Dyani White Hawk: Love Language Roundtable Conversation
In the following conversation, Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) brings together women artist peers Christi Belcourt (Métis) and Marie Watt (Seneca Nation) for a generative exchange about their artistic practices, supports, and commitments. Moderated by the curator and writer Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), November 26, 2024.
This conversation was originally printed in the catalogue Dyani White Hawk: Love Language, copublished on the occasion of the exhibition by the same name and co-organized by the Walker Art Center and Remai Modern.
Candice Hopkins
I'm grateful to all of you for being here and taking time for this conversation. I've been thinking about the shared affinities across your practices. I see this in the ways you each work but also in how your practices actually create community. You each mobilize different knowledge systems, centering not only reciprocity but also care. So, I want to begin by asking each of you–Marie, Christi, and Dyani–to first share why you do the work that you do.
Marie Watt
That's such a deep question, and I always struggle a little bit with answering it. I am Seneca. I come from the Turtle Clan, but I was raised in Seattle, Washington, far away from our reservation, Cattaraugus, in western New York. My mom moved out West to become a nurse, eventually working in Indian education. My understanding of community and being Seneca didn't come from growing up in our community, but from visiting it. I also spent a lot of formative time at the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in Seattle, as well as among the Urban Indian community, where my mom did cultural programs.
For me, the work that I do as an artist is centered in community, and is a way for me to understand my relationships. When I was much younger, I thought there was a specific experience I missed out on by not growing up on the reservation. I've since realized that we all have different journeys and stories, and that is an authentic Indigenous reality, but it's also very different from the one Western culture paints for us. I make the work in order to understand my place in the world as I walk through it and my relationship to past generations. I also feel I have a responsibility to future generations as well.
CH
I was intrigued in learning more about your history, Marie, about your mom working in education, and those experiences with Daybreak Star. Thanks for sharing more about this. Christi?
Christi Belcourt
My name is Christi Belcourt, and I come from the Métis community of Lac Ste. Anne, which is located in what is now called Alberta, in what is now called Canada. I didn't grow up in Lac Ste. Anne. Like Marie, I grew up away from my family's land, in Ottawa. My dad, Tony Belcourt, has been involved in Métis and non-Status Indian rights for fifty years. Growing up in Ottawa in the late '6os and '7os, I was immersed in Métis politics, so that struggle has really influenced me, my awareness, and my understanding of history.
Reconnecting to community has been a lifelong thing. When I was growing up, we didn't have money, so we didn't travel out West that often. I saw my grandparents once or twice a year, and was disconnected from cousins and family. My process of reconnecting to community has been reconnecting back to the land. I've spent the last thirty years on the land, trying to learn from the plants and from Elders. I'm reconnecting to my language. And it's possible to do. This has given me hope and encouragement. I still know who I am, I know who my people are, I know who all my grandmothers are going back centuries.
Why do I do art? I don't know. I knew from the age of seven that I was going to be an artist. It popped out of my mouth in conversation with a friend, and I still recall that moment because it surprised me! I think each of us is born with gifts. In my arts practice, Ideal in multiples. Multiples equal communities, or universes, or complex histories. Multiples equal the shared things that as Indigenous people we face globally with enduring, surviving colonization and the violence that comes with that. So multiple dots connect to the multiples of ecosystems on which we survive. I see that in Marie's work, and also in Dyani's. I think that's a common thread–this idea that we connect multiples that create a consistent story that speaks across generations, borders, and experiences.
CH
I appreciate that observation. And I'm sure it resonates with you too, Dyani.
Dyani White Hawk
Yeah, 100 percent. With my obsessively painted line work or beading huge canvases–I'm always thinking about how pulling all of the multiples together reflects our communities and the value systems we're taught. It is embedded in us to understand that the whole doesn't exist without the many gifts each of us brings.
Another thing I'm responding to as I listen is that each of us has stories of removal and reconnection. That's hugely guiding. Our story of removal comes from my mom's adoption off the reservation when she was eighteen months old. She was placed with Christian missionaries who felt they were "called to work with the Indians." That's how they talked about it. She had nine siblings, and I believe seven of the nine were taken and put in different families in different states, then a couple were together in households here and there. So that was the effect of the adoption era and the Sixties Scoop. These are corresponding timelines and policies that were intentional governmental efforts toward continued assimilation of Native peoples. Repairing that, preventing separation, and supporting reunification has become my mom's life's work.
When you asked the question, "Why do we do what we do?" my thought was, "Because I must, because it's always been." I feel the same as Christi does–I believe it was a gift I was given. My mom saw it. I credit her for a lot, because I didn't understand it for years. She would tell me, "Dyani, you're an artist and one of these days you'll believe me." When I sold my first drawing, I called her, all excited to tell her about it. And she's like, "Do you believe me yet?" But it wasn't until I went to Haskell Indian Nations University, and then to the Institute of American Indian Arts, that I started to believe it.
