AC Interview | Marisa Cummings + Annika Johnson
Marisa Cummings; Cotton waté snede, breechcloth, vest, and beadwork; photo: Marisa Cummings
Marisa and her partner Sam at the Red Corn camp during IloNshka dances.
Indigenous communities, particularly those located in rural areas where ways of knowing and being are rooted in interdependencies with the environment, are on the frontlines of confronting the climate crisis and often the hardest hit. Associate Curator of Native American Art at the Joslyn Art Museum, Annika Johnson and Director of Native American Student Services at the University of South Dakota, Marisa Cummings recently sat down to talk about connections between resiliency, Indigenous cultural practices, and Nation building. Listen to the conversation below or on Amplify’s Anchor page and share your thoughts in the comments section.
Transcription
Interviewer: Annika Johnson, Associate Curator of Native American Art, Joslyn Art Museum
Interviewee: Marisa Cummings, Director of Native American Student Services, University of South Dakota
Date of Interview: April 14, 2020
List of Acronyms: AJ = Annika Johnson; MC = Marisa Cummings
[AJ] First off, a big thank you to Peter Fankhauser for inviting us to have this discussion and to share it with the Alternate Currents Blog. I'm Annika Johnson, Associate Curator of Native American Art at the Joslyn Art Museum and I'm speaking today with Marissa Cummings who has generously offered to share with us a bit about her creative practice and her work with food sovereignty. Marissa I'll let you introduce yourself.
[MC] Okay. I'll start with an introduction in my language.
Umóⁿhoⁿ Onba tʰe udoⁿ. Thatitʰe udoⁿ. Izhazhe wiwita tʰe Miakonda. TeSinde wa’u bthi. Waxé izhazhe wiwita tʰe Marisa Cummings.
So what I just told you in my language is that it's a really good day; thank you for being here. My Umóⁿhoⁿ name is Miakonda and my English name is Marissa Cummings, as you stated earlier. A lot of times when I do an introduction, just to read into this a little bit, there's two very different dichotomies. There's a traditional version of who I am and my responsibilities in terms of kinship, clanship, and even in terms of what it means to be a tribal member; and then there's this idea of being “legitimate,” I guess is the word I would use within Western society or mainstream American society. That would include obviously your name and where you're from.
I'm from Sioux City Iowa and am a member of the Umóⁿhoⁿ or Omaha tribe. I belong to the Buffalo Tail Clan of the Sky People and I have my undergraduate degree from the University of Iowa in American Studies, with a certificate in American Indian Native Studies, and my graduate work right now (I'll graduate this May) is in the Masters in Tribal Administration and Governance program, which is a Nation building program, at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. I work at the University of South Dakota in Native Student Services specifically, so I work with Native students on a daily basis. Is that a good enough introduction [laughter].
[AJ] Yes! Thank you for sharing that with us. To give everybody a little context, Marisa and I first met in South Sioux City at a quilters guild meeting at Nebraska Indian Community College. They were hosting a ribbon skirt making workshop, generously invited me to come down and just hang out. Marisa, you showed us a few examples of your floral ribbon work or appliqué skirts and shared a bit about your journey learning this creative practice, especially it relates to an Umóⁿhoⁿ way or Umóⁿhoⁿ tradition.
For those of us who might not know what appliqué ribbon work is, can you talk about this a little bit and how you went about learning this creative practice?
[MC] Right. So, first of all, as we've discussed before, I'm not an expert. I don't qualify myself as an expert in ribbon work, or much of anything else in life [laughter]. I think life is a journey and we're all constantly learning. I think I started sewing, just in general, Umóⁿhoⁿ specific probably around 2008. My children danced when they were very young. I danced in the pow wow arena, but I realized when we reentered the circle after we came out of mourning when my mother and father passed away, I wanted to make sure that we were very knowledgeable about our Umóⁿhoⁿ specific cultural traditions within the circle.
