Peggy Fontenot, an award-winning photographer and bead worker, was inspired to bead a series of samplers to tell the story of her identity as a Native artist. Born and raised in Los Angeles, the 63-year-old is an enrolled member of the Patawomeck Indian Tribe of Virginia and a certified Potawatomie artist. She has exhibited her work at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of the American Indian, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Eiteljorg Museum, and the Heard Museum. For some people, though, that’s not good enough. “Some people think I’m a fake Indian,” she says. “The Indian Arts and Crafts Act [of 1990] says that in order to sell art as an Indian artisan, you have to be from a federally recognized tribe, a state-recognized tribe, or be a certified tribal artisan, as certified by an Indian tribe,” says Tailinh Agoyo, co-founder of We Are the Seeds, an Indigenous summer art market held in the Railyard Park since 2016. “Peggy is 100 percent in compliance with the law. Some states and some art festivals want a narrower definition of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, so they won’t accept state-recognized enrollment or certified tribal letters. Seeds follows the law.”

Agoyo continues: “It’s important for We Are the Seeds to be inclusive of artists from state tribes, as well as tribally certified artisans. It increases diversity in terms of nations and regions represented and adds to the vibrancy and strength of what we present in our show.”

Fontenot has been beading since the early 1980s. For decades, she’s made items like treasure bags and earrings, and her work has been displayed at the National Museum of the American Indian. Her black-and-white photography straddles a line between fine art and photojournalism. In recent years, she’s veered towards political topics in both arenas. She now beads the kinds of samplers that girls and young women made in early America to practice their embroidery skills, sometimes hiding personal symbols and stories in the stitches. She was drawn to the form after hearing a story about an institutionalized woman who made samplers to document her life, as well as the history of girls at Indian boarding schools making samplers under duress. Fontenot’s samplers are laborious, made from tens of thousands of Japanese seed beads, and conform to a standard sampler size, about 20 by 16 inches.

Colonial Status Sampler (2018), Murdered and Missing Sampler (2019), and Self-Assimilation were recently included in an exhibition called We Are the Seeds at form & concept gallery. Gallery director Jordan Eddy curated the group show collaboratively with Agoyo and Seeds co-founder Paula Mirabal, while the market is on hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic. Fontenot has shown with Seeds since it began. She also showed at SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market for many years but become ineligible for the world-famous festival in 2019, when SWAIA limited applicants to those enrolled in federally recognized tribes.

The three samplers are part of an ongoing series that discusses issues in Indian Country, such as the problem of missing and murdered Indigenous women. The series is also an opportunity for Fontenot to air her grievances about Native issues and identity. Sometimes her message is loud and clear, as in Colonial Status Sampler, which reads “Regardless of the colonial status you impose upon me — Enrolled, Certified, Descent — In the end I will still be Indian.” Self-Assimilation is more of a treasure hunt, for which you’d need a key to understand all the clues.

“Peggy refers to the works in this series as ‘samplers,’ in reference to the needlework samplers that Native children made at boarding schools,” Eddy says. “The purpose of these institutions was to assimilate Native children into White society and surviving needlepoints exemplify this: Bible verses and the English alphabet were common subjects. Peggy reclaims the format by swapping needlework for beadwork, grounding the series in an Indigenous knowledge system. The threads of those historic samplers tied Native schoolkids to a European tradition. Conversely, Peggy’s vibrant beads deconstruct the violent and enduring paradigms that institutions like this helped create.”

Self-Assimilation is property of the artist and is for sale. It will be on display at The Main in Santa Clarita, California, Nov. 4–30. Fontenot can be reached at pfontenot@earthlink.net.

SELF ASSIMILATION

“This piece is called Self-Assimilation because artists who are members of federally recognized tribes don’t recognize artists in state-recognized tribes. They are the ones who are putting the distinctions on these titles,” Fontenot says. Native people born into families that automatically enroll their children in their tribe might not realize that everyone isn’t in the same position. When the Indian Arts and Crafts Act came about in 1990, “there were many artists who didn’t have documentation, and we had to set off on this journey. Some of us were able to get this documentation and some of us were not.”

10780

Fontenot’s Patawomeck tribal number is 10780. She grew up knowing she was Native American, but she didn’t get involved in the Native community until early adulthood. She has spent the bulk of her life with the Patawomeck Tribe, raising her daughter within the culture. Her granddaughter is now part of the community as well.

HB2261OK

In 2016, Oklahoma passed a law allowing only artists who are enrolled in federal tribes to sell their art as “Indian made.” With the help of the Pacific Legal Foundation, Fontenot challenged the law; in 2019, the courts found the law to be contrary to the federal Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 and therefore unconstitutional. She challenged a similar law in Missouri (MO1384HB), where the courts ruled that only members of federally recognized tribes are permitted by Missouri law to use the term “American Indian” when identifying their art. The Missouri law does not prohibit artists from state-recognized tribes or those certified by a state or federal tribe from describing their art as “Native American” or “Indian” or from using their tribal affiliations in connection with selling their art.

VIRGINIA FLAG

Virginia Indian tribes were wiped out with the stroke of a eugenicist’s pen when the state passed the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The law criminalized interracial marriage and required that every birth in the state be recorded by race, either “White” or “Colored.” The act made Blacks in Virginia second-class citizens and eliminated the identity of Native Americans, who were assigned a category based on their skin color or the percentage of “Indian blood” they were thought to have based on lineage. The law was repealed in 1967, but the damage was done. Old records had disappeared or were destroyed. Seven Virginia tribes have earned federal recognition in recent years, while others are still working on it.

POISON APPLE

A vivid red apple drips blood and is gripped by what might be a witch’s hand, but this is not the fruit of a fairy tale. “There’s a term in Indian Country, ‘They’re an apple,’” Fontenot says. “It’s a derogatory term that means that you’re Native on the outside and White on the inside. To me, the apple represents Native people who are buying into the non-Native society and thought. It’s a poison apple. Instead of living with their traditions and oral histories, they are discriminating against other Native people based on the rules of the non-Native society.”

RED DRESS

There is a human rights crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women in North America, where Native women have a significantly increased risk of experiencing domestic violence and sexual assault. A grassroots movement to bring attention to the problem has grown in recent years, with artists and activists sometimes using the symbol of a red dress.

CULTURAL STATUS/CULTURAL THEFT

Many Native Americans don’t live on reservations. Many were relocated to urban areas with the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, a federal law that encouraged Native people to leave their homes and assimilate into the general population. Others weren’t welcomed back after being sent to boarding schools, while some were disenrolled from their tribes for other reasons, leaving their descendants without connection. “The government doesn’t have the final say on who’s Indian and who’s not. There are state tribes that can’t get federal recognition. They’re [real] tribes, but they can’t be in an art show,” says We Are the Seeds co-founder Tailinh Agoyo. “People think the Indian Arts and Crafts Act is a good thing. And it is, when you’re talking about dealing with counterfeit people on the Santa Fe Plaza or billions of dollars in fakes from the Philippines. But when you’re targeting individual elder Native people, taking them to court, and threatening to put them in jail, that’s when it becomes really problematic.”