When you grow up outside of your own community, you're taught to carry a lot of shame–about being mixed, or about not growing up on your reservation, or about not knowing enough or this or that–you inherit that. Neocolonization is real. Our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were taught to be ashamed of who they were. And then our generation has been taught to carry a lot of shame about not being who we are. It takes a lot of internal work to unlearn this perpetual cycle of shame and to see each other with empathy, compassion, and grace. When I was at tribal colleges, I learned about all the policies and governmental efforts that attacked our communities across generations. I remember finally realizing, "Oh, my life experience is 100 percent an Indigenous experience." I think it's extremely important to share the history, because if we're not actively recognizing it, we're bound to repeat it. And hopefully, the more we have these conversations, the more we can spread awareness, and move toward healthier futures. So that's why I do what I do.
On Collectivity
CH
Thanks, Dyani. I wanted to share something about these complicated layers and that framework of guilt. My colleague Sarah Biscarra Dilley recently said to me, "Guilt is a colonial construct." When I heard that, I thought, "It seems so simple, but so right." Because guilt perpetuates. My grandmother was forced to go to Choutla Residential School in the Yukon, which created deep fractures with our community. These ruptures were very deliberate. My community in Carcross was unhealthy for a very long time. It's now going through a radical mode of cultural regeneration, starting with a dance group being formed, and with reorienting our village. The center of our village is now a commons. It started with, again, the redistribution of wealth as part of the potlatch system. Traditionally, we had to put in a lot of systems in order to enable health.
So, I want to return to this generative idea of multiplicity. Each of your practices is remarkably collective, both through gathering, and working together with one another. I'm curious about what teachings you have learned through collectivity. How do you create a kind of sense of shared ethics and accountability in that space?
We might start with you, Christi. One of your projects that I experienced in a few different iterations was Walking With Our Sisters. It was, number one, a way to call attention to the continued emergency of murdered, missing Indigenous women. But number two, it created a necessary space of honoring and healing, because this was a crisis that wasn't being seriously addressed by the Canadian government. Now it's being more broadly recognized in the US. And of course, we also have a femicide epidemic in Mexico. You shared with me recently that for Walking With Our Sisters there were some 2,600 pairs of moccasin vamps made by a nearly equal number of participants. Four hundred people attended beading circles that you organized. You estimated that some 2,000 people volunteered, and that 100,000 people attended over the course of an almost ten-year tour. That's remarkable. That project helped shift the discourse about this issue on a national level. I was hoping you could share more about the project: how it came to be, how you organized it, and the impact it had.
CB
I could talk about different aspects of this project all day long. But first, I want to center the Indigenous people who have been murdered or who are missing. Although the project focused on women, Two-Spirit people, and children who never made it home from residential school, I also want to acknowledge the men and the boys who are also being murdered. It continues today. I want to acknowledge those who are missing and keep them in my prayers that they will return home safely to their families. The people–the victims and their families–were always at the core of this project.
At one time, the Native Women's Association of Canada were the only ones doing a national database to track families who had said, "These are our people who are missing or who have been murdered." At that time, the number was 632. They were urging the government for funding to be able to do a proper database. Then the government of Canada, under [Stephen] Harper, gave funding to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to do the database instead. The number has jumped up to 1,000 over the past thirty years, but we all know it's more than that.
The project came out of a moment of overwhelming emotion and compassion. A missing persons' poster was put up on Facebook, and the girl in the picture looked similar to my daughter. The girl and her friend went missing, and had left their cell phones and purses behind. That sent horror like a shudder through me. I thought of her mother, and thought, "If that were me, I would be searching the faces of every single person I came across until my dying breath to see if they were my daughter." I was driving, and tears were streaming; I was just really feeling that for her mom. That's when–I like to think our grandmothers work in mysterious ways–the picture of some vamps came into my mind. The image of unfinished moccasins representing unfinished lives. And then I thought, "I'll ask people if they want to do this and if this is a good idea." And all of a sudden, there was a flood of responses.
CH
I remember when that Excel sheet was circulating, and you could sign up to bead pairs of vamps.
CB
It became so much that I finally said, "Here's the address. Just send them." The post office was overwhelmed, giving me boxes and boxes. I would come home, open them up, and enter them into the spreadsheet. At that point, I needed help, so I asked some pretty amazing people to help. There were nineteen of us in a national collective that helped to guide the project, which then got pared down to a core group of about six or seven who pushed it through. Although I'm credited with the project, I credit this larger group for keeping it going, because I didn't attend all of the openings or all of the installations. We took turns; they were the leads at some sites, and I was the lead on others.
