All My Relations Art Gallery

Minneapolis, Minnesota

By Elizabeth Wilkinson

All My Relations Art Gallery is on Franklin Avenue, 1.1 miles from my house, in the Ventura Village neighborhood of Minneapolis. This section of Franklin Ave is called the American Indian Cultural Corridor. The corridor starts just as you cross over Cedar Avenue, is interrupted by Hiawatha Avenue, and extends west toward an end point near Maria’s Café on 11th Avenue. The art gallery shares space with the Pow Wow Grounds Coffee Shop. During the summer months, their joint parking lot becomes the Four Sisters Farmers Market, selling produce from Indigenous farm cooperatives. Much of what goes on, on the corridor is under the umbrella of the Native American Community Development Institute. Heid E. Erdrich, National Poetry Series Award recipient and poet from the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe, until just recently served on their board and now works as curatorial mentor for All My Relations.

Heid’s work weaves through the Twin Cities and the cities weave through Heid. When I first came to Minneapolis and Saint Paul, a non-Native moving from North Carolina into Anishinaabe and Dakota territory, Heid Erdrich and her poetry welcomed me in. Only a few weeks into my life in the cities, fall of 2008, a colleague took me to hear Heid read poems from her collection National Monuments, which would come out in November. Now, I weave that book of poems over and over again into the classes I teach and smile at the sharp wit:

Guidelines for the treatment of sacred objects

that appear or disappear at will

or that appear larger in rear view mirrors,

include calling in spiritual leaders such as librarians,

well-ness circuit speakers and financial aide officers.

The Pow Wow Grounds is in the same building as All My Relations, and you have to go through the coffee shop to get to the art. Well, to get to the gallery. There is always some community art hanging on the coffee shop walls and some community artists hanging around drinking coffee. At Pow Wow Grounds, you can tuck into a warm corner with a cup of tea and a wild rice blueberry muffin, baked by Bob Rice, the owner. World-class poets write in Pow Wow Grounds. Heid’s newest collection, Little Big Bully, has poems that sprang up inside the bright yellow walls of the Grounds. Heid has been connected with the gallery for over a decade. It makes sense; her work — both poetry and prose — is often intertwined with performance and with visual art.

On her homepage, Heid includes links to her video poems. “Pre-Occupied” takes viewers from the comic cosmos into the churning Mississippi River, turned brown and frothy at the point of the St. Anthony Falls Lock and Dam in central Minneapolis, just a scant two miles north of All My Relations. “River, river, river,” she says, “I never, never, never…” Her poem spills out over city scenes and archival photos and clips from a 1950s animated Superman comic, while the Crash Test Dummies’ “Superman’s Song” plays.

She wrote and recorded “Od’e Miikan / Heart Line” for an award-winning art project; her voice autotuned with wolf sounds and then with moose sounds echoed into the Minneapolis night sky while giant animated wolf and moose art installation sculptures, made from chicken wire and scrap plastics, howled and pawed the ground.

A few years ago, Heid taught ekphrastic poetry — poems that describe art, and its impact on the viewer, in vivid detail — to a small group of Indigenous women at All My Relations. Those writers traveled the gallery, pulling imaginative language-meaning out of the artistic visual-meaning pieces all around. Heid sat, as she often describes herself, bear-like, watching and listening with a fierce-gentle-art-love. Inside the warm yellow walls in Minneapolis, a name that combines mni, the Dakota word for water, with polis, the Greek word for city, Heid connected words and images and women across space and time in the heart of the American Indian Cultural Corridor.

Liz Wilkinson is an associate professor at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, MN. She researches, writes about, and teaches women’s literature — more specifically Native women’s literature and the literature of women and sports. She finds that these areas pleasantly collide more often than most people imagine.

Photo courtesy of All My Relations Arts.

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Tallgrass Prairie Preserve
Osage County, Oklahoma 

By Mason Whitehorn Powell

“Three ridges roughly boat-shaped push their prows south into the sea of prairie.” The opening lines of Talking to the Moon by Osage author John Joseph Mathews describe the land where he would build a sandstone cabin in 1932 to live out the remainder of his life. Published in 1945, Talking to the Moon is an intimate reflection on the landscape, wildlife, occasional tribal affairs, and seasonal changes that he experienced across this decade.

