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Government and STF reach tentative agreement

A tentative agreement has been reached between the Government-Trustee Bargaining Committee and the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation Bargaining Committee. The agreement was reached today following a recent round of negotiations. The recent negotiations came after the teachers rejected the Government-Trustee Bargaining Committee’s offer that was brought to the STF membership earlier this month. The STF announced on Thursday that 83 per cent of teachers voted 95 per cent in favour of further job action if an agreement could not be struck. “I want to thank parents, teachers, and students for their patience during this process,” Education Minister Jeremy Cockrill said in a press release. “I am hopeful that the tentative agreement will be finalized so that predictability is provided to families and teachers.” Details of the agreement will be released as ratification draws closer.

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By Native News Online Staff

May 16, 2024

Native-led arts and culture non-profit Forge Project announced this week the recipients of the 2024 Forge Fellowship. 

“We are thrilled to host this year’s cohort of Forge Project Fellows,” Forge Project Director of Indigenous Programs & Relationality Sarah Biscarra Dilley (yaktitʸutitʸu yaktiłhini), said in a press release. “We look forward to supporting their time in residence, whether it be anchored in uninterrupted time to work, engaging others through a public or invitation-only program, or the spaciousness to rest.”

Each Forge Project Fellow will receive a $25,000 grant to support their artistic endeavors. During their three-week residencies on-site, they will also enjoy full access to the Forge Project’s facilities, libraries, and contemporary Indigenous art collection. 

Fellows will also have opportunities to showcase their work through events and online platforms.

The selection process for the 2024 Forge Fellowship involved a panel of esteemed Native artists, scholars, educators, and former fellows. This year’s selection process also involved a panel specifically for fellows from the Stockbridge-Munsee Community.

Established in 2021, the Forge Fellowship has recognized Native leaders across various fields annually. Previous fellows include Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians), Jasmine Neosh (Menominee), Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache), Rainer Posselt (Stockbridge Munsee Band of Mohicans), and Tania Willard (Secwepemc Nation).

Meet the 2024 Forge below.

Delbert Anderson (Navajo/Diné)
Delbert Anderson, a Diné jazz trumpeter, composer, and educator, blends Navajo “spinning songs” with jazz and funk, creating a unique sound in Native American jazz. Leading the Delbert Anderson Quartet, he infuses Diné culture into his music, with notable projects like “The Long Walk: 1,674 Days” and an upcoming tribute to Indigenous Jazz legends Don Cherry and Jim Pepper. Anderson also runs the “Build A Band” program, teaching jazz improvisation to youth with a focus on Diné values. Recognized by Chamber Music America and the First Peoples Fund, his work has been featured in the New York Times and NPR. Photo credit: Maurice Johnson.

Schon Matthew Duncan (United Keetoowah Band of the Cherokee Indians)
Schon Duncan, is a filmmaker, writer, actor, and language activist deeply engaged in community, arts, and education. After youth work in Tulsa, Duncan immersed themselves in Cherokee language revitalization through the Cherokee Language Master-Apprentice Program in northeastern Oklahoma. Now at Dahlonegah Public School, they promote Cherokee language and lifeways to students of all ages. Duncan’s recent achievements include directing the documentary ᏓᏗᏬᏂᏏ (We Will Speak) and voicing ᎢᎾᎨᎢ (In The Woods). Dedicated to fostering Cherokee youth culture through film and art, their work exemplifies a steadfast commitment to language revitalization and mentorship.

Donna Hogerhuis (Stockbridge-Munsee)
Donna Hogerhuis, is an emerging basket maker specializing in Mohican technique and design. With a master’s in museum studies from the University of Washington and prior fellowship with the Smithsonian Native American Program, Donna now serves as the Manager of the Preservation Program’s Library, Archives, and Repository for a Northwest Tribe. For over 25 years, she has supported Tribal members, artists, scholars, and government entities in researching, publishing, and exhibiting Washington’s Tribal culture and history. Drawing from her own Tribe’s history, Donna emphasizes the significance of studying ancestral designs and artifacts. Descended from generations of basket makers, she is currently researching Mohican basket makers and northeast designs to honor their legacy.