I'll talk about the core of your question, about ethics. That was the most important thing. We had some guiding principles on the project. One was you had to "take off your hat" [job title]. It didn't matter what you did for your job, you were just a human being like everybody else. There was no hierarchy. The second thing was that to be part of Walking With Our Sisters, you had to be a volunteer–no one could make any money from it. The main guiding principle, though, was that grandmothers had to be on the steering committee in each community. Those grandmothers had to be the ones to decide how this is going to go. In choosing your grandmothers, make sure they're the kind you want to sit beside and have tea. Nobody needs to be scolded, because we're all grieving. And, if it's a choice between a grandmother who really knows ceremony but is known as not fun to be around, or a grandma who doesn't know ceremony that well but is comforting and kind and has those protocols, then choose the one who's comforting and kind.
Ceremony also guided it. So, when we went into spaces like community centers, museums, art galleries, and those types of places, we said, "If you're going to do this with us, you have to turn your space over to us. You need to give us the keys. You need to let these grandmothers and grandfathers guide the ceremony following the protocols of their lands and their traditions and their people. And if it means that they want to do a pipe ceremony and fill your space with smoke, that's the way it is. If it means that they want to smudge all day long, that's the way it is. If it means they want to stay open after hours, that's the way it is. And this is what you have to agree to." And it was amazing–they did. In some spaces, they even changed their fire codes because they had no policy for smudging. In some of these spaces, it was the first time they allowed community to drive the experience.
Guiding this whole thing was a teaching from a late Elder of mine, Wilfred Peltier, who was originally from Wikwemikong First Nation. He told me, "Indian communities are highly organized without looking like it, and you can't come in from a top-down position and try and organize things." He said, "The people who make the best pies will bring the best pies, and everybody knows who they are. The people who make the best turkeys will bring the turkeys." And I thought, okay, that is my philosophy for life. In all the work I do, I try to remember that if people come and can only spend ten minutes, that's the ten minutes they could spend. I honored and valued everybody's contributions equally. This brought a sense of doing things in a respectful way.
I often said Walking With Our Sisters was a mirror. The spirits coming to that ceremony and installation were like a mirror held up to the community and the problems in it. Whatever the nature of conflict was, those were the things that needed to be worked on. In some communities, it was the idea that Two-Spirit people couldn't keep the fire, that only biologically male people were permitted. That created a real conflict and was a mirror reflecting back to the community. This is what we need to work on. There were other conflicts about things like skirt protocols and women's roles–wherever the conflict was, that was an opportunity for people to sit back and say, "What are the grandmothers trying to tell us here?"
DWH
That needs to be written down as a guidepost for many, many people. Wherever the conflict is, that's your opportunity for growth.
CH
That's your mirror. Christi, it was profound that some of the conversations about protocols that local communities put forward were really part of witnessing. And I think part of the reason that these lives could be honored in such a way was because you set forward a different ethics of relation. Marie and Dyani, given that you also work deeply in and with community, I think your projects also produce protocols. Can you speak to how you put these in place, or the ethics of relationships that you work with? I love what Christi shared about "You give us the keys"–understanding that this is our sovereign territory while we work on this project.
MW
Christi, as you're talking about the protocol of taking off the hat, and then opening the mail, it makes me think about when people contribute blankets to my projects. Or when Cannupa Hanska Luger and I were working on our project Each/Other at the Peabody Essex Museum. We were receiving bandanas that people had embroidered. I want to acknowledge what an emotional experience that can be, opening a package and knowing that a specific person actually made this thing. They're giving something of themselves creatively to be part of this, showing their connection to the community. I have always found it emotionally moving, and I can only imagine what that experience was like for you, and then for those packages to keep coming. Because it's not just a piece of mail–it's a really intimate gift.

CB
Yeah, that comes with emotions. That speaks to the teaching where you're putting your energy into the things you make. I think when we're talking about violence and loss and grief, seeing these multiples of things in the piece is meant to feel overwhelming, given the gravity of the subject.
On Beads
CH
Dyani, I was reminded about the last time I visited your old studio. You were deep into a new process. For a long time, you’d made your paintings yourself, including beading directly on them or painting quillwork. Your practice started shifting when you began overlaying that onto these canvases that had a beautiful background of what looked like copper. As a Tlingit person, that really resonated with me. When you started beading on the larger canvases, and realizing that this vision required more hands, it became collective. So, I wonder not only about that transition in your work, but also how you have found a way for collectivity to create works that are honestly—like you’ve all shared—your work. They’re really monumental, and not monumental in the colonial way at all, I feel, because they become representative of relations.
