Raven Halfmoon (Caddo Nation) makes monumental, totemic sculptures that speak to the living power of indigenous peoples. Halfmoon is best known for towering, glazed stoneware figures that loom at more than twice a human scale and can weigh hundreds of pounds. These figurative beings, whom Halfmoon builds from a coil method, bridge Caddo pottery traditions with ideas rooted in the artist’s feminist matrilineal ancestry along as well as a range of artistic influences including Land Art and the Moai figures on Rapa Nui (Easter Island).

Installation view “Raven Halfmoon: Neesh & Soku” 2024. Images courtesy of the artist and Salon 94. © Raven Halfmoon. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein

Now in a new exhibition “Neesh + Soku (Moon + Sun)” at Salon 94 in New York, the artist has taken inspiration from her name —Halfmoon—to mine the binaries of light and dark, male and female, past and present, while finding meaning in the rich spaces in between. Here for the first time, the artist presents work in stone and bronze, in addition to new stoneware sculptures. In these works, twinned figures appear, hinting at the multiplicities present in each person. Her works are still monumental, and include a 9-foot bronze sculpture and a 7-foot figure made from travertine. 

The artist, who was raised in Oklahoma, has pulled from Caddo history in these new works taking inspiration from the Spiro Mounds of Oklahoma and the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks in Ohio. She’s also done deep dive of research into the interrelation of textile culture and womanhood. In these works, the dush-toh, a traditional and ceremonial Caddo hairpiece worn by women and girls has offered her evocative new meanings. 

Below, Halfmoon takes us along on her journey to Earthworks in Ohio with her mother, to the stables where she visits her horses, and into ceremonial moments in Caddo culture. 

Raven Halfmoon, NDN Rockstar (2024). Images courtesy of the artist and Salon 94. © Raven Halfmoon. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein

My work is an ongoing quest to bridge past, present, and future, with particular focus on my Tribal Nation’s history, tradition, and culture. Growing up in Oklahoma, a state with 38 federally recognized Tribal Nations, I’ve felt it part of my responsibility to reclaim space for myself and my Caddo lineage. I feel a passion and a responsibility to share my family’s story and hopefully normalize Native culture and the Native experience in the 21st century. Every sculpture I create carries within it my experiences such as going to dances, listening to stories, and learning our history. Each sculpture contains a piece of me. Each sculpture reflects the powerful spirit of Native people, my family, and me. I view my pieces as monolithic beings that demand to be heard, acknowledged, and experienced.

Courtesy of Raven Halfmoon.

This image shows me and my mother Stacey at Earthworks in Ohio—one of many Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks built by American Indians 2,000 years ago. My mother is an anthropologist who has worked for several Native cultural centers/ museums and is also my operations manager; so our work together and relationship further cements my love for Native culture and the strong female role models it has provided me with.

Courtesy of Raven Halfmoon.

The earthworks site is the largest complex of its type, built from earth carried by human hands and laid intentionally, one basketful at a time. Many groups of American Indians from all over North America gathered at the Newark Earthworks to practice spiritual traditions, celebrate, and connect with one another and the world around them.

Such large earthworks and natural features have provided a guiding influence on the centerpiece of my new show at Salon 94—particularly my first large-scale ventures with bronze and travertine. Each sculpture is conceptually rooted in the traditional coil-built methods of Caddo pottery, using customized clay that emulates the clay sourced from the Caddo homelands centered around the Great Bend in the Red River. The bronze sculpture, created in residence at Urban Art Projects in Rock Tavern, New York, and the travertine sculpture, sculpted in Carrera, Italy, maintain my signature palette of red, black, and white: reds (after the Oklahoma soil and red symbol of the MMIW movement, blacks (referencing the natural clay native to the Red River), and white (referencing the dualities of light against dark).

Courtesy of Raven Halfmoon.

No fieldwork process would be complete without an image of my horses; beyond being a significant part of my daily life and Caddo culture. I have also been interested in horse iconography in my work. The horse can be seen as a metaphor for people; wild or tamed, imperial or submissive—through them I can also consider the importance of our collective heritage, histories, and legacies. The figure of the horse has a political bent for me; like horses, Native people have been traced through blood quantum. Keeping track of “how much Native Blood” someone has is something only put on Tribal people by the US government.

