Courtesy of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian - Dr. Helen Maynor Scheirbeck (1935-2010) receives an honorary degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009.

Scheirbeck was a member of the first Board of Trustees of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. She served as the Secretary to the Board for two terms and joined the staff at the museum, where she served from 2000-2007 as Senior Advisor for Museum Programs and Scholarly Research and earlier as the Assistant Director for Public Programs.

Prior to joining the museum, Dr. Helen Scheirbeck had a long career working for the development of Indian tribal governments and communities, Indian  control of educational  institutions, and on issues related to Indian children and families.

She began her career as a staff member of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights chaired by former Senator Sam Ervin (D-North Carolina). She helped organize a Capitol Conference on Poverty in 1962, where Indian leaders advocated for Indian participation in the War on Poverty. On her recommendation, Ervin held hearings that culminated in the 1968 Indian Bill of Rights.

That same year she was named director of the Office of Indian Education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, where she led efforts to pass the Indian Education Act of 1975. As a member of the American Indian Policy Review Commission, she worked to craft reforms that led to the Tribally Controlled Community College Assistance Act of 1978.

“She had a hand in every major initiative in Indian education for the last 40 years,” remarked Kevin Gover, director of the museum. “Her passing is a great loss, and a reminder of what we can achieve when we believe deeply in our cause.”

As Assistant Director in the years immediately before and after the museum’s opening on the National Mall, Dr. Helen Scheirbeck established and set the course for Office of Education and its program in Cultural Arts. “Helen’s vision for education at the museum went beyond providing new perspectives on American history or correcting misconceptions about Native cultures,” says her colleague Clare Cuddy, director of the museum’s education office since 2004. “She deeply believed that the knowledge held by Native peoples, and especially the ways in which communities traditionally pass knowledge on to succeeding generations, can inform teaching models used by educators everywhere. The museum’s National Education Initiative, being launched in collaboration with Native communities, carries on her vision and will reach millions of students.”

Scheirbeck was a graduate of Berea College, Kentucky, with a B.A. in History and Political Science. She also attended Columbia University’s School of International Relations, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of California at Berkeley. She received her Doctorate of Educational Administration with a Public Policy emphasis from VPI-State University at Blacksburg, VA.

She was the first Indian intern to serve with the National Congress of American Indians.

In the area of children’s rights, Scheirbeck served as the program director for the National Commission on the Rights of the Child and the White House Conference on Children, Youth and Families. She also worked in the private sector for the Save the Children Federation as their American Indian Nations Director. Prior to becoming the head of the Indian Head Start Program in 1991, Scheirbeck worked in North Carolina as the founding director of the North Carolina Indian Cultural Center in Lumberton.

She published and spoke extensively throughout the United States relating to American Indian rights issues, language and culture. Helen had a deep interest in cultural regeneration and enhancement and extensive knowledge of Indian cultural institutions, artists and craftsmen as well as spiritual leaders and their practices. As Senior Advisor for the office of Museum Programs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., Dr. Helen Scheirbeck developed the subject matter which was used to plan museum exhibitions, cultural arts programs and educational materials.

Over her long career, Scheirbeck organized cultural festivals and powwows. She curated museum exhibits, conducted cultural symposia with traditional Indian leaders and scholars and organized arts and crafts cooperatives. She encouraged and developed marketing outlets for Indian artists and craftsmen. “Helen’s legacy lives on at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian,” said Howard Bass, director of the Cultural Arts Program at the museum since 2002. “She was an inspiring leader who mixed tough love and compassion. She questioned everything and listened closely, urging us to do our best to serve the interests of Indian Country and our visitors. She knew that with hard work everything was possible.”

What Scheirbeck most enjoyed was visiting Indian people and communities that she got to know through her decades of service. In Alaska she slept on the floor of Head Start centers, met with tribal leaders in their offices trying to solve one challenge or another, and spent hours working with people to found a tribal school, a Head Start program, a relief effort for Indian families stranded by floods on the Navajo Nation, and to help unrecognized tribes in Virginia and throughout the south become recognized. She not only met the movers and shakers in Washington, D.C. and in state capitals, but she worked with everyday people, building one program at a time to create Indian controlled institutions that improved the lives for all Indians.

Scheirbeck’s family is planning a memorial service for a later time and will be establishing a scholarship fund in her name.

Established in 1989, through an Act of Congress, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian is an institution of living cultures dedicated to advancing knowledge and understanding of the life, languages, literature, history and arts of the Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere. The museum includes the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall, the George Gustav Heye Center, a permanent exhibition and education facility in New York City, and the Cultural Resources Center, a research and collections facility in Suitland, Md. For more information about the museum, visit www.AmericanIndian.si.edu.

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American Indian News Service

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Photo by WETA. In James Cameron’s new 3-D, sci-fi blockbuster “Avatar,” Cherokee actor Wes Studi lends his voice and face to the computer-generated character Eytukan, who with his wife is responsible for the safety and well being of the Omaticaya clan.

In James Cameron’s new 3-D, sci-fi blockbuster “Avatar,” Studi lends his voice and face to a computer-generated character whose planet is being invaded by a private army bent on exploiting its resources. As one of the human characters says early in the film, “We have an indigenous population called the Na’vi….They are very hard to kill.”

Leader of the resistance is a familiar role for Studi, 62. Whether in “Geronimo: An American Legend,” “Last of the Mohicans,” or “Dances with Wolves,” Studi has played the indigenous man who fights against incursion.