Lindsay McIntyre (Inuit)
Lindsay McIntyre, an acclaimed filmmaker and artist of Inuit and mixed settler heritage, specializes in 16mm film, exploring themes of portraiture, place, and personal histories through an analog process. Notably, she crafts her own emulsion with caribou gelatin. With a portfolio comprising over 40 short experimental and documentary films and expanded cinema performances, she is currently developing her debut feature, “The Words We Can’t Speak,” which earned her the Women in the Director’s Chair Feature Film Award and a 2024 Sundance Native Lab Fellowship. Her short film “NIGIQTUQ ᓂᒋᖅᑐᖅ” (2023) received the Best Short Live Action award at imagineNATIVE, along with other prestigious honors. McIntyre is a COUSIN Fellow, a member of the IRIS Film Collective, and has been recognized with the REVEAL Indigenous Art Award and the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for Excellence in Media Arts by the Canada Council. Additionally, she shares her expertise by teaching Film + Screen Arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design on unceded Coast Salish Territory.

Mikayla Patton (Oglala Sioux Lakota)
Mikayla Patton, an interdisciplinary visual artist based in Pennsylvania, pioneers a unique approach melding recycled paper-making with earth elements to craft sculptural objects. Her creations delve into Indigenous intimacies, materiality, and sustainability, viewed through a Lakota lens. Incorporating glass beads, porcupine quills, leather, and plants, she explores themes of healing, growth, and renewal. Holding a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, her work has graced prestigious venues such as the Texas Tech School of Art in Lubbock, All My Relations Gallery in Minneapolis, and the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans. Recognized in publications like Hand Papermaking magazine, First American Art, and Pasatiempo, Patton has garnered numerous fellowships, awards, and residencies, including the Ucross Foundation, First Peoples Fund, Native Arts and Culture Foundation, and the 2023 Joan Mitchell Fellowship.

Sterling Anthony Schreiber II (Stockbridge-Munsee)
Sterling Schreiber II, an enrolled member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, resides with his family on the Stockbridge-Munsee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin. They operate a 25-acre produce farm and apiary, focusing on cultivating cleaner and healthier foods for local tribal communities. Through collaborations with Feeding America Eastern Wisconsin, the Great Lakes Intertribal Food Coalition, and the Tribal Elder Food Box Program, their produce and honey reach over 2,000 Elders within tribal communities across Wisconsin. Together with his brother Brock, Sterling initiated a program to provide tribal Elders with access to venison, a vital traditional food source. They aim to expand the initiative to educate the community’s youth about the outdoors while continuing to support Elders with traditional foods. Sterling advocates for tribal food sovereignty and security, actively engaging in his tribal community.

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About The Author

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Native News Online is one of the most-read publications covering Indian Country and the news that matters to American Indians, Alaska Natives and other Indigenous people. Reach out to us at [email protected].

The ribbon skirt is a colorful symbol of Indigenous pride, born of Voyageur trade with Great Lakes tribes.

At Native Nations Fashion Night in northeast Minneapolis, the historic garment was rocking the runway, paired with chunky black boots as Nirvana blared. The look was deeply traditional, yet totally modern.

The same could be said of the fashion show, held in late April, which featured fur apparel made by an Alaskan Tlingit designer (who hunts her own material) alongside bodysuits with translucent skirts that evoked Beyoncé or Taylor Swift.

The show’s creator, designer Delina White, of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, is known for contemporary-style clothing and accessories that incorporate Indigenous motifs and materials and reference social issues.

Since the self-dubbed “Native fashionista” boldly launched her design career at age 50, she’s dressed a two-spirit (gender non-forming) model in jingle pants, a riff on Ojibwe jingle dresses worn by female dancers. And made jewelry with vintage rosary beads to reclaim the harmful history of church-run Native American boarding schools.

“Fashion is such a visual art form,” White said. “You can make statements with it.”

Though White’s work has been getting attention — it’s been displayed at Mia and the Walker — her larger mission is to spotlight other Indigenous designers. That’s why she created the largest annual Native runway show and artisan marketplace in the Upper Midwest, now in its fourth year. At a time when global brands such as Louis Vuitton, Levis and Minnetonka Moccasins are collaborating with Native designers, White reinforces the message to “appreciate not appropriate.”

At this year’s Fashion Night, attendees represented multiple generations and tribes from across the region, including Bad River in Wisconsin and South Dakota’s Cheyenne River. The crowd dressed in vibrant colors and dense patterns. The room smelled of burning sage.

White had lined up an especially high-profile model: Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe who is known for her striking Native-designed wardrobe.

On the runway, Flanagan told the crowd how “guys on the internet” like to disparage her style, commenting, “That’s not what a Lieutenant Governor dresses like.” “But I am a Lieutenant Governor,” she said. “And this is what I dress like.” The audience roared with applause.

