Volume X Summer 1999 Number 4
For Native people, art is not optional
by Marjane Ambler
When Sherwin Bitsui was growing up on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, everyone in his family was an artist. They made quilts, jewelry-anything that they could sell to live for awhile, he said. Bitsui wanted to do more with his art. He tried going to a nearby community college, but he claims he was a terrible student. Then he decided to go to the Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico. The decision was a good one. To Bitsui, now 23 years old, it seemed predestined. "I was meant to come here," he said. Since enrolling in the spring of 1997, his poetry has been published internationally, he was invited to read poetry at a national education meeting sponsored by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and his art was selected for the cover of this issue of the Tribal College Journal.
"I always did these things without real direction. When I came to IAIA, I found people like me who come from similar but diverse backgrounds. We all have this desire to express ourselves. I got to work with Arthur Sze and Jon Davis (writing instructors) to develop my poetry to where it's my own," he said. Commending the whole faculty, he said, "We get a lot of support-everyone pushes everybody to keep producing."
To the outside world, it seems only natural that an Indian person would become an artist. Museum art galleries and amateur collectors value American Indian-made blankets, baskets, beadwork, and jewelry. However, with a few outstanding exceptions, Indian artists rarely make enough money to do more than get by.
Several tribal colleges are trying to change that, but they encounter obstacles. Like other schools and colleges across the country, tribal colleges must continually find new grants and scrounge resources to help their arts programs get by for awhile. Ironically, despite the widespread interest in certain types of Indian art, public and private funding agencies encourage science and math much more than arts education.
"Most colleges cannot afford to offer arts," said Marie Smallface Marule, president of Red Crow Community College in Alberta, Canada. According to a tally of recent catalogs, only 9 of the 32 Indian-controlled colleges and universities offer any arts degrees. At least one tribal college campus in the United States with a long standing program is considering discontinuing it. Even well established arts programs at universities such as the University of California at Berkeley have been threatened with closure.
"The mainstream mindset is that art is optional. To our indigenous people, it's not optional," said Rita Alvarez, the fine arts instructor at D-Q University in Davis, Calif. "It's the way we express ourselves and pass on the ways of our ancestors. For me, it's prayer work. We don't make art to decorate things. It's a form of prayer," said Alvarez. D-Q offers an associate degree in Native American fine arts to its predominantly Indian and Hispanic student body. The college serves many different tribes, mostly from California.
Art and the community
When Alvarez teaches the mural painting class, she tells her students to prepare by having a "good clean mind" and to treat each other respectfully so that when future students see the mural, they will get the message. "The majority of students have a good mind. They're here with the intention of learning more traditional ways and being closer to their ancestors," she said. Students evidently share Alvarez's passion, working weekends on mural projects and evenings at the beading circle she organized. Writing about the mural, student Ivan Hernandez said, "Being involved in the mural made me feel proud of who we were." The students included an eagle and a condor because of a prophecy about the northern and southern people of the continent coming together.
D-Q University students centered their mural around the eagle and the condor to express a prophecy that the people of the north and the south will come together.
To keep their fine arts program going, students and faculty supplement scarce resources by soliciting donations from the community. For their pottery class, Alvarez and her students dug their own clay. The University of California donated a kiln; a local bead shop donated a display case; and another shop donated a wedging table for mixing clay. A local farmer donated cow dung to fire the pots, and the students collected it from his pasture. With the scarcity of arts grants, Alvarez hopes that D-Q will succeed in getting some cultural preservation grants to support their program in the future.
Each tribal college that offers education in the arts has a unique approach, but most involve the community in some way. The Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute (SIPI) in Albuquerque, N.M., has offered students a graphics arts program for over 25 years. Unlike reservation-based tribal colleges, SIPI can enlist assistance from nearby businesses. Local printing firms and federal agencies donate equipment, serve on its graphic arts advisory board, conduct workshops and field trips, and hire student interns and graduates. SIPI teaches all aspects of the printing business, including layout and design, camerawork, printing, and bindery. The institute is now getting into computer generated printing. "We always have a full load of students," said Alfred Green, chair of the SIPI occupational and vocational programs department.