DWH
For me, the process of moving from what was, for many years, a solo studio practice into eventually receiving help started in 2015 or 2016. Right now, we have thirteen people working in the studio. During crunch time, that number grows, then it gets whittled down again. I had known for quite a while that I needed help in the studio, but I was refusing to accept it for different reasons. Up until that point, everything had been done by my own hand, so I had to mentally surmount the challenge of letting go of that control. I had to finally recognize that I didn’t need to prove to anybody that I knew how to bead—I had already done that—even though I took pride in that, and I crave doing bead work. I crave painting; I crave sewing. I crave all these things I’ve grown up learning how to do. Some studio models are about the idea and getting the idea out, but for me, it’s not only about that. It’s also in part fulfilling this thing I need to do and that I’m connected to. But what shifted for me, and allowed me to begin accepting help, was that I had a deadline and I wasn’t going to make it! [laughs]
CH
That just pushed you over the edge.
DWH
Yeah, Todd Bockley, my gallerist, showed up for a studio visit. We were looking at where the various paintings were in their progress and then looking at the timeline. And he turned to me saying, “I think it’s time. I think you need some help.” And I was like, “Goddammit, I know!” [laughing] I had resisted up until that moment. So, I thought, “Okay, if I’m going to accept help, it has to be another Native beadworker, somebody who is guided by the same value systems in doing the work. I can’t just hand it off as a process for somebody to finish. This person will sit down at that work with good intentions and love, thinking about the energy they’re putting into the work, and the way we’re taught to do that work. That needs to be inherent.” I was remembering horror stories out there about studio assistants being mistreated, and how their work and contributions aren’t acknowledged. It’s opposite of anything that I would ever feel good about.
I finally realized that we already have a model in our own communities: if you go to a powwow and see somebody’s full regalia, chances are many family members contributed to create it. When that person puts on every item that they’re wearing, that’s monumental. Oftentimes, various family members will have worked on different items. Maybe somebody did all of the geometry or all of the florals, and then somebody else did all the fill, right? Or someone did the sewing and the ribbon work, and another family member did the beadwork. Or maybe they had to hire out different pieces of it: they got a roach from one person, and their shags from another person, and maybe this other person is the bustle maker. All of these family and community members come together to create this single set of regalia. Then one person puts on this collective expression and dances it all to life. And that is community.
So I thought, “Okay, we have a model. I can build off of that and feel good about it.” I hired two Ojibwe women at first. One, who I call my second mom, my “Ma Two,” is one of my mom’s best friends. She’s from White Earth and is an amazing beadworker. I knew she had the chops. Then another is Jennie, a jingle dress dancer. She came to mind because of the way she carries herself in community, and her beadwork is beautiful. I had to teach both of them how to do Lakota-style lane stitch beadwork, because they did Ojibwe-style, two-needle flat stitch technique. But they knew how to bead. There are things you learn in handling beads and needles, how to work with tension, stuff that takes a while to learn. I knew they’d be able to do it, and it was really successful. Jennie worked with me for over five years, but as her own practice grew, she no longer needed the work the studio provided, which to me is the ultimate win. I want the studio to be a place that can be supportive and fulfilling for somebody for a period of time, and I love to see when people grow beyond it. That’s when I know the nurturing and reciprocal goals I have for the studio are working.
When I was invited to participate in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, I had shown a 7-by-10-foot acrylic on canvas painting [She Gives (Quiet Strength VII), 2020] at the Armory Show the year before. When the biennial curators [Adrienne Edwards and David Breslin] came to visit, I had a 48-by-48-inch mixed-media beaded painting in the booth. Adrienne pointed at it, and was like, “Can you do that,” and then she pointed at the great big painting, “like that?” I remember I laughed out loud.
CH
As in, “Do you have any idea how long that’s going to take?”
DWH
Yes! Because the 48-by-48-inch work was the largest beaded mixed-media piece I had done up to that time, and it required serious effort. I had to stretch it, do the painting, unstretch it, and then hook it up to a quilting loom, because you can only reach so far in order to do controlled beadwork in the center of that big space—our arms are only so long. We all know the time that it takes. So, I laughed and said, “I mean, sure, but what you’re asking me is crazy.” But I’m not going to say no to the Whitney Biennial curators. So, I’m like, “All right, let’s figure this out. I’ll probably need a few more people.” I did all the math, and hired four people to start, thinking we could handle it. As we were beading, I kept doing more predictive math, then realizing we needed a few more people. So I’d add more people, and we’d get further along, and then I’d do the math again, and decide we needed a few more. In the end, eighteen people had contributed to the beadwork of this piece [Wopila | Lineage, 2022]. That’s what it took to get it done and to get it done in time.
CH
So, how has this changed the model of how you work now?
