Here are the photos of my final project for water media. I'm happy with how it turned out. Of course there are several things I would do differently, however, that is how you learn. I'm very pleased to be taking Book Arts this term (starting tomorrow!) with the same professor as for the water media class. We will be constructing books in several different styles, using different materials, and then putting artwork in them.
Book Material: Thick watercolor paper
Book Style: Accordion
Book Pieces:
Book Container: Parfletch-Style envelop encasing the book for cultural symbolism and to keep the accordion book protected.
Book has two different sides with two different covers.
Book Size: Parfletch cover folded out is 29"x 25"
Accordion book is 12"x 15" and 24"x 30" with full page shown
Click on any photo for a larger image.
Parfletch-style cover tied closed with a leather tie. Two large pieces of water color paper were glued together with PVA glue. I was happy this worked well and the cover is very strong. I decided to use a parfletch style because this is what my ancestors used to carry food, supplies, and herbs in their nomadic life. Of course their parfletches were made of hard and water resistant buffalo raw hide and painted with designs.
The cover partially open showing the book inside and the inside cover of the parfletch was also decorated. Part of our assignment was to create a map of the place were were recording in the book. Instead of having a fold out map I chose to paint my map on the inside of the parfletch drawing a connection between winter counts on buffalo robes of several plains tribes before European contact. I'm not sure if my tribe did this. I know the Lakota regularly created winter counts.
The parfletch folded out.
The inside cover of the parfletch has a very abstract design and mapping of my home and the property I live on. I resisted the urge to create a linear style map and instead used symbols and colors to create where I live. I read that the "maps" and directions given to Lewis and Clark by several tribes were very confusing to the expedition because Natives have/had a different perspective and relationship to the land around them. They are and we still are part of the land, not separate from it. I did however create the map from a birds eye view like European style maps, but you will see I added an abstract tree and my own hand print showing my connect to the land.
(Note for image below): One of two front covers for the book: Shelter. This part of the book is about my family that lives around me right now. It's supposed to be more realistic types of rendering and a more European style of painting. Although I can never get too far away from abstraction...
Full open page of the book. A "family tree" of family members that came to visit me while I was working on the book. My sister and I top left, an owl I painted from a practice composition from a previous assignment, center right is my 7 year old nephew Jimmy, bottom left is my 3 year old nephew Nate when he was an infant, and in the bottom right is my Mom and Dad. 
Close up of Jimmy and the Owl.
A close up of Nate and the background. I chose to paint the portraits on separate sheets because I was worried of making a mistake and then the whole page would be ruined. I really like the color palate of the trees on this page. I love how winter trees look so much like the veins and respiratory system in our bodies.
The second cover of the book: We Live. I Live. this part of the book as about my connection to my Cheyenne ancestors and my on going process of healing past wounds and reconnecting.
The first full page. I used water color, acrylic paint, and wire on this page.
This page is about just putting a color wash on the page and see what happens. I noticed right away the profile of a man in the center and then the clouds at the top and mountains at the bottom. This is about the story of Loo-Wit (Mt. St. Helens) and how I can see the mountain from my backyard and was five years old and living near by when the mountain erupted. It's also about our culture and stories and how we need to preserve them and that they are alive.
This page is about my on going struggles with my identity and my current difficulty in working with my tribe to get some paperwork I need. They don't see me as a Cheyenne because I can't be enrolled. So this page is about NOT being a Southern Cheyenne-Arapaho of Oklahoma, but a TSITSISTAS which means "the people" in the Cheyenne language. The tribe can leave me and my family behind, but they can't take away my ancestors, my blood, my spirit, and my heart. The round circles are an abstraction of a tipi from above. I may not have a home with my tribe, but my grandmothers will always provide a spiritual home for me.
I used wired to construct a screen.
Page Two of We Live, I Live: These are portraits of some of my ancestors. Far left side is my great-grandmother, Mary, in the center is my great-great-great grandmother, Grandma Cow (a female buffalo, not a jersey cow!), right of center is my great-grandmother's sister, Auntie Maggie, the man in the bottom right is Black Kettle as we were part of his band, and the upper right is me. I used water color for the background and sumi ink for the portraits. I used red yard that's unraveled to symbolized the unravelling of my family over the years of the destructive forces of loss of land, the Sand Creek Massacre, Indian boarding schools, and then the total cut off of my family to our people when my great-grandmother denied who she was and didn't tell her children she was a Cheyenne. Her decision to assimilate has had caused me several problems just three generations later.
I'm interested to exploring more about my continued struggles with my identity and working with my tribe to prove my decendency. It has been a very frustrating and upsetting process, but in that negativity I have found artistic inspiration and a better understanding of my identity away from their stringent rules of identity based on genocidal practices of the US Government.
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