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By Kaili Berg

April 19, 2024

This week, there are plenty of events in Indian Country for everyone to enjoy. From powwows to a Native American Health Summit and Spring Arts Market, here is Native News Online’s weekly round-up of arts, culture, and entertainment offerings around Indian Country.

American Indian Week 2024
Albuquerque, NM
April 20, 2024

Join in for American Indian Week, which offers cultural dances, exhibitions, dining at Indian Pueblo Kitchen, and shopping at Indian Pueblo Store with direct access to Native artists. The event features over 40 artists selling pottery, jewelry, and paintings, accompanied by hourly cultural dance performances. 

Annual School’s Out Powwow
Witchita, KS
April 20, 2024

Join in for Wichita Public Schools Title VI Native American Indian Education Programs Annual School’s Out Pow wow. Come support Native American students in the community who work hard organizing, running, and participating in this powwow.

Native American Powwow at CDUDH
Carson, CA
April 20, 2024

Join in for California State University, Dominguez Hills’ 10th Annual Native American Pow Wow, which honors the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Enjoy traditional dance and drum performances.

Spring Arts Market
Albuquerque, NM
April 20, 2024

Don’t miss out on this extraordinary event featuring over 40 Native American artists. Kicking off American Indian Week with a vibrant celebration of artistry, the courtyard will come alive with bustling market booths showcasing pottery, jewelry, paintings, and more.

2024 Time Out Wacipi Powwow
Grand Forks, ND
April 20, 2024

Time Out Week at the University of North Dakota is a dynamic celebration of diversity, featuring workshops, performances, and discussions that promote cultural understanding and unity among students. It’s a vibrant showcase of the university’s commitment to inclusivity and respect for all voices.

Native American Health Summit
Pembroke, NC
April 20, 2024

Join Trillium for this free public information event regarding Native American health. There will be discussion topics such as alcohol and substance awareness, diabetes and mental health.

Native American Series Speaker: Debi Cochise
Mountainair, NM
April 20, 2024

The Native American Series Speaker event featuring Debi Cochise is a significant gathering aimed at honoring and sharing indigenous perspectives and experiences. Through Cochise’s insights and storytelling, attendees can gain valuable insights into Native American culture, history, and contemporary issues. 

28th Annual University of Iowa Powwow
Iowa City, IA
April 20, 2024

The University of Iowa’s Powwow is a vibrant celebration of Native American culture, featuring dance, music, and art. It brings communities together to honor heritage and foster understanding through colorful traditions and lively festivities.

Celebrations of Traditions Powwow
San Antonio, TX
April 20, 2024

Celebrations of Traditions Pow Wow is an official Fiesta event, which will provide all who attend, individuals and families, the opportunity to view and participate in the American Indian culture and traditions of dance and music at an official Native American Pow Wow.

Young Learners’ Series: Dance
Florence, AL
April 20, 2024

The Young Learners program at the Florence Alabama Museums offers engaging and educational experiences tailored specifically for children. Through interactive exhibits, hands-on activities, and guided tours, young visitors will be immersed in the wonders of art, history, and science. This initiative provides a fun and enriching environment where children can explore, learn, and discover new interests while fostering a lifelong appreciation for culture and knowledge.

3rd Annual Powwow For the Planet 2024
Las Vegas, NV
April 19-20, 2024

The 2024 Powwow Planet event at UNLV is a dynamic celebration of Native American culture, featuring traditional dance, music, and art. It’s a vibrant gathering that honors indigenous heritage and fosters community connections. Attendees can immerse themselves in the rich traditions of Native American peoples while enjoying the lively atmosphere and festivities.

Powwow at Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ
April 19-21, 2024

The ASU Powwow is an annual celebration that showcases Native American culture through dance, music, and art. It’s a vibrant gathering that brings together communities to honor indigenous heritage and promote understanding. Attendees can experience the rich traditions and diversity of Native American peoples while enjoying performances and participating in cultural activities.

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About The Author

Author: Kaili BergEmail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Staff Reporter

Kaili Berg (Aleut) is a member of the Alutiiq/Sugpiaq Nation, and a shareholder of Koniag, Inc. She is a staff reporter for Native News Online and Tribal Business News. Berg, who is based in Wisconsin, previously reported for the Ho-Chunk Nation newspaper, Hocak Worak. She went to school originally for nursing, but changed her major after finding her passion in communications at Western Technical College in Lacrosse, Wisconsin.

