It was a massive competition between the best new hip hop acts from New York and L.A., and when all was said and done it was LightningCloud — a Native act from the left coast — who reigned supreme.
The finale took place at South by Southwest, the entertainment-industry mega-event that descends upon Austin, Texas annually and which concluded on Sunday night. On Friday, LightningCloud, the delegate from Los Angeles as selected by hip hop radio station Power 106, faced Brooklyn product Radamiz, who had earned his spot in the finals by winning the contest held by New York’s Hot 97.
The matchup was decided by text voting on Friday, and LightningCloud were announced as the winners following a performance by hip hop artist Kendrick Lamar. For their victory, the group, which consists of MC Redcloud, Crystle Lightning, and DJ Hydroe, will open for Lamar on tour, and received a cash prize of $10,000.
By Jordan Wright, Indian Country Today Media Network
Pam Knapp of KQ Designs
Crafted from the tanned skins of elk, deer, moose or buffalo, and in colder climates often lined with rabbit fur or sheepskin, moccasins, often accompanied by leggings, are the standard footwear for pow wows.
Since colonizing Europeans began arriving in North America and started trading their glass beads with American Indians, the art of beading on moccasins has become a tradition that has evolved into high art. Once simply adorned with shell, quill, wood and bone, the moccasins of today are intricately beaded leather canvasses that depict the wearer’s heritage and/or dance style. Beads are stitched into complex motifs to reflect tribal, clan or familial influences with fanciful botanical, geometric or animal design themes.
For Michael Knapp, of KQ Designs, based in Lexington, Kentucky, a bead artisan for the past 40 years, beadwork is like snowflakes, in that “no two designs are the same.” Knapp, of Winnebago descent, who learned the art of beading from his mother and later taught his wife how to do it, creates head-to-toe regalia. “There are several different styles for women,” he says, “depending on what is typical for their tribe or the part of the country they are from or their dance style. For men, it’s typically a basic pair of fully beaded moccasins using the lazy-stitch style of beadwork. Men who dance traditional or straight dance wear leggings. In the old days all men wore leggings. With women there are more choices.”
The pow wow dancer can choose from three basic styles, though the final product shows the limitless artistry expressed by the beader. There’s the familiar low-cut moccasin with a squared-off tongue and hole-threaded leather laces, or the high-top “desert boot” with turn-down cuffs. There’s also the mid-calf boot with thong ties that wrap around the leg and up the calf. (Floor-dusting fringe often runs along the sides or back of the boot.) Beaded leggings that cover the top of the moccasin up to the top of the calf are sometimes added to complete the outfit.
Stepping Out in Style: contemporary and traditional leggings and moccasins (Pam Knapp of KQ Designs)
Whether pow wow dancers are performing grass dance or jingle, straight dance, fancy dance, traditional or hoop dance, beaded footwear is a considerable investment, and it must not only be beautiful but also able to withstand wear and tear. Although sinew, the animal tendon once used to lace the shoe together, is seen at art shows demonstrating traditional styles, it’s not strong enough to hold up to energetic pow wow dancing. Instead a strong thread is used, though Knapp likes to use sturdier, and pricier, waxed dental floss to ensure the beads stay on during the dancers dynamic performances.
Historically, tribes like the Kiowa and Comanche typically wore high-tops. Seminoles, who did little beadwork, used predominately patchwork appliqués with different colored materials and some accent edge beading. On the West Coast, beadwork was rare, but in the Plains, including the Dakotas, Nebraska and Iowa, there was a lot of beading, and women’s regalia had not only fully beaded yokes on their dresses, but also on their moccasins and leggings. In the Plateau region of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, western Montana and Northern Utah a different style of stitchery called flat stitch was often used—that refers to the way beads are tacked down onto deer hide or cloth. The Cheyenne were known for lazy stitch, eight to 10 beads wide.
Today much of the regalia no longer incorporates traditional stylings, and many beaders feel the change is good. “Though rhinestones and mirrors in beadwork are only from the past 15 years and don’t reflect traditional styles, it comes down to artistry and we are very open to it,” says Knapp. “It has more to do with the dancer as a beautiful piece of art.”