Mathews named his one-room cabin The Blackjacks, moored by those eponymous native oak trees and harbored by a sea of prairie. The cabin was abandoned after his death in 1979, and his grave remains on the property, which is now surrounded by a fence to keep roaming buffalo off the grounds. The Blackjacks and the land surrounding it were purchased from Mathews’ descendants by The Nature Conservancy in 2014 and, during summer 2020, I toured the cabin digitally, in a virtual event hosted by TNC and the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve.

I may have never seen the Blackjacks with my own eyes, but I know the world he describes because I was cut from the same cloth. After serving as a pilot during in World War I, studying at the University of Oklahoma, obtaining a degree in Natural Sciences from Oxford, and roaming around Europe, Mathews grew travel weary and was drawn back to the lands he knew intimately and loved. He returned home to allotted land on the Tallgrass prairie north of Pawhuska, Oklahoma, his birth town.

His words are familiar to me, as an Osage having the same blood quantum as Mathews, raised in Osage County, pulled between tribal traditions and the white influence upon my own life. I also studied in Europe; I met my wife there and lived in Italy for a time before returning to reside in an even older native sandstone building in Hominy, Oklahoma with family allotments not too far from Mathews’ cabin. 

Mathews writes, “My coming back was dramatic in a way; a weight on the sensitive scales of nature, which I knew would eventually be adjusted if I live as I had planned to live; to become a part of the balance.” Structured by and depicting the four seasons, Talking to the Moon is subdivided according to the traditional Osage calendar: moon phases. Everything is structured as so — one only has to look. I write this as the Yellow-Flower Moon fades into Deer-Hiding Moon. Heat enters through my window and I notice that the yellow flowers growing in my yard have closed up. Behind my grandfather’s house, a doe and fawn are beginning to stir on cooler evenings, but the bucks have already vanished as hunters ready themselves.

Under this same moon, Mathews writes of driving to Hominy to meet with the old Osage men, Claremore, Abbot, and Pitts, to have their portraits painted by an artist with the Public Works of Art Project. These portraits are still on display in the Osage Tribal Museum in Pawhuska, which Mathews established in 1938. From 1934 to 1942, he sat on the Tribal Council on that same hill rising above downtown Pawhuska, where my mother also served for two terms as an Osage Congresswoman.

My grandfather never met Mathews but tells me about my family’s encounter with him:

“About half those books were given to him by your [great-great-] aunt Magella. When he’d run out of things that weren’t in a book somewhere he could study, or come out of the Catholic Diocese or wherever, then he’d have Magella tell him what had really happened. Where they came from. What families you were talking about.”

He summed up the conversation: “My dad told my aunt, ‘Don’t you be giving him any more information.’”

Mathews and my blind aunt Magella Whitehorn were speaking after the “old ways” were laid to rest during her father’s generation. Mathews and Magella were both born in 1894 in Osage Indian Territory, twenty-two years after our final relocation. She was a full-blood and among the last of those born onto the ground and raised with a bundle, observing the ancient Osage religion.

In the posthumously published autobiography Twenty Thousand Mornings, Mathews writes of his childhood bedroom, from which he “could look down into the valley.” From this vantage point, he could hear Magella’s father and other elders rise before dawn to greet the sun with prayers, which sounds he recounts as “the scar” of “a precocious memory.” Mathews writes, “The prayer-chant that disturbed my little boy’s soul to the depths was Neolithic man talking to god.”

In her youth, Magella was sent to boarding school and pressured to relinquish her traditional Osage identity and status grounded in our ceremonial rites. She did so because her elders said to, and it must have felt like entering an oblivion. Even though Mathews spent a career wrestling with his precocious memory of Osage mysteries — a lifelong attempt to capture and confront the past with words — there remained a painful tension between those who had to leave the old ways behind and those raised to inherit the new world. For Magella, this was a tragic episode. And her brother Sam Whitehorn, my great-grandfather, told her not to speak with Mathews because he viewed her knowledge of the past as family business.

The land speaks in indescribable ways, and our history is mysterious in its abandonment as we are adopted into a new world. It is evident in his writings that Mathews experienced a different Osage County than I know, but my generation still faces many of the same concerns, will pass down similar traditions, and can still fully experience that immutable landscape. A cabin is just a building. That was never the point—rather that it is centered, grounded, embraced by land that knows and accepts us, that is our inheritance despite ongoing changes. Lost traditions survive in both Mathews’ books and family stories such as my own. Mathews knew that Osage history must be preserved, just as land must be conserved, because the two are inseparable.