In December 1931, the Italian commissioner of the 18th Venice Biennale penned a plea to organisers of the United States pavilion, who had yet to fully deliver their vision for the impending international art exhibition. “We should like some of your very great artists like Whistler,” he wrote, “and as for the living ones we should allow a room for [Paul] Manship as Sculptor, and [Maurice Sterne], or some others, as painters.”

The following January—four months before the exhibition’s opening—a reply arrived from New York. It confirmed that the US pavilion would feature, out of four rooms, one devoted to art by Native Americans, among them the Pueblo painters Fred Kabotie and Awa Tsireh. It would include neither Whistlers, nor Homers, nor Sargents—conspicuously setting aside the era’s assumed “great artists” to shine an international spotlight on lesser-known Indigenous names.

The resulting display was historic: it marked the first time that Native American artists represented the United States at the prestigious art exhibition, a distinction that has repeated only this month, with the Chocktow Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson’s takeover of the US pavilion at the 60th edition of the Biennale (until 24 November). Yet it has largely been forgotten, according to Jessica L. Horton, a professor of modern and contemporary Native American art at the University of Delaware.

“We are versed in a truism that Native artists have never exhibited in the US pavilion,” she argued in a 2015 paper. That claim was repeated as recently as last year: The New York Times issued a correction to an article that had erased this history, apparently relying on information provided by the commissioners of the 2024 US pavilion.

Today, little information remains about the Native art section of the 1932 pavilion, despite its commissioner, Martin Birnbaum, proclaiming it “the most popular exhibition of the entire display of all the nations”, the Times reported that May. Horton dove into historical archives during a 2011 trip to Venice, where she found the exhibition catalogue listing the participating artists: Ma Pe Wi, Santiago Cruz, Oqwa Pi, Tonita Peña, Awa Tsireh, Julian Martinez, Pen Yo Pin, Tse Ye Mo, Otis Polelonema and Fred Kabotie. Among their contributions, only one painting by Kabotie, Mountain Sheep Dance (undated), was reproduced in the catalogue, which did not include serious discussion of their work, Horton says. Installation photographs revealed that textiles, jewelry and pottery were shown alongside paintings, many of them depicting the motions and rituals of Pueblo dance. Most of their makers, excepting the potters Maria Martinez and Tonita Roybal, remain anonymous. It was “a very ethnographic type of presentation”, Kathleen Ash-Milby, a co-commissioner of Gibson’s 2024 pavilion, told NPR.

Other rooms of the 1932 pavilion featured paintings by non-Native artists including George Bellows, Arthur B. Davis and John Sloan, who is credited with assembling the Native art selection. Sloan had once described Pueblo watercolours as “the only 100% American art produced in this country”, and in 1931 had co-organised The Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, a blockbuster touring exhibition of Native objects and paintings. Due to its success, a large selection of the works from that show were sent to Venice.

‘Aesthetic nationalism’

“His whole argument rested on Native art offering a modern aesthetic with ancient roots on the continent,” Horton tells The Art Newspaper. Contemporaneous reports affirmed this sentiment: responding to the 1931 exposition in a WOR radio broadcast, the critic and collector Christian Brinton claimed Native art “as an artistic treasury not only older but fresher and purer than anything Europe has to offer”. A Times headline announcing “Venice to exhibit art of Americans” was accompanied by the subheading: “An entire gallery to be given over to work of Indians.”

But this “export of aesthetic nationalism” to Venice, Horton argues, resulted in what she calls the pavilion’s ultimate “malfunction” as conflicting values came to the fore.

“There’s always been this complexity around who [Native artists] represent when we try to nationalise art, and that came out really clearly in the competing nationalisms on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1930s,” she says. “That made it hard for the organisers of the pavilion to swallow this choice, that Native artists could represent the United States as the nation’s great artists. Not everyone was ready to get on board with that, and so it was not claimed proudly by the organisers as a success.”

In her research, she details how Birnbaum slighted the pavilion in his introduction to the catalogue, suggesting that the country’s “truly outstanding works” were absent. Organisers also found the press response, which overwhelmingly failed to mention in detail the Native artists, disappointing. “They determine that this was a failure of representation,” Horton says.