Courtesy of Raven Halfmoon.

The below image was taken at the Caddo Tribal Headquarters in Binger, Oklahoma, at the dance ground. The women you see are participating in the Caddo Turkey Dance, an all-women/female dance that must be completed before sunset. Growing up in Oklahoma, I went to Caddo dances with my mom, Grammie, and other family. I was always struck by the beautifully colored dresses, shawls, jewelry, ribbon work, and designs of our Tribe.

Courtesy of Raven Halfmoon.

I like to incorporate these elements in my artwork. In a stone sculpture I recently created for a show at Salon 94, the female figure is adorning a dush-toh (pronounced dush-doe). The dush-toh is beautiful regalia worn by Caddo women during traditional dances. Dush-tohs are worn toward the back of women’s heads. The top part usually consists of a velvet-wrapped leather piece in the shape of two triangles; the second part is multi-colored ribbons that are attached to the headpiece and flow down the women’s backs.

The dush-tohs are often decorated with mirrors, silverwork, and bells. The ribbons dance in the wind and the mirrors catch glimmers of sunlight. The dush-doh remains special to me, particularly as it is culturally distinct: I am told there are only three Tribal groups who wear them, the Caddo, Delaware, and Shawnee. I am both Caddo and Delaware.

The artist Raven Halfmoon. Courtesy of Raven Halfmoon.

These images are of me in my Caddo dress, also wearing my shawl and fan. I took these during my time at Long Beach’s ceramics center. I love fashion and textile culture, whether that’s contemporary brands or indigenous creations. The clothes I wear also help me interrogate narratives such as Indigenous identity and feminine histories with my own contemporary perspective and context. I’m particularly interested in the interrelation of textile culture and womanhood, how things like my shawl or the dush-toh can also become important signifiers embodying the timeless spirit of female empowerment.

Courtesy of Raven Halfmoon.

Welcome to Source Material, where artists share their creative journeys beyond the confines of the studio. From hunting down frescos in Florence to chasing storms in Cornwall, we explore the eclectic sources of inspiration that fuel artists’ imagination.

Just as land can hold memory of what happened on its soil, so too can the human body. We all hold the capacity to collect stories and house them in a unique narrative that is written both in our minds and in our bodies. Whether we know it or not, as we tell ourselves stories and pass those down to our children and their children, a sort of literary DNA is created over time: a tapestry of tales that we take with us, like wallpaper on the inside of our souls.

Just as wallpaper layered over time can create its own texture and map of the lives housed in the walls it adorns, so too can our elders, through their wealth of experience, provide a deeper understanding of where we’ve been — and, hopefully, help guide us to where we need to go. To that end, powerful stories from eight Native female elders, all from different tribes, were captured and written in the book Worlds within Us: Wisdom and Resilience of Indigenous Women Elders, from Spirit Aligned Leadership and published by Guaní Press. Braiding Sweetgrass author Robin Wall Kimmerer calls the narratives in this book “rich and varied, gentle and fierce at the same time,” and notes that the elders’ lives “offer guidance on a path of healing, resilience and courage.”

Indigenous women have always held our communities together. We grow tall individually, but like elder trees in a forest, we maintain a deeply entwined thicket of roots under the surface. It is a world of our own, where we organize our offshoots and their seedlings, and visualize the future of our common children. It is from this vein that we wondered what could happen when Indigenous women elders intentionally align our spirits and together represent a connected circle. A whole movement of spiritually aligned Native women elders has grown from this question, and a first wave of legacy women, always the core of our Indigenous resilience, emerged.

– Katsi Cook, in her Introduction to Worlds within Us

To celebrate the national release of Worlds within Us, Mohonk Consultations is hosting a book launch/presentation on October 6 at 3 p.m. at the Mountain House Conference Center, which will feature several of the distinguished Native elders who have offered to share some of the stories in the book that give an intimate look into their lives and the worlds and histories their lives encompass. Program speakers include Loretta Afraid of Bear Cook (Oglala Lakota), Wakérakats:te Louise Herne (Bear Clan, Mohawk Nation) and Tekatsi:tsia’kwa Katsi Cook (Wolf Clan, Mohawk Nation, New York). Those in attendance will be able to hear stories from these respected elders and also purchase copies of the book.

