Original perspectives

The painting’s impressionist technique means it’s hard to say where the woman riding the horse is looking, whether she stares intently at the road ahead or casts a glance behind her. She might be gazing back at us. The distinctions between the subjects and their surroundings are also unclear. The woman and the horse may well have sprung up from the ground.

“I love to paint. That’s my medicine,” said artist Joyce Nevaquaya Harris. “It helps me to remember who I am and where I come from and to share with people, not only our Native people, but everyone.”

Harris’ painting Path of Her Ancestors is one of the many artworks included in Through Her Eyes, an exhibition featuring paintings, beadwork, photography and textiles created by Indigenous women and on view at Red Earth Art Center, 100 N. Broadway Ave., Suite 110, in the BancFirst Lobby, through Sept. 26.

A Comanche artist whose ancestry also includes the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Crow tribes, Nevaquaya Harris said she consciously incorporated elements of her father Doc Tate Nevaquaya’s painting style in Path of Her Ancestors. Orphaned at 14 and enrolled in the Fort Sill Indian School in Lawton, Doc Tate Nevaquaya gained international fame as a self-taught painter and flute player despite the school’s attempts to discourage his early artistic tendencies.

“He would sit at his desk and sketch,” Nevaquaya Harris said. “The teacher would tell him, ‘You’re not allowed to do that,’ and I think that she hit him with a ruler on his hand.”

Her father never talked much about the family life he had before the boarding school, but Nevaquaya Harris sees signs of an artistic legacy reaching back across generations in some of his work.

“He depicted a man sitting on a horse and sketching into a rock,” Nevaquaya Harris said. “That tells me there was something that he knew back then or stories that he had heard. He remembered it, and he would put that in some of his artwork.”

As a child playing in the yard, Nevaquaya Harris wanted to make art like her father.

“Me and my brother, we’d sit out there … imitating our dad, kind of sketching in the dirt,” Nevaquaya Harris said. “So I could just say that I started from the ground up.”

Reclaiming something

Chickasaw multimedia artist Destiny Green’s Incho’wa is an ongoing series of black-and-white photographs of people with tribal tattoos. The portraits consciously imitate the high-contrast glamour shots of Hollywood stars from the 1930s and ’40s.

“It’s part of a revitalization that’s occurring right now for a practice that had essentially gone to sleep,” Green said. “So we’re in the process of reclaiming something. … I did not want the piece to come across as clinical or like some sort of anthropological work. …  I’m using a style that in the past neglected or in fact sometimes pushed aside the beauty of indigenous people and their existence in lieu of a more Eurocentric perspective of what was proper, what was beautiful and what was expected from society.”

Another of Green’s works, “Aahíkkiʼya Again: Chickasaw Hatchet Women Live Forever,” connects modern Chickasaw women to the singing, axe-wielding “Hatchet Women” who repelled French invaders at the Battle of Ackia or Hakki’ya in Mississippi in 1736.

“They changed the course of history in allowing the Chickasaw people to maintain control of the Mississippi River,” Green said. “From my understanding of history, the sight of these women and children running out to protect their community was enough to frighten some of the French into running away.

“The hatchet women are very special to Chickasaw people because they remind us of the strength that women hold and how we help not only help support society, but how we can be the glue that holds it all together. In the piece, the women are wearing what I consider to be a form of contemporary regalia. … Chickasaw women are always ready to bring their hatchet out … to not only protect ourselves, but to be a driving force toward the future of our community.”

Healing the family tree

Lauren Kelly’s painting “Nshekéwbe” takes its title from the Potawatomi word meaning “to be home alone.”

“Like many people in my generation, I have a lot of living family that even if they are enrolled

with our nation, they don’t really practice the culture and they don’t know where to begin,” Kelly said. “That isn’t necessarily their fault, but it’s a result of a lot of negative things

in United States history. … As somebody that is going on that journey of reconnecting, I often feel myself at home alone … so it’s really just about exploring that return home when you feel like there’s nobody, at least nobody living, whose hand you can take.”

Kelly, whose influences include Canadian indigenous artist Norval Morrisseau and Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt, purposefully blends realism with open-ended abstraction. Her family’s artistic tradition has its own unanswered questions.

“Mental health struggles have informed not only the making of my art, but the decision to pursue art seriously,” Kelly said. “There’s also a healing history to the arts. … My great-grandfather was really low-key about everything that he did, or at least he tried to be. … Something that he hid was that he was always, all of his years, making traditional beadwork, and a lot of people in my family didn’t even know that until he passed away and we found pieces of beadwork that were half-finished. So I think it’s not only a healing for myself … that I can share with other people who view it, but also kind of a healing for that family tree as well.

