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SPORTS The new exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian traces the sport’s lineage from Native Hawaiian surfing through its latest incarnation at the All Nations Skate Jam
By Kara Briggs
The All Nations Skate Jam, held every year at the same time as the Gathering of Nations Powwow in Albuquerque, N.M., attracts hundreds of American Indian kids who glide and fly on their skateboards while their friends and families watch. “Ramp It Up!”, an exhibition this summer at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., focuses on skateboarding, which has become one of the most popular sports in Native communities—in addition to better-known Indian Country sports like basketball, lacrosse and rodeo. “A lot of Native kids are athletic,” said Todd Harder, who is Creek and the co-founder of the All Nations Skate Jam. “They’re fearless, they still have that warrior mentality in their blood memory. This is a way they can test those skills.” Skateboarding isn’t new to Native America. As soon as the first skateboards, called sidewalk surfboards, were introduced in California half a century ago, Native teens throughout the Southwest were skating. Skateboarding is an indigenous American sport, said exhibition curator Betsy Gordon. Using historic photographs and contemporary ones, the museum’s exhibition explores the Native skateboard movement. Skateboards were born from Hawaiian surf culture, rooted in ancient traditions of the Polynesian Islands. Surfers figure in the Hawaiian Islands’ ancient petroglyphs. The 2001 documentary “Dogtown and Z-Boys,” narrated by Sean Penn, tells the story of young skaters in Santa Monica, Calif., in the 1970s who evolved modern skateboarding by copying the styles of renowned Native Hawaiian surfer Larry Bertlemann. “Larry Bertlemann started surfing in a remarkable way,” Gordon said. “He had a low-slung way, aggressively darting in and out of the waves. There were a group of surfers who wanted to emulate what Larry was doing on his surfboard, and they did it on the skateboards. At that moment skateboarding developed its own set of moves, separate from sidewalk surfing.” American Indians followed the trends. Native kids skated on homemade ramps and paved parking lots. As the Native skaters of the 1970s and 1980s matured, they looked to skateboarding as a way to promote a healthy lifestyle and culture among Native young people. In the past decade, several small Native-owned skateboard companies have emerged, such as Harder’s Native Skates in Adrian, Mich., and Jim Murphy’s Wounded Knee Skateboards in the New York City borough of Queens. “The reason I am doing this company is not to make money, except to keep it going so when I go to Wounded Knee, I can take boards,” said Murphy, who was a pro skateboarder in the 1980s and is of Lenni Lenape descent. “I know what it is to grow up poor, and what a difference it makes when I can give a board away to a kid who I know can’t afford it.” The skateboards, whether Harder’s or Murphy’s, feature Native graphics like big eagle feathers and medicine wheels. When Harder sets up his booth at powwows, the designs stop kids in their tracks. He uses the moment to quiz them about their cultures. Referring to the American Indian Movement’s 1971 occupation of the notorious island prison in San Francisco Bay, he’ll say, “Do you know what Alcatraz is?” At the Pala Skate Park on the Pala Band of Mission Indians Reservation in Southern California, Harder asked kids, “How do you say, ‘Hi, my name is…’ in your language?” Gordon recalls, “No one knew, so he was like, ‘Call up your mom and ask her. If she doesn’t know, call your grandma.’ Soon we had the grandma on speaker phone.” Native skateboarders have been putting culturally significant designs on skateboard decks almost from the beginning. The expression is unique, Harder said, and something he doesn’t see among other cultural groups. Maybe what has attracted Native youth to skateboarding all along has been some of the linkages between the sport and their culture. Skaters have been outsiders because of the way they dress or the music they listen to, Harder said, not unlike Native Americans. “Even though it’s a true-born Native sport to America,” Harder said, “it’s been hated since it’s been around. They don’t want the kids skating here or riding there. A lot of the ways skaters are treated parallels the way we as Native peoples have been treated here. They may not want us to ride in the best areas, but we are still going to exist.” Skateboarders find their own community, often forming ad-hoc groups who share a skate park or skate in similar styles. “Once they start skateboarding,” Murphy said, “they are part of a global community.” One place the Native skate community gathers is at the All Nations Skate Jam, which has doubled the number of skateboarders registered in each of the three years it’s been held. The jam, with pro skaters offering demonstrations in a festival atmosphere over two days, drew nearly 1,000 registrants in April. Parents in bleachers watched between sessions of the Gathering of Nations powwow. Fred Mullins, who works as an addiction prevention counselor at the Seminole Tribe of Florida, came to the All Nations Skate Jam before starting a program for Seminole youth. Mullins, who made his own board in the 1950s by tying roller-skate wheels to a 2-by-4, is using skateboarding to promote healthy lifestyles among youth at Seminole. In communities where more than half of the families deal with addiction or domestic violence, Mullins has formed a club, Skaters’ Nation, where youth who pledge to remain drug- and alcohol-free learn “101 ways to fly without drugs.” In recent years, new skate parks are being built at reservations across the country, including Cheyenne River Sioux in Eagle Butte, S.D.; Osage Nation in Pawhuska, Okla.; and Gila River Indian Community in Sacaton, Ariz. Some communities report a decline in crime after establishing the parks, which offer tribal youth something fun to do, Murphy said. The All Nations Skate Jam was a moving experience for Mullins. “Every morning, sessions opened with a gentleman who came burning sage, and we had prayers together,” he said. “To bring that many kids, and to see them in their own world, where it was like they were family meeting for the first time—we didn’t have to tell them how to behave.” |
