 Hello, good afternoon, and welcome to the Brooklyn Museum. I am Elizabeth Sackler, and it is a pleasure to be here today and to welcome today's panel, Contemporary Native American Women Artists of the Great Plains. It is the museum's first inter-museum coordinated panel between the A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and the ongoing, and as if you have seen it and if you haven't, I hope you will go, a glorious exhibition outside of the Center's walls, which is teepee heritage of the Great Plains, which is co-curated by Nancy Rossoff, was with us today, Curator of Arts of the Americas, and Susan Kennedy Zeller also with us today, Associate Curator Native American Art. And I'd also like to thank personally the staff at the National Museum of American Indian at Bowling Green. Since its opening, the museum and its curators there have created outstanding and really instructive exhibitions at the same time supporting non-natives like us, like me, in better understanding the history, art, and culture of the First Peoples. And they have been very instrumental, I think, in assisting in making everything that you will see, if you haven't seen it already, on the fifth floor, happen in many ways that it has. Welcome. As always in life, we are living right now in complex times. In Egypt, we have witnessed an unprecedented revolution where women who marched and faced adversity in the streets are now fighting for the right to be represented in a true and new democracy. In Libya, Sarah Costa, who is Executive Director of the Women's Refugee Commission, has pointed out with great trepidation that women have been both absent in photos and terrifyingly absent at the borders as refugees fleeing the country. And Sarah wonders, as we all must fear, for them, where are they and what are they experiencing? The upheavals and all of the attendant horrors are part of the history of this country, of our country, and of this continent. In fact, a close majority, and Nancy might correct me if I'm wrong, of native nations and tribes were matrilineal, if not matriarchal, at the time of conquest. I can see her brain. She's counting them up as we go along. She'll let you know when I turn the panel over to her. I have a significant anecdote about that, which I really enjoy. It was over 10 years ago. It was probably 15 or, well, it wasn't 20 years ago. It was 15 years ago when Orin Lyons, who is a great and eloquent leader of the Onondaga Nation, has said to me, hell, before Columbus, us men were nothing here. And the more I traveled through Indian country, the more I found out that that used to be true, and in fact, still is. So the more things change, the more they stay the same. On March 8th, however, I had the privilege of being at the 100th anniversary of Women's History Month. In Washington, DC, for the Women of Courage Awards, which was hosted by Secretary of State Clinton and the First Lady. And I learned there that there are 890 million girls and young women between the ages of 14 and 27 in the world today. And that gave me this incredible sense of hope. Both Secretary Clinton and Mrs. Obama stressed that priority must be given to the opportunity for education. And the education of these young women is going to hopefully make it an enormous change and a major shift in power worldwide. This month, which of course is Women's History Month, here in Brooklyn and at the center, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, we're celebrating our fourth anniversary of the center. And for four years, we have provided progressive and provocative programming to our visitors. We're very proud to be exemplary and represent the diversity of our community here in Brooklyn. Next Sunday, which is March 20th, is going to be no exception and Gloria Steinem will be here and moderating a panel, Sexual Violence During the Holocaust and Other Genocides. Panelists include Sonja Hedgepeth and Rochelle Sedel, who are co-authors of the new Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust. And it's the first book that has been written about this. So it will be here in the auditorium at two o'clock and then at 4.30, we will all make our way to the Sackler Center for a toast to March the fourth anniversary of our existence. If you're interested in becoming a member of the Council for Feminist Art, to be more involved with the center in a more direct way and with events in various ways, please do join us. There are brochures at the entrance of the auditorium. So today, today marks an intersection for me of two aspects of my life's work. In 1992, I founded the American Indian Ritual Object Repatriation Foundation to educate the public and museums and auction houses and collectors about the distinction between that which is appropriate for sale or exhibition and that which is needed by living cultures to continue a spiritual life way. And I would like to invoke, it's been a long time since I've been doing repatriation work. I've been so busy here at the Brooklyn Museum and there's a part of me that just misses traveling through Indian country so. So when I say I would like to invoke, it suddenly set up this wonderful feeling. Two of my mentors of that decade and it was that many decades ago actually and the extraordinary Ruben Snake who was a spiritual leader and chairman of the Ho-Chunk Nation and he was also the first president of the Native American Congress. And also the great Vine DeLoria who was a writer, lawyer, professor and I like to call him an intellectual agitator. And I think that this day, this very day would have given them a very big lift, both the exhibition and all of your presence here in this museum in Brooklyn today. So I'm delighted that you're here. The TP exhibition as we fondly call it has successfully expressed the complex, the painful and often horrific truth of the European conquest of the Western Hemisphere and the westward expansion over the glory exquisite life ways of the first peoples. I was evident that this exhibition, this TP heritage of the Great Plains required the presence and voices of American Indian women artists. So if you haven't been there, of course, as I've said before, you want to hop to the fifth floor. And I want to thank the friends of the Sackler Center for Feminist Art who are also passionate about American Indian art and culture. So I'd like to give a thanks, a big shout out to Tom and Kamala Buckner, to Julia Emerson, to Joanne Balser, to Frieda Arth, to Marjorie Miller Engel who is with us here today. Thank you Edwin and Milner and to Barry Rosen. Thank you very much. Without all of these people, this panel would not have been possible. So it is a great pleasure to introduce our moderator, Nancy Marie Mitlow. Nancy and I first met in the early 90s. Yes, we are that old. When she was teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and I was on the road with the Repatriation Foundation. Tuscarora Rick Hill was director of the IAAA Museum at that time. He also was the curator who put the first inaugural show in up down at the Customs House at NMAI. And it feels like it was a long time ago. Nancy recognized the imperative for repatriation to be a section of her museum studies class and I had the honor of lecturing there on that subject and on NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act for a few years running. I'd like to introduce Nancy to you and then Nancy will introduce her panelists. But first I would like to welcome each of you personally, Carol and Nita Terry. Thank you for coming to share your beautiful work and your stories. Thank you for traveling to the east so that we can hear and feel the plains and the beads and the basketry and all. That give us so much pleasure and people across this country. So Nancy, Nancy Marie Mitlow is an associate professor of art who may or may not have an announcement to make when I'm finished, about two weeks ago having just received tenure of art history in American Indian studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison. And we did before the panel have an opportunity to talk about what is going on in Madison. And I hope she'll say just a couple of words about how incredible it is to be around live passionate activism at work in a democracy that is being threatened. So Nancy, back to Nancy, away from Madison, earned her PhD in 1993 from Stanford University writing on Native American identity and arts commerce in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her recent book, Our Indian Princess Subverting the Stereotype, was published by the School of Advanced Research Press. Mitlow's extensive relationship with the IAIA, if I could call it IAIA, Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe is a pen, tribal, college and contemporary arts museum. Many of you may know it well, including serving Nancy did as senior editor for the Ford Foundation funded volume manifestations, new native art criticism. She directs historic American Indian photography research in New Mexico and Oklahoma including the Horace Pula photography collection scheduled for exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in 2013. Mitlow's curatorial work has resulted in six exhibitions at the Venice Biennale. In June 2011, she curates the exhibition Epicentro at the University of Venice Cia Foscari featuring the work of John Hitchcock and the dirty print makers of America, sounds good, you'll have to tell me about that. She was selected recently as a 2009-2010 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellow to support the completion of her second book that documents and theorizes the emergence of an indigenous art presence at the Venice Biennale from 1999 to 2011. Nancy was trained in visual anthropology, regularly teaches courses on American Indian film, fine arts, visual representations and so on. I have to say this could go on and on. What I can tell you because I know Nancy is that she's brilliant. She knows her stuff like few people do and that it is really a pleasure and we are very lucky and honored to have her moderating this panel today. Thank you, and thank you, Nancy. As Liz mentioned, we are friends from way back and I really think of Elizabeth Sackler as one of our great unsung heroes of the repatriation foundation movement. She's been a friend to native people for many, many years and their thing she does that people don't even know about. She supported some of my Institute of American Indian Arts students on a type of habitat of humanity project they did at a tribal center in Philadelphia. So she has many lives as well. So thank you for the very kind introduction, Elizabeth, and for welcoming us here. Thank you each for being here. We have some stellar information to share with you today. This is a very exciting moment, I think for the exhibit, for the native women who joined me and for just the state of where we are with American Indian issues, American Indian art. I teach at the University of Wisconsin Madison and I shared with Anita this morning over coffee. I was showing a video of one of our great tribal leaders, Walter Echo Hawk. He is an attorney, has been with the Neighborhood and Rights Fund for many years and he had a quote on this video. If you Google Walter Echo Hawk and just go to video, it's by Sterling Harjo, who's an excellent filmmaker. In any case, he says the number one problem facing Indian tribes in the US today is a lack of reliable information about our native peoples. Now I thought he might say something about environmental exploitation, about mineral access and resources, about sovereign treaties. No, he basically said we need reliable information about, and I love the way he put the R in there, our native people, reliable information. And I really do think there's power in that. There's power in that for museums. There's power in that for the artists that we'll be hearing from today. There's power in that for the amazing curators that have put together the TP exhibit and I just want to give a little shout out to Nancy Rossoff and to Susan Kennedy Zeller for pulling this amazing project together. Congratulations on the exhibit. Really, it's been an achievement. So the work that we're doing together today is really making that information available to you as an audience and I count on you to carry that information