Renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma joined a group of Alaska Natives, artists and environmental activists last month in Fairbanks for a performance that expresses Indigenous peoples’ grief over the shrinking population of salmon and other impacts of climate change on the far north.

In his composition performed during a climate change workshop at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Yo-Yo Ma’s mournful strains reflect the sorrow that Alaska Native peoples feel at the loss of once-rich salmon runs decimated by climate change and overharvesting.

The tempo builds early in the composition before it gives way to cries of outrage in the verses of a poem composed for the occasion by Gwich’in filmmaker, screenwriter and activist Princess Daazhraii Johnson from Arctic Village.

The poem is entitled “When We Were Salmon,” and Johnson describes it as a sort of lament about the state of planet and its peoples.

“We do have a lot of unexpressed grief about what it happening,” she said, “and from my perspective as an Alaska Native person, it’s like so many families are not able to fish anymore up and down the Yukon River and feed our families and communities.”

That was the theme of three workshops held this summer in Fairbanks by a group that included the Alaska-based indigenous-advocacy organization Native Movement, the Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition, Association of Interior Native Educators and UAF Climate Scholars.

The workshops were presented in partnership with a program run by Yo-Yo Ma’s organization called Our Common Nature, which explores how culture connects people to one another and the natural world.

“It was really a pilot program, of sorts,” Johnson said in a recent interview with other workshop participants. “We brought in elders, and we listened to traditional stories from the region, and then we brought in a lead artist for every workshop that we did.”

But the stories related by elders and other workshop participants weren’t just focused on the loss of salmon. The conversations also brought comfort, and healing for other emotional pain, as highlighted in a final event called “Gath and K’iyh: Listen to Heal.”

“Gath in the word for King Salmon in the Benhti Kenaga dialect,” she said, “and then k’iyh is the word for birch — the birch trees.”

Mato Wyuiyuhi, who helped facilitate the musical component of the workshops, says he found comfort in Ma’s composition.

“It was really a cool thing,” he said, “because it was mournful, but it wasn’t glum or it wasn’t really solemn. It was like a really beautiful thing.”

Wyuiyuhi is a musician, filmmaker and a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe of Pine Ridge, S.D. His professional experience includes work as a composer for the hit television series “Reservation Dogs.”

Wyuiyuhi says he appreciates what he calls the “spiritually centered” approach to grief in workshop sessions.

“So I think that sacred element was really good,” he said. “And then, yeah, moving forward, how do you integrate the type of grief into something that can actualized through music?”

Another workshop participant, Eli Wasserman, brought his experience as an educator who gives music instruction to kids in Baltimore schools that don’t have enough funding for the arts.

“So I definitely took my music education background, teaching people how to write music and make music and why music is important, and kind of create together,” he said. “And then brought that to the workshop.”

The hundred or so people who attended the workshops included kids who, like all the participants, were welcome to join some of the jam sessions held during the workshops, which included a Sept. 4^th finale with Yo-Yo Mah at the University of Alaska President’s House on the UAF campus.

“Throughout all these workshops, we’ve really thought about everybody who enters that space as being a participant, whether they are an organizer, or an artist, or an elder,” says Aurora Bowers, a communications organizer for the Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition. She herself picked up a fiddle to accompany Ma in the final workshop concert.

Bowers says the workshops showed how music can bridge cultural divides and heal the trauma of climate change.

“It’s a massive, massive issue to be facing,” she said, “and so we really need tools to be able to feel our way through that.”

This story first appeared on Humanities Without Walls.

Dr. Samantha Majhor is an assistant professor of English in the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences. Majhor is of Yankton Dakota and Assiniboine descent, and in her role as faculty advisor for Marquette’s Indigeneity Lab, she works alongside undergraduate students in collaboration with Native and non-Native faculty on interdisciplinary research projects in the sciences and humanities, with a focus on Indigenous topics. During her Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota, Majhor was part of the HWW Grand Research Challenge project team for “Indigenous Art and Activism Along the Mississippi River in Changing Climates.”

Describe your involvement with the Grand Research Challenge project “Indigenous Art and Activism Along the Mississippi River in Changing Climates.” How did this project impact your dissertation research?

My participation in the project began when I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota and culminated with my participation as an assistant professor at Marquette University, so the project bridges an important and transitionary moment in my life as a scholar. During the first two years of the project, I was finishing my dissertation work on Native Materialisms in contemporary Native American literature. Meeting Indigenous artists and activists whose work focused on Native relationships to the Mississippi River and its tributaries further informed my thinking on the deep human and non-human relationships that our literary texts so often express. Many of the artists we consulted are responding to climate change threats to the environment by remembering long-held human and other-than-human relationships — those connections between agriculture, basketry, pottery, mound-building — and bringing those longstanding relationships into the contemporary moment in strategic ways. Their work illustrates what’s at stake in the disruption of these relationships, and they also point toward strategies of continuance through and beyond settler-colonialism and climate disaster.

