Photo by Katherine Fogden, National Museum of the American Indian-Janie Hendrix, President/CEO of Experience Hendrix, delivers a coat that belonged to her stepbrother, Jimi Hendrix, to the National Museum of the American Indian’s Tim Johnson.

“We’re trying to show where Native musicians were instrumental in crafting the big American music,” said Tim Johnson, one of the museum’s associate directors, “and document instances where Native musicians were right in the center of it.”

 The exhibition opens July 1.

 “Up Where We Belong” was popularized by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes in the movie “An Officer and a Gentleman,” winning the 1982 Oscar for Best Song. Sainte-Marie co-wrote the song with Jack Nitzsche and also made a recording of it.

 Hendrix was raised with his Cherokee grandmother, a former vaudevillian who passed on her performance gene as well as a  taste for extravagant stage clothes. Janie Hendrix, the late singer’s stepsister, loaned the museum Hendrix’s long, multi-colored leather patchwork coat. It was one of the few pieces of Hendrix’s belongings that his father was able to recover from the musician’s apartment after his death at age 27 in 1970. The rest were stolen.   

 “The coat has never been exhibited anywhere before,” Johnson said. “Janie Hendrix personally delivered it after we indicated that we didn’t want a guitar or a gold record. We wanted the person.”

 Hendrix may only be the most famous of the Native artists to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s. The band Redbone, a pair of  Yaqui/Shoshone brothers who played with a Cheyenne drummer and a flamenco guitarist, performed hits like “Come and Get Your Love.”

 Others, such as Jesse “Ed” Davis, who was Comanche and Kiowa, and Link Wray, Shawnee, were musician’s musicians.

 Davis was a session guitarist in the 1970s who performed with each of the former Beatles. At one point John Lennon asked producer Phil Spector to get Davis to help Lennon create what he  called the “back to the roots” sound on his 1975 album “Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

 Davis also gave voice to Native themes through songs like “Washita Love Child” and set John Trudell’s spoken poetry to music for the album “AKA Graffiti Man.” It was nominated for a Grammy in 1986, two years before Davis died.

 Link Wray’s 1958 song “Rumble” helped set a course for rock-and-roll guitar, loud and distorted and foreboding. The song was banned for its title’s suggestion of violence. In 2003, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame named “Rumble” to a list of 500 songs that shaped rock music.   

–Kara Briggs, the American Indian News Service

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.

Download as a Word document: Exhibition spotlights Native in rock

Watch and listen to the songwriter’s version of “Up Where We Belong” at www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLCk066o9sU

Watch and listen to Jimi Hendrix perform “Hey Joe” at

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOjwMxccsZc&feature=related

Watch and listen to Redbone perform “Come and Get Your Love” at www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO3Y4W5xJdI&feature=related

Watch and listen to Davis perform on Taj Mahal’s 1968 “Everybody Got to Change Sometime,”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hZ_6xIjywI

Watch and listen to Link Wray from a 1978 video, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUHz0i8_ziAhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUHz0i8_ziA

Photo by Glenna Augborne - The Mitsitam Cafe's Mexican Hot Chocolate

Using arbol chiles and dried poblano peppers to season the chocolate, as ancient Mayans and Aztecs did at the time of the conquistadors’ arrival, Hetzler blends the hot with the sweet to make this indigenously inspired drinking chocolate.

For summer cookouts and late nights watching fireworks, try this twist on an old favorite. Or taste it all year round at the Mitsitam Cafe in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The Mitsitam Cafe’s Mexican hot chocolate recipe

Serves 4-5

1 gallon milk

½ stick Mexican or regular cinnamon

3 arbol chiles

1 pasilla pepper, or dried poblano

1 cup sugar

3 pieces Mexican chocolate

1 cup cocoa powder

To prepare:

Heat milk with cinnamon and dried peppers. Once milk has scalded, remove cinnamon and dried peppers, and remove from heat. Break up Mexican chocolate into small pieces. Whisk in sugar, cocoa powder and Mexican chocolate pieces. Place the combined chocolate milk on heat, and whisk until it simmers. Serve immediately.