A second career

A month earlier, one of White’s Fashion Night designs — a buoyant hoop skirt with a colorful diamond pattern — was still three cut-up quilts, laid out on a bedspread at her home on the Leech Lake Reservation. White had purchased the quilts, featuring the star design popular with Plains tribes, and was piecing them into a round.

White likes to incorporate natural elements with cultural significance, such as birch bark, red willow and oblong beads made of bone or horn. Her sewing room is stacked with fabric, so her work tends to spread throughout her home, which once belonged to her paternal grandmother. On a living room table, she was assembling jewelry made from deer sheds, cut into cross-sections to look like miniature tree rings.

White’s lifestyle is modest (she drives a Honda with 250,000 miles on it), but her view of Leech Lake is priceless. Though she grew up mostly in urban areas — Chicago, Milwaukee, Houston, Minneapolis — she spent breaks on the reservation near Walker, Minn., where her mother’s family also lived. “I always wanted to come back,” she said.

In 1992, she did. White spent the next several decades raising a family and working for the tribe in administrative roles. But she’d always been interested in fashion. She was a model who competed in Miss Teen Minnesota and, before that, learned beadwork from her grandmother.

When White was in her 30s, she and her husband, Gerald, took their blended family of seven children on the powwow circuit, dressed in regalia they’d made. White’s beadwork impressed other dancers, but it was too labor-intensive for her to justify selling it.

Instead, more than a decade later, White pursued a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, which facilitated a 2015 series of fashion shows in local galleries, in collaboration with her daughters Lavender Hunt and Sage Davis. That project launched White’s brand, I Am Anishinaabe, which has been featured in the country’s largest Native fashion show, in Santa Fe, N.M., and collected by the University of Minnesota’s Goldstein Museum of Design.

White discovered a way to make her beadwork more accessible by photographing her designs and having them printed on fabric. The original beading remains a one-of-a-kind artwork. But the photorealistic reproduction, which she turns into flowy clothing and scarves, can be worn and enjoyed by many within the Native community and beyond it.

Economic capacity

The best way to ensure that clothing and apparel with Indigenous imagery is culturally sensitive, White says, is to make sure it was designed by a Native person. “We trust that the designer is not going to appropriate their sacred or traditional designs that they use in ceremony as a commercial thing,” she said.

Supporting Indigenous designers helps develop the community’s economic capacity, White added, noting how tribal members often leave the reservation for job opportunities. (While the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux have profited immensely from gambling operations on their reservation near the Twin Cities, casinos in more remote areas, such as Leech Lake, bring in far less revenue.)

Grace Goldtooth, this year’s Fashion Night emcee, noted how the show not only brings visibility to Native artisans, but to issues in the community. Goldtooth, the executive director of a Lower Sioux Community nonprofit focused on revitalizing the Dakota language, said she appreciates White’s gift for raising up everyone in her orbit.

“If she succeeds, we all succeed,” Goldtooth said. “She makes room at the table for everyone. One of our cultural practices is to be humble and have compassion, and she executes that so well by being compassionate and supportive to the artist.”

The oldest art museum in the Northwest delights visitors with its permanent collection, sculpture garden and frequent major exhibitions.

Emilly Prado

Emilly Prado is a writer, award-winning journalist and consultant living in Portland. Read More

The Portland Art Museum (PAM) has been a hub for artistic celebration and culture since its 1892 founding and continues to evolve.

Portland Art Museum History and Campus

Today, the Portland Art Museum spans 2.5 sweeping city blocks spread among two primary buildings. Visitors of all ages can wander through the innovative gallery displays, stocking up on artsy goods at the gift shop, or perhaps resting on sleek benches with sketchbooks in hand. As one of the largest museums on the West Coast, PAM eagerly welcomes its visitors — more than 350,000 annually — but in the beginning, the scale was smaller. The first collection, an estimated 100 plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculptures, was displayed in the museum’s original location: a section of a public library several blocks from the current campus.

As the collections, public interest, and patronage alike grew, the PAM campus continued to expand and remains an iconic destination amid the idyllic South Park Blocks (a gorgeous tree-lined green space that served as Portland’s first public park in the mid-1800s.) By 1978, the Northwest Film Study Center (recently renamed PAM Center for an Untold Tomorrow) was incorporated into the museum. The Mark Building, a former Masonic Temple, was added in 2005 to house numerous administrative and curatorial offices, event spaces, the Crumpacker Family Library, which boasts around 33,000 volumes, and the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art.

