By Kai Monture - The Git-Hoan dance group, co-led by David Robert Boxley and his father, David A. Boxley, sing their “Outside” song from behind a screen at the Anchorage Museum, letting their hosts known “we are here.” The performance celebrated the opening of the exhibition, “Living Our Cultures, Sharing Our Heritage: The First Peoples of Alaska,” last May.

Father and son are often together, whether at performances of the Git-Hoan, Boxley’s Tsimshian dance troupe (scheduled to appear at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York on May 21-22), or in the carver’s shed by his house on Washington state’s Kitsap Peninsula. A second son, Zachary, 26, who makes the drums and bentwood boxes now, works a job on the graveyard shift and is asleep in the house. An almost-constant winter rain muffles sounds. In the shed the father, 58, and the son, 30, talk while they work, finishing each other’s sentences, and possibly each other’s thoughts.

“I’ve taken on a mantle of cultural leadership,” Boxley said. “David Robert has, too, for his generation. We look at it from a broad spectrum of carrying on the culture. In 100 years no one alive will remember us. I don’t care if people don’t remember my name, as long as people are speaking our language, and people are still doing this kind of art.”

Boxley is internationally celebrated for his carvings and his visual arts. He also teaches students the Tsimshian language in his spare time. At this point in this life, he is thinking about generations backward and forward, most notably his sons’, who have grown up in a depth of Tsimshian that was unimaginable when their father was a boy.

“Our village, Metlakatla, Alaska, was founded by people who left their home in British Columbia with a missionary in 1887,” Boxley said. “They left all their traditions behind. The missionary was very successful with us, I think you might say.”

His grandparents, Albert and Dora Bolton, were among the first generation of Tsimshian to be born in Metlakatla. Cultural expression was illegal when they were young, and their daughter, Boxley’s mother, was among a generation of Alaska Natives sent to boarding school. His grandparents raised Boxley at home, teaching him what they still had, language, and subsistence life skills. His grandfather was a quiet man who loved his family. His grandmother wove Tsimshian baskets at home. As a young man, Boxley wanted to become a basket ball coach, so he became a high school teacher and coach. He was teaching 1978 when his interests turned to Tsimshian culture and artistic expression.

“The art started taking me over,” is how he remembers it. He laughs now that when he decided to become a carver he bought an X-Acto tool kit. His grandfather soon took him to a junkyard and salvaged leaf spring from a VW Bug, ground one end of the metal down until it was sharp, and bolted it to a wood handle to make Boxley’s first adze.

He copied pictures of totem poles in books, carving pieces, some of which he still keeps in dark corners of his workshop, and one of which he calls “the ugliest-looking thing in the world.” In two or three years, his carvings started to look like the old pieces carved by Tsimshian a century earlier. In 1982 he gave the first pole-raising and potlatch in Metlakatla; a newspaper picture shows Boxley dancing in street clothes with a carved wooden helmet on his head. It was the first time Boxley danced in public. A father with a wife and two young sons, he quit teaching school in 1986 and turned to art full time. The next year he composed his first six Tsimshian songs for a newly formed adult dance group called 4th Generation.

“I would have loved to have instruction,” Boxley said of his carving. “But I didn’t know who to go to. Because I had no instruction, I developed a style of art that is known as Alaskan Tsimshian.”

David Robert and Zachary grew up in the Tsimshian culture; often simply in the carver’s shed, which is really an insulated garage next to the house on the Olympic Peninsula. David Robert remembers never being forced to carve or dance, but he remembers being coached by his dad, both in art and in Little League. He said, “It was always great to do something with Dad.”

Over 30 years Boxley has built a reputation as an artist, notably stepping into the international arena in 1990 when he was commissioned to create the crown of a talking stick, for which he carved an American eagle and a Russian bear embracing, for the Goodwill Games. U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev wrote messages of goodwill and inserted them in the carving’s hollow.

