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2002
Community Spirit Artists
[ Community Spirit Awards ] [ CSA Nominations ] [ Artists In Business ] [ Cultural Capital ]
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Rodney Cawston
Okanogan / Nez Perce
Coulee Dam, WA
Rodney Cawston
descends from the Lakes, Okanogan and Chief Joseph Band of Nez Perce,
and lives on the Colville Reservation in northeastern Washington.
Randy first learned how to do beadwork and cornhusk weaving from
elders on his and neighboring reservations. He creates cornhusk bags,
hats and belts, cedar root baskets, necklaces and purses.
Rodney is deeply
committed to maintaining the arts, language and culture of his people
and has demonstrated his dedication through a variety of educational,
entrepreneurial and program building efforts. He teaches cornhusk
weaving and cedar basketmaking in his community, as well as cultural
resources management – which plants to use, how to use them and where
to find them. Some of his students have been known to drive over 100
miles to take his classes. In addition to starting a Language
Preservation Program, Randy is currently working to incorporate
traditional language into the tribal workplace, and his experience in
starting the tribal Museum and Gift Shop is helping him to plan a
tribal cultural center.
Through all these
efforts, Rodney hopes that he can help reduce alcohol and drug use
among his people and revitalize an interest in the tribal culture.
“Each of us
were given special and unique gifts, and it is up to us to develop
these talents and to pursue the things that we like to do.”
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2007 Community Spirit Awardees Press Release |
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Rose Kerstetter
Oneida
Oneida, WI
Oneida potter Rose Kerstetter lives on the reservation of the Oneida
Nation located near Green Bay, Wisconsin. She is a traditional potter
who also creates contemporary pottery with Iroquois design elements.
Rose has been working to revive the pottery tradition in her community
by teaching pottery classes to students of all ages for the past
twenty years. She has even taken colleges students into her home and
has mentored them in their pottery making. Rose is working to
incorporate more art into her community through the display of
paintings, sculptures, pottery, photography, etc. in tribal
administration buildings, the schools, the health center and other
public places She is also working on a book about contemporary
Iroquois potters.
As a
well-respected elder and valuable cultural resource, Rose envisions a
day when art becomes a part of everyone’s daily life. She believes
that art is universal and is therefore, a good starting point to
establish understanding between different cultures, generations, and
members within the same community.
“By sharing
parts of our culture with others, whether they are within or outside
our own community, we not only strengthen our local community, but
also the larger, global community.”
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Shawna Shandiin
Sunrise
Dineh
Albuquerque, NM
Shawna Sunrise is a
fifth-generation weaver through her Navajo matrilineage. She is also a
silversmith (taught by her father), photographer, filmmaker,
videographer, and performance artist. She devotes much of her time to
training young people in video production and filmmaking, teaching
weaving and painting to developmentally challenged children, and
showcasing Native artists on her television program, NATIVEZINE.
Shawna represents a
new kind of artist who acknowledges the importance of maintaining
traditional lifeways while also reinterpreting and applying them to
modern media, such as filmmaking and video production. And rather than
choosing to focus on the struggle of being Native, she fully embraces
her identity and contextualizes her artistic endeavors and
community-building through the lenses of her Dineh and Santa Domingo
perspectives.
“It is not
about protest or reaction. It is about us creating.”
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Kathy Wallace
Karuk / Yurok / Hupa
Fairfield, CA
Kathy Wallace has
been making traditional Karuk, Yurok and Hupa baskets for twenty-five
years. Nearly a decade ago, Kathy sold her thriving commercial
business to devote her life full-time to weaving. As one of the
founding “mothers” of the California Basketweavers Association, Kathy is
working to revive basketweaving among California tribes, as well as
protect the practice of the art itself. She is helping to accomplish
this through instructional workshops on Northern California Native
culture and basketry.
As a practicing
artist, Kathy harvests the native plant materials for her work utilizing
ancestral knowledge that has been passed down to her. It is this
ritualized practice that drives her efforts to educate lawmakers and
state and federal agencies on the hazards of pesticide spraying in the
traditional gathering areas located in the forests and wetlands of
Northern California. She also works to ensure that controlled burns
are conducted in certain areas to ensure on-going plant regeneration.
Kathy’s vision for
the future is to one day see all people practicing at least one art form
that ties them in some way to the earth around them.
“It is
impossible to separate the art from the ceremony, the environment, and
the history of my people.”
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Ruth A. Waukazo
White Earth Anishinabe
Naytahwaush, MN
Ruth Waukazo is from
Naytahwaush, Minnesota – a village in the center of the White Earth
Reservation. She is a third generation Ojibwe bead worker who has been
practicing her art since she was six years old. Ruth is a student of
pre-contact quillwork and post-contact beadwork in the Red River Metis
style. She creates pipe bags, moccasins, jingle dresses, dance shawls,
medicine bags and other traditional items.
Ruth has been
described as a background person who is a gifted teacher and natural
leader.
Over the past ten
years, she has focused on the research, revival and teaching of
traditional Anishinaabe art. She conducts one-on-one apprenticeships,
group bead retreats, and week-long residencies in the reservation’s
schools. She is also a strong advocate for the integration of art into
the teaching of reading, writing and mathematics to children with
learning disabilities, believing that excellence in education is
possible only with the full inclusion of the arts. Through her work as
the founding chair of the Native Peoples Bead Quill and Fiber Arts
Guild, Ruth strives to protect the integrity of Anishinaabe art, and is
now working to help local artists become economically self-sufficient so
that they can also contribute to the community’s economic stability.
“Our language
allows us to speak to our creator in the same way as our ancestors. In
teaching art, we strive to speak our language. In that way, the thread
that connects our generation to our ancestors and to our descendents is
a strong, woven strand of language, arts, culture, values, ways of life,
and knowledge of survival.”
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