However, beyond the aesthetic appeal of the masks, which were traditionally created to represent various gods and deities during the historic annual festival, but now reflected ordinary humans, animals and common objects, Gauri was also interested in their potential for socio-political explorations of class and wealth disparity. Writing in the book, she says “When I first heard of the Bohada masks and festival, I began to wonder about the incongruity between these idealised mythic masks and the reality I saw around me. For instance, Jawhar, in Palghar district, is one of the most impoverished areas in Maharashtra… Surrounded by this precarity, I wondered why it was that the ritual masks were so extraordinary, and if the exaggerated tropes of representation were in fact inversely proportional to the routine landscape of everyday life.”

As such, Gauri became interested in the idea of using these newly created masks as a tool by which to empower this mundanity. She asked the Adivasi artists to create masks that, rather than symbolising deities, actually captured the people, animals and objects that surrounded them, as well as the emotions they experience on a day-to-day basis. And rather than performing such acts as the epic slaying of a demon — as would be the custom during the Bohada festival — asked them to reenact quotidian rituals familiar to them such as sweeping the floor, washing dishes or reading a book. Gauri guided this process of creation as a kind of catalyst but, importantly, the artists were given agency over their final interpretations, crafting life as they see it, and offering suggestions while staging the improvisatory mise en scenes.

While ripping out yellow blooms blanketing hillsides in Los Angeles, Max Kingery has been questioned about his fervor for killing flowers.

But the clothing designer who used the plants to dye his spring and summer lines said he takes no offense at being accused of pillaging this part of California’s “superbloom.” Instead, he sees it as an opportunity to raise awareness about a destructive flower that proliferated in the state following an unusually wet winter: wild black mustard.

Mustard was among the most prominent of wild flowering plants that seemingly popped up everywhere in California this spring. As temperatures warm it is starting to die, making it tinder for wildfires in a state that has been ravaged by blazes. Its stalks can act as fire ladders, causing flames to climb.

Mustard also smothers native plants, transforming the landscape. Its leaves and roots inhibit the growth of other species, creating a mono-thicket that spreads rapidly. There are numerous kinds of wild mustards in California, but black mustard or Brassica nigra is considered among the most pervasive.

Kingery is part of a growing group of artists, designers and chefs who are tackling the invasion by harvesting the plant to use in everything from dyes to pesto.

Foragers have led edible hikes to pick its peppery flower and munch on its leaves. There have been workshops and instruction guides on how to turn it into paper, fertilizer and a spicy version of the well-known condiment by the same name.

Kingery’s line, aptly named “Pervasive Bloom,” features sweatshirts, pants, tank tops and other items dyed naturally using mustard. On the website for his company, Olderbrother, a model embraces the uprooted weed while donning a mustard-dyed jacket. Other photos show the clearing of the land.

The Olderbrother store in Los Angeles is decorated with a huge panel of the plant’s stalks, leaves and flowers that were woven on a loom by designer Cecilia Bordarampe. The material came from the first harvest when Kingery said his team initially harvested about 450 pounds to make the dye. They have continued, removing more than a 100 pounds a week ever since, mostly from public land in Los Angeles.

Even that amount is only nipping at the problem, Kingery said.

The plant from Eurasia was first brought to California in the 1700s — it has been found in the adobe bricks of missions. But its presence exploded this year after a record amount of rainfall from December to April. Years of wildfires also created more spaces for the plant that thrives in disturbed lands.

State and local agencies remove mustard from managed lands, but it’s spread to places beyond.

At its peak bloom this spring, undulating swaths of yellow lined freeways. Hillsides jutting up from urban landscapes glowed. Sidewalk cracks were abloom.

“Physically, it’s been demanding,” Kingery said. “And yes, there seems in sheer volume, if you zoom out a bit, that there could be enough wild mustard here to make salads and dyed sweatshirts for everyone in the United States.”

But when Kingery sees native plants sprouting in plots that have been cleared, it makes it all worth it, he said. And, he added, to get the hues that he wants requires a lot of mustard, which in this context is a good thing.