Beyond the ways the project spoke to the subject matter of my research, I believe it was even more instrumental in helping me develop Native American and Indigenous Studies research methodologies by its collective and community-driven nature. This was a critical counterpoint to the dissertation experience, which tends to be solitary work. The collective of faculty and graduate students quickly expanded into a forum that included Native artists, activists and other scholars and knowledge-bearers along the river.

How has your role working with this GRC project impacted your career trajectory?

Participating in the GRC project impacted my career trajectory in a number of ways, especially in my teaching and continued research. Coming into my position as an assistant professor in English at Marquette University, I continued working on the “Indigenous Art and Activism Along the Mississippi River in Changing Climates,” and I developed one of my first courses at Marquette based on the research we had done and the website, Indigenous Mississippi, that we were in the process of creating. I developed the course, “Water is Life: Indigenous Art and Activism in Changing Climates,” to share our project and its artists’ and activists’ work with undergraduate students. The course allows me both highlight visual and material artists alongside literary artists who are articulating on-going Indigenous relationships with water, place, and environment.

As we begin to look back on the extraordinary 2016 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was a galvanizing event for the our GRC project, it’s more important than ever that undergraduate students see the links between the long history of environmental depredation that has long been part and parcel of settler-colonialism and the current calls, in large part coming from their own generation, for attending to environmental justice.

Not only has the project impacted the focus of my teaching, but it has greatly impacted the methodology of my current research projects. With the work and leadership of Dr. Jacqueline Schram (Ojibwe, Sankeeng Nation) and Dr. John Su and with grant funding from the Joerres Family Fund, I’ve been part of building Marquette’s Indigeneity Lab, a site for funding undergraduate research on Native American project topics. Largely undertaken during the summer months, the research work has expanded to include graduate researchers. We focus on building a community of scholars from underrepresented populations—who may be working on different projects—but come together as a collective. They support each other and share their work beyond the summer research. Like the GRC project, the Indigeneity Lab cultivates Native American and Indigenous research methodologies, whether we are working in library archives, developing digital maps and resources, or testing Milwaukee river waters for restoring wild rice.

The research and development of materials, coursework, and scholarship that came out of the GRC has substantially impacted my career. However, it is the relationships between our cohort that has proved most valuable to me over these first years as a junior scholar. In Summer 2022, I co-taught the Newberry Library’s NCAIS Summer Institute alongside Dr. Kelly Wisecup, who proposed and led our GRC project. Our graduate course for NCAIS was yet another iteration of our project, and Dr. Wisecup continues to be a significant mentor and colleague whose generosity shapes my scholarship. I could name countless ways in which the continued sense of camaraderie and scholarly community radiates from working with everyone involved in the GRC project.

In January 2023, I once again teamed up with one of my mentors from the GRC project. Chris Pexa (Spirit Lake Dakota) and I were awarded a grant from the Mellon Foundation to support “Remapping the Očheti Šakowin Oyáte: Orature as Deep Mapping” project. Drawing on NAIS methodologies, we’ve envisioned the development of a digital storymap, an archive of stories connected to place, that is developed and held by Očheti Šakowin (Dakota, Nakota, Lakota) nations. We are partnering with community members from 16 tribal nations and beyond in order to build the archive, as well as with graduate and undergraduate researchers for a distinctly collaborative, Native-community-guided project. I remain connected to and indebted to my mentors and collaborators who worked on the GRC project and anticipate many more collaborations through the years.

Tell us about your work with the Indigeneity Lab at Marquette University. What projects are you involved in, both on-campus and in the community?

It has been most exciting to come to Marquette University and join a team in creating the Indigeneity Lab, the site of a growing number of undergraduate-led research projects on topics that center Native American history, culture and contemporary concerns. While our projects germinate on campus, each of our three main projects work in connection with the local Milwaukee Native community and Native Nations beyond the city. I have mentored undergraduate and graduate students’ work on the Native American Boarding Schools in Context project, a website that seeks to contextualize Marquette University’s archival holdings of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Mission records. Our site, soon to be updated with selected samplings from the archive, serves as an introduction to the types of documents one might find in the extensive BCIM archives. We also hope to give a primer on Native American Boarding School history and provide links and resources to the scholarship, investigations, and reports pertaining to over 100 years of forced assimilation and genocide through a boarding school education system.