David Robert followed quickly in his father’s footsteps, selling two pieces for $150 each when he was 7 years old and achieving his first gallery show when he was 15. His first totem commission followed at La Push, Wash. “I have a clear memory of being 6 years old and learning how to run adze along a straight line, then seeing how chopped up the wood was. Now I can run a pencil line straight down the board.”

Boxley nods, appreciating how his sons have been able to live a life entirely in Tsimshian and never having to be on the outside looking in. He said, “The best thing a parent can have is for their children to do more than they did. I am proud of both my boys.”
David Robert works now for Robert Davidson, a widely respected Haida carver. Boxley notes with pride that his son is a carver working for Davidson, not an apprentice.

Boxley and David Robert co-lead the dance troupe Git-Hoan, and before that they co-led another group, Tsimshian Haayuuk. “My dance group is well known for its masks. At one time people were likening us to modern dancers, but that wasn’t true. We are old style dancers. Masks were used a lot in the old days by all the tribes.”

The inspiration for the masks, the box drums and the capes comes from the old materials that the Boxley family has found in museum collections such as the National Museum of the American Indian’s Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md. Bringing out new materials made in the old style may have made the style seem new. But David Robert said of visiting the Tsimshian objects in museum collections, “It’s the only way to talk to the old people.”

His father said, “He is taking it over after I hang it up.”

“Not too soon, I hope,” David Robert replied. “One thing we feel strongly about is that the culture doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to everyone.”

Boxley grinned at the bentwood box he’d gone back to painting, and said, “It’s a big canoe, that is what I say, everyone can fit.”

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By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

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Courtesy of the Siletz Tribe Young Siletz feather dancers keep time and sing as one boy makes his way around the floor of the dance house, built by the tribe in 1996 in the heart of Siletz, Ore.

Black ash trees across a vast swath of the continent—from Wisconsin to New York and as far south as Tennessee and north as Ontario—could be effectively extinct in as little as a decade because of an infestation by the emerald ash borer, a voracious imported Asian beetle. In her home state of Michigan, Church said, a decade is optimistic.

“I apprenticed two kids who were able to harvest a tree with me, and pound it—that’s one of the most important parts of what we did,” she said. “More importantly, we need these kids to plant the black ash seeds decades from now, when the emerald ash borer is expected to be extinct.”

American Indian children across North America take on grown-up responsibilities for cultural preservation. Every Indian nation has its own way of sharing its ancient indigenous knowledge with its younger generation. But now, the speed of that transfer of knowledge has increased under pressure from insect infestation and climate changes altering the natural environment.

Courtesy of Kelly Church Mark Shananaquet, 15, works on a basket made from the bark of the black ash tree, which is endangered across a broad swath of North America, at a Michigan weaving conference. His teacher hopes the skill can be kept alive for the tree to be reintroduced in future generations.

At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the renovation of a classroom-like gallery space into an interactive children’s exhibition, opening in May 2011, will show the 40,000 schoolchildren who visit each year the leadership roles that children from many tribes play in carrying on cultural knowledge. In August, Church, whose family has woven black ash baskets for countless generations, participated in a panel discussion about her efforts via teleconference with the museum.

With a grant from the National Museum of the American Indian, Church, 42, held a weaving workshop in Kewadin, Mich., attended by 14 children. From that group, she asked for volunteers to become her apprentices and learn how to harvest the tree. Two children stepped forward, a boy and a girl. Historically, men harvested the tree and prepared it for the women to weave. Now most weavers do every part of the process. Still, Church tried to divide the knowledge along male and female roles, if only to help the youngsters share the responsibility for remembering.

She videotaped the practices because, as she said, “I don’t expect everything to be fresh in their minds 30 years from now.”

Now two more children, a pair of siblings, have volunteered to be Church’s next apprentices.

