����ֱ�� is pleased to announce that Shaliyah Ben has been named Director of the Native American Arts Program by ����ֱ�� Foundation President Pamela Jordan. Under the guidance of Heather Companiott, ����ֱ��’ Native American Arts Program became a formidable player in the world of Native American arts in recent decades. Ben, who worked closely with Companiott for the last two and half years until her recent retirement, is supremely qualified to continue building upon this strong foundation to solidify the program’s leading role in the continued growth and recognition of ����ֱ�� as an internationally renowned center for arts education.��

A Transformative Presence to Drive Transformation

Shaliyah Ben, Diné (Navajo), was born in Shiprock, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation and is the first Native American to direct the ����ֱ�� Native American Arts Program. Before coming to ����ֱ�� in 2019, she worked at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, an institution dedicated to the advancement of American Indian art. During twenty years with the Heard, her positions included Director of Public Programming.��

�����’s profound understanding of Native American traditions is rooted in her family’s continuing practice of traditional farming methods, but she is also determined to position Native American art, life, history, and pedagogies as relevant to the modern global conversation. The breadth of her education at Arizona State University, where she earned a Bachelor’s degree in French as well as certificates in Arabic Language and Islamic Studies, suggests her desire and ability to connect Native American arts to the wider world.��

Seeking the Full Integration of Native American Arts

Education and promotion of Native American arts have been central to the work of Idyllwild Arts ever since the Foundation’s establishment shortly after the end of the Second World War. While the popular Native American Arts ����ֱ�� Workshops and Native American Arts Festival

Week & Exhibition will continue to flourish and grow, in her new role Ben will also work to further integrate the Native American Arts Program into ����ֱ��’ mission of “changing lives through the transformative power of art.”��

This integration will both strengthen the pursuit of that mission and bring lasting benefits to the Native American arts community, driving the implementation of Indigenous pedagogies in the classroom, on the stage, on the set, and in the studio while recognizing the extraordinary contributions of Indigenous people to science, mathematics, language arts, and history. By promoting this integration of Indigenous perspectives, ����ֱ�� will actively take steps toward dismantling long-held attitudes that position Indigenous people and other people of color within an inferior past.��

Reconciliation and Humility

The integration of Indigenous perspectives will take one of its most dramatically visible forms in a land stewardship initiative in partnership with the Native American Land Conservancy. While “land acknowledgement” statements have sometimes been criticized as hollow or performative, the goal of this partnership is to create a living and breathing land acknowledgement that puts words into daily action. By engaging in appropriate care for the land, the partnership is intended as a transformative step toward reconciliation with local Cahuilla communities on whose tribal land the ����ֱ�� campus rests, and to respectfully demonstrate an authentic interest and investment in connecting the Foundation’s community with their own.��

There is considerable irony in ����ֱ��’ devotion to these efforts; ����ֱ�� is a boarding school, and boarding schools have an ugly history in relation to Indigenous people. ����ֱ�� cannot erase this, but it can acknowledge and teach that history—not only to Native American students, but to itself. And from this lesson ����ֱ�� can draw the determination to provide to Native students a learning experience that will be radically different from the experience found at US Indian Federal boarding schools of the past. ����ֱ�� can provide an education that honors the culture of Native American students and that gives them the support they need in order to succeed here.��

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“To start with, I’m looking forward to more time with my husband, George.”

Heather��Companiott was speaking on Wednesday, September 1. In two more days she would retire from her position as��Director of the Adult Arts Center and Native American Arts Program for ����ֱ��.

“By the way, I have to give George a shout-out: over the years he’s taken more ����ֱ�� Program classes than anyone else in the history of������ֱ��. And he’s taken classes in every kind of art you could imagine!”

Heather’s speech is animated. It suggests the restless energy that, since January 1991, had made her indispensable to the growth and success of the������ֱ�� ����ֱ�� and��Native American Arts Programs. But she had worked hard to help put new leadership in place. Now she could turn her attention and her still-vital energy elsewhere.

“I loved the work, but it was completely immersive. You don’t have time to do other things, so now there are trips to explore the world that��George and I can finally take. And I’ll have time to read more books and listen to more music.”

She laughs.

“And I grew up in Southern California but I’ve never been on a surfboard. Maybe��George and I will take one of those one-day crash courses in surfing. He’s up for anything.”

Her laughter is aimed at herself: she doesn’t expect to become good at surfing. She knows that what she has been good at — better than good — throughout the decades are collegiality and collaboration.