Download as a Word document: Mitsitam Cafe Mexican Hot Chocolate Recipe

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 the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay - Oneida elder Maria Hinton, 100, has dedicated decades to teaching her ancestral language to students, including this group from the Oneida Nation School System.

Hinton recently put the finishing touches on an exhaustive recording of the Oneida dictionary. Taking five years of almost daily work, she recorded 12,000 audio files, including tens of thousands of Oneida words, and told stories she first heard in her mother tongue.

Hinton’s had a lot to celebrate in recent weeks—including her 100th birthday on June 5. Last year she was named one of the first recipients of the Prism Award from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian for her quest to save the Oneida language.

“I am not completely retired,” said Hinton, of Oneida, Wis. “We need to keep doing this so the young people can learn things and then they can pass them on.”

Beside her, a young woman named LeAnne Thompson listens on the phone to the questions. She repeats them in English or Oneida for Hinton, who is hard of hearing, before Hinton takes the phone back and answers in English. Thompson has been Hinton’s pupil for 22 years, starting when she was 8.
By the time she reached her 20s, Thompson realized that what she had amassed was knowledge of words, not conversational language.

She began visiting Hinton at her home, taking her to lunch and helping her with errands. Together they speak Oneida, the young woman who is now 30 keying on every inflection and turn of phrase her elder imparts.

For Hinton, Thompson is a model of the way the Oneida must now work to recover their languages. “She has four children and is a very active mom,” the elder says. “She comes here to learn.”

Hinton was among a generation that grew up speaking and hearing Oneida as the dominant language on the reservation near Green Bay, Wis. She was 10 in 1920 when she went to school and learned English. But she held onto her first language, standing up to matrons in order to keep her knowledge of Oneida alive.

“It was the predominant language when she was born, and for quite a few years after she became an adult,” said Jerry Hill, who is Oneida and president of the Indigenous Language Institute in Santa Fe, N.M. “Over time people got assimilated, got jobs outside, got married, and it became less necessary.”

Still Hinton remembered. Her memory is a gift that was recognized in a name, Yaké-yahle, given to her at a gathering in Canada when she was 46. It means She Remembers.

A year later she left Wisconsin on a one-way plane ticket to Los Angeles to be with her only son’s family. Her grandson, Ernie Stevens Jr., the chairman of the National Indian Gaming Association, reflected on her move to California when he accepted the Prism Award on her behalf in October at the museum in Washington, D.C.  She cleaned houses and waited tables to help support the family, he recalled.

“She always has had a track record of being noble and proud,” Stevens said. “I don’t know how you get all that, and she don’t take any crap from nobody.”

In 1971, she returned to Wisconsin with her family. Soon she and her brother, Amos Christjohn, began working with the Oneida Nation to teach the language to a generation of children who knew only English.  Two years later, at the age of 63, Hinton enrolled in the University of Wisconsin to earn her bachelor’s degree, even learning to drive so she could get to her classes.

She graduated cum laude in 1979 to become a founding teacher along with Christjohn at the Oneida Nation Turtle School. They worked with other elder speakers over 35 years to compile a dictionary with the help of a Yale-trained linguist, Cliff Abbott.

“We were trying to train a core of Oneidas who had enough ability in the language to teach it to kindergarten and first and second grades,” Abbott said.

Building on a Depression-era Works Progress Administration project to document the language, in which many grandparents and great-grandparents of Oneida families participated, the dictionary grew to 34,000 words. When it was published in 1996 there were between 25 and 30 Oneida speakers living, though many would pass away in the next few years, including Christjohn. Hinton continued working.

“Maria was one of the people who noticed that when people came to her and tried out their Oneida, their pronunciation was often terrible,” Abbott said. “I pointed out to her that the only way to prevent that was if they had a model, and we started the project of her recording the entire dictionary.”

Courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Elder language teacher Maria Hinton recorded the Oneida Dictionary with help from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Her recordings, available online, will help future generations learn how to properly pronounce the Oneida language.

The dictionary in Hinton’s voice can be heard on the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay website here. The database is searchable with English words.
Hill said Hinton’s gift is being a teacher to generations of Oneida learners.

“The woman has an infinite acceptance of people trying to acquire the language,” Hill said. “She is a quiet woman but very expressive. She has a lovely motherly way of generating trust and gaining acceptance. She brings the trust level down to where you are.”