In 2023, a major renovation project began to modernize the grounds, increase accessibility, and expand the campus to include several new features, including the Rothko Pavilion. Although the museum’s permanent collections are closed for renovations for the duration, exciting rotating exhibitions will remain open through the project completion date of mid-2025.

Planning Your Visit

Exhibitions

Please note: the permanent collections will be inaccessible due to construction until mid-2025, but rotating exhibitions will be open to the public.

Permanent Collection

The Portland Art Museum’s permanent collections are shaped by several geographic areas, mediums and communities spanning two millennia and include paintings, sculptures, ceramics, prints, drawings, objects, and more. The permanent collections, browseable online, are categorized into American art, Asian art, European art, graphic arts, modern and contemporary art, Native American art, Northwest art, photography, and silver.

The multi-story Native American art collection, housed in the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Center for Native American Art within PAM, has a sizable collection of more than 3500 artworks created by at least 200 tribal communities from the Americas. In late 2015, the museum also added the Center for Contemporary Native Art gallery to showcase the breadth of art by renowned modern-day Native American artists such as James Lavadour, Allan Houser, Maria Martinez, Wendy Red Star, and Marie Watt. During the 2024-2025 construction, PAM curator Cathleen Ash Milby will work with native communities to reimagine PAM’s galleries and exhibition spaces for Native American art. When the museum reopens in 2025, visitors can enjoy PAM’s Native art collection via special exhibitions while the museum wraps up a permanent gallery space in collaboration with Native tribes.

Rotating Exhibitions

Credit: Jason Hill by better.

At PAM, several special exhibitions are presented to the public, rotating throughout the year. Major touring retrospectives like Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism and Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe join groundbreaking collaborations with local community artists at the museum. These include Black Artists of Oregon (2024), curated by multi-disciplinary artist and journalist Intisar Abioto and the AUX/MUTE Gallery located at PAM CUT (which is presented by Oregon’s only Black-led radio station, The Numberz FM.)

Exhibitions on view in 2024 include Throughlines: Connections in the Collection, which uniquely pairs artworks across themes as opposed to cultural region and time, Monet to Matisse: French Moderns and Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm.

PAM CUT

The Portland Art Museum’s Center for an Untold Tomorrow (PAM CUT) was unveiled in 2022 but was born from a rich five-decade history as the Northwest Film Center. The new name formally marks the museum’s creative pivot, expanding its scope beyond solely short and feature films to include multimedia arts such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence. 

While PAM CUT’s headquarters undergo construction to expand viewing spaces and concessions through mid-2025, including the Whitsell Auditorium, visitors can still enjoy screenings and multimedia experiences offsite at the newly launched Tomorrow Theater, which opened in 2023 in Southeast Portland’s Division neighborhood.

Explore the Arts

Within the Portland Art Museum and beyond, to local institues supporting living artists.

Oregon Contemporary

In North Portland find visual art installations and performance art to collaborations with bands, chefs and mixologists, with international curators and partnerships with Oregon art makers, Oregon Contemporary is the cutting edge of visual arts.

The Portland Book Festival

Portland Book Festival (formerly “Wordstock”) returns every November with an impressive (and extensive) lineup of local and national authors.

Time-Based Art (TBA) Festival

Portland’s Time-Based Art Festival (TBA) returns every September with 10 days of boundary-pushing performances, visual art and projects that defy categorization.

Portland Art Museum Events and Activities

The Portland Art Museum hosts ongoing programming, including tours, in-gallery curator conversations, family- and educator-centered talks, interactive classes and workshops, and more. The free Bloomberg Connects app provides a digital guide to PAM, while the online calendar lists upcoming artist talks and events.

The Portland Art Museum also serves as the primary venue for the annual Portland Book Festival. In addition to panels, signings and author conversations, the pop-up author reading series features writers reading in front of artworks throughout the galleries. Be sure to check the online calendar before going as some events may be on hiatus during construction.

Events at the Portland Art Museum

Explore fun and fascinating visual arts and events at the largest art museum in Oregon.

Saturday, May 25, 2024

Journey to the Future

Join the Portland Art Museum for a cutting-edge workshop designed for families with kids ages 11+ wh…

When Nancy Strickland Fields saw the flawless craftsmanship of an AD 700 pot discovered at Town Creek Indian Mound in Mount Gilead, North Carolina, she sat in awe of its creator. “It was just so perfect, and I felt that the artist stepped forward and I could see her,” recalls the member of the Lumbee Tribe and director of the Museum of the Southeast American Indian in Pembroke. Fields knew then and there what she wanted to do for an exhibition she had been invited to guest-curate at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. It would center around three-dimensional works, like this pot, that captured the story and spirit of Native identity. 