Within traditional styles of women's dance, we wear the traditional clothing of our ancestors, which includes, when women are dressed up, they wear their appliqué. The traditional way of doing appliqué using a cut and fold technique with silk ribbons, is not one that I practice. For one, the silk ribbons are incredibly expensive. Sometimes you can still buy them on Etsy, or sites like that, where people found these old French ribbons in their attic, which is amazing and beautiful. But the technique that I use is more of a modern technique where we use a bonding agent, cut out the design, and then sew it with a zig zag stitch.
The floral designs are very very personal to people, from my understanding. When a woman makes a design, she essentially owns that design. That design could be her family design, it could be a clan design, it could be a design that's very special or intentional for that specific person wearing it. The colors that are incorporated often also have meaning. So there's a lot of elaborate work that goes into it. This ribbon work is worn on panels in the skirt--usually a front panel and then a panel that goes around. It was traditionally done on broadcloth material, which is like a wool trade cloth, and also done on blankets. Actually, skirts were first blankets that were wrapped around and tied with a finger woven belt and then later came to be skirts, worn just as skirts, with cotton tops or silk tops. Usually, when a woman's wearing a blanket, it is a very special occasion. For Umóⁿhoⁿ specific ribbon work, it's very common to see a gold or silver, usually gold, military fringe around the bottom of the skirt or blanket. I sometimes see it at the top too.
That's kind of, in a nutshell, what ribbon work is. Ribbon work was really worn by most of the woodland tribes. Although the Umóⁿhoⁿ People are currently in what they call the prairie [laughter], I guess this was new to me, but we're essentially woodland people and we're new to the prairie. We lived in the woodlands in the Great Lakes area for hundreds of years before migrating down the Missouri River. It's very common for many Great Lakes tribes, or woodland tribes, to have a version of ribbon work and sometimes they look very, very familiar or similar.
Marisa Cummings; Omaha Waté snede or Omaha dress, French jacquard; photo: Marisa Cummings
This dress I made by hand and it was my first dress. My grandmother helped me with the pattern by memory of her grandmother’s dresses.
Marisa Cummings; Ribbon Work Skirt, Taffeta, acetate, crushed satin, German silver broaches and hawk bells; photo: Marisa Cummings
[AJ] A lot of what you just shared, and what you've talked about with me previously, is about knowledge and how you learn this practice. It seems like it's partially a very personal journey. In a lot of ways, you're self-taught but you're also learning from generations of sewing work in different artistic traditions. Can you talk a little bit about this journey and learning and how knowledge is shared as it relates to sewing and ribbon work?
[MC] For me, I had to ask a lot of questions and I think I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up this idea or reality of colonization and the mass dispossession of Indigenous people, Umóⁿhoⁿ people from our lands, to create a settler state and to create Nebraska. The Umóⁿhoⁿ people had to sign a treaty in 1854 in order for Nebraska to be established as a state. In order for us to really address the learning, we have to address the trauma and the idea of lost knowledge within families and communities.
We really hold knowledge keepers very very close to our hearts because there are very few left and when I talk about knowledge keepers, we could talk about language, we could talk about ribbon work, we could talk about songs, we could talk about ceremonies, naming ceremonies, and we could go on and on. The reality is that the Umóⁿhoⁿ people were heavily colonized through the Allotment Act. Even prior to the Allotment Act, 30 years prior, when we signed our treaty, allotment was built into our treaty. So in the treaty, land was already being divided up and there's a relationship between land, Indigenous women, agency, patriarchy, agriculture--there's a relationship between all of these things. They’re all interconnected.