forward as well. I want you all to go home and at dinner tonight say, hey, I saw this amazing panel. Let me tell you one thing about it and that one piece of information will find its way somewhere else. So let me just take a moment and what we plan to do today is instead of me giving a bio in each of the artists, the artist will actually be talking about their life and their work concurrently. We're going to put the lights down. You'll see some amazing images and we'll do that for a couple of minutes and then also we'll have a question and answer period where I've scripted a couple of kind of evocative questions that they will be able to pursue and then we'll take questions from you. We want to have at least 20 or more minutes from you, the audience, to let us know what your interests are. So please join me in welcoming Terry Greaves, Kaia Wabid worker here to my right. I'm going to work my way down and then Terry's going to start out. Kara Omarthly Douglas, his Northern Arapaho Seminole of basket weaver, will be next. And then we have Anita Fields, Osage, Muskogee Creek, a ceramicist from Oklahoma will be our last speaker. So Terry, I'm going to turn it over to you now and let you show your images and talk about your life. Thank you. It is a huge, huge honor for me to be here and to be on this panel and to meet you finally. And thank you, Elizabeth, so much for asking me. It's an enormous honor to be a part of this exhibit as well as this discussion. So I'm Kaiawa from Oklahoma. I was born and raised on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, which is Shoshone in Arapaho. I grew up on the Shoshone side of the reservation and there my mother had a trading post for over 20 years, 25 years I think it was. I grew up in her trading post crawling around behind her cases and absorbing beadwork. She sold things from other places. The traders from the Southwest would come up and sell her Navajo blankets and silver, but mostly she dedicated her time and her efforts to beadwork. When she was a young woman, she was Kaiawa Princess and she was working in the Southern Plains Indian Museum and she said this really amazing Cheyenne beadworker came in and she had a beautiful pair of Cheyenne women's moccasins that were made perfectly and they were exquisitely beaded and they didn't have the money to buy them. The buyer there at the shop didn't have the money to buy them. And she said later on that week she saw those moccasins in a gas station case. And it was then at a really young age that she decided that she was gonna dedicate her life to promoting beadwork in the way that she understood it for the aesthetic value, for the cultural value. And so later on when she was in her 30s and it moved to Wyoming, she opened up this trading post and she did. She spent the rest of her life promoting beadwork and she gave me that passion, absolutely. My grandmother was a beadworker. She only had a sixth grade education and she supported not only her children but several of her grandchildren that she raised doing beadwork and working menial jobs. So that's the background that I come from. I have a really intense memory as a child. My mother had a small closet and in her closet she had all of her moccasins. She had, she still has many, many moccasins on shelves all rolled up and then she had all of her medallion necklaces hanging on the wall and then her clothes in there and it smelled like smoked hide and my mother. And I would close the door and I would turn off the light and I would feel the beads on the wall and smell the hide and it is absolutely like, it's what drove me as a small child to wanna learn how to bead. So when I was eight years old, I asked my mama, she would show me how to bead and she said, well, Terri, I'm not a beadworker but your auntie was my adopted auntie, Shoshone auntie that was working for at the time. Zidora Ena, she said, ask Zidora, she'll show you how to bead. So I went into the shop and Zidora said, fine. And she sat down with me and she showed me how to do the first stitch I ever learned how to do is called Lazy Stitch, which I hate the name because there's nothing lazy about it. Hump Stitch is another name, it's called and I made a pair of moccasins and so I started beading as a really young girl and I never stopped. I beaded my way through college. I made all my book money making small objects and then eventually after I had graduated from college, I was thinking about going into law and but before then I wanted to take some time off of school and my mother had been buying my work and selling it through her shop in Santa Fe at that point and she said, well, Terri, why don't you try and make a pair of beaded tennis shoes? And I thought she was crazy because at that time I had only worked on really small kind of powwow beadwork type of things belt buckles and earrings and whatnot but she asked me to do the shoes and we had seen a pair of shoes growing up as kids. There was a pair of Lakota shoes, fully beaded tennis shoes, Converse that came through my mother's shop and my sister and I thought they were the coolest things on the planet because they were so contemporary but at the same time they were very traditional and so it was those shoes that kind of started my way of thinking about beadwork outside of traditional objects. To the point now where though I started off doing traditional objects, I don't do them at all anymore except for for family and I have tried to move away from, well, I don't do ceremonial objects unless it's for family, I don't do like moccasins and that kind of thing unless it's for family. So this first image that I have up on this screen is a beaded hide umbrella. The white is brain tan deer hide and this is the piece that I want best of show with at Santa Fe's Indian Market in 1999 and it is the piece that really launched my career and it was a point for me when I was really able to see or start to understand that I could make the medium not necessarily be linked to the traditional object and so my mother, again, my muse, said, why don't you try and bead an umbrella which I also thought was a crazy idea and then she went and found me an antique beaded or an antique umbrella with a bakelite handle and gave it to me and said, you know, go for it. So I took it apart, I used the fabric as a pattern on it and I beaded a parade scene on it. I grew up going to Crow Fair was like the way that people go to Disney World in the summertime, we went to Crow Fair and my memories of the parade at Crow Fair and not just at Crow Fair but all the powers that I went to, all the doings that we went to, I was proud to be Kiowa, I was definitely proud to be Kiowa, proud to be a part of a larger Indian world and those parades are a way for us to really dress and to strut and that's what I wanted to do on this umbrella. Also my mother dislikes the sun intensely so I thought it was very appropriate that I make an umbrella. So at the beginning of the umbrella, you can see the two men on horses, one holding an American flag and the other one holding an Indian flag, which is the staff with the feathers on it and then after, always at a parade, after comes the Paoa royalty, the princesses, my mother was Kiowa princess back in the 50s and then throughout there's other scenes on every panel. So the top of it, I worked, this was pre-kids so I could work through the middle of the night. The top of it, once I got it laid out on there, I realized that I needed something on the top of it and every day my mother and my sister would come in the morning and look at what I had done, I'd leave it out for them and my sister one morning came busting in after I had done the blue and the feathers. She came, she woke me up and she said, Terry, you did grandma's design on the top of that umbrella and I woke up and I realized, wow, I did do grandma's design, I used her colors, her last name was Big Eagle and she always did a lot of eagle feather designs and I realized I had put her on the top without even knowing it and this whole piece came together in that way. It was definitely probably one of those artists' experiences where you open up and it flows and this piece felt like it was done in a day. It was like I had started it even though it took me a couple of months and by the end I was surprised at what I had done. I had no idea that it was in me. Eventually I decided, because I had been doing pictorial work for a long time, I decided that I wanted to do, I wanted to beat a book. I was thinking about those illuminated manuals that the monks would spend entire lifetimes painting sacred stories on and I thought that's what I wanted to do but it couldn't have text on it. It needed to be visual and so that's what I decided to make and that's what this piece is. The front of it is my hand and it's the melding of the earth and the sun which is where our sacred beings, the sunboys, come from and the story of this particular book is the sunboys. So the book couldn't just be pages that you flipped open. I wanted it to actually be an object too that you could walk around. So it opens up into a five-pointed star. The sunboys, when they passed into the spirit world, turned themselves into 10 medicine bundles and so I thought the number five would be appropriate as being half of that. The story starts off with their birth which you can see the little porcupine and the baby in the center and the mother at the bottom. The sun for us is a porcupine and he fell in love with an earth woman and he came down and stole her. She was actually a baby and stole her up to the sky world and eventually had a son with her and the son was the sunboy. He was the son of the sun and the son of an earth woman. Eventually she got so lonely for home she dropped herself through a hole in the sky world to the earth world and he came and saw her and was so angry that she left with his son that he threw a gaming wheel at her and killed her and she fell to the earth but her son was alive and eventually spider woman found her found him and raised him as her own son or grandson and at some point or another she gave him a warning to leave her things alone in the teepee and of course as children do he didn't and he went and got into that bundle and he found the wheel and that's kind of what you see on the next page and he threw it up in the sky and it came down into the bolt of lightning and it split him into two and it two halves of the same person not two people but two halves of the same person and so you see them fighting the bear that's another part of the story it's a very long story and it has many but I kind of, in this particular piece I kind of kept it small, short. My idea was when I started working with the sunboys as a subject matter was my children they love superhero stories, Batman, Spider-Man the Star Wars trilogy, well whatever it is more than a trilogy, they loved it and I thought well we have our own superheroes the sunboys are our people, are our heroes and I thought there has to be a way for me to illustrate it and my idea was is that once they looked at this piece if they could remember these pictures and I actually would make copies of them as line drawings and give them as coloring pages to them my hope was that at some point or another when they were adults and they were laying in bed with their children they would remember the images and they would know the story and they would be able to give it to a next generation. This is another piece that I did relatively recently it actually happened right after all that crap went down in Fallujah I was thinking about, I was thinking about how we as native people serve in larger numbers by per capita than any other majority or minority in the United States and so raising suns specifically coming from a warrior culture where we really value our soldiers what, like why, how did they do that? How what was the leap in their mind to be able to do that to basically fight for the occupying forces in a foreign land over similar reasons over oil, resources and after going to Black Lagoon Ceremonial and really listening to what the men were saying it came to me that it doesn't matter what the politics are of the time it is their place in the universe that matters it is our place within our communities that matter and these men are