Over the next year and a half, she gathered contemporary pieces for the exhibition, calling upon a diverse cast of seventy-six artists, including celebrated sculptors Roxanne Swentzell and Virgil Ortiz and legendary textile weaver Margaret Roach Wheeler, plus local Southeastern artists working in various mediums. The result—titled To Take Shape and Meaning: Form and Design in Contemporary American Indian Art—runs through July 28 in Raleigh. 

Senora Lynch (Haliwa-Saponi) used red and white clay to create this bowl, titled “Woodland People Bowl.”

Over fifty tribes are represented in the exhibition, and thematically, the pieces tackle everything from Native origin stories to contemporary fashion. North Carolinian Harlen Chavis re-created the deity Bird Man in copper, inspired by a rendering of the warrior found on a gorget at Oklahoma’s Spiro Mounds. Caddo artist Raven Halfmoon contributed a huge, two-toned sculpture titled “Soku and Nish,” or Sun and Moon. Jeremy Frey fashioned an intricate beaded basket in the shape of a snowy owl, a messenger for his tribe, the Passamaquoddy. Cherokee artist Laura Walkingstick fashioned corn husk dolls, believed to protect the home, livestock, and personal wellness. Potter Kathleen Wall, who has Jemez and Chippewa ancestry, created a clay figurine portrait of her daughter that celebrates multiplicity of identity. “She’s wearing a traditional Pueblo manta dress, a Southeastern belt sash, and holds two Cherokee baskets,” Fields says. “It makes you consider what it means to be Indian today, when Native peoples might be members of multiple tribes and embody multiple identities.” 

Raven Halfmoon’s “Soku & Nish (Sun & Moon – Caddo),” in ceramic and glaze.

“Adaptation II” by Jamie Okuma (Luiseño/Shoshone e-Bannock/Wailaki/Okinawan) takes shoes designed by Christian Louboutin and adds leather, glass beads, porcupine quills, sterling silver cones, brass sequins, and chicken feathers.

Fields invites everyone—both Native and non-Native—to come and engage with the art. “I hope the exhibition shows who we are and that we are still here, we are diverse, and we have so many stories to tell,” she says. “The range of art, from basketry to ceramics to mixed media, shows the commanding breadth of art from Native America…it is not only Native American art, it’s American art.”

The three-dimensional aspect of all of the pieces, whether they’re baskets or stiletto heels, lends the show a special force. “For Native peoples, when we give something shape, we give it meaning and it takes on a life,” Fields explains. “That means this exhibition is alive.” 

Throughout the summer, residents of Reno and Sparks will become familiar with a poster that will soon be distributed at several businesses as part of Artown’s promotional campaign.

Steve Nighthawk, a descendant of the Shoshone, Washoe and Paiute Nations of the Great Basin and an enrolled member of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, created that artwork.

Nighthawk’s design embodies tribal practices and the spirit of the city of Reno. It connects the mountains to the Truckee River and celebrates life, music, dance and culture. It incorporates natural elements such as blue skies, clouds and two red-tailed hawks, a spiritual bird for Native communities, Nighthawk said.

“The centerpiece is a traditional basket which is very important to Native people because it’s been done here for 1000s of years. And the outline of the city of Reno and with the music notes coming out, the movie reel, piano keys, the hand drum, the ballerina slippers, Hollywood masks, all down to the earth on the bottom and the dancer,” he said.

It took Nighthawk about a month to complete the 18” x 24” original design. He has been involved with Artown for years, but this year the conversation about creating the poster for the event came up, he said.

“I did a sketch first. And then I filled it in. Most of the color is chalk pastel, then charcoal pencil, and a little bit of acrylic paint. So it’s kind of mixed media,” Nighthawk said.

Nighthawk has spent most of his life in Reno and remembers creating his first art pieces at the age of six. He has turned his living room into an art gallery where he works on paintings and drawings of nature, real life, wild-life and native traditions that he then sells or trades.

He is currently working on paintings of Pyramid Lake, wolves, hummingbirds and eagles.

With this poster, Nighthawk wants to remind the community that northern Nevada’s Native communities have been in relationship with nature for thousands of years.

“Well, first off, we’ve always been here. We, Native people, have been here in this area for 1000s of years. And to be a part of the community is very important. Whether it’s Artown, or something else,” he said.

His message to the community is to take care of each other.