Thompson said what Oneida students long for today is to be able to hear two Oneida speakers flow in conversation together. But with less than a handful of first-language speakers left at the Oneida Nation in Wisconsin there are fewer opportunities. Thompson said she persists in her own efforts because “the Oneida language makes my heart feel good.”

Hinton, who personally received her Prism Award from the National Museum of the American Indian at the National Indian Education Association in Milwaukee last fall, is still talking about the high school students who spoke Oneida, and sang and danced in her honor.

She remembers thinking, “Everything around us is Oneida.”

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By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

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Photo by Paul Carbone, AV&C New York - George Ramos (center), a Tlingit elder from Yakutat, Alaska, joins a dance during the opening ceremony for the exhibition “Living our Cultures, Sharing our Heritage.” Ramos, 79, is one of the advisers to the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center, which brought the exhibition to the Anchorage Museum.

They “belong to Alaska,” Ramos says.

Now, “Living Our Cultures, Sharing Our Heritage” has opened at the Anchorage Museum, with 600 objects that were selected in part because they were fairly traded by Native communities to collectors over a century ago and ended up in the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of the American Indian. The exhibition of the objects will continue for seven years in Alaska.

The May 22 opening was a cause for celebration by Alaska Native peoples, among them Beverly Faye Hugo, an Iñupiaq adviser to the exhibition from Barrow.

“These are our treasures,” Hugo said. “It is time to let them come home.”

The Git-hoan, a Tsimshian dance group based in Seattle, performed at the exhibition’s opening celebration. At one point, the group invited the Native peoples of Alaska to join the dance. Midway through the song, group leader David Boxley called out, “On stage, George Ramos, a leader of leaders.”

The stage cleared as Ramos danced with his hands stretched upward, knees bent, as he was taught at age 8 by his mother’s brother, a man of 80. When the song ended, young people came to steady Ramos, an adviser to the Arctic Studies Center, as he stepped down from the stage.

“There are things in the exhibition I have only heard about from my instructor when I was a child,” Ramos said.

The objects selected for the exhibition were all fairly traded for, said William Fitzhugh, director of the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center. It was part of the criteria put forth in seven years of meetings between elders from the Native cultures of Alaska and museum curators.

Photo by Clark Mishler of Clark James Mishler Photography - Mitzi Mishler sits in the Anchorage Museum in front of Clark Mishler’s photo of Vera Spein with willow bows and a traditional ulu near Kwethluk, Alaska.

“Living Our Cultures, Sharing Our Heritage” is the most ambitious exhibition organized by the center since its inception in 1988, and the Anchorage Museum constructed a 10,000-square-foot addition to house it. The curators and conservators from the National Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of the American Indian worked together to conserve and repair the objects for the loan, then to transport them to Alaska in three cargo planes. The exhibition will continue for at least seven years, at which time other items from the tens of thousands of Alaska Native objects in the Smithsonian collections are expected to rotate in.

Fitzhugh knows the impact of these exhibitions on Native cultures, because the Arctic Studies Center has organized them for years, bringing objects from Smithsonian museums and others around the world to Alaska. With each exhibition, Fitzhugh said there has been a growing rejuvenation and recovery of cultural practices.

“There is a type of blanket that until 15 years ago was lost. Everyone knows the Chilkat blankets, but this was another woven blanket,” Fitzhugh said. “They have figured out how to weave it because today David Boxley was wearing one.”

Andrew Abyo, a 40-year-old Alutiiq carver who teaches Native arts in Anchorage schools, stood in front of a Sugpiaq wood mask he’d only seen in books. Twenty inches tall, and three-dimensional with marks left by the carver still evident, the mask was collected in 1884 from a village on the Alaska Peninsula.

Shaking his head, Abyo said, “It was so flat and small in the book.”

His wife, Melinda, was moved to tears when she saw a century-old woman’s beaded headdress, which she had copied from a book. She brought in her replica to show curators, and to compare it with the original.

Abyo, whose work is in museums in Alaska, Japan and Ireland, wants the tools of his ancestors’ everyday life, such as  bows and fishing gear. But gaining the skill that it takes to make tools that are functional as well as beautiful requires more than books.