Asked why Mohonk Consultations chose this particular book to highlight, board member Patty Matteson says that the answer “is multilayered and driven by our understanding of the ways in which Earth is under siege, from the ways people treat it and create extreme environmental stresses to all of our ecosystems as well.” She notes that the “book itself is groundbreaking in terms of its focus on the wisdom of Indigenous women elders and the way it provides them a doorway to expressing their voices and telling their life stories.”

These stories are wide-ranging and include how different Native nations have fought to protect their land and way of life from hostile government and corporate forces, as well as how women pass down the art of herbal healing or weaving to the next generation. There are powerful stories about survival in circumstances where Native children were forced from their homes to attend government and church boarding schools in an effort to fracture these clans and nations. But love and resistance returned them to each other and to the Earth.

In her introduction to the book, Cook writes, “Being from a place and living in place, as Indigenous elders, we know how strongly we are formed by the natural world. We are embodied in those roots, which have been cut and scarred but have not been severed.” She says that weaving is the way of embodiment for Yvonne Peterson, Toon Nee Mu Sh, a Chehalis elder dedicated to continuing her people’s traditional weaving.

Peterson’s story highlights how weaving is a cultural knowledge, linking current generations to the past and to the future, connecting both their history and their language. She discusses her nation’s fight for fishing rights, which took them all the way to the US Supreme Court. “I see us moving forward within my lifetime to protect our plants, the way we eat them, use them for medicine and ceremonies, industry and weaving,” she says. A professor at Evergreen College in Washington State, Peterson knows that the roots of her educational work are in the consciousness of that relationship. “We begin with a prayer to recognize the teachings of the tree people. In our area, the trees are seen as the first teachers. For every tree, there’s a teaching that they give to us.”

Another story in Worlds within Us centers on Sara James, a Gwich’in leader from Arctic Village in northern Alaska who is now internationally recognized for her advocacy on behalf of her people in their struggle against oil development of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the breeding grounds for the caribou herds. “We have been a strong people, because we could live on the land,” she says. “We are more settled now, but we still live with the land. I remember with my mom back when I was growing up out in the land. We had everything there. And today we’ve still got everything there.”

James was sent out by her elder chiefs to represent their concern that oil development would destroy their caribou herds. This was James’ quest for three decades, and her inspired advocacy and supporters have helped to keep corporations at bay.

“The Porcupine caribou herd is my life. It makes me who I am. My people grew up with caribou, depending on them for everything. In return, we also take care of the caribou and the environment so that our caribou are healthy. Our elders always say that we’re in the caribou’s heart and the caribou is in our heart, which means that they take care of us and, in return, we take care of them. We are proud of who we are, the caribou and us.”

The stories woven through this narrative all point to one central theme: that we are connected, to each other and to the Earth. We are of the Earth, and there is both power and fragility in that, if we do not act responsibly. The wisdom offered by some of these Native elders is a precious resource in and of itself.

Louisa Finn, Mohonk Consultations board chair, says that it was the organization’s mission to support the interrelationship of all life on Earth, and practical means for sustainability. She adds that “Keith Smiley, our founder, felt an urgency about communicating that humans were just a part of the whole ecology of life, not central to it. Indigenous people the world over view all beings as interrelated, including animals, birds, insects, trees, plants, rocks, land. They have practices that maintain the balance of all creation and preserve life on Earth. In North America, they endured the end of their world many times over, yet survived. These elder women and mothers bring the wisdom of hope, healing and transformation. Through their worldview and their lived experiences, they can help us shift into a more felt and sacred relationship to our own lives, offering guidance that speaks to our own fears about our world.”

Both Finn and Matteson are excited about the upcoming program and book launch and believe that it will be an empowering event for all that attend. “I hope that our audience will find new and healthy ways of understanding and living our lives: ones that are deeply connected to and important to our times and the society in which we live,” says Matteson. “It’s an honor for Mohonk Consultations and Mohonk Mountain House and our audience to be able to listen and to ask questions of these strong women leaders.”

The book will be hot off the presses and available at the event and in the Mohonk Mountain House Gift Shop, and also on Amazon beginning October 7. To learn more about the event or to purchase a ticket, go to https://mohonk-consultations.org/conferences-and-forums/resilient-communities/worldswithinus. To learn more about Mohonk Consultations’ work, visit https://mohonk-consultations.org.