Submitted photo
Youngstown native Bob George is co-founder of The ARChive of Contemporary Music, which is devoted to preserving recorded music history and other related memorabilia.

Bob George has lots of stories.

The Youngstown native lived in New York during the birth of the punk movement. He did radio shows in England where then-unknown musicians like Ian Curtis of Joy Division would hand him their 45s in hopes of airplay. He stayed at the compound of Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, where he slept on the floor with his wives, and he attended the baptism for one of the Gipsy Kings’ children.

He’s traveled through Colombia in search of records, a trip that required protection from members of a drug cartel. And he has a white label promo copy of the Rolling Stones’ debut album on Decca Records UK that was signed by the entire band. He found it underneath a stack of dog urine-soaked newspapers.

George has even more records than he has stories, millions of them.

He is co-founder of The ARChive of Contemporary Music, which has a collection of more than 3 million sound recordings, about 2,500 signed by the artists who made them and all but one without dog urine stains. There also are 30,000 music books and millions of pieces of supporting material — posters, fliers, press kits, sheet music, etc.

ARC has records that can’t be found at the Library of Congress, and resources that have been used by filmmakers ranging from Martin Scorsese to Ken Burns. Scorsese serves on its advisory board along with Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees Keith Richards, Paul Simon, Todd Rundgren and Nile Rodgers (David Bowie and Lou Reed are former board members).

“A lot of the people I set up chairs for (at concerts) and did menial things for ended up serving on my board,” George said.

The beginning

The interests in music, art and collecting that led to the creation of the archive started with a childhood in Youngstown and Poland.

“I grew up on Midlothian, the inner city, the wrong side of the tracks, and then my parents did well and we moved to Poland, Ohio, which was pretty ritzy at the time,” George said. “The school band in Poland was the Human Beinz (who went on to have a top 10 hit with “Nobody But Me”). Mike Tatman, who was a friend, played drums with them.”

George remembered buying music at Record Rendezvous, hearing Boots Bell on the radio and being a member of the Carousel Teen Club. He still has his membership card. And the first autograph he ever got was from young actor Sue Lyon at a screening of “Lolita” at what is now Powers Auditorium.

Art also was a major interest growing up.

“Mrs. Butler, whose family started the Butler (Institute of American Art), lived right outside of Poland,” George said. “I would go there on Saturdays. She had a barn set up that was refurbished and had art materials there for kids to play with. That really got me started. And my uncle, Jon Naberezny, was head of the art department at Youngstown State for a while and has pieces in the Butler.”

After graduating from Poland in 1967 or ’68 (George couldn’t remember which year), he went to the University of Michigan, where he studied art and also worked at Canterbury House, an Episcopal campus ministry that also hosted concerts.

There he set up chairs for shows by Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and where he saw Detroit-area acts like Commander Cody and Iggy Pop & the Stooges.

New York

In 1974 George got a scholarship from the Whitney Museum to study in New York.

“The Whitney was great,” George said. “They gave me a 3,000-square-foot studio, seminars … They didn’t care what art you made, but they wanted you to understand how the art world worked, which made me want to not be an artist.”

Through the program, he met people like composer Philip Glass and performance artist Laurie Anderson, and he moved to the city at a time when its punk rock scene was exploding.

“I got to be a hippie and a punk,” George said. ” Nobody was famous then. There was only one restaurant in lower Manhattan and everyone showed up there at the end of the day. I got to meet David Bowie and Lou Reed and everybody in that scene, David Byrne. That was really cool. You didn’t have to talk to their handlers first.”

George started collecting the music being made at the time, in many cases 45s that were self-released or put out on small labels in limited quantities.

That led to creating with Martha DeFoe “Volume: International Discography of the New Wave,” the first comprehensive catalog of the music from that underground scene, and the book led to an invitation to do radio shows for renowned BBC DJ John Peel.

George also tried to help his friend Anderson get a label deal for her experimental song “O Superman.” When Seymour Stein (Sire Records), Ahmet Ertegun (Atlantic Records) and Richard Branson (Virgin Records) turned him down, he created his own label and released it himself.

The eight-minute song made it to number two on the UK charts and was a hit in several other countries. George said his only artistic contribution to the song was making it longer, so it would generate more royalties from that UK airplay.

The start of the archive

Through these different paths as a fan, DJ and label owner, George amassed a personal collection of about 47,000 records.

“Once I did the book, everyone was sending me records,” he said. “A friend who started the archive with me, David Wheeler, said, ‘We’ve got to save this. This stuff is going to disappear. It’s very ephemeral.’

“Nobody wanted my records. I had mostly punk, reggae, world music, artistic and experimental stuff and hip hop. In ’84, ’85, I tried to give it away — Lincoln Center, Library of Congress, NYU (New York University). Nobody was interested. If you put all of that together. That’s kind of what music is today.”

ARChive spends about $10,000 a year on new acquisitions. The overwhelming majority of the collection came through donations.

Agent, producer and label owner Jeep Holland, who George met in Detroit, donated his collection of 125,000 albums. It was so big, it was causing his Boston-area home to sink from the weight of it (that’s also where George found that signed Rolling Stones album).

Keith Richards has donated his collection of blues recordings. New York Times critics John Rockwell and Jon Pareles have donated their personal collections.

Looking to move

The ARChive of Contemporary Music currently is located in Hyde Park, N.Y. The building was donated, George said, but it’s in an area that is zoned agricultural with little parking, and it’s not the kind of neighborhood where folks want semi-trailer trucks coming and going with the latest massive collection being donated.

The archive is not open to the general public and can’t be at its current location, so the search is underway for a new home.

When reminded that there are many big, empty buildings in his hometown, George said, “If you have a 100,000-square-foot building in great shape, $10 million to donate and someone in town who has the clout and power to get it done, we’ll be glad to move.”