DWH
What I had desired through the process of expanding my studio was to draw from within this trusted network of, “you’re either another Native person that knows how to bead or you’re a really trusted friend of a Native person and you know how to bead.” I really prioritize that. It’s an inclusive model that centers the Native, artistic, and BIPOC communities here in the Twin Cities. Everybody in the studio is BIPOC and/or queer. It’s also a lot of family: my daughter, my mother-in-law, my sister- in-law, my brother-in-law, my niece, and one of their cousins work here. An auntie, niece, and nephew of my dear friend Tom Jones work here. For me, the studio is about continuing teachings in the way I’ve been taught to approach beadwork. We smudge in this space. We take care of one another and the work in the ways that culturally we’ve been taught to do. The studio is meant to be a place of safety, warmth, light, laughter, and love. We don’t always get it right because we’re a bunch of humans coexisting in a shared space, so we naturally have an imperfect but beautiful studio environment guided by Indigenous values.
CH
Thanks for sharing that, Dyani. That’s a real sense of generosity. This notion of the “ethics of relation” is one I know from many Elders as being that you simply just "come in a good way." But that gets forgotten. I always liked that idea of coming in a good way as something that is transferable.
I’m glad that you have all talked about the beadwork, because I wanted to get deeper into this. I think of beads as not only about cultural transference but also about our inheritance, even if the ways in which we’ve used them are different: Métis beadwork comes from its own very specific histories. Haudenosaunee beadwork is also different—it’s the raised beadwork style. It’s something else. Lakota beadwork is something else again. Beads are a perfect example of how, when there has been a new material introduced in community, the first thing that people want to do is make it our own but also make it very beautiful and ornate.
Through the work each of you do, you mobilize beadwork differently, and I think you’ve all become beadwork historians. I’m curious about the kinds of research you do in your practice, and how you bring those cultural inheritances into your work. Marie, I know you’ve talked about Seneca trade beads and have used a lot of historical beads in your practice. And more recently, you’ve been citing things like how neon can be seen as extending traditions of glass beadwork too.
MW
Yes, the thing that I like about working with beads is the story of that material. It’s really interesting to me that the Czech beads created today are made on the same machines as they were a hundred years ago. I have been using vintage Italian beads more recently. They’re hex cut, and the glass has mirrored interiors that remind me of raised Haudenosaunee beaded whimsies. There is something in the DNA of these vintage beads that connects me to my ancestors.
People call beadwork traditional, and beads do go way back: I can point to wampum in our community, and I know that Christi and Dyani can identify different beads that also are part of their traditions. But when I look at glass beadwork, I think about how, from the moment that they came to our communities through trade, beadwork was a radical contemporary expression. But that’s not the way beadwork stories are often presented. Beadwork is presented as a traditional Indigenous art form. I think the word “traditional” sometimes limits a public understanding.
CH
Yes, I feel like “tradition” comes with all these presumptions. If you look at the root of the word in English, it means “change over time.” I always say that in Native communities, people wouldn’t value traditions if they didn’t remain relevant. They remain relevant by shifting, by changing. And agree there’s a misconception with this idea that “well, beadwork is a traditional thing.” What is shared through your practices is showing how this is actually a space of radical innovation, maybe even aesthetic rebellion.
DWH
Yes, definitely.
MW
I love the notion that a bead can be anything. So in Christi’s work, the bead is a dot in paint. And Dyani, in your painting process, you use physical beads, but at other times you also imply them by articulating their abstraction in paint. I think anything can be a bead, right? A piece of masking tape. Or a stitch. I remember one of my gallerists asked, “I don’t understand why you want to work with neon.” And I said, “Well, I don’t understand why not?” I think of the glass tubes used in neon as both a cord and a bead. It is a very natural extension of beadwork. It does all of the things that beads do, actually. It’s also interesting how early currency was beads, not gold. A bead is a shiny object we attach value to. A bead is like the sun, the moon, and a reflection on water. What is the first thing we see when we come into this world? Probably the reflection off of an eye—we are received, in a way, by things that are somewhat bead-like.
CH
I love that. Christi, I remember when I first saw your paintings, I’d never seen anything like them. Your canvases show us how everything is interrelated, from the root systems that pull up the water, to insects and birds. You’re always presenting us with a very particular kind of ecosystem. I was curious first about how you came to that kind of material translation of beads to paint, and also how you choose what you want to represent. A lot of the imagery centers on healing, like medicinal plants, or foregrounds birds or waterways that are significant for you.
CB
My paintings came out of growing up not around beadworkers but with beadwork, and the smell of the home-tanned moose hide my dad would bring back as gifts for us when he traveled. So, I’d have moccasins, or little bags, or this or that. I grew up always having these material objects around that were so normal, they were part of me. As I grew older, I became fascinated by floral beadwork, because Métis people are known as floral beadwork people. Historical Métis beadwork often has colors on black or deep-colored wool trade cloth. Our people really love the contrast of colored beads popping off that dark background. But the available palette of bead colors was sometimes limited. There’s a mathematical thing that happens when you have a limited palette. You have to create balance; you can’t have one side appear too blue or one side appear too pink. You have to balance these out. The Métis beadworkers really were masters at that. It’s an artistic legacy passed down through the generations that we’re still practicing fully today, whether we’re doing it in beads or in paint.
