Writer and visual artist Melissa Melero-Moose talks about fostering creativity during the pandemic on the Reno-Sparks Indian colony in Hungry Valley, NV. Eric Hemenway, director of the Department of Repatriation, Archives and Records for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, explains how storytelling can uncover misrepresentations about Native communities.
Explore Melissa Melero-Moose’s work, read her Nevada Humanities essay, and find out more about the Great Basin Native Artists. Learn more about the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians.
Read more about this episode’s topic and guests at our website.
Sydney Boyd: Hello, and welcome to Making Meaning, a podcast that explores how and why the humanities are an essential part of our everyday lives. In this series, we hear stories from our nations, humanities, councils, and leaders across the greater United States about the role the humanities have played during the pandemic and are playing in our recovery. I'm Sydney Boyd from the Federation of state humanities councils. And today I'm learning how writing, creativity, and storytelling can uncover misrepresentations about native communities.
American Indians, and Alaska natives had the highest COVID-19 mortality rate of any US ethnic group in 2020, according to the CDC. Melissa Melero-Moose is a mixed media visual artist, writer, and curator. She is a Northern Paiute enrolled with a Fallon Paiute Shoshone Tribe, and lives on the Hungry Valley reservation. In an essay for Humanity's Heart to Heart, a Nevada humanities program, Melissa described moving through the pandemic as quote unquote blank mentally and physically just nothing. She wasn't sure how she'd ever get back to creating. When I read her essay, I wanted to learn about what writing meant to her and how it helped her process this moment of crisis.
Melissa Melero-Moose: Well, I'm always writing in one way or another, always have since I was a kid and then poetry sort of alongside my artwork that I do in the studio. And then in the last couple of years, I've written for art magazine called First American Art Magazine. And so I was writing, I was writing for them, I was writing for myself, but definitely when the pandemic hit that really just poured out, as well as photography. And that was something I actually went to school for. I got an associates degree at IAIA probably back in the early nineties, and I hadn't really done that medium in a long time, but for some reason that was the only thing that I wanted to do to sort of document or tell this story.
Boyd: You reference indigenous poet and writer Heid Erdrich, saying indigenous peoples are already post-apocalyptic. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that statement means to you and what it meant to you at that moment?
Melero-Moose: I mean, I think about that a lot, I guess, because Indian people have endured so much over the past 500 years plus, and I think American society doesn't really think about us anymore. They think it's just sort of done and gone and the past, but we're still recovering from basically the apocalypse. Some people came in and completely eradicated us and over the next hundred years, lots and lots of things have happened since then. And as far as our recovery, it's still happening and something that I do within my community with the artists in our community, I started an indigenous art group called Great Basin Native Artists. And it's just because I know so many artists around here, our region is so underrepresented. I mean, people wouldn't know that we are still doing art and we're still basically in existence.
Boyd: I would love to hear more about the comprehensive archive you're working on with The Great Basin Native Artists. I read that it will house both physical and digital records of indigenous artists and art related events.
Melero-Moose: The archive is sort of an evolution of the group. The group started out being just a place that we can exhibit our own shows and sort of create our own opportunities and learn among each other sort of art business. And I don't see a lot of our artists exhibiting in museums, so I was feeling that this group needed to learn and create our own opportunities and make it easier for that next level of curators and museums to access us. And that's what the archive is, is so that we aren't sort of reinventing the wheel every time someone gets an idea to do an exhibit with us, which is really rare. All of these artists are accessible through this archive. The hard copy is located permanently at the Nevada Museum of Art and their library collection. And then I have the online, I'm working on the online database.
Boyd: Looking through sort of your portfolio, there's sand and acrylic and willows and cattails and pine nuts that you talk about as well as basket tree. That seems to inform quite a bit of your art in this really wonderful way. Could you talk a little bit about basketry, especially, and how that feeds into your work?
Melero-Moose: Sure. Right before the pandemic hit, I just learned how to do some traditional basketry with a basket maker, Loretta Burden. I met her because I was sort of stalking their indigenous basketry group because I paint basketry and I put willow and pine nuts and sort of things relating to our culture, like some of my paintings, they're called like basketry or pine nut baskets where we're putting the pine nuts in the baskets and collecting and different things. And I take that imagery and that sort of cultural inspiration, and I abstract it and rearrange it into different ways onto my canvas. And so strangely enough, during the pandemic, I sort of got to enhance that inspiration and really learn how to weave traditional Paiute basketry.