Essentially, the archive is looking for a donor on par with James Smithson, who 185 years ago donated the money that created the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

George believes the archive’s collection is as important to preserve as the items in the Smithsonian’s collections. While they have worked with the Internet Archive to digitize portions of their recordings, but digital storage companies go out of business, data gets corrupted, CDs and DVDs deteriorate.

“We have this debate — which is going to last longer, the physical item or the digital version? One nice thing about vinyl, it never disappears. It gets dirty, but the information doesn’t get lost from oxidation, dropouts. CDs are not mechanical. Anything that’s not mechanical, it can’t possibly be preserved. You can’t build a chip at home, but you can take a bicycle wheel, a rubber band, a cone of paper and a bundle of sewing needles and you can play that record.”

Once that benefactor and new location is found, George would like to return to being a globe-traveling searcher of new sounds and new music.

While being surrounded by every possible record one can imagine sounds like a dream job for many, George said his days don’t have much to do with listening to music.

“I’ve become a petty bureaucrat who’s trying to keep it alive … I really don’t want to run a big institution. In the ’80s I had my best time,” he said, as he rattled off a few of the many countries he’s visited and people he’s met. “That’s what I really enjoy.”

Pam Tillis and Phil Vassar are packing up the sleigh — OK, more like a tour bus — to deliver holiday songs and hits.

The two country artists have plenty of both from which to choose, and Warren’s Robins Theatre will be the second stop on the tour on Dec. 1.

Tillis, who was married to songwriter and Liberty native Bob DiPiero from 1991 to 1998, is a Grammy and CMA winner whose country hits include ‘Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life),” “Maybe It Was Memphis,” “Shake the Sugar Tree,” “When You Walk in the Room” and “In Between Dances.”

Vassar got his start writing hits for others and was named country songwriter of the year by the publishing company ASCAP in 1999. As a performer, Vassar has recorded more than 15 top 40 country singles, including the chart toppers “Just Another Day in Paradise” and “In a Real Love.”

Both also have recorded Christmas albums — Tillis in 2007 with “Just in Time for Christmas” and Vassar in 2011 with “Noel.”

Vassar did a phone interview in mid-November to promote the upcoming tour. That may seem a little early for some to talk about Christmas, but as Vassar explained it’s nothing compared to recording a Christmas album in Nashville in August. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

TICKET: Have you and Pam Tillis done a holiday tour before?

VASSAR: Never have. We were label mates at Arista and I’ve known Pam forever. She’s such a great singer and writer. We’ve done shows over the years together but never a Christmas tour.

TICKET: What will the structure of the show be?

VASSAR: Each artist will do their thing, their hits, and then we’ll do some holiday stuff together. So I’m excited about that. That ought to be great.

TICKET: I know the tour hasn’t started yet, but have the two of you been going back and forth, putting together the setlist?

VASSAR: We’re getting together again on Tuesday next week to finalize everything. We have video and all this stuff. It’s always a production, but I love Pam, I love playing with her. She’s just the real thing and can really, really sing. We’re going to have a good time

TICKET: What are the challenges of putting together a set list where “Six Pack Summer” and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” can work side by side?

VASSAR: That’s funny you say that. We have a lot of hits to do and, of course, I do the hits I wrote for Alan Jackson, Tim McGraw, JoDee Messina. You’re trying to keep some kind of holiday theme. I guess you can have palm trees with lights on them at the beach. A lot of that stuff is with video. I’ve been talking to my video guy about that.

TICKET: What are your feelings on Christmas music in general? I know for your album “Noel,” you did a split between traditional stuff like “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and some newer things. What do you gravitate to?

VASSAR: It was fun to try to write Christmas songs. I’d never really done that before that record. Being a writer, you want to write something like that, but who’s ever going to beat “The Christmas Song,” the classics? I want to do some of the songs we wrote for the Christmas album and some classics too, make it interesting for everyone if we can. It’s hard to please everybody but you try to.

TICKET: What were some of your favorites growing up?

VASSAR: With my grandmother and my mom, it was always Nat King Cole. I loved that music, that guy’s voice. Sinatra. I love the Christmas stuff Dean Martin did. That’s old, old stuff, but it’s what I grew up with. My family was big on that stuff, so whenever I hear that now, it reminds me of being a kid.

But it’s fun to get some new stuff out there, and that’s really why I wanted to do that Christmas record. I love it. It’s one of the funnest records I ever recorded. We cut the whole thing in a day. I’d never done that on a record. And I like the way it turned out. I’m very happy with it.

TICKET: I’ve interviewed a lot of artists who’ve made Christmas albums, and they always seem to record them in the summer. Was that the case with you?

VASSAR: I think it was the end of summer. I want to say it was August, so it was a 100 degrees in Nashville. To get the vibe, we were putting up decorations in the studio.

TICKET: The holiday tour takes you through 2023. What’s the plan for 2024?

VASSAR: I took a lot of time off this past year. I’ve been on the road for so long, 25 years, it was time. I can’t wait to get back out there. We’re already booking big festivals for next year. It’s still fun to see your friends out there on the road. I just did this Ronnie Milsap tribute (to celebrate more than 50 years of performing and his retirement), where I saw Trace (Adkins), Tracy Lawrence, Terry Clark, so many people. And it was great to see Ronnie. I’ve done shows with him for decades. It was a little bittersweet, but he sure deserves a break.

TICKET: For many acts, it’s not even about the money. They just seem to love being on the road.

VASSAR: It’s funny. We do take a break at the end of the year. January is a slow month. We rest a little bit, but everybody is so ready to get back out by March. “OK, let’s get out of here. I’m going stir crazy.” But I’m really excited about getting back out there and blasting it again, because it’s been a little bit.

