Courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian “Meet Christopher”—the fourth title in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian’s illustrated series for 9- to 12-year-olds—introduces a young Osage boy from northeast Oklahoma.

Author Genevieve Simermeyer selected her cousin as the focus of the book, the fourth in the My World series published by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Christopher Cote lives in Skiatook, Okla., a town on the border of the Osage reservation. Simermeyer, who is the museum’s school programs manager, and Katherine Fogden, who is a museum photographer and Mohawk, traveled to Oklahoma to document Christopher’s life.

“I think what makes him interesting is that he is a lot like every other kid in his school,” Simermeyer said. “He’s in the band, he likes to play the trombone. He very much has a sense of not having to be only one thing or another. Participating in all the extracurricular activities doesn’t impinge on being an Osage person. They are all a part of who he is; he doesn’t feel like one thing is more important than the other.”

Christopher was 11 when the author began her research by chatting with him on the phone. Producing the book took over two years, and now Christopher is a freshman in high school. Simermeyer said he is proud to be the protagonist, and his family is proud of his willingness to share his life story.

But the book isn’t only about a boy, it’s also about his multigenerational Osage family. One scene describes Christopher going with his parents and older brother to Osage language class at the library. His family stopped routinely speaking Osage when his great-grandmother was a young girl.

The book explains, “One of our teachers, Mr. Lookout, told us that we are pioneers in re-learning Osage. Our class has people of all ages in it—kids, teenagers, adults and elders—and all of us are excited to be hearing and speaking our original language.”

Two other books received awards from the American Indian Library Association. Lurline Wailana McGregor’s “Between the Deep Blue Sea and Me: A Novel” (Kamehameha Publishing) was named Best Young Adult Book; and Thomas King’s “A Coyote Solstice Tale” (Groundwood Books), illustrated by Gary Clement, was named Best Picture Book.

“Meet Christopher: An Osage Indian Boy from Oklahoma” can be purchased by going to the museum’s website, at http://AmericanIndian.si.edu/MeetChristopher, or from Council Oak Books at www.counciloakbooks.com.

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By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

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By Katherine Fogden. New tastes are part of the "Power of Chocolate," a festival, which will be celebrated at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian on Feb. 13-14.

Mayans transplanted the cacao tree from the rainforest to their villages and fermented, dried and roasted its seeds to concoct a decidedly unsweet drink involving chilies and lots of froth.

The Aztec were drinking the bitter brew when the Spanish Conquistadors arrived in the 1520s. Although the Spaniards didn’t like the beverage, they hauled the cacao seeds back to Europe. A century later, when someone thought to add sugar—a luxury the ancient Mayans didn’t have—this indigenous American flavor became a lasting worldwide sensation.

Native ties to making chocolate continue into the 21^st century via Bedré Fine Chocolates, a company the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma bought in 2000. Bedré, sold in Neiman Marcus and Bloomingdale’s department stores, is particularly proud to provide the guitar-shaped chocolates to three of the Seminole Nation’s Hard Rock© hotels. Guests find the delicious products of the only Native American-owned chocolate company in the United States on their pillows.

At the Smithsonian’s Mitsitam Cafe, Hetzler likes to cook chocolate the old-school way, though with a twist. His Mexican hot chocolate is both sweet and spiced with pasilla peppers. And the Mitsitam’s Chocolate and Coconut Soup draws out the chocolate’s distinctive flavor with coconut milk, onions and pasilla negro chile peppers.

Hetzler will demonstrate cooking with chocolate during the museum’s “Power of Chocolate” festival on Feb. 13-14. The festival will travel back to the roots of chocolate with Bolivian cacao farmers and presentations about the history, mythology and art surrounding its origins.

Mitsitam Cafe shares the flavor, originally sipped with chilies by the Mayans, with two quick, tasty recipes.