warriors in the same way that the Quaytenka were warriors in the same way that that man over there that's a Vietnam vet was a warrior and he's recognized as such so in this particular piece this is about five feet by five feet it's five deer hide overall I have it split into two planes the terrestrial and the celestial the bottom half being a buffalo medicine and the top half being kind of sun representation of the buffalo medicine because we were Sundance people I traced outlines of my mother's hand she came and was looking at all my panels as I was working on them and she has arthritis now in her beautiful hands and so she was like oh well you'll have to clean up the edges like make my fingers straighter and I said no mother I said your hands are beautiful as they are they were kind of wavy and ethereal looking and I thought it was appropriate and so in the center panel let me just see, yes in the center panel I have four figures the top left one is a Quaytenka warrior and they were our elite warriors and there was only ever very few of them in the tribe they would stake themselves down on the battlefield and they would do or die next to him is a woman in a battle dress a red sleeve, a Cairo red sleeve dress and she has a lance in her hand and is doing a women's victory dance for the men below her is a man in contemporary black leggings warrior clothing, dancing and I put stripes on him and also I've noticed that they wear the colors of the services of the places that they've been so the green and yellow I believe are Vietnam colors so each one of those staffs are painted and according to what like that particular man has been involved in so then finally on the lower left hand corner is a young Cairo man in battle gear and they're placed in a field of all these silver dots which is actually the Milky Way which is where we go when we pass away and I thought that she's leading him into the sky world and the old warriors and his contemporaries are around him and they're leading him into his rightful place into this world, into our cosmic world outside of, excuse me, outside of the politics. Here's another piece that I did for the sunboys, this one was specifically for my kids. There is a scene at the opening of Spider-Man where the spider bites his hand and the DNA starts to spin together, spider DNA and human DNA and I thought, oh what a perfect way to meld the earth and the sky together is with DNA and I knew that my kids would get it in fact I knew that probably any of the kids this generation would get that melding of the DNA they understand what DNA is for one and so I put the sunboys and I kind of have them in my mind as kind of different characters from one another, kind of one athletic and one kind of stout, kind of like my sons and there's Spider-Woman on the other side, his grandmother the one that raised him so I also do flat panels just basically beaded paintings. Though a lot of my work is political or historical I also like to do just humorous things as well. This is taken from a photograph of my auntie back in the sixties, in the late sixties with the beehive and the pointing glasses. She was standing with a group of women and I call it tradition because while they are traditional, they are tradition. They have made traditional their own which is what we do as native people though we don't sew with sinew anymore we sew with nylon thread. Who's to say that nylon is any more tradition or less tradition than sinew is? This is the piece that kind of started all of my flat work. I was thinking about where native art was I think this was about three years ago and I thought well I need to make something that I use traditional materials, traditional techniques traditional being relative because we didn't have glass beads if you go far enough back glass beads are not traditional. And put them on a piece that is completely non utilitarian so it's a flat panel and then in his mouth I needed to use a stereotypical image so that if you went to Thailand with this piece they would identify it as Indian and then out of his mouth a little bubble that says art which is lifted from Roy Lichtenstein's art, 1964 I think it was and he was thinking about the same thing in terms of where contemporary art was at the time and so this is my piece art, 2006. So as a mother, again as a mother we were just talking about how much our children influenced what we do at the time. And I was thinking really hard about when the vote happened in Iraq and it was supposedly the insurgents and come and ruin the whole thing and it wasn't the correct democratic process and I was thinking seriously about how we kind of went through the same thing. We are still considered incompetent to take care of our own lands. My Indian land goes through the Bureau of Indian Affairs and my grandmother was not considered a citizen of the United States until 1924. You can ask any Indian what 1924 means to them and we all know what that means. That means we became citizens at that year. And then I was specifically thinking about how similar these wars were in terms of fighting for resource and then more specifically what is a mother's experience trying to raise a child in this with an occupying force. How do you raise that child not to hate? How do you not pass that kind of feeling on to the next generation? And how much my grandmother who went to a boarding school and had her head shaved and her mouth washed out with lie, how did she not hate? And how did her mother teach her not to hate? And how we as families go through time dealing with these situations. And so this piece is called Witness Occupation Democracy. I wanted to talk a little bit about the teepee that's upstairs. It was a huge honor to be asked to make a piece specifically for this exhibit. And I thrashed it around in my head for quite a while as to what the images I was gonna do on it. I wanted it to work the same way that I do all of my large pieces and that I wanted it to read from the right to the left. So when you read the images, you actually walk around it that way, which is the way that you walk into a sacred space. Whether it's a ceremonial teepee or a sweat lodge or a regular teepee, you walk in and go around in the movement of the sun. And so on the front, on the door, is it's kind of split again into the terrestrial and the celestial. And on the front is the basis of our communities, which is our families. A mother and father was small children. And then on the right-hand side is the women's side. And so there's a grandmother, that's my mother. My family is in all of my work, poor things. That's my mother and my youngest son. And above her is the devil's tower, which is a story that I learned as a really little girl. My mother actually taught it to us, like just telling it to us, but then also made us learn it in Indian sign language. My grandmother was Kiowa and she was married several times, but mostly to Cheyenne men. They didn't have a language in common oftentimes, but they had sign language in common. So when the Cheyenne relatives would come and the Kiowas would meet, they would speak to each other in sign language, which my mother has these great memories, she said, of these long, beautiful conversations happening and only the sound of the fire going and then laughter every once in a while as they're talking to each other with their hands. So my mother has the ability to sign Indian sign language. On the backside is the elders above the drum. The drum for us is so important because it's the music that brings us into dance. It allows us to move towards the movement that's important for whatever the ceremony is. But it was also important to me that those men be contemporary men, the way that drummers are today. And they use microphones and they drink Coke. On the right hand, our left hand side is the men's side. There's my uncle who's doing a gourd dance and he loved Elvis and had a bouffant, Elvis bouffant. He was also a bit of a ladies man. And then the one generation handing off to the other generation of warrior because the warrior culture, the warrior society is very active among the Kiowa. And above him, you can see grandfather's snake. And on the women's side, grandma spider is above them. And then my uncle who's an enormous OU fan with one of my kids, it had to be Oklahoma for me. And nothing says Oklahoma more than OU. And this is the female figure at the front on the door and it is an image of me holding my first born. And that is my slideshow. Thank you. So we're now moving on to Carol E. Marthely Douglas. She's going to be pulling up her slide presentation and talking about her images, her work. I'm Carol E. Marthely Douglas. I'm Northern Arapaho and Seminole. My mother's from the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. And she's full blood Northern Arapaho. My father is Seminole from Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. He's also full blood. And I am kind of the opposite of Terry. I was raised in a real untraditional, nontraditional way. I think because my mother was raised in an orphanage at St. Stephen's Mission in Wyoming. She was taken away from her family. She had a family of 11, I think there were 11 brothers and sisters and a couple of them didn't survive. So my mother said she remembers one day when they lived in a log cabin with her mother and a couple of other brothers and sisters. She said she remembers when a black car came up and pulled up in front of their house and out came these two people. And she says to this day, she remembers that she thought of them as penguins, but it was the nuns from the mission. They came to pick up my mother and my aunt. And so it was kind of a blessing, but in a way it probably saved their life. They survived in the mission, very strict Catholic upbringing of course. And of course she wasn't taught any of her tribal traditions, her language. She didn't speak her language at all. And so in that respect I was raised, like I said, non-traditionally from my mother's point of view, kind of also the same thing with my father. He's Seminole from Oklahoma. And he was the tribe that was allotted 160 acres of land. They were allotted that land because they were removed from Florida. So they ended up in Oklahoma and they got their allotment and they were pretty much told more or less to be farmers, which my father's family was, they had their farm and he came also from a large family. I think he had 13 siblings. So, and my father was also one of those that went to a boarding school and he did speak his language and he still does today. He's very fluent in the Muskogee Creek Seminole language along with his brothers and sisters and I have some cousins that still speak it today. And of course, going to boarding school, he was not, they were punished for speaking their language or for even talking amongst themselves in their own language also. So that's why I was raised really non-traditionally. We didn't have a lot of native art in our family, in our house. So I'm a late bloomer. I kind of learned on my own from when I was growing up we kind of had family that would come and stay with us, kind of learned about our traditions through them, because when I was younger, we'd have a lot of family come stay for weeks. We'd have like uncles come from Wyoming to stay with us. I think maybe they were probably coming to Oklahoma to look for jobs or whatever. So we always had family in our house. It was either my dad's family or my mother's family, but there was always aunts or uncles coming around somehow. So we kind of learned from them some of the traditions. I went to a Catholic school in Oklahoma City and didn't learn a lot of my own traditions there. When I was 14, my parents got divorced. So we were sent to Indian school. I went to Fort So Indian school in a lot in Oklahoma. So I really experienced culture shock there, going from Catholic school to all native school. And I went kind of, Terry was from my mother's reservation and she was raised in Wyoming. And I was raised kind of in Terry's neck of the woods in Oklahoma among the Kiwis and Comanches and Apaches. But I really enjoyed Catholic school, not so much, but Indian school because you know, everybody kind of looked like us, like me. I really kind of immersed myself in the culture. I