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By Levi Rickert

November 18, 2023

The UC Health Hospital in Aurora, Colorado on Friday finally admitted that a hospital staff member cut the hair of a 65-year-old Lakota elder Arthur Janis, without his or his family’s permission. 

The admission comes after two weeks of questioning by the Janis siblings and a week after  members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) protested on grounds of the hospital demanding answers.

Keith Janis, who spoke with Native News Online on Saturday said the hospital lied to him and his family since they began questioning the health facility about when, why and who cut their brother’s waist-length hair. They finally “fessed up” on Friday, according to Keith Janis.

Keith Janis said he filed a police report with the Aurora Police Department late last week. A detective was assigned to the case. The detective did not get far with the hospital staff initially and was told that he would need written permission by the Janis family before the staff could talk to him.

“So, he called and got legal authorization, a legal affidavit granting him authority to access any and all information pertaining to my brother Art since he’s been at the hospital,” Keith Janis said.

Related: Hospitalized Lakota Elder’s Waist-length Hair Cut without His Permission; Family & AIM Demand Answers

Keith Janis granted the detective the legal authorization.

“The very next morning, Colorado University Hospital called and said that they finally confessed, They decided they weren’t going to lie to us anymore. They, in fact, cut Art’s hair,” Keith Janis said.

Art Janis, who is a traditional Lakota, who does not believe in cutting his hair had worn his hair long since he was a child. A sister discovered in Art’s hair was cut short during a video call to discuss his ongoing treatment with UCHealth staff. 

Art Janis has been under the care of UCHealth since he we flown from Rapids City, South Dakota in August. Art Janis was first admitted to care a hospital in Rapid City for abdominal pains caused by blood clots. The Rapid City hospital could not provide the adequate medical treatment, so Art Janis was sent to UCHealth. 

While under the care of UCHealth, he experienced a heart attack and a stroke. The stroke prevented him from speaking and his siblings have been making medical deicsions on behalf of their brother.

Keith Janis, who lives in Kyle, South Dakota, wants to get back to Colorado early next week to be by his brother as the family decides the next steps to take, if any, against UCHealth. 

“It’s really hard to get things done here in South Dakota. I’m trying to actually raise money to get back to Colorado. I think people are having a really hard time, too,” Keith Janis said. 

On Saturday, November 18, 2023, Keith Janis started a GoFundMe account to raise funds for travel do more investigative work related to Art Janis’ hair being cut without his persmission.

UCHealth was named by U.S. News & World Report as the best hospital in Colorado for 2022-2023

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About The Author

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

Levi “Calm Before the Storm” Rickert (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation) is the founder, publisher and editor of Native News Online. Rickert was awarded Best Column 2021 Native Media Award for the print/online category by the Native American Journalists Association. He serves on the advisory board of the Multicultural Media Correspondents Association. He can be reached at [email protected].

SACRAMENTO – Governor Gavin Newsom today issued a proclamation declaring November 2023, as Native American Heritage Month.

The text of the proclamation and a copy can be found below:

PROCLAMATION

During Native American Heritage Month, California recognizes and honors the first people to call this state and nation home, while also committing to the personal, collective and institutional work we must continue to embrace as we create a California that respects, values and uplifts Native peoples.

Over the course of the last year, we celebrated the unveiling of a new monument to California Native peoples on the grounds of the State Capitol, witnessed the validation of the Indian Child Welfare Act from the nation’s highest court and felt every emotion with the conclusion of Reservation Dogs. We also saw California tribal nations leading the state in historic efforts to address climate change, launch state-of-the art cultural centers and compel institutions to once and for all return Native ancestors to their lands and communities. These milestones are all testaments to the power of shifting the narrative, making space for Native people to determine their own place in our collective culture and elevating the Native experience in the story of California.

While we celebrate these achievements with Indian Country, we remind ourselves that they are but small signs of goodwill and progress in the journey toward truth and healing. Native people in California have been advocating for greater space, voice and understanding for hundreds of years—during which time their communities and cultures have been actively erased, displaced and painted over. Peoples that long predate even the concept of “California” have fought to keep languages and families intact in the face of ongoing waves of settlement of this place. This month, it is our task to reflect on our knowledge gaps and fully educate ourselves on the histories, cultures and governments of the first peoples of this place in order to codesign a future that elevates Native voices and experiences where many of our predecessors sought their eradication.