My daughter’s aunt (I called her my aunt too) once gave me a pair of mukluks. I had put them on my wall because they were too big for me. And at one point I thought, “Oh, yeah, I should just paint those. I should paint the flowers.” With my first paintings, I realized quickly that I did not know enough about beadwork because I had never actually done it myself. I began to do beadwork because I needed to know how it was constructed. I did not know about plants the way that I needed to in order to be able to paint them, so with every plant I came across, I would introduce myself. I’d take a picture; I’d go back and look at it, blowing it up to the biggest size so I could see every little detail. I started to notice all the little hairs that are on plants, which translated as those little mouse tracks across the stems that we see in Métis beadwork; and that on every single plant are insects doing their work. It spoke to interconnectedness, that everything relies on everything. We are not the top of the food chain, we’re the bottom because we rely on everything to survive, and nothing needs us as a species. Mycelium networks underneath the ground are communicating with the entire forest. Without all of these, without the pollinators and everything else, we are not alive. I’m not a fast beader. I’m a painter, so it was just much easier for me to start to put it onto canvas than to actually do the beading, although I have tried.
At first, I was going larger and larger with my work, partly because Métis people in Canada are legally in this kind of middle ground quagmire. The provinces and the feds toss us back and forth as a political football. My original purpose of going big was to be like, “Uh-uh-uh, don’t you forget about Métis people. You’re not going to be able to walk by this painting and not stop and take a look.” Now, I don’t really feel that need anymore; it’s all about the environment and our interconnection. I’m also thinking about something I was taught by Maria Campbell, who said, “Although your patterns come from the plant world, trying to understand the medicines, the aesthetics, comes from your people, and you have to follow traditional protocols around copyright. When you’re using stories or songs or patterns, you have to say how you came by them, who gave them to you. You carry your community with you, so you have to carry yourself well. You have a responsibility to your community to give back, because they gave you this beautiful aesthetic legacy which you’re passing on now.”
On Resistance
CB
I want to go back to what Marie was saying about new materials, and share a story about Sherry Farrell Racette, who has had such a huge impact on me.
DWH
On all of us.
CB
She's such a wealth of knowledge, but sometimes just one or two little things she says go into you and it's like alchemy or something–it starts to change things within you. Anyway, Maria Campbell organized this thing called the Half-Breed Ball. It was this phenomenal meal of traditional foods inside a huge barn. I remember everyone was sitting at round tables-there were ten courses, and every course had a new kind of bannock. It was decorated beautifully, and she had all sorts of artists bring our artwork to hang on the walls. She had a beautiful fiddle player, and then she had Sherry do a fashion show of the development of Métis aesthetic material culture through the ages. Sherry's on the mic, and she's introducing each person walking out, and saying, "We look at these items as being old or traditional, but in the day, these were cutting-edge fashion." She said, "Nobody was making these before this generation. Nobody was wearing this cut of jacket before this generation."
It made me think about what you were saying, Marie. Marjorie Tahbone once said about tattooing, "If my people would've had metal needles, they would've used them. They wouldn't have used bone needles. Because we always use what materials are going to be best for the survival of our people, what materials work best, what we simply liked and preferred. And we were never stuck in the past. We were always contemporary." And I think about that.
The Métis people participated in two rebellions against the Canadian government. Our leader, Louis Riel, was hanged for treason by the government for rebelling. At that time, in the nineteenth century, we were pressed upon to assimilate into the church. Christianity was becoming more and more dominant in the communities. Métis people were being devastated by disease and starvation. The mass murder of the Buffalo Nation affected our people in such a profound way. When the American-Canadian border was put into place, that severely limited our movement. The treaty and then the half-breed commissions were signing people up to accept money or acreage in what they said was an extinguishment of our rights. All of these things happening at the same time really had an impact on Métis aesthetics. As Sherry has said to me, "The darker things seemed to get for the people, the denser and more colorful the beadwork got." I thought, wow, that is a beautiful testament to our resilience and the continuation of our connection to land and asserting our place.
CH
Christi, thanks for recounting this, and I'm also grateful for you bringing Sherry's words here because it made me think of how we have so many examples of ways that things like the stitch and beadwork became a place of resistance too. We wore that resistance on our bodies. Dyani or Marie, do you consider your work as part of that lineage?
DWH
Beadwork is absolutely about innovation and about the artistry in our communities. It's important for my own journey to say out loud that I learned how to bead many years before I learned how to paint. It's important for me to say that, because within the mainstream art world, I find that I regularly correct people because they make it sound like I'm taking the history of Euro and Euro-American modernist abstraction and just sprinkling Native art on top of it, which I find insulting because it is exactly the opposite. I'm like, "No. You're not listening to anything I've said about my work!" My work comes first from my community, from my life experiences.
