Natives Americans

Artist transcends traditional notions of Native American art

Anonymous — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 19:02:33 +0000

Artist transcends traditional notions of Native American art Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/09/2024 - 13:02

Clint Talbott

Whether in a somber performance in the National Portrait Gallery or in her wry takes on Native humor, Anna Tsouhlarakis follows her heart

Anna Tsouhlarakis was a self-described “math and science nerd” in high school, even representing the United States at the International Science and Engineering Fair in her senior year. But while studying at Dartmouth College, she took classes that interested her, particularly studio art and Native American Studies.

“That’s where my heart was—and still is,” Tsouhlarakis says. Math and science nerds might not be expected to love art, but following her heart—and contravening stereotypes—was a wise choice.

In recent years, Tsouhlarakis’ art has appeared as a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and New York City’s Independent Art Fair, and it has appeared in Switzerland, Greece, Canada and in dozens of venues in the United States. In 2023, she performed and exhibited her work in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Anna Tsouhlarakis' "She Must Be a Matriarch" sculpture, part of the "Indigenous Absurdities" exhibition. (Photo: Wes Magyar)

Just as she broadened the notion of what might interest a budding scientist, she now transcends stereotypes of what constitutes Native American art. Tsouhlarakis, an assistant professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado Boulder, works in sculpture, installation, video and performance and is of Navajo, Creek and Greek descent.

At the National Portrait Gallery, her work drew on those strengths and backgrounds. There, she performed and showed Portrait of an Indigenous Womxn [Removed], which commemorated murdered and missing indigenous women and girls.

In 2018, the Urban Indian Health Institute released an extensive study on missing and murdered indigenous women. As of 2016, there were 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women, but only 116 were logged into the Department of Justice’s database, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

“I knew there was nobody more important that I could highlight in terms of their story,” Tsouhlarakis observed. Her work featured missing-person posters of indigenous women. In a video recording of one performance, she carries a sculpture topped with a poster seeking information about Kaysera Stops Pretty Places, who was murdered in 2019 in Montana.

Tsouhlarakis notes that most of her art is not activist, but rather expands upon long-held expectations of Native American art. Her father is a Navajo silversmith, and she grew up going with him to art markets, shows and galleries.

“There was this expectation of Native art to always be beautiful, and for the aesthetic to be very perfect and for it to be very serious,” she observed, adding that she rebelled against those expectations.

Performance of Anna Tsouhlarakis "Portrait of an Indigenous Womxn [Removed]" (2023) at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. (Photo: Matailong Du/courtesy Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery)

“I want to make things that question that expectation of Native American art, and for me, humor does that as well.” That humor was evident in her 2023 exhibition titled “Indigenous Absurdities,” at MCA Denver.

Tsouhlarakis, who is the mother of three young children, described a key moment in which Native humor seemed an obvious way to frame Native art. While at a powwow in Montana, she overheard two Crow women conversing.

“One said, ‘You never come by to see me,’ and the other responded that she didn’t know where she lived,” Tsouhlarakis told a New York writer. “Then, one said that the other didn’t ever call them, and she said: ‘Well, you don’t even have a phone.’ Then they just burst out laughing—like almost falling off the bench.”

Such everyday observations underlie textual work like HER FRYBREAD ISN’T THAT GOOD and HER BRAIDS ARE ALWAYS TOO LOOSE. Humor, Tsouhlarakis noted, is a good coping mechanism in times of hardship, which Native communities know very well.

Tsouhlarakis’ art has been recognized and supported by a host of organizations. This year, she won a Corrina Mehl Fellowship from S.O.U.R.C.E. Studio and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and she’s also been recognized with more than two dozen other awards and fellowships. Also this year, she has artist residencies in New Hampshire and Maine.

In addition to her BA from Dartmouth, Tsouhlarakis holds an MFA from Yale University. She joined the CU Boulder faculty in 2019.

Top image: Performance of Anna Tsouhlarakis' "Portrait of an Indigenous Womxn [Removed]" (2023) at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. (Photo: Matailong Du/courtesy Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery)

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Whether in a somber performance in the National Portrait Gallery or in her wry takes on Native humor, Anna Tsouhlarakis follows her heart.