Boyd: Hearing you talk about that, it makes me think of this other image that's titled Westward Expansion Access Denied. I was curious what you were thinking about as you titled that, there's obviously associations, but maybe there's some undertones there too.
Melero-Moose: I would hear a lot of talk amongst the traditional basket makers that it's really hard to get materials, to gather materials because there's so much fenced off areas where we used to gather. And so the image has all these sort of layers of basketry texture and then barbed wire and then pine nuts on there because we have the same problem with gathering our pine nuts, which used to be a main part of our sustenance. They're high in fat and in calorie content, so that was like a main thing that Paiutes and Great Basin Tribes would gather pine nuts for the winter. And so that piece is just a bunch of different layers of that sort of idea. And I guess the telling of that story, I mean, I made that piece so I could talk about it like that, like this, which is great.
Boyd: I didn't notice that there were pine nuts on that Westward Expansion Access Denied piece. That's fascinating.
Melero-Moose: Yeah, I use a lot of pine nuts in my work and like bits and pieces of willow, just to sort of repurpose a lot of things. Pine nuts, usually it's such a luxury to have them when you get access to them that people are like, how can you put them on the canvas? You know, my tribal peoples, and I'm like, no, no, no, don't worry, I ate the ones that were edible. These are the ones that people have been giving me that they had, in their backyard or something all dried up.
Boyd: You had me really thinking about how you have, I know it's a bad metaphor to say this, but woven together, all of these different artistic forms and stories to communicate something that is so strong about where you are and who you are. That's just really, really amazing.
Melero-Moose: Thank you. I don't think of it that way, I guess when you're just kind of getting through, you're getting through. I mean if you would've told me that we were going to go through this, I don't know things would have gotten dark because I couldn't have imagined. And I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way and they're still going through the aftermath. I think we've lost a lot of our native elders and community members here and for such a small tribe that was huge and we're still dealing with that, but our people have gone through a lot of things, and this is just another part of what they call our resilience. For some reason, I think native people I've heard indigenous people say that they don't like that word. And I don't know for me personally, I like that word. I think it's accurate. I mean, it's something that we say about children, right? I mean, children can go through a lot of things and they always bounce back because they have this free open mind that adults sort of lose. And so, yeah, I'd say it's resilience.
Boyd: When we say that someone is resilient, it usually means they've gone through something hard, like a tragedy or an injustice and survived in the context of indigenous communities. I turned to Eric Hemenway to help me understand a little more of the weight behind a word like that. He's the director of the Department of Repatriation, Archives and Records for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. A big part of his job is telling stories.
Eric Hemenway: So I'd like to give an introduction in my native language of Anishinaabemowin first, to help center my train of thought and guide me in the conversation. So I'll translate that really quickly. One of my names is snake. I am Anishinaabe, that's how I self identify, and I am from the Place of the Prayer Tree, AKA Cross Village, Michigan, and I am of the Crane Clan.
Boyd: I really want to think with you about stories, because when you talk about stories around Native Americans in particular, I know that there are histories and facts that are hard to hear. How do you think about how to tell those stories when they're difficult?
Hemenway: So this is something I grapple with on a daily basis, really Sydney, as learning these stories and then processing my own personal reaction to them. Because a lot of times it's anger, it's frustration, it's hurt. And then once I process internally how to go forward, how much do you tell the story? Where do you tell the story at? And who's essentially ready to hear this story. So this all part of this process of getting the story out there. And oftentimes these stories are just utterly brutal. Children are victims, women are victims. It's senseless violence. It's taking. It's theft. It's dehumanizing on all levels. And these repercussions of these events that may have happened 200 to a hundred years ago are still directly felt by native communities, myself included. There's always something that is lacking humanity in the history between the United States and tribes.
It's constant. And it's easy to dwell upon that lack of humanity and this more negative aspect. What I've learned through others is that you can't dwell on that. You had to acknowledge it, but you have to look at, this is so cliche to say this, but you know, the good out of this that. These tribes do these remarkable things to survive in these remarkable individual stories. And it pulls you out of that bad place and not fall into the stereotype of the angry Indian. And that's something for good reason, a lot of people label us like, oh, this is another pissed off Indian, angry Indian. Well, there's a lot of reasons to be angry, but not to stay in that place.
Boyd: I'm wondering if you can talk too, a little bit about how native stereotypes have obscured the history of who native people are.