NEW YORK (AP) — The financial crisis of 2008 hit Mary Kathryn Nagle differently. As a playwright and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, she saw parallels to events that negatively impacted Indigenous people centuries ago.

>>> STREAM ACTION NEWS JAX LIVE <<<

Her play “Manahatta” juxtaposes the recent mortgage meltdown when thousands lost their homes to predatory lenders with the shady 17th-century Dutch who swindled and violently pushed Native Americans off their ancestral lands.

“A lot of times history does repeat itself,” Nagle says. “I’m really interested in the ways in which we can connect to our past, carry it with us, learn from it, and maybe change outcomes so that we’re not just doomed to repeat the past in the present.”

Nagle’s 2018 play has landed in New York City at the prestigious Public Theater this winter and it’s just the latest in a flowering of Native storytelling. From “Reservation Dogs,” “Dark Winds” and “Rutherford Falls” on TV to “Prey” on the big screen and Larissa FastHorse becoming the first Indigenous female playwright on Broadway, barriers are being broken.

[DOWNLOAD: Free Action News Jax app for alerts as news breaks]

“I hope it’s not a moment. I hope it’s the beginning of an era,” says FastHorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation and a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. “We stand on the shoulders of so many folks that came before us.”

In 2020, the University of California, Los Angeles published a diversity report that examined media content from 2018-2019 and found Native representation to be between 0.3%–0.5% in film. In television or on stage, Native representation was virtually nonexistent. ( According to the Census, 9.7 million Americans claimed some Indigenous heritage in 2020, or 2.9% of the total U.S. population.)

“The truth was most theaters had never produced a single play by a Native playwright. Most Hollywood film studios had never produced any content actually written or produced by Natives. It may have been about some Native people, but it was not written by Native people. And we’ve just seen that flipped on its head,” Nagle said.

[SIGN UP: Action News Jax Daily Headlines Newsletter]

Non-Native storytellers are also exploring the history of white atrocities on Native Americans with Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” telling the story of the Reign of Terror in Oklahoma, and documentary-maker Ken Burns examining an animal central to the Great Plains with “The American Buffalo.”

Nagle recalls moving to New York in 2010 and asking artistic directors of theaters why they weren’t producing Native work. They would answer that they didn’t know any Native playwrights or that there weren’t enough Native audiences to power ticket sales.

“Good storytelling is good storytelling, whether the protagonist is white, Black, Asian, LGBTQ — it doesn’t matter,” said Nagle, who is on the board of IllumiNative, a nonprofit working to deal with the erasure of Native people.

“There’s a lot of projects out there that are changing the narrative and that are proving that our stories are powerful and that non-Natives are really moved by them because they’re good stories.”

Madeline Sayet, a playwright and professor at Arizona State University who also runs the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program, sees the contemporary Native theater movement flowing from the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s and an increase in awareness of Indigenous issues ever since Native people won the right to legally practice their culture, art and religion.

She connects the Wounded Knee occupation of 1973 to the Standing Rock standoff over the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 to Ned Blackhawk’s “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S History” winning the National Book Award this year.

Sayet, a member of the Mohegan Tribe who became the first Native playwright produced at the Public when her “Where We Belong” made it in 2020, said keeping Indigenous stories being produced depends on changing funding structures and getting long-term commitments from theaters and programs like Young Native Playwrights Contest.

“Part of what’s really helping right now is us all creating more opportunities for each other instead of in competition with each other,” she said.

FastHorse, who made history on Broadway in 2023 with her satirical comedy “The Thanksgiving Play,” which follows white liberals trying to devise a culturally sensitive Thanksgiving play, has since turned her attention to helping rewrite some classic stage musicals to be more culturally sensitive.

“Native people have been exotified in a way that keeps us othered and separate, sometimes in a negative way, as in, ‘We just kill all the Indians’ and sometimes in a ‘positive’ way where they’re this special, magical thing.”

She has recently reworked the book for an upcoming touring musical revival of the 1954 classic “Peter Pan,” which was adapted by Jerome Robbins and has a score by Moose Charlap-Carolyn Leigh and additional songs by Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

FastHorse found the character of Peter Pan complex, the pirates funny, the music enchanting but the depictions of Indigenous people and women appalling. There were references to “redskins” throughout, a nonsense song called “Ugh-A-Wug” and Tiger Lily fends off randy braves “with a hatchet.”

“I was like, ‘What? We’re having little kids read this? This is just rape culture written out, exoticized with a Native person to boot,” she said. “This is what makes you a good woman? If you fight hard enough to keep the men away?”

FastHorse widened the concept of Native in the musical to encompass members of several under-pressure Indigenous cultures from all over the globe — Africa, Japan and Eastern Europe, among them — who have retreated to Neverland to preserve their culture until they can find a way back.

The playwright said one of her guiding principles in the reworking was to make sure a little Native girl in South Dakota could see herself and celebrate. “Then we’ve done our job and she can join the magic instead of having to armor herself against the magic.”

Nagle is enjoying making her debut at the Public Theater — her play runs through Dec. 23 — but is realistic that no one play is going to teach everyone every single lesson they need to know about Native people after hundreds of years of misinformation.

“I think one thing I’m just hoping that people take away from this play is like, ‘Wow, Native stories are really compelling. Native people are incredible. They’re incredibly resilient. They’re incredibly brilliant. Yes, there’s tragedy, but they have such incredible senses of humor,’” she said.

“I want them to love my characters the way I love them. I want them to feel the heartache. I want them to feel the laughter. I want them to feel the love,” she said. “And I want them to leave the theater just wanting to know more about our tribal nations and our Native people.”

Click here to download the free Action News Jax news and weather apps, click here to download the Action News Jax Now app for your smart TV and click here to stream Action News Jax live.

Dezeen School Shows: a San Francisco fish market transformed into a bathhouse is included in Dezeen’s latest school show by students at the Academy of Art University in California.