Catalogs of Names

Heather’s thoughts turn to the people she has worked with. Dutifully, she mentions a handful of names. But she stops. The catalog of names includes the dead as well as the living and it’s thick. She knows that her interviewer won’t write down every single name. It’s less important to list the names of the people than to talk about their achievements.

“Another thing I want to do is make art myself. The countless brilliant, creative people who’ve passed through��the������ֱ�� Program and the��Native American Arts Program have been so generous in sharing their��creativity and so open to collaborating. I’ve been lucky to work with people like that.

“I see all those I’ve worked with as mentors. I think in particular of the multifaceted��Hopi artist Michael Kabotie [1942-2009], who guided me when I first arrived in Idyllwild and continued to be a major mentor to me and to advise on the ����ֱ�� Native American Arts Festival until his death.

“Still, there’ve been quite a few besides Michael, and they’ve given me so many ideas for making art that I’ve stored up but had no time to do something with. It’s a lot of ideas, but the people I’ve worked with won’t let me forget them. So I’m looking forward to continuing my adventures in the arts with old — and new — collaborators.”

Mentioning her good fortune in the people she has worked with reminds her of other ways in which she’s been lucky.

“Because we’re not a museum, we’ve had the kind of flexibility that museums��and larger organizations��don’t��necessarily��have. Think about our Native American chef event��back in 2015��that��was��so popular: a��museum would take months��or even years��to plan and organize something like that. But here: boom, it’s over and we’re on to envisioning the next thing and getting excited about it.”

She is��excited now as she relives the��envisioning of all the next things that belong to the past. She is reminded of the pleasure of working with people who made the��envisioning possible.

“I’ve also��been lucky to work with donors like��Lillian Lovelace and. .��.”

She pauses.

“There I go again, wanting to read from a��catalog! But to think there’ve been so many��donors who understood what the experience of art does for people, and that it’s been important to them to give their money to make those experiences happen. . . It’s very moving.”

Still more people must be��thanked.

“You know, the other day I was counting up all the great assistants I’ve had over the years, and the number I came up with was about sixty. I need to thank them. But I think they’re all grateful to������ֱ�� for the training they’ve received in arts administration. It’s easy to overlook that because we focus so much on the education we provide in making art.”

An Unexpected Career

Heather’s own��education had not originally been meant to prepare her for a career in��arts administration.

“I was born in Palo Alto but my family moved south to Riverside when I was very young. I went to Colorado College, in Colorado Springs, for undergraduate studies in anthropology. I had good reasons to stay in Colorado for a while: my first job after college was in archaeology there — and I met George!”

She also worked for the Colorado History Museum (since replaced by the History Colorado Center), in Denver, and the Squash Blossom Gallery,��in Denver, featuring��Native American art.��

“Then I went to Indiana University for my Master’s degree in Folklore. Meanwhile, George was training to be a teacher. He did his student teaching on the��White Mountain Apache reservation,��in northeastern Arizona, and I worked in the Apache Culture Center.

Idyllwild came next: teaching at the public school for George, and for��Heather, of course, working for������ֱ��.

“Back in��1991������ֱ����was a lot smaller and there was practically no separation between the������ֱ�� Program and the Academy. So I worked for both, and that included helping out with the��Academy’s Commencement speakers. It was fun because we had some wonderful��speakers. And I was able to spend a couple of days touring Idyllwild with��Fritz Scholder [1937-2005], the great expressionist painter��who was an enrolled member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño��Indians!”

She recalls the year 2000 as a turning point.

“Around then, almost overnight, the generosity of��Lillian Lovelace and other donors suddenly made us so big that ever since I’ve only had time for the ����ֱ�� Program��Adult Arts Center��and the Native American Arts Program.”

Rich Memories

The memories are rich and plentiful. Yet��Heather��can’t resist highlighting a small number of them.

“I think of 2013, when the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, at their Forging Hope Event, gave ����ֱ�� the Yawa’ Award which signifies ‘a call to manifest one’s beliefs through action.’ They produced a video about the ����ֱ�� Native American Arts Program, which was screened at the event for about a thousand guests from the organizations they support.

“And the PBS show,��Craft in America, filmed part of their��, which aired in 2016, at Idyllwild��Arts. It featured Barbara Ornelas and Lynda Pete and their Navajo Weaving workshop and highlighted our Native American Arts Program.��It was a real honor.”

