On Friday, Sept. 8, the Zootown Arts Community Center will open up its spaces for “How We Celebrate Our Families,” curated by the local Indigenous community in collaboration with the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center. It will include a Native art market, three gallery shows, a series of murals made by students from the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, a performance by “Montana’s Troubadour,” Jack Gladstone, and more.

The central idea is simple: “bringing our Indigenous people together,” said curator Andrea “Dre” Castillo, a multicultural Navajo artist and activist. The goal is to raise serious issues and potentially make people uncomfortable.

“We still think of our loved ones that have passed,” said Castillo, who uses they/them pronouns. “We still celebrate them.”

There are emerging artists like Matt Bell, an educator who’s recently begun selling his paintings; works by established graphic artist Barbara Schelling, to Monica Gilles-BringsYellow, a mixed-media artist who works with historical photographs and has branched into traffic signal boxes and other public-facing projects; and established Montana legends like Corwin “Corky” Clairmont.

The center began having art markets two years ago as a way of building bridges and community, with Castillo taking the lead.

“My real role is to try to make more events for our Indigenous community, but also educate a white organization as to how to extend a hand to our Indigenous people and give space back to them,” said Castillo.

“It’s kind of saying, like, ‘Hey, how are you? We see you, we want to get to know you,’” they said.

In their model, the center provides space for the artists free of charge and also supplies gas cards.

Castillo is a member of the center’s Indigenous art and education committee and its coordinating council. Castillo curated the ZACC event, along with Leslie Burgess and Claire Charlo, fellow committee/council members, and the Rankin Center’s executive director, Nicole Mitchell.

All of the proceeds from the Main Gallery go back to the artists. Works in the silent auction in the Blackfoot Communications Gallery go to the Snowbird Fund and related causes to support searches and family and communities, according to a news release. These programs have been grant-supported through the All Nations Health Center and First Interstate Bank.

Message murals by the Fort Peck students

In the Youth Gallery, murals by students from the Frazer School, located in the town on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, will be on view.

The three collaborative pieces were made by high school students led by art teacher Teresa Heil, each relating to different contemporary issues.

“We researched the cultural significance of it and tried to put that in visual images,” Heil said.

The first relates to missing and murdered Indigenous women; the second to the history of boarding schools and residential schools where Native children were forcibly enrolled after the government separated them from their families and culture and they suffered abuse.

One student, senior Kalianna Blount, contributed to the murals. A senior who’s thinking about pursuing art education herself and teaching on the reservation, Blount works on portraits in her free time, including portraits of family.

For the mural, Blount painted a portrait of a girl who was forced to go to a boarding school.

She’s “having her whole identity stolen real quick, and becomes a different type of person,” she said.

Visually, Blount chose to depict her having “lost her hair, which is your strength.” It symbolizes the trauma that children went through, “because they had to adapt to a whole different lifestyle.”

She hopes the images get across the effects of the schools and “how people still suffer from that today.”

Compared with a normal school art project, knowing that it would be visible, the art “felt like it had more meaning to it.”

After those two emotional projects, Heil said the group shifted to a “more celebratory theme” that could be more strength-based: President Joe Biden’s proclamation of Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

The finished pieces measure 5 by 8 feet each, made one per year starting in 2021. The year before, Heil was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Foundation Global Learning Fellowship, where they learned about how to incorporate global perspectives into learning.

So when students returned to school in 2021, the timing felt right for a project to help everyone get back to normal — “a big project that was really important and meaningful.”

The first was successful enough that they decided to make it into a series, with a new topic.

“When we’re doing things so relevant to their lives it makes it engaging,” Heil said.

Everyone had input and they heard everyone’s ideas in steps and stages.

The murals were picked for the Great Falls Urban Art Project, which presents rotating art projects in the windows on the parking garage downtown.

“Now, they’re all together as a group so they’re much more impactful and powerful,” Heil said.

For the Indigenous Peoples’ Day mural, she worked on various parts of the project, which included handprints, portraits and text. In 2021, President Joe Biden issued a declaration of the day on Oct. 11 (also Columbus Day), making him the first U.S. president to do so, the Associated Press reported.

She chose text from the declaration that was meaningful for her.

After high school, she’d like to pursue art and become an arts educator — it’s helped her as far back as third grade and she wants to come back to teach in her community.