When all of this trauma was happening, we tended generationally to try to assimilate. Some families assimilated more than others and some knowledge was lost. There has to be a baseline for us to understand that not every family has the ability to have family patterns; not every family has the ability to go to an elder and ask for them to teach them. In my family specifically, I’m the oldest grandchild in my family. There's eight in my family specifically, and as the oldest, I was very very close to my grandmother and had the responsibility of caring for her later on in her life. She would share memories and experiences with me. She sewed a lot but she was not someone who had ribbon work. Ribbon work was for women who had, a lot of times, the ability to have that. She grew up in a time of the Depression on the reservation. She would sell walnuts to white people who would drive onto the reservation to look at Indians for the day. They didn't have money and they didn't have resources and so that was not something that was passed out in my family. My grandmother's mother died when she was 10 years old and she was then sent to boarding school at what's now known as Hascall, but then was known as an Indian Boarding School in what is now Lawrence, Kansas.
For me specifically, in my family line, that was something that was not there. So I sought out knowledge keepers in our community. I took food baskets. I sat in every time I saw a session that was being done and I asked a lot of questions. I'm very thankful to the teachers that I had. Sometimes those teachers weren't even Umóⁿhoⁿ. They were other tribal women who practiced a technique and showed me tricks of the trade and things like that.
[AJ] A few things out of that. I'm so interested in the response to historical colonial forces embedded in this practice. It seems like it's very much a process of reclamation, of healing from trauma, and also activism--we've talked about this and I’m sure it will come up again and you can talk about what it means to be an activist (or not). How does that relate to seed gathering, seed exchanges, and to other forms of reclamation and sovereignty that you’re working on, or that you see other Indigenous people working on, that connect creative work to food practices, to ceremony, and to other ways of healing.
[MC] Right. This is all an individual journey for everyone. Healing and reclamation, I think, is a really beautiful way of saying that. Some even call it rematriation. A lot of the history books and the ethnographers and anthropologists didn't tell the story of our women. I tend to think that was very thought out and methodical as to why they didn’t tell our women’s stories because our women have an incredible amount of agency. They were actually the base of the economy.
When you look at traditional agriculture, meaning of course the corn beans and squash, but we also had melons and so many other different types of seeds that we were growing intentionally. Then you have what people call foraging and the foods and medicines that grow naturally people would out and seek. Women were surrounded with these beautiful flowers and plants and medicines and they were relatives. You had a relationship with them. It was more than just “Oh, look at that pretty flower. I’m going to put that on my skirt.” A lot of times, women held those medicines in their bundles that they put on their skirts. We have to think too, now I have five or six ribbon work skirts. Women usually only had one or two traditionally. The skirt that you had was constantly being added to, or the blanket you had was constantly being added to.
I think that I'm just trying to go back to your question here. We're looking at women as being the primary ones who were the seed keepers and that story has been completely left out because we have this mainstream story of agriculture being a white man, a plow, and a cow or a horse as this idea of agriculture in complete contrast to traditional Indigenous agriculture where women were the seed carriers. We waited for the moon cycles to plant. That's why our Umóⁿhoⁿ women have all of these moon names. We waited for the flood to come on the Missouri River. You know, the Missouri River agricultural basin is one of the most fertile in the world and when the flood receded it was almost like a woman’s moon cycle or fertility cycle. When the flood receded it left the most fertile lands and that's when we planted our crops.
Those crop areas that women planted were family based, community based, clan based. Again, we're going back to this idea of kinship. They planted their crops as a community, so this was a time to laugh and talk and sing to your seeds. We planted in mounds and that goes back to the stories of when we received one version of corn and the Buffalo being in the four directions and left the mounds and out of that mound grew the corn. But there’s no talk of the women in that story at all.
My youngest daughter is sixteen and a couple years ago we planted, and I had her plant with me, mounds that were carrying seeds inside and in her mind, she could make that relationship between a woman’s belly carrying a child. That’s exactly the relationship. You have the water--your belly's full of water. You have the moon, which controls the tide and can make women go into labor. All of this is interconnected in our female teachings and our women’s role in the community.