Also included is a foldable and portable bed that combines a sleeping surface with storage for people who lack safe and stable housing and a house in Palo Alto that has a living green roof.

Institution: Academy of Art University
School: School of Architecture and School of Landscape Architecture
Course: NAAB Accredited M Arch 1, M Arch 2, B Arch MA, BA M Arch and B Arch IPAL programmes
Tutors: Mark Mueckenheim, Karen Seong, Sameena Sitabkhan, Mini Chu, Simon McKenzie, Maria Paz de Moura Castro King, Philip Ra, Eric Reeder, John-Michael Wong and Ethen Wood

School statement:

“We are a progressive design laboratory of highly passionate students and a distinguished faculty of practising architects who work together to explore the boundaries of architecture.

“Our interactive on-site and online studio experience harnesses digital tools to mentor students throughout our rigorous curriculum.

“We offer an excellent design education by developing each student’s capacity to synthesise critical thought, architectural vision and technical comprehension.

“Our programmes engage with current global issues, empowering students to be changemakers and leaders advocating for social equity.

“Our diverse international community enables us to propagate a unique cultural response to build a better world.”

Group project: Stay Over Programme Family Shelter

“Stay Over Programme (SOP) is a family shelter located at the Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 Community School, which was piloted to address the overwhelming number of families in the district who lack safe or stable housing.

“In partnership with shelter residents, Dolores Street Community Services, 826 Valencia, and the BVHM school, students design and fabricate modular beds and storage units while reimagining the dining room/after-school area to improve user experience.

“During Community Workshops with the Stay Over Programme families, parents and children provided design input through various activities, such as exploring kids’ safe spaces and identifying what everyone needs for storage.”

Students: Edgar Castillo, Lowai Ghaly, Mazen Ghaly, Andrew Hart, Mohamed Meawad, Petros Peritos and Shadi Vakilian
Course: B lab Community-based Design Collaborative Project
Tutors: Karen Seong and Sameena Sitabkhan

Unveiling Lost Identities: Investigating Migration Problems in Chinese Architecture and Culture by Qiyang Xu

“During China’s rapid urbanisation, millions of rural villagers migrated into cities while leaving their children behind in villages.

“The separation from parents caused many children to display characteristics that include loneliness, misconduct and lack of confidence.

“In Zhaoxing village, with the development of tourism, local inhabitants have returned to work in their hometowns.

“The design aims to provide children with a warm place, help them regain their lost identities and give them a sense of belonging to a culture through the local architecture.”

Student: Qiyang Xu
Course: Master of Architecture Thesis M Arch
Tutors: Philip Ra, Ethen Wood and Mini Chu

Compost Tower – A new Typology for a Circular Economy by Kenan Beker

“The compost tower is a proposal for a new kind of sustainable waste centre for a future circular economy. When waste as a concept is eradicated, we can treat it as a nutrient or energy meant to be reintroduced to broader systems.

“The thesis proposes a facility for nutrient energy transformation and exchange. Rather than being located outside the city, the thesis proposes that these systems will be closely intertwined within the urban fabric as visible landmarks.

“As vertical embodiments of aerated static pile composting, these new building types will also deal with municipal waste and offer landfill alternatives.

“Future waste is proposed as a resource with the potential to be reintroduced into water systems, energy or heat.”

Student: Kenan Beker
Course: Master of Architecture Thesis M Arch
Tutor: Mark Mueckenheim

Boundary Connector – Future Port For Transforming the Defined Border Line between Hong Kong and Mainland China by Xiaoman Sun

“In 1986, Luohu port opened at the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border under the ‘one country, two systems’ policy to promote exchanges between the two areas.

“With the advent of the era of globalisation, the separating function of the border is still restricting the free flow of people and supplies.

“The living cycles and cultural circles of border residents continuously extend across the border and this process reconstructs the border space. This continually developing condition shows that the port is not just a line separating two places – instead, the port should be a place for cultural and economic exchanges.

“The project focuses on the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border and the residents living on this boundary, using architecture as a tool to resolve two different urban and social conditions.”

Student: Xiaoman Sun
Course: Master of Architecture Thesis M Arch
Tutor: Mark Mueckenheim

Cultural Exchange – Chinese Cultural Center of San Francisco by Yi Ling Liao

“Since the nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants in the United States have made a significant contribution to the transformation and economy of California through mining, transcontinental railroad construction and through subsequent generations of active citizenship.

“The project seeks to establish street connections at three locations – creating spaces for art galleries and cultural attractions to promote interaction between tourists and residents alike.

“Cultural Exchange will reinforce Chinese culture by integrating an interpretation of cultural elements, establishing spaces of mixed opportunity.

“The goal is for Chinatown to retain its cultural identity while establishing a progressive public interface for residents and tourists alike.”

Student: Yi Ling Liao
Course: Bachelor of Architecture Thesis B Arch
Tutor: Maria Paz de Moura Castro King

Western Addition Community Center by Lowai Ghaly

“The Western Addition in San Francisco is a diverse neighbourhood with a large number of immigrants. This community centre provides services to immigrant families by guiding them through the immigration process and connecting them to different resources.

“To promote stronger connections between parents and their children, classes are offered for parents to learn English and for the children to learn their native languages and cultures.”

Student: Lowai Ghaly
Course: Bachelor of Architecture 4th year project ARH 410 studio course
Tutors: Karen Seong and Simon McKenzie

Bayfront Park Mission Bay, San Francisco, CA by Sol Lee

“Sol Lee embarked on a transformative project that is a testament to the power of creating spaces with profound meaning and purpose.

“This endeavour takes advantage of its stunning location by the Bay, with unparalleled views of the water and exceptional light quality throughout the day.

