This story from the Helena Independent Record in Montana previews a weekend symposium that will examine the challenges faced by Native American artists.

This weekend’s symposium. Sept. 11 and 12, at the Montana Artists Refuge in Basin is an opportunity for American Indian artists to take control of their own destiny, said artist Bently Spang.

He is co-chair of the organizing committee for Confluence of Red Nations American Indian Artists Symposium: Looking Back to Move Forward and a member of the Northern Cheyenne Nation in Montana.

Indian artists can often find themselves locked into how others have defined American Indian art ever since the 1800s, he explained.

One thing Spang plans to share is a 1940s letter written by Oscar Howe, an internationally renowned artist who was Yanktonais Sioux. Howe, whose work had been influenced by Picasso, submitted a painting to be shown in the Annual National Indian Painting Competition at the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, Okla. It was rejected as not being a “traditional Indian painting.”

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Cobell, supporters look to next move in wake of Senate rejection of settlement
The latest setback for congressional approval of the $3.4 billion lawsuit settlement on Native American trust accounts will send its supporters back to the House of Representatives to try again, Mary Garrigan of the Rapid City Journal writes here. Lead plaintiff Elouise Cobell, who is Blackfeet from Browning, Mont., has expressed faith in the backing of House Speker Nancy Pelosi, and South Dakota Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson has vowed to work toward approval.

Oklahoma universities No. 1 in Native college grads
Northeastern State University, Oklahoma State University and the University of Oklahoma led the list of schools graduating Native Americans last year, the Oklahoman reports here. That’s according to a report by Diverse Issues in Higher Education, which also showed that Oklahoma universities made up six of the top 12 schools, and 12 of the top 100.

Author, filmmaker talks on Native military service
The the history of American Indians and the military is the topic of a lecture tomorrow at 6 p.m. at the Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, in Banning, Calif. Gary Robinson, a writer and filmmaker of Choctaw and Cherokee descent, is the co-author of the 2008 book, “From Warriors to Soldiers: A History of American Indian Service in the U.S. Military.” His short film, “I Am the Warrior,” won third place in the 2009 national Veterans Day short film competition hosted by the National Museum of the American Indian, according to the Banning Record Gazette, here.

Vermont panel on tribal recognition seeks new members

The Burlington Free Press writes here that “a new law that sets up a process for state recognition of American Indian tribes in Vermont has revised the makeup of the Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs and has that panel seeking nine new members.” Gov. Jim Douglas is to appoint the new members by Sept. 1.

Gwen Florio

A custom-made patchwork coat belonging to Jimi Hendrix – whose sense of style was exceeded only by his guitar playing – will be exhibited at the National Museum of the American Indian.

The Washington Post’s Reliable Source column has the story here:

Say the name Jimi Hendrix and you think: Rock star. Woodstock. Crazy costumes. Greatest electric guitar player ever.

But his sister Janie and the National Museum of the American Indian want you to know that part of his great style came from his Native American ancestry. Now 49 and head of Jimi Hendrix’s Seattle-based estate, she brought one of the musician’s custom-made coats and two replica guitars to the museum Wednesday for an upcoming exhibit, “Up Where We Belong: Native Musicians in Popular Culture,” which opens in July.

“Having Native American culture is really important to our family,” said Janie, Jimi’s little sister from his father’s second marriage. She’s the keeper of Jimi’s flame, the one who tries preserve the history and family story behind the images.

Jimi, she told us, got his fashion sense from their paternal grandmother, who was part Cherokee, played vaudeville and had a flamboyant collection of feather hats and flashy costumes.

Of the coat, she says, “We’ve been saving this piece for some special exhibit,” she said. “When this request came, it just felt natural.”

Gwen Florio

As the catalogue to this new exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts points out, the artistry of the peoples of the Great Plains had to be functional, given their semi-nomadic nature.
So they created beauty for everyday use, on their clothing, their homes, and their implements, according to this story by Eric Newhouse.