He recently spoke at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian about tapping into the warrior role. It’s “almost therapeutic how easy it is to get into that mindset of warrior-ism,” Studi said. “You kind of think of the injustice Indian people lived through. It’s pretty easy to draw from the kind of feeling. You have a completely different aggression than the white folks.”

Studi’s “Avatar” character, Eytukan, is native to a lush planet called Pandora. The mercenary army of humans regards the Na’vi as “savages.” As in many a Western in Studi’s portfolio, the army soon learns otherwise. This time, it’s via a paralyzed ex-Marine, played by Sam Worthington, who becomes an Avatar, a hybrid human mind linked with a Na’vi-cloned body. As an Avatar, he falls in love with Eytukan’s daughter, played by Zoe Saldana, and finds himself drawn into the battle to save her world.

Photo courtesy of Wes Studi - Wes Studi

In Studi’s projects outside Hollywood, he has been called a Cherokee traditionalist and honored for his work in Native language preservation, particularly the Cherokee language. In “Avatar,” the language of the Na’vi is one of the creations of a computer-generated world in the $300 million production. Studi, who has learned acting roles in Native languages besides his own, considered it just part of the fun of being a blue-skinned alien.

“Because I do speak another tongue besides English,” Studi said, “my tongue is more willing to take chances.”

By Kara Briggs,  American Indian News Service

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Courtesy of Wes Studi

On Dec. 18, the Cherokee film actor will bring just such a role to life in a new 3-D sci-fi thriller by “Titantic” director James Cameron. In “Avatar,” the people of Earth seek to exploit the natural resources of a distant planet, stirring its inhabitants to stand up against the invasion. Studi’s computer-generated character a father who helps lead the resistance.

Studi, who has appeared in scores of films and television productions, was recently honored by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian’s Native Achievers Series. A 61-year-old Vietnam veteran, Studi has been called a Cherokee traditionalist and honored for his work in Native language preservation, particularly the Cherokee language.

To kick off the Native Achievers Series at the museum in Washington, Studi sat down with N. Bird Runningwater of the Sundance Institute for a wide-ranging public conversation. He discussed his roots, how he taps the emotions of injustice to portray warriors in film, and how keeping Native languages alive requires a tongue willing to take chances.

Runningwater: You grew up on your grandparents’ allotment.

Studi: Nofire Hollow was a real hollow, not a post office, not a town. You people from the South know what a hollow is. Nofire Hollow is what it’s been known after allotments were issued to Cherokee citizens. 160 acres. My grandfather and grandmother and their kids lived in the Hollow. It was ours. We had gardens and water running through the hollow. Before then, it was known as Nickel Jack, but it lost its meaning over time. It’s between Tahlequah and Stillwell, Okla.

Runningwater: Boarding school was a part of your upbringing. How old were you when you left home for the first time?

Studi: I guess I should stop blaming my aunt for sending me off to an orphanage. She convinced my mother and everyone else that I would get a better education living there and going to public school. That’s where I learned English within nine months. It was enough to pass first grade. When I went home I discovered, oh wow, I couldn’t speak Cherokee anymore. A little English-speaking boy in a Cherokee home, where everyone was adamant that we speak Cherokee. I managed to learn the Cherokee language again.

I went to Chilocco Indian School from ’60 to ’64. I went there not because I was whisked away. I went there by choice because my dad had gone there. I thought, now I can move away from my mom’s beans and cornbread to what we called white bread, Wonder Bread, at Chilocco.

Up to this point I only knew there were Cherokees and Creeks and, my God, there were so many kinds of Indians at that school. It probably had a population of 1,500 Indians. We were part of that Chilocco civilized tribe. We didn’t ride horses and we dressed like white folks. I wanted in time to identify with my Cheyenne brothers, my plains brothers. In all the pictures of us, we were dressed in colonial-wear.

Runningwater: My parents went to Chilocco also. That’s why I’m mixed. And they remember you. So in your early adult years what was your experience of cinema?

Studi: In the 1970s, we only had the late Will Sampson (who was Muscogee Creek, best known for his role in “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”) and Chief Dan George (of the Tsleil-waututh Nation, best known for his role in “Little Big Man”) who were in acting. Unfortunately, in the early 1980s David Carradine played Black Elk. These guys were being cast as Native American. Some people started going, really, these Indian actors can do it. Then “Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson” (1976) with Paul Newman came out. (Frank Kaquitts, a white actor, played Sitting Bull.) It was directed by Robert Altman. I’d seen the play and went to see the film. (He shakes his head in disapproval.)  There were other films that sought to portray us in a different light in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But many were appalled that Indians wanted to play Indians.

Runningwater: You did some stage work in Oklahoma.

Studi: I went to Tulsa looking for work. I found work at the Gas Light Dinner Theater. It paid $12 per night and all you could eat. One weekend after calling bingo, a bunch of us after partying ended up in jail. I made the deal to do “The Trial of Standing Bear” (a 1988 TV movie shot at Chilocco in which Studi played Long Runner) from a jail cell. After two or three weeks’ shooting, it was over. I realized there was nothing I could do to continue acting in Northwest Oklahoma. So I went to LA. At the time an organization that Jay Silverheels (Mohawk, best known for playing Tonto) and Will Sampson put together sent us to agents who looked for work for people. It didn’t enter my head that I could get paid for this. After a year and a half, I got “Powwow Highway.”

Runningwater: It’s such an iconic film, especially for Native audiences. After that you went on to do an obscure film called “Dances With Wolves.”