“The project capitalises on the restoration of an old fishing pier, positioned along the well-trafficked Bay Trail, to weave together the fabric of the community comprised of residents, tourists, workers and basketball enthusiasts.

“The design aims to carve out a strong, independent identity for the park, ensuring it’s not overshadowed by the presence of the nearby Chase Center.

“It aims to offer a sanctuary from the urban bustle, shielding visitors from noise and wind, while providing a multitude of vantage points for bay viewing and a dedicated observation area, enhancing the public’s engagement with the waterfront.”

Student: Sol Lee
Course: LAN 610 Landscape Architecture Design Studio
Tutor: Toni Bava

Speaking of Reality: Creating an Immersive Experience for Landscape Architectural Design Presentation using the Latest Technologies in the Field of Game Design by Jason Jeon

“This project explores how poster boards and videos have a limit in explaining architecture to teachers or clients.

“It explores different presentation methods and was informed by San Francisco’s annual Game Developers Conference.”

Student: Jason Jeon
Course: Landscape Architecture – Master’s Thesis

Residence Aerial by Justin Wagner

“This residential design in Palo Alto, California, exudes a serene yet vibrant charm, deeply rooted in a palette of native-inspired landscaping, embracing the local ecology and biodiversity.

“Sustainability threads through every element, from utilising drought-resistant plants to incorporating living green roofs, creating a space that’s as kind to the environment as it is aesthetically pleasing.”

Student: Justin Wagner
Course: Landscape Architecture Design Studio

Metamorphic Insertion – public bathhouse and spa by Maud Indiana Vikjord

“The Fisherman’s Wharf once held a special place in the heart of local San Francisco residents as a fish market on the coastal edge of the city.

“Today, it has a reputation as a tourist destination yet during the Covid-19 pandemic, travel restrictions left the area a virtual ghost town.

“The building, which occupies an entire urban block, is based on a continuous surface of concave and convex spaces inspired by the spatial and tectonic quality of an egg crate and on circular components made out of thirty different prefabricated concrete elements.

“The upper floor houses the bath, while the lower floor is inhabited by public restaurants, a spa surrounding a lush courtyard, and the changing and service areas of the bath.

“The project aims to bridge the gap between the two in a curated cultural bathhouse experience and an assortment of local businesses.”

Student: Maud Indiana Vikjord
Course: Master of Architecture Thesis M.Arch
Tutor: Mark Mueckenheim

Partnership content

This school show is a partnership between Dezeen and Academy of Art University. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

The story of Keepunumuk is a Thanksgiving story told in Native tradition. Written by Danielle Greendeer (Mashpee Wampanoag), Anthony Perry (Chickasaw), and Alexis Bunten (Yup’ik and Unangan)

The Thanksgiving story that most Americans know only celebrates the Pilgrims. Without members of the Wampanoag tribe who already lived on the land where the Pilgrims settled, the Pilgrims would never have made it through their first winter. Without Weeâchumun (corn), the Native people wouldn’t have helped.

Keepunumuk is an important picture book that retells the Thanksgiving story for a more inclusive America, a story that honors the Native peoples who made it possible.

Learn more! and Read up on ways you can rethink Thanksgiving

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a three-and-a-half-hour historical film, centers on a wave of brutal murders against members of the Osage Nation, a Native American tribe based in northeast Oklahoma. As depicted in the movie, a great number of these murders were of Osage women, many of whom were married to white settlers, and all of whom were killed in a bid to obtain the rights to their land.

The film is founded upon a real-life investigation by journalist David Grann, who examined dozens of murders of Osage people that took place in the 1910s to 1930s during a time that became known as the Reign of Terror. The Osage were oil-rich, but were barred from using their own money, and Grann concluded that this wave of violence was the result of an expansive conspiracy of the Osage’s white financial “guardians.”

Yet while the focus of the film is historical, the issue it highlights — brutality against Native women — is an enduring one.

Disproportionate rates of violence toward Indigenous women, including murder and sexual assault, continue to persist and remain a significant problem. According to a 2017 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American Indian and Alaska Native women, as well as Black women, suffer from higher homicide rates compared to other racial groups, and have been murdered at more than twice the rate of non-Hispanic white women.

Per a 2016 National Institute of Justice report, American Indian and Alaska Native women are also much more likely than non-Hispanic white women to experience intimate partner violence, which accounts for a high proportion of these homicides. And according to a 2022 Amnesty International report, almost one-third of American Indian and Alaska Native women have been raped in their lifetime, a rate that’s more than twice as high as that of non-Hispanic white women.

Much like in the film, there’s been limited accountability for many of these offenses due to conflicts of jurisdiction, inaction by law enforcement, and a lack of resources on Tribal lands. Since Tribal nations are sovereign entities, they have their own courts and law enforcement. Because of a Supreme Court decision in the 1970s, however, tribes are broadly barred from prosecuting crimes committed by non-Native people on Tribal lands. As a result, they’ve had to rely on state or federal governments to step in and pursue these cases, a gap that leaves many of them unresolved.

In recent years, reforms to the Violence Against Women Act have given tribes more power to prosecute non-Native people in instances of domestic violence, but the impact of past policies — and the message they sent — lingers.

“Non-Native men harass and kill Native women because settler colonial governments have created a system in which they can do so with impunity,” Liza Black, a historian at Indiana University and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, told Vox.

Indigenous studies experts say that it’s vital to situate the events depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon in this broader context in order to make clear that this isn’t an isolated historical incident. In reality, the tragedy and horror of the Osage murders are part of a much larger, widespread, and ongoing phenomenon. Acknowledging this is critical for understanding the sources of this violence — and confronting them, experts say.