The Mitsitam Cafe’s Chocolate and Coconut Soup, garnished with cocoa-dusted plantains

Serves 3-4

• 1 medium white onion, diced
• 2 medium shallots, diced
• 3 dried pasilla negro chile peppers
• 2 cups half-and-half
• 2 cups heavy cream
• 1 14-oz. can of coconut milk
• 8 oz. bittersweet chocolate (74 percent)

For garnish:

• 1 green plantain
• ¼ cup cocoa powder
• ¼ cup sugar

To prepare:

For the soup, sauté onions, shallots and the dried chiles until translucent. Add cream and half-and-half; bring to a boil. Remove from heat and add chocolate. Whisk until blended. Add coconut milk. Puree in blender. Season lightly with salt.

For garnish, peel a green plantain and slice fruit into thin discs. Lightly deep fry until crispy. Stir together cocoa and sugar, and use the mixture to lightly coat the fried plantain chips. Scatter the cocoa-coated chips atop each serving of soup.

The Mitsitam Cafe’s Mexican hot chocolate recipe

Serves 4-5

• 1 gallon milk
• ½ stick Mexican or regular cinnamon
• 3 arbol chilies
• 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.

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By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

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Illustration by Joe Poccia

Howard-Yana Shapiro, the global director of plant science and external research at Mars Incorporated, will give a talk about the mythology of chocolate and its relationship with indigenous peoples at 2 p.m. on both days.

Over his long career Shapiro has taught sustainable agriculture in universities, junior colleges and high schools throughout the United States. In documenting the oral history of seeds, he turned to the cacao bean—the basis of chocolate—and traced it through agricultural practices and archives to its roots in the cultures of the Mayans and their ancestors.

Shapiro is the co-author with Louis E. Grivetti of “Chocolate: History, Culture and Heritage” (Wiley, 2009), a book that takes a long look at the fascinating history of chocolate. Shapiro recently joined American Indian News Service editor Kara Briggs for a conversation about the Native American roots of chocolate.

Shapiro: From a domestic standpoint, chocolate really goes back only 1,500 years from the Mayans. The Olmecs, or however you refer to the people before the Mayans, are the ones who domesticated it. From a simple perspective, it’s a fairly recent crop, but because there has been so much complicated history about how it fits into mythology and the world story, it has really taken on this amazing role in culture.

Briggs: In your research you found stories about how cacao came to be sacred.

Shapiro: In the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico—where I was doing research on the Zapotecs and their use of cacao—it was so integrated into their lives, its preparation and its ceremonial use. There were myths about how the chocolate came into being. There is a Mayan myth about how it was like any other tree in the forest, then Christ appeared and he was persecuted by his enemies and he ran into the forest and took refuge under the cacao tree. When he touched it, the tree blossomed with white flowers, and the flowers covered him. He gave the tree to the people; they called it a tree of knowledge. Later when they used the cacao beans for money, it lost its power. There is another story that while the emperor was away, his enemies came and assaulted his wife. Still she wouldn’t tell them where the treasure was hidden. They killed her, so the cacao beans are bitter like suffering, and they are strong seeds like virtue.

Briggs: Is the history of the cacao bean tied to indigenous people both in its origins and in its ongoing cultivation, by indigenous peoples who live near the equator around the world?

Courtesy of Mars, Incorporated Howard-Yana Shapiro

Shapiro: When we consider chocolate was domesticated by the Olmecs, used by the Mayans, spread around the world by the Spanish, cultivated by the Ivoirians of West Africa and the Indonesians, it’s been inextricably linked to indigenous people for 1,500 years. The cacao tree is very susceptible to diseases. In history we find references shortly after the conquest of Mexico that the tree already showed signs of suffering from diseases, suffering because it didn’t have enough shade. In the 1,500 years when it was domesticated, it has suffered from disease.

Briggs: Is chocolate still a significant crop in the Americas? Is it still farmed? Is it still used culturally by Native peoples?