The exhibit “breaks new ground,” associate curator Joe Horse Capture writes in the catalogue. “This is probably the first time a major art museum has held an exhibition devoted to a specific Native American tribe and curated by members of that same tribe. Tribal members also wrote the catalog.”

The catalog is dedicated to Horse Capture’s dad, George Horse Capture, who moved back to Great Falls from Washington, D.C., after retiring as senior curator of the National Museum of the American Indian. The elder Horse Capture also
contributed a historical and cultural narrative to the catalog, as did tribal artist and teacher Sean Chandler.

“Our tribe has always been a small one, and we lived in Canada for hundreds of years, so compared to other, larger tribes we are little known,” he wrote. “But many of us have earned college degrees and with the help of our elders over the years have located and gathered information from the four corners of the earth to provide this glimpse of our history and aspects of our culture.”

The exhibition includes a century-old hide war shield made that had belonged to Bull Lodge, a warrior and holy man, and am A’aninin shirt made from an animal hide and decorated with strips of beadwork down the chest and back and along the arms, Newhouse writes.

Many of the items were donated by Richard Pohrt Sr.

“Later in life, Pohrt gave objects that were sacred to the A’aninin back to the tribe,” Horse Capture says. He had considered himself as a caretaker of these powerful objects and felt compelled to return them. Such a close and personal relationship with a tribe is rare among collectors.”

Gwen Florio

The January issue of Smithsonian magazine features this story on what it calls a “breathtaking” collection of 88 quilts stitched by members of Northern Plains tribes.

The National Museum of the American Indian is home to one of the largest such collections, and the article focuses on those acquired from a collector named Florence Pulford.

Pulford, a San Francisco Bay area homemaker, first got interested in quilts of the Plains tribes in the 1960s. According to NMAI curator Ann McMullen, these quilts—many bearing a central octagonal star—functioned as both ritual and practical replacements for Plains Indians buffalo robes. Bison hides had grown scarce as herds were hunted nearly to extinction in a campaign to subdue the Plains tribes during the late 1800s. Missionary wives taught quilting techniques to Indian women, who soon made the medium their own. Many of the patterns and motifs, McMullen says, “have a look very similar to [designs painted on] buffalo robes.”

The collection began with an invitation to the Pulford family from Frank Arrow, a Gros Ventre man who worked for them, to visit him on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana. There, according to the story by Owen Edwards, Pulford was given a quilt as a gift. She was so struck by the work – and the way the quilts were made from scraps – that she began supplying quilting materials to women on the reservation.
Pulford would then sell the quilts, and return profits to the women.

More than a quarter of the quilts in the collection are by Almira Buffalo Bone Jackson, a member of the Red Bottom band of Assiniboine on the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana. Jackson died in 2004 at age 87.

Gwen Florio

Here’s more about Brian Jungen, who – as we wrote Sunday – is the first living artist to see his work featured at the National Museum of the American Indian.

The Washington Post’s Blake Gopnik has some fun making Jungen’s point by salting the beginning of his story with terms like “shape-shifter” and “trickster,” and then writing:

“If you said either of those things, you’d be playing into Jungen’s hands. His new show at the National Museum of the American Indian, called ‘Brian Jungen: Strange Comfort,’ is all about probing such cliches of Indianness, which stick like glue to anyone with native roots. That probing puts him on the leading edge of native culture, as well as in the thick of international contemporary art.”

“Native cultures are living, and shouldn’t be in the Museum of Natural History. . . . It’s good for people to realize native art isn’t just beads and carving,” says Jungen, of the Dunne-za First Nation in British Columbia.

This is Jungen’s first show in museum specializing in Native art. His others have been featured in, among others places, London’s Tate Modern and New York’s New Museum. The video ad above for his 2006 exhibit at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal gives a good sense of his work.

You can also check out the Post’s slideshow of his work, here.