I have also consulted and mentored undergraduate students work on our Wild Rice revitalization project, which is spearheaded by Marquette’s Dr. Michael Schlappi, professor of biological sciences. The Wild Rice project asks whether environmental cleanup efforts in Milwaukee rivers have created conditions clean enough to bring wild rice, an Indigenous plant and food species, back to the area. For many Native Nations who have connections to the western Great Lakes from time immemorial, wild rice is not just a staple food—but an important plant connected to story, ceremony and spiritual and intellectual life. The wild aquatic grass is a bellwether plant when it comes to healthy water systems and has been greatly impacted by both industry and, now, climate change. Marquette students have been testing wild rice varieties to see if they can grow and thrive in Milwaukee rivers at current conditions and learning about all the challenges and possibilities for restoring this important plant relative to waters in which it once thrived.

I am also so excited about the Indigenize Milwaukee mapping project, headed by Dr. Brian Rindfleisch in history at Marquette. Dr. Reinfleisch had long envisioned creating a digital map that highlighted Milwaukee as an Indigenous place, connecting sites of historical importance to Native Milwaukee’s contemporary sites of note. Recently, the project has expanded to include an app and walking tour.

Once again, the Indigeneity projects each develop out of Native American and Indigenous Studies research methods, they center collaboration, and they provide community-oriented materials. For me, the foundations of these collaborative research practices were first made manifest in my participation on the “Indigenous Art and Activism Along the Mississippi River in Changing Climates” project.

KáaSháyee Kéet’aakw was raised in Ketchikan, Alaska, right in the middle of his historical Tlingit Alaska Native homeland. When he was 14 years old, his family moved to Ferndale, likely to enjoy a lower cost of living and a lifestyle that wasn’t so dependent on the boom-and-bust economy of the trades and tourism industries. He arrived just in time to enter his freshman year of high school and has more or less made his life in Ferndale ever since.

He began a career in graphic design in 2009 and has worked in marketing specialties like sign layout and logo design, as well as print layout and business cards. When the pandemic arrived in 2020, his ground job to a standstill. This gave him the opportunity to take stock where he was in life and what he wanted for his future. He also took an inventory of any deficits he felt and found his connection to culture was lacking.

“Being that I was in Washington, dislocated from Alaska, I thought one place I could start would be to enroll at Northwest Indian College,” he says. “They had quite a few classes on Cultural Sovereignty at the core of their Native Studies Leadership Program, and it really sounded like I would be diving into who I was as a Native person.” He enrolled and found the classes did exactly what he hoped they would; he is now set to graduate in 2024.

Learning the Forms

Online learning spread like wildfire during the pandemic. KáaSháyee had already taken one online workshop in 2019, offered by Sealaska, a corporation established by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. It taught Formline, a very distinctive aspect of the visual art produced by Indigenous groups of the Northern Northwest Coast of the North American continent. Its flowing lines and use of strong positive and negative space can be found in paintings and carvings by Tlingit and Haida Tribes, along with many others.

As more and more artists took to the internet to stay connected, KáaSháyee found himself working with five different teachers. He learned about art, design, and his own history — but he was also absorbing how different people teach and started to himself feel a call to teach others. “There are quite a few Alaska Natives that live outside of Alaska, and many of us would like to connect with the culture,” he says. “Even in Alaska, plenty of people would love to learn, but if there isn’t somebody on the other end to help, that makes it difficult.”

A Journey via Paddle

As the world began to open up again, KáaSháyee traveled to the Port Townsend School of Woodworking to take classes in carving masks and paddles. Because the Tlinglit are largely coastal, the canoe is central to their way of life and paddles have always been some of their most valuable tools. As a result, they’ve also become a symbol of heritage.

“When I finished my paddle, I found that it was a nice piece of artwork, in its shape and design,” KáaSháyee says. “But it wasn’t a functional paddle you would use to pull, in a canoe.” He began to compare this current artwork to what would have existed prior to European colonization.

This led to an application to visit the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle. More than just an art museum, the Burke traces its roots to 1879, and holds more than 16 million artifacts. KáaSháyee was selected to make a three-day visit and was granted an assistant to assemble a selection of pieces from as far back as the 1870s. He was able to handle them and make drawings, trace outlines, and use calipers so he could make replicas. As he examined 21 different paddles, KáaSháyee found that only one had the form of a true, traditional paddle. Although some examples dated back to the 1870s, because of the presence of European settlers “even then they had changed,” he says.

