NATIVE ART, NATIVE HANDS

Nico Strange Owl is drawing Native artists and community members back to the mountains beneath Longs Peak By Emily Bernard Boulder Weekly The assignment came in third grade, just before Thanksgiving, the way it does in elementary schools across the country: pick a tribe, write a report. I went home and asked my dad who we were. Blackfoot, he said. The library book I checked out painted a brutal picture of a violent people, feared and disliked by other Indigenous nations. I remember carrying those pages home in my backpack, sick with the feeling that I had discovered something shameful. When I told my dad, he paused. His face settled into a long silence as he tried mentally to simplify a history contested, rewritten and misunderstood long before either of us were born. He corrected the book. But what stayed with me wasn't the correction. It was the realization that something about who we were existed somewhere beyond the few facts either of us could easily reach for.

This excerpt comes from the named source. Read the original for the full reporting.