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Balancing fraught history and modern collaboration in America’s ‘best idea’

Anonymous — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 21:17:55 +0000

Balancing fraught history and modern collaboration in America’s ‘best idea’ Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/24/2024 - 15:17

Rachel Sauer

In new book, CU Boulder scholar Brooke Neely explores pathways to uphold Native sovereignty in U.S. national parks

Since Yellowstone became the United States’ first national park in 1872, these parks have existed in a dual space—praised, per author Wallace Stegner, as “the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst," while existing on Native lands.

National parks “have a fraught history in the United States and globally with respect to Indigenous lands. The creation of U.S. national parks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was part of a broader project to dispossess Native peoples of their homelands,” writes Brooke Neely, a research fellow in the University of Colorado Boulder Center of the American West, and her co-editors Christina Gish Hill and Matthew J. Hill in National Parks, Native Sovereignty: Experiments in Collaboration, a recently published collection of case studies and interviews exploring pathways for collaboration that uphold tribal sovereignty.

Brooke Neely, a research fellow in the University of Colorado Boulder Center of the American West, co-edited National Parks, Native Sovereignty: Experiments in Collaboration.

“There’s a tension between the ugly history of U.S. national parks and the ongoing efforts to assert Native peoples’ sovereign rights to these lands,” Neely explains. “A goal with this book is to rethink relationships between national parks and tribal nations, especially in light of shifts in federal policies over the past 20 years. It’s helpful to think that not everyone is going to come to the table with the same goals or interests, but we can find some room for collaboration.

“So, there are some discrepancies in terms of how the park service understands its job and the land resources, how it separates cultural resources versus natural resources, and the perspectives of tribes who may not distinguish between the two because they see the whole landscape as important or meaningful.”

Perspective of the tribes

Neely became interested in U.S. national parks and Native peoples in graduate school, when she studied Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota’s Black Hills. Both sites exist on Native land, “so I was looking at how they grapple with this contested history,” Neely says. “How do national park sites work to include more people and tell a broader story?”

During the time Neely was doing her PhD research, Gerard Baker, a member of the Mandan-Hidatsa Tribe of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, became superintendent of Mount Rushmore National Memorial—the first Native American to earn the position. “I got interested in what he was working to do there,” Neely says, “bringing in the perspectives of the tribes, creating exhibits, bringing in Native speakers.”

In 2016, Neely was one of several researchers from the Center of the American West and the CU Boulder Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies to begin working with representatives from Rocky Mountain National Park and members of area tribes to expand interpretive programs and build collaborative relationships with the tribes.

Through this work and research she previously conducted for the 2014 sesquicentennial of the Sand Creek Massacre, Neely met Christina Gish Hill, an associate professor of anthropology and American Indian studies at Iowa State University, and Matthew Hill, an applied anthropologist who was principal investigator for two National Park Service projects focused on early American treaty-making and the Black Hills as a contested heritage landscape, her co-editors on National Parks, Native Sovereignty.

National Parks, Native Sovereignty presents case studies and interviews exploring pathways for collaboration in national parks that uphold tribal sovereignty.

Between 2016 and 2019, the researchers worked together on an ethnographic overview and assessment of Mount Rushmore for the National Park Service, seeking to understand the meaning of Mount Rushmore for Native people.

Talking about history

The idea for National Parks, Native Sovereignty came, in part, from a desire to highlight case studies from National Park Services sites, focusing on contemporary efforts to address the colonial history of U.S. national parks through research, outreach and collaborative partnerships with tribal nations, Neely says. It includes interviews with Gerard Baker and Max Bear, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, among others, as well as research and commentary from scholars and historians.

“Our goal was to represent a wide range of folks and the kind of work that’s being done currently,” Neely says. “There’s a federal mandate to consult with tribal nations, and it’s a unique mandate because tribes have sovereignty, so these interactions are government-to-government, and consultation can vary considerably across park sites.

“We focused on efforts over the last 15, 20 years to broaden that consultation and engagement. We wanted to look at what parks are doing to build relationships, to establish co-stewardship or co-management or some steps toward that.”

Neely and her co-editors chose interviews and scholarship that represent a range of national parks, “some of them in very emergent stages of exploring this kind of work, all the way to ones that have some kind of co-management relationship with tribes,” Neely says.