“As many accomplished artists as there are today, these are the works of the masters,” Abyo said. “They didn’t have our technologies, but we don’t know all of their technologies, either. We can’t fathom how they did some of this.”

Another visitor, Darline Kygar, a tourist from San Diego who happened to visit the museum on the day the exhibition opened, admired the intricate stitching in the clothing and the diversity of the many Native cultures from Alaska.

“I really had my eyes opened,” she said.

View the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center website, including the objects in the exhibition, at http://alaska.si.edu/index.asp

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By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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Paul Chaat Smith. Photo courtesy of Paul Chaat Smith

Smith has curated many exhibitions including ones about two of the most prominent contemporary Native artists, as well as a permanent exhibition about the history of indigenous Americans.

In 2008, he co-curated a major retrospective of the late Luiseño abstract expressionist Fritz Scholder, titled “Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian.” Last year, Smith curated a retrospective of another provocative artist, Brian Jungen, the Dunne-za sculptor from British Columbia. Smith calls him the best Native artist of the 21^st century.

Recently Paul Chaat Smith joined American Indian News Service editor Kara Briggs for a conversation.

Briggs: When did you come to the National Museum of the American Indian?

Smith: August, 2001, when the museum on the National Mall was still a very large excavation site.

Briggs: Is the National Museum of the American Indian an important institution to the Indian world?

Smith: I think in some ways it’s more important than the people who created it imagined it would be. Going back to the 1970s and some of these early conferences when people talked about a museum of our own, then to the ’80s and the actual planning of it, I think most of them would be surprised at how important the institution is within Indian Country in the U.S. It’s one of the largest and richest Indian institutions in the United States, so its importance is beyond its standing as one of the Smithsonian
museums. It is also significant in terms of indigenous issues in Latin America. It is in a lot of ways a model for Native peoples in some Latin American countries where a museum like this would be inconceivable.

Briggs: The museum has a world-class collection, containing 800,000 objects collected a century or more ago by industrialist George Gustav Heye. Yet is the National Museum of the American Indian symbolically important for Indian nations in the U.S.?

Smith: Establishing this kind of museum is one way that nations like the United States make an effort toward reconciliation. Even though the circumstances were almost accidental, it really was about the George Gustav Heye collection being up for grabs and the competition between the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Smithsonian Institution and Ross Perot to buy it. All those things were sort of coincidental and accidental to some degree. But the way it played out with the Smithsonian acquiring that collection, and then the legislation to found the museum, that was significant.

Briggs: When the museum opened in 2004, there was a message that we are still here. Some people took that as not intellectual or missing the point, but you’ve said that was a very particular and important message, considering that there are people today who think that Indians are extinct.

Smith: Some scholars think that the missing component is that visitors do not get the depth of what happened and how singular it was in human history, that the level of the biological catastrophe is greater than anything else that’s happened in recorded history. For that reason, it’s really a singular event, the two halves of the world coming together. There are a lot of scholars who really talk about how that Columbus contact created the world we live in now. The problem, though, is that this isn’t a story that Indians are comfortable with, or even think about in a personal way—the loss of an estimated 30 million people from North and South America to epidemics brought by Europeans in those 150 years after 1492. The last 200 years is a story that is part of our historical memory, when we talk about boarding schools and other particular stories that are authentically true, because we get them through our relatives. The first 150 years after European contact, we don’t. It’s not part of our collective history in an emotional way or in a personal way.

Courtesy of Ralph and Ricky Lauren “Indian With Beer Can” by Fritz Scholder, who was Luiseño, oil on canvas (1969).

Briggs: Fritz Scholder, who was one-quarter Luiseño and who resisted the label “Indian artist,” really redefined what Indian art was, moving it from anthropologic depiction to abstract expressionist paintings like “Indian with Beer Can.”

Smith: Scholder’s work is really amazing in the way that it provides a window into what’s happened in Indian Country during the last 50 years. The way you can talk about Scholder’s life is kind of a guide to how much it’s changed since the 1950s. It was something that you could resonate with because so many Indian people can remember when this was shocking, when Scholder’s work would literally stop people in their tracks. So there were a lot of things to explore in that project.