Then when you look at the trade networks that were based on agricultural economies, women were really at the core of those trade networks. They may not have been the ones actually doing the trade negotiations--that may have been a male’s realm--but we have to remember that there were powerful female realms as well and duties and responsibility and female agency. I guess we can get into this idea of rematriation too when we go back to this more European model of farming and patriarchy where land is passed from male to male in the family. The male owned the woman and the children. That's essentially what happened in the Allotment Act. They handed it out to a male head of household who then owned the wife and the children. Umóⁿhoⁿ women were like “What’s going on here?” In some more traditional families, this idea of the home being the woman’s is still practiced as an our home.
In the seeds that I take care of, planting those traditional seeds, meeting other people who do and love the same thing, we’re seeing this reclamation Indigenous women taking on Indigenous female crafts. I hate calling them “crafts.” I would say traditional female knowledge like sewing, appliqué, beading, and other traditional forms like tanning hides or any of these beautiful ways of being that we had and reclaiming those as art forms. They are art forms, but it's hard for me to say that because it's so much more than an art form. There's ceremony that goes with it; there's this love and this complete sense of identity that goes with it. I think traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) ties into that. That's how I connect seeds and agriculture with ribbon work, but it’s also more just a way of life and a way of being.
There was the Great Lakes Food Summit that happened last year out in Pokagon, Michigan. The year before that, it was in Meskwaki Settlement, Iowa. What an amazing way to talk about healing and recovery too. There were things we ate like squirrel soup when there wasn’t food around or things we ate that were starvation foods, like milkweed soup, that we remember people eating or making. There are feelings that go along with that for a lot of elders who may remember what it was like not to have food and having to eat those specific foods. Reclaiming those makes us so thankful that our grandmothers knew how to make those foods because they knew how to keep us alive. They knew how to keep us going as a community. Those grandmothers were the backbone of our survival, essentially. For our people, you know, we were reduced in population by 95%. I mean, we went from 10,000 to 333 people. We lost families. We lost clans. We lost incredible knowledge. We are survivors because of those grandmothers who carried that knowledge of plants and medicines. Reclaiming those, reusing those, reintroducing those can be a little challenging but also very rewarding.
I wouldn't have known about the Great Lakes Food Summit if I didn't have if I didn't have social media, because that’s how it was shared--on Facebook. But then there are some things you can't learn on social media, which may also be the generational part. Young people who think “Oh, this is how I go harvest licorice root. I'm just gonna go up and do it because I saw it on YouTube.” There's a process to plant harvesting. There's asking consent from the plant to have that relationship and offering tobacco, which shows reciprocity. We're consent based people. We practice reciprocity in our daily lives. If someone gives us something, we gift that back. There's the communication of the needs of the plant: what are you looking for the plant to do for you; what healing do you need from the plant? A lot of the plants can do a lot of different things and so that prayer is built into that connection to the plant. And then giving the plant back to the earth after you use it. You know, you don't throw it in the garbage, you don't just discard it, you really make a relationship with that plant.
That's something that's hard to teach through social media, although I've recently seen Linda Black Elk do some YouTube videos where she talked about that. She said, “Talk to elders in your community about what harvesting looks like.” But what happens when there isn't anyone with that knowledge in a community? In addition to that, when we talk about kinship and you think of the moon, the sun, the earth, the seven grandfather's and their teachings, you're looking at soil, water sources, seeds, foraging all of those things for me, that story is like a puzzle piece. I would get pieces here and there of knowledge and then I had my grandmother I could bring them to and ask, “Does this make sense, grandma?” Because I still think academically in Western ways, I could be like, “Grandma, does this make sense?” and she was there to tell me yes or no, you're way off track. Now she's gone, so I have to put the pieces together in my mind by myself now. I do often bounce ideas off of people who I respect, and have a relationship with, to make sure that I but I'm kind of going in the right direction.
