On June 25 and 26, 1876, warriors of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho nations defeated Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn. Americans have always remembered the battle. What we often forget are the difficult decisions tribal leaders made afterward to ensure the safety of their people. The values that guided them then—generosity, perseverance, bravery, and wisdom—continue to serve the Lakota people today.
Leaders of the Osage Nation had hoped to buy the land that contains the 1,000-year-old images. An auction bidder agreed to pay $2.2 million for 43 acres including the cave 60 miles west of St. Louis.
Scott, Sascha T.; Lonetree, Amy. 2020. “The Past and the Future Are Now.” Arts 9, no. 3: 77.
Stevens, Scott M. 2020. “Collecting Haudenosaunee Art from the Modern Era.” Arts 9, no. 2: 55.
Hawk Polk, Dyani W. 2020. “The Long Game .” Arts 9, no. 2: 67.
Scott, Sascha T. 2020. “Ana-Ethnographic Representation: Early Modern Pueblo Painters, Scientific Colonialism, and Tactics of Refusal.” Arts 9, no. 1: 6.
Moore, Emily L. 2019. “The American Flag and the Alaska Native Brotherhood.” Arts 8, no. 4: 158.
Shannon, Jennifer. 2019. “Trusting You Will See This as We Do: The Hidatsa Water Buster (Midi Badi) Clan Negotiates the Return of a Medicine Bundle from the Museum of the American Indian in 1938.” Arts 8, no. 4: 156.
Chavez Lamar, Cynthia. 2019. “A Pathway Home: Connecting Museum Collections with Native Communities.” Arts 8, no. 4: 154.
Penney, David W. 2019. “Siyosapa: At the Edge of Art.” Arts 8, no. 4: 148.
Burns, Emily C. 2019. “Circulating Regalia and Lakȟóta Survivance, c. 1900.” Arts 8, no. 4: 146.
Chavez, Yve. 2019. “Basket Weaving in Coastal Southern California: A Social History of Survivance.” Arts 8, no. 3: 94.
Deloria, Philip J. 2019. “T.C. Cannon’s Guitar.” Arts 8, no. 4: 132.
The Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies (CAIRNS), located in the Pine Ridge Reservation, has recently been gifted Survival Songs, a collection of over 40 poems by Lydia Whirlwind Soldier. The poet has offered the book to CAIRNS in support of the work they do, especially in the field of education related to American Indians.
Kimberly Blaeser, author of Copper Yearning, and Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2015-16, writes that “Lydia Whirlwind Soldier’s Survival Songs opens and closes with echoes, reminding the reader of the whisper of ageless prairie grasses and all that is left in the wind. Filled with remembrances of family and with the voices of Lakota history, Whirlwind Soldier’s book becomes a strong heart song for survivors of boarding schools, federal mandates, the shadows of war, and ghosts everywhere. It weaves together an intimate knowledge of the landscape with traditional stories, showing through the craft of poetry their conjoined reality. She invites us into her homeland – an island of refuge in an alien world where eagles’ shrill cries still resound, sacred like Sundance whistles.”
Craig Howe (Lakota), who is the director of CAIRNS, writes, “Thank You, Lydia! Special thanks also to Charles Woodard, CAIRNS board member, for his careful and insightful editing of the book.”
Survival Songs is available on the CAIRNS website by clicking here.
Please purchase a copy today, and help support CAIRNS!
In May 2019, the members of our Humanities Without Walls team for the project “Indigenous Art and Activism in Changing Climates: The Mississippi River Valley, Colonialism, and Environmental Change” met for the second time. We visited sites in Chicagoland, focusing on the tributaries of the Mississippi and their vast reach from the homelands of the Three Fires Confederacy (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatami), as well as from the lands of the Menominee, Miami, and Ho-Chunk nations, which remain home to many Native peoples. We listened to Dr. Ashley Falzetti (Miami) and Dr. John Low (Potawatomi), who discussed Miami and Potawatomi alluvial histories, before viewing a Ralph Frese birchbark canoe and then going on the water at Skokie Lagoons. Dr. Margaret Pearce (Potawatomi) conducted a mapping workshop with us, and we also visited with Indigenous futurist artist Santiago X (Coushatta/ Chamoru) at one of the sites for his two earthwork projects in Chicago that he is creating in partnership with the American Indian Center. Drawing on this meeting as well as the previous one in Minneapolis, the graduate student team members came up with keywords that reflect the processes and methodologies we are engaging with and thinking through as this project continues.
John Low discusses canoe travel in the Great Lakes.
Santiago X explains the indigenous-centered river walk project.
Margaret Pearce joins the group for a canoe trip on the Chicago River.