Juanita Growing Thunder Fogarty, Sioux/Assiniboine, is another bespoke beader whose work has won numerous awards and been featured at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, D.C. (some of her art will be presented in the upcoming NMAI exhibit Grand Procession, opening April 17) and the Denver Art Museum. While living on the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana, she learned the art from her mother, Joyce Growing Thunder, one of the most prominent beaders in North America.
As Fogarty works on a pair of smoked moose hide moccasins for her 10-year-old daughter, she explains that her family not only beads together, but dances together. “It’s a part of who we are. We were raised to dance for others,” she says. Brother George is a grass dancer and older daughter Jessa Rae Growing Thunder, Miss Indian World 2012-2013, is a competitive dancer and a beader.
Joyce and Juanita incorporate a wealth of stitches in their extraordinary designs. “Some of the stitches we use are appliqué, lazy, edging, whipstitch, Southern, peyote, brick or loom beadwork,” says Fogarty, who teaches summer classes in beading at the Idyllwild Arts center in California and refers to moccasins by the Sioux word hampas. “Mostly I use our tribal style, sticking to lazy stitch and appliqué, a two-needle stitch with one needle on top that holds the beads and another that loops over to attach it to the hide. I use materials we would have used a hundred years ago.”
There is a tremendous sense of pride at pow wows as dancers express their ancestral stories not just through the intricately stitched symbols and designs that glimmer from the light of thousands of hand-sewn glass beads and sparkling ornamentation, but by each footstep reconnecting them to Mother Earth and Father Sky. As Fogarty puts it, “The circle is a healing place. You’re there to heal others hearts and spirits.”
Ask Northwest book lovers about authors they enjoy. Picking one favorite is too hard, but Timothy Egan is sure to be on many lists.
The Seattle-based author has a gift for bringing together history, humanity and a knowing sense of place.
I’ve been hooked on Egan’s nonfiction since reading his 1990s books “The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest” and “Breaking Blue,” a tale of police corruption in 1930s Spokane.
For years a correspondent for The New York Times, Egan chronicled the Dust Bowl in “The Worst Hard Time,” which won the 2006 National Book Award. His book “The Big Burn,” about a massive 1910 forest fire, explores early champions of conservation President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot.
Egan’s latest, “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis,” is a biography of the Seattle photographer who sacrificed much to capture iconic images of American Indians in the early 1900s.
It’s all so well written you forget you’re reading serious history. Wouldn’t it be fun if another Northwest favorite, “Book Lust” author Nancy Pearl, sat down with Egan for a literary chat?
That’s a book-lover’s dream, and it’s going to happen at 7 p.m. April 6 at the Everett Performing Arts Center. Planned by Friends of the Everett Public Library, the event is free, but organizers will ask for donations to support the library’s summer reading program.
Pearl, a former Seattle librarian and former director of the Washington Center for the Book, spearheaded community reading with the “If All of Seattle Read the Same Book” program. Her reading recommendations fill several “Book Lust” volumes, and she’s been a public radio regular. Pearl may best be known as the inspiration for a librarian action figure, a replica that makes the finger-to-lips “shhhh” gesture.
“I’m just hoping for a great turnout,” said Everett Public Library Director Eileen Simmons, adding that she knows Egan and Pearl both have many fans. There were plans to bring the pair to Everett years ago.
Before becoming library director in 2007, Simmons was involved in planning a “Reading in the Rain” winter program at the library. Another librarian suggested bringing Pearl to a kickoff event to interview an author.
“Tim Egan had just come out with ‘The Worst Hard Time,’ so we picked him. He was willing, we had it all set up,” Simmons said Friday. Pearl had to cancel. Another date didn’t work for Egan; it was Super Bowl Sunday. “Then he won the National Book Award, and we couldn’t get him,” she said.
Simmons had hoped Matika Wilbur could be part of the April 6 program. Wilbur, a member of the Tulalip and Swinomish tribes, was featured in Gale Fiege’s Herald article last November.
Like the photographer subject of Egan’s book, Wilbur’s mission is to photograph members of every American Indian tribe. Simmons said the young woman won’t be available for the library event, which is sponsored by Rodland Toyota.
There’s other good news at the Everett library.
The Bookend Coffee Company, a coffee shop inside the library, is open again after its previous owner quit the business. Opened as Espresso Americano in 2004, the library shop had been run by Jennie Wheat as Bookend for almost two years. Wheat left when her lease expired in February. Espresso Americano now operates at Everett Station.
