Karen Ann Hoffman, Artist (Oneida)

   

    On a lake of icy blue silk velvet a turtle glitters.  It is made of tiny glass beads in the Iroquois style so that it is embossed or raised.  Beaded trees stand bare;  they ring the lake where the turtle swims.  The deep silence of winter hangs in the air. 

"Wampum Urn" by Karen Ann Hoffman.  Photo by Mike Hoffman.  Used by permission.

     “It is not enough to be pretty,” says the artist, Karen Ann Hoffman.  Her forefinger traces the shape of the lake.  “I want people to understand that great beauty – artistic beauty - is intentional.  When the earth was early, the creator said to the trees, ‘I have other responsibilities.  The trees need to watch over things.’   The trees get tired;  it takes a long time to watch.  The poplars and the maples fall asleep.  The pine family is still awake and so the Creator said, ‘As a reward, only the pine will keep its needles.’”

     Hoffman traces the lake again.  “The earth was created on the back of that turtle.  On good Iroquois raised beadwork, there is always a circle that encloses the design.  We bead counterclockwise.  Everything is done with intention: the earth moves counterclockwise.  The three-dimensional raised beadwork of the Iroquois reflects our environment where so many things are round.  The two-dimensional geometric designs of the Plains people seem to reflect the angularity of their landscapes.”

     The turtle is a symbol of the Oneida origin myth.  Earth was formed by the Creator on the back of a turtle.  Hoffman is a member of the Turtle Clan, a clan descended from that animal, and passed down through the maternal line, a line of women. 

     Every aspect of Hoffman’s work holds meaning, down to the backing of calico on each piece of raised beadwork.    When the Iroquois signed a treaty with the Dutch, they received calico cloth; the Treaty of Canandaigua (1794) with the United States stipulates an annual payment of cloth, “yearly, forever”.  Each fall, the United States government sends cloth to the Six Nations in New York and a cash equivalent of $1,000 or so to the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.  The calico backing and the raised beadwork bring together European and Native American traditions.

     Hoffman is in a line of artists.  As a young woman, she beaded basic items.   Later, in 1999, Sam Thomas and Lorna Hill, master beaders from Niagara Falls, Ontario and members of the Cayuga Nation, one of the Six Nations of the Iroquois confederacy, visited the Oneida.  That is when Hoffman became serious about learning the techniques, history, and traditions of Iroquois raised beadwork.  She has seen examples that are more than 150 years old.  As she beads, she can hear the old people who beaded so long ago whispering to her, encouraging her, talking to her.  She wants to be welcomed when she dies by the “old women who pick strawberries”, the ancestors who prepared the way for her, just as she prepares the way for the next generation of beaders.  

     Hoffman honors the traditions of her people in her designs inspired by the traditional Iroquois world view and executed in materials of the highest quality:  custom-dyed silk velvet, tiny Czech beads, and sometimes even hand-printed calico.  Wednesday evenings, Hoffman welcomes apprentices to teaching sessions at her home. In 2013, Hoffman and apprentice Roderick Elm won a competitive year long Folk Arts Apprenticeship Grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.   Elm, too, will take his place in the long line of artists and hopes to pass the tradition on when he becomes is a master beader. 

      Hoffman exhibits and speaks across the United States. The Wisconsin Arts Board recognizes Hoffman as a master artist.    Her best-known work, “Wampum Urn”, a three-sided urn in plum velvet lined with white satin and beaded in glass seed beeds, wampum, and amethyst, resides permanently in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian.  It depicts Peacemaker and the gift of wampum to the Iroquois people. 

      “My designs are not a commodity,” Hoffman says, working on a large piece depicting a pileated woodpecker on a birch branch.  “They come from within and were inspirations.  My designs and my work are a tribute to my people and their traditions, which go back thousands of years.  My work is not a craft, which is a design or motif that can be repeated over and over and commercialized.”  The woodpecker is coal-black, gray, with a vermillion tuft and a hard, sharp beak of smoky-clear beads.  The bird and its beaded branch connect to a specific Iroquois story. With the help of a magic arrow, a woodpecker’s feather bound to its shaft, a boy killed a monster and saved his village.   