Such transatlantic exhibitions of Native American art were not infrequent in the 1920s and 30s, reflecting collectors’ and patrons’ burgeoning interest in the Santa Fe market in particular. Most of the work was made by Native artists for consumption beyond their communities, with the knowledge that their art might travel. However, it was not often that overseas exhibitions, like the US pavilion show at the 1932 Venice Biennale, parsed the full complexities of artists’ visual and cultural choices, especially given that artistic merit was evaluated through a Western lens and by Eurocentric standards.

Radical for its time

Still, Horton says it would be a simplification to attribute the diminished legacy of the 1932 pavilion to a failure of well-intentioned white patrons to properly contextualise the work. “Sloan was doing something politically radical for his moment,” she says. “Within the cultural politics of the moment—especially in the 1920s, when Native American dancing was outlawed—just to be a champion of Native art and culture was a fairly radical decision to make as a white person circling in elite East Coast circles.”

The historical record further illuminates how the 1932 pavilion faded from dominant narratives. There is surprisingly little scholarship on the display despite its import. The whereabouts of many works in Sloan’s selection are unknown; due to the scarcity of information in the catalogue, Horton was able to locate only Kabotie’s paintings Mountain Sheep Dance and Snake Dance (around 1930) in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Tonita Peña’s painting Basket Dance was later acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art for $225.87—setting a record for the highest price paid for a Pueblo painting at the time. But Basket Dance has since disappeared from the Whitney’s collection, along with all related records.

Much has evolved in the ways institutions curate and care for Native contemporary art. But the US pavilion at the 1932 Biennale highlights complexities in the field that are unchanging and ever important, around notions of sovereignty, citizenship, rights and representation.

“Native American art didn’t fit that paradigm [of nationalism] neatly or clearly in the 1930s, any more than it does today,” Horton says. “The fact that it’s taken this long for a Native artist to again be invited into that position speaks to some real ambivalence, politically, around where art and sovereignty intersect.”

Jeffrey Gibson’s takeover of the U.S. pavilion for this year’s Venice Biennale contemporary art show is a celebration of color, pattern, and craft, which is immediately evident on approaching the bright red facade decorated by a colorful clash of geometry and a foreground dominated by a riot of gigantic red podiums.

Mr. Gibson, a Mississippi Choctaw with Cherokee descent, is the first Native American to represent the United States solo at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest contemporary art show. For context, the last time Native American artists were included was in 1932.

Mr. Gibson accepts the weight of the honor, but he prefers to focus on how his participation can forge greater inclusion going forward.

“The first is not the most important story,” Mr. Gibson told The Associated Press this week before the pavilion’s inauguration on April 18. “The first is hopefully the beginning of many, many, many more stories to come.”

The commission, his first major show in Europe, comes at a pivotal moment for Mr. Gibson. His 2023 book “An Indigenous Present” features more than 60 Indigenous artists, and he has two major new projects, a facade commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and an exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

Mr. Gibson’s eye-catching exhibition titled “the space in which to place me,” features text in beadwork sculptures and paintings taken from U.S. founding documents, music, sermons, and proverbs to remind the viewer of the broken promises of equity through U.S. history. The vibrant use of color projects optimism. In that way, Mr. Gibson’s art is a call to action.

“What I find so beautiful about Jeffrey’s work is its ability to function as a prism, to take the traumas of the past and the questions about identity and politics and refract them in such a way that things that realities that have become flattened … can become these beautiful kaleidoscopes, which are joyous and celebratory and critical all at the same time,” said Abigail Winograd, one of the exhibition’s curators.

“When I see people walk through the pavilion and kind of gasp when they walk from room to room, that’s exactly what we wanted,” Ms. Winograd said.

Entering the pavilion, the beaded bodices of sculptures in human form are emblazoned with dates of U.S. legislation that promised equity, the beading cascading into colorful fringe. A painting quotes George Washington writing, “Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth,” in geometric letters that meld into a colorful patterned background.

By identifying specific moments in U.S. history, Mr. Gibson said that he wants to underline that “people who are fighting for equity and justice today, we’re not the first.

“This has been a line in the history of American culture. But I’m hoping that people will think about why … some of these things … have either been revoked or have not come into fruition,” he said.

Craft is at the center of Mr. Gibson’s art, both in defiance of past denigration of craft and as a way to confront “the traumatic histories of Native American people,” he said.

“There is something very healing about the cycle of making,” Mr. Gibson explained.