“What [the film] could have done better is connect the historical story that it focused on to what’s happening today and also to the larger context of missing and murdered Indigenous women,” Elizabeth Rule, an assistant professor of critical race and gender studies at American University and enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, told Vox, “I think it’s important that we have the story of [film protagonist] Mollie Burkhart be told, but it’s also important to provide really critical context to audiences who may walk away thinking this was a story about greed, or a story about individual corruption, or a story about history — when in fact this is a story about systemic violence, and a story about colonization, and a story just as much about contemporary Indigenous communities today.”

An ongoing crisis of violence against Indigenous women

Violence against Indigenous women is an enduring problem for which there continues to be limited accountability.

In its 2016 report, the National Institute of Justice found that more than 84 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence during their lifetime, a rate that’s 1.2 times that of non-Hispanic white women, a category the report used as a benchmark for comparison. Additionally, 56 percent have experienced an incident of sexual violence, compared to 50 percent of white women who said the same in the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey that informed the report.

“On some reservations, Indigenous women say they don’t know even one woman who has not been raped. Consequently, they tell their daughters what to do when—not if—raped,” Columbia University health sciences professor Robin Whyatt says of the crisis.

These figures are in addition to the high number of Native women who’ve been murdered or gone missing. In a 2008 review, criminal justice experts from the University of Delaware and University of North Carolina Wilmington discovered that Native women living on some reservations were murdered at 10 times the national murder rate. And in 2021, 5,203 Indigenous girls and women were reported missing, “disappearing at a rate equal to more than two and a half times their estimated share of the U.S. population,” according to a 2022 USA Today investigation. While data isn’t available in every state, in Montana — which does track this issue — Native people comprise 6.7 percent of the population but 26 percent of missing persons reports, per Vice News.

Because there’s significant underreporting of instances of violence, and there’s no federal database to which all tribes can submit crimes and missing persons cases, much of this data is also likely an undercount. While some of these offenses are happening on reservations, roughly 70 percent of Native women live in urban areas, and victims’ ethnicities are often incorrectly reported by local law enforcement, masking the number of cases of violence that may be specifically affecting the group.

In the past few decades, organizations including the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women and the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center are among those that have sought to draw attention to these issues and lobby for policy changes as part of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement (MMIW). Originally a hashtag coined by former Canadian journalist Sheila North Wilson in 2012, the MMIW movement builds on years of efforts to raise awareness about the scale of this crisis and give tribes more legal power and resources to respond. As more activists and artists have coalesced around it, many have used red dresses and red handprints to symbolize Indigenous women who are missing and whose voices aren’t heard.

Disproportionate rates of violence are tied to the longstanding legacy of colonization and how it promoted abuse of Indigenous women, experts say.

“This crisis is both cultural and legal in nature,” Mary Kathryn Nagle, a lawyer who focuses on Indigenous rights, told Al Jazeera.

Violence against Indigenous women was central to colonization, writes Whyatt. From the 1400s through the 1800s, groups ranging from Spanish colonists to Gold Rush settlers normalized the rape and sexual abuse of Native women. Additionally, the murder of Indigenous women was key to colonization efforts focused on reducing the population and political power of Native peoples. Native women were targeted due to “their ability to sustain the tribes through childbearing,” Whyatt notes. Their killings were part of “the colonial focus on tribal extermination, including the relentless massacre of Native women,” according to a Columbia write-up.

Later on, American political policies would continue to enshrine gender disparities into law. Under the Burke Act of 1906, many Native women were declared “incompetent,” or unable to manage their own lands without the supervision of a white guardian, a policy that diluted the power they had over their own assets. “For Native women, the one way to be deemed competent was to marry a white man,” according to Project 1492, a website dedicated to sharing US history from an Indigenous perspective. This dynamic is evident in Killers of the Flower Moon, which shows Mollie, an Osage woman, forced to have regular meetings with a white guardian who oversees her and her family’s spending until she marries her white husband.

In the 1970s, Native women were also subject to coercive sterilization campaigns, which led to at least 25 percent of women of childbearing age getting sterilized. These campaigns were driven by physicians in the Indian Health Services who were wary of high birthrates by Native women, and who believed they were “not capable” of making decisions about birth control. Many Native women were pressured into these procedures, while others weren’t even informed that they were happening.

Over time, these policies have established a culture in which violence against Native women has both been encouraged and condoned. Collectively, they’ve also fueled stereotypes that continue to exoticize and dehumanize Native women, and which take the form of everything from revealing Halloween costumes to ugly tropes that portray people as “savages” and “drunk Indians.” There is “a larger ideological framework that has constructed Native women as everything from less than human to less than civilized to overtly sexualized,” Shannon Speed, director of the American Indian Studies Center at UCLA and a Tribal member of the Chickasaw Nation, told Vox.

These cultural attitudes are compounded by the lack of legal consequences that perpetrators face. Confusion about who has jurisdiction over a case — Tribal authorities, the state government, or the federal government — has long been a major obstacle to addressing violence and seeking accountability. That’s especially been at issue when the perpetrator is a non-Native person, which is the case in 86 to 96 percent of cases of sexual abuse of Native women.

In 1978, the Supreme Court eliminated Tribal criminal jurisdiction over non-Native people in the Oliphant vs. Suquamish decision, which meant that Tribal courts weren’t able to pursue cases against non-Native people who killed or assaulted women on their lands, forcing them to rely on state and federal authorities who often ignored cases.

Perpetrators have been able to exploit these legal gaps, as well as institutional racism against Native people, to evade consequences.

One 2021 study published in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine found that violence toward Native women spiked in places near fracking sites due to an influx of white men working in these areas. “When predominantly indigenous communities are infiltrated by masses of white males, indigenous women tend to face more violence, and the pervasive culture of structural violence tends towards protecting the perpetrators (who are often white) through the biased law enforcement system,” writes Binghampton human rights researcher A. Skylar Joseph.

