Sandra Hale Schulman
Special to ICT
The latest: Canadian artist gives face time, lyrical story searches for home, protest poet honored in song.
ART: Artist excels at picturing people
Hailing from the Seine River First Nation of Ontario, Gene Boshkaykin has become a prolific painter of larger than life faces. He has been using social media to show his skills and let people know they can have their portraits done from life or a photo.
Using mixed media, he gives dignity and honor to every expression. He paints famous people – Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Quannah Chasinghorse, Wes Studi – as well as chiefs and elders.
“I am a First Nation portrait artist,” Gene told ICT. “My First Nation is Seine River First Nation, but I reside off reserve in Thunder Bay, Ontario. I have been drawing since I was 10 years old but didn’t get good until high school. People and family members recognized there was talent there when I was young and everyone encouraged me to continue. At the university I majored in fine arts and Native studies. Although I didn’t finish, it was a good stepping stone.
“After living in the states for 20 years, in 2002 I moved back to Canada. I was struggling with addiction and wasn’t giving my art my full attention, but the talent was still there. Since getting sober 11 years ago, life has made some turns for the good. I have started taking commissions from people all across North America. I’ve had a couple of my online posts go viral. I was in a magazine last year and on APTN InFocus a couple of months ago.”
As for tribal politics, he sees the difference between the two countries.
“I have hope in Canada reconciling our past more than America. They seem to be making faster steps toward it. My own city Thunder Bay is making steps also. They have hired a Metis chief of police. I believe it starts with the kids and making changes with them. I recently attended my stepson’s eighth grade graduation and there was a large Native presence. They did a land acknowledgement to start the ceremonies.”
BOOKS: Memory and poetry in a search for home
In a lyrical and haunting story, writer m.s. RedCherries takes an uneven journey through time and memory to find the mother and home she never knew. The book, “mother” (Penguin Books) is a work rooted in the now familiar story of displacement due to boarding schools.
Redcherries received a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and attended Arizona State University College of Law. She is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and now lives in Brooklyn.
In the book, an Indigenous girl is forcibly adopted out of her tribe and raised by a non-Indian family. As an adult she seeks to find her way back to her roots. The unnamed narrator begins to put the pieces of her birth family’s history together through stories she heard from her mother, father, sister and brother, all of whom remained on the reservation where she was born.
Through oral histories, family lore, and some imagined pasts and alternate futures, a memory collage of community emerges that questions adoption, inheritance and Indigenous identity in America. She writes in poetic vignettes, dream states, and lyrical streams of consciousness to mirror the nonlinear, patchwork process of constructing a sense of self. It’s an indelible, original work about the winding roads that lead us home.
RedCherries will be reading from her book at these locations and dates: August 19 at 7 p.m. at
Powells Books in Portland; September 26 at 7 p.m. at Prairie Lights Books, in Iowa City, Iowa.
MUSIC: Honoring a poet activist
Poet, artist, activist, husband, father. John Trudell, Santee Sioux, who passed away in 2015 at age 69, was a pivotal figure in turbulent times. He was the spokesperson at the occupation of Acatraz, a founder of AIM, and a devastated man who channeled the unimaginable loss of his family into prose.
“They’re called poems, but in reality they’re lines given to me to hang on to,” he said.
His most popular album with Jesse Ed Davis was “AKA Grafitti Man.” He was interviewed at length in the Michael Apted film “Incident at Oglala,” a documentary about Native American prisoner of conscience Leonard Peltier. He had a featured role in the Tribeca Films release “Thunderheart” and is featured in his own documentary “Trudell.”
Now his former band members and friends present “A Tribe to John Trudell” featuring collaborations by Quiltman, Annie Humphrey, David Huckfelt and Bad Dog band members Mark Shark and Ricky Eckstein on Saturday, July 27, in Portland at Alberta Abbey, hosted by The Jim Pepper Native Arts Council.
Go for the groove and as John would say, “Think more – believe less.”
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