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2. Linda Haukaas (Sicangu Lakota)
- University of Arizona Press
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linda HauKaas | 29 2 Linda Haukaas ( s i C a n G u l a K o t a ) I was born but not raised on the Rosebud reservation. My life, dictated by my father’s career with the federal government, allowed us to travel, live in Puerto Rico (my mother’s homeland) and Florida, and stay [on the reservation] in Okreek during many of our summers. Life in Puerto Rico was a well-defined, linear path to womanhood. I was well protected, and there were no opportunities for experimentation. I spent most of my time reading, listening to music, occasionally went night clubbing, and was chaperoned till nineteen. But life with my big Sicangu family, particularly because of my dad, was adventurous and involved taking risks. I learned to shoot, hunt, ride bareback, fish, herd stray cattle, bead, make quilts, paint, bake bread, gut chickens, and dance. Regardless of the contrasting philosophies, I focused on the commonalities which consisted of love, family, traditions, and making art. Despite the differences in lifestyles, Haukaas’s world while growing up was supportive and flexible, although she “was directed according to what was considered appropriate conduct.” In the 1970s, traditional gender roles began to break down, and men began to bead—in part because of economic necessity. Haukaas began to see more college men who wanted to earn a living in native art take an interest in women’s traditional art forms. “My grandmother Florence, knowing that there would be a viable market, taught my brother Tom to bead so he could earn money while away in college and med school. Although beading did not finance his education, it did supplement his income as she had intended. As a result, he became a highly regarded beader in the pictographic beading tradition of our grandmother and great-grandmother.”1 By the early 1990s, Haukaas tells us, “Joanna Bigfeather and I began to independently create pictographic 30 | womEn and lEdGEr art imagery for public viewing. Joanna’s focus on colonialism, and by implication the multigenerational trauma, continues to resonate. My work . . . focuses on the adaptability and stability of tribal life, the details of the rituals in daily life that provide tiospaye, family individual sustenance . . . stability, continuity, and a thriving society.” Haukaas appropriated the male-gendered form of ledger art because of her “need to tell stories [and] make commentaries. . . . For women practitioners of this art form, like Joanna Bigfeather and myself, there does not seem to be a transition period that I can say [has] led to this visual expression. It was for us the right time to utilize this art form . . . [to] drive our stake into the art world ground, and speak up.”2 Linda Haukaas drove her stake into the ground of the art world with a complex drawing that brings a Lakota tiospaye, or clan, into a museum to repatriate an historical pictographic muslin. It was featured in the Tacoma Art Museum ’s 2004 exhibit, Lewis and Clark Territory: Contemporary Artists Revisit Place, Race, and Memory. According to the curator, Rock Hushka, the museum took advantage of the Lewis and Clark Expedition’s bicentennial to present “recent art from a broad spectrum of media that reverberates across the span of two centuries” and reflects “three broad themes that reoccur throughFigure 9. Linda Haukaas, At the Museum, 2001 (1st in series). Color pencil and ink on 1880s ledger paper. 27 x 17 in. Artist’s collection. (Photograph courtesy of Linda Haukaas.) [3.83.81.42] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:31 GMT) linda HauKaas | 31 out the expedition’s journals—place, race, and memory.”3 At the Museum confronts place, race, and memory from the perspective of a Lakota whose identity had been defined in part by the land taken from her tribe after Lewis and Clark’s “opening” the “American” West; whose race had been defined by the colonists who justified taking their territory for “civilized” use; and whose communal memory was passed down—not in the journals of Lewis and Clark, or books by American historians, or exhibitions of a vanished culture—by telling stories through the generations and drawing such stories in pictographic form on the pages of ledger books. Indeed, Haukaas’s drawing calls attention to the ambiguous role museums have played in displaying native people’s art and material culture.4 In her layered picture story, Haukaas tells us, a Lakota tiospaye, including both male and female warriors, has traveled to the museum “with a single purpose...