An eye emblazoned with a question mark roots the artist in the stream of time, even if not all of his questions have been answered. Photo courtesy KáaSháyee Kéet’aakw
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His goal was to find the differences between the old objects and today’s artwork, and to be able to close that gap. As he carved a number of paddles, he discovered an interesting glimpse into the past: even with the best possible planning, he would arrive at a part of the carving and realize there was a better way to do it. Saying to himself, ‘This probably isn’t the way it was done,’ over and over again seemed to only strengthen the link to the past.

Identifying a Language

This year, KáaSháyee returned to the Burke to study again, this time focusing on two-dimensional art. “I looked at many orca designs that were done in the Formline style, and I started seeing patterns where certain elements were placed,” he says. “There are stories attached to these different designs, and this artwork accompanies stories.”

“Whether it be a mask that somebody would dance with during storytelling and song, or engraved onto a box, there might be a raven holding a sun in his beak,” KáaSháyee says. “That ties it to the story of ‘The Raven Brings the Light,’ an origin story we tell. What we’re talking about is a visual language.”

Along the coasts of Alaska and Canada, he says, the artwork produced by different Tribes looks similar. But by looking closer, the viewer can notice differences. Sometimes it’s as obvious as a clan’s crest, but other times it’s much more subtle. While they all may speak the same visual language, you can detect differences in regional visual dialects. Here in Southern Canada, Washington, and Oregon, people use a Coast Salish way of assembling designs — a different language — but there are still more different dialects.

Sharing His Story

As an Alaskan in Washington and a trained designer who practices art, KáaSháyee is careful in how he approaches his work. He was recently commissioned to create a logo for a Native Education Conference that brings together teachers from Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. He wanted an image that spoke to all three areas, but didn’t want to copy any styles, so he blended a wave to represent Oregon, an evergreen for Washington, and an Alaskan mountain. He is currently brainstorming along similar lines to create a logo for the WWU Native American Student Union.

His work is visible in Bellingham’s Waypoint Park, on a 150-foot-long wall found close to the intersection of Granary Avenue and West Chestnut Street. The piece is a collaboration by seven artists representing Lhaq’temish, Nooksack, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Nimiipuu, Dineh, Apache and Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribes.

KáaSháyee also recently completed a 600-square-foot mural that welcomes people into downtown Ferndale, on the east-facing wall of Kevin’s Car Wash. “The design is the orca, and it’s my first iteration of those elements that I examined at the Burke Museum,” he says. A close look at the components that make up the design reveals that one of them is the question mark in the orca’s eye.

Question Marks, Past and Future

As KáaSháyee investigated his past, he discovered a story about his own grandfather. Since the Tlingit are matrilineal, family names follow the lines of their mother figures. But the Europeans are patrilineal, and when they made their written records, they tried to follow the lines of the fathers. So, when his grandfather tried to trace his family tree, he was left with more questions than answers. When KáaSháyee’s grandfather carved himself a paddle, in the place where he might have carved his family’s crest, he instead decided to paint a question mark.

KáaSháyee has taken this cue and decided to continue placing that question mark within his own work. In this way, it also becomes a statement, a part of a story that is being told by visual artwork. As a result, it makes his designs more than ‘just art,’ and allows them to also become part of a continuing visual language.

As he moves forward with his own projects and pursues more collaborations, KáaSháyee also plans to share what he has learned, so other artists can carry their languages into the future.

“I think about all the people who can connect and engage with their culture, and it would be life-changing to them, to their identity,” he says. “I feel that my future is going to be making resources available to people to learn the Tlingit visual language.”

In addition to Paris+ by Art Basel, visitors can view cityscapes, paintings that became classics and treasures from the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (WGGB/WSHM) – A Springfield singer and rapper is up for consideration for a Grammy. A rhythmic pop artist from the Springfield area has been placed on the official ballot for the upcoming Grammy awards.

She’s hoping to make the final list of nominees.

“You wait all this time for these moments, and then when they happen, we’re all stunned,” said Taija New.

Excitement has taken over Springfield native Taija New because this pop singer and rapper now adds a high note to her resume: being under consideration for a Grammy award.

“It’s insane,” expressed New. “I cannot even believe that Taija New and the Grammy’s are in one sentence. It’s so weird.”

New began her career about 10 years ago, doing some writing and open mic stuff while attending umass Amherst.

Since then, she has been recording songs and performing with her team across the country, as well as Canada.

Now, the recording academy has placed her on the official ballot for the Grammy awards’ best melodic rap performance, thanks to her song over your allure.

“When I worked on the song, I knew it was going to be something because I liked it,” explained New. “I wrote it. It’s basically about being in a situation where it’s kind of toxic, but you’re just feeling like ‘I think I’m over the glitz and the glamour of this situation and I just want to move on.’”