Heather��won’t say this. Her work at ����ֱ�� has been about��collegiality and collaboration. Her work has been, to her mind, about others: artist/teachers, students, donors, assistants. Therefore let someone else say that������ֱ�� has been��honored to have��Heather��Companiott��work here.

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When Everything Has Been Done Before

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The poet Brendan Constantine,��longtime instructor in the ����ֱ�� ����ֱ�� Program, has written the following enthusiastic account of the workshop he taught this year,��Creative Writing Intensive: The Living Word:

For years I’ve wanted to lead a Creative Writing class at������ֱ����in the��middle��of the��night. Ideally, I’d like to have the students wake at a set time, perhaps 12:30, then gather at our open-air classroom.

There, with the participation��of������ֱ�� Program��Counselors (and interested parents!), we would listen to the sounds of the forest��and do some new writing.��What inspiration��could��be had under the pines, when the sounds of the town have receded, and the stars have no competition? Would��we be more open to our imaginations? More playful? More psychic?��My hope��would be��to have plenty of bug spray, flashlights, and hot chocolate to make everyone comfortable while we find out.

After we��had��written for a while, and perhaps shared our first impressions, I’d��send everyone back to their dorms with the understanding that class would��resume at a later time.��10��am? 11��am? That way,��the��kids could��sleep��in and be fresh for our recap of the experiment.

Well,��I��can’t remember a time when things went so closely to plan. The above scenario was realized perfectly. I arrived at my study pad at midnight and set out lanterns��and��composition books, and even put on a little music:����with “I��Only��Have Eyes��for You.”��Very haunting, indeed. About an hour later, I saw the eerie traces of flashlights approaching! We gathered under the stars and got a sense of our surroundings.

After a brief discussion of the Milky Way (so vivid on Idyllwild nights) and a few notes on the variety of wildlife, big and small, which was likely watching us, we��began to write. Meanwhile, the������ֱ�� Program Counselors��prepared cocoa and a variety of cookies. For the next thirty minutes, the kids summoned all kinds of wondrous��language and crafted poems and stories.

Here’s an excerpt from a student��named��Nayomi:

“The house on Mallard Way is old, and when I say old, I mean older than the rest of the houses on the block. White paint chips off the aged planks as the front yard grows more untamed by the day. There are thick flowery weeds growing in the cracks of the painted curb, and a forlorn hexagon window that seems to give the impression of loneliness. . .��or something other. . .

“Some people say I’m the weird house on the block. . . Plain they call me, and��it’s no wonder I live with my grandmother on Mallard Way. .��.”

For the last part of our session, students shared their work and their observations of the experience. All agreed it was a total success and should be offered next year! It’s also worth noting that the next morning, the kids did in fact sleep in, and then held our most productive day of our two weeks.

Wahoooo! I’m so proud of this group! This was a truly great summer.

I should note that Eric Bulrice,��Director of Program Operations��for the������ֱ�� Program, was absolutely instrumental in the success of this effort, from beginning to end. We could not have done this without him!��������

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The��longtime������ֱ�� ����ֱ�� Program teacher is��Mountain Cahuilla and��Fort Sill Apache.��For decades,��Lorene has collaborated��with��Barbara Drake��in teaching native plant uses and basketry.

Yet Lorene’s expertise transcends basket-making.��Cahuilla baskets are made from yucca, deer grass, and��juncus��(rushes). These are native California plants that point to her devotion to��place-based arts.

“Plants are everything to us,” she says. “Our food, clothing, homes, tools, and��medicine. This means that responsible caretaking of the earth, by using responsibly��the gifts we’re given, is also��everything.”

Humans driven to create art are not necessarily limited to drawing upon the places where they live—otherwise, we would have no science fiction! But the study of��place-based arts like��Cahuilla basketry acquires urgency in a time of��catastrophic climate change. Fabricating out of yucca, deer grass,��and juncus requires a familiarity with them that includes being able to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy plants, and��being able to recognize when they’re available for harvest or must instead be left in the wild. Perhaps only by cultivating such��familiarity, which relates to��native resources as if they are��family, can we experience the love needed to preserve them.

Lorene’s love of��native California plants has been almost, but not quite, life-long.

“I became interested and started learning when I was around ten or eleven.”

Though she attended public schools, she was��born and��raised��on the��Riverside, California,��campus of the��off-reservation boarding high school��for��Native Americans called The Sherman Institute,��which would become����in 1971.��She recalls that her��mother had also been raised on the campus and��“.”

