A member of the Bitter Water Clan, she was raised in a community of traditional Navajo artists and religious practitioners. In the 1970s, encouraged by a burgeoning Native American art market and local traders, Black focused her creative work on basketweaving and introduced several innovations that proved critical to the tradition’s survival.
Passamaquoddy basketmaker
Mary Olympic’s life at Katmai represents a subsistence lifestyle in Alaska that has endured for thousands of years and continues today. Her recollections illuminate the practice of reindeer herding from a time when very few other first-hand accounts exist.
The matriarch of four generations of Passamaquoddy basketweavers
First Nations nun who sang for a queen
Dakotah Sioux/Hidatsa storyteller, historian and educator
As a child, she learned the art of making pottery from her mother, who was herself an heir to the pottery tradition that had been passed on from one generation to the next for centuries by the speakers of the Tewa language in the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico.
Lila Greengrass Blackdeer first learned black ash basketmaking to help supply her family’s roadside basket stand on Highway 12 near her hometown.
Namahyoke Curtis, known as Namah, was a prominent African American nurse in late-19th-century Washington, D.C. During the Spanish-American War (1898), the Surgeon General assigned her to recruit other Black women to serve as U.S. Army contract nurses.
Lillian Bernice Snooks was at the forefront of the late-twentieth century campaign to preserve Atsugewi culture and traditions.