Whether or not new wins the award, she said she wants to set a clear example for other young aspiring artists.

“If you really, really put yourself to it, if you really work hard, you can do it,” said New.

But if New wins, she gave Western Mass News a good idea of how she would react.

“I probably wouldn’t even get up from my seat,” expressed New. “I’d probably be just, like, stunned and shocked. Someone would probably have to drag me up the stage, honestly.”

New said she has received a lot of support from family, friends and the community.

Recording academy members have until October 20 to vote for their top five nominees, and the winner will be announced at the Grammy awards on February 4.

New asks anyone who knows a voting member to ask for their consideration on her behalf and if you do not know anyone, you can still spread the word through email and all social media platforms.

Copyright 2023. Western Mass News (WGGB/WSHM). All rights reserved.

Art can elicit a lot of emotions for people and in this week’s Java with Jamie we meet Los Angeles native, Erica Everage, who is known for her works highlighting feminine power and beauty.

Her works of art are displayed on the wall at Figeroua Hotel and that’s where Jamie Yuccas sat down with the artist to talk about her journey. The hotel also has an artist suite decorated by Everage herself. 

The hotel also has an extensive coffee list from specialty lattes to matcha tea, Café Fig has a little something for everyone on their menu.

Everage’s artwork is featured in her new exhibit, which is part of the hotel’s 2023 Featured Artist Program.

“The hotel itself, the history and the ethos of it, really match with my art practice and what I’m about as an person and an artist. Women empowerment, specifically women’s bodies and the safety of women’s bodies, and women being the subjects not the objects of our stories,” said Everage.

Figeroua Hotel opened in 1926, funded by women and for women, who weren’t forced to check in with a male chaperone. Now, Everage’s nearly 20 hung pieces expand the idea of bold female figures.

 What inspires you when you create these pieces? 

“History. Right now I’m really into the archeology. Visually my pieces are already abstract and very curvy and mysterious. So I like I like to use all those elements,” said Everage. “I like to use my own body to paint from. I used to be a dancer and I use my dance so make paintings. The connection is that I like to make my paintings larger than life rather than shrink them down.”

Everage says that she spent a lot of her life trying to shrink down her body and minimize her curves, but now she wants to show that she can be a woman and be proud of her gender expression.

Her parents are interior designers, so creativity in the art space has always been part of her life.

Did you grow up knowing you wanted to be an artist? 

“No, but I was always drawing fashion in my room at age 12 and my mom noticed I was always doing it a lot and said, if you’re spending all of this time drawing, you should learn how to draw well. So, I got sent to figure drawing class and it became by favorite by of my week.”

Her mom and dad are not only her biggest fans, but also her biggest supporters. When Everage found out about the hotel’s new featured artist suite, she enlisted ‘Krista & John of Everage Design, Inc.’ to help decorate.

Before blasting onto the art scene, Everage wanted to become an actress. She was featured in a Barbie commercial in 1996 and although she went to school study acting at Northwestern, Everage found her way back to her paintbrush. 

“It feels incredible and so free. I feel so much freer than when I was an actress. I feel in charge of my own destiny and I don’t have to audition to get the job,” said Everage.

Eventually Everage wants to open her own studio and teach others about art, painting and powerful female expressions.

The University of Scranton Programming Board (USPB) Mission Committee and the Multicultural Center invite all to experience a presentation by native storyteller and dancer, Larry Yazzie on Wednesday, Oct. 18 at 7 p.m. at the DeNaples Center Ballroom, Room 407. 

“Larry Yazzie NATIVE | STORYTELLER | DANCER” is presented by the actor, a two-time World Champion Fancy Dancer and Eagle Dancer from the Meskwaki Nation in Tama, Iowa. Yazzie is the founder and artistic director for Native Pride Productions, Inc. based in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Yazzie’s repertoire includes performances worldwide, including at the Olympics, The Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian Institution. 

The international lecturer, dancer and educator is considered one of the nation’s leading experts on Native American dance. In May 2010, he and his son, Jessup, were the sole U.S. performers invited for presentations and workshops throughout northern France.

Yazzie founded Native Pride Productions to give back to his community and to the world. His goal: to share cultural traditions through artist-in-residency workshops, performances, lectures, classroom instruction and theatrical performances that enhance access to diverse, multicultural artists for people of all ages and backgrounds. His warm, enthusiastic spirit reflects the beauty of Indigenous people. Following the tradition of his elders, he gives back and enriches the lives of all audiences.

For questions or information, contact Jose Sanchez at jose.sanchez@scranton.edu or Julie Chropowicki at julie.chropowicki@scranton.edu.