In Box Canyon

Lorene would take a roundabout path to becoming Curator of the��.

“I was in my��teens at a time when a lot of Natives were forming Native communes as a way to resist��mainstream culture. So at thirteen, I joined an intertribal commune in Box Canyon.”

California features more than a dozen��Box Canyons. But Lorene’s��commune was situated in the��Box Canyon that is part of a census-designated place in western Los Angeles County that still��bears the name given by the Native American Tongva tribe:��Topanga.

She left the commune after four years, when she was seventeen. The��four years had been memorable and decisive.

“People have certain ideas about the communes from those days, but this one wasn’t like that. It was all about discipline and learning—learning about��Native history and traditions and culture—and I loved it.”

A year after leaving the commune she gave birth to the first of her three children. (Today she has seven grandchildren and a great-grandchild.) Four years after that she returned to Sherman Indian High School as part of the dormitory staff.

Eventually, she began teaching at��Sherman. Her vast, ever-growing knowledge of California’s native resources and of place-based arts has made her a prized educator whose other��teaching credits include not only������ֱ��, but the University of California, Riverside, and the��.

Like millions of teachers around the world, Lorene is relieved by the retreat of the pandemic. She expects��the Sherman students to return to campus this fall.

But the prospect of teaching in-person again might thrill her even more than it does most teachers. Some subjects are surely more adaptable to remote learning than others are. The importance to��Lorene’s��subject of a felt connection to place suggests that her students will also benefit��profoundly from sharing the��place of learning with her.

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When he died��on December 13 at the age of ninety-one, Roland Reiss left behind a distinguished record of artwork that “.”��Reiss talked about his work in��.

However, it was by directing Painting’s Edge summer artist’s residency at������ֱ����from 2002 to 2008 that��Reiss��expressed his endlessly magnanimous appreciation of the work of other artists. In doing so, he made an enduring impact on������ֱ��.

“Our office still gets inquiries about��Painting’s Edge,” says��Heather Companiott, longtime��director of the ����ֱ�� Adult Arts Center and the Native American Arts Program.��“That’s even though the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 ended the program.”

Reiss’s generosity��also left a profound impression on��Heather herself.

“That impulse to give came with being a teacher; as a teacher, you’re there to inspire people. He brought famous artists to campus for��Painting’s Edge, and the thirty students chosen to take part would get one-on-one critiques��from them. The afternoons were magical: group conversations facilitated by Roland—who was a great facilitator—and focused on one of the visiting artists, with all the��visitors and students sitting in a big circle outside on the deck of Studio A, behind the ����ֱ�� Program building, overlooking the meadow��across the road.”

Of course, the entire Painting’s Edge program��would have been magical: painting in a community of gifted painters, then hearing from a different brilliant faculty member every day, in conditions that made digesting the artists’ reflections as natural as��digesting the dinner that would follow the conversation.��Time to speak and listen had to be allotted so abundantly because, for��Roland Reiss, there was always more to learn.

Forever Young

Reiss��was in his early seventies when he began��directing Painting’s Edge, yet “he seemed youthful in his approach to life,” Heather recalls. “He wasn’t satisfied just to create the program and say, here it is. He wanted to rethink the program every year to keep making it better. And that youthfulness—that restlessness—of thought didn’t end when��Painting’s Edge��ended. I stayed in touch with him, and even in his eighties, even to the end, he was constantly exploring new ideas and new approaches to creativity.”

Reiss was a great teacher in part because he was a great learner. He learned from conversations with other artists and he also learned from books about art.

“He was nervous about driving up the mountain from LA,” Heather laughs. “So even though he was anything but a prima donna—he was the opposite—we would need a driver to bring him here. He would arrive on campus and climb out the passenger’s��side and start unloading box after box of art books. The books would be available as a resource to all Painting’s Edge participants throughout the two weeks��of the program. And talk about generosity: he eventually donated the whole collection to the ����ֱ�� Visual Arts Department!”

Reiss’s death follows close on the heels of the death of veteran������ֱ�� Program faculty member��, a revered Native plants expert. They helped establish the tradition��for��passionate, deeply informed teaching that sets ����ֱ�� apart. The current faculty continues to uphold that tradition. Yet, needless to say, Reiss and Drake will be deeply missed.

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In the days after the recent death, at eighty, of longtime ����ֱ�� ����ֱ�� Program faculty member Barbara Drake, memories flooded the mind of Heather Companiott.