For example, Natasha Myhal, who earned her PhD in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies, wrote about indigenous connections at Rocky Mountain National Park, and Clint Carroll, an associate professor of Native American and Indigenous studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies, focused on Cherokee medicine keepers and the making of a plant-gathering agreement at Buffalo National River in Arkansas.

“There are 574 federally recognized tribal nations with different views on how they want to engage with public land agencies,” Neely says. “We consider the painful histories, the lands that have been taken illegally, the customs and traditions that existed for centuries before the parks were established. So, this book looks at the push and pull of this conflict and collaboration, and at the way we educate and talk about our shared history and shared landscapes in this country.”

CU Boulder scholar documents plant-gathering agreement

In April 2022, the Cherokee Nation and the National Park Service signed a landmark agreement to designate a 1,000-acre site along the Buffalo National River in Arkansas as the Cherokee Nation Medicine Keepers Preserve.

Under the agreement, the National Park Service will issue an annual permit to the Cherokee Nation to gather 76 types of plants within the national river area, and the Cherokee Nation agrees to provide a list of those who will be gathering plants.

For Clint Carroll, an associate professor of Native American and Indigenous studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, the agreement was a significant moment in his longtime work and research with the Cherokee people in Oklahoma on issues of land conservation and the perpetuation of land-based knowledge and ways of life.

Clint Carroll, an associate professor of Native American and Indigenous studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, collaborated with Cherokee Medicine Keepers and research colleagues to study the desirability and feasibility of a plant-gathering agreement in Buffalo National River.

In most situations, taking plants from national park land is against federal law, but a 2016 rule protected plant gathering by members of federally recognized tribes. The Cherokee Medicine Keepers, with whom Carroll closely works, contributed “their expertise on land-based knowledge and stewardship practices that provided the basis for such a landmark agreement,” Carroll wrote.

The Cherokee Medicine Keepers also were the experts with whom Carroll and his co-researchers—Richard Stoffle, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, and Michael Evans, a cultural anthropologist with the National Park Service—partnered while studying the desirability and feasibility of the Buffalo National River agreement, which research they detailed in “Returning to Gather: Cherokee Medicine Keepers, the National Park Service and the Making of a Plant-Gathering Agreement at Buffalo National River” for the book National Parks, Native Sovereignty.

“It was a multiyear collaboration that entailed multiple visits to the park and meetings with the elders,” Carroll explains. “One visit was to make sure the places elders would be gathering were safe and had amenities for them. The next visit entailed an ethnobotanical study, where a team of researchers from the University of Arizona interviewed the elders during a two-day event at Buffalo National River, asking them about the plants that would make up the list that is now represented through the agreement.”

Plants such as wild onion, sage, bloodroot, wild indigo and river cane have long been important to citizens of the Cherokee Nation for food, medicine, art and other purposes, Carroll explains. However, patchwork land divisions with differing ownership, as well as habitat loss related to climate change, have made some of these plants harder to access and harder to find.

In fact, many tribes still feel the effects of the Dawes Act, which divided communally held tribal lands into individually owned private property, so lands where Cherokee people had long gathered plants “can be private property, state land, other types of lands that Cherokee people simply don’t have access to anymore,” Carroll says.

“It’s an issue of not only limited access to land, but those places where Cherokee people were gathering, the plants they were seeking were less prevalent. So, it was these compounding factors that led to thinking about what else can we do to ensure that Cherokee people can continue to gather into generations beyond this one.”

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In new book, CU Boulder scholar Brooke Neely explores pathways to uphold Native sovereignty in U.S. national parks.

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What the White Buffalo Calf tells us about Indigenous history

Anonymous — Thu, 11 May 2023 22:16:53 +0000

What the White Buffalo Calf tells us about Indigenous history Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/11/2023 - 16:16

Jeff Mitton

Native Americans have been associated with bison in North America for more than 15,000 years

Road construction had closed Route 285 through South Park, detouring traffic to the eastern edge of the park. While inconvenient, it afforded people a sight that they would have missed otherwise. A herd of bison, Bison bison, was grazing next to the road, and in the herd were four white bison.

