Resilient Matriarchy: Indigenous Women’s Art in Community

Art, poetry and reflections by: Tacey M. Atsitty, Avis Charley, Lynnette Haozous, Aretha Shining Moon, Monica Wapaha, and Venaya Yazzie

— Online: JANUARY 15-MAY, 2020

Introduction

— Venaya Yazzie, Diné/Hopi, New Mexico, USA

We are Indigenous sisters, born of different mothers from across vast Indin’ Country. We stand in sisterhood in our understanding, in our portrayal of modern-day matriarchy as “neo-ceremony.” Within our individual landscapes, we see, we hear, we taste, we smell, we touch the land, flora, fauna, and our people. In our diverse experiences we create a sacred solitude to balance the chaos of a modern society that remains foreign to our epistemologies and tribal mother tongues. Sisters from California to Maryland parallel each other’s daily rituals of 21st century life as brown Indigenous beings. Sisters in Apache lands and in Pueblo homes recreate female generational movements of healing empathy and compassion. Within our art are narratives of life, of survival, of resilience.

In sisterhood, we revisit the relatives we mourn, their life stories on the land we adore. In my photo essay, Bizhi'ba Trekking through Ancestral Grief, Offering Migration as Healing – Birthplace, Human, Loss, Spirit, Healing, Resilient, Indigenous women living in the darkness of loss & grief initiate migration as a means of healing. In sisterhood, we celebrate the young women in our clan groups, caressing their brown hands in ceremony. In sisterhood, we laugh with our aunties and mothers, appreciating the beauty of their matriarchal narratives of past and present. In sisterhood, we feel within our bodies the movement of the land and sky. In sisterhood, we recognize the shadow of violent colonialism, the stereotypes that follow our “red” bodies, our “squaw” identities. Together, as strong, knowledgeable, and beautiful Indigenous women we are reenvisioned. Our spirits are strengthened when we breathe in the culture of the Apache women gathered in Monica Wapaha’s Identity.

The 500-years of Euro-American colonization was resolute in erasing our cultures, of eradicating our very lives. And reaches into the contemporary. Yet, we still laugh and keep our humor close to us, in many ways as a conscious act of “decolonizing.” Each tribe, each one of us in Indin’ Country, lives with this knowledge. Many integrate sacred ceremony inside the home space and outside in their public lives. It is a coded existence that we all understand. Lynette Haozous reclaims the efforts of her ancestral Pueblo matriarchs in the pottery motifs of her own bold, contemporary work. Dakota/Diné, Avis Charley, carries this theme in her bright ledger paintings depicting strong matriarchs in unique Indigenous garments and hairstyles.

As Indigenous, contemporary, women artists, our work is a vital piece of the narrative of our ancestors’ lives. We are they living on. Navajo poet, Tacey M. Atsitty, understands the essence of living with one hand in a rich past and the other in a modern, although abridged, present. In “Elegy for Yucca Fruit Woman,” she writes, Without me, she said. Go— I’m going to the rock that once had wings. My life rolls like rock clods down a volcanic throat. Circle the tips of big winds beneath…

As Indigenous, contemporary, women artists, using the senses bestowed upon, we hope we are blessing our People and creating a Native world that is better and brighter.