Heather directs the ����ֱ�� Adult Arts Center and the Native American Arts Program. She knew Barbara as the teacher for twenty-five years of the ����ֱ�� Program’s Native Plants class.��Barbara brought��in additional culture bearers and plant/ethnobotany experts and designed and redesigned the class each year to keep it compelling. Heather also knew Barbara as a consultant for the project to restore the meadow facing Krone Library in��respectful acknowledgement of the Cahuilla people, who have stewarded the land occupied by ����ֱ�� for generations.

Heather admires this work of Barbara’s, as well as her work as a visiting educator in Southern California schools and as a consultant on many botanical gardens, notably at the Autry Museum of the American West, in Los Angeles, and at Pitzer College, in Claremont, California.

But Heather also knew Barbara as a friend. As she performed the bittersweet task of sorting the memories of her friend and tried to explain Barbara Drake to someone who had never met her, one memory seemed especially revealing.

“The board of a big donor to the Native American Arts Program was on campus and Barbara was preparing a meal for them,” Heather recalls. “I walked the campus with her while she gathered ingredients. To collect stinging nettle for nettle soup— nettle is loaded with all kinds of vitamins and minerals and fats, and might reduce inflammation, though Barbara knew way more about this than I do—she looked by the little bridge that leads onto campus.”

The memory makes Heather wince.

“She started picking nettle with her bare hands! I wanted to say something, but I could see from her body language that she was fine. No, better than fine: content. She was in a happy place. And when she showed me her hands full of nettles, they weren’t stinging, or red from inflammation.”

Heather’s expression has changed into a smile.

“She understood the nettles. She knew how to touch them. She had to have seen how amazed I was. Yet Barbara was always so unassuming and humble. All she said was something simple like, ‘The nettles are good to me.’”

Shaliyah Ben, Coordinator of the ����ֱ�� Native American Arts Program, is a party to the conversation.

“Barbara never tried to impress you with her wisdom,” Shaliyah adds. “She simply��was��wise.”

Sand

Though Barbara Drake was an Elder of the��,��of the Los Angeles Basin, she had profound respect and reverence for all Native American peoples. This appears with particular clarity in her friendship with��Shaliyah’s father,��Joe Ben,��Jr., the Diné (Navajo)��sandpainter who has exhibited in��the Smithsonian and in the Pompidou Center, in Paris.

“In 1993, ����ֱ�� ran a Travel Study Program to the Navajo Nation and Zuni Pueblo,” Heather says. “Joe Ben,��Jr.,��hosted us on the Navajo Nation, and organized our learning activities there. The beauty of the Navajo and Zuni tribes that we were able to experience, the things we learned. .��.”

She pauses. Heather mentions this trip often. A quarter of a century later, it’s fresh in her mind.

“Still, I don’t think anyone else on that trip was moved in the way Barbara was,” she continues. “She was already in her fifties, but it’s like her education was just getting started. She was a true lifelong learner, but more than that. She had a depth that gave her an extraordinary capacity to be moved.”

“Not just by��nettles, or plants,” Shaliyah laughs. “There was a magic between my dad and her.”

“Barbara��was one of the kindest, most generous people,” Heather says. “When she came to teach, she always arrived on campus with gifts for the people she would be seeing. It’s true, though: the connection to��Joe Ben,��Jr.,��around the knowledge they were preserving and the beauty that their different arts expressed, was��magical.”

“She was everybody’s mother,” Shaliyah says. “I was a child—eight years old—when she first met me on that��Travel Study trip. But she still wanted to take care of me when I left the Heard Museum, in Phoenix, to work here at Idyllwild a couple years ago. She was one of the people who��really made me feel at home.”

“And��one of the people who��made your father feel at home last December,” Heather says, “when he��came here to do his sandpainting on campus. They hadn’t seen each other in twenty-six years. But when there’s a connection like that between people, time dissolves.”

Sandpaintings��are��ephemeral expressions in sand, used in the healing ceremonies of the Diné people. Recalling that sandpainting by Joe Ben, Jr., invites reflection on the impermanence of human life, since Barbara’s visit to her friend marked her last time on campus.

That was only weeks before the pandemic struck. Barbara Drake may be missed now even more than at other times.�� ����

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JAZZ IN THE PINES happened, but, because of the coronavirus pandemic, it couldn’t go according to the original, ambitious plan. For example,����had to be livestreamed from the����studio, in downtown Los Angeles. Her vocals there are accompanied by bassist Rick Shaw, an ����ֱ�� ����ֱ�� Program faculty member, and by Michael Bluestein, since 2008 the keyboardist for Foreigner.