learned a lot because from Indian school, there was people from all over the United States. We met people from Washington State New York, Texas, all throughout the planes. So that's how I got a lot of my knowledge from that and my interest in, you know, Native American traditions. I attended Haskell Indian Nations University, which is, that's what it's now called. It was Haskell Indian Junior College with the plan of going to law school. Hey. Yeah. That was the plan. I graduated from there and actually that's where I met my now, my husband. And I also attended the University of Kansas and I was also going, I was pretty long. Met my husband in Kansas. We ended up moving to Washington State in Seattle. And that's where I live with my family today. So I kind of put my law school ambitions to the side after I got married and started having kids. And my first son was born in 1990 and he was like two or three years old. And I kind of, I stayed home with him. I raised him at home and I kind of was looking for some kind of hobby, something to do in my spare time, with a little bit of spare time I had. So I tried sewing and didn't really care for that too much. Did crocheting. I took a class at the Seattle Art Museum and it was a Northwest Coast drawing, which is really interesting. I love the Northwest Coast art, but drawing just didn't click for me. I think I stressed too much about it. Just like having something to put on paper was just, it didn't click with me very well. So I found a school in Seattle at the time. It was called the Basketry School of Seattle. And I enrolled and took a couple classes there and started with Cedar Bark weaving, which I enjoyed and they also had other classes. You could take pine needle basketry, you know, traditional pine needle basketry, which I did also enjoy. And then I took this one class I saw. I noticed a sample, they had a little shop and I noticed a sample of different baskets they had. And this was the coiled baskets. So I signed up for that class. And something about that that just really clicked, I just really enjoyed using the material. I just enjoyed the colors. I, something just really called out to me when I took that class. And I found out that I was, you know, pretty good with my hands. So that's how I started. And this first slide I'm showing is in the exhibition. It's called the Gathering of Nations. And what I did with this basket is I took each person on this basket is, they're specific to each tribe I have. I'll start with the lady. With the first lady in the purple that is represents the Cherokee tribe like the Northeastern Cherokees, Oklahoma Cherokees. So the little basket she's holding is a Cherokee twill tray. And that's, you know, that's their traditional, you know, the cotton dress that they, that they wore in the like late 1800s, 1900s when they were trying to, when they were getting Americanized, I guess you could say. Next to her is a seminal lady in her traditional seminal patchwork dress. And she is holding a coiled basket which was made with pine needles which is part of their tradition. And in that basket, I just used one pine needle. And the next lady, you can't see her, but that one is, it's, she's dressed in black and red and that's a traditional Haida tribe which my husband is Haida. And the basket she's holding is in the traditional materials of the Haida which is the red and yellow cedar bark. And the lady next to her with the braids and then the white is a pomo from California. And that is the pomo style basket that she's holding the coiled pomo style basket. And next to her is a Navajo lady and she is holding a Navajo wedding basket in their traditional colors and materials. Next to her is someone from Eastern Washington that's representing the Calville tribe, Eastern Washington. And she's holding a berry basket and that is a traditional design that's from that tribe. Next to the lady in green is Nespers from the Idaho area and she is holding a corn husk basket, you know, a corn husk bag actually. And the next we have our represented, I represented the Northern Plains, the Northern Arapaho lady. She is, you know, she has her regalia on and I put some beads on there so you can kind of tell she has beads on her leggings and some bead work on her dress. And she's holding a coiled basket. We can't see the other one next to her is someone representing the woodlands and she is holding a birch bark basket. And the last, the lady next to her is honoring one of my, some of my friends from Maine, they wore the peat hats and she is holding a sweetgrass basket. The last lady here represents the Louisiana basket weavers, the Chittimacha tribe and they do some amazing twill work. So each basket, I had no trouble doing the coiling and I had to teach myself how to do the Chittimacha style and the twill work on the Cherokee basket. But the other ones I could handle, I could handle the coiling and some of the twining but those other two I had to teach myself how to do. So I think I did okay. Buffalo Thunder, this is one of the baskets I had done about five years ago. And so this is my kind of tribute to the planes since there's not many, I don't think there's very many other planes, basket weavers out there. This is what I decided to do. This is kind of something I saw in a picture and I thought, well, maybe I could put that on a basket and I just kind of sketched it out and then as you're working your coiling in this continuous circle, so I had to keep track of where the hoofs were and where the bodies were. So as you're coiling up, you have to kind of keep an idea of keeping a pattern in there. And the same thing for this one also, this is called the hunt. And this is when I started getting it really into it, doing a lot of the pictorial type of baskets, horses, and you can see there, the hoof prints at the bottom. This is the round dance. Also the men and the women in their traditional regalia and it just shows the back, you know, the back of them. And I put beads in, there's beads on some of their leggings and on their Contra belts, I put little silver beads on there also. And that's just representing the round dance. And this is called the healing hands. I don't know, I like the hands for some reason. I use that a lot in some of my, in a lot of my baskets. This is called the grand entry. Also what Terry had mentioned before, you know, you have your, you have a certain way that people enter the powwow circle. You have the man with the staff, the eagle staff and then there's further on the other side, there's the American flag and then you have your royalty. You have the elder men, the elder men and elder women and then you have your traditional dancers. So it's in order as you come into the circle and then, you know, it comes around, you have your traditional man dancer, I had to put the straight dancer in, grass dancer, fancy and then the women, the traditional, the jingle dress and then the fancy shawl. This one is called tradition meets technology. This is my take on mixing the two together. I have the ladies, you know, all the ladies and the kids are all in their traditional regalia and one of the men on the horse is as a cell phone. The lady in the back there on the Trevoy, she's holding her laptop and the little boy is holding his Game Boy. So I just mix the two together. This is a butterfly basket. I just wanted to throw a lot of colors in there. I think I used every color material that I could get a hold of on that one and this is a real traditional geometric design in a lot of baskets throughout the Southwest and this one is Buffalo basket, just the Buffalo heads and I put a little copper beads for the eyes and this is my tribute to the Seminole. This is a snake design. This is a traditional patchwork design that they use in a lot of their clothing and this is contemporary leap frogs and this is a lightning basket, just a real traditional lightning design which is used a lot in a lot of tribes from California and throughout the Southwest also and I have to have my people in there too and this is the four directions. So this is my kind of plains tribe with the four riders, each in the traditional colors and these are my miniatures. I do miniatures. These are usually about an inch, inch and a half. This is my miniature hummingbird basket, another miniature dragonfly. Of course I got to have my frog and I put the little beads for the eyes and this is the geometric. So I do the big coil baskets. I used, for the big coil baskets I use hemp. I use contemporary materials and it's hemp and it's Irish wax linen thread imported and the reason I like to use those materials is because it allows me to do a lot of different shapes. You can do a lot of shapes with that material and also because you can get a lot of colors, a lot of different colors on that and for my miniatures I use reed which is, you know what's in it, you get it in a big coil and I use reed and I use a grass which is called raffia which is imported also but you can dye it and then just make dye it to any color and it holds the color real well and when I do the miniature baskets I use a beading needles and I strip down the grass to make it really thin like a thread so that's how I get, you know, I just coil with that and then just sitting there just coiling with the beading needles. Thank you. And next we have a Neeta Fields presentation. Well I would like to say that I'm delighted to be here and very honored to be asked to be among the wonderful ladies here and to talk to you about my life as an artist and a mother and sister, all those things. I mean it all mills together. I don't think there's any difference in all of that. I like to begin with pictures of my family and up on the upper right here is my great-grandfather and his name was Richard White. That was the name that was given to him. His name was Pahuleh, pretty hair and then my grandmother is to the right and she's holding my cousin but in our way he's actually my brother. We have extended family, a system built in and basically what it does is that you are never without folks so that we have a system built into our clan system that you always have family. So he is my brother. And then on the bottom there's a picture that I received by way of email a couple years ago. I was real excited to get this because it's my dad. So they kept moving back to Oklahoma. There was about a three-year period that we'd moved to Colorado for a little bit. Life and that's where my dad was from and that's where I was born and raised and we lived out on my great-grandfather's allotment until I was about 10 years old and then we made a move back and forth to Colorado where my dad was a guide and outfitter but that move was really hard for my folks and so they kept moving back to Oklahoma. There was about a three-year period that we'd moved to Colorado for a little bit, moved back to Oklahoma at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, the very early 70s, which was an amazing time. It was a really wonderful time to be there and it was an amazing as a young person to be around young native people who were interested in the arts, who wanted to be artists and to start exploring our histories and our backgrounds as a source of inspiration for our work. This is a picture of my daughter wearing a blanket that is an heirloom in my family and to the right is the same blanket which shows the traditional ribbon work of the Osage with the beaded hand and my grandmother's most prized possessions were this traditional clothes that she had for our family that had been handed down through two or three generations. One thing that I like to say about this is that during ceremonial time and when we had the opportunity to wear our traditional clothing or Indian clothes, it was a big ordeal. We'd get the trunks open and everything smelled like mothballs and start taking out the blankets and the skirts and grandma would say, this is what you're gonna wear, this is what you're gonna wear. And so it was a very special time but not only that, as a young person, one of the first things I learned to do as an artist was I asked my grandmother to teach me how to sew and over a period of years, looking at these, I understand now as an adult that this was really my first initiation into color, pattern, design and