Conscious weaving

THEbasket This River Runs Red is woven in the traditional Cherokee pattern known as water. Printed words run vertically and horizontally in black and white along the exterior — vertical texts present statistics of violence against Native women in the United States, while horizontal texts pertain to discrepancies in official and probable numbers of missing or murdered indigenous women in Canada. (Even if the official number — 1,181 police-reported homicides and missing women in Canada between 1980 and 2012 — were accurate, it would mean that indigenous women are six times more likely to be the victim of homicide than non-indigenous women, according to the 2014 Statistics Canada Homicide Report. Activists estimate the number to be at least 4,000.)

On one side of the basket, the words surround a map of the Red River, which runs up the Minnesota-North Dakota border into Lake Winnipeg, Manitoba, and is the site of the discovery of numerous Native women’s bodies. The river is lined in bright red acrylic paint — a color echoed in the basket’s interior, where the names and tribes of 306 murdered and missing women are woven in rippling, river-like zigzags.

Shan Goshorn (Eastern Band Cherokee) completed This River Runs Red earlier this year. It is one of the latest works in an artistic career of creating multimedia art that merges traditional forms and activist themes in a manner that, though forthright, is not limited by one-way didacticism. The works are too engaging for that, and too encouraging of dialogue. Like their interwoven splints, they depend on interconnection.

“They’re such a familiar shape,” Goshorn said of baskets, which she began working with around 2008; she has also worked in media such as painting, hand-colored photography, metal, glass, and beads. “They’re a vessel that every culture experiences. We associate it with caring, nurturing things, whether it’s babies or carrying wood or carrying crops or carrying water. … They’re pretty, they’re colorful, they’re interesting. People look at them — especially the ones with photographs on them [reproduced and woven into the exterior] — and they’re just so curious. They’re like, How did she do that? Did she paint on the basket? And they literally lean into the work, and that’s the moment when we can have this honest dialogue, this conversation I’ve been trying to have with my work for 20 years. Instead of leaving so agitated ... they actually leave feeling like they know more about American history, and they can understand why these topics are relevant now.”

A number of Goshorn’s works honor Native women of the past and present: In the 11-basket series Hearts of Our Women (2015), for instance, the names of 700 indigenous women have been woven into the basket

“There are just so many things that we take for granted that we see and we just don’t even think about it being the name of a nation of people. That’s really what got me started thinking about using art as an activist weapon, as a tool for education and persuasion.”

interiors, with reproductions of archival photographs of Native women woven into the exteriors. Goshorn noted that while she was conducting research at the Smithsonian, she found many portraits of Native men but few of women. Another central issue in Goshorn’s works is the sending of Native children to boarding schools. In Unexpected Gift (2015), words on horizontal blue-and-white splints depict Goshorn’s grandmother’s and mother’s boarding school experiences, respectively, taken from her grandmother’s oral account and her mother’s memoirs. Yellow vertical splints present the last names of friends made at two boarding schools by a woman who became Goshorn’s adopted Kiowa mother. The patterns surround a reproduced photograph from the National Anthropological Archives of children who have just arrived at the Carlisle Indian Boarding School in Pennsylvania, which is set amid red handprints — “I use them here to illustrate how these experiences belong to us as Indian people and how we are all connected,” Goshorn says on her website. Inside the basket are the names of Carlisle School attendees. Other works explore specific contemporary instances of appropriation and Native rights abuse, including the Dakota Access Pipeline (Defending the Sacred, 2017) and the naming of the Washington Redskins (No Honor, 2014).

Goshorn grew up in Baltimore and spent summers in Cherokee, North Carolina, with her grandparents. She was always interested in art: “What got me hooked on art? Breathing,” she said. She worked at the Qualla Arts and Crafts cooperative in Cherokee as a teenager, during which time she learned about the works of Cherokee artists and traditional arts. She later organized exhibitions and documented raw materials for the Indian Arts and Crafts Board (U.S. Department of the Interior) in Cherokee. After attending the Cleveland Institute of Art and Atlanta College of Art, she was commissioned by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board to illustrate traditional Cherokee basket patterns. She did not focus on the medium for another few decades, during which time she explored other media. Goshorn, who has lived in Tulsa since 1981, has supported herself as a professional artist for more than 35 years. Her work has been in more than 30 museums, among them the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian and Santa Fe’s IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. Though she is not showing at this year’s SWAIA Indian Market, she has previously won awards there including Best of Classification — Basketry in 2013.

A turning point for Goshorn and her work occurred in the 1990s, when she began using art as a medium for activism. She said, “I had been doing work that addressed women’s issues, but I wasn’t involved with Native human rights issues the way I became in the ’90s. That [national] quincentennial was a real educational experience for me. I was showing my work with Edgar Heap of Birds and Richard Ray Whitman at the time, and Edgar kind of challenged me. He said, ‘You know, you’ve been talking about doing some work about appropriated imagery. We’ve got a UN delegation coming through. Why don’t you create some work that we can exhibit there?’ So I took my kids to the grocery store, and I said, ‘Anything you can find with an Indian on it or an Indian name, put it in this cart.’ And I thought we’d have three to eight items. We ended up with like 40 items, and it made me realize how insidious this was even to Native people. You know, how Jeep Cherokee or the Winnebago — just so many things that we take for granted that we see and we just don’t even think about it being the name of a nation of people. That’s really what got me started thinking about using art as an activist weapon, as a tool for education and persuasion.”

Goshorn is currently working on a basket in the shape of the Venus de Milo that will also address the ongoing crisis of murdered and missing indigenous women. On her website, as in her works with interwoven words, she uses language in a way that demands attention, reflection, and conversation. She writes, “It is time to recognize the humanity of these women, mourn the value of their lives, and put a stop to this terror.”