The more I learn from the rolling hills around me, the more I know about myself. Any time I drive north from Hominy towards Pawhuska, crossing a sea of prairie and islands of blackjacks, I feel at home and overwhelmed by acceptance. I haven’t needed to visit his cabin to know these things, only to truly see nature here, and to listen. When the world allows and in-person tours resume, I hope to step inside Mathews’ cabin. Until then, I have the Osage landscape and my connection to Mathews in our shared culture and his books: “with word symbols as my poor tools, to sweat at the feet of a beauty, an order, a perfection, a mystery far above my comprehension.”

Mason Whitehorn Powell is a freelance journalist based in Oklahoma and Rome, Italy. An enrolled member of the Osage Nation, his work often explores Indigenous arts and representation. 

Photo courtesy of Tallgrass Nature Conservancy.

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Earlham Hall
Richmond, Indiana

By Leah Milne

I was a Midwest transplant, born and raised on the East Coast. Before I left home, friends joked about flatland and cornfields and voiced concerns about my entering what they perceived to be a region of overwhelming whiteness. Culture shock, however, was nothing new to me. As the first in my immigrant family to attend college, I knew what it meant to feel unmoored, to walk into a room where no one resembled you.

My conference visit to Earlham College was an attempt to soften that dislocation. Books have always been my second home, so sitting in the Runyan Center listening to literary presentations, I was already more comfortable. A bonus? Zitkála-Šá went here in the 1890s. Having read her stories about being the only American Indian among over 400 college students, I felt a kinship.

Earlham Residence Hall — where she stayed — was right next door. Bright leaves floated onto the campus quad where I stood before a sweeping red-brick building. Its entrance was framed by white columns, wooden benches, and painted Adirondacks. This was what the child in me imagined all college campuses looked like. Later, I would learn that this tree-lined enclosure was called The Heart.

In “School Days of an Indian Girl,” Zitkála-Šá — known to Earlhamites as Gertrude Simmons — writes about leaving her happy childhood on South Dakota’s Yankton Reservation for White’s Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana. Her introduction to education left her homesick; she was forced to cut her hair, adopt a new language and religion, and endure numerous abuses. One wouldn’t blame her for leaving school entirely. And yet she went to college, much to the chagrin of her mother, who feared losing her daughter to “the white man’s ways.” If my visit was a modest attempt at self-encouragement, Zitkála-Šá’s more permanent move to Earlham represented a willful assertion of a new life.

Gertrude’s time at Earlham was lonely. She often isolated herself in her dorm room, and a classmate described her as “pleasant but somewhat distant.” Nevertheless, she flourished, publishing poetry in the school newspaper and performing in recitals. Her speeches, however, were where she found her voice as an activist.

After winning Earlham’s oratory contest, Gertrude was surprised when fellow freshmen celebrated by decorating the student parlor. Maybe, she thought, my classmates aren’t so bad. But then, weeks later in the subsequent state-level competition, students from one university mocked her with racist epithets. Gertrude rallied. In her soft but determined voice, she lambasted America’s prejudices, winning over all the judges save a Southerner offended by her position on slavery. She won second place.

I picture her afterwards in The Heart, staring at Earlham Hall, those columns festooned in cream and yellow drapery in her honor. Like many of Gertrude’s triumphs, this one was bittersweet. The humiliation of the night’s racism lingered, and she rushed to her dorm room, questioning her decision to leave home.

Even as she became a student at the New England Conservatory of Music and a teacher at the infamous Carlisle Indian School, she would remember this night. Maybe she stared at the stars and stripes flying above the Hall’s entrance and thought about how her speech referenced “our nation’s flag” and “our common country,” stubbornly and even hopefully insisting on a shared humanity that she knew was often denied. The image of her standing before Earlham Hall inspires me to contemplate my experiences in education, both alienating and invigorating, and the way that institutions can both fail us and uplift us. If Zitkála-Šá could make such resolute demands for equality after all she had experienced, I figure there’s still hope for me.

Leah Milne writes about and teaches multicultural American literature at the University of Indianapolis. It took her a full year living in the Midwest to learn how to properly pronounce “Louisville.” You can find out more about her publications and courses at LeahMilne.com.

Photo by Rebekah Trollinger, the Plowshares Assistant Professor of Religion at Earlham College.

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