Briggs: “Strange Comfort,” the Brian Jungen retrospective, deconstructs consumer goods and reconstructs them as art that plays on some of the most ancient and traditional forms of Native art.

Photo courtesy of Debra and Dennis Scholl “Prototype for New Understanding # 23” by Brian Jungen, who is Dunne-za, made from Nike Air Jordans.

Smith: Jungen is creating Indian art without Indian artifacts. I’ve always felt that, generally speaking, Indian people have always wanted to be part of the world as it is. This idea that we really want to go back in time, that we’re against modernity, I don’t think that’s our real tradition. So I think Brian Jungen creates work from the artifacts of our time. He is doing it as an artist who came of age at the end of the 20^th century, an artist who is affected by what artists are doing internationally. He went to art school in Vancouver, B.C., and he is a Native person who is totally informed by the art that he sees. His art feels very much of the moment, and also timeless.

Briggs: Jungen’s masks made from Air Jordans, totem poles from golf bags, and a whale skeleton cut from those white plastic lawn chairs, are almost a comic puzzle for someone who sees this art in its traditional form every day.

Smith: Most of these pieces were first exhibited in British Columbia, so that’s a province where it’s common in the neighborhoods of Vancouver to see people make their own totems. For non-Indian folks there, it’s such a motif, such a popular thing. And of course, Jungen’s not Salish; he’s not from the Pacific Coast. His people are at least 1,000 miles north of Vancouver, and east, and his culture has nothing to do with whales or totems or any of that. So it’s sort of nervy in a way that he’s appropriating Northwest Coast art.

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By The American Indian News Service

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Courtesy of the National Congress of American Indians Odessa Lozano’s “Stand Tall and Be Counted!” was the first-place winner for grades 11 and 12 in the National Congress of American Indians’ student art contest celebrating the 2010 U.S. Census. Lozano is San Carlos Apache from Arizona.

The second-place winner at the college level, Julius Badoni, a senior at Arizona State University, said he wanted to incorporate symbols of perseverance, tribal pride, and strength, while encouraging Native Americans to participate in the Census.

“Even at the lowest point in the 1900s, Native Americans endured,” said Badoni, who is Navajo, about his piece titled “Resurgence,” a colorful abstract showing the plight of Native people since 1492. “There will be a continued endurance and resurgence of Native Americans.”

The contest was judged by staff at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

“One of the most successful messages from the Census is that tribes are thriving and doing well, and the attempts to completely assimilate Native people into mainstream America weren’t successful,” said Jacqueline Johnson Pata, NCAI executive director. “This art competition was to showcase that Native people are still here.”

The 1990 Census failed to count an estimated 12,000 people living on reservations; an aggressive promotional campaign in 2000 helped to reduce the number of those missed to an estimated 4,000. The NCAI’s contest gave young artists a chance to learn about the Census, and why it is important for their families to participate.

The youngest winners, who were pre-kindergarten, received a LeapFrog Leapster2 Learning System or a Tag Learn to Read Storybook Pack. Winners in first through third grades received a Nintendo DSiXL or a LeapFrog Tag Dr. Seuss Reading Gift Pack. Winners in fourth grade through college were awarded a Wii or an iPod Nano.
—–
By The American Indian News Service

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Before it opened, founders of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian heard from Native peoples that one of its most important roles would be to teach all children the true history of the Americas.

By Marilu Lopez Fretts - Tim Johnson, Associate Director for Museum Programs, the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian

In this undertaking, I cannot overstate the importance of what José Martí, the Cuban poet and thinker, wrote in his 1891 manifesto, “Our America.” He stated, “The American intelligence is an Indian headdress.”  What Martí was saying grew out of his observation that human progress must not only factor in economic considerations, but must also include social, cultural, and familial dimensions. He came to this understanding by listening to what Indians had to say.

I think one could even venture to say that the future belongs to the American Indian. That might sound a bit grandiose and perhaps ethnocentric, but it emerges from Native cultural perspectives and underscores the relevance of Native knowledge and experience in the world today. In order to survive, the world will have to arrive at many of the same principles, values and social life-ways of Native cultures, which will produce a more balanced way of living for the future.