The pavilion’s intricate beaded sculptures owe a debt to Native American makers of the past without imitating them, employing couture techniques to create something completely new. In the way of his forebears, Mr. Gibson uses beads sourced from all over the world, including vintage beads from Japan and China, and glass beads from the Venetian island of Murano.

Paper works incorporate vintage beadwork purchased from websites, estate, and garage sales in mixed media displays that honor the generations of Native American makers that preceded him.

Mr. Gibson’s themes fit well into the message of inclusion of the main Biennale exhibition, titled “Stranieri Ovunque – Strangers Everywhere,” which runs in tandem with around 90 national pavilions from April 20 to Nov. 24.

His personal history has placed him firmly in what he calls the “diasporic history of Indigenous people.” His father’s job took his family abroad when he was a child to Germany and then South Korea, and he later studied in Chicago and London. His partner is Norwegian artist Rune Olsen.

Through all of this, Mr. Gibson has picked up traditions and practices that go beyond his Indigenous background.

“I’ve looked at op art, pattern, and decoration. I’ve looked at psychedelia, I have taken part in rave culture and queer culture and drag and the whole spectrum,” Mr. Gibson said.

“And so for me, I would not be telling you the whole truth if I only chose to spoke about indigeneity. But my body is an Indigenous body – it’s all funneled through this body,’’ he said. “And so my hope is that by telling my experience, that everyone else can project their own kind of intersected, layered experience into the world.”

This story was reported by The Associated Press.

Details

By Kaili Berg

April 19, 2024

Indigenous filmmakers will come together on April 29 in Sante Fe, New Mexico, for the 2024 Sundance Institute Native Filmmakers Lab,  a week-long program designed to empower and elevate their voices in the world of cinema.

Led by Adam Piron (Kiowa/Mohawk), Director of the Sundance Institute’s Indigenous Program, the program aims to empower Indigenous voices in cinema through tailored sessions with advisors. The lab will offer workshops, feedback sessions, and roundtable discussions to enhance participants’ skills and deepen their understanding of their craft.

“The Native Lab has a rich history of supporting Indigenous filmmakers and artists for generations since its founding. Its unique approach involves intensive sessions with advisors, tailored to elevate the voices and projects of indigenous artists to the next level,” Piron told Native News Online.

One of the foundational aspects of the Native Filmmakers Lab is its emphasis on Indigenizing creative practices. Throughout the week, participants will be encouraged to explore how they can infuse their work with elements of Indigenous culture and tradition, creating stories that are both authentic and impactful.

“What sets the native lab apart is our commitment to meeting artists where they are and empowering them to pursue their creative vision without constraints,” said Piron. “Rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all approach, we tailor our support to each artist’s unique needs and aspirations. We prioritize authenticity and cultural resonance, ensuring that Indigenous perspectives remain at the forefront of the storytelling process.”

Past participants of the Native Filmmakers Lab include acclaimed filmmakers such as Sterlin Harjo, director of “Reservation Dogs”; Sky Hopinka, visual artist and filmmaker known for works like “Kicking The Clouds”; and Erica Tremblay, director of “Fancy Dance”. 

“Over the years, we’ve had the privilege of witnessing the growth and success of many talented indigenous filmmakers who have participated in our lab. Their journeys serve as inspiring examples of the impact our program can have in nurturing Indigenous talent and amplifying Indigenous voices on a global scale,” Piron said.

Beyond the lab itself, the Sundance Institute’s Indigenous Program offers ongoing support and resources to Indigenous filmmakers, helping to foster their growth and success long after the event has ended. Participants will receive a $10,000 grant to support their projects, with the goal of helping them take their work to the next level. 

Additionally, participants become part of a community of Indigenous filmmakers, with opportunities to showcase their work at the Sundance Film Festival and connect with industry professionals and funders.

“Looking ahead, our goal is to continue expanding opportunities for indigenous artists and fostering a more inclusive and equitable landscape in the film industry,” said Piron. “By providing ongoing support, mentorship, and resources, we hope to bring positive change and create lasting impact in Indigenous storytelling for generations to come.”

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About The Author

Author: Kaili BergEmail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Staff Reporter

Kaili Berg (Aleut) is a member of the Alutiiq/Sugpiaq Nation, and a shareholder of Koniag, Inc. She is a staff reporter for Native News Online and Tribal Business News. Berg, who is based in Wisconsin, previously reported for the Ho-Chunk Nation newspaper, Hocak Worak. She went to school originally for nursing, but changed her major after finding her passion in communications at Western Technical College in Lacrosse, Wisconsin.

