Indigenous arts at Crow’s Shadow Institute | Buckskin dresses to Parfleche prints | Oregon Art Beat

Art is what is left behind of cultures. Our ancestors made enormous sacrifices so that we could be alive today. Our knowledge is not for us to keep, it's for us to share. The full title is Crow Shadow Institute of the Arts. We're located on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation here in Pendleton, Oregon. We are a creative conduit to education, social and economic development through artistic and creative means. If you could describe Crow Shadow as a person it would be that it's a facilitator for the creativity. It really does bring things together, both physically but also kind of spiritually. Good morning everyone. My name is Terry Carnes and I'm the instructor for the buckskin making class. So a buckskin dress is definitely a part of an individual's being. The different stitches, you notice the different colors of the beads, you notice the design, the whole layout of the dress, the cut, the style of the dress. I did work off of a pattern that you're welcome to use and then we will get to cutting, sewing and fringing and then we'll have a dress. If you speak to any creator, they learned from somebody else. The stitch is called whip stitch. So the whip stitch, she'll just sew it all the way across. So this is a way for me to share and for them also to then share with their family members. I always think about it this way. Our ancestors are working through us. So me being able to share the knowledge that I was taught is super important for our future generations. They did a really nice job of this. Bobby Connor is Aunt Bobby Connor. She is our elder. They patched those in using just a lacing method. They did the sides with the lacing method. Today, Bobby brought in four or five dresses for us to look at. When we cut into the hide, when we mend the buckskin, we're humbled and we're respectful because an animal's life is now repurposed into that buckskin dress. And so I think it's a great way to begin the class to start patching and mending the weak spots in the hide where it's thin, either through the skinning process or because of how it was killed and because of the thickness of the hide due to the season it was harvested. So you look at the imperfections of the hide and it's a reminder to us of one other thing. None of us are perfect. There is no perfect hide. There is no perfect person. We all just come together as humble human beings doing the best we can and we do it out of respect for the life that's been given. And this is a beautiful dress and you can see the flair. It's incredible. Part of what I was sharing was from books because I wanted to demonstrate different kinds of skirts or different kinds of fringes or different movement of dresses and how dresses can be made to ride horses, dresses can be made as sort of a straight style for a certain contest in powwow or they can be plain or very ornamental. James Lavadore and Philip Cash Cash ended up founding Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts and James is very clear that the brilliance in this community needs to be thriving at all times. It's part of our well-being to have our creativity and our forms of expression rich and vigorous. Founding Crow's Shadow was a place to not only nurture artists but a place to teach people about getting art into the market and a place where people could learn about copyright and they could learn especially printmaking. Printmaking was an idea early on but it didn't really develop until the early 2000s when we hired a master printer and started the residency program. I'm Wendy Red Star and I grew up on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. I am now in Portland, Oregon. I'm a visual artist and I've been practicing professionally I'd say since 2006. I've had a long history with Crow's Shadow. I think all the way since 2011. And that's a gift in itself. It's like my favorite residency. Hi. Hey Wendy. Good morning. There's coffee in the kitchen. Awesome. So did you get through this? Yep, those are done. So I'm just almost finished with the dark blue and then I have the red and then just the outline. Judith is the master printmaker and she is basically the captain of the ship. So yeah between today and Friday there's 22 plates that we need to shoot and proof. Okay. Which is a lot. Yeah. And alongside Judy is Maggie and is Judy's right hand person. Basically they know all the technical things that need to happen within printmaking that an artist like myself who really doesn't have any experience with making technical prints can rely on them. It was up to me I would put this one on. With the simple one? Okay. When the artist gets here we have to go over ideas talk about like what's feasible and what's not feasible what can translate into print. So these are the outlines of the parfleche. I have been really determined to study parfleche. So they're basically a rawhide folded case that has geometric designs. This is at the National Museum of the American Indian. These cases are utilitarian for the most part and each tribe has their own designs and their own set of colors that they use. So you could identify crows traveling across the plains by the parfleche. I've been diligently collecting images off the internet and printing them and making studies of like paintings of them and so that actually has carried over to what I want to do here. Each color is printed as its own like layer and then the next color is laid on top of it. There might be like 10 layers on a print. From there the artist starts to finally work on their pieces and that includes like us cutting all the mylars giving them all the materials them trying to figure out composition. From there we start to make the plates so that we can start proofing. All right hopefully the artist finishes a piece and then we can make the plates as Maggie is making the ink as I'm exposing everything and then Maggie and I come back together to proof. It's like an experiment each time to see the different layers and how their place can really inform like if you want to move in that direction or you want to change. You would tell people like I'm going to an artist residency for two weeks and they'd be like two weeks that's a long time and I would I kind of think yeah two weeks is a long time but here we are it's Sunday I've only got through the next Friday to be here and it's like a time crunch. We keep the completed approvals to print we have a plate drawer where we just store all the plates labeled with all of the artist information and this was the proof that we made with the artist without them we can't edition. My use of cultural designs and images of my ancestors is that everything has a meaning to it so with the traditional dressmaking here I'm sure that shows up in their dresses. Native women especially in history books we were truly underrated and under-recognized in the importance of our roles. It's just basically Native women sort of shouting out like really preserving our history and the importance of who we are through these geometric designs so if I can do my duty and honor them and bring them into the light and show them to people I hope that they get excited about them too. We've been in this building for 30 years the goal in the next two years is to help develop a piece of property here on the reservation that Crow Shadow could then build its own new facility. We're the only professional print studio on a Native American reservation in the U.S. We have artists from all over the country wanting to come to Crow Shadow to make prints work in the studio and to be able to share that with much broader audiences there's museums now the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has a large collection of prints. We were just featured in the Whitney Museum of Art in the biennial last year. I hope that that can continue and I really want more and more people to see the magic that happens here and be able to experience the art through both printmaking and the traditional arts. If we had a Crow Shadow on my reservation wow, that could really do stuff for the youth and community. That would just be so impactful. So to see a Native person doing something and then also to see that the Native community here is supporting that is pretty powerful. I'm just hoping for the community to have exposure to artists in the arts and for artists to have the opportunity that Crow Shadow provides that are way beyond the borders of this reservation.