Near the Pacific Ocean, the feather dance of the Siletz Tribe at the summer solstice draws dozens of young people, from 3 years old to their 20s. For the tribe, which 33 years ago won its restoration after termination, bringing the dance back to the public center of its nation has been a long journey, said Alfred “Bud” Lane III, Siletz Tribal Council vice chairman.

Courtesy of Kelly Church Selina Shananaquet, 12, and her mother, Toni Shananaquet, display black ash baskets at a workshop in Kewadin, Mich. Weaver Kelly Church, who is Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa, is urgently teaching a new generation the traditional art because the tree is threatened by an invasive insect.

“The Indian agents burned all our dance houses so the people put on the ceremonies in their own houses,” Lane said. “The dance has never ended; it has gone into certain families over the years.  The ceremonial house we built in 1996 is the first one at Siletz in 126 years.”

Wearing regalia he made himself, Lane, 53, walked into the 2010 summer solstice dance holding the hand of a 3-year-old. He told the child, “Stand here,” then took his place as one of the singers. For the next hour as Siletz children took their turns dancing, the youngest boy stood, keeping time with his foot on the cedar plank floor, and singing.

Lane and his wife, Cheryl, prayed for years to see the new generation of Siletz practicing their culture, with their traditions in the center of their lives, and they have seen it happen in this generation. Young adults discuss the meaning of words in the Siletz language, and join in gathering roots and shellfish for meals. Even if wild, traditional foods aren’t as plentiful as they once were, the people are dancing.

“My kids were real little when they started dancing,” Lane said. “Now they are adults who dance, and my son sings with me.”

Patsy Whitefoot, National Indian Education Association president, said American Indian children have valuable opportunities for intergenerational learning because they live in close-knit families, often with parents and grandparents in the same home. Children, even those who struggle in school, can excel in cultural environments.

“Children soak up information,” said Whitefoot, who is Yakama and lives in Washington state. “Often we have elders teaching, and the children feel safe.”

Recently, Whitefoot’s family took their children into the mountains to gather the first huckleberries. On the way, they reminded the children of the cultural protocols, such as not tasting even one of the berries they were gathering to be used in ceremony. On a break for lunch, the children sat together eating and talking, the older ones coaching the younger.

On that same trip her granddaughter began imitating the call of crows, making Whitefoot think about how her ancestors are remembered as children who did distinctive things, who learned to fish and hunt, and who were known to be able to act heroically in a crisis.

Children from Indian nations have always been the ones who would carry on the culture, Church agreed; in some ways, it’s just more urgent now.

“When we have a meeting of any kind, you will always see our little ones running around. They are always welcome,” Church said. “That is one difference with our culture and other cultures; in our culture, the children are part of everything we do, because pretty soon, they will be doing it as well.”

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By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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Photo by Chris Cook/Forks Forum Quileute children point and observe in delight as three pods of whales approach the beach during the Quileute’s Calling the Whales ceremony. The Quileute Tribe’s reservation is on the Pacific Coast of Northwest Washington state.

The exhibition, “Behind the Scenes: The Real Story of the Quileute Wolves,” is meant to provide a counterpoint to the popular “Twilight” series of books and movies, which fictionalizes the Northwest tribe and its origins. When the first movie came out in 2008, the Quileute’s one-square-mile reservation in a remote part of coastal Washington state instantly became a worldwide destination for tween fans.

But real Quileute have nothing in common with the werewolves that the movies interpret them to be, as 1,600 people who crowded into the Seattle museum this summer to see the tribe’s teens and adults perform their ancient wolf dances soon learned firsthand.

“After ‘Twilight’ came out, I got my ears pinned back by some of our elders,” said Ann Penn-Charles, a Quileute, who dances and shares her culture with her tribe’s youth. She is known as Miss Ann. “They said, ‘How dare they portray us as werewolves? That’s so disrespectful. I want you guys to go represent us the way we Quileute are meant to be.’