On Dec. 1, 2002, I spoke with Chickasaw astronaut John Herrington while he was circling the globe in the space shuttle Endeavour. I was at the end of a phone line in a log cabin on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, Canada, and Commander Herrington was hundreds of miles above the Earth, at that moment hurtling over the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America.

Prior to Herrington’s historic odyssey, I sat with editors at Indian Country Today to determine the questions we would ask him during the in-flight interview NASA had granted the newspaper.  Mission Control allowed only enough time for about six questions. Access to the communications feed was narrow, given the speed of the Endeavour. In addition, several news agencies were bundled up in a queue. As a result, we put a good deal of thought into the questions we would ask.

We considered technical questions concerning Herrington’s responsibilities for construction on the space station and the hazardous business of space walking, and what it meant to him to become the loftiest of all Indian steelworkers.  We considered questions about his example as a role model to thousands of Indian children who were tracking his voyage from schools across the hemisphere. We considered, and eventually asked, a question about NASA’s prohibition of his bringing along tobacco, which is used in ceremonies by many Native peoples. But, ultimately, we decided the first question needed to address the philosophical or spiritual nature of the experience.

“Commander Herrington,” I said, “please describe as best you can what you are seeing and feeling as you look down upon our Mother Earth from the Skyworld.”

With characteristic humility and eloquence, traits which have endeared him to the American public, Herrington spoke of humans finding themselves living on a remarkable life-giving planet set in the midst of the vastness of the universe.

He spoke of the grandeur of the Earth and observed how thin the atmosphere appeared by comparison. He reflected upon how minor human beings seemed in the larger scope of things. And he talked, clearly with awe, about his realization of the “grand scheme” of our living earth. He spoke as one of the relative few to ever occupy such a remarkable vantage point.

Our conversation was emblematic of the distance Indian peoples had traveled, both figuratively and literally, in our related struggles to keep our ongoing stories alive. For the newspaper, connecting to outer space from a log cabin on Indian Territory was intentional. Its purpose was to reveal the powerful adherence Native peoples have to place, to our lands of the Western Hemisphere, and to symbolically express the numerous cultural entreaties made from our lands, over millennia, to the great unknown.

Herrington’s reverence at the vision that appeared before him, combined with his inclination to appreciate its complexity, was not dissimilar to the fundamental propositions that serve as a foundation to American Indian cultural inquiry, to Indian thinking.

Let us all strive to fly as high as Commander Herrington, with dignity and purpose, toward educational enlightenment.

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Tim Johnson, who is Mohawk, is associate director for museum programs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. The American Indian News Service is an outreach of the National Museum of the American Indian. All content is free to publish or post. Email the editor at editor@americanindiannews.org. Visit the American Indian News Service at www.americanindiannews.org.

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Photo by Leonda Levchuk, Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian Cherry-dusted sea scallops from the Mitsitam Cafe at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

Cherry-dusted sea scallops, with roasted-garlic potato hash and cherry reduction, is an elegant dinner that can be made year round, but is never more suitable than in the sweet months between cherry blossoms and cherries ripening.

Cherry-dusted sea scallops, roasted garlic and potato hash with cherry reduction, serves 4

Ingredients

12 sea scallops

1 cup dried cherries

3 oz. olive oil

2-3 medium Yukon Gold potatoes, diced small

4 cloves roasted garlic

3 tbsp. cornstarch

Note:  For roasted garlic, place garlic cloves with about 2 tbsp. vegetable oil on a roasting pan in a 350-degree oven for 8-10 minutes or until golden brown.

For sauce

2 cups cherry juice

½ cup red wine vinegar

½ cup sugar

To prepare cherry dust

1. Lightly coat dried cherries with cornstarch and place in a 200-degree oven overnight, about 12-14 hours.
2. Remove from oven and let cool completely at room temperature.
3. Puree in coffee grinder and set aside. (Note: If cherries still feel like they have a lot of moisture in them, dry for longer in oven.)

To prepare sauce

1. In a medium sauce pan, add in all ingredients, bring to a boil, reduce by three-fourths and cool completely (should be the consistency of syrup; if too thick thin with more cherry juice).