| SURVEY The American Indian News Service is conducting a survey to learn how it can better serve its subscribers. The news service provides articles and photos about events and activities at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian free of cost to news outlets throughout North America. As a thank you for filling out this two-minute online survey, your name will be entered into a drawing for a Canon PowerShot SD890 IS digital camera. To take the survey: click here. |
ENVIRONMENT Participants in the gathering at the museum discuss uniquely American Indian responses to climate threats
By Kara Briggs
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian hosted “Mother Earth: Confronting the Challenge of Climate Change” in late June. This year’s symposium considered indigenous answers to the world’s environmental issues. The museum, which has a mission to promote knowledge about Native American achievement, held its first climate-change symposium in 2007 conjointly with Live Earth, a global series of concerts held to bring awareness to climate change. Former Vice President Al Gore organized the concert and broadcast internationally that day from the museum’s Mother Earth event. Mother Earth 2009 emphasized Native responses to climate change—with a focus on environmental efforts by indigenous communities. The event comes two weeks after the Obama administration released a landmark report, “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States” and unveiled the website globalchange.gov. “It was politically uncertain where things would roll in terms of the general American acknowledgement of climate change three years ago,” said Tim Johnson, Mohawk, associate director for museum programs. “With the advocacy of tribal leaders and the change in administration, there has been a shift in understanding since then.” Three participants in the symposium joined American Indian News Service Editor Kara Briggs in conversation about the issues. They are: Patricia Cochran, Inupiat, chairwoman of the Inuit Circumpolar Council and former executive director of the Alaska Native Science Commission; attorney Robert Gough, who serves as secretary of the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy, headquartered on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota; and Johnson, of the museum. Q. What has been the objective of the museum’s Mother Earth programs? Johnson: The first year, it was really a global awareness effort that Gore started, and the Native perspective on climate change. Last year, we delved into scientific consensus into causes and the cultural perspective. This year, to look at solutions, we’re asking speakers to talk about what Native communities are doing. Cochran: Our indigenous people have been here for centuries. The reason why we have been able to live in the most extreme environments is because we are adaptable. That kind of knowledge and wisdom is exactly what this world needs. Gough: The traditional Lakota calendar called winter count, of which there are about a dozen in the Smithsonian’s collection, go back as long as 200 years. About the time they were collected in the 1880s, the government started keeping weather statistics. The winter counts, on buffalo robes and later in ledger books, looked at climate extremes. One year the snow was above the top of the tipi poles; another year they ate frozen fish because the fish were frozen in the winter. Q. In your view, what is the most important work you are now engaged in regarding climate change? Cochran: Every day there is something else that is occurring. Our elders talk about all the changes they are seeing. Interior elders say the song of the robin has changed. I tried, as director of the Alaska Native Science Commission, to engage scientists to try to figure out what those observations in local communities mean. There are all the usual issues like lack of funding, and the relationship between Native people and researchers has not always been a good one. But it’s important to gather information. If the commission can document 2,000 people telling us something, then it’s not an anecdote anymore. Johnson: Even though Native communities are not idyllic utopias, there is a great deal of cultural recovery. How do you construct a culture that makes it more prestigious to drive a car that consumes very little energy, rather than a big SUV? Traditional leadership among the Haudenosaunee expected you would live softly upon the earth. Gough: In the past, there is not a Native community on the continent that didn’t build energy efficient homes that kept them fairly comfortable. You have 14,000 years of green building and you have 400 years of disaster relief. The buffalo is gone. There is tar paper in place of the natural product. Dams and cheaply built HUD houses. It didn’t matter that they weren’t efficient, you could heat them with cheap energy. Now the era of cheap energy is over, what can you do? Tribes have an easier time getting back to that thinking about that kind of adaptation than communities that have never had to think about it. Q. What indigenous knowledge do you see employed to make a change in this arena? Cochran: Wind generation in Kotzebue [a city in the northwest Arctic area of Alaska] produces about 40 percent of their electricity. It’s only one of a number of sustainable energy projects in Native communities. People tend to think of traditional knowledge as a relic, and they don’t really understand that traditional knowledge is dynamic; it is all about knowledge gained and used from one generation to the next. We use knowledge not only from the past but also the present to improve upon what we know. The knowledge I learned from my mother and grandmother isn’t what I taught my children. Gough: Initially, tribes in the Great Plains organized around making sure they could get some benefit from the Missouri River and the dams on it. They secured water rights and an allocation of hydropower, which they could purchase. Later we realized how much electricity you could produce from wind, and how much you could save through conservation. We want every Indian nation to be energy self-sufficient. |
HISTORY The group of students, educators and elders is part of a six-year program to promote cultural knowledge among Hopi youth