Studi: I had my doubts about that film. It’s not my first Western, but it felt to me as if it might not work. I wasn’t part of the Lakota Party. I played a Pawnee. It was almost therapeutic how easy it is to get into that mindset of warrior-ism. (He lets out a high-pitched screech.) You kind of think of the injustice Indian people lived through. It’s pretty easy to draw from the kind of feeling. You have a completely different aggression than the white folks.

When the movie opened, I worked in a store across the street. “Dances With Wolves” had a process of growing its audience. Day by day, lines kept getting longer. I’d already spent my money I made from “Dances With Wolves,” and I’m across the street from the theater trying to sell bracelets in a jewelry store. I’d say, “Wow, that looks good on you, really good.”

Runningwater: In “The Last of the Mohicans” you speak a language that isn’t your own. How did you approach that language?

Studi: It’s phonetic. Languages do that; they change with the lift of the voice. Because I do speak another tongue besides English, my tongue is more willing to take chances. I know I am not going to speak perfectly. For languages to continue to be learned, people are going to have to take a chance, and the people listening are going to have to be tolerant. If languages are going to go on they are going to have to be part of the present.

Runningwater: In “We Shall Remain: Trail of Tears” you actually played someone from your own tribe; you played Major Ridge, a prosperous Cherokee landowner who argued for giving up the Cherokee homeland and relocating, actions that would leader to the Trail of Tears.

Studi: Unfortunately, I got to play a fellow who in my mind and other people’s minds was a villain. I had always known one side of the story. This opened my eyes to the actual decisions that had to be made.

Runningwater: You’ve appeared in more than 60 films and television shows. You’ve played a bingo caller, a warrior, historic leaders, a fireman, a detective and even a superhero in “Mystery Men.”

Studi: For “Mystery Men,” I walked in and said, “You must fight like the wolf pack, not like the superhero.” It made the audition team laugh. I have even made it to outer space in “Avatar” (to be released Dec. 18), a James Cameron film about inhabitants of another planet. My skin is a different color, and we speak a made-up language.

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Wes Studi’s comments were transcribed live and N. Bird Runningwater’s questions were paraphrased by permission. The American Indian News Service is produced for the National Museum of the American Indian by journalist Kara Briggs, Yakama/Snohomish. All content is free to publish or post. Email her at editor@americanindiannews.org. Visit the American Indian News Service at www.americanindiannews.org.

Courtesy of Irving Nelson - Children attend the summer reading program at the Navajo Nation Library.

He’s more likely to be discovered among the bookshelves, where he recently finished a three-decades-long project: He personally catalogued his library’s 73,392 books.

“I won’t get to see all the people the library touches,” said Nelson, who is Navajo. “But we’re touching the lives of people out there.”

Nelson, 50, was one of two individuals recently honored with the Prism Award by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Given for the first time this year, the Prism Award recognizes unsung Native American heroes who serve their communities in innovative ways.

Hired in 1977 to drive the bookmobile, Nelson has built a formerly humble library of several hundred books into an eight-employee system encompassing a main library in Window Rock, Ariz., a branch library in nearby Kayenta and several mini-libraries across the Navajo reservation. Each day about 350 people visit the libraries, and not just for the books. Many come to use the free Internet. Some do homework or look for jobs, others email friends and family in the military. Some search archival records, which include Navajo land-claim documents dating back to 1675.

Many tribes established libraries in the mid-1970s after the National Indian Education Association released a series of pamphlets about how to start them.

“Now tribal libraries truly run the gamut,” said Liana Juliano, president of the American Indian Library Association. “One library is in a house with bookshelves in the bathroom. Others are sophisticated libraries that function like a public library anywhere with storytelling times and computer access.”

But the majority share a tradition of making the most of scarce resources, said Mary Villegas of the library development division of the Arizona State Library. “A lot of tribal libraries, I call them a library of one, providing all the services of a public library,” she said. “Tribal librarians are an amazing group of individuals; they have amazing camaraderie among them.”

The original library at Window Rock, capital of the Navajo Nation, was opened in 1941 by wives of Bureau of Indian Affairs employees. Located in the basement of the old BIA building, the library had asbestos-covered steam pipes running along its ceiling, and a heating system that didn’t always work when Nelson joined the staff in 1977.

Driving the bookmobile took Nelson to far-flung corners of his reservation, roughly equal in size to the state of West Virginia. He navigated rugged terrain and rutted roads to bring books to all of Navajo’s 110 chapters, each the size of a county.

The bookmobile went memorably kaput after two years. “The last time I drove the bookmobile, it broke down 90 miles out of Window Rock in January,” he said. “We walked back, two of us with one jacket between us. We just passed it back and forth.”

That was only the prelude to Nelson’s journey to bring books to the Navajo people. It would take him to cities on both the East and West Coast, where he picks up donated new books by the truckload and drives them back to the Navajo Nation—and not just to the library. The Navajo Book Project, which he ran until 2002, put more than one million new books into the hands of the reservation’s readers.

Herbert Long Sr., who once supervised the library, said Nelson has also worked to provide computers to chapter offices so people in remote areas can have Internet access.

“When I was growing up, there was really nothing here for kids,” Long said. “Up to at least the last year or so, even if you had a computer, you were pretty much limited to dial-up Internet service. Now he is increasing the access for people.”

Nelson’s resourcefulness has sustained the library for more than two decades. In his early days, he learned how to dry out books after a flood, spending months saving the collection. In recent years, he has worked with a company to digitize the leading newspaper on the reservation, the Navajo Times.