To prepare potato hash

1. Heat a medium non-stick sauté pan with 2 tbsp. of olive oil.
2. Mash the roasted garlic in the saute pan with a wooden spoon or spatula.
3. Add diced potatoes and sauté until potatoes are golden brown and soft through.
4. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

To prepare scallops

1. Heat a medium non-stick sauté pan with 1 tbsp. of olive oil.
2. Season the scallops with salt and pepper, and lightly dust with cherry dust. Sear scallops for 2 to 2 1/2 minutes per side.
3. Remove scallops from pan. Let rest for 1 minute before plating up.

To plate up (7-inch round plate or a plate of your choosing)

1. Using a 1 ½-inch ring mold in the center of the plate, fill with potato hash and pack down with a spoon.
2. Lightly drizzle about 1½ ounces of the cherry sauce on the plate. Then place the seared scallops as if on the face of a clock at four, eight and 12. Serve warm.

Courtesy of the 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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Photo by Katherine Fogden, Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian Leila Butts, as August Jackson, hands a bundle of sage to David H. Sawyer, who plays her uncle Craig Robe in the production “Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

Playwright William S. Yellow Robe Jr. draws a story of adult siblings, descendants of an African-American Civil War cavalryman and a Native woman, who find themselves driven apart by their mixed feelings about their blended heritage.

At its core, “Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers” is a love story. It begins with the grandparents, who find love and leave their respective peoples to start a family together, and continues with their modern descendents, who renew their love for each other and themselves.

“Whenever you hear a story about the Buffalo Soldier, it becomes that the Indian woman was raped,” said Yellow Robe, 50.  “There is no conception that these people might have been in love and that they were leaping into new relationships.”

Indian tribes in the West have a complex history with Buffalo Soldiers, who were all-African-American units in the U.S. Army. Tribes gave them the name “buffalo.” But the soldiers were assigned by the U.S. government to subjugate tribes, making them enemies to many. Still, in some instances, Indian women and African-American soldiers married.

For their descendants, prejudice isn’t only historic, as eldest brother Craig Robe explains in the play: “I saw myself through eyes that weren’t mine, then I got on my own and saw myself different.”

Yellow Robe, like his characters, is Assiniboine and also descended from these African-American cavalrymen.

The production is presented by the museum in conjunction with its exhibition, “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas.”

“This is an opportunity to provide our audiences with greater insight into the IndiVisible exhibition, and to allow the local African-Native American community to share their story on stage through Bill’s words in the play,” said the museum’s Vincent Scott, who is directing the play.

Scott began reading Yellow Robe’s plays in the early 1990s when Scott was teaching at Fort Peck Community College on the reservation in Northeastern Montana, where the playwright is from. Since then, Scott has wanted to direct Yellow Robe’s work because of its themes of heartache and hope. Now Scott said the museum can bring these stories to the public.

“For myself it is an ongoing process of acceptance; there are moments of good and bad,” said Yellow Robe, who divides his time between writing and teaching literature at University of Maine.

Yellow Robe finds forgiving a necessary part of dealing with history, without forgetting the unique ways his family blended traditional Assiniboine and African-American culture. That synergy gives texture to his life and work like bannock and pork-neck bone, or corn soup and spare ribs, or R. Carlos Nakai and Duke Ellington.

At the museum, the play has inspired sharing among the cast and crew about the universality of knowing and respecting one’s family ancestry, said Scott. He hopes that will resonate with audience members, too.

“Discussions during break times often occur among cast and crew that allow opportunities for company members to share their own experiences of living with mixed heritages or being tribal members,” Scott said.

While the characters in the play confront the different ways in which they have dealt with their mixed-race heritage, there is one character, a young niece, who embraces her whole identity, proudly dancing in regalia, and giving her family hope.

“There are a lot of Native families in Montana who have come up to me and said, ‘That’s our story,’” Yellow Robe said. “The play itself is now reaching communities where people are now facing this reality, because to live in denial is the worst.”

Yellow Robe, who hopes someday to move home again to the Fort Peck Reservation, reflected, “It’s like the old people used to say: We are related to the world.”

View the “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas” exhibition online at www.americanindian.si.edu/exhibitions/indivisible

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By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

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