     It is technique that allows the bird and its branch to unfold their beauty in beads, explains Hoffman, cutting interfacing to sandwich between the beaded front and calico back.  Beauty comes from the artist, yes, but also from tradition, spiritual values, and the meaning that they convey to others.

"TreatyRights Footstool, Walleye Spearfishing"  by Karen Ann Hoffman.
Photo by Mike Hoffman.  Used by permission

     Native American art is typically exhibited in museums of anthropology or natural history or in segregated museums or galleries.  It is often understood as folk art, operating outside of the Art Establishment and not made as something separate from daily life by trained artists but primarily as utilitarian or ceremonial objects by artisans with little or no formal artistic background.   That is not a distinction that applies, Hoffman believes. She knows that her work is as much Art as anything from Western culture. She is disappointed that her work and others like it is displayed in separate rooms or separate museums from mainstream art. 

     After all, Hoffman’s work speaks to a wide public.   Take as an example a different tree by Hoffman.  It is snow white with braided roots on a background of black velvet.  The tree is the White Roots of Peace, a tree that represents the laying down of weapons centuries ago when chiefs from the Iroquois Nations decided to form a confederacy that stressed peace and harmony among the 5 Iroquois-speaking tribes at that time -the Oneida, Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, and Seneca.  Today, that symbol remains relevant to all.  It reminds us of the need for peace and respect between the races and the nations.   The Iroquois Confederacy represents those values, as does Hoffman’s work. Just as the Iroquois nations sent a group of singers and storytellers, the White Roots of Peace, around the United States during the Viet Nam era, Hoffman sends out her raised beadwork.  She has a message for all of us: traditional values are relevant to the present and into the future.

    For more about Karen Ann Hoffman and her work...

•  The painter, author, and beadwork scholar Gerry Biron has a beautiful portrait and detailed biography here.

•    This placard by Ann Prior of the Wisconsin Arts Board, was part of  "Masters of Tradition", mounted at the Dane County Regional Airport.  The exhibition, co-curated by Hoffman, focused on Wisconsin's Master Folk Artists and was produced by the Airport, Tandem Press, and the Wisconsin Arts Board.  

•     Hoffman's piece "Treaty Rights Footstool, Walleye Spearfishing" will be part of the upcoming exhibition, "Standing in Two Worlds:  Iroquois Art in 2014" at the Iroquois Indian Museum in Howes Cave, New York.  Hoffman is the inaugural featured Artist in the Spotlight on the museum's Facebook page.

Dawn Walschinski, Newspaper Editor (Oneida)

       The Washington Redskins were coming to town to face off against the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field.  This was going to be one of those weekends where Dawn Walschinski was going to learn a lot about many different things.   That’s what she likes best about her job as managing editor of the Oneida biweekly newspaper Kalihwisaks:  the chance to learn a lot.

      That Redskins weekend, learning a lot was going to mean covering: 1) a meeting of the Indian Mascot and Logo Task Force’s forum on race-based mascots, 2) Richie Plass’ exhibit of 300 items demonstrating Indian stereotypes, and 3) a gathering of protestors on the west side of Lambeau Field during the game itself. “We have a long way to go to change these things,” Walschinski explained. “Our newspaper staff is going to be busy this weekend.”

      Walschinski started working at Kalihwisaks in 1993, after she graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, with a degree in Communications Processes.  She worked for the publication for a few years, then as a videographer for two Green Bay-area television stations, WBAY and WLUK. Walschinski decided to come back to her roots and what she enjoys doing most: writing and editing. She has been managing editor of the paper since 2006.

     She is also a playwright; her play, “Pow Wow Something” was performed in 2002 at St. Norbert College’s Walter Theater, located in the nearby city of De Pere. It is about a fancy dancer who hopes to win back his girlfriend. Walschinski said the topic of pow wows is personal to the Oneidas, but many Green Bay-area residents aren’t aware of their importance and history to the tribe.