“Take care of nature, wildlife, or mountains, or rivers or lakes. So that we can all move forward,” Nighthawk said.

An artist reception with Steve Nighthawk will be held on July 11 at 6 p.m. at Sierra Arts Gallery in Reno.

As a note of disclosure, KUNR is a media sponsor of Artown.

Several dozen people gathered in the rain last week across the street from a coned-off Ketchikan property. They held signs saying “No Fake Totem Poles” and “Protect Indigenous Artists.” They faced a small construction vehicle sitting atop a pile of rubble spilling onto two carved, wooden poles.

Leaders from a number of Native groups turned out for the May 5 protest, including Rob Sanderson, 3rd Vice President of the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska.

“The bottom line is that our people have come too far, too long to get to where we’re at,” Sanderson said to the crowd, gesturing over to the poles lying on the ground. “When I look at these poles, that’s a slap to the face of our local artists here in Ketchikan and abroad.” 

At first glance, the poles resemble the art forms carved by Northwest Coast Indigenous artists for thousands of years. But in an interview with the Ketchikan Daily News, owner Joseph Machini said that he bought the poles from a non-Native Minnesota man named Carl Muggli in 2008. 

In a bizarre twist, Muggli was later charged with murdering his wife with one of the 700-pound poles they crafted as part of their business. He eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree unintentional murder in that case.

Machini acknowledged that unfortunate history to the Daily News, and explained that he had sought poles from out-of-state suppliers because he wanted something done quickly, and “the Indians here were very busy.” Machini plans to have the imitation poles adorn five small kiosk shops where he will sell local arts and crafts.

Back at the protest, Willard Jackson, a Teiḵweidí Brown Bear spiritual leader, shared a story about respect before leading a song.

“This man doesn’t got any respect! Doesn’t have any at all,” Jackson said, referring to Machini. “It’s time we stand up and move forward as Native people! This is our land. It lives in our heart!” 

Machini’s property sits directly across from one of Ketchikan’s cruise ship docks, and a number of disembarking tourists stopped to watch the protest. Ketchikan Indian Community President Norm Skan said that demonstration was just the beginning.

“Because really, as I always say, somebody from Iowa getting off one of these cruise ships is not going to know the difference,” Skan said. “But we know.”

Skan said he appreciates the business idea of creating spaces to sell local goods, but the imported poles are a different story.

“We don’t want these fake poles here made by a non-native person in Minnesota brought to our community and put up in Tlingit land,” Skan said. “And I’m surprised that our local politicians would put up with that, it just don’t make sense to me.”

In fact, one local politician did raise the issue at a Ketchikan City Council meeting days before the protest. Vice-Mayor Janalee Gage addressed her fellow council members during the citizen comment section.

“If we allow these poles to be raised, we will be no better than the individual who thought bringing those poles here that were carved by a non-native from Minnesota was okay,” Gage said. “This is appropriation at its finest.”

Gage cited the 1990 Indian Arts and Crafts Act, which prohibits the sale of products that are falsely marketed as being produced by Native artists.

“The owner may not be selling these poles, but he is selling an idea to those unsuspecting visitors, and our locals, that get off the ships,” Gage said. “They will think these are real, Native art.”

Gage requested a future agenda item to discuss what can be done. 

City Manager Delilah Walsh has been looking into what potential regulation might look like to share with the Council. In a phone interview, she said the city works closely with Native organizations to promote authentic Alaska Native art. 

“And we very much want to not only preserve, but to support not only that historic aspect of our local culture, but to respect what those items reflect,” Walsh said.

Walsh said that was the purpose behind the creation of the Totem Heritage Center, and its Native Art Studies program. 

“It’s absolutely not acceptable for culturally appropriated poles to be surrounded with debris and treated as such,” Walsh said.

When it comes to the Indian Arts and Crafts Act though, Walsh said the law is really only aimed at fake items that are displayed for sale, whereas the Minnesotan poles are simply decorative.

Some residents are also concerned that the property owner has been drilling into the hillside to make room for the kiosk buildings. A busy, one-lane tunnel runs through that same hillside, and critics say the excavation endangers both the tunnel and the homes directly above it.

Walsh said Machini’s original building permit did not include permission to excavate, but once he was granted that, he obtained the services of an engineering firm which has been monitoring for seismic activity from the drilling. Walsh said thus far, the operation is structurally sound.

As far as what city management can do to intervene, Walsh said their authority is limited to building codes. 

