Native American Women

[Sharikee]

[Sharikee]

Amanda CroweLike many traditional artists, Cherokee carver Amanda Crowe first learned her craft by watching others. She was drawing and carving by the age of four, and she was selling her carvings of animals and birds by the age of eight. "I was barely big enough to handle a knife," she says, "but I knew what I wanted to do so I just whittled away. I guess it was part of my heritage."
Her talent did not go unrecognized, and she eventually left North Carolina and completed high school in Chicago. From there she went on scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago where she earned a master of Fine Arts degree, followed by study in Mexico with Jose de Creeft. Her decision to return to the Qualla Boundary in the early 1950s was a turning point in her own life and in that of the tribal community. She was hired by the Cherokee Historical Association to teach art and carving at Cherokee High School, and she taught there for almost forty years.
Amanda Crowe successfully combined the roles of artist and teacher and received numerous honors and awards for her work, including a 2000 North Carolina Heritage Award. She exhibited carvings at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Mint Museum in Charlotte, the Atlanta Art Museum, the Denver Museum of Art, and at locations in England and Germany. Her pieces are in many permanent collections, including those at the Smithsonian Institution and the United States Department of the Interior. She was quick to say, however, that her most satisfying reward was knowing that she taught hundreds of Cherokee students to carry on the tradition of their ancestors.

[Sharikee]

Luci Tapahonso Luci
Tapahonso joined Joy Harjo, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko,
and others as an undisputed important female voice in the
American Indian literary landscape.
Born November 8, 1953, in Shiprock, New Mexico, and reared on the Navajo Reservation, Tapahonso
knows who she is and that sense of identity comes through her poetry. Unlike many mixed bloods who
grew up away from reservation or Indian communities, Tapahonso still calls Shiprock "home." For
Tapahonso, Chinle, Lukachukai, Albuquerque, Dulce, and Gallup are not just places on an ancestral
map; they are places she has lived and worked and where her extended family has always lived and
travelled.
The landscape dotted with mesquite, tamarack, and sagebrush, the greasewood and chaparral of the
arroyos and buttes of Arizona and New Mexico are where she has gathered piñons, collected
firewood, and eaten mutton stew. It is this physical landscape of Arizona and New Mexico that informs
and infuses Tapahonso's poetry and short fiction even as she lives among the flat terrain of Kansas.
Dinetah, the land of the Diné, is her source of spiritual strength as it has for years physically
sustained her people.

[Sharikee]

Naelyn PikeNaelyn Pike, a 16-year-old member of the Chiricahua Apache tribe, demonstrated in Times Square against a land swap between the federal government and a copper company that could affect land the protesters hold sacred.

[Sharikee]

Cecilia Fire ThunderCecilia Fire Thunder (born Cecilia Apple; October 24, 1946) is a nurse, community health planner and tribal leader of the Oglala Sioux.
She is the coordinator of the Native Women's Society of the Great Plains.

[Sharikee]

Megan Red Shirt ShawMegan Red Shirt Shaw is an activist, writer, and college admissions professional who is an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux tribe. She earned her bachelors degree from the University of Pennsylvania in English with a Creative Writing focus, and will be attending Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education to pursue her Masters in Higher Education this fall. She is the founder of Natives In America, an online literary publication for Native American, Alaska Native & Native Hawaiian youth. Currently living in the Bay Area, she loves the written word, learning about projects for Indigenous youth and the idea that a college education opportunity can change one’s trajectory forever. Her favorite phrase her mother ever taught her in Lakota is “Weksuye, Ciksuye, Miksuye” meaning “I remember, I remember you, Remember me.”

[Sharikee]

Sooner DavenportSooner Davenport is Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, Kiowa and Navajo. She was born in Shiprock, New Mexico and currently lives in the Oklahoma City area.
She graduated with her Bachelor’s from Oklahoma City University and pursued graduate studies at the University of Minnesota-Duluth’s Master of Tribal Administration and Governance program.
Davenport is a passionate advocate for quality education, child welfare, multiculturalism and sensible economic policies. In 2014, Davenport was selected to the prestigious Native American Political Leadership Program in Washington DC. It was there that she served as a policy assistant for the White House Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education. She returned from this experience at the US Department of Education determined to continue policy work in Oklahoma. Her work with tribal governments includes the areas of taxation, economic development, oil & gas, renewable energy and government accountability. She has also completed an internship for the Oklahoma Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
Currently, she works in the non-profit sector building public awareness around the issues of domestic violence and sexual assault in communities throughout Oklahoma. She is involved in many projects and organizations, the latest of her endeavors is her campaign for the Oklahoma House of Representatives in District 43.