Nelson’s current challenge is how to share and perpetuate his life’s work through his staff and community, Long said. The lifelong reader, the man who has brought  a million books to his nation, is losing his sight to glaucoma.

But like the country veterinarian in James Herriot’s “All Things Great and Small,” his favorite series of novels (which he rereads every year), Nelson is simply heading into a new chapter.

And it’s not the books on the shelves or the catalogue of accomplishments that motivate him. It’s serving people who like to read.

“I don’t think that I am a leader,” Nelson said. “Anyone can do it. They just have to have fortitude and a lot of passion for their work.”

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By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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“The museum has been key to training a new generation of conservators and integrating Native ways of knowing and belief into conservation,” said Anna Strankman, curator of Native American art at the Portland (Ore.) Art Museum. “Questions get asked like, ‘How do you treat things? What is the best thing for the object?’ They’ve been at the forefront. I think that has had a lot of influence on a lot of museums.”

Since 1991, more than 130 conservation interns have spent from 10 weeks to two years honing skills under the leadership of Marian Kaminitz, the head of conservation at the National Museum of the American Indian.

The museum has some unique conservation challenges because it inherited its 800,000-item collection from the Museum of the American Indian headed by George Gustav Heye, a wealthy industrialist who began collecting American Indian objects in 1897. Heye spent his fortune amassing the largest collection of Native American objects in the world, but showed less care for documentation about the origin of pieces. In 1922, Heye established the Museum of the American Indian in New York City to display his collection.

His museum remained open until 1994, when the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian opened its doors in New York City.

Kaminitz was already at work at Heye’s Bronx storage facility, assessing the collection and preparing for its move to the museum’s state-of-the-art conservation facility, the Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md., which opened in 1999. To view a video about the move, go to: www.AmericanIndian.si.edu/subpage.cfm?subpage=collections&second=collections&third=move#f

The interns come to the museum’s conservation department to work with Kaminitz and to obtain real-world experience working with the collection, which spans North and South America. Many say they have been personally affected by their experience. Three former 10-week interns, including Strankman, recently shared how their internships influenced their careers and lives.

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Anna Strankman Photo Courtesy of the Portland Art Museum

On the first day of Anna Strankman’s internship in 1996, Kaminitz sent her outside to watch conservation work on a totem pole. The totem from Old Kasaan, a village from Haida Gwaii in British Columbia, was standing on a street corner in the Bronx, outside the storage center of its former owner, the Museum of the American Indian in New York. At some point, the former curators had replaced decay with concrete.

It was no way to treat a totem. The famed Haida carver Jim Hart came from Vancouver, B.C., to advise about removing decay and carving replacement pieces out of wood.

“He basically taught me to use a crooked knife and carve cedar,” Strankman said.

They also removed concrete from the pole, one of many destructive measures taken by past curators in misguided efforts to preserve materials.

Over the year Strankman spent at the museum, its staff was getting the 800,000-item collection ready to move to the National Museum of the American Indian’s Cultural Resources Center outside Washington, D.C. Strankman was involved in inventorying and planning. “The storage was not ideal,” she said. “I remember emergency measures that had to be taken, especially in the wintertime.”

Strankman left before the move to undertake studies for her master’s in art history at the University of Washington. Her thesis catalogued the totem poles from Old Massett,  B.C.,  and traced their stories. Now, as curator of the Native American art collection at the Portland (Ore.) Art Museum, Strankman isn’t necessarily responsible for conservation, yet her experience at the national museum makes her mindful of how long organic materials are exposed to light and when she needs to rotate them off display for rest.

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Heather Whiteman Runs Him-Oleyte Photo courtesy of Heather Whiteman Runs Him-Oleyte

Heather Whiteman Runs Him-Oleyte, a Harvard-educated attorney, is the associate lead legal counsel for the Crow Tribe in Montana. But in 1995 she was a student at the Institute of American Indian Art and a conservation intern at the National Museum of the American Indian.

As an intern, she disassembled exhibitions from the George Gustav Heye Center in New York and packed them for moving to the national museum’s new Cultural Resources Center in Maryland. She made simple repairs on bandolier bags for an exhibition. But when she looks back at the experience, what she takes away is a feeling.

“It is a privilege to work with the things our ancestors created with so much care,” said Whiteman Runs Him-Oleyte, who is Crow. “It is a huge responsibility to contemplate how to ensure their survival for future generations, and to determine what actions or prohibitions constitute respect.”

At the museum, she contemplated pursuing a career in conservation. The heavy chemistry prerequisites were an obstacle, and she said she was “sidetracked” by law school. But in what she calls a roundabout way, her experience at the museum led her to the law.

“Working with art, with material culture of Native peoples on an intimate basis, one cannot help but to contemplate the history and the
circumstances that led individual artists and craftspeople to make things the way they did,” she said. “It often made me think about what we, as tribal nations, are doing today, and the choices we have now.”

The exposure to the beautiful clothing, household items and horse gear in the museum’s collection continues to inspire Whiteman Runs Him-Oleyte 15 years after her internship. “That was a real gift to me as a traditional doll maker and artist,” she said.

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Tharron Bloomfield, who was an intern at the National Museum of the American Indian in 2001, is one of a growing generation of indigenous curators and librarians—in New Zealand and Australia.