If the only time we reflect on the Native Peoples of the United States is during the month of November, we are selling ourselves—and Native peoples—far too short. It is incumbent on all Californians to remind ourselves of the price Native peoples had to—and continue to—pay as a result of centuries of oppression and the settlement of California beaches, grasslands and mountains. We owe it to them to better understand, acknowledge and elevate their place as the first peoples of these lands.

This Native American Heritage Month, I challenge all Californians to commit to the lifelong process of learning more about the diverse Native peoples in California as we work toward truth, justice and accountability for all.

NOW THEREFORE I, GAVIN NEWSOM, Governor of the State of California, do hereby proclaim November 2023, as “Native American Heritage Month.”

IN WITNESS WHEREOF I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Great Seal of the State of California to be affixed this 18th day of November 2023.

GAVIN NEWSOM
Governor of California

ATTEST:
SHIRLEY N. WEBER, Ph.D.
Secretary of State

###

CLEVELAND — Native American Heritage Month celebrates the culture of Indigenous people. Keeping native traditions alive is something some members of these communities say can be challenging.

Philip Yenyo celebrated Native American heritage month by carving.

“Pipestone being one of our sacred stones is what we use to create our chanunpa,” he said.

Yenyo comes from a Mēxihcah and Hungarian backgrounds and has lived in Ohio nearly all his life. He said he thought his people were extinct and now that he knows otherwise; he wants to keep his heritage alive.

That’s why Yenyo said he does his best to keep others educated on Native American heritage, from teaching the history at schools to even showing people how to carve. He said being a full-time handyman and home construction worker doesn’t work to his advantage.

“Sometimes I don’t get to do as much as I’d like to do with a lot of my artwork,” he said.

While Yenyo is carving, others like Robin Robinson are creating exhibits, but the goal is the same.

“I think that it would be nice to have a place in Cleveland where the information is present on a regular basis where people can actually come and learn about the Indigenous culture,” she said.

Robinson is the Executive director of Sankofa Fine Art Plus and wants people to know Indigenous people are around.

“That people understand that Indigenous people are everywhere, all over the country, and Cleveland is part of that,” she said.

A sentiment shared by Yenyo.

“We don’t walk around wearing feathers. We’re your next-door neighbors and we still exist. We’re still here,” he said.

A new show of marine invertebrates, modeled in Germany nearly 150 years ago, helps tell a story about the Connecticut coast today.

The deliberate destruction of works of art, also known as art vandalism, is the sort of crime that rarely leaves people indifferent. In the majority of the registered cases, acts of art vandalism are committed not by outraged visitors but by aspiring artists aiming to leave their mark on pieces of history. Here are seven outrageous yet remarkable cases of art vandalism.

1. Art Vandalism Against Barnett Newman

In 1986 an unsuccessful realist artist Gerard Jan van Bladeren entered the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He then headed directly to the room where Barnett Newman’s work Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III was and slashed it with a utility knife. Van Bladeren claimed that he was acting as nature against the vicious ideologies of modern art.

But what made the case truly remarkable was not the act itself but the public reaction to it. While art professionals and conservators were fearfully assessing the damage, some visitors sent letters to the Stedelijk Museum suggesting van Bladeren as its new director.

The court sentenced Gerard Jan van Bladeren to five months in prison. Yet, nine years later, the vandal returned to finish his job. Since Red, Yellow, and Blue wasn’t on display at the time, he turned his knife against another work of Newman called Cathedra (1951). While the latter painting was successfully restored, the restorers could not reverse all of the damage caused during the 1986 attack. The original layer of paint in Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III could not be reconstructed, and the canvas was painted over several times.