You know, now we have podcasts. WOW Indigenous is one that I listen to a lot. I'm listening to a lot of Kim Tall Bear’s thoughts and commentary, who I know we both love, and other women who are out there. There's another one that I listen to too that I really like that shares a lot of the same types of thoughts called All My Relations--that's another one.
photo: Marisa Cummings
I look at how we have access to these support networks and these people who are like-minded. That helps when we're really fighting patriarchy, either in our communities or in general. It helps to have these women, who may not even be our own tribe, support us, understand us, and lend critical information to these ideas that we’re forming right now. It's not like we have the answers. These answers are always forming and coming back to us and this is something that'll be passed on to our daughters. They'll continue. I look at my 16 year old and I'm already like, “You know as much as I do, if not more, and you're 16. So what is this going to look like when you're 43?”
[AJ] Thank you for sharing all of that. I keep returning to the word “art,” which I think is very much, when you're talking about these extended networks and different ways of learning and of knowing that are related to a personal independent journey but also watching and listening to different generations, a word that has a very settler colonial orientation toward making and creativity that idealizes the individual. Working for an arts institution and with a lot of arts institutions in Omaha, and in the past in DC and Minneapolis, I always struggle with this and I'm wondering how arts institutions can support the efforts that you're talking about: revitalization efforts, healing efforts, [the efforts of] Indigenous women working towards these practices that are part of a much bigger way of knowing and existing within the world beyond narrow definitions of what art is. From what you've said about appliqué work, it is not just appliqué work, it's everything. I would love to get your take on how institutions can support that work.
[MC] Well, when I think of the idea of art, I also think of museums and what museums contain. Museums often were tied to institutions of higher education that were founded shortly after statehood here in the Midwest. Even the land that they're based on was treating land. When I think about institutions like that, I think about my process with repatriation of my family's bundle that was taken to the museum by my great-grandfather, Charlie Walker. He asked for safekeeping and it actually belonged to his grandfather, whose name was Wahoⁿgithe (Orphan) Allen Walker. He was part of a group of 12 Umóⁿhoⁿ families that were called the Council Fire. They were resisting what was happening at that time, which was the colonial process, or the treaty signings in the Allotment Era. They knew that Allotment would be the beginning of dismantling our traditional governance systems, our clan networks, our secret societies, which were then not secret societies--they were open societies; we didn't have to hide. They knew what was coming and that this dismantling of our traditional Umóⁿhoⁿ kinship systems and way of life was going to come with Allotment.
When my grandfather took the bundle, it was still illegal to sing our songs and practice our way of life. He put it there, as he said, for “safekeeping.” He didn't say it was theirs forever. My journey...I didn't go looking for this. I heard about my whole life from our family members. I heard people say, “You should go get it. You should go get it.” I was like, “No! Why would I?” So, I didn't go looking for it. I was looking for something else. I was actually looking for a White Otter, which is used in our Mide'win ceremonies. I was looking for it to see if the shell was still in it, and it was actually in Denver, but the woman at the Museum said, “Well, let me send you a list of everything that we have that we don't put on the website.” She sends me these card catalog lists of everything they had and the first one said, “Alan Walker” and “Charles Walker.” I know my family tree very well, so I knew that was our family’s bundle. When I asked to see it, they were very open about going there and seeing it. It was very powerful. Then, I asked if I could take it with me to ceremonies to get more guidance. After that, I said, “Okay, here’s my official letter of repatriation.” I know NAGPRA laws really well and I asked to repatriate it based on family lineage and showed my family lineage.
That caused something I did not expect, which was a great deal of opposition by certain men of power in the community who attacked myself and my family members. It became very personal for me and part of this healing process, or what people call “decolonizing,” was realizing that my enrollment number mattered less to me than a family bundle being returned and the idea of what it means to be Umóⁿhoⁿ and what those original teachings that we received from the Creator were. We went through and eventually brought it home. The bundle went to ceremonies with me in our Mide'win Lodge during spring ceremonies. It was opened, we care for it in our home, feast it, and do things that are appropriate.