“I chose to be a conservator because there weren’t many Maori doing it, so I saw a gap,” said Bloomfield, who is Maori from the Ngati Porou tribe in New Zealand. “And I like the hands-on aspect of conservation and the close relationship you build with objects.”

As a “summer” intern in 2001 (interviewed by email, he wrote summer in quotation marks because the internship was during New Zealand’s winter), he worked preparing objects for the 2004 opening of the museum in Washington. Bloomfield is now a conservator at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Darwin, Australia, where the large indigenous population is reflected in the collection’s many beautiful Aboriginal pieces—contemporary and traditional.

He was impressed during his 10-week internship by the diversity of material, “and, therefore, the Native people of the whole Western Hemisphere and objects made from such a variety of materials,” he said.

But where the National Museum of the American Indian most influenced him was in its relationship-building with tribal culture bearers.

“I would say working at the museum reinforced things for me in terms of working with indigenous peoples and material,” Bloomfield said. “Things such as treating objects with respect and acknowledging their feelings, and the need for proper consultation and relationships with traditional owners.”

As his professional training spanned hemispheres, so Bloomfield’s interest in indigenous arts stretches from traditional arts made of natural materials to contemporary expression in new digital and video media.

“We are not just ancient cultures who stopped existing when we were colonized,” Bloomfield said. “We are around and here now, contributing to the 21st century.”

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Randy'L He-dow Teton Photo by Moz Studios

Randy’L He-dow Teton, the Shoshone-Bannock/Cree woman best known as the model for the Sacagawea coin, was a conservation intern at the National Museum of the American Indian in 1997.

“I have a passion for ethnographic conservation,” she said, “doing small mending, doing photography, giving tips about how to take care of family heirlooms at home.”

At the time of her internship, Teton was a student at the Institute of American Indian Art. She met a freelance artist while at IAIA and posed for pictures in which she portrayed Sacagawea. She didn’t know what it was for, but later heard from the U.S. Mint that her face would be on the coin. Teton is the youngest and only living person on a U.S. coin.

By the time she completed her bachelor’s degree in art history from Fort Lewis College in Colorado, Teton had fallen in love, and her life would take a different path.

Now she and her young family live at the Shoshone-Bannock reservation in southeastern Idaho, and Teton works for a nonprofit organization, Partners for Prosperity, which does workforce training. But she’d like to use her experience in museum collections again, maybe as an appraiser on the PBS program “Antiques Roadshow.”

Teton believes that she carries the values of the museum into her community in ways other than working in a museum. “I am active in going to our cultural meetings,” she said. “I work with artists and craft vendors, looking for a model to make sure our artists are protected from pawn shops.”

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By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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Courtesy of Wampum Books “Poneasequa: Goddess of the Waters," by Stephanie A. Duckworth-Elliott, is the inaugural title from the new Native American publisher Wampum Books.

The dream belongs to author Stephanie Duckworth-Elliott, who is Wampanoag tribe of Gay Head, Mass. In the process of getting her own book published, she developed a plan for a publishing house that would publish great, but little-known Native American authors and others.

Wampum Books debuted this November as its edition of “Poneasequa” went to market nationally. In this venture Duckworth-Elliott is in the unique position of being a Wampanoag woman who owns a national book publishing house.

“The whole point of the book is motivating yourself, loving where you come from, and loving where you are,” Duckworth-Elliott said. “The point of Wampum Books is to bring to the reading public authentic Native voices.”

As she has toured the country, appearing recently at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian’s Native Writers Series, Duckworth-Elliott has found herself speaking to young adult readers about the importance of knowing their own roots.

“The character is really based on me. Once I accepted who I was and loved who I was, everything got easier,” Duckworth-Elliott said.  “I think that’s a huge message for children.”

“Poneasequa” grew out of a promise that she made to her grandfather. He helped to raise her, and died when she was 19. She promised him she would write about their relationship. Heroine McKenzie Jones likewise is raised by a Wampanoag grandfather. But when McKenzie gets tapped by her fifth-grade teacher to tell the class about what it means to be a Wampanoag, she must first find out for herself.

That’s when the adventure begins. McKenzie tries to document a day trip with her grandfather, but instead finds herself slipping through time on a journey that will bring her face to face with her ancestors. She emerges from the encounter a Wampanoag girl who is confident of who she is.

The novel, said Lisa Brooks, Abenaki, a Harvard University assistant professor of history and literature, “is the first book from southern New England to directly address young readers and to relate the story of a contemporary Wampanoag girl living in the 21^st century. Such an approach is vitally important in educating non-Native readers.”

Duckworth-Elliott is a former sixth-grade teacher and former director of development for the Princeton Center for Leadership. She also has taught several college classes, including as a faculty member of Rutgers University and Princeton University.

She launches Wampum Books in the hope of signing contracts with 10 authors in the next year. She aims to expand the market for Native American books, whether fiction, non-fiction or memoir. She will publish books on any subject, as long as the author’s voice is authentic, in her view. She hopes that the sale of books and related opportunities for her authors will become a revenue stream into Indian Country.

Duckworth-Elliott takes advantage of the new print-on-demand technology to create only as many books as are ordered. She plans full-scale marketing of her new authors and national distribution of their books.

“Native writers have not been given the opportunity to have their stories told, and also to have ownership over their stories,” Duckworth-Elliott said. “My goal is to inspire people and allow them to tell their stories.”

Already “Poneasequa” is available at Barnes & Noble stores in New England, and she plans to sell the novel nationwide through popular book retailers. She also sells at book signings, which she plans to do across North America.