“When you get directives from the elders like that you have to honor them. A lot of our youth were like, ‘We’re not werewolves.’ We have been here since the beginning of the flood. Our kids are like, ‘Man, we’ve got to show it.’”

Courtesy of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian A Quileute wolf mask of cedar with a painted design was made in the late 1800s or early 1900s.

When Barbara Brotherton, curator of Native American art for the Seattle Art Museum, came to Quileute in the summer of 2009 to ask if an exhibition at the museum would help dispel stereotypes, she found the Quileute more than willing.

Brotherton scoured museums and archives across the U.S. looking for historic Quileute cultural materials. While the tribe has lived on the Pacific Coast since time immemorial, it sustained a major cultural loss in 1888 when a homesteader burned the Quileute village, destroying most of the tribe’s longhouses and their precious contents. A year later, the reservation at La Push was established by an executive order from President Benjamin Harrison.

In 1916, Leo J. Frachtenberg, an anthropologist and teacher at a federal Indian boarding school near Salem, Ore., obtained several Quileute ceremonial objects for famed New York collector George Gustav Heye. Frachtenberg sent Heye a letter reporting that Quileute culture was devastated.

Heye assembled a collection of nearly a million Native objects, which was purchased in 1989 by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. It provided many of the Seattle exhibition’s 25 objects, including a painted-wood wolf headdress and a cedar basket with wolf-head designs. Most had never been seen by living Quileute people, and most of the pieces had never been exhibited before.

Between 1905 and 1909, Albert Reagan, a teacher and Indian agent at Quileute, asked the children in his school to draw their culture. The results were rich and vivid, depicting a living culture.

The children’s work was later deposited in the Smithsonian National Anthropological Archives, where it remained unknown to the Quileute for a century. Brotherton convinced curators to let the fragile drawings, made with colored pencil on paper, come to Seattle so that descendants of those artists could see the work. Although the children who made them grew up to be the grandparents and great-grandparents of today’s Quileute, no one remembered any drawings being made.

But the descendants of James Hobucket, one of the young artists, told Penn-Charles that they remember him as an adult using a stick to draw on the sand, and then letting his pictures wash away in the tide.

The century-old drawings depict simple scenes of deep culture—a coming-of-age dance in which people crawl covered in wolf skins while others decorate themselves with salal branches; a wolf society ceremony in which men wear carved wooden headdresses and bark aprons; a public competition between two shamans to see who was more powerful; a whaling canoe with a whale being pulled alongside.

Penn-Charles said the drawings are bringing back information, such as details of the regalia men wore at the time, skirts made from cedar bark. Still, she wishes there were more images, to answer more questions.

Brotherton thinks the drawings show how alive the culture was to the Quileute children in 1905-1909. “Clearly, these kids were watching wolf dances, even if it was outlawed and only being done privately.”

The exhibition doesn’t dwell on the books and movies that prompted it, except to show Quileute objects or types of tribal objects that have appeared in the films. The movie character Emily, who is supposed to be Makah, wears a carved paddle necklace, like those commonly worn by the Quileute, the Makah and other tribes in the area. A replica of a deer-hide drum borrowed by the film crew from a Quileute girl is on display. And a dream catcher featured in the movies is not Quileute at all, but is made more “coastal Indian” by the inclusion of beach glass and a wolf charm.

“Twilight” has drawn tourists from all over the world to the Quileute reservation, about a four-hour drive west of Seattle in a rainy corner of Washington state. Rather than closing their borders, the Quileute have let the world in to the Wednesday night drum and dance circle where they teach their culture to their children. Instead of focusing on the liberties Stephenie Meyer took in making up a fictional culture for a tribe and naming it Quileute, the Quileute have focused on getting more of their youth to dance, to know their songs and practice the culture that makes them distinct in the entire world.

“When we do our dances we carry our families; we dance to represent our families,” Penn-Charles said. “We dance all together as one, and never turn away anyone from dancing. The elders don’t like it when only certain people go up to dance. If someone wants to dance we let them all dance. If they have a shawl, we bring them out, and always bring extra shawls.”