Hemenway: I mean, we could go on for an hour about the problems that this creates with misrepresentation being invisible, stuck in the past, that all Indians are from one tribe or a couple of tribes, they're all from one area and that's not the case. You know, we all have unique identities. We all live in special environments. We have our own language and customs and traditions, but that respect and that willingness to acknowledge all of our uniqueness is often washed away with these stereotypes. Everything I do, whether it's an exhibit or a sign, or even this, say this is from this one tribe, this is from this one individual. And there's over 500 tribes in the United States. And that's 500 different stories. So not just setting an example of saying, okay, we're doing this exhibit, we're doing this sign, it's telling this story. It lets people know that this isn't this Pan Indian project, this isn't this homogeneous people speaking on behalf of all native people in North America.
Boyd: Thinking of hurtful words, another phrase you have me thinking about is proud culture. When you hear that describing native Americans, what's your reaction?
Hemenway: Sometimes it depends on the individual. You know, you're not giving me the individuality to express myself and just labeling all natives as proud or brave. To me, this is problematic on a lot of fronts, but also because you're saying, you're trying to give this flattering or this compliment, but this is me as an individual that I'm not representing all natives. I'm not representing the tribe here. I'm not represented all of Anishinaabe. I am representing my expressions as Eric and Anishinaabe. So I'd like to put that out there because somebody might hear this say I heard this Indian guy talk so it represents all natives. That's completely not the case. So when I hear this, you're not acknowledging all of the other things that have happened. You know, all of the land theft, the murders, the massacres, taking the children. It's just like, oh, you're proud. Well, there's a lot of scars that are left though.
Boyd: When you look to the future, is there more to feel hopeful about, or do you just see more work? Or what do you see?
Hemenway: Yeah. You got to keep hope. The stories help provide that hope for me. I read circumstances and activities and things that people did under such times of duress and pain and war and suffering. And they do these truly remarkable things to make, not just their lives better, but the lives of others around them better, and for future generations. And one year that really stands out to me for the tribes in Northern Michigan is 1838, 37-38. We just signed a large treaty seeding over 60 million acres to the United States to avoid forced removal to Kansas, or so we thought. The United States still wanted to remove us after the treaty was signed. And we are all familiar with the Trail of Tears with the Cherokee, out of Georgia, but there are over 40 removed tribes in Oklahoma, Kansas. So those are 40 different Trails of Tears that often aren't talked about.
The community here, the Odawa were targeted for removal to Kansas. And we knew what that meant: hardship, death, suffering. You had to walk out there. People were dying from starvation, dying from exposure, and literally dying from broken hearts and they were breaking rightfully so. I mean you're forced off your Homeland. You've been for thousands of years, you have to leave your burial of your ancestors, all your sacred areas, everything you built, you're forced down these marshes through harsh conditions, to an unknown, hostile territory. And when you get there, your survival's not guaranteed. You're relying on food and other provisions from the same government that wants to remove you. So people started starving out and getting sicker when they arrived. So how do you avoid this? And you know, the Odawa here took some very, very drastic measures to do this. They went to DC in November, and they peddle canoes made out of birch bark through the Great Lakes all the way from Northern Michigan to Washington DC in November. They risked their lives in order for future generations to be in the Homeland of their ancestors.
And on top of all of this, you have diseases, smallpox, influenza that are ravaging the communities in Michigan. Sometimes until your villages would die from the sickness. And then there was crop failures. So all of this is going on in a two or three-year period, but people survived. So I think about that, that they made it, they made it through a lot tougher times than I did. And it's my obligation to not just tell their stories, but find inspiration from it. Because without them doing these things, I wouldn't be here or I'd be in Kansas, talking to you about a whole different set of circumstances in history. But I'm not. I'm in the Homeland of my ancestors, and they were here before Columbus arrived, before the Vikings arrived, and we're still here in the same area. That's something I don't take lightly.
Boyd: Thanks to my guests, Eric Hemenway and Melissa Melero-Moose. At the top of the show, you heard the voices of Matthew Gibson, Julia Wong, Jennifer Tonko, Samantha Anderson, and Stephanie Gibson. Making Meaning is a podcast from the Federation of State Humanities Councils, and as part of its Humanities and American Life Initiative, which is generously funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. You can learn more about our work and member programs by visiting our website at statehumanities.org.
The show is produced by LWC. Elizabeth Nakano is our producer and sound designer. Jimmy Gutierez edited the series. Jen Chien is executive editor. Cedric Wilson is lead producer. You can find more episodes on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. I'm Sydney Boyd. Thanks for joining us.
CITATION: Boyd, Sydney, host. “Indigenous Communities and the Strength of Storytelling” Making Meaning, LWC Studios. October, 28 2021. statehumanities.org/