The tribal council actually fought me on it and we had to each go to the museum and testify as to why we thought it should, or should not, come home. The museum did a really great fair and just due process and followed NAGPRA laws and and the bundle came home to us. For me that was scary. It was the first time in our tribe that a bundle was actually brought home to a family, or a person, a family member and not repatriated to the tribe as a whole. The Sacred Pole came back in the 90s but still is physically down at the Museum in Nebraska. I see that also as a process of healing--looking at what these museums possess and how they gain access to objects. Were they stolen? Were they bought? Were they sold? Because when we talk even about a skirt, like my daughter's skirt, as having all of this memory already in it, all of these prayers in it. She's gone through the Mide'win Lodge in this skirt and so this skirt has its own sense of spirit.
Then you have people thinking, “Oh, it's just a blanket that's in a museum. It’s just some moccasins in the museum.” But where did those moccasins travel? Where did they go? Who did they belong to? I think that there's a better idea of that now and there are certain people, women specifically, who understand this connection because it's the women who make a lot of these things. Women made moccasins for their partners, for their children, for their relatives. Women were the ones creating the hides, making the leggings, clothes for their men and daughters and sons. These are traditionally women's practices and so reclaiming those does come in line with healing and institutions and how they work. Having institutions even acknowledge women's practices as an art form, I think, is powerful. Even though our art is wearable, our art is usable art, it's still an art form. It's still valued and significant and so having that acknowledged, I think, is very important.
As we go back and we heal and gain more understanding, we can put together a bigger picture of what the community looked like and to me, that goes directly into Nation-building as well. Nation-building is essentially creating a Tribal Nation not just a tribe, but a nation. To do that, we have to understand and pull together as much cultural knowledge and understanding as possible, and pre-colonial cultural knowledge as possible, which means a lot of times we are dismantling these patriarchal ideas that people call traditional.
I don't know if I explained before, but when we talk about the term patriarchy, patriarchy and matriarchy are not synonymous; they're not equal. Patriarchy obviously is male-dominated. Women have very little agency, very little voice. With matriarchy, we aren't talking about dominating men. Most of the women I know--we love our men, we love our sons. Matriarchy is about the idea of life, whether that life be life that we carry in our wombs; whether that be our sister's children, which are our children; whether that be seeds that we carry; or water spirits that live in the water. All forms of life, and the spirits around us, are about the continuation of our people into the future. That is matriarchy and when we create food systems that sustain our people and allow us to live and create beautiful things, that's a good life.
Marisa Cummings; Appliqué ribbon work skirt on cotton fabric with drawstring waist, traditional Umóⁿhoⁿ breechcloth, otter cape and beadwork; photo: Marisa Cummings
Marisa and her partner, Sam Grant, Prairie Island Wacipi in Minnesota
[AJ] Such a huge contribution and that was such a beautiful explanation of matriarchy. I think it segues well into the last question, which is: what are the next steps? You've talked about the work you're doing within your own family. How does that translate to a broader community level, and to even a policy level, when we're talking about very specific ecological challenges that this region is facing due to colonial policy. What challenges do communities on the reservation, or within urban spaces, face?
[MC] I don't know if it’s next steps. It's more like stuff is always happening. Interconnected with the work that we do as Mide'win women is praying for and taking care of water, as our grandmothers and great-grandmothers did along the Missouri River. So when you talk about policy, or if people use the word “activism,” that feeds into advocacy. If we have the ability to advocate for those who have no voice, we have to do it and the water can't speak for itself right now. Although, she's clearly resisting by flooding [laughter] and going back to her traditional path before Pick-Sloan.