      “Green Bay is right next to the reservation,” she said. “For years, the 4th of July pow-wow has been a very visible event. Still, WBAY did not know the Oneida have a big pow-wow during the 4th of July weekend,” she said. “It’s not grass dancers and ribbon dancers so much. We do traditional Iroquois smoke-dancing where we use a water-filled drum, not a big drum, and create dust by moving our feet as we dance.That creates the impression of smoke. We dance counter-clockwise because that’s
the way the earth moves. The earth is our mother, and the moon, our grandmother.”

     The Oneida, one of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederation, are divided into clans descended from women, originating in animals. “I’m a member of the Bear Clan,” Walschinski explained. “Women have held important positions in our tribe because we are descended from a line of clan mothers. Because of that, there have been fewer barriers for women to hold leadership positions. By 1964, the chair of the tribe was a woman, and we have had many members of the tribal council who
were women. Not only that, women have always been leaders pushing for better education and health. Our newspaper’s name Kalihwisaks means She Who Looks for News. ”

      Kalihwisaks is available in print and online at www.oneidanation.org/newspaper. Walschinski said she and her team aim to provide the tribe with the highest quality local news content through many news-telling resources: the Internet, including Facebook, print, video and photography. The paper’s strong Facebook presence, currently ‘liked’ by over 2600 people, is an important facet to the publication. On the Facebook page, Walschinski and her team post photos, video, links to articles, and community updates. She also creates an online community by asking readers questions to generate story content.

     Walschinski sees Kalihwisaks as a connection to home for the many Oneida who live away from the reservation and immediate area, notably in Milwaukee. “Part of the reason we went online is because there are so many of our members who don’t live in Brown and Outagamie County and they’re the ones who get the paper weeks after, so now they can connect instantly, “ she said.

     The vast majority of articles, video and photos is locally produced; earlier incarnations of the paper relied heavily on wire stories. The locally-generated content keeps the small staff of four busy. The tribe subsidizes Kalihwisaks, and each Oneida household, as well as some subscribers, receives one of the approximately 8900 copies printed every week. The staff occupies space in the tribe’s Skenandoah
Complex.

      The Oneida are gradually buying back much of their original reservation. It had dwindled to several hundred acres by the 1930’s. They have now acquired about one-third of the original reservation. It has taken a long time for the Oneida to realize a great deal of money from their casino operations. Walschinski recalls the first annual per capita payment of only $225; it came about the time she graduated from college.

      What does the future have in store for Kalihwisaks? Walschinksi said she hopes to expand the newspaper’s staff and her team would like to eventually incorporate podcasts into the paper’s storytelling toolkit. “We would cover a mix of news and cultural items like language,” she said. “It would reach more people.”

“We’re very proud of what our tribe has accomplished in the past few years”, Walschinski said, “and our newspaper is part of that success, documenting what our people do and what is important to them. It’s part of the pride we have in being Oneida.”

                                                                                     - by Thomasina Merkel
                                             

Misty Cook (Davids), Herbalist (Stockbridge-Munsee)

      Much of the area around Gresham in Shawano County is farmed but here and there are pockets of undisturbed woodland.   Roads wind in and out of stands of oak, pine, hemlock, maple, linden, and ash and on the forest floor grow a rich variety of understory plants.  Misty Cook, author of Medicine Generations, lives with her family in a log house nestled by a brook in these woods.

     Her people, the Stockbridge-Munsee band of Mohicans, have lived in this part of Wisconsin since the 1850s.  Their journey to Wisconsin was long and consisted of what the tribe calls “many trails”:  all the different places they lived after being forcibly removed from their original home along the Hudson River in New York state.  Eventually, they arrived in Wisconsin, first settling on land reserved for them on the east side of Lake Winnebago but as that land became flooded with non-Indian squatters, the United States government moved the tribe to two townships annexed from the Menominee Reservation. 

