Washington, DC – Several weeks ago, FAAM posted a story about the artists (three of them Native) whose designs were chosen as possibilities for the National Native American Veterans Memorial to be constructed on the grounds of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). On February 7, the finalists presented their designs at NMAI. You can watch the full presentations on the SmithsonianNMAI YouTube channel. Below are the finalists, in order of appearance. Click on the links for more detailed drawings and descriptions of the designs. James Dinh: Wellspring of Valor “The concepts that I often examine through my…
Author: Stacy Pratt
BETHEL, AK – On February 9, Francesca Sosa shared a video of her six-year-old daughter, Olivia, on the Yupik Eskimo Dance Facebook page. Within hours, it was shared widely across Indian Country, then the rest of the country, then the world. As the video was making its rounds across the internet, the page’s administrator, Marie Chiklak, asked why she suddenly had so many new requests to join the page, and people from all over responded, “The little girl!” Chiklak, who studies Alaska Native governance at Alaska Pacific University, says she has been dancing her whole life. She created the page…
Indigenous people have always danced, but they weren’t associated with ballet until the 1940s when Osage ballerina Maria Tallchief rose to prominence as America’s first prima ballerina when famed choreographer George Balanchine formed the New York City Ballet. Tallchief and her sister Marjorie (Osage), along with Yvonne Chouteau (Shawnee Tribe), Rosella Hightower (Choctaw), Moscelyne Larkin (Peoria-Eastern Shawnee-Russian) were known as the Five Moons. Quapaw-Cherokee composer Louis Ballard created The Four Moons ballet with solo dances in honor of each of the ballerinas’ heritages. Since then, many Indigenous dancers have studied ballet, including Navajo/Puerto Rican dancer Jock Soto, who had a long career…
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — On Friday, Feb. 2, 2018, large areas of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments were opened to mining bids in what a Reuters headline described as a “modern-day land run.” Representatives of the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and the Pueblo of Zuni all testified against Rep. John Curtis’ (R.-Utah) bill, H.R. 4532 (Shash Jáa National Monument and Indian Creek National Monument Act), but in the end, federal protection for 85 percent of the land was ended. The formerly protected land is sacred to members of the five tribes…
(Washington, DC) – According to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), Native Americans serve in the US military at higher rates per capita than any other ethnic group. That is an especially interesting statistic considering Native Americans weren’t allowed to become US citizens until 1924, not to mention that Indigenous nations actively fought against the United States until long after the American Revolution. Nevertheless, Native Americans who served and are serving have built a proud tradition around their service to the United States, and veterans are honored at most ceremonial events. Now, they will also be honored…
The Standing Rock photograph, Dec. 6, 2015: No Spiritual Surrender, by Tlingit photographer Zoe Urness, has been entered for a Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography by World Literature Today, where it appears as the cover of the magazine’s May 2017 issue, “New Native Writing: From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock.” In an interview, Urness described how she arrived at Standing Rock and what drew her to the scene that would become the photograph. “Standing Rock had become quite a movement, and I was actually at a booth at Indian Market and the protesters came through,” she said. “Then I started to…
Like a lot of people, I found out about the Google Arts & Culture app when my Facebook friends used it to post selfies next to their doppelganger portraits from the world of fine art. Some of them posted articles about how the app would steal your biometrics for the government, but I’ve gone to the Indian Health Service my whole life, and my husband is a soldier: The government probably has everything it needs from me. So with great interest, I took a selfie in my pajamas and discovered that my closest matches were a woman from Singaporean artist…
(Tucson, Ariz.)—Shortly after President Trump allegedly referred to Haiti and countries in Africa by an adjective prohibited by most publications’ profanity policies, On’k Akimel O’odham artist Dwayne Manuel posted a graphite drawing to his social media that instantly went viral across Indian Country. “Coyote and His Sh—hole Headdress” depicts an anthropomorphized Coyote wearing a ribbon shirt, a sardonic expression, and a headdress made of the president’s head. Almost the minute it was posted, the drawing garnered thousands of likes, many laughs, humorous and supportive comments and, crucially, almost 3,000 shares across social media. Many of us watched to see whether…
On Christmas Eve, artists took their a public art intervention, #JailBedDrop to the streets of Los Angeles. Members of the Green Corn Collective, “A Constellation of Indigenous Feminist Bosses,” created one of the installations in this “artivism” action initiated by JusticeLA. The Green Corn Collective artists decorated a steel-frame jail bed which they placed at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. Collective member and Mvskoke artist Kimberly Dawn Robertson wrote on her website, “Native peoples were sold as slaves on Temple Street well into the 1850s. Native peoples have been under surveillance and suppression of the settler state for over…
Epiphany is a big day in Louisiana. It’s the official start of Mardi Gras season, and parties abound. But this year, I spent Epiphany walking the surreal landscape of drained Vernon Lake in west-central Louisiana. The lake was drained in late 2017 to examine damage that may have been caused by Hurricane Harvey. I was there with archaeologists Johnny Guy, president of the West Louisiana Archaeology Club; Dr. Joseph B. Mountjoy of Universidad de Guadalajara (Mexico); and his son, Nate Mountjoy, principal investigator, staff archaeologist, and field director with Prentice Thomas & Associates, Inc., the company contracted to investigate historical…