Shapiro: It’s significantly farmed in Brazil, which was the second-largest producer in the world until the late 1980s, when this disease called witches’ broom wiped out the production. West Africa produces 70 percent of the cacao crop. Indonesia and Brazil are coming back under different production models. It is grown a little in Mexico, Belize, Honduras and Panama. Farther south, there is a substantial production in Ecuador and Venezuela. Mexico absolutely is where its hold went beyond mythology to a central part of culture. In Oaxaca, and in Mexico City and Monterrey, on the Day of the Dead it is completely integrated in the culture. Even around Veracruz, the indigenous peoples are still very involved with cacao. I’ve seen necklaces strung of cacao beans and corn hung around the necks of church statues of the Virgin Mary and Christ. I’ve seen processions of people carrying strings of cacao beans on bamboo poles to be blessed by priests. In the Oaxacan lowlands, the Sierra highlands and the Sierra mountains, it is expected that you will be served hot chocolate made with water and sometimes chile in the mornings. There are ceremonies where they will add a froth on top, and that is an extreme honor.

Briggs: Is the chocolate bar the most common use of chocolate in the world?

Shapiro: The ubiquitous chocolate bars made by companies like Mars Incorporated, include its brands M&M’S®, SNICKERS® and others. Mars is the largest user of cacao beans. We source from all over the world. It’s hard to go somewhere where there hasn’t been a traditional use of chocolate, or else they are evolving it, like in China. China is developing a taste for chocolate.

Briggs: Eleven years ago, Mars Incorporated convened a meeting with the Smithsonian Institution and non-governmental organizations from around the world to talk about the role of the cacao tree in sustaining the tropics, and maybe sustaining the peoples of the tropics.

Shapiro: Out of that meeting, Mars developed a program to encourage best practices in farming the cacao tree. In West Africa, we do it through the sustainable tree program. Since June 6, 2006, we have been sequencing the cacao genome. The findings are being put in the public domain and they won’t be able to be patented. That is unique in the world of agricultural research.

Briggs: What does this mean for cacao farmers, who as we’ve said are indigenous from many regions of the world, and who are small farmers, who eke out a living from this globally-traded, fragile crop.

Shapiro: In modern times we assumed there were only three genetic structures of the cacao tree. Over the centuries people bred these and didn’t make other selections. Over the last 15 months, we discovered that there are 10 genetic structures of the cacao, and there is a potential to add to the gene pool. All those things point to the potential to strengthen this fragile tree that is cultivated by indigenous people around the world, but is linked to the GNPs (gross national product) of countries. It is 30 percent of the GNP of the Ivory Coast and 20 percent of the GNP of Ghana. It is more valuable in modern times than gold, and it is dependant on 6.5 million small farmers around the world, working an average of 2.5 hectares (about 6 acres) of land each.

Briggs: Mars Incorporated is the largest buyer of cacao beans in the world, and since 2002 it has set a goal of buying cacao beans which have been certified to have been grown using best practices.

Shapiro: When we started, there were probably only 20,000 metric tons of sustainably-grown cacao beans available globally. Now there are probably over one million metric tons that you would call certifiable. Mars is forming a coalition of the largest chocolate companies, and with these partnerships, it is likely that the idea of sustainability will soon sweep the chocolate world. The result—that farmers will have better yield and better productivity, matched with the social issues—is amazing to consider. A farmer should be able to triple his yield with good agronomy, and to get out of the kind of marginal life we imagine in North Africa. With a triple yield, the farmer should be able to get out of the poverty cycle

Briggs: Does chocolate, which began in its earliest-known use as a sacred plant, still carry some of that importance even in other cultures? I ask considering the deep feelings that people express through the giving of chocolate?

Shapiro: In Central Sulawesi, a state in Indonesia, in a town that has been built largely on the success of cacao farming, there is a statue, a set of hands 18 to 20 feet high which hold a giant cacao pod. I’ve seen metaphors like that on different scales everywhere. Chocolate is one of the great stories of the world. Unlike corn or wheat that can be grown on a large scale, cacao will always be a crop for small, indigenous farmers. Even if we can make the crop more robust, it will still be a tropical plant, grown in forests as an understory plant. You can’t get to it by tractors, you can only harvest it with the human hand.

