Winter 2016

A puzzling passage in the Norse account of an expedition to Vinland 1,000 years ago has recently been recognized as a nearly verbatim record of an encounter between the Icelandic heroine Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir and a young indigenous, probably Beothuk, girl. It tells of a missed chance for peaceful Contact.

Did the wrong Minnesotan win this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature? Some in Indian Country think the honor is overdue for Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa), the Minneapolis-based writer whose 15 novels weave together families, tribe and Ojibwe land over several generations in a way compared to William Faulkner’s chronicles of Yoknapatawpha County.

Long a leader in Southwest design, Patricia Michaels (Taos Pueblo) made a national breakthrough, for herself and for indigenous designers, as a star of the television competition show Project Runway. She recently returned to Manhattan, along with Diné designer Orlando Dugi, with a spectacular Style Fashion Week presentation in the elegant Hammerstein Ballroom.

Steven Paul Judd (Kiowa) gives a unique twist to some well known images. The results are pointed and hilarious.

New York’s exposure to the broad range of Indigenous couture continues in February at the Museum’s George Gustav Heye Center in lower Manhattan with the arrival of the travelling exhibition Native Fashion Now.