She sees a niche in publishing books for all ages. These books, as she envisions them, will share the complex experiences of living in Indian Country, even the experience of growing up as she did.

“Part of my message is, ‘You can do it,’” she said. “I was told I could not. I was left by my parents at age 10. I was an emancipated minor at 17. I graduated with my first graduate degree at 23, suffered many illnesses, including cancer, but yet I still rise. Our collective struggle within Indian Country is one that is shared by so many, but not told or understood.”

Learn more at www.duckworthelliott.com.

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By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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Courtesy of Sam Devenney A Comanche family in the early 1900s. The elder man is Ta-Ten-e-quer and his wife is Ta-Tat-ty. Their niece, center, is Wife-per, also known as Frances E. Wright. Her father was a Buffalo Soldier, an African American cavalryman, who deserted and married into the Comanches. Henry, center left, and Lorenzano, center right, are her sons. Click photo for full resolution version.

“IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas” is an exhibition of 20 banners bearing photographs and text. It will be shown at the museum in Washington from Nov. 10 through May 31, 2010. A symposium on the topic of the exhibition will be held at 3 p.m. on Nov.13 at the museum.

Guest curator Thunder Williams, a Washington, D.C., radio talk show host, is Carib Indian, African and European. “The exhibition touches a deep interest in African American communities because of their links with Native America,” he said. Published accounts estimate that 60 percent of African Americans may share Native American ancestry, he said.

“People in the U.S. tend to be black or white, linear thinkers,” Williams said. “We have been indoctrinated by a race-centered system where vestiges of the ‘one-drop’ of black blood rule persist. When I acknowledge my Carib Indian and European ancestors, it is not a disclaimer of my African heritage. I am all of them, my blood is indivisible.”

The exhibition takes the long view of history, traveling in a few short panels that illustrate the 1600s, when intermarriage and slavery brought Native peoples and African slaves together, to present-day families for whom this dual identity is indivisible.

“It’s a very provocative topic,” said curator Gabrielle Tayac, who is Piscataway. “The huge back story is that it all has to do with interactions brought about by the European, with practices of slavery on the continent.”

Many panels, which feature contemporary and historic photos, touch core issues of identity for people of racially mixed heritage. The discussion is emotionally charged, Tayac said.

“In many Native communities on the Atlantic seaboard, African American mixing has had consequences historically,” Tayac said. “It may have them be erroneously viewed as less Indian, and it plays out in acknowledgement and enrollment. In African American communities, there is a controversy of whether people should identify as mixed race.”

Foxx Family (Mashpee Wampanoag), 2008. From left: Anne, Monet, Majai, Aisha, and Maurice Foxx. Photo by Kevin Cartwright. Courtesy NMAI. Click photo for full resolution version.

Ideas about the identities of mixed-heritage people grow out of colonial policies, which viewed black and Native people as dangerous.

“In colonial Mexico (the word) lobo, the wolf is the blend of Indian and black,” Tayac said. “The combination was thought to be dangerous, that you could have two colonized and enslaved people, if they come together it could be dangerous. How much did we absorb those ideas?”

The emotions stirred by the exhibition are so close to the surface that even staff at the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of African American History and Culture sometimes felt uncomfortable.

“Though sometimes there were things that were uncomfortable, we decided to keep it in the exhibition,” Tayac said. “There are difficult stories; the Cherokee Freedmen on one side, the Buffalo Soldiers on the other. What’s been interesting is people keep coming to us saying, ‘I have a story to tell you about this.’ ”

Guest curator Penny Gamble-Williams, a spiritual leader of the Chappaquiddick Band of the Wampanoag Nation, knows people who denied their Indian heritage and others who would not talk about it. Some embraced their Native roots later in life.

She remembers some tearfully approaching her to ask how they could get information about the Blackfeet or Cherokee tribes, to which people from the South may have heard their family elders say they had blood ties. Many are eager, she said, “to find the missing pieces of their identity, to fill the void of belonging.”

In the end, such questions need to be answered with genealogical research, Gamble-Williams said. Or, perhaps acceptance, Tayac said, if a family story doesn’t check out.

IndiVisible doesn’t try to provide all the answers, Tayac observed. The exhibition often turns the question back to viewers.

And many will get the chance to reflect on them in the coming year. African American museums and schools across the U.S. have already scheduled the traveling version of the IndiVisible exhibition, which will visit Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Rome, Ga.; Aurora, Ill.; and Los Angeles, among other cities through 2011.

– By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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Courtesy Penny Gamble Williams and Thunder Williams - click photo for full resolution version

The former Sunksqua or female sachem of the Chappaquiddick Band of the Wampanoag Nation of Massachusetts shared the experiences with the American Indian News Service in an interview about the upcoming exhibition “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas.” She and her husband, Thunder Williams, lead the Ohke Cultural Network Inc. which submitted the proposal for the exhibition to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

“I have been an activist in movements—AIM, Women of All Red Nations and others. At a meeting of the Black Panthers in the 1970s, they told me that I had to choose. “You are either black or Indian, you can’t be both.’ I made my choice.”

The experience reminded Gamble-Williams of the time her fifth-grade teacher walked up to her desk after reading an essay about her summer vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. Squeezing the young Gamble-Williams’ shoulder, the teacher said, “It’s not nice to make up stories. Everyone knows the New England Indians are dead.”