After growing up on the Navajo Reservation and graduating from high school, Allison Begay (Diné) said he chose SIPI because of the low cost and small class sizes. He plans to become a printer and already has a job at a local printer, thanks to SIPI's cooperative training program. At the printer, he said he gets hands-on experience with more advanced electronic equipment than SIPI has.
Several of the tribal colleges print up literary collections to share their students' poetry and short stories with the community. While the Institute of American Indian Arts publishes a professional looking anthology each year and distributes it nationally, others photocopy the students' work, snap a plastic comb binder on it, and distribute copies to moms, dads, and aunties. Fort Peck Community College instructor Pat Wilson said his college has printed a collection of student writing each year for six years, but last year, they didn't have enough resources for even their low budget effort.
Art and the marketplace
Katie Beheler, a student at United Tribes Technical College (UTTC) in North Dakota, has always been an artist, selling her beadwork at tourist attractions. She supported herself not by her art but by working at a grocery store. "My brother told me to get my priorities in order; I'm not getting any younger," she said. Beheler, 32, enrolled in UTTC's Arts/Art Marketing Associate Degree program.
While some other colleges teach skills that only can be used in urban areas, others like UTTC focus upon providing students with entrepreneurial skills they can use to work on reservations with stagnant economies and unemployment rates above 50 percent. A college created 30 years ago by tribes from the five reservations in North Dakota, UTTC sponsors an annual art exposition and seminar each fall. Between the classroom and the annual seminar, UTTC covers many aspects important to developing entrepreneurs, including web marketing, copyright law and trademarks, mail order, identifying local buyers, according to John Beheler, UTTC's director of research and development and Katie's brother. Katie said she has learned new artistic techniques; designed a logo for her business, Beheler Beadwork; and created business cards.
Prior to graduating, each student has an art show or participates in the Indian Art Expo. As with several of the tribal colleges, UTTC encourages its students by purchasing some of the best work for the college's permanent collection. Other tribal colleges patronize their student artists, using their art work on college calendars and Christmas cards. To support its efforts in the arts, UTTC has received grants from several sources, including the National Endowment for the Arts, Dakota West Arts Council, and the North Dakota Council on the Arts.
While educating students about marketing, tribal colleges are aware that the marketplace cannot be allowed to dictate what artists should produce. Unsophisticated collectors often favor Southwestern Indian art over the art indigenous to a particular region; they also often prefer art that they consider "traditional" to more contemporary art by Indian artists. "A lot of the raw talent of this region went south already because of the lack of arts instruction," said John Beheler, an artist himself. "We're losing the distinctiveness of the Northern Plains; we used to have Plains Indian pottery." UTTC teaches both tribal art forms (such as shields, beadwork, quillwork) and contemporary art forms (stained glass, painting, airbrush), but not sculpture because it is too expensive, he said.
People want Sherwin Bitsui, the IAIA student, to fit better into their expectations of an Indian artist. They ask him why his writing is not like that of Sherman Alexie, the well known Spokane Indian author, and why his paintings are abstract. "I want my art to be centered on my own traditions and my own beliefs, but I want it to be open to people," Bitsui said. "We Native people have our own voice. It's not dictated by patronage and by a Southwest esthetic of what we should be. We're not into self-romanticizing," he said.
Bitsui is a soft-spoken but confident young artist, sure of his talents and who he is. It wasn't always so, he said. "I've gone through a lot of self-questioning and a lot of despair that I am never going to be accepted by the white world. The color of my skin will always be an issue--people are blind because they see." With the support of fellow students and the guidance of Indian and non-Indian instructors at IAIA, he has found his voice as an artist. His outlook has changed. "When people appreciate what you do, you begin to grow from that. You begin to look upward instead of downward and backward," he said.
Marjane Ambler is the editor of the Tribal College Journal.