(gentle music) - It is hard to be here.

Life is hard.

But one of the gifts that we have is beauty and artwork is beauty that walks through the day with us.

(gentle music) I was born in Manoomin, raised on White Earth Reservation and have always lived near on or adjacent to the White Earth Reservation.

My mother went to boarding school at White Earth and my father's family was Scandinavian.

I was really interested in artwork when I was in high school, and when I started looking to reconnect culturally, I started making artwork as ceremony gifts.

In the late '90s, I saw a quill box for the first time.

It was like I'd been struck by lightning.

I knew that that was my path was to make quill boxes.

What quill boxes are is they're this elegant combination of birch bark and porcupine quills and sweet grass, and they serve as a storage container for dried foods or dried medicines.

In 2014, I went to work with Mel Losh on the Leech Lake reservation and learned how to make quill boxes from him.

I have to find a piece of bark that's big enough for what I'm trying to accomplish, if I want a really big basket that can be limited by the size of the tree, the tree I really like peeling bark from is a birch tree that would be standing kind of out by itself in a sunny area.

It affects how the bark grows and how pliable it is.

I have to soak the bark to make it pliable again, cut out the bark, bring it together in a form, and then tie it off and let it dry for several days.

I go into a meditation and see what images come to me, what designs come to me.

I'm able to sketch that out onto the birch bark and apply the quills, apply the beads, and then I have to consider the collar on the top.

I like that collar to match the bark that I'm using for the basket itself.

The process of putting a porcupine quill into the bark, it's a woodland style of doing quill work.

I'll soak them in water and make them pliable like a rubber band, and once they're pliable, we're able to take them all and put holes in the birch bark and place the quill through the holes in that birch bark.

As the quill dries, they grab onto each other and it holds that quill in place.

I find that I'm more interested in doing things that are a little bit out of the ordinary.

A lot of my baskets have machine sewn ribbon work on them now, or I'm adding bead work to introduce color that's moving them into more of a contemporary expression of basketry, and sometimes people don't recognize what I'm doing because it's unusual to see that color brought into that medium in that way.

(gentle music) Right now I have baskets that are being shown in the exhibit, Queering Indigeneity, at the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St.

Paul.

The exhibit itself is a community collaboration of queer and two-spirit native artists from the upper Midwest.

The term two-spirit is kind of a modern term, but the concept is ancient.

It's a queer but absolutely has to be a Native American person.

And as a result of assimilation and boarding schools, a lot of people feel like they don't have a place or a right to be present in their communities.

A lot of my work in the last few years has really focused on two-spirit cultural reclamation, so that is both the drawing in the knowledge and the understanding of the value and the celebration of two-spirit people, and also providing safe spaces and places for people to come and feel like they can just be themselves.

There's a freedom in being able to just come forward as your authentic self.

We've particularly designed this moment in this time, in that place, for that opportunity for people.

Having my baskets there is super exciting because I did particularly create some of those pieces to advocate for two-spirit relatives everywhere, and I'm really glad that I got an opportunity to both curate there and to have my baskets in the exhibit.

One of the pieces that's at the exhibit is a basket that's called "Anishinaabeg Descend," and that one was a particular effort on my part to retell the story of how Anishinaabe people descended from the stars here to Turtle Island, there's a blue and red double helix as we descended from the stars here to earth, and that red and blue double helix is red for women, blue for men, but through the center were the two-spirit people providing balance so that we could arrive here safely.

(gentle music) Working with birch bark and working with porcupine quills has really deepened my understanding of my culture, but more so in the fact that what I'm doing to help others that come behind me, that is a primary focus for any Anishinaabe person is what do we leave for those who are coming behind us?

Being able to teach, being able to leave a legacy of some sort, really fulfills that need within myself.

One of the things I've learned about making quill boxes and working in community is that each of us has a unique path.

When I talk about feeling like I was struck by lightning the first time I saw that quill box, I think each of us has that within ourselves.

We should look for the thing that lights us up and we should go for that because I think that's how we know what it was that we came here to do.

That's our path.

That's where we're meant to go.

That's what'll bring us joy, and that's where the freedom and being our authentic self comes in.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.