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By Walt Pourier, Nakota Designs, Inc. The All Nations Skate Jam is held in the Los Altos Skate Park in Albuquerque, N.M., on the same weekend as the Gathering of Nations Powwow.

Skateboarding is an indigenous American sport, said curator Betsy Gordon. Using historic and contemporary photos, the exhibition explores the Native skateboard movement.

Skateboards were born of Hawaiian surf culture, rooted in ancient traditions of the Polynesian islands. Surfers figure in the Hawaiian Islands’ ancient petroglyphs. The 2001 documentary “Dogtown and Z-Boys,” narrated by Sean Penn, tells the story of the young skaters in Santa Monica, Calif., in the 1970s who evolved modern skateboarding by borrowing the styles of renowned Native Hawaiian surfer Larry Bertlemann.

“Larry Bertlemann started surfing in a remarkable way,” Gordon said. “He had a low-slung way, aggressively darting in and out of the waves. There were a group of surfers who wanted to emulate what Larry was doing on his surfboard, and they did it on skateboards.”

American Indian kids followed the trends, skating on homemade ramps and paved parking lots. As the Native skaters of the 1970s and 1980s matured, they looked to skateboarding as a way to promote a healthy lifestyle and culture among Native young people.

In the past decade, several small Native-owned skateboard companies have emerged, such as Jim Murphy’s Wounded Knee Skateboards in the New York City borough of Queens.

“The reason I am doing this company is not to make money, except to keep it going so when I go to Wounded Knee, I can take boards,” said Murphy, who was a pro skateboarder in the 1980s and is of Lenni Lenape descent. “I know what it is to grow up poor, and what a difference it makes when I can give a board away to a kid who I know can’t afford it.”

Native skateboarders have been putting culturally significant designs on skateboard decks almost from the beginning. Many of the skateboards feature Native graphics like big eagle feathers and medicine wheels.

In recent years, new skate parks are being built at reservations across the country, including Cheyenne River Sioux in Eagle Butte, S.D.; Osage Nation in Pawhuska, Okla.; and Gila River Indian Community in Sacaton, Ariz. Some communities report a decline in crime after establishing the parks, which offer tribal youth something fun to do, Murphy said.

One central place the Native skate community gathers is the All Nations Skate Jam, held every year at the same time as the Gathering of Nations Powwow in Albuquerque, N.M. It attracts hundreds of American Indian kids who glide and fly on their skateboards while friends and families watch. With pro skaters offering demonstrations in a festival atmosphere over two days, the jam drew nearly 1,000 registrants last April.

“Once they start skateboarding,” said Murphy, of Wounded Knee Skateboards, “they are part of a global community.”

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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 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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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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Photo by Graham F. Page, courtesy Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. Jimi Hendrix, the Royal Albert Hall, London, Feb. 18, 1969.

Hendrix—who not only identified himself as Cherokee but also performed at Woodstock in buckskin, and elsewhere wearing a hand-beaded jacket—is featured in an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian called “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas.”

Ron Welburn, a Native poet and English professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who contributed a chapter to the book accompanying the exhibition, explains that the roots of the blues lie deep in Native America. It was the blues guitar that Hendrix taught himself as a young man.

The blues were born at a unique moment in history when the slave trade and colonization of the American South forced people and their musical traditions together, he said. The blues came to life on the Tuscarora Indian trails that the Underground Railroad followed across the Niagara River to the Six Nations and freedom, said Elaine Bomberry, host of “Rez Bluez,” a show on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network in Canada.

The blues peculate up from the soil of the experience of stolen peoples and stolen lands.

“There are things (in blues music) that say to me that someone knows something about stomp dancing,” said Welburn, who is Gingaskin and Assateague, Cherokee and African American. “It’s the call-and-response phrasing, and the length of the statement, which may be longer than the response.”