The city actually filed a lawsuit against Machini in 2015 for failing to remove the burned down structure of a building he owned on the same tunnel-adjacent property. But Walsh said that didn’t come into play when approving his current building permit.

“Simply because, building code does not talk about prior performance,” Walsh said. “So code doesn’t say ‘if you had a bad relationship or interaction with the city in the past.’ That’s not something that would be considered.” 

The City Council will discuss its regulatory authority over the imitation totem poles at its next meeting on Thursday. Walsh said the Council could try to enact new regulations, but that may be difficult due to the First Amendment rights of private property owners.

When first approached about the chance to participate in Vail’s Artist in Residency program, Danielle SeeWalker saw it as an opportunity to share her art and participate in a cultural exchange with the town.

“I was really excited about being a Native American woman coming into that community and being able to share and have a cultural cross-reference and exchange with their community,” SeeWalker said Tuesday in a phone interview with the Vail Daily.

But around 30 days before the program was expected to start, the residency unraveled over what town officials claimed were concerns from residents over a piece of artwork SeeWalker posted to Instagram. The town announced the cancellation of the summer program on Thursday, May 9.

Artist in Residency

Conversations around SeeWalker joining Vail’s residency program began in January when Molly Eppard, the town’s Art in Public Places coordinator, reached out to SeeWalker to gauge her interest in participating.

Over the next few months — through numerous emails, conversations and a visit from SeeWalker to Vail in March — the picture of the residency started to form.

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The town has been working for many years to create an Artist in Residency program in Vail, piloting it last July with Squire Broel, a visual artist based out of Walla Walla, Washington.

In a statement provided to the Vail Daily on Tuesday, the town indicated that it engaged in the conversations with “Danielle for a June residency based upon her interpretations of Native American culture through art; what we believed could be an important, contemplative discussion for our locals and visitors, alike, within our diverse Western community.”

SeeWalker is Húŋkpapȟa Lakȟóta and a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota who currently lives in Denver. On her website, she describes herself as “a fine artist, muralist, writer, activist, and boy mom of two.”

In addition to various murals in Denver, she has written a book and currently has an exhibition on view at History Colorado.

Specifically, the town discussed SeeWalker “creating a mural as a part of the town’s public art program based on SeeWalker’s existing body of public art murals highlighting Native American culture,” according to its statement.

“My mural work is much different than my studio work. My mural work is much more geometric, much more bold and vibrant and not as expressionistic as some of my studio work can be. And I was just really excited to be able to bring that over into the community,” SeeWalker said.

Her artwork, she added is “very much centered on my identity as a Lakota woman, as a Native American woman. It’s all centered on my personal experiences, my family’s experiences, historical perspectives that have occurred (and) stories that I’ve been told about my ancestors.”

In this way, SeeWalker said her art is like her diary.

“It’s about things I’m thinking about, personal experiences,” she added. “I’ve only been showing my art publicly since 2020. And so it’s very vulnerable still for me to put my art out there and have people respond to it, good or bad. It’s just because it’s very, very personal for me.”

From January to May, SeeWalker said the conversations with the town continued, forming the picture of “a pretty robust residency.”

Meeting minutes from the Arts in Public Places board meetings show that the board discussed SeeWalker’s residency at its Feb. 5, March 4, and April 1 meetings.

The two-week residency, as outlined in the initial release sent by the town on Tuesday, May 7, was to include SeeWalker creating a mural outside of the Vail Village parking structure pedestrian entrance as well as an engagement with the Vail Symposium, a community workshop and more.

However, while the details were seemingly “nailed down,” she never received a final contract, which had been expected to come through the first week of May, SeeWalker said.

The town has said that no proposal had been submitted for the mural and as such no contract was yet issued.

Still, even without a contract, SeeWalker said she had turned down other job opportunities in June — including another similar residency — and began work for the Vail program.

“I had spent time mocking up a mural design for them that I never did get the opportunity to present to their board,” she added.

The town said it never received a proposal.

Suspension of the program

Two days after the town issued a press release on May 7 announcing SeeWalker’s residency for June, SeeWalker received a phone call telling her the residency would no longer be happening.

SeeWalker said she had exchanged some text messages with Eppard earlier in the week “where she made me aware that we needed to urgently discuss the residency” as it related to her “G is for Genocide” painting.

SeeWalker had been traveling at the time and ultimately they scheduled a call for Thursday morning. Kathleen Halloran, the town’s deputy town manager, and Eppard were both on the call.