For more than 2,000 years, Lakota (Sioux) elders have been passing the legend of the White Buffalo Calf Woman to younger generations. The legend tells of a time when the Lakota had lost their ability to pray to the Creator. A young woman in shining white buckskin appeared to teach the people to pray during seven sacred rites, and she gave them the White Buffalo Calf Chanupa, or pipe, which played an important role in each of the rites. As she left, she told them that she would return to establish peace, harmony and balance.

Then she rolled on the earth four times, and each time she appeared as a buffalo of a different color (red and brown, then yellow, then black), finishing this display as a white buffalo calf. Today, the Sioux, Cherokee, Commanche and Navajo celebrate the birth of a white buffalo as a sacred omen indicating that their prayers had been heard and portending much better times.

White buffalo are more common today than 2,000 years ago when the legend of White Buffalo Calf Woman began. Photographed by Jeff Mitton.

Historically, white bison were rare, because they were probably albino (white hair, pink eyes), which occur at a frequency of about 1 in 10 million. But why are white bison so much more frequent now?

The herd in South Park had at least four, and white bison can be seen in three Canadian Territories and about a dozen states. The white bison in South Park have white hair but normally brown and black eyes. The gene for white hair was introduced from cows.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, cattlemen attempted to cross bison with cows, hoping to gather the best traits from both species into one lineage as docile and manageable as domesticated cows. These experiments had unsatisfactory outcomes, but not before introducing genes from cows into bison.

One of the breeds of cattle in these experiments was Charcolais, which are all white. The gene (Charcolais SILV) producing white hair is recessive, meaning that two copies of the gene are needed to produce white hair. The gene influences hair color, but does not alter eye color. The white bison in South Park have dark eyes, so they most likely have two copies of Charcolais SILV.

Professional breeders would have no problem recovering a lineage of bison that breeds true for the Charcolais white hair, and indeed, herds of exclusively white bison with dark eyes can be found in Ohio, Oregon, Texas and Saskatchewan.

Similar phenotypes—albino vs. white hair produced by two copies of Charcolais SILV, present a conundrum to the Native Americans honoring the legend of White Buffalo Calf Woman. White bison calves are no longer rare.

Native Americans have been hunting bison for thousands of years, even before our contemporary bison evolved. The first of a series of species in the genus Bison migrated from Asia into Alaska via the Bering land bridge between 220,000 and 240,000 years ago.

The immigrant was B. priscus, an enormous animal with very long horns. The direct lineage of bison in North America began with B. priscus, followed by B. latifrons, then B. antiquus and finally our modern B. bison. From B. priscus to B. bison, both body size and horn length decreased.

According to the National Bison Association, one out of every 10 million births a white buffalo is born. Photographed by Jeff Mitton.

For example, large bull B. latifrons, B. antiquus and B. bison measured 8, 7 and 6 feet tall at the shoulder. B. latifrons went extinct 21,000 years ago, and B. antiquus disappeared 10,000 years ago, approximately the time that B. bison arose.

In the early 1900s, anthropologists thought that Native Americans had arrived in North America from Asia about 5,000 earlier, but B. antiquus provided a revelation for our history of Native Americans in North America. Shortly after a disastrous flood in New Mexico in 1908, a black cowboy named George McJunkin found large bison bones exposed by a new arroyo in Folsom, New Mexico.

This self-educated cowboy recognized that the bones came from a species much larger than B. bison. He shared his insight with others, and years later, when archeologists explored the site, they found the bones of 32 extinct B. antiquus and 26 spearheads unlike any that had been found previously.

Carbon dating indicated that these bison lived 12,000 years ago. The arroyo was once a marsh where B. antiquus were stalked by hunters wielding spears with spearheads now called Folsom points. This kill site provided unequivocal evidence that Native Americans had arrived in North America at least 7,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Subsequent to the discovery of Folsom points, Clovis points dating to 13,000 years ago have been found in mammoth kill sites at Clovis, New Mexico, and points dating to 15,500 years ago have been found at the Debra L. Friedkin site, a bison kill site near Dallas. Bison have inadvertently yielded considerable insight to Native American history.

Native Americans have been associated with bison in North America for more than 15,000 years.

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