The chika-ching syncopation, pioneered in jazz by innovative Mohawk and African drummer Jesse Price, sounds much like the bells or deer hooves that Native dancers wear. As Oscar Pettiford, the Cherokee, Choctaw and African-American bandleader, told  Jazz Times in 1960, it’s jazz attempting over and over to render an American Indian beat.

Or as Carlos Santana said in 1995 to “UniVibes,” a Hendrix fanzine, “Most music comes from Indian reservations,” from cultural and spiritual practices interpreted by “just two people—Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley, you know.”

Late in his life, Hendrix drew on these Native roots for help.

Hendrix traveled to the Tuscarora reservation in New York to seek a cure for sleeping problems with medicine man Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson, said nephew Wray Anderson. The elder Anderson agreed to help Hendrix obtain a cure, but told the musician he would have to give up his prescription drugs. Hendrix set a time to return after the Isle of Wight Festival in England in 1970. He died before he could.

As the exhibition’s text muses, “Out of the struggles and triumphs, African-Native American people have created cultural innovations by bringing together sensibilities from two ancient and beloved continents. By ‘eating out of the same pot,’ delicious cultural fusions arise, such as gumbo and the blues.”

View the exhibition online at www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/indivisible/ or buy the book at www.nmai.si.edu/subpage.cfm?subpage=shop&second=books&third=IndiVisible.

Hendrix at Woodstock

By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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Courtesy of Kim Cournoyer North Dakota’s Standing Rock High School Band performs on the back of a flatbed truck.

An urban Indian, Cournoyer was raised in the Chicago suburbs, far from the rural reservation of her forbears, which straddles the border of North and South Dakota. But the University of South Dakota-trained clarinetist had a dream of starting an all-Indian high school band.

“I believe the students need to embrace their culture, kind of like I did,” said Cournoyer, 45, who is Standing Rock Sioux, like most of her students.

American Indian marching bands emerged in the boarding-school era, when students were trained in European musical instruments and patriotic marches. From the 1930s through the 1950s, dozens of Indian nations had their own marching bands made up of musicians trained in boarding schools. A few of these bands survive, such as the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe Band of Arizona and Nevada, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2006.

But today all-Indian high school bands are rare, said Georgia Wettlin-Larsen, director of the First Nations Composer Initiative. Musical education, beyond culturally-based drumming and singing, is almost nonexistent in tribal schools, she said. That makes Cournoyer’s program both distinctive and important.

The high cost of music instruction is a common barrier, but the Standing Rock Sioux community, where unemployment hovers around 70 percent, does not let that stand in the band’s way. The school district buys all the instruments, although the band lacks marching harnesses, equipment to support massive instruments such as tubas.

“We don’t have tubas, so I substitute with bass lines,” Cournoyer explained. “What we do is get a flatbed truck, we put a generator on there, we plug in the electric bass, and we play.”

In the 10 years since the band started—with 14 kids—nearly 100 percent of the band members have graduated. Some of them have used the discipline gained from learning to play music to go to two- or four-year colleges.

This year the band began a collaboration with Courtney Yellow Fat, the lead singer of Grammy-nominated powwow drum group Lakota Thunder and a culture and language teacher at Standing Rock Middle School.

Cournoyer worked with Yellow Fat to as she wrote sheet music for an ancient Lakota song so her student band could play it. The song, “The Land You Fear,” which originated before Columbus landed in the Americas, had not been written down before, like much indigenous music.

“That song was meant for a warrior to go off to war and not have any fear,” Yellow Fat said. “In contemporary times, we put out a warrior who must be a well-rounded person, who must be a warrior for the people.”

The New York debut of the song came at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, with Cournoyer playing the cedar flute, Yellow Fat singing and the band playing.

It is the band teacher’s prayer that her students, as the ancient song says, will learn to walk with victory, instead of fear: “I want them to know that this world is bigger than they think it is, and that they are capable of so much more than they think they are.”

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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.