“We don’t want to rip a bunch of plants out of the ground for no reason,” Kingery said. “The idea of something being utilized that is growing out of the sidewalk is a pretty cool concept.”

Artist Erin Berkowitz of Berbo Studio makes dyes from invasive species, including the dye for Kingery’s clothing line. She has offered classes along with a chef who crafts pesto from the mustard greens and mashes the flowers into dressing.

“This is an abundant art supply that is all around us,” Berkowitz said.

She said her work with Kingery showed the possibilities of what can happen if more people become aware of its uses.

“Visually we watched a whole hill of a park be denuded of mustard, which was a very hopeful thing,” she said.

Underneath the towering stalks of mustard, which can grow more more than 8 feet tall, blue lupine, poppies and other native plants were fighting to reach sunlight. “One public space, one whole neighborhood, returned to having healthy, functional native ecology,” Berkowitz said after the harvest in the working-class neighborhood of El Sereno in east L.A.

Jen Toy of Test Plot, an organization that partnered with Kingery and Berkowitz and helps people restore biodiversity to their neighborhoods, said “it’s really about broadening what we mean by land care, and getting other folks who might not see themselves as like environmentalists interested.”

To that end, ecological horticulturist Alyssa Kahn and artist Nadine Allan made a zine, a digital magazine, about the uses of black mustard, including to make paper, a face mask and even a kind of natural pesticide to till into garden soil.

Kahn said she was motivated to act in part because she has friends who lost nearly everything to wildfires.

“We wanted to incentivize people to do something about it,” she said, and educate them.

“They just look so pretty,” Kahn added. “They have those yellow flowers, and if you don’t really know kind of what’s happening on a larger scale, you might say, oh they’re just a sea of yellow flowers.”

Jutta Burger of the California Invasive Plant Council applauds the ingenuity and suggests people contact land management agencies to gather left-behind seeds when areas are cleared.

“You’ll never completely get rid of it, at least where it’s been established for a long time,” she said.

Still, Burger said similar efforts to creatively use something have made an impact. For example, she said, when chefs started crafting recipes involving the predatory lionfish and serving it in restaurants, its population decreased in areas, and it became widely known that the species was a threat to native marine life.

“One thing we would like to make sure people know is those yellow fields out there, they were once fields of not just yellow — they were fields of yellow, purple, pink, and blue,” Burger said.

The cruise ship with about 1,000 passengers anchored off Nome, too big to squeeze into into the tundra city’s tiny port. Its well-heeled tourists had to shimmy into small boats for another ride to shore.

It was 2016, and at the time, the cruise ship Serenity was the largest vessel ever to sail through the Northwest Passage.

But as the Arctic sea ice relents under the pressures of global warming and opens shipping lanes across the top of the world, more tourists are venturing to Nome — a northwest Alaska destination known better for the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and its 1898 gold rush than luxury travel.

The problem remains: There’s no place to park the big boats. While smaller cruise ships are able to dock, officials say that of the dozen arriving this year, half will anchor offshore.

That’s expected to change as a $600 million-plus expansion makes Nome, population 3,500, the nation’s first deep-water Arctic port. The expansion, expected to be operational by the end of the decade, will accommodate not just larger cruise ships of up to 4,000 passengers, but cargo ships to deliver additional goods for the 60 Alaska Native villages in the region, and military vessels to counter the presence of Russian and Chinese ships in the Arctic.

It’s a prospect that excites business owners and officials in Nome, but concerns others who worry about the impact of additional tourists and vessel traffic on the environment and animals Alaska Natives depend on for subsistence.

The expansion will “support our local economy and the local artists here, the Indigenous artists having access to the visitors and teaching and sharing our culture and our language and how we how we make our beautiful art,” said Alice Bioff, an Inupiaq resident of Nome.

Bioff was a tour guide who greeted the Serenity’s passengers when they arrived in 2016. One of the guests admired her cloth kuspuk, a traditional Alaska Native garment similar to a smock, and wanted to know if it was water resistant.