     It wasn’t until about the time that her daughter was born that Cook began to take a serious interest in the natural medicines traditional to the Stockbridge-Munsee. She had grown up watching her grandmother, Mary Burr use these medicines; her family had always lived around Cook’s cousin, the herbalist Dave Besaw.  People stopped him at the market or the gas station or the post office to ask advice about aching bones or a persistent cough or anxiety or any one of a hundred common complaints.   “Many of the medicinal plants were known to my people but I hadn’t taken an active interest in learning them,” Cook explained.  “I already knew a few of them, like Wild Bergamot or Bee Balm as it's known at the commercial garden center.  We also call it #6, it’s that commonly used.  #6 is like aspirin so it’s good for many kinds of cold, flu, symptoms of fever.”  She made a sweeping gesture of her hand. “ You can find it all through here. “

     After earning a master’s degree in management from the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay, Cook worked as Director of Education for the Stockbridge-Munsee.   She began to ask Besaw to show her the medicines he gathered from the woods and fields and stored in jars and hung in bunches from rafters to dry.   Besaw’s knowledge came from his mother Ella Gardner and her knowledge came from her great- grandmother Granny Gardner.  “It’s seven generations from Granny Gardner to myself.  Granny Gardner lived to be 106,” Cook said.  “Her name was Jeanette Skenandore and she came to Wisconsin from New York State when she was eight years old.  She was an Oneida who married a Stockbridge so she lived with them after their last move from their reserved lands near the village of Stockbridge to the town of Red Springs near Gresham.  Granny Gardner died in 1936.”  

        In the early spring, they collected the little white Blood Root Flower for its red stem that helps staunch bleeding.   In the fields, they found the tall, droopy milkweed for the stem milk that dries up warts.   As summer came on, they gathered and dried red raspberry leaves for a tea to lower blood sugar levels. Colt’s Foot they found all over the reservation.  The white roots, washed, boiled, and strained they made into a salve to promote hair growth and the hoof-shaped leaves with their white wooly underside and smooth, dark-green upper they steeped for a hair and scalp treatment.  Even in sandy or gravely driveways medicinal plants grew.    Cook learned how to preserve and prepare what she and Besaw gathered.

  Over about five years, Besaw and Cook went collecting together in the woods and by the streams and in the marshes.

     She became expert enough to help Besaw in using the medicines to treat people.  Now she was becoming Besaw's assistant and helped with a presentation on their family’s knowledge of traditional medicines.  Soon after the presentation, Besaw died;  Cook didn’t feel ready to end the apprenticeship.  “Everything fell into place, even though Dave died too soon,” she said.  “I had no idea I would be doing this and writing this book but everything has led up to it.   My people try to keep a balance of the mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical sides of life through the proper use of these medicines.  That was an important part of Dave’s work.   The medicines are part of our culture.  These medicines are tried and true down through generations and generations.  Now I teach others about them.” 

     Her book, Medicine Generations, documents 58 herbal medicines traditional to the Stockbridge-Munsee.  Cook describes where, when, and how to gather the right leaves, stems, flowers, roots, and bark and the preservation, preparation and use of the teas, salves, and poultices.  Each plant has a photograph for identification and is called by its common name and many of the Munsee dialect names.   “I wanted to collect the knowledge in one place,” Cook said.  “The book is a tribute to Dave and our family, to those who came before us.  The medicines are part of our oral tradition.   Doctoring in the Native tradition did not require money.   My people have these rich traditions.  The book is a way of passing this knowledge to my daughter and my community and to those who come after us. “

     Misty Cook can be contacted at niconishkawah@yahoo.com   Medicine Generations can be ordered at www.createspace.com/4208715 

Regina "Gina" Washinawatok, Arts Educator (Menominee)

           

      Gina Washinawatok retired in June 2013 after 27 years of teaching.  “I loved my career as a teacher.  I loved what I did.  It was my life and I hated to quit.  I cried when I handed in my keys on the last day,” she said.   “I got a lot of enjoyment from working with kids and helping them open up and learn to express a part of themselves they didn’t know they had.  It’s very important for them to know who they are and where they come from.”  

     At the beginning of her career, Washinawatok taught studio art but after a decade or so, she began to teach a course in traditional Menominee arts – beading, finger weaving, quill-work, basket weaving, appliqué.  No instructional materials or curriculum existed; she had to create, plan and organize all aspects of the Traditional Menominee Crafts coursework.

       Washinawatok taught at the High School in the Menominee Indian School District formed in 1976.  Previously, Menominee high school students were bussed to the next town off the reservation to attend school.  Many issues, including racism, arose from this experience.  After a long fight for local control of their children’s education, the Menominee won the right to have their own school district, which now resides within the boundaries of the Reservation.  The Menominee people wanted a separate school district that not only taught regular subjects like math, science and English but would also teach and promote Menominee culture, language, history and the arts.