One of the Quileute youth told Brotherton that if he were making the “Twilight” movies, he would have put a lot of Quileute culture in, because it’s a great culture.

“I think there is a real intelligence among Quileute kids,” Brotherton said, “that ‘Twilight’ is Hollywood, and Hollywood does what it wants to do—but they know who they are.”

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By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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Photo by Nick Vanderpuy, Courtesy of News from Indian Country. Dennis White, who is Ojibwe, teaches the ancient art of finger weaving at a workshop sponsored by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. The event was held on the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation in Wisconsin, where White works as administrator of the tribal school.

Last year White was one of four recipients of a residency from the Artist Leadership program at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. White spent two weeks in Washington, D.C., studying the museum’s collection of finger-woven sashes and bags worn in Ojibwe culture.

“Finger weaving was at one time an important and widespread art among our people in the Great Lakes, but now there are not that many people in Wisconsin and Michigan that actually do the weaving at the advanced level,” White said.

He conducted two workshops, one at the museum in Washington, and the other—a three-day gathering—at the Migizi Cultural Center at the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Community College in late February.

White taught himself the art of finger weaving from books in the early 1980s when he was studying for his master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He subsequently consulted with elders who knew the craft and became one of the few living Ojibwe finger weavers.

“Before the Europeans came we would use fur that fell off any creature, like the hair you comb off a dog or cat, and spin that into a fiber for weaving,” he said. “When the Europeans came with blankets, we unraveled their blankets for the yarn. We already had blankets made from rabbit skin, and their blankets weren’t as warm.”

White, who works as the administrator at the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe School, www.lcoschools.bia.edu, also has been known to use finger weaving as a way to teach mathematics to young people.

“To me there is a fine line and almost no line between mathematics and art,” White said. “The designs I make for my belts and sashes, they start out as a set of symbols.

“If I have a problem weaving that is probably a number problem,” he said. “If you can recognize the patterns you are on your way to understanding mathematics.”

Learn about the National Museum of the American Indian’s Expressive Arts Program at www.americanindian.si.edu/icap/recipients.html.

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By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

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By Mathieu Génon, courtesy of Brian Jungen “Carapace,” 2009, is a work made from industrial waste bins by Brian Jungen of the Dunne-za First Nations in British Columbia. “Strange Comfort,” an exhibition of his sculpture, is at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian until Aug. 8.

An emu on roller skates and a two-tone crocodile—both crafted from plastic luggage—hang from a mobile in the Potomac Atrium. In the retrospective’s gallery, a whale skeleton hangs resplendent under lights. Only upon closer inspection does it become clear that the whale’s bones are cut from common plastic chairs.

Jungen, 40, of the Dunne-za First Nations in British Columbia, is called the best Native artist of his generation by Paul Chaat Smith, curator of “Strange Comfort.” Jungen’s work is usually shown by modern art galleries in cities such as New York, Montreal, Rotterdam and Munich. Never have his creations been made available, as they are now, to the zoo-going set.

The museum is visited by about 40,000 schoolchildren a year. On a recent Wednesday, about a dozen third-graders from Emmanuel Christian School in Springfield, Va., found themselves sitting on the gallery floor, surrounded by Jungen’s “Carapace.” The children didn’t know the word carapace means exoskeleton or shell.

So the museum’s lead cultural interpreter, Sharyl Pahe, who is San Carlos Apache and Navajo, asks the students to do a little deductive work.

“If we look at what is all around us,” she asks, “what does it look like?”

Trash bins, the third-graders answer in unison.

“You’ll see that this artist has taken something useful like a trash bin and cut it in two,” Pahe says. “Is it still useful?”

No, the children almost sing.

“But what does this make you think of?”

A hut, a fort, a forest or bleachers, the third-graders offer.