In the next few posts on The Repatriation Files, we will share these keywords and use them to gesture toward how we see the project’s next steps unfolding. Shaped by the input of the artists/activists/scholars we’ve encountered, the keywords represent our take on concepts that have guided our understanding of Indigenous art and activism in the Mississippi River Valley. The accompanying digital maps help visualize the concepts of collaboration, place-based learning, and remapping on the one hand, and give visibility to Indigenous art and activism by highlighting the Native Midwest on the other.
Published March 12, 2019 “Zibaaska’ iganagooday: The Jingle Dress at 100” will open April 3 at Mille Lacs Indian Museum and Trading Post ONAMIA, Minn. — The Mille Lacs Indian Museum and Trading Po…
Sara Černe (PhD candidate in English, Northwestern
As someone born and raised in Central Europe, I came to the Mississippi River via music: roots rock at first, the blues only later—a backwards trajectory for sure. I associated the river with the vastness of America; with Mark Twain and antebellum steamboats; with African American musical traditions; and with Tina Turner’s cover of “Proud Mary,” of course. Neither Native Americans nor the Upper Mississippi figured in that vision. Writing my dissertation on environmental justice in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and culture along the Mississippi at Northwestern University, I have now gone beyond the pop culture understanding of the river, but until recently, the Upper River and Indigenous populations remained conspicuously absent from my research.
In other words, I came to the Humanities Without Walls-sponsored research trip to Minnesota for a collaborative project on Indigenous art and activism in the Mississippi River Valley with very little background in American Indian Studies. I left with a much better understanding of the Dakota and Ojibwe history and present and the importance of the spaces we visited to Indigenous communities native to the area, humbled by the experience.
Wild rice and reflected skies at Lake Itasca, MN—Minnesota’s name is derived from the Dakota phrase ‘Mni Sota Makoce,’ translated as ‘land where the waters reflect the clouds.’
In taking photographs of these places—Lake Itasca in Northern Minnesota; Indian Mounds Park and Wakan Tipi in St. Paul; and the Bdote, the confluence of the Mni Sota Wakpa and the Hahawakpa rivers, the Minnesota and the Mississippi, on the edges of the Twin Cities metro area—I looked for ways in which Native presence, historically as well as presently, is seen, felt, and experienced. Instead of fixating on the myriad ways the US state has worked to disenfranchise and erase Indigenous populations, I wanted to focus on the many acts of perseverance I was witnessing all along the Upper Mississippi.
My first tobacco offering to the Mississippi River at the Headwaters, beginning its 90-day journey to the Gulf of Mexico
The various educators’ and activists’ efforts at regenerating, revitalizing, and reclaiming Native spaces establish firmly Indigenous presents as well as futures. Such actions include cleaning up sacred sites that had been reduced to toxic waste grounds; leading Nibi Walks for water; teaching about the places along the river from an Indigenous point of view using American Indian languages and place names; and marking the areas with Indigenous art.
Grant participants Prof. Jacki Rand (University of Iowa) and Agléška Cohen-Rencountre (University of Minnesota) wading in the Mississippi Headwaters at Itasca, MN.
The Sacred Dish by Duane Goodwin At Indian Mounds Park, St. Paul, MN.
In this last category of public art, I would like to highlight two sculptures of Native women—standing rocks, so to speak—that mark their respective spaces as Indigenous even when no one else is around. The first is the 2005 bronze Headwaters—Caretaker Woman by Jeff Savage, a member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, at Itasca; the second is the 2006 dolomitic limestone The Sacred Dish by Duane “Dewey” Goodwin, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, in Indian Mounds Park.
Emphasizing Native American feminine cosmology in which women are seen as the custodians of water and earth, the two sculptures pay tribute to the ancestors and speak to the importance of traditional knowledge and practices for the health of the planet and future generations. They also serve as beautiful and unequivocal reminders that these places I was lucky enough to visit are Indigenous—yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Headwaters—Caretaker Woman by Jeff Savage in Itasca State Park, MN .
1. At the headwaters, I shook hands with the Mississippi, we remember(ed) each other, I sent a prayer along the river, one day the words will return, the water always returns
2. At Wakan Tipi, we walked in the heat for a long time / we walked in the cold for a long time, we sang to ___ because the earth was blanketed with snow / we didn’t say _______’s name when there was no snow, they used explosives and destroyed the cave, the railroad men came here and destroyed the womb, the stars still reflect in the water, in both winter and summer the spring does not freeze, the water lives/water is life
3. At Bdote / It is at that place where the Mississippi and the Minnesota rivers meet / I saw a steamboat go upstream / they say the Dakota people emerged here / Back in 1862 the Dakota people were jailed there / and at that time many were sick and died / and then a steamboat took them away on the Mississippi river / now the Dakota people have returned to Bdote / like water the Dakota people will always return here.
4. What will we bring when we come back here?
5. What will the water bring back?
PORTLAND, Ore. (PRWEB) January 31, 2018 20 Native artists representing five artistic disciplines have been honored by the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (NACF) with National Artist Fellowships.