Gwen Florio

“Dance Me Outside” centerpiece of film festival
The Common Ground film festival in Middletown, Conn., this week will feature Native American films, including the 1994 drama, “Dance Me Outside,” about an Ontario reservation, and “These Walls are My Reservation,” about the urban Indian experience. See Hartford Courant story here.

First living artist featured at Museum of the American Indian
The exhibit of Brian Jungen’s work at the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., is the first solo show of a living Native American artist at the museum. Jungen tells NPR that much of his work is a response to the hostility and stereotypes that he faced as a person of First Nations ancestry. Listen here and see a slideshow, too.

Native American artists’ installations featured at Fabric Works
Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop has long been dedicated to that unique art. Now it’s showing “New American Voices,” the work of five artists, two of them Native and one Latino. The Philadelphia Inquirer says, here, that Marie Watt’s “Cave” simulates “a process of cultural transmission that predates history.” There’s a slideshow with this one, too.

Energy bigger than gaming for tribes?
Energy could prove bigger than gaming for tribes, according to Jim Gray, principal chief of the Osage Nation and chairman of the Council of Energy Resource Tribes. His comments are made in advance of the group’s annual conference, this year titled “Indian Energy Solutions,” to be held Nov. 3-5 in Tulsa. Read about it here in Indian Country Today.

Politics roils Little Shell search for recognition
The Billings (Mont.) Gazette reports here that political infighting has again gripped the Little Shell Band of Chippewa, involved in a decades-long quest for federal recognition. A faction of tribal members is calling for an election to challenge the legitimacy of tribal Chairman John Sinclair.

Gwen Florio

Jeri Redcorn’s “Intertwining Scrolls” (shown in this National Museum of the American Indian photo) is among several pieces of Native American pottery chosen for the White House by President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. So is Maria Poveka Martinez’s San Ildefonso Pueblo jar, from the late 1950s. (See Nos. 4 and 8, also No. 11, in this slideshow.)

Those and other works in the collection, writes the Washington Post’s Blake Gopnik, here, “seem to redress past imbalances in the nation’s sense of its own art. There are works by African Americans (seven paintings from three artists, out of a total of 47) and by Native Americans (four artists contributed three modern ceramics and one abstract painting). There are also 12 paintings depicting Native Americans, by the 19th-century ethnographic artist George Catlin.”

Later in the story, he writes, “As for the Catlin Indians, should we think of them as a positive nod to the original peoples of this continent, or are they all about a white colonialist gawking at exotic conquered peoples? Paul Chaat Smith, who curates contemporary art at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, says that even he and other native peoples aren’t sure of the answer. ‘They’re not us, they’re not for us,’ he says, but they’re also’”part of how we think about ourselves.’”

We’re not sure of the answer, either, but we’re glad the Obamas have chosen works that focus some attention on the subject.

Gwen Florio

You knew the museum was a big deal, right? Well, the Rochester Institute of Technology is making it even more official. It’s picked the museum as the subject of this year’s Big Shot Project.

This year is the 25th anniversary of a photo project that uses volunteers to “paint” a subject with light for a spectacular nighttime photo. Past subjects include the Great Pyramid of Khufu (in 1959), the Alamo (2001) and the Royal Palace in Stockholm (2003).

This year’s subject was picked in part because the museum is celebrating its fifth anniversary, Digital City’s Hannah Brehm reports (here) today.

Also, writes Brehm, “the Big Shot Project is intended to draw a community together to celebrate the work the NMAI does to preserve and promote Native American culture, to reflect on the beauty of the building in its attempt to mimic the mesas and canyons of the Southwest.” The building is designed by Douglas Cardinal, who is Blackfeet, and Johnpaul Jones, who is Cherokee/Choctaw.

Big Shot will take place on Sept. 26, when volunteers with hand-held light sources will gather outside the museum at 7:45 p.m The photograph will be taken at 8:45 p.m., and all volunteers will receive a print, courtesy of Nikon.

Gwen Florio