“Could it be a turtle shell?” Pahe asks.

The children look with new eyes at the plastic shell.

“Why is this turtle shell so big?”

The children look quizzically at her. She explains, “To some tribes, the turtle represents the earth. The shell is important because it is like the land.”

The children nod in understanding. They’ve visited this landscape of the imagination before, though perhaps not through the works of a Dunne-za artist who could be the age of their parents, but who, like them, lives in a society where white plastic chairs and green garbage cans can be the backdrop of imagination.

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By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

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Photo by Mary McCarthy Mary G. Ross, at 96, joins the 2004 opening procession for the Smithsonian's new National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, D.C

Because Ross, after a lifetime of high-flying achievement as one of the nation’s most prominent women scientists of the space age, wanted to wear her ancestral dress to the 2004 opening of the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of the American Indian.

In the past 12 months, the museum has received a bequest of more than $400,000 from Mary G. Ross, who died in April 2008, only three months shy of her 100th birthday

“She was a strong-willed, independent woman who was ahead of her time,” said her Oneida friend Norbert Hill, recent past chairman of the National Museum of the American Indian’s Board of Trustees, “and a proud woman who never forgot where she was from.”

Mary G. Ross—whose Cherokee lineage includes leaders and teachers and who herself now figures in that lineage as the Cherokee rocket scientist—spent her century of life looking mostly into the future.

Born in 1908 on her parents’ allotment in the foothills of the Ozarks, she was one year younger than the state of Oklahoma. It had been 70 years since her ancestor led his people over the Trail of Tears. She excelled in math, and her first career was as a young high school math and science teacher. By 1937, Ross remembered asking herself, “Are you going to go out and see anything of the world, or are you going to stay in Northern Oklahoma?”

She went to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and, at age 29 in 1937, and later went to Santa Fe, N.M., as the girls’ adviser at a new school for American Indian artists. In the summers Ross pursued a master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Northern Colorado. While there, she took every astronomy class the school had, and read every book about the stars. The clear night sky in Colorado fascinated her.

She was hired by the Lockheed Corporation as a mathematician in 1942 and worked on improving the aeroelasticity of the P-38 Lightning fighter plane—the first to go more than 400 mph.

By 1948, Ross was on the ground floor of what would become the space race. In 1952 Lockheed asked her to be one of 40 engineers in what became known as the Lockheed Skunk Works, a super-secret think tank led by legendary aeronautics engineer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson. It was the start of Lockheed Missiles & Space Co., a major consultant to NASA based in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Ross was 45, the only woman and the only Native American. Most of the theories and papers that emerged from that Lockheed group, including those by Ross, are still classified.

Around the time of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik, Ross moved into the public eye. In 1958 she appeared on the television show “What’s My Line?” It took contestants many guesses before they realized that the smiling woman in a V-necked, sleeveless black dress in fact, as the caption read, “Designs Rocket Missiles and Satellites (Lockheed Aircraft).”

One San Francisco-area newspaper article from 1961 called Ross “possibly the most influential Indian maid since Pocahontas,” and noted that she was “making her mark in outer space.” She told the interviewer, “I think of myself as applying mathematics in a fascinating field.”

Another article from the time noted that Ross, who had yet to see a rocket blast off, believed that women would make “wonderful astronauts.” But she said, “I’d rather stay down here and analyze the data.”

Ross retired from Lockheed at age 65 in 1973, and turned her attention to the next generation of Native Americans and women in engineering.

“To function efficiently, you need math,” she said later in life. “The world is so technical, if you plan to work in it, a math background will let you go farther and faster.”

One of the few regrets she ever mentioned was that she had spent so much of her life apart from Indian people.

At 96, Ross was looking ahead again—to the long-anticipated Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. In the opening procession, she stepped out of her electric wheelchair on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and walked for half a block.

“She felt she was a part of history being made, again,” said friend Norbert Hill.

By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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