I think what people have to realize first with policy, is that there have been generational historical US policies that have targeted specifically Indigenous people here in America, and targeted us in very harmful ways. One of those was the Pick-Sloan damming project that happened in the 40s and 50s. It impacted over 28 tribal communities whose treaty boundary was the Missouri River. Some of those communities like in North Dakota were completely flooded like the Mandan and Hidatsa. They were completely flooded and are still under water now. With us, they literally moved a river into Iowa and so we lost thousands of acres, tens of thousands of acres, of land. That was intentional, you know. That wasn't done by mistake and the goal was to prevent areas like Sioux City from flooding. You have a down bottom in Sioux City and where a lot of the agricultural stuff was going on. So we lost acres of land, of course, but you also lost ceremonial sites. You lost women's prayer sites where the full moon ceremonies were done. My grandmother would tell me about specific places where the women would gather and pray and do ceremony and sing. “Sing to dinosaurs,” is what she would say, that lived in the caves, but I know those were code words for water spirits.
When we look at what's happening with the water now and the KXL pipeline or oil pipelines that are going through, you know pipelines are nothing new to Indian Country. They're nothing new to our communities. What we're acknowledging now, I think on a more collective level--not all Indigenous people agree with preventing pipelines--but I think what we're seeing more collectively, is an understanding of the impact that these pipelines have not just on the ecological base of our lands, but on the health of our people. They have an impact on what’s coming into our communities. Right now, are there people going in to build KXL contaminated with Covid-19? Are they bringing that into the communities? That's definitely an issue. Of course, we were at Standing Rock in ceremony with our Lodge members. We went up four different times and two of those times were specifically for ceremony. I also organized resistance at the Army Corps of Engineers in Omaha, Nebraska, which is the ACE that oversaw the TransCanada oil pipeline.
The most important part to me, in organizing those actions, at ACE was to have our Umóⁿhoⁿ people understand the value of the river, to understand a ceremonial value of the river, and also to understand that we can stand up and not to be afraid. We brought the big drum down, singers down and it also allows us to create this sense of identity, of community by saying, “No, this isn't okay and this is going to impact us and it's going to impact our children,” like the Pick-Sloan damming project impacted generations of our people and our women and our our garden plots.
Feeding into that, we have this “new” idea of what people call missing and murdered Indigenous women. We know that our women have been targeted since contact. This is nothing new. It's been happening forever. As Indigenous women, this is nothing new. Our grandmothers were having these same conversations at their kitchen tables about our women. Are they safe? Where are they experiencing harm? How can we prevent them from being harmed in urban areas, border towns, where it’s really common, and also in the community by community members, by our own.
That's a whole other area that I think we're just looking at addressing--domestic violence in our communities and what that looks like. That's really hard because that's taking it from non Indigenous people doing something that we’re familiar with, because they've been doing it for so long, and now saying, we're doing it to ourselves, our own. What does that look like? Why? How do we heal from that? How do we prevent it? Those prevention efforts look very different from prevention efforts from non Indigenous people harming our women.
Then we look at the over-sexualization of Native women. You know, Pocahontas and “Poca-hottie” costumes and all of those things that lend to the idea of Native women being not human. Dehumanizing a group of people is the first way that you make it okay to harm them. “They're all drunks, they're all alcoholics,” you know, are all stereotypes [that characterize] Native women as “drunk whores,” essentially. That's where the word “squaw” comes from. That word is so commonly accepted too. People are able to use it like it means nothing. The issue, in terms of policy, with missing and murdered Indigenous women is something I've worked with across boundaries; working with other women who are like-minded, who are strong. All of this to them is also rooted in food sovereignty, reclamation, and building our bundles. I don't think I'm unique. This is something I see a lot of our women doing.
Rhonda Purcell, Pokegon and of Pottawattami Indians, (Bodéwadmi) Wedding Satin
My lodge sister and I did a commission exchange of our appliqué ribbon work skirts. She made this beautiful skirt with red to honor our Missing and Murdered Women.