I learned Native art history before I learned a lick about Western art history. My undergraduate years were in tribal colleges, taught from an Indigenous perspective. Then I learned that those guys at times copied or drew inspiration from our people, and that I love this painter because the work reminds me of Lakota aesthetics. I got excited about those intersections, and I thought, "Okay, here's where I can show these connections between these great abstract easel painters who were intersecting with Indigenous legacies of greatness, but they're leaving out our greatness in the ways this history is presented"–so I want to talk about that.
MW
I've been thinking a lot about that. Like when I use double-long, red-and-black trade blankets, I think of them as looking like a Barnett Newman, or rather, Barnett Newman paintings look like these blankets. I feel that "monumental" painting first came in the way of blankets or weavings, and I'm calling attention to those weavers and blanket makers who came before.
CH
I love that idea, Marie. You're absolutely right, because that's also what many of them were looking at.
DWH
Yes, they were. My form of resistance really comes from the deep burning desire to be like, "Hell no, you aren't going to leave out the legacy of the first people who were practicing abstraction on this continent." It's a big fuck you, and it's also a big hug. I say that because it is responding to what you're talking about, Candice. The resistance in it is real, but, again, it's guided by our value systems. Through advocating for honest and just accounting of history, the work resists erasure while simultaneously offering nurturing artistic experiences that I hope contribute to collective growth.
It's exciting to talk about beads, and how our ancestors took this brand new material, incorporated it into their existing artistic practices, and ran so hard with it that beads are now synonymous with our people, even though we didn't make them. They're European items; they're trade items. But those women were so good that now people are like, "Beadwork? Native Americans." We've also got quillwork, and moose hair tufting, and amazing practices that were utilizing the natural materials of this land base. And then these items start showing up through trade and relationships with new people.
If you go through collections, you can see where new materials start getting incorporated into our works, and then become "traditional." Calico is an amazing example of that. When we look at calico now, or use it in a ribbon shirt or a skirt, it's considered old school, but it wasn't old school at the time. It was the most coveted fabric, and was just incorporated into our aesthetics. And we did that over and over again: wool, tin, cones, and now rhinestones–I recently started putting rhinestones in my paintings as an ode to all of our earring makers, who are using rhinestones like nobody's business. Innovation is what we have always done. It's what we continue to do. The work that you two do and the work that I do, and the work that our peers do, is simply a continuity of that.
On Monumentality
DWH
I did want to say something else about the monumental. The three of us are doing monumental pieces in our practice right now, but our ancestors have done monumental pieces for as long as we know. Beading an entire dress is a monumental gesture. Beading an entire pair of pants, front and back, the whole vest, the whole dress–the undertaking to do that is monumental. Quilling an entire buffalo robe. When I get the opportunity to visit collections, those are the pieces I want to see. I don't know what it takes to have to make the sinew first or for the buffalo to be hunted and brought home. I don't have to tan my own hide or gather and dye all my own quills first. I know about the labor it takes just to make it, but I can't imagine adding all of the prep work that comes first. Those are monumental tasks.
When I look at those things, I see love, because our relatives are adorning each other, speaking about family history, and about that individual, and about communal history. They're speaking about our relatedness to all of life, our relatedness to the land. So every stitch, every quill, every repetition, like that intense labor, is a monumental gesture of love. I'm thinking about that when I have made decisions to make works really big.
But they're multipronged decisions. One of them is in direct protest to the way that our artistic histories have been shoved to the side as anthropology, as ethnographic art, as craft, as design, as something other than art with a capital A. Making my art as large as those abstract painters who get all the credit is an intention to say, "Absolutely not. You will not ignore the way that our artistic history has contributed to this nation's artistic history." Native audiences are first and foremost my primary audience. I want them to feel uplifted, and celebrated, and seen, because historically we have not had that in contemporary art spaces. I'm also thinking about what I want the art world to learn, and how our field can grow from greater conversations that include Indigenous people and the things that we have to offer, especially in regard to recognizing our relatedness. I want any human who stands in front of the work to be blessed by beauty.
CH
I love how you're speaking about this idea that an entire beaded outfit represents a community of care, because of the intentionality behind it. It's a monument, yes, but it's also about that kind of labor of love, which is real and literal.
Christi, I feel like your work is a monumental reminder that the things that we need to live healthy and good lives are all around us, and we need to care for them in a better way. And Marie, you've made some of your largest, most monumental works using jingles. As you have shared before, the Jingle Dress Dance came about during the early twentieth century, during the influenza pandemic, and that the sound from the dance was intended to heal. There's a very particular reason that they're a part of regalia. I just wondered if you could reflect on some of that.