Gamble-Williams, who is descended from African American and Alabama Creek on her father’s side and African American and Chappaquiddick/Wampanoag on her mother’s, is a visual storyteller and cultural presenter. She serves as spiritual leader of the Chappaquiddick Band of the Wampanoag Nation of Massachusetts (www.chappaquiddick-wampanoag.org).

Thunder Williams, whose lineage is Carib Indian, African and European, emigrated from Trinidad and Tobago at age 5.

Both have been active in the African American, Native American and Afro-Caribbean communities. For the past decade, they’ve hosted The Talking Feather Radio Show on Radio One WOL 1450 AM in Washington, D.C. It is also broadcast on Blog Talk Radio at www.blogtalkradio.com/talkingfeather.
They joined American Indian News Service Editor Kara Briggs for an interview recently.

Kara Briggs: Why is the IndiVisible exhibition important for America?

Penny Gamble-Williams: This exhibition, IndiVisible, is valuable because it helps all people formulate another way of looking at the history of this country. We cannot obfuscate the facts of American history, deny that genocidal practices nearly wiped out an entire race of people or refuse to acknowledge that two richly diverse indigenous civilizations, the African and Native, mightily contributed to the wealth and prosperity of the Americas.

Thunder Williams: African-Americans and Native peoples stood together in the cotton and tobacco fields. We were often literally chained together. We were bonded through the tyranny of oppression and colonization. We intermixed and intermarried on the Underground Railroad, the forced removals across Turtle Island and the resistance in maroon colonies.
All these experiences give us a rich shared heritage.

Kara Briggs: Penny, you grew up in Providence, R.I., not far from Chappaquiddick and the island homelands of the Wampanoag. You were saying that the tribe was a whaling tribe originally?

Penny Gamble-Williams: Chappaquiddick men were whalers historically, and after colonization they had to go out on the whaling ships to make a living. Whaling was one of the toughest jobs during that time and because the men were out to sea for long periods of time, sometimes years, it took a toll on the elders, women and children. Some of the men never returned home, either, because of death or settling in other parts of the world.

Thunder Williams: As the Native men went out to sea, African American and other foreign men who worked in the surrounding areas of the islands intermarried and became part of the tribal community.

Penny Gamble-Williams: My great-great-great aunt, Sarah Brown, who was Chappaquiddick, married a black whaling captain, William A. Martin. His great-grandmother had been enslaved on Martha’s Vineyard Island and was owned by the Bassett family. When I was Sunksqua of the Chappaquiddick from 1995 to 2002, Thunder and I traveled to London and conducted research in the British Museum, the Guildhall Library, Oxford and the Maritime Museum. It was amazing to see documents that related specifically to the Chappaquiddick and other Wampanoag Bands of Massachusetts, as well as Narragansett and Pequot.

Kara Briggs: What did you learn personally through that research?

Penny Gamble-Williams: Most of the European American whaling captains were well off and had stately homes in Edgartown. William and Sarah lived in a humble home that he built on Chappaquiddick. The house still stands and is privately owned. It needs major repair. There is no plaque showing the history of this black whaling captain. He and Sarah were married for 50 years. (Editor’s note: As this issue went into production the New York Times published an article about the current owner of William A. Martin’s house putting it up for sale.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/us/04chappaquiddick.html.)

Kara Briggs: Three generations before you, your relatives lived on the Chappaquiddick Reservation, were allotted land and owned houses. But in your childhood Chappaquiddick was anything but home.

Penny Gamble-Williams: I heard the stories and spent time with the elders of my family. I enjoyed every summer until I was 16 years old on Martha’s Vineyard in Oak Bluffs on Wamsutta Avenue. On some occasions we’d get in my uncle’s convertible and take a trip to Chappaquiddick. That’s where my mother would talk about the land and family. I’d say, ‘Why can’t we get out and walk around?’ My mother never wanted to.

Thunder Williams: Even now when you talk about the Chappaquiddick Indians, the current residents on Chappaquiddick Island, who are 99.9 percent European, seem threatened or guilt-ridden or noticeably indifferent.

Kara Briggs: In reconstituting your nation and reclaiming nation’s ties to Chappaquiddick Island, you faced court battles with residents even to have access to that burial ground. They were claiming that you weren’t Wampanoag.

Penny Gamble-Williams: Every Chappaquiddick family had title to the land that had been allotted in the 1800s. Most had to move from the island in order to make a living. My family moved to Nantucket, New Bedford and Providence. The ties were never broken. When I grew up I had my map with lots of information about family land on the reservation.

Kara Briggs: You and your family have been culturally active for decades. There are Chappaquiddick/ Wampanoag burial grounds on the island that have become gathering places for your people. But there was resistance to your reclaiming those places.

Penny Gamble-Williams: On occasion when my family got letters from attorneys representing parties who owned land in common with us, they would ask me, ‘Why are you trying to hold onto this land when you are not even Indian?’ They felt that because I didn’t grow up on Chappaquiddick I knew nothing about the land or the culture. They were wrong. Because of all these experiences we decided to have ceremonies on Chappaquiddick at one of the burial grounds where many of our relatives had been buried.

Thunder Williams: It’s normal for Europeans to visit their burial grounds, but if Native people want to pay homage to their ancestor and do ceremonies in their spiritual tradition they seem not to understand. They seem not to understand our deep-rooted spiritual bonding to Mother Earth and the healing nature of walking on the land, not selling it and not building trophy houses on it.

– By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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By R.A. Whiteside, National Museum of the American Indian Macklin Becenti, a 19-year-old Navajo, traveled to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian after winning the 2009 Student Artist Competition.