absolutely finely crafted design and pattern and there were sewn so exquisitely. A lot of these were hand sewn totally. And so I had a real, when I was a very young mother with my daughter, Wilaina here, one of the first things when we moved back to Oklahoma, I met my husband out in Santa Fe and then we moved back to Oklahoma and he's Cherokee and Crete, he's also from Oklahoma. And he worked at the Osage Agency so I had the opportunity to take from one of my aunts who was the curator at our, actually she was the director, I don't think we had a curator at that time at the Osage Museum but she gave lessons all the time on finger weaving, how to make moccasins, how to make ladies' shirts, how to do ribbon work and so I would just go to those classes and learn how. And so she, we would take out, everybody would bring an old blanket from home and look at the craftsmanship on it and many of them were not sewn with a machine, they were just totally hand sewn. The kind of work that you really don't see today and but she encouraged us as modern women, she said to use the machine because she felt like it would, things would last longer. This was one of the first pieces, well I'm gonna go back a little bit. When I was a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts, I was there, I went there to paint. I was a very young woman and I wanted to be a painter and we were encouraged to do all kinds of mediums at the Institute and so one of the things that I did was clay and I had never really worked, I think I worked once with clay in high school and really loved that medium. So when I left the Institute of American Indian Arts, I always made sure that I had a place that I could go make things out of clay and actually what I was taught there to make utilitarian objects, I learned how to throw, make pottery. Did a little bit of sculpture there but not so much but I always, when I became a young mother and wanted to have a place that I could go make art so I would find a community college or a community place that they made art and made sure that I had a place that I could work in. When I, after having two of my children, and had worked all kinds of crazy jobs, I had made a commitment to myself that I had always, I wanted to be an artist and so I just threw that out to the universe and said this is what I wanna do and I'm just gonna make a commitment to doing this and see if it works for myself and luckily it did. I did have a little strategy, I had a plan of some markets I was gonna enter into and try to have a show at the Southern Plains Museum in Anadarko, which I gotta put a plug in for the Southern Plains Museum in Anadarko. I mean they've just, they've done so much for Oklahoma artists and so I had a little strategy going and also at that time they had a wonder, they would do a catalog for you that would go out, they had a huge mailing list so I thought well this would be maybe a way to begin but it was also at that time that I quit doing utilitarian throwing pots and decided to take my work in a more narrative way. So this is one of the beginning pieces and this is based on a little beaded purse that my grandmother gave me when I was a young girl and it's a very old piece, it's actually sung with sinew. And so I have, a lot of my work is narrative and it's based on memories from childhood or like we were talking about earlier, your children, just all the experiences that I've had in my life up to a certain point. So this was, the beads were squeezed out with a little, I use these little, they're little plastic containers and I go to like, you know, hobby stores, well I go to all kinds of places to find my tools but you can squeeze the clay out when it's in a clay slip and to make it look like little beads. And that's a gold luster glaze on it, on the top. So everything's clay except for the little rings that are holding the clay handle. This is a piece that's called While You Move Over the Earth and it is a piece that was inspired by when the war broke out many years ago that we're still in. The images that were coming across the screen of Afghani women who could not feed their children, remember in the beginning that was kind of some of the images that we were seeing a lot of. And I was so moved by it, I thought what a horrendous thing not to be able to feed your children. And then it also brought back, I thought of the kind of, some kind of thing that you were talking about in terms of for native women, when a time in our history that was very hard for us, that we had a hard time feeding our children also, that that was in our history also. So I decided to make a piece that was dedicated to each of my children. And so the one on the right is for my youngest son, Ngozi. The one in the middle is for my oldest son, Yadika. And the one on the left is for my daughter, Wilena. And they all have a little icon up there that described them at that time. And on the bottom, it was, they have all these little carts, they had skateboards and they had wagons and they had things that rolled and moved. And so that is indicative of that. And then there's a little organic form that is about them growing. And so these pieces are about them moving over the earth. And in terms of texture, I use, a lot of my work is very heavily textured and I make stamps out of objects that are very personal to me. They might be just a pair of earrings that a friend has given me. I have lifted from that beaded purse and other objects that are important to me. I have lifted a stamp image from them so that I have that and I can reuse that. And I think of this as the language that I have developed for myself to make an expression of who I am in this time and day. Language is also important to me in terms of that picture of my grandmother that I showed. When I was a very young, very young, I hung out with my grandmother a lot. I stayed with her a lot. And at that time, our elders, they spoke only to each other in Osage. And our language, we have a, there's a program that's trying very hard to revitalize our language. And so I feel really fortunate that I was at the end of a time period when that was around people that that was their first language. And it's a very beautiful language and it's a very poetic language and it's a very descriptive language. So I like to think of that that that's had a, it has had a big influence on how I think about the world and how I see things. And also they had great stories. Those little aunties had wonderful stories to tell you. I do a lot of pieces about women. And again, kind of going back to my grandmother and those little aunties and their circle of friends, they were very strong women. They had a lot of strength. And I'm very interested in the human spirit, our ability to have, that were very tenacious and stand up and keep going when things get really rough. I really enjoyed that about thinking about the human spirit in that way. And so I do a series of, I also do clothing out of clay, kind of going back also that references back to the first instances of the ribbon work. And I like the transformative quality of thinking about clothing. And again, that kind of goes back to those very early memories of my grandmother dressing us and having special articles made for us of children. There's actually a store here in New York called Henlers and Sons that sells ribbon. And also just have been buying ribbon from there for a very, very long time. And so that's one of the places I always go. But I like the idea that, I mean, that's a very special thing when you receive a gift from Henlers from somebody, it's a big deal. And so I like to think of our clothing as the transformative qualities that it has for us. When we make children, and then as a young mother, being able to do the same thing that my grandmother had done for me and my folks. And that is have traditional clothing made for my own family so that they would understand where they came from and who they are. And they could take part in our ceremony and dance. So this is another form of clothing. And the top is clay and the bottom is fabric with oil pastel. And this was created after a trip to Tuscany where I went back to painting a couple of years ago. It was the first time I had painted in a very, very long time. And this is about the memories of that wonderful place. This is for an exhibit called The Little Black Dress. And this is images, this is called Woman with Rabbits. And I actually told Carol this when we were up here preparing that my youngest son, he said, I wish you'd quit telling that story. I used to talk about it all the time. And I said, well, this is a really wonderful story. When he would come to the studio with me, he would just push and pull and pinch the most beautiful little rabbits out of clay. They were so exquisite. And he started giving them away and everybody was like, oh my gosh, you made that rabbit. Artist friends would come in, I'd say, that ghost, he made it and it's embarrassing to him now. But anyway, so this is the woman holding his beautiful rabbits. And then she also has turtle ears. And my youngest son, my oldest son when he was a very young child, he was all about turtles. He could just tell you anything you needed to know about a turtle. And he collected them and had a little turtle farm. So this woman's holding precious memories. And this is Woman with Black and White Ball and Gold Hand. And a lot of my imagery also comes from Osage Thought, our philosophy based on our creation story, which is that we came from the stars and we came to the earth. And so we have a duality. We think of everything in terms of either earth or sky and water. And so on her ears are patterns from our ribbonwork clothing. And that's another thing that I use in this texture is I just took my patterns, my paper patterns and made them into a thicker cardboard to press them into the clay so that they would become also imagery for my work. This is a piece that I, this is very new. And this is for a show that's going to be out in California, Beyond Craft. And it's a wall piece. And this is referencing also that thought of the division between the earth and the sky. And this is movement of the sun number two. We also have a lot of reference to the sun, the very ancient belief and the movement of the sun during certain time periods of the day, noon. When the sun goes down, when the sun comes up are very marked times of the day for us in terms of ceremony. And so this is referencing that. And then also I use a lot of distorted writing in my work. And so there's some of that distorted writing in the landscape below. And it will also reference how I feel about the earth, just what's going on in my life. But it's distorted so that you can't, it becomes design, but it's also about a thought. And this is above the earth. This is a two piece wall hanging which depicts the power of nature. So I use a lot of, I use, in my work I use a lot of slip in sizing, scruffido work scruffido work, which are, you know, these are clay terms and use a palette that's basically black and white, slips, on-gobs, and terrace and gelata, which is a Greek word, stamped earth. This was a piece that was created at the Idle Jorga Museum about three years ago. I was a recipient of one of the, they called them the rare, I think it was rare. I'm not quite sure what that stands for. I can't remember exactly. But where you were given a 30 day residency there at the Idle Jorga Museum. And my proposal was to have the community make, we make a piece together, a collaborative piece. And it was a little hard to do because I wasn't quite sure who my audience was gonna be, but it turned out that to be a wonderful thing and it was collectors who came to visit me. It was museum staff worked with me a couple of days. I saw Girl Scout troops. I saw some Boy Scouts. I went to schools. I went to one community center where there was people actually age four to 80 that day. And I created the center poles, which connect the earth and the sky. And above hanging from it are hundreds of raindrops and birds that were created by, they just weren't all from Indiana. They were people traveling through the museum or they would ask me to see a group. And then on the bottom is all things that are from the earth. And so we kept it very simple. You can make