Themes of sovereignty, preservation of language, and art expressing these issues peppered the agenda for the Symposium on the American Indian, and the logo for this year’s event celebrated 100 years of recognized citizenship.

Makiya Deerinwater designed this year’s logo that populates flyers, programs and T-shirts, for the annual event at Northeastern State University.

“In 2023, I was commissioned to create the logo for this now 51st symposium. All I was provided was the theme, which was 100 years since the Indian Citizenship Act,” Deerinwater said.

Deerinwater wanted to convey the celebration that Native peoples are almost recognized people, and legally, they are finally acknowledged.

“I felt a way to present that was showing a traditional practice that many indigenous people do, which is stomp dance,” Deerinwater said.

The logo is a homage to the stomp dance and depicts a lineup alternating between man and woman, and the dancers circle counterclockwise. The figures represent a timeline – left to right – of Indigenous people. It starts with modern, then female seminary, to the trading era, and all the way back to pre-contact.

“So they go around the sun to represent the fire of the stomp dance but also a new generation – a new day,” Deerinwater said.

In the session “Soft Power: Proclaiming Tribal Sovereignty through Visual Arts,” three presenters shared how Native artists support sovereignty through their art.

Amber DuBoise-Shepherd, a member of Navaho, Sac and Fox/Prairie Band Potawatomi tribes, shared the work “Artspace At Untitled” in Oklahoma City, commissioned for an exhibit.

The project was woodblock printing. DuBoise-Shepherd began by drawing three figures on a 2-foot by 3-foot panel of wood. With chisels, she carved out the designs and then rolled ink over the board, each time creating darker and lighter highlights.

“A lot of my paintings are very narrative-based, so I try to tell a story from my Native background,” DuBoise-Shepherd said. “I will put in my french heritage – DuBoise – it means ‘the woods.'”

Her grandparents on her mother’s side were Navaho silversmiths, and her great-grandmother was a weaver. On her father’s side, her grandmother was a seamstress and fashion designer and created ribbon skirts and jingle dresses.

America Meredith, Cherokee Nation citizen, is publishing editor of “First American Art” magazine.

“[It was] impressed upon me that all the opportunities I have as an artist is because people sweated and made those opportunities happen,” Meredith said. “They fought a lot of heavy duty racism and lack of funding and support for the arts.”

The theme of Meredith’s talk was, “What does a tribe look like?” She said most people don’t have a clue what a tribe looks like. Who gives a tribe its image is the artist, Meredith said.

“Now we have lovely things like Osiyo TV and there are more and more tribal culture centers, which is absolutely fantastic,” Meredith said. “But in that thin thread of time during the ’60s and ’70s – before the internet – you kind of disappeared.”

It was the artists who showed what tribes were, Meredith said. 

“And by artists – I use that as a big umbrella. Because regalia makers are absolutely artists,” Meredith said.

Stacy Pratt, a member of the Mvskoke tribe, spoke on the art that adorns the walls of the Council Oak Comprehensive Healthcare campus in Tulsa.

“The hospital opened in August 2021, and can treat Natives and nonnatives – so [with] sovereignty, we’re the nation within your nation – and I was really proud of that,” Pratt said.

The art collection was part of the hospital’s conception, Pratt said. 

“Having a national art, respecting it and using it for your daily life is so important for your identity, but also as a nation,” Pratt said. 

Part of the money to open the hospital was dedicated to pay artists for pieces to adorn the walls of the facility, Pratt said.

“All the art was either bought from Muskogee artists or commissioned, so we have some massive murals in there,” Pratt said. 

More than 30 Mvskoke artists are currently in the collection, but it is ongoing, Pratt said.

“I’m also a patient of the hospital and a Muskogee citizen and those are two ways I experience this art collection,” Pratt said. “When you [enter the front doors] the first thing you see is Bobby Martin’s massive piece that goes all around [the lobby].”

Martin’s piece is about the Council Oak story – which is when the Muskogee reinstated their government after the tribe arrived in Indian Territory. 

“It tells the story all the way through the removal until the establishment of the government in Oklahoma,” Pratt said.

