When Graci Horne was a child, her mother produced her first album of Dakota music. It was a good time financially for the family, Horne said, until they learned that the contract her mother had signed with a white woman gave away all of her rights to her music. “All of a sudden, she couldn’t perform her own songs,” Horne said.
Horne, curator and story keeper for the Mnisota Native Artists Alliance (MNAA), was one of three Native American artists who shared examples of cultural appropriation with about 60 people in the Northrup King Building on Saturday, Nov. 19. MNAA and the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Association sponsored the discussion.
Marlena Myles (Spirit Lake Dakota) and Ashley Fairbanks (White Earth Nation Anishinaabe) joined Horne (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota and Hunkpapa Lakota/Dakota) to explain the ways non-Native people have profited from Native American art and designs and how appropriation hurts Native Americans and their communities.
Moderator Horne explained that cultural appropriation can be defined as one cultural group taking artistic forms, items or practices from another. In general, it’s used to describe Western appropriation of non-Western or non-white art and cultural forms and carries connotations of exploitation and dominance, she said.
While working at the Minnesota Historical Society, Fairbanks tried to find Ojibwe women who knew how to weave mats of cattails that were used to cover floors in their wigwam homes. “Every Ojibwe woman used to be able to weave rush mats,” Fairbanks said, but after visiting reservations and talking with community members, she couldn’t find anyone with the skills. “And we found a class at the North House Folk School that cost $1,500, with a white lady weaving rush mats,” she said.
That story pointed to another theme emphasized throughout the evening. In Native communities, the transmission of cultural practices and art forms was forcibly interrupted by the displacement of people from their land and the disruption of families when children were removed to live in residential schools or “adopted out” into white families.
Those traumas are as much a part of Native American art as the beautiful designs. “You can’t really be … people who make beautiful things and tell beautiful stories, without also knowing that pain,” Fairbanks explained. She described her grandmother’s experience of being taken away from her family at the age of 5 years. “And that is connected to my work,” she said. “That’s what appropriation does. It’s people telling our stories without knowing our pain.”
It also steals from the next generation, Horne said. “We [Dakotas] have this belief that everything that we own … nontangible things … our language, our way of life, our practice, our culture, our art forms, those don’t belong to the current generation, those belong to our children. Those are things that get passed down. They’re the ones that hold the copyright. So when you are appropriating our designs, when you are appropriating our forms of art, you’re taking away from a child.”
The women described many manifestations of cultural appropriation. A Native American family came upon appropriated Native designs and art in a non-Native artist’s studio during Art-A-Whirl® weekend. Horne, who had been told about the encounter, said, “We see that as a form of racism. As soon as you see it, it’s an unsafe place to be, because it’s a bold act.” She hoped that the MNAA’s partnership with NEMAA could be used to educate more artists in the future.
Myles is a digital artist whose work ranges from book illustration to fabric design to public art projects, including a permanent augmented reality Dakota Spirit Walk in Bruce Vento Nature Center in St. Paul. In answering calls for Native art, she’d see the work of other finalists who were not native to the tribes in the area. “They’re trying to take our stories and our experiences and create art through their art forms. … Those are our experiences that someone else is channeling,” she said. She has also been on judging panels for grants and has seen proposals of non-Native people who want to come into Native communities and document what’s happening there. “They talked about us as if we’re just not capable of telling our own story,” Myles said.
The women also discussed appropriation at the corporate level, such as at the blanket company Pendleton, which has non-Native owners and has profited from Native designs for more than 100 years. Sometimes even native artists do the appropriating. Native artists hired by Nike used sacred symbols and other designs from cultures that aren’t theirs, Fairbanks said. “My being Indigenous doesn’t mean that I get to use Dakota designs and call them my own,” she explained.
The legal aspects of cultural appropriation, including the conflict between the community-based concept of art in Native communities and the individual-based U.S. copyright law was another focus of the discussion. Horne described Myles as a “big hitter” with respect to understanding contracts and working to protect rights to Native art.
“As a Native person you want to make sure that you don’t disenfranchise your own people trying to make a profit for yourself,” Myles said. She works hard to get clients to change contracts to acceptable terms, explaining to them that the work she creates is protected by laws of her tribe. “The work I create is copyrighted by our people. So I can’t sell you that copyright.” Although she’s had some clients cancel projects over such matters, thus wasting her time, she said, “They’ll have the patience, if they really want to work with you.”
The three panelists felt the federal Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, which prohibits misrepresentation in the marketing of Indian art and craft products within the U.S., is a good idea but widely unenforced. The law prohibits items from being marketed with the descriptor “Indian” or with the name of a tribe when the artist is not Native or of that tribe, as defined by the federal and tribal enrollment requirements. Fairbanks gives the regulation a D-, and Horne said there have been some successful prosecutions, but the burden of energy and time lies on the victim – the Native community – to prove that wrong has been done. “It’s time that’s just like this bucket that has a hole at the bottom and it goes all the way into the Earth and it burns up in the middle of the Earth.”
Fairbanks said she doesn’t really like talking about appropriation, that it was exhausting sharing personal family trauma, although she hoped that helped the discussion become more memorable. She and Myles, she said, would prefer to talk about their art. “I want you to be curious about Native art and learn more about our work.” Horne echoed that, and added her hope that others might pick up the conversation and effort: “I don’t want to give too much energy to this. I want to give energy into hoping that there’s going to be more action taken by the community, by fellow artists that are going to have our backs.”
For more information about the Mnisota Native Artists Alliance, see https://www.mninativeartists.org.
Below: The audience learned from Graci Horne, Marlena Myles and Ashley Fairbanks about the harm caused by the appropriation of Native American art and designs. (Photos by Karen Kraco)
