- My friend, Jill Ahlberg Yohe, asked me
if I would like to co-curate an exhibition
of Native American women's art, and I said yes immediately.
I'm Kiowa.
I was born on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.
I grew up in my mother's trading post.
Native women were coming in
and selling her beadwork, textiles, pottery.
All of those traditional materials were made by women.
This exhibit for me was an extension of my mother's work,
to go directly to Native women themselves
and ask them questions about their art.
We decided that we needed multiple voices involved.
We chose 21 women,
artists, makers, scholars,
to help us understand
what this exhibit was gonna be about,
and what was gonna be in it.
Native women are quite used to doing this as a group,
working together in our communities to get things done.
This is how we've survived all this time.
And this is democracy.
Hearts of our People is the first exhibit
that has shown the expanse of time,
from pre-history through the present,
that gives us that line in the canon, that length of voice
that shows these women's contributions over time.
- Carla Hemlock: For years,
I just kept dreaming of this coat.
What is it gonna look like?
Finally, I said, "I think I'm ready to do it."
[chuckles]
I come from a people who are known
as the Iroquois Confederacy,
and we have six nations within our Confederacy:
the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas,
Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution
were well aware of the Iroquois Confederacy,
and Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine,
went to see how this democratic political system that we had
put checks and balances on the leadership.
And they took those principles
and put it into the U.S. Constitution.
But the main thing that they did not include
was the role of the women.
Laws, acts of war, women sat in on every discussion.
This is the women's nomination belt,
and the role of the women is in this belt.
The woman's nomination belt is used
when a woman is going to be putting up
one of the men for leadership.
And that was her right through this wampum belt,
but it was all based on consensus.
We had no hierarchy in our society
where men were higher than women,
or women were higher than men.
Everyone had this equal voice.
[gentle music]