            In order to understand why the Menominee people wanted these changes, it is necessary to step back in time to remember that Native people were forced to attend boarding schools from the 1800’s on.  The boarding schools' sole purpose was to assimilate Native people into the general American culture.  This meant that Indian children were taken from their homes and sent to government-run boarding schools hundreds of miles away.  Once there, they were stripped of all things Indian.  Boys’ hair was shaved and girls’ hair was cut.  Children were not allowed to speak their language and there was harsh punishment if they did.  Many children died from being homesick and not allowed to go home.  “I visited some of the children’s graves at the Haskell Boarding School in Kansas.  You could feel the sadness of these little ones who never made it home,” Washinawatok said.

            During the 1950’s, several United States Congressmen decided that the United States government could end its treaty relationship with tribes like the Menominee because they had a successful sawmill.   Congress slated several of the more prosperous tribes for what became known as termination: ending treaty obligations to the tribes.   The United States would no longer provide services guaranteed in the treaties. The Menominee tribe became a forced experiment. “What was so detrimental to us as a people was not only that we were told that our land base, the reservation, no longer existed, but we were no longer considered to be Menominee Indians!" Washinawatok explained.  "If we’re no long Menominee, what are we then?  This was devastating to our very identity."

            Termination went into partial effect in 1954 and into full effect in 1961.  The Menominee reservation ceased to exist and became the 72^nd county in Wisconsin.  For the next ten years, the Menominee had to find the resources to run their county and pay taxes on their land.  Financial circumstances became critical and so Menominee Enterprises, Inc. – the corporation set up to manage the tribe’s resources – had to find other sources of revenue.  The Board of Directors bargained with the N. E. Isaacson Corporation to create a chain of lakes known as Legend Lake to be developed into vacation homes for non-Menominee.  Some Menominee realized that selling their land to pay their bills was not right. 

      For many Menominee, including Washinawatok’s father, Jim “White” Washinawatok, this could not continue.  Jim and other Menominee in Chicago and Milwaukee organized a grassroots movement known as DRUMS – Determination of Rights and Unity for Menominee Shareholders.  “Every weekend we drove the five hours from Chicago to the reservation to protest the sale of land”, Washinawatok remembered.  Finally, after much hard work by the Menominee, they succeeded in not only stopping the sale of the land but also in getting Congress to reverse termination. President Richard Nixon signed the Menominee Restoration Act in 1973. 

            As a teen along with her family, Gina Washinawatok came to be a part of the movement to restore the Menominee reservation and as an adult she became a teacher, helping to educate future generations in the arts and crafts traditional to her people and intrinsic to their identity, nearly destroyed by all the things that happened to them historically.   She grew up in Chicago with her parents, Jim and Gwen, and one younger sister, Ingrid.   When the family moved to Madison, Washinawatok began her studies at the University of Wisconsin.  In 1980, she made the decision to move her own family – two boys at the time – to the reservation and she finished her degree in Art Education at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay.   She now has three sons, Daniel, James and Meyakenew, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Washinawatok served in the Menominee Tribal Legislature for three years.  The Menominee Tribal Legislature is the governing body of the Nation.  While on the Legislature, she chaired the Labor, Education and Training Committee.  She helped organize a summit meeting on historical trauma, including forced assimilation and its impact on community members as a result of the issues they were seeing in their schools.  “The Menominee People have made great strides since the reservation was restored in building a culture and a way of life that draws on our strengths, traditions, and brings in renewal of the language through the Menominee Tribal School, the Menominee Indian School District and the College of the Menominee Nation and gives us confidence in knowing how unique we are as a tribal people and nation,” she said.  “I currently chair a committee named Maehnow Pematesen, the Menominee word for ‘Living in a Good Way’.  I try to remember what my parents taught me with how they lived their lives and fought for what they believed in for the Menominee People.”

     

To find out more:
Menominee Termination and Restoration
Community, Culture, and Language Revitalization in the Menominee Nation

Menominee Indian High School
Menominee Nation official site