In mid-August, Lori Pourier, the Oglala Lakota founder and senior fellow of the Rapid City, South Dakota-based Native arts service organization First Peoples Fund, attended the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts’ Indian Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The annual market draws more than 100,000 visitors and features the work of over 1,000 artists from more than 100 tribal communities in North America and Canada.
While artists “are starting to see high-end folks pulling back from buying Native art,” Pourier told me in a late August conversation, many artists were thriving. Indeed, the show’s winner in basketry, Cherokee/Penobscot craftsman Caleb Hoffman, studied under a First Peoples Fund (FPF) Artist in Business Leadership fellow, Passamaquoddy basketmaker Jeremy Frey. “It’s wonderful to see so many artists enjoying so much success,” Pourier said.
Pourier’s insights underscore how funders are conceptualizing their support for Native artists. Equipped with fellowships and grants, practitioners can achieve professional success while navigating a fraught economic climate. But Native artists do not operate in isolation. Given that the arts are inextricably linked to Native life, funders view their support as a means to achieve broader aims, like reestablishing post-pandemic intergenerational connections and positioning artists as agents of community development and social change.
“While there are new and emerging opportunities surrounding Native arts and artists, the very core of Native arts is anything but trendy,” said Catherine Bryan, a vice president at the First Nations Development Institute. “Art is a cultural asset for Native communities and is deeply intertwined in Native lifeways — languages, traditional beliefs and ceremonies, land and food systems.”
I reached out to Pourier, Bryan and Nicole Yanes (Opata), director of institutional philanthropy at NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led grantmaker dedicated to building Indigenous power, to get their take on the state of the field. Here are four funder action items gleaned from their feedback.
Reestablishing intergenerational connections
The sustainability of traditional Native arts “depends on intergenerational learning and interaction, and as art forms and artistic skills are passed down, so, too, are knowledge systems that Native art embodies,” said First Nations’ Bryan. The pandemic disrupted the transmission of knowledge and practices across Native communities, and arts funders are committed to reestablishing and strengthening these connections.
First Nations, which aims to sustain the lifeways and economies of Native communities through advocacy, financial support and knowledge sharing, has provided roughly $6 million to 33 Native-led nonprofits and tribal programs working to sustain traditional Native arts, artists and lifeways through its Native Arts Initiative and First Americans’ Cultural Treasures Initiative, which receives support from the Ford Foundation and Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies. Grantees have used the funding to build staff and organizational capacity, build out arts programming and invest in renovation projects.
FPF is also helping Native artists and organizations regain their footing in a post-pandemic climate.
Last year, the fund was one of eight arts service organizations rooted in communities of color selected by the Wallace Foundation to participate in its Field Studies program. Working with research scholars and Native culture bearers, the FPF will “produce community-informed survey measures that more accurately reflect and capture the ways in which Native peoples engage with and work within the arts and culture sector and tribal economies.”
With funding from the Doris Duke Foundation, FPF published Brightening the Spotlight, a 100-page report educating funders on how best to support American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native creators working in performing arts disciplines. In August, it announced the Native Performing Arts Fellowship, which provides grants of up to $10,000 for Native individuals who practice or work in fields like theater, dance and music.
Last but not least is the FPF’s Jennifer Easton Community Spirit Awards. Named after the fund’s founder, the award provides a $50,000 grant to four to six Native artists who “sustain culture through language, ceremonies and tradition practices through their art,” Pourier said. Check out 2024’s awardees here.
With the impacts of the pandemic gradually dissipating, First Nations’ Bryan shares Pourier’s sense of cautious optimism about the state of the field.
First Nations’ community partners are “leveraging hybrid programming and opportunities to reach broader audiences through virtual mediums, and they’re doing it all with renewed urgency,” she said. “They know they are in a race against the clock to regain and protect the knowledge lost during the pandemic, and to ensure their programming is sustainable and able to support the sharing and teaching of knowledge and artistic skills between culture bearers and community members.”
Galvanizing community development
Funders recognize that in addition to transmitting knowledge to younger generations, Native artists play a critical entrepreneurial role in supporting their communities’ economic sustainability.
“Our work in helping artists has always included a financial education component so they can successfully operate a business,” Pourier said. With funding from the defunct ArtPlace America, the Bush Foundation and others, the fund launched Rolling Rez Arts, a state-of-the-art mobile arts space, business training center and bank in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. (FPF’s other institutional funders include the Jerome, Kresge and Ruth Arts foundations.)
The fund’s Cultural Capital Fellowship is a year-long program that provides $10,000 in funding to artists and culture bearers’ work in their community. Pourier said many fellows have leveraged that seed money to generate additional support to grow their businesses. Others go on to serve as consultants to help entrepreneurs in other tribal communities get projects off the ground. “We’ve created this whole army of trainers,” Pourier said.
Another offering, the Native Arts Ecology Building Grant, supports organizations uplifting Native artists in their communities. And last year, FPF, Lakota Funds and Artspace Projects, Inc., announced the opening of Oglala Lakota Artspace, a Native-run studio space in the heart of the Pine Ridge Reservation. “It’s an amazing space led by artists,” Pourier said.
Yanes encouraged philanthropy to trust in Native artists, even if their ideas may be too “radical” for some funders. “When Indigenous people can mobilize the resources and invest directly in our communities,” Yanes said, “we can do it from a deeper understanding as direct practitioners because we understand the issues and solutions from a place of love for our people and our planet.”
