TVLSE, Oklahoma – Natives lined up to see Sten Joddi perform at the Venue Shrine in Tulsa. His set list included DJ Lonewolf, Frank Anthony, KickdHopeless, WOTKO, and Frisco featuring HV and MadMatt.

According to Sten Joddi, he carries a relationship with the Shrine organization after hosting the event last year.

“They were really excited with the diversity that I brought to their establishment,” he said. “I brought Indigenous vibes to the venue.”

After the first year, he learned that something was missing. That’s when he called Okie Podcast host/Sun Eagle Media CEO, Russel Sun Eagle to emcee the event, bringing a little comedy to the show.

The first artist Sten Joddi reached out to was WOTKO (Ryan Barnett) to book him for the show.

DJ Lonewolf was the next person Sten Joddi contacted. Sten Joddi uses Lonewolf Entertainment for services every time he is in Oklahoma.

The Shrine added KickdHopless to their set last year, this year he was brought back by Sten Joddi. WOTKO introduced Sten Joddi to Frank Anthony, who was also invited to come perform for the event.

Sten Joddi Visits New Prosper

A few days prior to the show, Sten Joddi visited the Mvskoke reservations’ first Native-owned recording studio, New Prosper Studio.

Sten Joddi booked two hours of studio time to get himself and a fellow artist from Oklahoma into the studio. During that time, Sten Joddi also freestyled with Frisco, HV, and MadMatt.

It was the story released by Mvskoke Media that caught his eye and piqued his interest to work with the New Prosper Studio/400 Waves label.

According to Sten Joddi, he was impressed with the outcome of his track produced by HV, and even left the young musicians with recorded lyrics they could use in up-and-coming productions.

Originally, the three were not on the set list to perform that weekend. However, as the universe would have it, a spot became available. Sten Joddi called his new friends, asking them to perform.

“It was just the universe, all the good energy, and being home that kind of put all those things in alignment for me,” he said. “It wasn’t a big stress, it was all good vibes.”

According to the artist and emcee, the event, the night, and each performance was a seamless success with little, to no interruptions or problems.

“It was great to see all those Indigenous faces,” he said. “Even the non-Indigenous faces who came to check it out and to see them falling in love with all the different music that was presented to them.”

Each artist is different in their own way with one thing in common: each performer was Mvskoke.

As Sten Joddi has reached his current age of 40 years old, he sits back and looks at all the years he spent as a young rapper trying to be a voice for those coming after him.

“I didn’t have anybody to put me on until Sterlin Harjo and Rez Dogs gave me the platform to hear me,” Sten Joddi said. “I want to be able to do that and reciprocate those things to hip-hop and Muscogee people. “

According to Sten Joddi, Native entertainers are the least-paid entertainers in the industry.

“We can’t be afraid to ask for what we’re worth,” he said.

With sold-out shows and hotels across Tulsa that night, the local Native rap community set high standards with mainstream artists.

“We went up against some good competition that night and we packed the house,” Sten Joddi said. “At the end of the day, we are at the same level as other entertainers and we deserve the same opportunities.”

Sten Joddi has been in the music industry for over a decade now. He has won many awards, and recorded seven albums, amongst other accomplishments.

He has come to a point where he can truly enjoy himself and wants to help young artists succeed.

Although Sten Joddi is not sure of what is next, he is currently back home preparing his family for a new back-to-school schedule, producing tattoos in his shop, and making music in his studio.

Artists have favorite artists too. Artworks they encounter and connect with deeply same as those of us who can’t draw a circle.

Such was the case for Wendy Red Star (Absáalooke (Crow)) with the photography of Kimowan Metchewais (1963-2011; Cree, Cold Lake First Nations). Red Star, a celebrated contemporary artist, first came across Metchewais’ work when friend and Tlingit photographer Larry McNeil posted a remembrance of Metchewais on Facebook

“I was really intrigued because it sounded like this person was very special,” Red Star told Forbes.com. “I looked at his page and his Facebook is like a memorial. I started looking at his posts and his photos and found that I liked what he was doing.”