This bravura performance by Rose hints at the energy and flexibility she has brought to a role that changed overnight. The possibility that ����ֱ�� classes, which went all-online in April, would remain online for much of 2020-2021 led to the major fundraising effort called��, in which Rose was deeply involved. Her social media savvy continues to be invaluable to the Marketing Department’s promotion of a wide range of ����ֱ�� performances and exhibits.

Steeped in Jazz History

Whatever additional events come out of the ����ֱ�� Office of the President—and some exciting announcements are forthcoming—Rose will be behind them, as a rear engine with explosive horsepower. As her vocals for JAZZ IN THE PINES demonstrate, she is a frontline jazz performer, profiled by����and��praised there for her “coolly coquettish and swinging manner.”

Rose has been steeped in a love of jazz history since childhood, when she began learning the Great American Songbook��repertory from her grandmother. That was the jazz singer��,��who had in turn��learned the��classics of Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, and Cole Porter from Ella Fitzgerald.��However, Rose does more than perform: her jazz booking agency,��, has given her a wealth of management experience.

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The lineup included performers live-streaming from LA, NYC, Las Vegas, San Diego, Chicago, New Orleans, Louisville, Idyllwild, the Hamptons, and Charlotte. Jazz enthusiasts watched from countries all over the globe, including Canada, the UK, Brazil, Germany, France, Japan, Mexico, Finland, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Namibia, Argentina, South Korea, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Azerbaijan, Taiwan, Russia, Malaysia, the Netherlands, and Italy.

The livestreams reached more than forty thousand people from the ����ֱ�� Facebook pages and were viewed collectively from our own pages and others’ pages by almost a quarter of a million people.

The was highlighted by stars like Christian McBride, Cyrus Chestnut, and Dianne Reeves, and the broadcast was done in association with some of NYC’s hottest jazz spots, including Birdland, Smalls Jazz Club, and Dizzy’s Club.

The festival received mention by the LA Times, NBC Los Angeles, Palm Springs Life magazine, The Desert Sun newspaper, and many other media outlets.

Special thanks go to ����ֱ�� Foundation President Pamela Jordan for her leadership and vision and–of course!–to the Jazz In The Pines co-founder and daily inspiration, Marshall Hawkins.

Rose Colella
Special Events Manager, Office of the President

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But if the Assistant Professor of Native American Studies at the University of Michigan was apologizing for her public lecture on the ����ֱ�� campus this past summer, there was no need. As a guest of the annual Native American Arts Festival, she had plenty to say about the arts

Hughes says she is both “white and Choctaw.” She is a scholar from Oklahoma with a recent Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Her book-in-progress examines, among other issues, how “stereotyping as racialization erases reality.”

The idea that racial stereotypes get in the way of seeing people in either their cultural or their individual reality is a familiar one. But as a practitioner of “Indigenous feminist critique,” Hughes calls attention to the less familiar point that the stereotyping of Native Americans has been asymmetrical in relation to men and woman.

“What’s now being called ‘redface’ is gendered. From the time of the Wild West shows that started in the eighteen-eighties right up to today—picture the ‘Washington Redskin’ and other sports team mascots—our most vivid images of Native Americans are nearly always male. Think about how many historical Native American men you can name, compared to women.”

Hughes’ interviewer obeys. He thinks.

“Well,” he says, “there’s Pocahontas. . . identified with a certain current Democratic politician by a certain current Republican politician. . .”

Like Bethany Hughes, Senator Elizabeth Warren comes originally from Oklahoma.

“In that part of the country the desire’s very common to feel a deep connection to the land,” Hughes says. “I’m not talking about the particular case of Senator Warren’s ancestry. My point is that you can understand how ever since the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889, people who know in their hearts that the land was stolen would want to feel there’s a profound sense in which they belong on the land, anyway.”

Glamor and Loathing

The preview of a ��observes that in “the nineteenth century Americans were infatuated with Indians on stage” and that “the first superstar of the American theatre rose to fame playing an Indian.”

Yet the glamor attaching to Native Americans didn’t prevent white Americans from despising them. Nor did it prevent white Americans from building the Indian Residential Schools that were designed to “kill the Indian to save the man.” If Native Americans possessed things—not only land, but certain virtues—that white Americans admired, the Native Americans themselves were resented for possessing them. The systematic attempt was made, one way or another, to dispossess them from the admired things.

