Art, Native American Style

Laura Youngbird is a treasure waiting to be discovered. An enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa, Grand Portage Band, Laura is an artist who works with multiple media to explore and share the experiences of her family, especially her mother and grandmother, at Indian boarding schools. Her art addresses assimilation into the non-Indian way of life as well as the effects of Christianity on Native Americans.
I was lucky enough to visit Laura at her home in Breckenridge, Minnesota, where she spoke to me about her family, her art, her past, and how one cannot exist without the other. The following is some of what she shared with me regarding her family history, assimilation, “organized religion” and Native Americans.
“It [assimilation] is not just about boarding school.” she said. “There’s a lot more to it than that. It’s about the culture…It’s about anybody, not just Native people, but that’s what kind of inspired it. Trying to make people fit into a box. They’ve got to be a certain way and we buy into it. Native people didn’t really want to but we were forced. They did it in Europe, too, the Romans. And even Star Trek, the Borgs. They take over whole planets and assimilate them to their technology and everyone becomes robots. It’s funny but it’s true.”
“Part of the assimilation policy was that they divied us up just like a deck of cards…the Methodists get this reservation, Protestants get this reservation, Catholics get this reservation…we were Catholic, my mom still is and I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic school.”
“Both my mom and grandmother attended boarding schools for Native American children. When I moved to Fargo in 1979 and I was working as a designer, I looked into the Indian Center. I was asking my mom to tell me more about our background and she said that because of the boarding school experience it wasn’t good to know. I can remember my Great Aunt Lucy would start telling a little story and then she goes, “But it’s not true, you know,” because she’s really Catholic and she’s not supposed to be telling these old stories. A lot of the older people still have that influence where it was not okay to do that. It was against the law until 1978 to practice your Indian religion in the United States. It was out of fear that they didn’t teach it to their young people. My mom spoke the language when she was younger and now she can tell me what somebody is saying, kind of, but she can’t teach me the language.”
“My mom went to different boarding schools. In the summers she went to Catholic orphanages at times. My grandmother was a single mother. It wasn’t until the 1960s that there was any help for single parents. All kids went to orphanages or whatever if a single mom couldn’t provide for them, which is kind of scary. It’s not just negative kids that experienced these kinds of things. I would say, if you’ve seen the story “Annie,” that there were orphanages, and that was part of it, if a kid did something wrong you beat them. The boarding schools were a lot like orphanages. Even if you had parents there was a time where they just came in and took the kids out. They kidnapped them, they made a decision that these kids needed to be assimilated. There was a law that was passed sometime around 1948 but they were doing it long before that.”
We also spoke about Laura’s art. She is an art teacher and she paints, works in clay, ceramics, acrylic transfers, printmaking, and anything else that catches her interest. She explained to me how she drew as a child but it was when she was in college that she began working at her art.
“I was always really interested and my parents encouraged me,” she said. “I would take classes in the summer, as much as I could take. But mostly I would draw faces. I don’t think it was until I went to college and I was expected to put a little more into it that it started to come. I was older and had resigned to never making it as an artist so I studied mechanical design. However, that wasn’t what I really wanted to do so I went back to school and started taking classes.

“At first I didn’t necessarily think of getting a degree, I just wanted to immerse myself. I have a BFA in drawing and painting with an Indian Studies minor and a heavy concentration of anthropology/ archeology. I went back and got my Masters in Printmaking and Drawing. I went and got my BS after all of that, kind of backwards [laughs] but that’s because I started teaching.

“I started working at the North Dakota Council Artists in Residence. In a way it’s kind of ironic because I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m going to be a teacher.’ I wanted to teach art if I was going to teach anything and art didn’t seem that important in schools, but somebody’s got to be for it. And now I teach art. You can’t have art in a vacuum. You’re always teaching social studies, science, anthropology, and with the Indian Studies, since I work at the Circle of Nations, I try to educate them as much as I can.”
Two of Laura’s pieces that I am particularly taken with are her ‘Wacapi Wanagi’ buffalo she created for the Herd it on the Prairie Public Arts Project and the clay ‘Assimilation Dress’ sculpture on display at the Plains Art Museum and. I asked her to tell me about both.
“Wacapi Wanagi means ghost talk. They [Native Americans] weren’t allowed to speak like that anymore. It was near the end of the war at the Battle of Wounded Knee – they [the army] just slaughtered everybody. They [Native Americans] were traveling, trying to get to another camp and the Ghost Dance religion was against the law and they wanted them to be Christian. Ironically, it was kind of a blend of Christianity.

“So, that was about the Ghost Dance and the things that lead up to it. Forcing people off of their lands, killing off all of the buffalo so they could get the railroads through, on their way west and they discovered gold and so there were all these hidden agendas. It’s a lot of historical images and what led up to it.

“The original Wounded Knee was actually called the Battle at Wounded Knee but it wasn’t a battle, it was a slaughter. The Chief was taking other band members, mostly women and children and old people, and he had pneumonia, he was dying. The army was taking all of their guns, disarming them, and this one man, that’s all he wanted was his gun. He was deaf and they tried to take his gun, he didn’t want to give it up, there was a scuffle, the gun went off, and they just slaughtered everybody. They even said ‘If you give up we’ll stop’ and then they mowed everyone down. Part of it was they were mad about Little Big Horn, too.”
Regarding the Assimilation Dress, “I was trying to make a little girl to start with,” She explained, “but the clay started to slump [laughs]. I received a Jerome Fellowship to work at St. John’s [University] Pottery and I do like working with clay so that’s where I made it. It was fascinating. People from all over the world came down through there and I got to make art all I wanted and got paid to do it.

“I think that in school they want to have you go in a direction or whatever and I’ve just always been that way. I start to learn how to macramé or whatever and the once I figure it out I’m like ‘Okay.’ I start a lot of projects but I do stick with clay because I like it and I do a lot with it. I like to experiment. I mix paper with clay and then make these delicate bowls that look really old, but it’s sturdy. It looks like it’s something that came out of the ground.”

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