Kindred spirits.

Native photographers who grew up on reservations in the western part of the continent before going off to college and studying fine art.

Both using historical photographs of Indigenous people in their artmaking.

“There were so many things he was doing (that) I was interested in my own work,” Red Star said. “He had a (series) of Indians and eyewear, and a lot of those photos were of Crow people, I think even my great great grandfather was in there. I thought that was kind of funny for him to focus solely on cataloging different historical pictures of Native people wearing eyewear. Certain things like that, I could tell he was coming at things at a different angle that was refreshing and looking at details within photos the same as I do.”

When Red Star was undertaking a Smithsonian artis’ts research fellowship at the National Museum of the American Indian in 2018 and 2019, she serendipitously came across part of Metchewais’ archive housed there on one of her final days. She dug through many of his pictures and some of his journals, exploring his work in depth for the first time.

“From there, it became kind of an obsession,” Red Star admits.

She subsequently met more people who knew Metchewais, saw his work popping up more and more, more people told her what an amazing person he was.

“We probably would have been big nerds together because we’re both looking at ledger drawings, or the way that he talks about North America being a crime scene; he investigates, I call what I’m doing ‘researching,’” Red Star said. “Also for me, I’ve always felt like an outsider, I’ve always been the only Native person in art programs that I’ve been in and knowing that there was another artist out there–that we would just get each other–would have been incredible for me. That does happen, I have other artists I do find that, and it’s an awesome feeling to have people where you don’t have several layers to get through before you’re speaking the same language.”

Red Star’s efforts to raise up the lesser-known First Nations artist comes via “Native America: In Translation,” an exhibition she curated assembling the wide-ranging work of nine Indigenous artists, including Metchewais, who pose challenging questions about identity and heritage, land rights, and histories of colonialism.

The presentation can be seen at the USF Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa August 25 through December 1, 2023.

Kimowan Metchewais

Metchewais grew up on the Cold Lake First Nations Reserve in Alberta and went on to Edmonton to obtain a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. At just 29-years-old, he was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor, the treatment for which required him cutting his long hair, a source of great pride and identity as an Indigenous man. It left him with a permanent bald spot on the back of his head.

He would ultimately ascend to a faculty position in the art department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the finest universities in the world, but a 2007 surgery resulted in his losing feeling on the left side of his body. He would succumb to cancer in 2011.

In the decade-plus since, Metchewais’ artwork has slowly been introduced to wider audiences. Red Star has helped that progress, as have the countless other artists–Indigenous and not–he influenced.

A monograph of his work, “Kimowan Metchewais: A Kind of Prayer,” was published in 2023. The book reveals his experimental artmaking, particularly his Polaroid pictures, sometimes mundane, sometimes revelatory, in conjunction with his writing.

Here is the opening to his artist statement as published in the book:

“I’ve watched my grandfather anoint the house with sweet grass smoke, protecting us from harm, cleansing our home. Prowled city streets at three in the morning searching for someone to rob. Been blessed with a name that only spirits can hear. Talked with my mother through a prion-glass window. Wore Armani, punched in at nine even though I was up until four tending a sweatlodge fire. Ate dog. Sold acid. Beat up by a commando. A college degree or two. Bad credit. Powwow romance.”

Red Star picks it up from there.

The USF version of “In Translation” features Metchewais’ Polaroids, including selections of a series he did on hand signals, a series Red Star was particularly drawn to.

“Looking at the hand gestures, they’re poetic, they’re simple, and they remind me very much of the Plains Indian sign language,” she explained. “These are my own projections, we don’t know exactly what Kimowan’s thoughts were. Some works he does have amazing artist statements for, but in some cases not.”

Live Relics

His most detailed artist statement for a singular work is shared in “A Kind of Prayer” and focuses on a photograph titled Cold Lake. Examples from the series are shown at “In Translation.”

Describing the image, Metchewais introduces his novel concept of “live relics.” Hidden meanings embedded in the work.