Social change activism and movement-building
Native arts funders, like their peers across the arts philanthropy ecosystem writ large, are supporting artists advancing social or political change.
The NDN Collective’s Radical Imagination Program, which provides a two-year grant of $100,000 to 10 Indigenous artists, artist collectives or small nonprofits that are “deeply engaged with their communities to develop alternative visions of a new future,” is especially instructive because it merges the goal of cultivating an ecosystem of community-minded Native artists with the mechanics of galvanizing change.
“Through artistic interpretation, we are able to see what the future that we are fighting for looks like,” said NDN Collective’s Yanes. “What does it look like when we have torn down all the dams and the salmon is running? When we have rebuilt our food systems? When we have stopped oil companies from extracting from our resources? When we envision it, and we imagine it, it will happen.”
With Yanes’ commentary serving as a conceptual backdrop, here are some key issues on Native artists’ radars as they engage in and with movements — and how funders are investing in them.
The history of the U.S. Native American Boarding Schools
Native artists are addressing the forcible abduction of Native children by government agents to send them to government- and church-run boarding schools during the 19th and 20th centuries. FPF Artists in Business Leadership Fellow Denise Lajimodiere of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, Belcourt, North Dakota, cofounded the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition; this year, the Mellon Foundation awarded it a $516,480 grant through its Presidential Initiatives program.
Native-led organizations also are partnering with the Department of the Interior on developing the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. Launched in 2021, it’s a comprehensive effort to “recognize the troubled legacy of federal Indian boarding school policies with the goal of addressing their intergenerational impact and to shed light on the traumas of the past.”
“There’s been a lot of collaboration under the Biden administration across departments to engage tribal communities” around the initiative, Pourier said.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act calling for “the protection and return of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony.” Last December, the U.S. Department of the Interior issued a final rule providing processes by which tribal nations can repatriate the remains of ancestors and sacred cultural objects held by museums and federal agencies.
First Nations’ Bryan called the “ethical return of tribal artifacts that were stolen from tribes over centuries of colonialism to tribal nations” a “compelling movement in the field of Native arts.”
Pourier agreed. “There’s a movement through intermediaries to help tribes get the facilities to bring those artifacts home,” she said. One important intermediary is the Going Home Fund. Launched by the Association of Tribal Libraries and Museums to facilitate the return of “material culture” to Indigenous communities, the fund has received support from the Mellon and Henry Luce foundations.
Climate change
Grantmakers are supporting Native artists tackling climate change. “Our tradition keepers are sustaining culture at the community level,” Pourier said. “They’re also the ones that are leading the work around climate change because they’re most directly impacted. The natural resources they depend on for their food systems are at risk.”
First Nations’ Bryan noted that several basket-weaver nonprofits and programs in its network “are focused on understanding and protecting their plant ecosystems and developing strategies to address the detrimental impacts of climate change on their traditional basketry and underlying knowledge systems. Their goal is to ensure that community members have access to materials needed to continue making traditional baskets and continue passing on this knowledge system to future generations.”
Development projects threatening Native communities
Pourier said that artists are supporting efforts to remove the Dakota Access Pipeline and stop the development of the Constantine-Palmer Mine, a mining project that threatens five species of salmon in Alaska’s Chilkat River watershed. Pourier cited Tlingit weaver Lani Hotch, a Community Spirit Award winner and Cultural Capital Fellow, who launched a weaving project earlier this year to raise awareness about the need to protect salmon and the Chilkat River.
Advocating for the Native arts within the broader context of racial justice
Advocates are calling on philanthropy to provide increased support for Native arts holistically, tying funding to the larger social justice movement and issues like “Native control and stewardship of land, Native foods systems, Native language immersion programs, and more,” said First Nations’ Bryan. “Our work always involves encouraging philanthropy to do better when it comes to investing in Native communities.”
Earlier this year, First Nations launched Advocacy and Research for Economic Justice, a program focused on conducting research advocating for philanthropy to make greater investments in Native-led organizations and tribal programs, and providing financial education to Native communities.
The initiative includes the Building a Movement for Native Justice Project, which centers on boosting scholarship about Native environmental, social or economic justice, and providing Native communities, policymakers and funders with the tools and resources to advance economic justice for Native communities.
“In bringing this project to life,” Bryan said, “we recognized that art must be at the forefront of any movement for change.” As a result, First Nations launched “Justice Through the Eyes of Native Artists,” a virtual gallery featuring the work of Native artists sharing what Native justice means to them.
NDN Collective’s Yanes also called on philanthropy to support artists through a more holistic lens, calling on funders to invest in Indigenous organizations, communities and artists engaging with front-line organizers, advocates and policymakers. Artists can “communicate solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges, such as climate change, dismantling structural racism and capitalism,” Yanes said. “These issues and solutions should not become trends within philanthropy, but the norm of what and how we invest in art.”
Pourier noted that FPF partners with organizations like the Intercultural Leadership Institute, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, Alternate Roots, the Center for Cultural Power and the National Folklife Network to generate support for tradition and knowledge keepers across all communities of color.
“I’ve been doing this work now for almost 30 years, and it can be really exhausting,” she said. “There’s been some positive movement, and hopefully, the major funders like Mellon, Ford and Doris Duke will continue to do the work they do. But there’s still a lot more philanthropy can do to support Native arts and culture bearers.”