[Sharikee]

Pamela PetersPamela J. Peters is an Indigenous multimedia documentarian and film consultant in Los Angeles, California. She was born and raised on the Navajo Reservation. Pamela has professionally produced award winning films for the Southern California Indian Center's Inter-Tribal Entertainment multimedia program, co-created film workshops for Native youth, produced PSA's for Fox Studio's American Indian Summer Institute program, and co-hosted "Bringing the Circle Together," a monthly showcase of Indigenous documentaries at the Japanese American National Museum National Center for Preservation of Democracy Tateuchi Forum in Los Angeles, California. Her own work pushes viewers to critically analyze the psychological and historical structures of Native Americans in film, television and mass media.

[Sharikee]

Lucy ThompsonLucy Thompson (1856–1932) is an author known for her 1916 book, To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman. She wrote the book to preserve her people's stories. The book received the American Book Award decades later. Outside the book she is known to have come from "Yurok aristocracy" and be married to a white man named Milton "Jim" Thompson. Hence she had some intention to make sympathetic whites understand her people better, although she also criticized "whites" for practices like over-fishing.

[Sharikee]

Larissa FastHorseLarissa FastHorse is a playwright and choreographer from the Sicangu Lakota Nation. Her produced plays include Average Family, Teaching Disco Square Dancing to Our Elders: A Class Presentation and Cherokee Family Reunion. FastHorse has been under commission with Cornerstone Theater Company (Los Angeles), Children's Theatre Company (Minneapolis), AlterTheater (San Rafael, Calif.), Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences (Washington, D.C.), Native Voices at the Autry (Los Angeles) and Mountainside Theatre (Cherokee, N.C.). She developed new plays with Arizona Theatre Company (Tucson, Ariz.), the Center Theatre Group Writers' Workshop (Los Angeles) and Berkeley Rep's Ground Floor (Berkeley, Calif.). FastHorse was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Distinguished New Play Development Project Grant, AATE Distinguished Play Award, William Inge Center for the Arts Playwriting Residency, Sundance Institute-Ford Foundation Fellowship, Aurand Harris Fellowship and numerous Ford Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts grants. She is published with Dramatic Publishing and Plays for Young Audiences. In her spare time, FastHorse returns to her previous life as a ballet dancer through choreography.

[Sharikee]

Mitika WilburMatika Wilbur, one of the Pacific Northwest’s leading photographers, has exhibited extensively in regional, national, and international venues such as the Seattle Art Museum, the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, The Tacoma Art Museum, the Royal British Columbia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Nantes Museum of Fine Arts in France. She studied photography at the Rocky Mountain School of Photography in Montana and received a bachelor’s degree from Brooks Institute of Photography in California. Her work led her to becoming a certified teacher at Tulalip Heritage High School, providing inspiration for the youth of her own indigenous community.
Matika, a Native American woman of the Swinomish and Tulalip Tribes (Washington), is unique as an artist and social documentarian in Indian Country- The insight, depth, and passion with which she explores the contemporary Native identity and experience are communicated through the impeccable artistry of each of her silver gelatin photographs.

[Sharikee]

Alice Brown DavisAlice Brown Davis (1852 –1935) was the first female Principal Chief of the Seminole Tribe of Oklahoma, and served from 1922–1935, appointed by President Warren G. Harding. She was of Seminole (Tiger Clan) and Scots descent.
In her 40s after her husband's death, Brown Davis became the postmistress of Arbeka, while running the ranch and trading post. She became the superintendent of the Seminole Nation's girls' school, Emahaka. Built in 1892, Emahaka was a highly modern institution teaching grades one through ten.
Alice Brown Davis served as chief until her death on June 21, 1935 in Wewoka, Oklahoma. In 1961, she was inducted into the National Hall of Fame for Famous Native Americans in Anadarko, Oklahoma and also the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. The University of Oklahoma named Davis Hall in her honor.

[Sharikee]