That trend also has parallels with the film, which saw the killings of Native women increase as a direct result of white settlers attempting to steal their land, knowing that regional law enforcement would do little to stop them.

It wasn’t until 2022 that Tribal nations welcomed a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which enables tribes to prosecute non-Native people for sexual violence, sex trafficking, and stalking. This policy is expected to improve Tribal nations’ ability to charge perpetrators of these crimes, though experts note that more resources and jurisdictional authority is still required to fully implement these changes.

And it’s little comfort for what happened in between, an entrenched culture that will be difficult to walk back.

A crisis of inaction

Indifference and invisibility are two major barriers that Native communities have also cited as they’ve sought justice.

“Invisibility is the modern form of racism against Native Americans,” Crystal Echo Hawk, a founder of the social justice organization Illuminative and member of the Pawnee Nation, said at a 2020 conference focused on Native representation. Per Echo Hawk and the Great Falls Tribune, a two-year effort called the Reclaiming Native Truth Project conducted from 2016 to 2018 found that 78 percent of people knew little to nothing about Native Americans, and 40 percent didn’t know Native people existed in contemporary society.

“The complete lack of representation in the media, in pop culture, in K-12 education not only erases us from the American consciousness, it inadvertently creates a bias,” Echo Hawk, who consulted on surveys for the project, told the Women’s Media Center in 2018.

Law enforcement’s treatment of cases is just one of myriad areas in which this bias manifests. When crimes against Native women are reported, state and federal authorities often take them less seriously, and excuse missing reports by suggesting that they may have run away from home or are under the influence of drugs or alcohol. In 2016, 5,712 cases of missing Native women were reported across the US, but just 116 were logged by the Justice Department in their federal database. And in 2019, the federal government declined to pursue 35 percent of violent and nonviolent crimes that a non-Native person had committed against a Native person.

Relatedly, a chief challenge in missing persons cases is the lack of media attention and social pressure. This phenomenon was previously dubbed “Missing White Woman Syndrome” by the late journalist Gwen Ifill, who called out the disproportionate amount of coverage that missing white women receive compared to women of color. “I think the overarching thing is that they just don’t care and they know there’s not going to be an outcry,” says Speed regarding the subpar response from authorities in certain cases.

The Guardian called the summer of 2022 a “watershed moment for Indigenous representation in US pop culture” with the success of shows including the comedy series Reservation Dogs and the dramatic action film Prey. Those projects have provided more diverse depictions of Indigenous people onscreen that move beyond stereotypes some viewers may have previously held. Killers of the Flower Moon’s high-profile nature — and Scorsese’s reach as a director — also offered an important opportunity to raise awareness both about the specific attacks on the Osage people and about the connection these killings have to contemporary problems of violence.

“I certainly think that, viscerally, the film can make people aware,” Robert Warrior, a professor of American literature and culture at the University of Kansas and member of the Osage Nation, told Vox. “The roots of the current crisis do go back to that time.”

As multiple Indigenous studies experts note, however, establishing this broader context — and the pervasive nature of the ongoing problem — is one of the areas in which the film fell short.

“I think it failed to show that this is a systemic issue,” says Black. “The film depicts the violence against Mollie as isolated, and they refuse to challenge the idea that Ernest [Mollie’s husband] loved [her.]”

“The film makes it seem like the violence against Native women is something that happened in the 1920s and that it doesn’t happen today,” adds Speed.

Adding information at the end of the film or including a comment in the personal introduction that Scorsese gives at its start, when he speaks directly to the audience, were options that experts suggested as straightforward ways to convey this connection. Putting a greater emphasis on the role that federal policy played in making Osage people, and Native women, longstanding targets of violence, was another potential opportunity, Warrior says.

Using this film to make these points would have been valuable because of how large a platform the movie has, because of the limited attention violence against Native women has received in the media more generally, and because of the power that attention has in driving public perception and action. Due to the gaps that currently exist in awareness about this issue, Killers of the Flower Moon was a chance to continue calling it out, and to make clear that it’s not confined to the history books. What’s more, it would have meant telling a more complete story about the systemic sources of the violence in the film.

“It’s an important point to make that the violence has always been there and this is one manifestation of it,” says Speed. “It happened long before, and it’s certainly continued.”

DULUTH — Music fans around the world are grappling with

a recent report by CBC News,

which uncovered a birth certificate indicating that folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie was biologically born to white parents in Massachusetts and not, as she has long claimed, adopted by that couple from birth parents of the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan.

The revelation comes amid a reckoning with the practice of Indigenous identity fraud, in which people falsely claim to have Native ancestry. While Sainte-Marie forged close ties with a Piapot family, the doubt over whether her journey to Saskatchewan literally constituted a homecoming has caused sorrow and anger among generations who have embraced Sainte-Marie as an icon of Indigenous music and culture.

Reading this news in Duluth, I couldn’t help but think of Sainte-Marie’s peer, Bob Dylan. I’m not the only one — in the CBC News article, Dylan’s is the first name mentioned among fellow members of Sainte-Marie’s 1960s musical circles.

Dylan and Sainte-Marie both rose to prominence during what became known as the “folk revival” in American music. Both were born in 1941, and both took stage names: Dylan was originally named Robert Zimmerman, while Sainte-Marie was born Beverly Jean Santamaria.

Both left the areas where they grew up — Minnesota’s Northland for Dylan, the Boston suburbs for Sainte-Marie — and joined burgeoning urban coffeehouse scenes. Dylan made his way to New York via Minneapolis, while Sainte-Marie cut her musical teeth in Toronto and elsewhere.

Their paths converged in Greenwich Village. By Sainte-Marie’s account, Dylan heard her perform and urged her to see the manager at the legendary Gaslight coffeehouse. “I owe him a debt of gratitude,” Sainte-Marie told

Rhythms

magazine in 2020. Robert Shelton, the New York Times critic who wrote Dylan’s breakout review, did the same for Sainte-Marie.