It wasn’t, but the interaction inspired Bioff to create her own line of waterproof jackets styled like kuspuks. She now sells to tourists and locals alike from her own Naataq Gear gift store, a retail spot in the post office building, where about 20 Alaska Native artists offer ivory carvings, beadwork or paintings through consignment.

Studies show that cruise ship passengers typically spend about $100 per day in Nome, city manager Glenn Steckman said.

With the expansion, he’s hoping guests on larger cruise ships will extend their stays to experience more of Nome and the tundra, to view wild musk ox, or to sip a drink at the 123-year-old Board of Trade Saloon.

Climate change is making this all possible.

Nome, founded after gold was discovered in 1898, has seen six of its 10 warmest winters on record just in this century. The Bering Strait shipping lanes have gotten only busier since 2009, going from 262 transits that year to 509 in 2022.

“We’re going to be the first deep-draft Arctic port but probably not going to be the last,” Nome Mayor John Handeland said.

The Bering Sea ice on average reaches Nome in late November or December, about two or three weeks later than it did 50 years ago, said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

In 2019, mushers in the Iditarod, who normally drive their dog teams on the Bering Sea ice to the finish line in Nome, were forced onto the beach because of open water. The ice season will only get shorter, Thoman said.

The existing port causeway was completed in the mid-1980s. The expansion will be completed in three phases and effectively double its size. The first part of the project is funded by $250 million in federal infrastructure money with another $175 million from the Alaska Legislature. Field work is expected to begin next year.

Currently three ships can dock at once; the expanded dock will accommodate seven to 10.

Workers will dredge a new basin 40 feet (12.2 meters) deep, allowing large cruises ships, cargo vessels, and every U.S. military ship except aircraft carriers to dock, Port Director Joy Baker said.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, an Alaska Republican, said the expanded port will become the centerpiece of U.S. strategic infrastructure in the Arctic. The military is building up resources in Alaska, placing fighter jets at bases in Anchorage and Fairbanks, establishing a new Army airborne division in Alaska, training soldiers for future cold-weather conflicts and has missile defense capabilities.

“The way you have a presence in the Arctic is to be able to have military assets and the infrastructure that supports those assets,” Sullivan said.

The northern seas near Alaska are getting more crowded. A U.S. Coast Guard patrol board encountered seven Chinese and Russian naval vessels cooperating in an exercise last year about 86 miles (138 kilometers) north of Alaska’s Kiska Island.

Coast guard vessels in 2021 also encountered Chinese ships 50 miles (80 km) off Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg last yea r warned that Russia and China have pledged to cooperate in the Arctic, “a deepening strategic partnership that challenges our values and interests.”

Still, the prospect of Nome welcoming more tourists and a greater military presence bothers some residents. Austin Ahmasuk, an Inupiaq native, said the port’s original construction displaced an area traditionally used for subsistence hunting or fishing, and the expansion won’t help.

“The Port of Nome is development purely for the sake of development,” Ahmasuk said.

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Timothy Tate Nevaquaya loves sharing his Comanche art and music with non-Natives, but he wishes such cultural interaction could have happened much sooner.

Centuries earlier, in fact.

“Had the foreign invaders tried to understand our ways, things could have been so much better,” Nevaquaya said Tuesday during the 35th annual Sovereignty Symposium.

“They did not know what they were suppressing. They were cutting themselves off from something that had a very powerful meaning, a spiritual meaning,” Nevaquaya said.

“Thank God it has changed for the better.”

Nevaquaya served as a workshop panelist during the symposium, which is held every year in Oklahoma City as a forum for the exchange of ideas in a scholarly, non-adversarial environment. Speakers include tribal leaders and statewide elected officials, and workshops often focus on the contributions of tribes and tribal citizens to the economic and cultural development of the state.

Nevaquaya is an artist and flautist who divides his time between Tulsa and Apache and performs on the wooden flute during life events such as weddings, birthdays and memorial services. About 20 years ago, a non-Native friend asked him to take his flute to the hospital in Lawton so the friend could hear his music in his final hours. The family also invited him to play during the funeral.