2. The Artist Who Wanted to Free Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is one of the most provocative artworks ever. Since its first public exhibition in 1917, it kept offending the taste of many audience members with its simplicity and indecency. After all, a urinal is not a thing you would expect to see outside of a restroom, let alone inside an art gallery. Although the original work has been lost, numerous copies in the world’s most famous museums keep attracting vandals.

Most of the vandals tried to urinate in it. Some of them were, unfortunately, successful. These perpetrators claimed that they not only rightfully used the object but added their own artistic touch to it. In 2006, the French performance artist Pierre Pinoncelli damaged a copy of the work at the Pompidou Center using a hammer. The Fountain was only slightly chipped, however, it was immediately removed from display. A 76-year-old Pinoncelli called himself a Neo-Dadaist and claimed he wanted to save the artwork from the institution and not destroy it. The French police had been keeping an eye on Pinoncelli and his destructive performances. He even appeared as Santa Claus at a department store in Nice just to break all the toys inside his present sack in front of crying children and their outraged parents.

3. The Provocateur Who Vomited Paint on a Mondrian

In 1996, an attention-seeking aspiring artist Jubal Brown left his native Toronto to visit New York’s Museum of Moden Art. There, he vomited all over a work made by Piet Mondrian titled Composition with Red and Blue. Initially, MoMA employees believed this was an accident, yet two facts about Brown do not fit into that. First of all, the trace left by the visitor had an intense blue color. While someone’s dietary habits barely could be regarded as evidence, another fact made the situation clear: several months before the incident, Brown had the same accident happen to him in the Art Gallery of Ontario when he vomited red on Raoul Dufy’s Port of le Havre. As the investigation progressed, the mixture was revealed to be a combination of colored gelatine and cake icing.

Brown confessed that the two acts were parts of his three-stage performance. For the final act, Brown meant to vomit yellow on a third artwork, yet thankfully he never did this. The motivation behind the gross act was to demonstrate a reaction to art. The vandal claimed that both Mondrian and Dufy were so boring they needed more color in them. Thankfully, restoration teams in both New York and Toronto were able to quickly clean the paintings, preventing further damage.

4. The Drunk Who Punched a Monet

In October 2007, a group of five drunk individuals felt a sudden urge to visit the Musée d’Orsay in Paris at 1 in the morning. The museum was obviously closed at the time, so they broke in through the back door. As expected, the alarm went off right after the break-in, and the group fled. Moments before their escape, one of the perpetrators punched a work by Claude Monet called The Argenteuil Bridge. The painting was located on the ground floor of the museum. Despite being caught on the surveillance cameras, the vandals have not been arrested yet.

Unfortunately, the incident at the d’Orsay was not the only time someone punched a Monet. In 2012, an Irishman Andrew Shannon attacked Argenteuil Basin with a Single Sailboat at the National Museum of Ireland. Originally, Shannon claimed that this was done in protest of the government, however, during the trial he insisted that the punch was accidental and caused by a fall. Yet the video of the attack helped prove Shannon’s original malicious intent. The vandal was sentenced to five years in prison, followed by a fifteen-month ban from all art galleries and museums. Thankfully, both the French and the Irish painting were successfully restored and put back on display.

5. The Vandal Who Sued His Victim

One of the most famous yet controversial contemporary artists Damien Hirst found himself in the middle of a vandalism scandal in 1994. One of Hirst’s infamous formaldehyde installations called Away From The Flock, featuring a preserved white lamb in a glass tank, suddenly turned pitch black. This was caused by the actions of another aspiring artist called Mark Bridger who poured black ink into the tank. For some reason, the top part of the tank was unsealed, allowing Bridger to open it. Although some saw this as an act of jealousy, Bridger explained his actions as provoked by the sense of mortality coming from the artwork.

Bridger’s ambitious idea to call his act an artistic collaboration did not sit well with the investigators. However, Damien Hirst was not as outraged by the vandal’s action as he was expected to be. Several years after the incident, he published a photograph of the Black Sheep (the title given by Bridger) in an album of his work. What was the vandal’s reaction? He sued Hirst for copyright infringement!