In the call, SeeWalker said she was told something along the lines of “we can’t put ourselves in a position to have politics involved in our community or two sides, and so we can’t have someone like you with a political message coming into the community to create art.”

“I was pretty shocked. It was just a very direct conversation, very matter-of-fact,” SeeWalker said. “I tried to have an engaging conversation and try to provide some context and understand what they meant by being too political and someone like me. But they would not hear me out and the conversation ended pretty abruptly.”

SeeWalker expressed disappointment in the nature of the call, saying she wishes it had been an “engaging, professional, respectful conversation.”

The town said in its release suspending the June program that while it “embraces her messaging and artwork surrounding Native Americans, in recent weeks her art and her public messaging has focused on the Israel/Gaza crisis.”

In its latest statement, the town said it “was premature to have announced the residency before a mural had been proposed and a contract put in place. That’s on us. And we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.”

“The decision to suspend the residency program, only in its second year, was made in part to allow the town time to reexamine its approach and create robust and specific guidelines, timelines and deliverables for both artists and the town to ensure a positive experience for all moving forward,” adds the statement.

The controversy and ultimate cancellation refer to a piece of SeeWalker’s entitled, “G is for Genocide.”

SeeWalker said that this piece was created at the end of February for a group show in March in Denver.

“As I was thinking about what I wanted to create (for the show), at that time in my life, I had seen tons of graphic images of children and women, both from the Israel and the Gaza side, being harmed in the name of you know suppression, oppression, war, land issues, etc.,” SeeWalker said. “It got me thinking, this is a modern-day situation very similar to what happened to my ancestors; being forced off their land, being killed or taken as prisoners in a way, forced onto reservations, having your whole identity and culture being eradicated.”

The resulting painting, she added is centered on “this loss of culture and the parallels between those two cultures.”

Initial sales for the piece raised around $2,500 for the UN Crisis Relief Fund. On Tuesday, she said that the figure had risen after the events of the past week.

In an Instagram post by SeeWalker on Thursday, she wrote that the town’s “solution is a closed-minded, judgmental one. They are consciously silencing a Native American woman artist which ripples down to silencing people of color as a whole.”

In Tuesday’s statement, the town said the decision not to pursue a contract with SeeWalker was made following “thoughtful consideration and discussion by the AIPP board and town staff,” adding that it was not made in a vacuum.

“After releasing her name in an announcement, community members, including representatives from our local faith-based communities, raised concerns to town staff around SeeWalker’s recent rhetoric on her social media platform about the Hamas-Israel war,” the statement reads.

“We cannot tolerate rhetoric that targets one group of residents or guests over another as we are a welcoming and inclusive community for all,” the town added.

The town added that if “SeeWalker would like to discuss expense reimbursement incurred while preparing for the residency, we will speak with her.”

SeeWalker said the whole situation has been upsetting, disappointing and heartbreaking.

“I wasn’t even allowed to talk or get out what I wanted to say or even have a formal conversation with anybody from the town of Vail — that in and of itself is disappointing,” SeeWalker said. “I would have wanted to understand how they’re defining one piece of art as being my whole identity as an artist.”

While the town decided to suspend the residency, Vail Symposium has decided to keep its conversation with SeeWalker on the calendar.

On Friday, James Kenly, executive director of the Vail Symposium, told the Vail Daily while it was aware the town was considering canceling the residency, it was not involved in the decision.

Kenly added that the Symposium feels the conversation planned between SeeWalker and Clay Jenkinson on June 19 supports the organization’s mission to “provide educational programs for the community that are thought-provoking, diverse and affordable.”

On Tuesday, SeeWalker said she is still planning to participate in the event. 

“I’m really excited about it. It’s all about centering my art and not necessarily any politics or anything that got construed through what the town of Vail thought I was standing for,” SeeWalker said. “It’s really just about being Native American, being an artist, and really centering my artwork, which is not defined by that one particular piece out of thousands of pieces of art that I’ve created.”

In early March, Indigenous artist Danielle SeeWalker posted a new painting to her Instagram: A woman in profile, her face grayed out except one eye staring directly at the viewer — a signature of SeeWalker’s painted works. The woman is wearing a keffiyeh, the black-and-white scarf worn to signal support of Palestine, with a feather by her ear and a bright red braid.

Reactions to the painting were overwhelmingly positive, “I’m so grateful to know you and your work,” one person wrote. Hands clapping and watermelon emojis, a symbol of Palestinian support, dotted the comment section. She later created 60 prints of the painting, titled “G is for Genocide,” and sold them to raise money for the UN Crisis Relief Fund.