It’s pouring rain in Hoopa. The roads are slick with ice and snow is about to fall as roughly half a dozen people shuffle into a small room for the Klamath-Trinity Joint Unified School District Board meeting in mid-February. The crowd is small but those attending carry the voices of their children, their community and, […]
Native
Posted inArts + Scene
‘The Spirits There’
Lyn Risling’s clear, inviting images celebrate the Native Northern California in her exhibition Reconnecting: A Cultural Journey. Contour lines and panels of vivid color illustrate a world drawn from indigenous stories, in which human beings and animals coexist and interact as equals, without anyone making a big deal out of it. A gentle humor animates […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Basket and the Blade
I have reiterated tendencies, certain go-to forms,” Robert Benson said. “It’s like with any artist: You get caught up in your own style. With me, it’s the tension between angles and curves.” The trope has been evident “forever” in art made by Indigenous people of far northwestern California, as Benson, a Tsnung’we elder, observed. In […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
One Native’s Perspective on Turkey Day
The fourth Thursday in November is always a special day in many Native households. For most it’s about time off from work (if they have a job as the national unemployment rate for Native Americans is 12 percent according to the US Census, versus 4.2 percent for the country in general) and an opportunity to […]
Posted inNews
‘I am These People’
I saw the place the Karuk call the center of the world in a painting before going there for real. It was marked with a sleek isosceles triangle, blue magic marker on tinfoil — an emphatic shape that lingered in the mind. Standing before his painting, Brian D. Tripp turned to me in the oaken […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Photos from the Intertribal Gathering
The 37th annual Intertribal Gathering and Elder Dinner attracted another large crowd to the Redwood Acres Fairground in Eureka on Saturday. Sponsored by the Northern California Indian Development Council, Inc., the event honors veterans and Elders in ceremony and offers a friendly social experience over a turkey or salmon dinner provided at no cost to […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Room for the Missing
This month Humboldt State University’s Gou’dini Gallery hosts Sing Our Rivers Red, a traveling exhibition that seeks to call attention to the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women across North America. Organized by a group of 10 artists calling themselves the SORR Collective and sponsored by groups at institutions, including North Dakota State University, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Tattoos and Suspension: Photos from the Native Ink Expo
Needing a break from the North Country Fair late Saturday afternoon and looking for an opportunity to renew my interest in our daughter’s profession as a tattoo artist, I headed south to the first (promising to be annual) Native Ink Tattoo Expo event at the Bear River Casino Resort. The event ran Friday through Sunday. […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Photos from the 56th Klamath Salmon Festival
The tasty smell of fresh Klamath River salmon cooking the traditional way over an open fire mingled with the tangy smell of smoke from wildfires at the Yurok Tribe’s 56th annual Klamath Salmon Festival on Sunday. The Yurok tribe had canceled serving salmon in 2016 and 2017 due to low fish runs. The event’s annual […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Photos from the Hoopa Rodeo
As it does every year, the Hoopa Rodeo bucked, galloped and kicked up dirt Aug. 3-5. Native riders from California, Oregon, Nevada, Washington state and beyond came to compete. Both adults and young ones only a few hands high rode broncs (or mini broncs), zigged and zagged through the pole bending competition and sped through the […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Three Native Artists Carry the Weight
What They Bring, What They Carry brings together artworks by Brian Tripp, Brittany Britton and Robert Benson — artists of Karuk, Hupa and Tsnungwe descent, respectively, who grew up in and around reservations in the Hoopa and Two Rivers regions. Tripp and Benson, who have exhibited regionally and nationally for decades, use process to articulate […]
Posted inArts + Scene
First Contact: Steven Paul Judd’s Moving Pictures
When Kiowa-Choctaw artist Steven Paul Judd was a child, growing up on Indian reservations in Oklahoma and Mississippi, he contracted polio and had to go to the hospital. There, by his own account, he “saw TV for the first time.” It made a big impression. As luck would have it, the TV movie that was […]