Pavilions at the Venice Biennale are sectioned off by countries, embodying the idea of art as a cultural product of nation-states. In the colonial context, however, this model reinforces pre-existing inequality. In 2022 the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway and Finland) organised a Sámi pavilion instead. This year a team of three curators, Arissana Pataxó, Denilson Baniwa and Gustavo Caboco Wapichana, takes over the Brazilian space, renamed the Hãhãwpuá pavilion. It is the first time that Indigenous artists or curators have occupied the pavilion, while Adriano Pedrosa is also the Biennale’s first Brazilian curator.

The three Indigenous curators stress the strong connection of their vision to the Biennale’s title. “I think our concept has a lot to do with Pedrosa’s theme, Foreigners Everywhere. In the past, or at least in the past 400 years, Indigenous peoples have always been represented by others. Our main concern is to represent the present,” Wapichana says.

Pataxó says that Brazil’s Indigenous people are often called “invaders”, despite being owners of the land. “It makes us reflect on the place that we occupied in the five centuries of European invasion: on the margins of Brazilian society. Most communities live in situations that require them to always fight for basic rights such as food, health and education, due to the loss of traditional territories.”

Hãhãwpuá means “the great land” in the Pataxó language. The ancestral territory is home to more than 300 Indigenous peoples existing long before the Portuguese colonisation. Reflecting on the challenge of capturing the enormous richness of native languages and cultures in a single show, Baniwa says, “Through the works of artists Glicéria Tupinambá, Olinda Tupinambá and Ziel Karapotó, we try to draw a panorama of everything that’s taking place in Brazil—the poetics, the practices, and the latest trends in what we call Indigenous contemporary art.”

Struggles for recognition and survival

Indigenous contemporary art has exploded in Brazil’s museums in the past few years, engendering a dialogue with art institutions and the public about the meaning of activism, art advocacy and social and cultural agency. It is particularly urgent, given that land grabs, environmental degradation and massacres of Indigenous leaders reached historic heights under the previous right-wing government led by Jair Bolsonaro.

“In the last Biennale, in the Sámi pavilion, there was an encounter with Indigenous peoples that spoke to the fact that, unfortunately, what we have in common is this colonialist violence—it’s similar to all Indigenous peoples, in Canada, the US, etc,” Wapichana says.

Wapichana sums up the context of Brazil’s Indigenous people today by saying, “It’s as much about the strategies of survival and resistance as it’s about the process of regeneration.” The pavilion frames renewal as recognition and repatriation—a reminder that, for instance, the nation of Tupinambá, once thought to be extinct, was only officially recognised by the Brazilian government in 2001, and that many communities must still fight to have their spiritual and ancestral practices recognised by the state. Even when recognised, and legally demarcated, the lands are constantly subject to invasions by miners, land grabbers and ranchers.

Strategies for renewal

The title of the pavilion’s show, Ka’a Pûera: We are walking Birds, centres on capoeira, most commonly known as a form of an ancient martial art, but also a species of bird that symbolises renewal. “Many people see the capoeira territory as unused soil, but it’s where the forest regenerates,” Wapichana says, referring to the fact that Indigenous peoples have long cultivated the Amazon rainforest in sustainable ways.

The pavilion will also highlight other forms of knowledge circulating in Indigenous communities. For example, Glicéria Tupinambá’s video installation, Fold of Infinite Time, features seeds and nets as a reflection on how the past and the present flow into each other, and the artist runs workshops on making fishing nets and knitting. Olinda Tupinambá’s video installation Balance explores a spiritual entity, Kaapora, while reflecting her ongoing research on environmental degradation on Caramuru Indigenous land, combining first-hand testimony with official documents.Ziel Karapotó’s installation School of Fish comprises nets, maracas and ballistic projectiles to evoke the colonial past, but also to connect it to the current Indigenous fight against extractivism.

Another struggle the artists are involved in is the battle to reclaim the community’s ancestral mantles. Produced in the 16th-
17th centuries, the few that still exist are mostly held in foreign museums. In a recent case, the mantle Manto Tupinambá was returned by the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, where it had been held since 1699, to Brazil’s National Museum in Rio de Janeiro. Glicéria Tupinambá, who creates mantles with her community, will present Okará Assojaba, which features the letters sent by the Tupinambá People of Serra do Padeiro to European and Brazilian museums, requesting loans of these sacred Indigenous artefacts.