The library shop recently reopened with new owners, Everett’s Barry Wheeling and Jennifer Schmidt. “They lease the space from the Greater Everett Community Foundation,” Simmons said. That arrangement allows the rent money to be used by the library, she said. The Bookend shop serves Herkimer Coffee, a Seattle brand.
“It’s pretty good,” said Simmons, admitting she’s no coffee expert.
Books, best-selling authors on the way, and the coffee shop is back — it’s all pretty good.
National Book Award winner Timothy Egan will read from “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis” and will be interviewed by “Book Lust” author Nancy Pearl at a public event at 7 p.m. April 6 at the Everett Performing Arts Center, 2710 Wetmore Ave. The Friends of the Everett Public Library event is free, but donations will support the library’s summer reading program.
He was a friend to Indian tribes and served two terms as governor of Washington state; Booth Gardner, a democratic, died at the age of 76 on Friday, March 15 after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.
“Governor Booth Gardner was a wonderful man and an exceptionally good governor. He was clearly a very close friend of the tribes, a man who truly understood the great value of establishing and maintaining positive relations with us, on a government-to-government basis, and who had the courage to stand up for what is right,” said Fawn Sharp, president of the Quinault Indian Nation and the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, in a statement.
“It was under Booth’s leadership that the State of Washington and the Northwest Tribes stepped away from constant court battles into a new era of cooperation in the 1980’s. It was he who signed the Centennial Accord with tribal leaders in 1989 and it was he who helped open the door to positive state/tribal relations in places where conflict and polarization existed before,” Sharp continued. “Booth Gardner was a brilliant and visionary man. We pray the leadership he provided in his life will live on for generations to come. We extend our deepest condolences to his family and to all the people of Washington who we know will also miss this great and vastly accomplished man.”
ARLINGTON — Arlington’s second annual Flashlight Easter Egg Hunt will wrap up “Paint the Town Purple Day” on March 23 in the Haller Middle School stadium, with the gates opening at 8 p.m.
At 8:30 p.m., attendees 5 years old and younger will be released onto the field, and at 9 p.m., the lights will go out for all ages, come rain or shine, at a cost of $5 per person, with all the money raised going toward the American Cancer Society.
“The pre-hunt for ages 5 and under this year was added by popular demand,” said Heidi Clark, who organized last year’s Flashlight Easter Egg Hunt. “The main hunt will be open to ages 3 to 103. Teenagers and adults are encouraged to attend.”
While hundreds of plastic Easter eggs will be filled with candy, some eggs will contain raffle tickets for cash prizes, gift cards donated by local businesses, vacation packages and more, with some of them valued at $500 or more.
Attendees should bring their own baskets and flashlights. For more information, call Clark at 360-925-6436.
Luck o’ the Irish: Get in the mood for St. Patrick’s Day with this roundup of events coming up this weekend. There’s food, drink, music, dance and a lot more.
Plant sale: Get ready for spring gardening with Seattle Tilth’s edible plant sale. The free sale is Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. in Seattle. Seattle Tilth is well-known as an authority on gardening. You’ll find plenty of plants, selected to grow well in our area. There will also be classes to help you learn more about growing food. Click here for all the details, including a list of plants that will be available for sale.
Quilt show: The Quilters Anonymous Quilt Guild annual show is 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday at the Evergreen State Fairgrounds. The theme is “Out of this World.” More than 500 quilts, ranging from traditional to innovative, will be on display. There will also be demonstrations about quilting techniques. Admission is $7 and includes entry for all three days. For information, click here.
Taste wine: Chateau Ste. Michelle is offering a rare barrel tasting event from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. The winery only offers the barrel tastings once a year. You can taste several wines that are still barrel-aging and speak with the winemakers. The event is $20 and includes tastings and a glass of a finished wine. Buy tickets the day of the event at the wine shop. Click here for more information.
Outdoors: Cabela’s is getting ready for spring with Spring Great Outdoor Days from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. Attendees can participate in lots of free activities such as youth and adult turkey call contests. Other events include a laser shoot, wooden bow-making, and duck decoy carving and painting. There will also be a spring fashion show and a variety of free seminars and workshops with topics that include the basics of reloading, bear-proofing your campsite and preparing Dutch oven meals. Read more in our story here.
