Art Making With, in, and of Indigenous Communities in the Southwest

• In Event: Out-of-School-Time Youth Arts Programs: What Are the Big Juicy Questions?

Abstract

Objective
Education researchers who seek to leverage community assets to improve the conditions for teaching and learning often turn to a cultural geographic framework for describing community (Collins, 2008; Mills & Kraftl, 2015). This paper seeks to understand how art-making happens with, in, and of the Indigenous Southwest, as a method of honoring community art-making practices as legitimate forms of knowledge and to begin to connect these forms of knowledge to the national out-of-school time community network.

Theoretical Perspectives
Prior research has demonstrated that art making in rural settings focuses on individuals as inseparable from their communities, highlighting the social, cultural, and historical nature of human development (Halverson et al., 2009; Pyles, 2016). However, characterizing communities as either “urban” or “rural” hides many features of the social, cultural, and historical context embedded in particular regions. Organizations that work with young people living on Tribal lands, for example, have demonstrated the role of Native storytelling and the importance of local environmental issues in young peoples’ filmmaking processes (e.g. Gibbons, Drift, & Drift, 2011; Tynan, 2017).

Modes of inquiry
This paper relies on interviews, focus groups, and artifacts that are directly connected to art-making with young people in the Indignous Southwest. We used a snowball sampling technique to identify teaching artists, organizational leaders, policy makers, and funders whose work aims to honor the traditions of young Native artists and to improve their educational outcomes through participation in the arts.

Data sources, evidence, objects
We conducted four interviews and three focus groups with a total of 12 artists and arts leaders, all of whom work directly with Indigenous students living in the Southwest. . We also analyzed a series of reports focused exclusively on the experiences of organizations working with Indigenous youth artists (Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, 2021).

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
This work resulted in four key insights about the nature of youth arts practice in, with, and through Indigenous communities:
● Art making is inseparable from the cultural histories and individual lived experiences of young people and their elders;
● Arts practice is fundamentally intergenerational; it is challenging to call out “youth arts” as a separate category of knowing, doing, and being;
● Arts experiences designed for young people living on reservations and pueblos must look different from experiences designed for young people who come together exclusively for the purpose of exploring identity through art-making;
● The time it takes for non-Native peoples to build relationships with Native communities in order to create successful programs cannot be underestimated.

Scholarly significance
Out-of-school time research often groups BIPOC youth communities into a single group, without accounting for the social, cultural, and historical geography where youth work occurs. Art-making in particular affords direct connection to the ways of knowing, doing, seeing, and valuing that define communities and provide insight into how to design successful programs for young people that are asset-based and grounded in particular communities.

Author

• Erica Rosenfeld Halverson, University of Wisconsin - Madison