by Emily Potter-Ndiaye
Margot Lurie (she/her) graduated from Amherst College in 2021 with a degree in Environmental Studies. She is currently working as the Green Dean in Amherst’s Office of Sustainability, and will begin a PhD program in Sociology at the University of Chicago in the fall of 2022.
Manuela Picq’s spring 2021 course, Indigenous Women, partnered with the Mead to develop interventions that would amplify and visibilize work by indigenous women artists in the museum’s collection. These interventions were conceived of by the students, after a class meeting and workshop with me, and Mead Education Coordinator, Zoe Sasson. Zoe introduced students to artwork by Dyani White Hawk (Lakota/Sičháŋǧu Oyáte) and Andrea Carlson (Anishinaabe/Ojibwe). The Mead purchased these prints (Wačháŋtognaka | Nurture, Nakíčižiŋ | Protect and Exit– as part of student-involved acquisitions program known as Collecting 101: Acquiring Art for the Mead, in January 2020. In the workshop, we introduced students to the types of museum projects that the Mead had ongoing, especially those for which it would be possible, in a short burst to challenge traditional museum taxonomies and practices, which invisibilize indigenous knowledge and creative work. The students then developed a range of interventions aimed at making those visible. These included adding tags with the indigenous place names and information to the museum database to enhance the discoverability of collections; developing more culturally responsive labels for artworks; drafting lesson plans for K-12 learners, and, here, a podcast. Margot Lurie interviewed Dyani White Hawk about her work and process.
Listen here.
TRANSCRIPT Margot Lurie (ML): When the Smithsonian Institute organized the first national exhibition to showcase the artistic achievements of Indigenous women, it wrote: “Women have long been the creative force behind Native American art, yet their individual contributions have been largely unrecognized, instead treated as anonymous representations of entire cultures.” The Mead art museum at Amherst College was not immune to this tendency toward erasure; much of the work by Indigenous women currently in the museum’s collection has not been attributed properly or recognized as art in its own right. In January of 2020, the Mead started to right this historical wrong when it acquired work by two Indigenous women, Ojibwe artist Andrea Carlson and Lakota artist Dyani White Hawk. My name is Margot Lurie and I am a senior at Amherst College; I recently had the opportunity to speak with Sičáŋǧu Lakota visual artist Dyani White Hawk about her work and the importance of having Indigenous women’s artwork in the Mead. My conversation with White Hawk follows. ML: Would you just introduce yourself for our audience? Dyani White Hawk (DWH): Sure. My name is Dyani White Hawk. I am a visual artist, I'm Sičáŋǧu Lakota, through my 'iná, through my mom, German and Welsh American through my dad. I say visual artist, because although I feel like my studio practice is really founded in painting and it kind of branches off from there and it includes really a strong combination of the practices of abstraction, drawn both from longstanding practices of Lakota abstraction in the forms of beadwork and quillwork and painted parfleche work and also from the history of easel painting abstraction. ML: So the Mead, as you know, acquired two pieces from your series, Takes Care of Them. They're all print representations of Lakota dentalium dresses. I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about the inspiration for that work and what those four pieces mean to you. DWH: The body of work at large, you know it’s, you have two of the four. It is from a suite that is created intentionally to have four pieces, and the title speaks to the collective purpose of the work. So Takes Care of Them, speaks to the ways that the women in our communities and that our feminine relatives collectively care for our communities at large. And that is, the emphasis on collective is really important because it's not just mom, it's not just grandma. It's not, it's, it's the combination of mother, grandma, aunty, cousin, sister, all of those relationships and the way that our women, specifically when we're referring to the individual titles of each piece, these, the titles of each dress representation speak to just four of the ways that our women collectively care for us. But there are many ways. So the way that they lead, the way they create, the way they protect, the way they nurture us. ML: Yeah I actually wanted to ask a little bit more about their titles, because I know each piece has both a Lakota name and an English name. I was wondering for the two pieces that are in the Mead, which are Nurture and Protect, could you talk a little bit about their Lakota titles and what those mean to you that go beyond just like those English words? DWH: Some of them are more direct translations and some of them are more translated concepts. Nakíčižiŋ is more to defend, so, or to be in the defense of someone or something. So it's not a direct protect-protect, but it's, yeah, to be in defense of or to, to, to defend you, to defend them and that the dragonfly symbol on that dress is an illustration or representation of that. So dragonflies in our communities are looked at as some of the first warriors or the some of the original akicitas, or, or protectors. So that's what that piece speaks to and what that title speaks to. And then Wačháŋtognaka, the word nurture, there isn't a direct translation for that word, like I you know was in conversation with an aunty of mine and looking through the dictionary and thinking through that and we couldn't find, like that word doesn't directly translate. So the title here is, this word speaks to generosity, sympathy, compassion, affection, kind of at large, which are concepts that I relate to nurture. ML: So the last thing I wanted to ask you is, for someone who is actually visiting the Mead Art Museum, let's say they're looking at these two pieces, like, what do you hope that they know about them or what do you want them to know about these pieces? DWH: I guess a couple things that I would hope folks would think about would be recognizing the contributions of Native art to the artistic history of this land base, so, and the importance and the relevance of that. You know, Native art and aesthetics has had an influential role on the development of art on this continent. But it's not taught and it's not centralized and prioritized in mainstream academia and education in the way that I feel it should be. Nor are Indigenous people in mainstream narratives in really regards to anything. So, a lot of the works that I create, I create them large. Not all of them, but a lot of them, with the intentionality of making sure that they are seen. Making sure they're honored and recognized in our artistic spaces as having equal value to anything else in that space and any other person and any other artistic contribution within those spaces. So these two pieces are representations of the artistic history of this land. I want people to take that away. I want them to understand the value and the worth in that and the beauty in that and celebrate that, you know? ML: Well, thank you. And we really appreciate you and your work so much. Thank you for listening to my conversation with Sičáŋǧu Lakota visual artist Dyani White Hawk. You can find two of her prints, Nurture and Protect, at the Mead Art Museum.