Visit Wonderland: The students from the Farraige Mhor Academy of Irish Dance journey down a rabbit hole to follow Alice on her whimsical trip. The musical show is at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Tim Noah Thumbnail Theatre, 1211 Fourth St., Snohomish. Tickets are $15 general, $10 for students and seniors, free for children younger than 5. Go to www.brownpapertickets.com or buy at the door if available.
What is that thing? Got a strange artifact? Bring it here. The Monroe Historical Society invites the community to its annual membership meeting and program, 10:30 a.m. Saturday at the Monroe Library, 1070 Village Way. Laura Phillips, archaeology collections manager at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, will speak about local archaeology followed by an artifact identification session. Residents are encouraged to bring up to two items for identification, including American Indian artifacts from the Pacific Northwest made from bones, antlers, rocks and shells. No appraisals will be given. The experts do not authenticate items for sale.
Fill out your bracket: The NCAA men’s basketball pairings will be announced at 3 p.m. Sunday. If you’re not busy celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, you can spend the afternoon filling out your bracket.
Ballet for kids: Pacific Northwest Ballet is presenting a family-friendly version of “Hansel & Gretel” to help introduce children to ballet. The ballet is performed as an hourlong matinee and is narrated. The ballet shows twice Sunday. Click here for the details.
Music for all: The Hometown Hootenanny presents its “Family Ties” concert on Saturday in Everett. The performance plays on the theme that families that play together, stay together, and the songs celebrate the strength of families, whether it’s good or bad or special moments in family life. Read more in our story here.
Art walk: Wander through Everett, from one art studio to the next, on Saturday from 4 to 7 p.m. Galleries and studios will be open and snacks and drinks will be available. Local restaurants will also be displaying art. Click here for more details, including a map of participating locations.
By Eisa Ulen Richardson, Indian Country Today Media Network
source: hopscotchfilms.com.au
Too often, movies about brown people devolve very quickly into movies about a single white person surrounded by brown people. It’s not just that a white person is in the film – it’s that a white person becomes the film. The white, usually male, lead overwhelms the narrative, privileging the privileged, and disappointing those of us who paid the price of a ticket and a bucket of popcorn to see ourselves onscreen.
Finally, an unexpectedly delightful story featuring indigenous people has been produced for the big screen. Like magic, this movie does not show us the story through the lens of the white male lead, and so does not distort the image of the four beautiful brown women to whom the story belongs. It does not cater to the fantasy of white people dancing with wolves. Instead, this heartwarming, wonderful, joyous Australian film tells the story of four Aboriginal women from the point-of-view of the women themselves.
The Sapphires is a triumph.
It is also true. In the 1960s, a real-life quartet of sisters and cousins, one of whom had been ripped away from her family as one of the 100,000 Aboriginal children that formed Australia’s “Stolen Generation,” reunited and formed a soul-singing girl group. Styled and billed like The Supremes or The Shirelles of the same era, these women traveled to Vietnam to perform for American troops stationed there during the war.
Based on a hugely successful 2004 stage play of the same name, The Sapphires was written by Tony Briggs, whose mother was the youngest member of the group. The director, Wayne Blair, is also Aboriginal. Chris O’Dowd, who held his own as the good cop that almost got away in the estrogen-packed 2011 hit Bridesmaids, is just as charmingly flawed in The Sapphires. A reluctant manager with a drinking problem and a string of personal and professional misses haunting his heart of gold, O’Dowd’s character transforms into an unlikely hero. He plays the frog that needs a perfectly placed kiss to transform into a scruffy prince.
But the movie, of course, is not about him.
The four women who sing and dance their way through this film also transform. From country western singers who “love Charley Pride” to soul-singing divas who dominate the stage for increasingly larger audiences throughout Vietnam, the women experience a kind of coming-of-age as witnesses to the horrors of war and participants in their own liberation from the racism of mid-20th century Australian society.
Styled in sequins, go-go boots, and miniskirts, these women shine. Their wardrobe expresses their characters’ growing sense of empowerment without positioning them as hyper-sexualized “exotic others.” Though thrilling, their performances do not titillate or play to stereotypes about brown girls and white male access to their bodies. Indeed, their sexuality is expressed in relationships — affirming, sensual relationships, with black men whose romantic gestures are sure to make hearts swoon.