‘Helps to heal the soul’

Native flute music, he said, “really helps to heal the soul. The non-Natives have really taken to it. It’s really a very beautiful thing that’s taking place now.”

Nevaquaya said Friday that if given more time as a panelist, he would have shared more of his personal thoughts about the power of culture to bring people together.

“Man has cheated himself out of some great opportunities,” he said. “Every race on this earth had gifts that were beneficial for everyone. We all have the same Creator.”

Mankind fails to live in peace when the acquisition of land and possessions takes center stage, Nevaquaya said.

“Our personal desires are uncontrolled, and that’s when dominance begins to take place,” he said.

“When the foreigners came, they were struck by the beauty of the land, and the obstacle was the people who were already here. They did not take time to understand them. Had they just stopped for a moment, they could have learned what they had: the medicine, the culture, the arts.”

After the workshop, Nevaquaya led a flute circle, inviting symposium participants to share their flute music and anything they had on their minds. His youngest brother, Calvert Nevaquaya, who lives in Norman, drew enthusiastic applause after playing a song that imitated bird sounds on a small, high-pitched flute.

Timothy and Calvert and their three brothers learned how to make flutes from their father, Doc Tate Nevaquaya, who was instrumental in the revival of Native flute music starting in 1969.

The crafting was taught to him, Calvert Nevaquaya said, but his songs are his own compositions.

‘In awe of his music’

“When I was growing up, I would take one of my dad’s flutes and go off and hide,” Calvert Nevaquaya said. “I heard Comanche hymn songs or powwow songs growing up. And we lived down the road from the Apache and we would hear them sing. I began to mimic the songs with my flute.

“And I grew up hearing my father’s songs and was in awe of his music. I believe my dad played the most traditional music you will ever hear.”

Calvert Nevaquaya said he had not previously participated in a flute circle.

“To me that was something new, and it almost felt like a therapy session for some people,” he said. “The instrument brings out people’s emotions. It brings a certain kind of peace.”

Calvert Nevaquaya is fully immersed in the culture as an acrylic painter, sculptor, musician and powwow dancer. He said about half the people who buy his art are non-Native.

“For me to sell my work to other races, to me it’s an honor, that they want to hang it in their homes,” he said.

Several years ago, Tate Nevaquaya was invited by the Comanche Nation to teach flute-making to a men’s group.

“I wanted them to know that this was their inheritance, that it could be passed down to the next generation, and that this instrument would be good for your soul, to help you overcome certain difficulties during your lifetime,” he said.

Traditionally, only the men played the flute.

“The people were very strict,” Tate Nevaquaya said.

“They believed that if a woman played it, it would cause a bad omen to come upon the tribes. A lot has changed. A lot of non-Native women play the flute today. I have created instruments for them.”

His ancestors played flute music to women they liked as part of a courtship ritual, Tate Nevaquaya said, “so it was instrumental in the posterity of the tribe.”

Cleveland County residents have several options for enjoying Native art, Tate Nevaquaya said, including the Jacobson House Native Art Center and the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in Norman. In Oklahoma City, good examples of Native art are at First Americans Museum, the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, the Red Earth Inc. Museum and Exhibit C, he said.

Both men sell their art through their Facebook accounts.

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RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) – The Sioux Indian Museum in Rapid City is showcasing a new Oglala Lakota artist, Gene Swallow.

June 16 through August 27 the Doll Revolution will showcase Swallows’ work. Some pieces will also be for sale.

Conor McMahon, the senior curator for the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, said what made Swallow stand out as an artist is that the museum wanted to showcase a contemporary Lakota artist who is making something unique.

“It features a variety of his dolls; he’s created all these dolls, especially for this exhibit. It includes some traditional baby dolls, as well as his unique animal-human hybrid dolls, and then also some fashion dolls,” said McMahon.

About four exhibits a year are showcased at the Sioux Indian Museum featuring Native American artists.

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