“He didn’t, to my knowledge, ever explicitly say why, but I have a hunch based on the time that he was living in and that he was living here in Oklahoma, that it may not have been safe

all the time to be proud as a native person. But even though he was on the rolls, he wanted to blend in quite a bit for the sake of safety, and I know that he encouraged his kids to do the same.”

Though she’s been creating art for as long as she can remember, Kelly struggled to take herself seriously as an artist for years and hopes to help other people on similar journeys with her book, From Canvas to Career: An Artist’s No Sh*t Guide to Going Pro, available at Red Earth and local bookstores.

“I really sat down with myself and thought, ‘What would I have wanted about five years ago or six years ago that would have made my journey a lot easier and given me a little bit less of a winding path, even though obviously that winding path has been very rewarding.”

Whitney Virden, a floral artist with Comanche, Kiowa and Cherokee ancestry, originally created her sculpture “Between Two Worlds” for the annual Art in Bloom exhibition at the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa. Inspired by the Philbrook’s collection of works depicting Mary and Jesus, Virden made the sculpture from chicken wire, air clay, dried leaves, rose petals and amaranths to honor “the children taken and the mothers left behind” by the federal policy of removing indigenous children from their families and enrolling them in boarding schools from the 1860s until the 1960s.

“Jesus was forcibly removed from his mother, and we know his end,” Virden said.  “I thought, well, ‘What if I gave it a Native American perspective?’”

The original sculpture won the People’s Choice award in 2024, but Virden was surprised to learn that many people she talked to about the piece were unaware that the boarding schools existed, though their impact still affects families.

“A lot of the stories say that these kids never went back home because they became ashamed of their families and thought that they were savages,” Virden said. “If they did go home, weren’t able to communicate with their grandparents anymore, because all they spoke was their native language. There was such a divide and disruption in Native American families that it’s like, ‘Who raised these kids?’”

One family divided by the legacy of this policy, Virden said, is her own.

“I had a great-grandma who, at the age of 13, was put into a boarding school, considered an orphan and so we have no history of her,” Virden said. “My Comanche grandma actually disowned me when I was probably in about a kindergarten because my mother she considers to be white. She’s Cherokee, but not enough, I guess, in her eyes. And so I think as I was learning more about the impact of the boarding schools and learning more about the trauma that the Native Americans faced … what her mom had experienced.

“Most people would blame the enemy, let’s say they’re white or they’re religious, then that’s why she’s having a harder time having a relationship with me because I could be seen as the enemy if that’s how she grew up being taught. And there’s a lot of people that still believe that. There’s so much trauma in her that it creates such a divide. … The seed that we allow to take root determines our path. So if it’s anger, bitterness, obviously it’s gonna create a divide, whereas if it was forgiveness, it would create love.”

While the original piece was more spiritually symbolic, the sculpture on display at Through Her Eyes is more educational.

“I took the enemy out of the picture, and I actually placed a rake in the child’s hand, basically to symbolize that the purpose of the boarding schools was to assimilate them into modern society. … But on the rake, I have written, ‘Taught to serve the upper class, not join it,’ because they were taught to be laborers, maids, landscapers, that sort of thing.

Basically taught to serve the upper class.

“I grew up in poverty. Our electricity was turned off all the time. Our water was turned off all the time. …  So I think a lot of my piece is just basically just kind of self-discovery and just trying to understand the correlation between poverty and Native Americans, and this division between me and my own kin, just kind of like, ‘How could this happen?’”

With her art, her Bartlesville-based floral business Roots + Blooms and classes helping Native American entrepreneurs, Virden hopes to help break the cycle of generational trauma and poverty.

“I love the fact that I’ve been able to build a business, and I’ve received tribal funding

that has helped me buy a commercial building, so now I own property …  which I wouldn’t have been able to do without tribal help. There’s so much funding out there right now, and there’s so many things to help build Native American entrepreneurs that I do believe that we have a hopeful future.”

“The Women Who Came From Ladybugs” by Cynthia Masterson, a Comanche artist and founder of Blue Dot Beadwork in Seattle, is inspired by a creation story, but a newer one than you might expect. When Masterson showed a ladybug pattern to her cousin over Zoom, her cousin thought they looked more like human women.

“She said, ‘Take off their antenna and put a braid down their back,’” Masterson said. “We can still make up stories. They don’t have to come from olden times. And I think they’re good in a way, but a lot of things that we’ve had are lost to time and oppression and things like that.”

Related events

This article appears in Best of OKC 2025.