By Craig Bailey, Perspective Photos - Martha Redbone in performance at Hopestock: Music to bail out your soul, a 2009 concert series.

Redbone is an independent artist who is as likely to include a powwow drum as she is jazz riffs in her highly danceable music. Her second album, “Skintalk,” is a sophisticated blend that is powered not by electronics but by a funk-rock band of veteran musicians. Released in 2005, she has toured behind it for five years—pausing only to have a son in 2008—bringing her songs to the indie-music scene in New York City and to festivals on reservations and across the U.S.

“Because we released it independently, it gave people more chance to discover it,” she said. “It is like a new album in each new community that we visited.”

In 2011, a new album, continuing in the danceable soul style of “Skintalk” and recorded with all live instruments, is planned for release.

“Martha has two sides to her, on her father’s side a lot of R&B and soul,” said her husband Aaron Whitby. “We are trying to put that together with some relevant messages and ethical messages, and with her mother’s heritage.”

Redbone, who grew up in Brooklyn and calls herself a mixed blood, Cherokee, Shawnee and Choctaw on her mother’s side, and African American on her father’s. She was in art school, drawing cartoons for George Clinton & the P-Funk All Stars’ Mothership Reconnection project, when she was coaxed in front of a microphone and, as she says, “fell into singing.” She went on to sing background vocals on Clinton’s 1996 album, “T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. (The Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mothership).”

Her British-born husband has been her friend and her producing and song-writing partner since they were in their early 20s. That was when the music industry first took notice of their talent.

As a young artist rooted in Otis Redding, Earth, Wind & Fire, and the stomp dance songs of her mother’s tribes, Redbone already had this vision for blending musical traditions. Whitby, a jazz pianist who toured Europe in jazz bands, brought the third ingredient into their musical gumbo. The sheer talent she and Whitby displayed on a demo drew the attention of the recording industry.

“I’ll tell you what happened, we had a really powerful manager at the time,” she said.  “He didn’t like the fact that I wanted to include my culture into my music. He didn’t understand. ‘You sing soul music, you sing R&B,’ he said. ‘No one cares about that kind of thing.’”

Whitby says he was probably the biggest manager in America then, but things ground to a halt.

“When he said, ‘Drop the Indian (influences)’ we decided to go on our own. We said, ‘We’ve already written our record and we write for other people too,’” Whitby said. “We have the right talent, but I don’t think we were the right personalities for that world.”

As songwriters and studio musicians they joined Warner/Chappell Music, writing songs including chart topper “Don’t Push” in both Canada and France sung by Jazmin and “Love is the Deepest Hurt” recorded by British Grammy winner Shola Ama. They turned down a year-and-a-half long tour with the band Simply Red, choosing to continue on as artists and writer/producers.

In 2000, Redbone released the solo album, “Home of the Brave” on Blackfeet Productions, a record label which she and Whitby co-founded. The album won her the Best Debut Artist award at the Native American Music Awards and Indian Summer Music Award for Best Pop Album. Backed by a tight funk and pop band of veteran New York musicians, Redbone’s powerful Native-infused soul delivery and social commentary won her accolades in the indie music world. The Village Voice called her an “heiress to such luminaries as Sly, Philippe Wynne and Roberta Flack.” Billboard’s Larry Flick wrote that, “She sounds the kind of artist who sets trends, a true original.”

“It’s really important that there are people like me representing and telling our stories to the world,” Redbone said, “regardless of MTV. Not that I would turn my nose up to a No. 1 or Top 10 song, but not at any cost. I am not prepared to put a headdress on and dance.”

“Sharing the Dream: A Multicultural Celebration of Love & Justice” will be held at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian on Jan. 15 and 16. It is a celebration of the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The festival is an event of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, Latino Center and National Museum of the American Indian. Martha Redbone is one of the many artists invited because of their expressions of love and justice through their music, spoken-word and storytelling performances.

Redbone’s heritage guides her life.

When after a performance at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival she met Brenda Dardar-Robichaux, then the principle chief of the United Houma Nation, and heard about the tribe’s efforts to share culture with their youth. Redbone offered to help, and for the last four summers she has traveled to this bayou nation where she shares songs that are culturally relevant to Houma’s six to 12-year-olds. Some songs are Choctaw, some in Houma French, and others are just beautiful when sung with a hand drum, Robichaux said.

“She is so gifted and talented, and she uses her gift not for self promotion, but to give to others,” Robichaux said. “It is evident in her coming to Louisiana and teaching our kids, she is not about promoting Martha Redbone. When she comes to camp she is out there, whether it’s serving food or cleaning up. It is not uncommon for me to receive phone calls from her. She is constantly brainstorming how she can help not only the Houma but youth across Indian Country.”

Redbone remembers where her name came from; it was a derogatory word from her youth for someone of mixed black and Native ancestry. As an adult, she embraced being mixed race, interpreting her father’s love of soul music and her mother’s Native heritage into who she is.

The “Skintalk” album’s “Children of Love” starts with a powwow drum led by Dennis Banks, Ojibwe, and a rap by Gyasi Ross, Blackfeet, that dissolves into a mid-tempo groove, but runs underneath and rises to the surface between verses. The purpose, she said, was to draw people into Native culture and music. The effect was provocative, even political. The song became a soul hit in Europe and England, where, she said, “they don’t even know that Indian people are still here.” Most people liked the powwow drum, but some didn’t. Still Whitby and Redbone stand by their vision of blending musical traditions.

Redbone’s hybridization of soul, R&B and Native music is in the tradition of contemporary artists like Keith Secola and Bill Miller, and it is a vision shared by Whitby.  He likes to quote legendary producer Quincy Jones, who said there are only 12 notes in a scale, or only so far that each style of music can go before it runs out of fresh material.  “The only way forward,” Whitby said, “is to make new hybridizations.”

“I think the Native American perspective is different,” Whitby said, “more interesting. As another way of putting it, it is real folk music, made for the people by the people without the help of corporations. It is really from the community, and that gives it some real legs.”

Still in Redbone’s hands it is also pop music in the best sense of that expression. Redbone credits the work ethic that has kept her and Whitby creating for 17 years, and making choices that were anti-intuitive. It’s work that she plans to expand with more albums, with more styles of music, more types of writing.

“You can turn on the television and see people who want to be famous for nothing,” she said. “People do something ridiculous and then they are on Oprah and writing a book about it. I look at it that this way, how is this going to look 20 years from now. I live my life that way.”

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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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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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