Hughes’ thumbnail notes her interest in “how performance constructs culturally recognizable categories.” The “wild Indian” of the Wild West shows helped construct the Indian that our culture still recognizes. But her bio goes on to point out that performance also “offers possibilities to resist or remake those same categories.”

Resisting or remaking damaging stereotypes is one goal of the ����ֱ�� Native American Arts Festival, as well as of newly energized efforts to integrate Native American arts and culture into the entire ����ֱ�� curriculum.

Even if she’s not an artist, Bethany Hughes has made an important contribution to those efforts.

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In June, I watched as 70 young jazz enthusiasts came to campus to participate in our annual Jazz Intensive program that takes place two weeks every summer. On that Monday, they eagerly waited to audition with the hope of securing one of the top spots in the band and work with this All Star faculty that includes multi-Grammy winner��John Daversa, Yamaha recording artist��Wayne Bergeron, iTunes “Rising Star of Jazz” Frank Fontaine, pianist, educator and composer Barb Catlin, and trombonist and musical director Francisco Torres��to name just a few. These students have come to study��Jazz…at ����ֱ��…In The Pines.

From our earliest days ����ֱ�� has been bringing together practitioners and enthusiasts to explore and learn on the campus of ����ֱ�� in the idyllic location of Idyllwild. This has continued through to the present day when young classical musicians attend our ����ֱ�� Program to be under the baton of Larry Livingston or be inspired by John Walz, Edith Orloff and Roger Wilkie of the famed Pacific Trio. When Jazz In The Pines returns, it will do so in the tradition of bringing together students with practicing artists to study the music of the masters, to explore humanity through multi-generational conversations and lectures, and to hear music performed by practitioners.

You’ll hear more about Jazz In The Pines 2020 as activities take shape for the coming year, so please mark your calendars now for June 28 – July 11, 2020. In the meantime, I hope that you visit the campus throughout the year to hear our young, budding jazz artists and the faculty who teach and inspire them.

Warmly,

Pamela Jordan
President and Head of School

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She still had to confront the ten-year-old Yaqui boy who’d been assigned to help guard the church as Easter Sunday approached. He didn’t trust her.

“Show me,” he said when Kent-Stoll promised that she hadn’t taken any pictures.

He bent over her cell phone, his cowboy hat shading the images. Satisfied, he turned away. Kent-Stoll and her guide, Wendy Weston, went into the tiny church. Just inside the entrance they stood on the dirt floor and looked at the profusion of statues of the Virgin behind the altar, a few steps in front of them.

Kent-Stoll and Weston had traveled only a minute or two by car from the glittering shopping malls and spacious middle-class homes of Phoenix and Tempe. Yet that minute or two had put them deep inside the town of . The town’s six thousand residents, mostly Yaqui and Latino, occupy barely four hundred acres of land, a little more than Dodger Stadium devotes to parking lots. A third of Guadalupe’s inhabitants live in poverty and a little over half of its children graduate from high school.

Guadalupe’s jarring combination of proximity to, but alienation from, the world familiar to most Americans makes it an extreme version of what Weston wanted to show Kent-Stoll during three days of driving through Arizona and New Mexico. Weston, a Navajo (Diné) from the Four Corners region, has intimate knowledge of how the United States has both swallowed the Indian Nations and kept them at a distance.

Recruiting More Native American Students

Weston drove Kent-Stoll through the Southwest in order to acquaint her with some of the communities from which ����ֱ�� hopes to recruit greater numbers of Native American students. The creation of more productive recruitment strategies is an important goal for both Kent-Stoll and Weston, a consultant for the Native American Scholarship Learning Grant, funded by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies. Yet the road trip meant far more than that to both of them.

The idea of traveling together emerged from Kent-Stoll and Weston’s weekly conversations about the opportunities that arts education can open up to young Native Americans. Their meetings have included discussions of how honoring Native American culture, family, and traditions would not only support the Academy’s Native students, but also enrich the larger ����ֱ�� community. But how could these things be accomplished without visiting Native communities and listening to the stories of the people who live in them?

Weston has enabled Kent-Stoll to get to know people she would otherwise never have met, including the Maricopa (Pee-Posh) and Kwatsan artist .

“This is the Gila River reservation,” Hart Stevens said as she climbed into Weston’s rented Ford pickup, parked outside her home on the reservation. “I grew up here, but I’ve never seen a Gila monster.”