“The folk-music revival is continuing to splash color on the canvas of show business,” Shelton wrote in 1963. “Brightening the local entertainment scene (is) a local Algonquin Indian girl who has written more than 200 songs.”

Early in Dylan’s career, he took considerable creative license in discussing his origins. Journalists eventually discerned that Dylan grew up in northern Minnesota, but when the artist first started getting press, he would answer questions about his origins obliquely and would often add wild untruths.

He’d describe living on the Great Plains and in the desert Southwest as a child, then traveling with a carnival in his teen years. Dylan acknowledged being born in Duluth, but cast a bit of doubt even between the Twin Ports. “Maybe it was Superior, Wisconsin, right across the line,” he said to Shelton.

Dylan was casting himself in the mold of his

itinerant Okie hero Woody Guthrie.

Dylan’s dissembling was in the spirit of a long history of artists obscuring their origins so as upend expectations surrounding their work. It also, though, spoke to the highly contested notion of authenticity during the folk revival.

In that politically turbulent era, young people saw folk music as a way to amplify grassroots voices — including the voices of people of color who were fighting for civil rights. Dylan spent time not only in New York but in Harvard Square, where a more academic coffeehouse scene was embracing folk music as a way to tell a truer, more inclusive story about the origins of American popular music.

There was tension, though, in the fact that even in calls for racial justice, lighter-skinned artists’ voices were often elevated. This phenomenon was vividly on display in the national coverage of musical performances at the 1963 March on Washington. Odetta, a Black artist whose music had

directly inspired

the young Dylan, was seldom seen on television. By contrast, Dylan and Joan Baez, as well as Peter, Paul and Mary, were all over the news.

Baez, who met Dylan in Cambridge and became a key advocate for his work, was a defining celebrity of the folk revival. She had a voice of extraordinary power, performing with a riveting gravity and sincerity. In person, she had a razor-sharp wit and the kind of physical beauty that turned heads wherever she went.

Joan’s father was born in Mexico; her mother, in Scotland. The family traveled widely, and Baez came to music with an ironclad commitment to social justice. Her advocacy was lasting and impactful, yet Odetta eventually initiated a frank conversation with Baez over the fact that the star’s light skin opened doors that Black folksingers found closed. Those doors were opened all the wider for white men like Dylan.

This was the context into which Sainte-Marie emerged, hailed as an underrepresented voice. While the injustices Sainte-Marie highlighted in songs like “My Country ‘Tis of Thy People You’re Dying” are real, it matters if the singer claimed a narrative that was not, in fact, her own.

While Dylan has never publicly claimed Indigenous ancestry, it seems he was not entirely averse to wrapping ersatz Native identity into the web of stories he wove in his early years. The young Dylan told some of his New York friends that he was of Sioux descent, fellow musician Dave Van Ronk recalled.

“One night he spent something like an hour showing a bunch of us how to talk in Indian sign language, which I’m pretty sure he was making up as he went along, but he did it marvelously,” wrote Van Ronk in his memoir. “And when we found out that a lot of his stories were bull—t, that didn’t really lower his stock all that much.”

There was more than a whiff of appropriation to the entire folk revival, in which white musicians like Dylan often performed songs that emerged from the experiences of Black Americans and other communities of color. Still, Dylan

won respect

from many Black Americans for crediting his influences and repeatedly confronting the nation’s racial injustices.

The reality of Dylan’s own origins is that he was born to middle-class parents in Duluth and came of age in Hibbing. While

Dylan,

Bruce Springsteen

and others have movingly sung of the plight of the largely white working-class Minnesota miners exploited by industrial titans, popular musicians have had much less to say about the Indigenous history of regions like the Iron Range.

“The land from which the mines were carved was coercively taken from the Ojibwe, largely for its mineral resources,” wrote scholar Joseph Whitson in a 2019

article

about the erasure of Indigenous history on the Iron Range. “The white ethnic immigrant workers’ ‘sylvan wilderness’ was only created by the coercive, and often violent, removal of the Ojibwe to reservations.”

Sainte-Marie did sing, however disingenuously, of real abuses such as these. It seems the breathtaking irony of her career is that even in elevating the most prominent voice speaking on Indigenous issues during the folk revival, mainstream U.S. and Canadian media may still have been neglecting the voices of Native artists who were definitely not, as Dave Van Ronk might put it, making stuff up.

Two powerhouse female painters, both brand names, are on view in New York galleries. Compare and contrast.

Rithika Pandey’s journey into art began as a quest to learn about her like-minded ancestors. During a year off from art school, she attended two residency programmes—the first in a small Portuguese town, the other on an organic farm in Spain—and spent some time travelling around the Scottish countryside, an experience that was instrumental in forging a connection between her practice and the natural world. “I just wanted to be in a space where my mind could expand equivalently to the landscape,” she says. “The world of my paintings is a process of connecting with the more-than-human.”

Epitaph for my heart

Pandey is especially inspired by the writings of Donna Haraway and Ursula K Le Guin, and is evolving her artistic practice through the lens of science and research. “I am looking at our ecological connections and finding a way to bridge that with a sense of future-thinking,” she adds. Her body of work—the “theatre of her paintings” as she calls it—compounds into a mythology in its own right, characterised by a futuristic, somewhat human protagonist that speaks of our collective resilience, recovery and transformation. At the start of this year, Pandey had her first solo show in India with Chemould CoLab, and simultaneously showcased an installation at the Mumbai Urban Art Festival hosted by St+art and Asian Paints at Sassoon Docks. “I also ended up doing this beautiful project with a Wales-based collective, Gentle/Radical, where I offered a painting to the town of Riverside in Cardiff, and alongside the painting, I made a zine filled with contemplative questions,” she adds.