6. The Man Who Put a Price Tag on Malevich

Another case of outrageous art vandalism at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam happened in 1997 when a Russian performance artist Alexander Brener painted a dollar sign over a Kazimir Malevich painting The White Supremacist Cross. Unlike other vandals on this list, Brener was an accomplished artist, who is today regarded as one of the leading figures of the Moscow Actionist movement. His reputation, however, did not save him from serving a prison sentence and paying for the work’s restoration. Saving the work was a difficult quest for the restoration team since the green paint used by Brener leaked deep into the cracks of the original layer.

Brener claimed that his work was a social commentary on the commodification of art and the loss of the immaterial. The court did not agree with his best intentions, but this act of vandalism still sparked a debate among the public. While the majority of art experts did not find anything artistic in this act, some insisted that the commercialization of the art market was a process dramatic enough to justify Brener’s radical reaction.

7. Art Vandalism and Mona Lisa

Probably the most famous painting in the world, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, had a long history of being targeted by art thieves and vandals. Mona Lisa’s worldwide popularity started with the scandalous disappearance of the painting in 1911. One of the suspects was none other than Pablo Picasso.

With great popularity came great risk. The earliest recorded account of violence inflicted on the painting happened in the mid-1950s. A man attempted to cut the work out of the frame with a razor blade, claiming he was in love with Gioconda. After the initial attack, the Louvre curators protected the work with a glass case. This decision would prove to be wise in 1956 when a homeless Bolivian man threw a rock into it.

Unfortunately, this was not the end of attacks on the famous Mona Lisa. In 1974, a disabled woman visited the Tokyo National Museum, which had the painting on loan, and sprayed the work with red paint. She wanted to protest against the museum’s failed accessibility policy. In 2009, a Russian woman, furious after her French citizenship request was denied, threw a souvenir mug right into the protective glass. The glass wasn’t broken, however. The latest incident took place in May 2022, when a climate activist smeared the protective glass with a cake.

ALEXANDRIA, La. (KALB) – Louisiana’s Celebration Gator is preparing to roll down the streets of New York City in less than a week for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade for the third year in a row. Each year, the float has hosted a Louisiana native as its headline performer. In 2021, that artist was New Orleans native Jon Batiste. In 2022, Lainey Wilson of Baskin sang her way to 34th Street.

This year, an Alexandria native will take the stage, representing Central Louisiana in a big way.

Alex Smith grew up in Alexandria, spending much of his time inside Red River Music, fostering a love of music first instilled in him by his family. Now, Smith will bring the sounds of the Pelican State to the streets of the Big Apple with what he calls Louisiana Country.

“I took a bunch of the songwriting aspects that 90s country has, but then also loved all the swampiness that we have in our culture and our music with slide guitars and [sic] and all these things that are Louisiana kinda feeling and swampy even in the texture of them,” said Smith. “So it’s kinda come together in this blend of Louisiana and Nashville to me is what I consider Louisiana country.”

There is no better stage to showcase the uniquely Louisiana mashup than from the top of the 60-foot-long Celebration Gator.

“We surely stole the show each year with that gator crawling down the street, blowing confetti out its mouth, it really shows Louisiana,” said Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser. “Especially since the Swamp People, Duck Dynasty and the swamp tours have been a big part of our tourism, that super gator just fits really well to promote Louisiana.”

Nungesser’s office estimates the parade has reached 2.4 billion viewers in the past two years, totaling more than $22 million in advertising value, which has meant great things for Louisiana’s tourism industry.

As he looks to showcase a little bit of home, it should mean great things for Smith too.

“I’m just overwhelmingly grateful for the opportunity. I am so excited to be able to represent my city in such a national exposure experience,” said Smith. “I hope it just brings joy to all these people that get to watch this on TV and show that’s what our culture and our music does. Because you can’t go to a single bar in Louisiana that doesn’t have a live band and there’s dancing, there’s not a still foot in the house. And I think that’s what Louisiana kind of represents is that style of music and that style of energy throughout the state.”

Smith will be joined by Mandeville fiddler Amanda Shaw to usher in the holiday season with his debut album “Bootshake.”

The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade begins at 7:30 a.m. CT on NBC and Peacock.

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