What she has seen more and more of over the years is “town,” meaning the city of Phoenix. Hart Stevens is about sixty years old. She recalls that during her childhood, some of the Maricopa elders would tell her that “You’ll see town some day.” She and the other children scoffed. But a new freeway will open up soon. It will border one side of the Gila River reservation, walling off its modest homes from the much bigger houses of middle-class Phoenix residents that thrust up against the freeway’s far side.

More Trouble for the Assistant Head

Hart Stevens directed Weston off-road, toward a spot where she hoped they could observe a baby eagle in its nest. They got out of the truck and made their way over the scrubby terrain. They’d walked less than a quarter of a mile when they saw a man approaching them. He wore an orange hunting vest.

“You’re in trouble again, Marianne,” Weston joked to Kent-Stoll.

But the second thing to become visible after his orange vest was the white of his teeth. Still smiling, he introduced himself as David Romero. He said he’d recently started volunteering for the nonprofit that protects bald eagles in the area. He and his girlfriend, Sarah, were happy to have company.

Did the visitors want to look through his telescope?

The eagle’s back was turned, but the telescope afforded a view of its beak as the baby looked from side to side.

“It hatched on January 23,” Romero said, “making it”—he thought for a moment in order to get the date right—“two months and one day old.”

Romero himself was practically a baby: in his early twenties, and a rookie firefighter.

“And I’m on the Tribal Youth Council,” he added, “trying to help the young people on the res make good choices.”

Beauty, Bad Choices, and Good Friends

Bad choices by young people were often on Weston’s mind during the trip. The day after their eagle sighting, she and Kent-Stoll traveled nearly three hundred miles northeast of Phoenix, to Zuni Pueblo. This New Mexico community has produced an abundance of world-class art that is out of proportion to its population of a few thousand. The renowned Zuni potters live and work in Zuni Pueblo.

Weston and Kent-Stoll hoped to see the murals painted by the late Zuni artist Alex Seotewa (1933-2014) in . Their astonishing beauty has prompted some people to call the little church, built in 1629, “America’s Sistine Chapel.”

But on a Monday afternoon the doors were locked. The seeming disrepair suggested abandonment. Weeds choked the adjoining cemetery. Disappointed, Weston let her gaze wander. Her eyes narrowed as she observed three young men.

“Doing a drug deal,” she said.

Forty miles north of Zuni Pueblo, in Gallup, Weston explained that Gallup had once been known as “Drunktown, USA.” (It’s the setting for , the debut feature film of Navajo director Sydney Freeland, a guest at ����ֱ��’s 2018 symposium on .)

“When I was little I’d pass through here with my parents,” Weston recalled. “They’d say not to look at the men sleeping on the sidewalks. ‘You don’t want to see that,’ they’d say.”

Weston had hoped to show Kent-Stoll around her native Four Corners region. But the visits with friends on the way ran long and the distances ran on forever. From Gallup they drove another twenty or thirty miles north to see an older Navajo couple, who are Weston’s clan mother and father, and their adult son, who is Weston’s clan brother. The son, Eric, talked about the difficulty of finding work on the reservation since he doesn’t speak Navajo.

The sun was going down as they left. Weston knew that driving another hundred miles north to the Four Corners would be exhausting. So they turned west, back toward Arizona, to spend the night near Window Rock, the seat of government and capital of the Navajo Nation.

In the morning they faced the long trip to Weston’s home in Phoenix, where Kent-Stoll would collect her car and begin the even longer journey back to Idyllwild. But before heading south they had one more Native American community to see, ninety miles west of Window Rock.

Awe and Fear

“This is the oldest continuously inhabited village in the United States,” Weston said as the Ford pickup climbed the narrow path clinging to the side of First Mesa, on the Hopi Reservation. “It’s called , and it’s been continuously inhabited for about eleven hundred years.”

Atop the mesa, Kent-Stoll was awed by the endless view in every direction. And, having raised four children, she also thought fearfully about what it would be like to care for a toddler in Walpi. In some places, only a few meters separated one flank of the mesa from its opposite.

On the drive to Phoenix, Kent-Stoll commented on the importance of visiting tribal communities and becoming acquainted with members of those communities as individuals.

“Through visits like these,” she said, “I know that ����ֱ�� will appreciate Native American cultures more deeply and do a better job of serving Native American students.”

Kent-Stoll also spoke about how much she’d enjoyed the trip and how much she would like to see the same places and people again. She said she wished there had been more time and that she’d seen even more.

“Don’t worry,” Weston said. “I’m bringing you out here again.”

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