photo: Marisa Cummings
Other policy work is around how food sovereignty can help our communities long-term, especially with what's going on right now. Our reservations are usually in food deserts and so when we look at access to food, we're talking about having to come into urban areas or cities. Is that always safe? What can we do within our communities to reestablish these food systems? I have seen some pretty cool stuff done, even with the government food distribution that's done--putting in blue cornmeal, or giving out wild rice, or buffalo meat, deer meat. I’m seeing that happen. I know the Winnebago Tribe recently did a buffalo kill and distributed meat to its tribal members which is a really beautiful thing. I've seen the Meskwaki do some beautiful work. Shelly Buffalo is amazing. She's doing work with the Meskwaki Food Sovereignty Initiative where they feed their elders traditional foods that they grow and help do gardens. I see it happening in all of these different ways but it takes somebody really special to do that in the community. For me, I'm not ready to lead like a big food initiative, or anything like that. We keep it in our garden, in our family and do that right now because my work is in higher education with young people.
Having these conversations with my students is so awesome. In my generation, I had to get rid of a lot of fear of judgment for being too Indian. In academia, you had to be a certain way to be successful within academia. It would be fearful to even use my language, or to learn my language, or definitely use it around non Native people. Overcoming those fears, I see this younger generation that isn't afraid. They are ready to wear their ribbons skirts in public. They are ready to learn how to make them. They're ready to use their language every way they can. They're ready to build gardens and feed elders and they're just amazing.
At the University of South Dakota, we’re working with the USD Sustainability Program and discussing very preliminary ideas of how we can build Traditional Ecological Knowledge, or TEK, into the sustainability program. Would that be a certificate? Would it be a major? What would that look like? For me, if I can find a way to work in Indigenous women's experience, agriculture, all of this, I would love to look at a PhD in that. We’re trying to offer majors that our students can take back to their communities to rebuild their communities. Not just majors like business and more mainstream majors [that lead to careers in] a more colonial model, but something where our students can take back our own knowledge and apply it as it fits their community. Our students can learn their language now at larger institutions, although I don't feel that they should be charged for it, [laughter] but they can relearn their language. It's just awesome being able to create that space for students to be themselves and to have these conversations and talk about Nation building is awesome. Then to see them go on to do policy work, whether that be in public health, or in the arts--we have students doing work in the arts--and to see all of these little seeds that are going out there and continuing to build our Nations and make our people strong and healthy, to me that's pretty awesome stuff.
[AJ] It's so wonderful to hear about the work that's changing at universities, especially. Young people--I think that generation has such motivation and is super bright and is doing wonderful things. It's really wonderful that you're mentoring them and sharing your community with us, here at Amplify, and with the listeners of this podcast. That was a wonderful conversation. I think we have to wrap it up here. I feel like I could ask more questions, but we'll continue to talk, and I'm looking forward to hearing about your work in coming months and years and good luck. You said May is when you finish your MA program?
[MC] Yep, that's when I'm all done. No commencement this year but everyone will stay safe and that's it. We have an amazing cohort model and I just can't give the MTAG (Master of Tribal Administration and Governance) program at UMD (University of Minnesota-Duluth) enough love for creating this program that is so specific to tribal communities and their needs. Pretty awesome stuff
[AJ] That's awesome. Well, congrats in advance! Good luck in these last couple of weeks and stay healthy. Stay well. Take care and your family too during this you know time and we'll talk soon.
[MC] Sounds good. Thank you.
*This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Marisa Miakonda Cummings is a graduate of the University of Iowa. While at the U of Iowa, she was an active leader in the Native American Council and the Center for Diversity and Enrichment. She is currently the Director of Native American Student Services. Marisa is proudly descended from the Umóⁿhoⁿ Tribe. Follow her on Twitter.
Annika Johnson is Associate Curator of Native American Art at the Joslyn Art Museum where she is developing installations, programming, and research initiatives in collaboration with Indigenous communities. Her research and curatorial projects examine nineteenth-century Native American art and exchange with Euro-Americans, as well as contemporary artistic and activist engagements with the histories and ongoing processes of colonization. Annika received her PhD in art history from the University of Pittsburgh in 2019 and grew up in Minnesota, Dakota homelands called Mni Sota Makoce.