things from the earth and the sky. And then I would talk to them about our Osage belief system of how the earth and the sky and the connection to that and all things in between. And it was very happy with it. It got really big, really fast. Their little studio was, it was hard to contain everything. And at one point I thought, oh my gosh, what did I start here? This is, I'm not sure how we're gonna put this together, but I like to always think of that I believe very deeply in the process of making art and that that belief will always lead me to where it is that I need to go. This was an installation piece that was made for the Herd Museum in Phoenix during one of the invitations. I can't remember which one. Most Osage ladies, when I was a little girl, had a set of about a hundred dishes, which is called the Osage dishes. And this, I used my grandmother's dishes that I still have, the ones that I have left, and I press molded them into clay. And then at a feast, you will always have fruit on the table and fried bread among the other bowls of delicacies. And then I transferred images from our ribbon work into the napkins, and we just use a big spoon. We don't use any other utensils except a big spoon. And then on the chair there, you see a clay bundle. And I use a bundle a lot in my imagery as a metaphor for my grandmother always told me to take things, and she said, if you're gonna have a giveaway, you're going to the dance, take your items in a scarf. If you're having a big giveaway, take it in a sheet. And again, I always like to think of that as not necessarily that action of what I am doing that for, but what I receive from that when I'm able to participate in that. And for us, we would have a giveaway in terms of something like our children are put into the dance, or somebody graduates, and it's a special time. Then we would have a giveaway for them, where we share what we have with the community. And so I like using that metaphor because I like the thought of, well, what is it that I take away there as a human being when I leave there as a mother, as a woman? And so I use that imagery quite a bit in my work. And this piece I was actually able to share not too long ago at the Osage Museum. And my grandmother, I was telling you this morning that my grandmother actually worked at the Osage Museum when I was a very little girl. And so I have great memories of our little, actually we have the first tribal museum in the United States. The Osage Museum was the first tribal museum in the United States. So I had great memories of the objects that were there and these very old cases. And she would buy me, paint my number kits from the Woolworths downtown. And then I would send her these big cedar trees out in front of the museum. She'd put a blanket down and we would play and we would paint and sew little things for dolls and that kind of thing. So when they asked me to do this, the curator, she said we're going to start showing some contemporary Osage artists. And I would like you to be the first. And so all these memories started flooding back to this time period. And so I was able to share some of my work with our Osage people there. And this was one of the pieces that they really connected to. Because it was made because of them and inspired by them. In my work I'm always interested in talking about what is it we do as Osage people? I'm always interested in getting to the essence of that, to that thought. So this piece is about Osage people coming together and where we share our food together. We come together in times of joy and sorrow to celebrate a birthday, a clan naming, a new baby being, you know, put into a clan, receiving a name, a soldier's return, a marriage, or sending somebody home on their final journey home. And when we do that, we use the table as a refuge and come together and hold one another up and comfort one another. And my thought was when we do that, then we make that connection to our ancestors and to our past. So thank you. Thank you. Okay, thank you Anita. Carol and Terry. And I think now we can have the lights up please. And I'm gonna start off with just a couple of eliciting questions and we're gonna open up to you and we're hoping to have some audience interaction. So I just have a handful of questions. Let me start with a question of, I am very interested in women's lives and their career choices. And I wonder for each of you if there was a pivotal moment in your path towards becoming a professional artist that really defined the direction that you took and if you could share that. And if you wanted to start Terry. I'm sharing. Well, we were just talking about how we refer to ourselves as whether we refer to ourselves as artists or I still refer to myself as a bead worker first. It took me many years to call myself an artist because to me an artist is someone who's like a painter or a sculptor, like one of those fine artists. And I think it's how I feel about what I do is like craft work, women's work, hand work, slow work. And I think, the kind of off subject, but for me the point for me was when I want best to show it in in market. I wanted to do shows. I was thinking about law school and I thought well let me do a couple of shows before I take my LSATs and see if I can do this. And I went, I asked my mom, I said, I'm thinking about doing it in market. She said, well, you know, Terry dear, it's a jury show. It's very difficult to get into, try, but don't be disappointed when you don't get in. So I applied, I got it in my first year and in my second year I won best of show. I was so new, I didn't know what best of show was. I was standing in front of my piece on the table and I was shaking people's hands because that's how it was taught to do when you get an honor, you stand there. And I was shaking everyone's hands and they were really making a big to do over me. And I kept kind of glancing back behind me and I finally realized that mine was the only piece with the golden ribbon on it. And it occurred to me about 30, 40, maybe an hour into shaking hands what had happened to me. I was shocked, I looked young but I looked even younger then. People thought I was a youth and they were mad that a youth had won best of show. I was so new they didn't know who I was. Right, I just popped out of kind of out of nowhere. And that it was then that I was like, good, now I can have kids. I think I have a career path. I have something in line that's gonna be stable enough for me to pay the bills so I can have children. Thanks, Carol. Let's see, boy we're really similar in some ways. Mine was also the first show I had done which was when they had the Indian Art Northwest show in Portland and it was 1998. And before then I was doing my baskets. You know, I had made a few baskets and had them displayed in my house. And I thought, oh, this is nice. And I kind of liked it and I would have visitors once in a while and I had someone come to visit and they really, they looked at that and they said, who did that? And I said, I did. And they really made kind of a big deal out of it and actually asked to purchase it. So I was surprised that somebody actually wanted to buy a piece because before then I would give them away as gifts, just a little basket here and there and someone offered to purchase it. And I said, okay. And I think I charged like $60 or something like that. And anyway, after that I did see the ad for the Indian Art Northwest and I said, well, I'll try it. I have a sister-in-law that also does baskets. So we decided to do a table together and like she said that I didn't know if I'd get in. I didn't know anything about the art world and it was just all so new to me when I went there. You set up your table, you put your baskets out there. You get there a day early so you can enter something in the competition. You never know. So I thought, well, I'll try it. And I had no expectations. And just the next day we came in to see who had won. And there was a first place ribbon next to one of my big baskets. I thought, wow, this is so cool. I had no idea what you're supposed to do after that. You know, just was like in shock. Did you decide to have children then too? I had kids before then. I had one before. So after that I thought, wow, this really could do. Turn into something and that first award check I went out and bought my kid a new bed or something just really something that we could actually have extra money to do to buy something with. But after that it just was something that I really still enjoy doing. Something that's in me and I hope I can help the hands hold out for a long time to be able to do that work. Okay, thank you. Anita? I spoke briefly about it when I was talking about my work but it was that decision that I made as after I had two children already and so I already had my children, two of them. And that I was so tired of doing my art on the side and that where my passion really was ever since I was a very young child because somebody asked me in third grade one time we had to make a collage out of what do you want them to be when you were an adult? When you grew up and I made an artist, I can see her, she had a little green smock on and she was holding little pallets, she had a little green tam on. And I mean so my passion, even then I knew I wanted to be an artist and so I felt like I wasn't really honoring what it was that I was supposed to be doing by just keeping it on the side. And so I made that commitment to try and see what would happen if I would just try to only make my work. But another pivotal moment for me was in my career in the beginning was when Susan Peterson, the wonderful late Susan Peterson who was the clay guru to everybody who wrote most of the texts that I had ever studied from came up to me at Indian Market and I knew her, I knew, I recognized her from her picture and she was talking to me for a while I just couldn't even, I couldn't hear her because I thought, why is Susan Peterson talking to me? I just thought, she's, it was kind of crazy, you know? And then she invited me to be in the show Legacy of the Generations Pottery by American Indian Women at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and she really, really kind of gave me the first opportunity to jump in there and to make this a career. You know as each of you talk I think about the economic aspects of making art and how important the market was and we don't mean like a gallery market we're talking about, a market primarily for Native Arts, you know, circulation, manufacture and so I wonder, one of the questions I had for the artist was can you reflect upon your artwork as craft, do you use the word craft? Is there an association with a craft movement in America? I consciously refer to my work as craft because it is women's work. Bead work is by and large though men do it and have always done it. It is by and large women's work and that hand work, the hand on an object slowly, methodically going through it all of that time and effort. Only a woman would have the patience to dedicate yourself to that much time decorating something for a family member. And I embrace the word craft. I know that there has been recently some sort of debate between fine craft and like folk craft and all of that but to me it's all interrelated and the more I'm, I was an American studies major I had no background in art. The more I learned about contemporary art the more I understand how entire art movements have been influenced by primitive women's art or craft and it's, I will always embrace it. I'm a craft artist because I do things by hand and I'm the one that does them. I don't hire people to do them for me. It's my work, it's my hand on every little piece and every little stitch. So I'm proud of it, it's a proud thing for me. I agree also, baskets you can't hand it off to another person, say here finish this or put this design in it, you're making it yourself and you're with it from the beginning to the end and when I'm working like that I have this design in my head or this picture in my head that I wanna make sure, I see it in my brain but I wanna make sure it comes out on the basket and so I understand I think exactly what you're saying you're working with your hands and I see it as a craft also. With the basket weavers, there's many