This Week in Native American News (1/31/2020): Museums embrace Native Perspectives, Street Artists Leave Their Mark, and a Tribe Saves a Boarding School
January 31, 2020
How Museums Are Deepening Their Commitments to Native American Perspectives
The Peabody Essex Museum hosts a field-leading fellowship program for emerging Native American leaders. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum.
Velma Kee Craig never expected to be where she is today. A poet, filmmaker, and weaver who grew up on the Navajo Nation Reservation in Arizona, she had aspired to play a role in supporting and preserving the work of Native American artists like herself. The profession of curator, with its opaque requirements, seemed inaccessible, despite her own education and experience.
Yet this autumn, thanks to a paid fellowship at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, Craig finds herself beginning the third year of a dynamic program for emerging museum professionals supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. “This type of experience wasn’t available to me when I started out,” says Craig. “Otherwise I would have found my career path a lot sooner.”
The Heard fellowships branch out into all areas of the museum, including research, education, and curatorial, but it was the emphasis on conservation that drew Craig to apply. Among the Heard’s 44,000-object collection are nearly 1,000 examples of Navajo textiles, one of the museum’s most in-depth collecting areas and, because of the fragility of the pieces, a significant one for the conservation team. An art form in itself, the care and preservation of the textiles requires a deep understanding of traditional Indigenous practices and the transmission of those practices across generations. The fellowship program helps ensure the long-term safekeeping of these important works.
Across the country at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts, the Native American Fellowship (NAF) summer program held its tenth session in 2019. Building on a previous grant, the Mellon Foundation recently expanded its support of the program at PEM, where the Native American collection comprises nearly 15,000 artworks and 50,000 archaeological items. The ten-week paid fellowships “remove financial barriers that make it impossible for many people from underrepresented communities to get a foothold in the field,” says Karen Kramer, the program’s director and PEM’s curator of Native American and Oceanic art and culture. “The museum is dedicated to presenting and interpreting its holdings in new ways. Fellows have consistently contributed to that work.” Mellon funding also supports a longer-term fellowship of up to two years; the 2020 fellow will be based in the PEM library, incorporating indigenous terminology into the cataloging and working on archival projects.
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In Similar News: Museums Have Stumbled When It Comes to Curating Indigenous American Art. These Native Students at Yale Are Modeling a New Way Forward
When Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, decided to reevaluate its North American indigenous art collection, uniting objects from its Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, and Yale University Art Gallery for the first time, it looked to the student body to lead the way.
It enlisted a trio of students, two of whom are Native Americans, as the curators. Initially, the students thought that the university “should be hiring someone who is a professional curator and has more time and more knowledge than we do as students,” co-curator Katherine Nova McCleary, who is Little Shell Chippewa-Cree, told Artnet News. “But then we realized that if we didn’t take this opportunity, the show was likely not going to happen.”
How a New Generation of Native American Street Artists Is Leaving Its Mark Across the United States
Ten years ago, an illegal street sign helped put Indian Alley on the art-world map.
In 2010, Los Angeles-based artist Wild Life installed an imitation street marker above the city-sanctioned sign for Wendin Place in LA’s Skid Row. His sign renamed the street “Indian Alley, Property of the People,” a play on official signage (which would normally say “Property of Los Angeles”).
Renaming the street after an already existing nickname, Wild Life kicked off a movement to make the area’s Native American history visible with site-specific murals and graffiti created exclusively by Native artists.
Colorado boarding school, where government sought to assimilate tribal students, listed as a “most endangered” place
This undated photo shows part of the Southern Ute Boarding School campus just outside of Ignacio in southwest Colorado. The site has been designated among the state's "most endangered" as tribal authorities consider how best to preserve its painful history. (Southern Ute Drum Archives)
Just outside the southwest Colorado town of Ignacio, on Southern Ute tribal land, remnants of a campus where the federal government carried out its campaign to assimilate American Indian youth and eradicate their culture juts from the landscape.
Only a few buildings, a former parade ground and a flagpole still stand, relics of the military-style education that became standard during the late 19th- and early 20th-century effort to “Americanize” the continent’s earliest inhabitants.
Though the Southern Ute Boarding School closed in 1920, the campus still served various other purposes — including intermittent use as a school — before closing for good in 1981. It marks both an often-ignored segment of U.S. history and a monument to tribal perseverance.
Now the tribe will explore the possibilities for saving what remains — both the structures and the troubling history that surrounds them.
Colorado Preservation Inc., a 23-year-old organization that works with communities across the state to preserve sites of historical and cultural significance, designated the campus one of the state’s most endangered places — one of four sites given that designation Thursday at the annual Saving Places Conference in Denver.
“Preservation of the buildings is important because it reflects a difficult and multi-faceted story of the Indian boarding school era within American Indian, Colorado, and United States history,” said Lindsay Box, spokeswoman for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe. “Fighting against all odds of cultural genocide via forced assimilation, it also represents the resilience of Southern Ute ancestors, descendants from the Mouache, Capota, and Weeminuche Bands of Ute, and others from various Indigenous Nations.”
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Add these to your reading list: 14 Contemporary Books By Native American Writers To Get Excited About
In Similar News: Sundance Film Festival saying ‘thank you’ to Ute Tribe at every screening
A series of short films playing at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival is calling attention to the Ute Indian Tribe.
Pretaped acknowledgments of the Ute people, in black-and-white and running about 30 seconds each, precede every festival screening in Park City, Salt Lake City and the Sundance resort. The messages are delivered by staff of the Sundance Institute’s Indigenous Program, which encourages native filmmakers from around the world to tell their stories.
“We would like to acknowledge the ancestral keepers of the land we are gathered on today, the Ute Tribal Nation,” Bird Runningwater, director of the Indigenous Program, says in one of the introductory messages. “We thank them for allowing us to be here.”
It’s hard to fit all the news in a little space.
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