper of our program and I got Francine Blythe, she's our program director sitting back there in that red scarf around her. And of course we love Ruben back there, he's our founding program director and now we're Hewlett, so hi Ruben. And Colleen, I have a lot of you, hi from all my relations gallery, just great to see some familiar faces here and new faces. And I guess in closing we need to do some evaluations I know, they want to make sure but I think in today's fractured nation we need more than ever, we need to have societies built on inclusion, understanding and respect for one another and the problems we're facing today really aren't just political. So people think that these challenges where both nationally and internationally are political and challenging barriers to world peace and understanding also are cultural. It is about really sharing our arts and cultures, our ways of being, our ways of thinking and our own individuality and our own experiences and that offers us that chance to learn and grow as citizens of this global, finite Mother Earth that we all share together. She'll be here for another billion years. She started billion years ago, she'll be here for another billion years. Whatever happens to us humans, so if we can get our act together maybe we'll be here with her. So thank you everybody and I think we have, thank you. You can grab an evaluation.