organizations, there's American basketry association which covers probably the whole United States. There's a big, that big organization. We also have, there's native basket weavers associations also. There's the main basket weavers, there's Oklahoma has a basket weaving association. The Toono O'odham of Arizona, they have a large basket weavers organization, California, they have theirs and then I'm a member of the Northwest Native American Basket Weavers Association which covers, let's see, tribes in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska. I'm just in there because I'm not a voting member but I'm just part of somebody that's in that area that's the basket weaver. So there's a lot of support out there but I think it's, I would consider it also still craft. I consider myself an artist in the same way I thought of myself as an artist as I did as a very young person and I think of it as an expression that I have to do. So I think of myself as an artist even though it's very rooted, Clay is very rooted in craft and tradition but I see myself taking that material and using it in a very narrative form. Sometimes I think of it like painting almost too which was my first love was that they're just clay paintings also because I do a lot of my work is in a very flat style so I think of myself as an artist. This brings up just, I'm wondering just quickly, who's your audience if you had to prioritize? Who do you produce the work for? Who do you have in mind? For my large pieces, I was telling these ladies earlier, for my large pieces I usually run them by my aunt and uncle, my mother always, my kids as well, they're great, great critics, my husband and then my aunt and uncle who are completely non-art related, they don't go to the markets, they don't collect art, they're native and if they can get what I've done, if they understand my storyline, then I've succeeded because first and foremost, it's a native I that I want to see my work. I did a piece two summers ago and it was this crazy rawhide sculpture, I thought, hey, I can beat on rawhide, insane idea, I had to keep it wet the entire time and beat on wet hide and then sew the whole thing together and then make it dry so that it would stand up as this big tree and it was ridiculous and it worked. But it was also one of those complete, like leaping off the deep end things and I got a ribbon and I felt very good about it because I could compete it in the sculpture category instead of the diversified arts or beadwork category with it and I thought, great, like they see it outside of the material and then a Kiwa lady came up and she was like, hi, how are you doing? I'm like, hi, shook her hands and then she was walking away and then she stopped and she turned back and she looked at it and she said, that same day, she said, that's the emergent story and I was like, I've done it. That was worth more to me than any ribbon or amount of money or any place that it could possibly go that this Kiwa woman looked at my piece and she read my whole story and I was like, oh, I'm done, I did it, it was the best compliment I could have ever gotten. For me, I think, thinking about that, my audience, maybe myself first because what I like to do is challenge myself to see, like I've been saying, is that I see an idea in my head or I'll see something and I'll see, maybe I could put that on a basket and so that's the challenge for me, it is myself first, I guess and as we were speaking about earlier, it would be my sons and my husband, they're like my biggest critics so when I get something done, I like them to come in and I'll say, hey, come in and look at this, see what you think and this is my favorite reaction is, wow, so that says it all for me but also sometimes I'll get, oh, that's nice so I don't know what that means but that's okay, I guess but the best reaction that I think I got is when I did the big basket with all the ladies on it is to see it when it won Best of Division last year at the Herd Museum show is to see all the basket weavers pick out the basket from their region and then I saw this little Navajo lady and she was real traditional, had her hair and she had her traditional Navajo dress on and I saw her look at it and she bent over and she checked it out and I think I got a thumbs up on the Navajo basket so that was really cool. I don't really have a particular audience in mind when I'm creating or making something but this last piece that I showed when I was talking about the exhibit that I had at the Osage Museum I was telling Nancy earlier that some of the people in the community said I didn't know you did this and some people said, oh, I didn't know that's, I knew you do, they kept saying I thought you did pots and then but when I showed this piece and talked about it and I actually had written a little statement about it and they said, that's it, that's it, that's what, yes, you got it right on the and it meant a lot to me for me to be able to, my work to connect with them and their hearts that way so but I too run, this thing about showing our work to our family, I get so excited when I make a new piece and I want to show them, I want to share that with them so it is important I guess that they validate my work for me. Now I want to leave time for the audience to ask questions but I have one quick question for each artist and what I've asked them to do is to say, what is their dream project? What do they want next and what do they need to achieve that dream project? I have this vision of this insanely large panel piece of several panels about kind of like the 10 most wanted Indians but I was, I had actually gotten the idea from Andy Warhol had done something for the New York State Fair and he had done it as kind of mug shots and at the State Fair it had gotten painted, no it had gotten, it was refused and so he got an image of the director of the State Fair I believe it was and he put it up on the wall, huge on the side of the State Fair building and then he white washed it and I thought all right this is what I wanna do I want to bead perfectly the 10 most wanted Indians and then I'm going to physically white wash them I wanna destroy the piece in my effort to explain the piece and so that I'm gonna need a lot of time to do because if I do 10 of these panels that's a lot of time so the nuts and bolts of it is when you have a good idea and you know it's gonna take a lot of time for me, for my family I need the money to get through the month or months, two months to get to that point the bill's gotta be paid because I can't be stopping what I'm doing here to make bracelets for wholesale I've got to be able to concentrate through that's how I'm my mind works I'm gonna be able to concentrate through it so at some point or another the funding will happen and that piece will happen for me at this moment oh, like I said I always have a few ideas in my head so I have one that I've been kind of thinking about over the years and it has to do with ledger art which I was a big fan of I did get to study some of that in the collections when I was a fellowship winner with the NMAI and I would like to do a series maybe two or three baskets with ledger art inspired I saw one with some women on it and they were playing a traditional game like I think it was like late 1800s but you always see the man side but this particular ledger had a woman's point of view and I don't think it was I'm not sure if it was done by a woman but it showed the ladies in a circle and they were playing their own game I think it was just called the ball game but who knows what kind of game it was but they each had their traditional clothing on and you could see them standing in a circle so as a series I'd like to be able to study more of the ledger art and I guess like Terry said you gotta pay the bills and everything but so maybe travel research is what I would like to do in the future with that and then also I was thinking maybe of course time is the biggest thing for me is having the time to be able to really do what I have in my mind so I was thinking maybe I would do a Gathering of Nations part two for the baskets that I left out of this particular because I missed a couple of tribes in there so maybe down the line I could get the materials that they actually use also is what I would like to do. Nina. All of my family are artists my husband is a photographer my daughter is actually graduating from Fort Lewis in cultural anthropology and very interested and she worked for the tribe in NAGPRA issues before she went back to school but she's also a dancer and my youngest son is a musician and now that they are older it has been a dream of mine that we collaborate in some way and I'm not even sure what that means at this point but everybody's an adult and so it would take for sure a studio space and it would take some money because everybody would have to commit themselves to a certain amount of time to be together my son lives here in New York and we're all kind of scattered right at this point but it would take us all coming back together for a certain period of time and I would really like to see that happen I don't even know what it looks like right now it's just that I would like to do that with them I think that would be really fun that'd be awesome. I don't know what it would look like yet. You've heard the artist's dreams where they want to go we want to hear from you now just open the floor to questions any of the topics that you've heard we've talked about biography, memory global concerns, gender yes, yes you have a question. I do draw them out I do since I'm not the greatest person for drawing it's really a rough sketch so as long as I get the figures the kind of where I want it but as I'm making the basket I figure out the spacing as I'm doing the basket so the picture is there but transferring it to the basket is as long as I have that picture in my head I can kind of gauge how to space things actually I purchased the basketry materials there is actually a website called the basketry it's called Royalwood and it's a basketry supply so you can buy basketry supplies and they do have the traditional and non-traditional materials you can just buy in bulk that's the best way to go and the colors are purchased also the colors are the colors of the thread so you can have a rainbow of colors to use and I think our I don't know if this is like everywhere but definitely with Kai was our cousins are our sisters and brothers and our aunts and uncles are like mothers and fathers I know that some it's real specific in some tribes where like the father's uncle is your father or whatever like that but my relative I grew up thinking that everyone on the planet was my cousin because when you go home you're just oh yeah this is your aunt oh this is your grandma's one of your grandma's and I didn't really realize that we weren't like really well maybe we are blood related but like you know seven parts apart or something like that I don't know and then Indian people tend to adopt people as family members I have, she's gone now but I have a Jewish auntie who lives in Manhattan and she's my auntie I've known her since I was you know very small and she when I was a teenager and would come to the city she put me up and fed me you know like and I have people like that actually kind of all over the place that helped bring me up into this world and luckily they accepted that I called them auntie the thing that I was talking about when I showed the picture of my grandmother with who he's actually my first cousin but he is my brother and that's how we refer to each other when we speak to each other we call each other brother and sister and I have many brothers and sisters in their family they have seven brothers and sisters and so my aunt was like a mother to me and my dad was a father to them and like I said that's built in our clan system the way that it's set up it's set up specifically so that you are not an orphan in Osage we have there was a word for orphan and it was really a very a bad word it meant you didn't have anybody and you were looked on as a very you know a pitiful person and so they you know built within this system that you would always have a family and it is very strong and it's very comforting to know that you have all those folks