By Kara Briggs
Hopi elders, as well as high school students and their teachers, traveled to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in mid-June to learn best practices in producing museum exhibitions about American Indians. The group, which included staff from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, visited the museum’s Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md., where they viewed ancient Hopi cultural items. They met with curators and other staff to confer about the 16 students’ ideas for creating their own exhibition about Hopi culture. Joelle Clark, of Northern Arizona University, said many of the students brought some part of their traditional dress to the museum and sang a Hopi song for the staff. The group was able to view the museum’s collection of Hopi objects including woven clothing several hundred years old, which most had not seen before. The museum staff hosted a potluck to welcome them. “They brought this incredible feast,” said Clark, who coordinates professional development projects in the anthropology department. “Everything was special. I think that’s something that Native people don’t expect when they visit a museum.” The trip, which also brought the Hopi visitors to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., is the culmination of a six-year project to promote Hopi culture among youth. Students will develop multimedia exhibitions in the coming months based on what they’ve learned. Over the past several years, the program, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, brought the students to Hopi archaeological sites, where elders shared history with them. Teachers developed curriculum and students learned about the footprints of their ancestors, as the Hopi call the archaeological sites and related oral history. The program was developed in collaboration between Northern Arizona University and the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office. Dr. George Gumerman IV, an anthropology professor at the university, said the program has deeply affected the teens involved. “One mother became very emotional when sharing just how much these experiences have influenced her daughter,” Gumerman said. “With tears in her eyes, the mother exclaimed how our summer journeys to their ancestral sites have changed her daughter’s life.” The National Museum of the American Indian welcomes tribal groups to visit the Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md. Appointments to view artifacts in the museum’s storage facility should be made two or three months in advance. To make an appointment, call Pat Nietfeld at (301) 238-1454 or fax at (301) 238-3210 or email at nmaicollections@si.edu. |
CULTURE The journey’s organizers promote forgiveness and healing for harm from the boarding school system American Indian News Service
The Wellbriety Journey for Forgiveness, a 6,800-mile trip across the United States, concluded in ceremony in the Potomac Atrium of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian on Wednesday, June 24. The journey, made by car, began in May at the Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Ore., and visited 23 current and former boarding schools in 18 states. Don Coyhis, founding director and organizer of White Bison Inc., has sent a letter to President Obama asking for an apology for the abuses to Native American children in boarding schools. He hopes that the United States will follow in the steps of Canada and Australia, which have both apologized for lasting harm caused by boarding schools. Coyhis said, quoting elders, that now is the time of forgiveness. Native peoples must forgive the unforgivable in order for healing to begin from the addiction, suicide and abuse that grew out of the 131-year-old boarding school system, he said. Starting at Carlisle Boarding School in Pennsylvania in 1878, the U.S. government developed a pattern of separating Native students from their families, cultures and languages using punishment, and physical and sexual abuse, Coyhis said in a YouTube broadcast about the journey. During the journey, local organizers invited the Native public to take part in events in their area, which drew hundreds of people. Lonny Peddycord, a member of the Boarding School Healing Project, participated in both the journey’s start in Oregon and its conclusion at the museum in Washington, D.C. “I am proud to have been a part of this historic journey, being there at the beginning at Chemawa Indian School on May 16th, and at the end on June 24th at the National Museum of the American Indian,” Peddycord wrote. “The time for this healing has been a long time coming for the generations forcibly required to attend the boarding schools in the government’s attempts at assimilation of these proud peoples.” At the journey’s conclusion, a ceremony was held, and those gathered were invited to step into the sacred hoop, to forgive and to be healed. Learn about the Wellbriety Journey for Forgiveness, and read journal entries from the route, at www.whitebison.org/wellbriety-journey/index.htm |
Go to www.nmaie-newservice.com to access high resolution photo page or add editor@nmaie-newservice.com to your address book to receive the HTML version of this news service. The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian is located in Washington, D.C., New York City and Suitland, Md. View online exhibitions at www.AmericanIndian.si.edu The American Indian News Service is edited by Kara Briggs, a Yakama and Snohomish journalist. She owns Red Hummingbird Media Corp., which is contracted by the National Museum of the American Indian to provide this service. Contact her at editor@nmaie-newservice.com or by phone at 503-577-0012. We’re interested in how the American Indian News Service is used. We welcome copies of newspapers that contain news service material, or e-mailed links to online postings. Please forward to Red Hummingbird Media Corp., 8825 34th Ave. NE, Suite L-154, Tulalip, WA 98271; or e-mail to editor@nmaie-newservice.com. Kara Briggs, Editor National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center Cultural Resources Center To opt-out to this publication, please email editor@nmaie-newservice.com. ©Copyright 2009, Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, All Rights Reserved
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