“They are relics because they are like trace elements from memory, history and culture,” Metchewais writes. “They are alive because they continue to transmit influence to this day.”

He goes on to detail 19 “live relics” within the single photograph. The first is how he dipped the paper in water colored by tobacco, tobacco being sacred to his nation and many others across North America.

“Tobacco is a handshake,” Metchewais writes. “It signals honesty and honorable intention. Cold Lake is a kind of prayer.”

Reading Metchewais in his own words describe the piece while looking at it in the book gives a feeling of the artist being there with you, speaking from just out of view.

He further details artistic liberties taken with visible figures, the actions they’re engaged in, the materials he uses, its size and on and on and on. An epic in a single image. Multiple layers of meaning revealing a staggering complexity of thought, imagination and intention.

All of which, naturally, appeals to Red Star, whose works similarly consist of layers of meaning; her own “live relics.”

“Him dipping paper into tobacco-colored water and then the paper itself having that tint acts as an aesthetic, but also a very spiritual, personal, Cree thing to do,” Red Star said. “Things like that, as a Crow, really resonate with me; somebody outside of the cultures won’t get that same sort of power of what that gesture is about.”

But a viewer needn’t be Indigenous to appreciate Metchewais work.

“There has to be a universal approach that everybody can appreciate, and I think that’s what’s so beautiful about visual artworks, they can be appreciated by different people, different cultures,” Red Star said. “Anybody will get something special from Cold Lake. They might find it beautiful. They might like the aesthetic quality, but there’s multiple layers and depending on who you are, you get access to some of those layers that somebody else coming in won’t.”

When viewing Cold Lake, think of your special place.

“Cold Lake was his place, a very powerful place on his reserve; he talks about going into the water and then popping up and kind of cleansing himself in a powerful way,” Red Star explains, reminding that, “we all come from somewhere,” we all have places special to us, our lives, our families our backgrounds.

For Metchewais, that was Cold Lake. For Red Star, it’s Pryor Gap and the Pryor Mountains in Montana.

“I’m always returning every time I go back to my reservation,” she said. “I always make a trip out to Prayer Rock, it’s called Baahpuuo, and that’s where the Little People live, and we always leave things (for them.”

What is yours? What does it mean to you? How do you feel when you’re there?

Feel along with Metchewais when viewing Cold Lake. He’s giving a piece of himself to you. Appreciate that. Honor it.

“When people walk in and try to put a Native American theme on (Native American artwork), I think that does an injustice to all of the artists and show, that’s just one thread of the exhibition,” Red Star said.

Native American photography

Joining Metchewais in the exhibition are Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe, Lac Seul First Nation), Nalikutaar Jacqueline Cleveland (Yup’ik), Martine Gutierrez (American), Koyoltzintli​ (Ecuadorian-American), Duane Linklater (Omaskêko Ininiwak from Moose Cree First Nation), Guadalupe Maravilla (American), Alan Michelson (Mohawk, Six Nations of the Grand River) and Marianne Nicolson (Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nations).

The USF Contemporary Art Museum has programmed a robust schedule of events to coincide with the show, including on online conversation October 4 between Red Star, Marianne Nicolson and Koyoltzintli moderated by USF Curator of Public Art and Social Practice Sarah Howard. The event is free, but advance registration required, and it will be available on Zoom as well.

In addition to “A Kind of Prayer,” those interested in Indigenous photography will enjoy another book published in 2023, “Project 562,” an effort by Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip) to photograph members of every Native tribe in the United States.

On the museum side, this October at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, “In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now,” features more than 160 works from an array of historical and contemporary Native artists.

NOTE: Visitors to the USF Contemporary Art Museum and Tampa from outside of Florida should be aware that the NAACP has issued a travel advisory for the state noting, and warning, that under its current governor, Ron DeSantis, Florida has “engaged in an all-out attack on Black Americans, accurate Black history, voting rights, members of the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, women’s reproductive rights, and free speech, while simultaneously embracing a culture of fear, bullying, and intimidation by public officials.”