Becenti traveled from his home on the Navajo Reservation to Washington in late July to be honored at the Office of Indian Education and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

His winning lead pencil drawing, depicting a Navajo woman weaving at her loom while a child does schoolwork, is a subtle interpretation of the competition’s theme, “Tradition is my Life, Education is my Future.” To view all the winning entries, go to kids.indianeducation.org/file/2009_SAC_art_winners.pdf.

This year’s competition attracted entries from 604 students from 30 states and more than a dozen Indian nations. Entries were judged in age categories ranging from preschool through high school. Becenti, the winner in the 11th- and 12th-grade category, received the additional honor of being named an Emerging High School Artist by the museum and receiving a trip to Washington.

It is “an opportunity of self-discovery and to gain new personal experiences that can only add to personal growth and greater self-confidence that is often needed by young adults,” said Keevin Lewis, Navajo, a programs coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian.

Becenti and his mother, Velma Toddy, live in Pine Springs, a community on the south end of the Navajo Reservation where the 19-year-old said he is related to everyone. Living seven miles from Houck, Ariz., and a 90-minute bus ride from school, Becenti draws, weaves, sculpts, sews moccasins and makes silver jewelry. He credits his grandmother, who makes baskets and pottery; a great aunt who weaves; and his uncles, who work in many traditional Navajo arts, with inspiring his artistry.

“When I was small, my uncles who were artists told me I was OK,” Becenti said.

After learning of the contest, Toddy said her son stayed up two nights sketching his entry. She told him, “I know you are going to win. I know it. When he brought back the message that he won, I said, ‘I told you so.’”

Of the drawing, Becenti explained, “I was thinking about education, and a little child growing up around her grandmother or in her tradition. She just got back from school and is doing her work while her grandmother weaves.”

Becenti specializes in portraiture, a skill he developed drawing from photographs. He hopes to study video production in college.

His illustration is included in a traveling art exhibition of all the winning entries. It opened at the U.S. Department of Education on July 21, and will also be shown at the National Museum of the American Indian and the Oklahoma City History Center.

Indian nations represented among the children who won include Northern Paiute, Sault Ste. Marie Tribes of Chippewa Indians, Cherokee, Gila River Indian Community, Mississippi Band of Choctaw, Hopi, Seminole Tribe, United Houma Nation, Oneida Indian Nation, San Carlos Apache, White Mountain Apache and Ponca Tribe.

By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

Photo by Katherine Fogden National Museum of the American Indian Missionary Sybil Bingham, played by Charity Pomeroy, ministers to Hawai’ian Queen Ka'ahumanu (Melonie Leihua Stewart) in the museum’s recent production of “The Conversion of Ka'ahumanu.”

“The Conversion of Ka’ahumanu,” by Native Hawai’ian playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, is the first play to be produced at the museum in Washington using exclusively local acting talent. It explores the powerful, controversial leader’s decision to destroy the male gods of the ruling classes, and later to convert to Christianity. More than 550 people attended the May 15-16 performances, including many from the Native Hawai’ian community in Washington, D.C., joining a discussion with the author afterward.

“I wanted to deconstruct this idea that Native peoples are children who need to be led around, that our chiefs didn’t have the intelligence to have informed choices for themselves,” Kneubuhl said. “When we look back at history we don’t realize how difficult it was.”

Kneubuhl, 60, came to the story of Ka’ahumanu (1768-1832) in the 1980s while working at the Mission Houses Museum in Honolulu. As a tour leader and role player in museum dramatizations, she was steeped in the history of Native Hawai’ian women and female missionaries at the time of first contact. Kneubuhl wrote the play in 1988, followed by several other dramas and books.

Courtesy of Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl Playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s “The Conversion of Ka'ahumanu” in May became the first play to be mounted at the National Museum of the American Indian with a local cast and production.

“The Conversion of Ka’ahumanu,” with its all-woman cast and powerful soliloquies, remains her most popular play, having been staged in theaters and universities all over the world. Vincent Scott, a cultural arts program specialist at the National Museum of the American Indian, directed the recent version and documented it on the blog www.nmainativetheater.blogspot.com.

The play exposes collisions of culture, religion and politics, Scott explained. It accomplishes this via discussion among three Native Hawai’ian women and two women missionaries who are building relationships with each other.

“She gives voices to women, whether historical or in a historical context,” Scott said. “She gives them voices that you don’t normally hear in history because history is generally written by men.”

Ka’ahumanu, as a historic figure, is respected for her leadership by some Native Hawai’ians and reviled by others for her religious actions. Kneubuhl leaves open the question of whether Ka’ahumanu’s Christian conversion was really a political move aimed at gaining the status of a Christian nation to the invading Americans.

Melonie Leihua Stewart, who played Ka’ahumanu in the museum’s production, said the queen regent was making difficult decisions at a time when foreign diseases and internal strife left many Hawai’ians dead.

“This play has made me realize how the death of over half of her people in such a short period of time impacted her decision to convert,” Stewart said. “Although there were many other influences, this one particular fact struck me emotionally, and it helped me to provide a stronger delivery on stage.”

Kneubuhl, the playwright and author, said one consequence of Ka’ahumanu’s conversion was that missionaries taught reading and writing to Native Hawai’ians.

“The population became literate very quickly,” Kneubuhl said. “In the 19th century, we see all these Native Hawai’ian newspapers, which lots of elders contributed to. Because they wrote things down, they were preserving things like the Hawai’ian language.”

—Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service