[gentle piano music]
- I was born and raised Kiowa,
but I was living on the Shoshone side
of the Wind River Reservation in Fort Washakie, Wyoming.
This is my palette.
There are certain things that I--
Oh, that's right, I'm making this guy pink.
All my friends were all Shoshone,
and I went to high school with the busload of Shoshone kids
that was driven into town to go to the white high school.
I definitely knew that I was not from there.
The way that we dressed when we danced,
which was a really big social event
when the powwows would happen, and the style of the dance.
My father is white, so I'm half Indian and I'm half white.
I was definitely an outsider.
The nature of the piece
dictates what kind of hide I'm going to use.
Some of the hides have bloodstains on 'em,
which I kind of like, and some of 'em don't.
Some of 'em are scarred up and some of 'em are smooth,
depending on what the animal went through.
And depending on what the piece is about,
that's what I decide, how,
what part of the hide I want to use.
On that reservation, my mother had a trading post,
and in that trading post, she sold bead work.
And it was a variety of designs and design elements
and aesthetic from all over the United States.
And it was crawling around behind her cases
full of moccasins and whatever that I grew up.
She let us take some of the big plastic beads
when we were really little, about five years old,
and we would string them onto wire
and make her these giant necklaces
and these giant earrings that
there's no way she could get them through her ears.
But then when I was about eight years old,
I really wanted to learn how to do the bead work that I saw,
with the small beads and everything.
I was hooked from that point on.
Most of the work I do now are stories.
The stories just depend on who,
what I'm doing or what I'm interested in at the time.
When my first child was born,
I became very aware of the fact of how very little I knew
about Kiowa stories and Kiowa history.
So consequently,
there was a whole two or three years there
where the subject matter,
the storylines of almost everything that I was doing
was either mythological, Kiowa mythological,
or historical in some way.
This was my mother's everyday purse.
It's really worn, but this was, this is where she,
when she went to the grocery store
or to office supply place or whatever,
this was the purse that she carried when I was a child.
One of the purses that she carried.
See, this is that Shoshone bead work, the pictorial stuff.
This is what I grew up with.
- Some of those bags are probably like the 1920s and '30s
and a couple of 'em,
I commissioned artists to make them for me.
Almost all the beads in this bag are very old.
You can no longer get those.
- This pink is an old pink, isn't it?
- Mm-hmm, and that pink.
And what I liked too was how they put colors together.
Who would have thought to put a pink mane on a horse?
Pink legs, pink tail, and pink spots, but it works.
[thread pulling]
- Making the leap onto non-traditional objects
was probably a gift of being an outsider
because I didn't feel, necessarily,
the strictness of having to adhere
to what was proper or correct.
My rules are, is that I try to use traditional techniques
and traditional materials.
Meaning I only use brain-tanned deer hide,
I do not use commercial tanned hide on anything.
Even if you can't see it, even if I fully beaded something
and I could have used canvas underneath it,
I will still use the brain-tanned deer hide
underneath it, because to me it's important
that the spirit of that animal is in it.
And there's something about that to me,
that's comforting or important.
At least, at minimum, it's important.
And so while I'm a stickler for the materials
and the techniques, the form has changed.
And pictorially, what I'm able to,
what I feel like it's okay for me to illustrate
is definitely, probably not
what you would consider traditional.
A pair of beaded tennis shoes came into my mother's shop
in Fort Washakie when my sister and I,
when I was about maybe 13 years old.
And I thought they were the most fantastic things
I had ever seen in my life.
I loved them.
Later on, when I was in college in California,
my mother called me up and said,
"Why don't you make a pair of beaded tennis shoes?"
And I thought she was crazy
because it seemed like such an insane amount of work.
At that point,
I didn't make much more than a belt buckle.
And it was then that I realized
that I wasn't bound by the technique,
that linear technique.
That's when I realized that
I could actually could read the shoe.
You could read around the shoe
and that the shoes didn't have to match each other.
Why did they have to match?
You could tell the same story, but more sides of the story
by using the entire shoe and looking at it as an object,
more than as a pair of shoes.
[upbeat drumming music]
The black shoes are called Sun Boys.
The Sun Boys are mythical characters among the Kiowa.
And I realized my sons
were really interested in comic book heroes,
specifically the Spider-Man movies had just come out
and they were all about the Spider-Man.
And I realized that we had our own heroes.
That's based on that archetypal hero story
of an orphan child with special powers.
And that's the Sun Boys.
That is our half boy story, that Kiowa half boy story.
And I realized that my children didn't know that story
and they needed to know it.
My mother is my litmus test
because I figure that if my mother
can understand what I'm doing, whether she gets it visually,
whether there's any kind of problems with it
or whether it makes her laugh, if it's a humorous piece,
it has to be understood from a Native point of view.
The umbrella was really my first try
at telling a long narrative story.
So there are like six of these panels
that when you pull it apart, I was like, well,
this is perfect for telling a story, telling a narrative.
So I did a parade scene on it.
Usually there's a parade during most powwows.
It's the piece that really started my career.
What took me many years to call myself,
which is an artist.
The right to vote piece is,
and how Native people got the right to vote.
In 1924, that vote came to us
because Native men in very large numbers,
though they were not citizens,
fought for the U.S. government in Europe.
The way the Indian people teach,
you wait for the child to show interest in something
and if they do, then you pursue it with the child.
You never say, "You're gonna play violin,
"and you're gonna take violin lessons
and you're gonna become a violin player."
It's not like that.
It's like, "He's interested in learning these songs?
"All right, come to the drum with me
"and I'll teach you these songs and we'll sing them together.
And if you're interested, then you can hang here with us."
And that was what she was doing.
In her own way,
she was teaching us all this information
without us even knowing it.