like Terry said you have I mean when I go to an event at home or I go to a social you know event or I'm very involved in our traditional ceremonies at home I'm a cook for our Elanshka dance or ceremonial dance and all the women are my relatives I mean but like she said like maybe seven eight you know generations back but you know our folks and then when our folks see each other our parents will say yeah that's our relatives that's your folks you know we'll tell our younger people that are with us this is your folks you know so that they will remember that and some of those we can't even remember how we are related but you know it's our back but you know they're telling us this is your folks and it's the same yeah it's the same way with me too I also have like I said before we we always have cousins uncles somebody staying with us when we were little it was just it was just the way things were you know we'd second cousin and you know when I go visit down there now my dad will say oh this is your cousin from this uncle or whatever so it's all down the line there's so many cousins aunts and uncles and they're all we're all still kind of just a huge family you know so we all acknowledge each other and I like that it looks like there's a follow-through question here yes my mother was such a strong woman and ran her own business and though my father I grew up in the art world my father's a sculptor but that was his business and my mother managed him and then she managed the shop and all of us and the kids and I didn't really know that there was any kind of difference between like a woman taking care of herself until I was a little bit older and then I would get around more of her generation of people and I realized that they had married men to look after them and that's just not the way my grandma was or my mother was like they didn't rely on the men to look after them they look after themselves my grandma was great she I think she had five husbands and she kept booting them out until she got one I don't know I'm sure that it has influenced me I mean I came up through college system I took you know classes and all of that kind of thing I do know that there is a separation of the sexes for Kiowa's and it's not a bad thing it's just the way that it is and it's not a power thing it's just the way that it is it's not like it is out in the western world where it's like men are on top and women are subjugated down below it's a separation that's equal are recognized as equal and men it'd be hard press to say otherwise Kiowa men it seems like that's the I remember that also is that the women are always there you know it's your grandmother you know you grow up to respect you listen to your you know and you raise your I raise my sons to always respect women elders you know they see someone you know you be sure you help her you go ask her what she needs you know with my even with my mother I you know I says you know when grandma tells you something you do it and they know that you know it's just it's just I don't know if it's I think it's just part of who we are it's you know respect for women I too was raised around a lot of really strong women and they had a huge influence on my life as a young person and as a mother and just a great set of women around me and two in Osage culture it's the same thing it's not and I think I believe that goes back to that you know what I was talking about our thought our the duality the the thought of duality and you know that encompasses many many things but it's on that same level as there's this and there's this and you know there's male and there's female I mean even in our own Osage thought system there's a there's a male part of the world and there's a female part of the world and so but they're equal you know they both have a very important job and in our particular our most important dance our ceremonial dance the wanshka dance that I was talking about where I'm a cook in our district the men are the only ones who are initiated into that dance it's it's for them it's called it's it's called the interpretation is the dance of the eldest son and you know these things go way back into our history but it is the women who make that dance go most definitely and again there's not a man there that would tell you that that isn't so either because it is the women who who make all the preparations for that and who make the pressure preparations for the clothing and for that to happen and that it is as a you know a young mother or an auntie or you know however you are connected with your family in there it's it's a group of women who prepare those those young men to go in there with great pride one of my cousins a man cousin he said it to me a long time ago he said he's Cheyenne and they are Sundance people and they pierce and he said we do that as men because we have to women don't have to they got a direct line to God because they give life and and that's the reason why they do what they that's the reason why they hurt themselves because they can only pray to the point that we pray or can pray if we choose to every month or when we get birth like we have that direct line to God it's really an important question and and I'd like to just answer briefly myself just on a kind of a larger level of arts organizations many of the artists have talked about the Institute of American Indian Arts I've been active in a pan tribal arts organization taking art to the Venice Biennale for many years and I think there's still that kind of recognition even though it's not tribally specific if you're working within native arts there's actually kind of a protocol you know that that people still really align themselves too and I remember one of the exhibits we had chosen it was our second year in 2001 and we had four male artists each from a different generation and we had a very well established feminist artists to attend one of our meetings which included you know basically a long table where we all ate and joked and you know that's what our board meetings looked like and and she said what is this with all male artists and uh Ladonna Harris many of you may know the name Ladonna Harris she runs Americans for Indian Opportunity she was one of our board members and she said what? she said we we women board members chose those men to go work for us so not understanding that of course the power that was inherent in us choosing those male artists to go out initiated with the women selecting them basically to kind of go to war for us and of course since then we did one woman shows and we've done a variety of different shows but I think that those values are also at play and on these kind of pan tribal organizations or you can see them actively working there I wrote an article for Meridian's Journal called A Real Feminine Journey that's devoted to this intersection of feminist art and native contemporary native arts if you're interested I can send it to you can we stay for one more question is it Susan can we stay for one more question there's another question from the audience I know we've got some native artists in the audience I know we have native intellectuals yes great question advice usually just give that without it being asked now it's been asked okay you asked my opinion I sat on a committee for Swaya that dealt with the standards of what is allowed and not allowed at Indian market material wise I hated it because to me it's not what you use it's what you say that is traditional and my my my speech to them was if we're going to be the gatekeepers we need to think about the next generation down because if my son wants to use some technology that we don't even know about what makes that any less Indian than what I'm doing right here and now like it's not the beads beads are not are not traditional if you go far enough back they're not traditional I use nylon thread that's not traditional nylon wasn't invented until the 60s or whatever so putting that kind of delineation between what is authentic and not authentic my advice is screw it it doesn't matter it's the voice it's your heart it's what you know that is what is always going to be authentic no matter what medium you work in I agree also because since I'm a basket weaver and you know like I said I'm traditional contemporary the traditional is the coiling it's you know it's it's tradition that's one of the oldest basket weaving techniques there is so that's the traditional part contemporary is the materials that I use and like I said I'm I'm an urban Indian I live in the city I don't have access to you know going out to the forest or you know you have to have there's these protocols you have to follow if you're going to be gathering you know you have to have certain places that you can go you can't go certain times of year a lot of the tribes they set aside places that you can gather sometimes you have to be a member of that tribe sometimes you have to ask permission so since I'm not even you know in my traditional basketry would be the white willow which is is in Wyoming and you know I don't live there I can't you know I probably would have to have you know get all kinds of access and everything and you know know the right people to ask so that's why I do what I do you know it's traditional but it's contemporary and like you said I think you use what you can use you know it's it's I think that's a way it's it's been for a lot of you know not let native people all this time you adapt you adapt to your surroundings I believe that you have to be true and honest to yourself to create work that is that is truly an expression of you and so I think that's probably the I feel like the best advice that I could give somebody is that you have to be just true to yourself and and passionate and believe in what you're doing and that you know our our stories are just right in our backyard no matter who we are you know they're an expression of how we see the world and how we how we think and I often think that that's when I when I think about all those little stories that you know my grandmother and all them when I was a little girl and all these things and I think they just taught me a way to think about things they gave me a way to to to view the world that is that is particularly in a way that they were taught to so I think just be true to yourself and be passionate about it and tell your story hmm it's important it's a good question I want to ask uh Susan Kennedy Zeller to come up and to close our session but while she's coming up just to thank each of the artists today for sharing your intellect and your talent and your heart with us it's it's meant to a lot I'm grateful to be a part of the process Nancy Rossoff who who thank you for all of your work and um especially Elizabeth Sackler Elizabeth Sackler thank you for being a visionary for all of us again my very very warmest thanks to Nancy Terry Carroll and Anita for sharing their thoughts themselves and their work with us today we really appreciate you coming and please stay if anybody wants to talk to afterwards a little bit that would be lovely Elizabeth Sackler thank you so much for your generosity and sponsoring this seminar it's the kind of intersection that she mentioned before we're at the Brooklyn Museum we aren't this department and this division and this and this we are a team and we are all together and marrying Elizabeth Sackler center with our Native American collection is just a very very natural thing to do and we really have had a lot of joy in doing that we'd also like to thank our exhibition sponsors and invite you up to the fifth floor if you have not seen teepee heritage of the Great Plains one thing you should know is except for the male warrior society teepees teepees are owned by the women they're the ones responsible for them and they are all owned by the women so if anything else it's another reason why it was a natural for us to do this seminar here today we had generous support for our exhibition which is from the American Express on our sponsor the Barbara and Richard Debbs Exhibition Fund the National Endowment for the Humanities the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bay and Paul Foundation and most of all and last of all I thank all of you for coming and sharing your thoughts and your time with us do come again