MW
First, I just want to thank and acknowledge Dyani for reminding us of what monumentality is. In the history of Western art, it's often about largeness, but I think monumentality in our community relates to these contributions–that many parts make up a whole. The Jingle Dress Dance originated in an Anishinaabe community and was shared with tribes, in part, because the medicine or healing sound from the jingles worked. This act of generosity and exchange is a reflection of how, while we come from specific tribal communities, there is this gifting of knowledge and sharing of information.
When I think about exchange, one thing that I see in all of our work is how things are being made in a multigenerational space, and how people bring together different worldviews and cross-disciplinary knowledge. And at times it's intertribal and also cross-cultural. Those values are something that have often shaped the sewing circles that I host. I like to say that I set the table, and what happens at that table is created by everyone. One thing I love in hearing from both of you about your work is that it's not a means to an end to make an object, it is actually the conversation. It's also the research, the friendships, and the mentors.
It is inspiring to be in conversation with you just knowing that moving forward, what I make will be changed by this conversation. There's an Elder, Gordon Battles from Klamath, who's since passed away, but he liked to say, "Your story changes my story." Changing stories begins in conversation with neighbors and strangers. We come from traditions where our stories, because of federal policies, were forced to sleep. I've learned in my recent exchanges with Sarah Biscarra Dilley about how special it is to be in this moment, where we're contributing and a part of this movement of waking, not only of our Indigenous languages but also the languages of protocol, of ceremony, of song.
The large jingle sculptures and installations are important to me, not only because the story of the dance and healing sound or how it connects to the experience of living through a pandemic, but for me jingles embody the multisensory experience that is part of being Seneca and Indigenous artistic. Heck, it's part of being human. I'm interested in what happens when those objects can occupy spaces like museums, where historically these expressions are flattened. I can share that in my experience of presenting the jingle sculptures, there has often been pushback from institutions about allowing people to touch them, and by extension hear them. This is counterintuitive.
And yet, I also think that this is why we're all here. Ferocious matriarchs. Blazing trails we've inherited from our families and relations, and forging new ones too. It's an existing path, but we can kind of clear it out for future generations and work to change protocols in places that have been historically closed to us.
DWH
Yeah, exactly. Human growth. What you're talking about, Marie, often feels like the goal to me, making your pieces and those spaces more receptive to the human experience, as opposed to closing it off. Like how Christi was asking for the Walk With Our Sisters spaces to be opened up to what the work needed. You're asking for something similar, asking people to push back against so-called protocols that have been ingrained in them that aren't serving the moment.
CH
Right, exactly. A lot of those protocols that come through museums are based on their ideas of fear and protection instead of based on care, hospitality, and reciprocity.
CB
It's so interesting, Marie. In a solo show I had in Thunder Bay, I put a sign up that said, "please touch." The people in the art gallery just about had a heart attack. The director was like, "I don't think we can do that." And I said, "Why can't we? This is my work, let them touch it." I have work in Saskatoon, and there they asked, "Can you make a little side piece that people can touch instead?" But with your piece, I think of the creation stories about how sound came first: we were made in sound. Sound is such an integral part of your piece that it just seems like it's like silencing what the jingles are meant to do.
Thinking about both of your practices, I recently had a chance to sit down with Dyani and have a visit over coffee. I was telling you, Dyani, about my braided sweetgrass in beads that I was working on, maybe twenty years ago, and have always had the mind to go back to. So I started buying all these beads and started doing it again. And then you were like, "Darn it, I was going to do something like that too!" And then I have been purchasing over the years, whenever I can, multiples of thimbles and needles with an idea to create a 3D sculptural work that would've hung from the ceiling. But Marie, you've already done that! So now, if I do that with the thimbles, it's just going to look like I'm copying your jingle cloud. [laughs]
I feel like this was a very essential conversation. Thank you so much, Dyani, and Candice, and Marie, for this really beautiful way to spend a day. I'm going to go away from this and your stories are going to have changed me, and they're making me think about my own practice in a different, great way. I just hope someday that maybe–let's put this out in the universe–some major gallery will hear and see this, and bring the three of us together to have a show of our work that we can explore in really deep ways.
MW
That would be amazing. Christi, I actually have thimbles too. I haven't used them yet, but I'm just saying, you go ahead and use your thimbles!
DWH
Yes, to collaborative work and collaborative exhibitions! And it made me think of this quote about how an idea is not married or loyal to any one person. We've all had this experience, I'm certain, where if you don't do it soon enough, another artist is going to do it. The idea doesn't stay with you. It comes and it visits, and if you don't act on it, it goes to someone else.
CH
Ideas are promiscuous.
DWH
I've definitely had that experience multiple times. They're not loyal to any one person, but I love that they're moving around humanity and popping in–it's beautiful.
CH
On that end, I just want to thank you all, and thank Dyani for bringing us together. My stories are changed by your stories. ▪︎︎
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