Intimacy grows between O’Dowd’s character and one of the four Sapphires, Gail, the “Mamma Bear” played by Deborah Mailman, who leads the group with loving command that remains unflinching even as the other three women find their own paths to personal power. The friendship and mutual respect expressed by these two characters offers a compelling counter-narrative to the myth of blond, blue-eyed desirability. Rather than detract from the women as the central focus of the film, this relationship only reinforces that focus.
Jessica Mauboy plays Julie, who fights hardest for the chance at something greater than her everyday life. Shari Sebbens plays Kay, the whitest looking of the girls, the one who was stolen, and the one who has the longest journey to make to get back home, and Miranda Tapsell is Cynthia.
Tapsell, whose great grandmother was taken from her family as one of the Stolen Generation, says the authenticity of the film is matched only by the enthusiastic response of the Aboriginal community. The experience of indigenous audiences is unsurprising. From the opening sequence, where four young girls sing in the Aboriginal language of their ancestors to an audience of family and friends, to the final scene, The Sapphires is a film that honors the original people of Australia and life in the missions where they are forced to live.
The Sapphires manages to examine the dispossession of Aboriginal people, the fragmentation of family, cultural dislocation, poverty, the particular plight of women who are also mothers, and the horrors of the Vietnam War — all without losing its upbeat tone, its rhythmic joy, its hopeful expression of uplift. Perhaps because the filmmaker, writer, and four lead actresses are Aboriginal, The Sapphires celebrates the beautiful, flawed, imperfect, glorious humanity of the indigenous people this film showcases.
Aboriginal people, an entire diverse community of the original people of Australia, are on the stage with The Sapphires each and every time they perform, and every round of applause, every cheer, every whistle and shimmy and shake, is for them — for the great-grandmothers who were stolen, and their descendants, the children who grow up to write the stories of their people’s ultimate triumph.
Home, Aboriginal home, though situated on the margins of Australian society, occupies center stage in this glorious film. Grab a batch of tissues, clutch hands with the one you love, and run. Go see it. Go and see yourself.
Wanda Sykes! Saturday, May 24-25, 2013
Orca Ballroom
Doors open at 7:00 PM – Show starts at 8:30 PM
Tickets start at $50
All attendees of show must be 21+
Tickets available on March 15!
Comedy show packages start at $329* and include:
Tickets to show (Row 5 or 6, center section)
Overnight accommodations
Eagles Buffet breakfast
Call 866.716.7162 to book your package on March 15!
Kirk Boxleitner Blanche Coy James, left, helps her childhood friend, fellow 90-year-old Barbara Caton VanderVeer, hold up VanderVeer’s memorabilia from serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II.
EVERETT — Even though Barbara Caton VanderVeer is not a Tulalip Tribal member herself, she can still remember what the Tulalip Indian Reservation looked like more than 80 years ago.
VanderVeer turned 90 years old on Feb. 26, and not only did her family help her celebrate her birthday at a party at the Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett on March 2, but so did her best friend, Blanche Coy James, a Tulalip Tribal member with whom VanderVeer grew up on the reservation.
“I came to Tulalip when I was 6 years old,” said VanderVeer, whose father was a carpenter who taught his trade to students at the school on the reservation. “I wound up staying there for the next 12 years. I met Blanche in the second grade, and we graduated together from Marysville High School.”
“I’m 7 months older than her, and I won’t let her forget it,” James laughed.
Although VanderVeer and James briefly lost touch during World War II, they reunited by chance in Seattle shortly after the war, around the same time that VanderVeer met her future husband.
VanderVeer was kept busy during the war by teaching gunnery to fellow sailors in the U.S. Navy, for which she still proudly shows off her certificates and rank patches. Between the time she entered the fleet in 1943 and when she got out nearly three years later, she was promoted up the chain to petty officer second class.
VanderVeer acknowledged that being stationed in Corpus Christi and Kingsville in Texas as part of her service marked quite a different climate from what she was used to in Washington, but in many ways, the local area that she and James grew up in is almost as stark a contrast to the region as it stands today.
“It’s a different world now,” VanderVeer said. “The forest came right up to the buildings. I think people helped each other out a bit more then.”
“We would walk around in the dark and not even worry,” James said.
“Just getting to Everett was quite an endeavor back then,” VanderVeer said, before laughing, “Of course, part of that was because my father was a lousy driver.”
In the years since then, VanderVeer’s family has grown to include one daughter, four grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.
