A dream came true for Shelley Patrick when the Mvskoge Waters Gallery opened Dec. 13 at the Jenks Riverwalk.
“We have been wanting this our entire lives,” says Patrick, a printmaker and fashion designer who manages the gallery. “It’s the first and only tribally-owned art gallery in the greater Tulsa area.”
Patrick says Muscogee artists now have “a place to show our artwork and our understanding of our history and culture, and to promote our view of the world.”
The gallery features sculpture, traditional and modern dress, jewelry, textile art, accessories and paintings. The filmmaker Sterlin Harjo was invited to exhibit his storyboarding art. Some items will be for sale, says Patrick, but the primary purpose is to showcase Muscogee artists.
Summer Zah, manager of the FAM Store at First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, draws on her Navajo, Choctaw and Apache ancestry for her printmaking, installation art and large-scale woven tapestries.
“A lot of Native people do take up some kind of creative endeavor,” Zah says.
And for many, it’s a family tradition. In her native New Mexico, Zah learned basketry and beadwork from her relatives, “or we took classes together,” she says. Her parents made their own regalia for powwows.
Ian Thompson, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Choctaw Nation, has practiced flintknapping since the age of seven, thanks to his uncle.
“We were at the Kansas City zoo, and he pulled some flint out of the ground and said ‘let’s go make something.’ That was a gateway into the culture for me,” Thompson says.
“Flintknapping is one of the oldest art forms and technologies in the world,” he continues. “There are certain types of rocks that break like glass in a predictable way, with a sharp edge. Flintknapping is applying force to the stone to make it into sharp-edged tools and weapons.”
Stones for flintknapping can be found in Oklahoma, including John’s Valley chert in the southeast, Peoria/Keokuk chert in the northeast and Alibates flint in the streams of western Oklahoma.
Thompson creates knife blades, arrow points, atlatl points and tools to process bison and deer, and he hunts deer with a traditional Choctaw longbow with stone-tipped arrows.
“It’s a connection with the land, if you do Indigenous arts,” Thompson says. “It’s a heritage that’s been passed down through hundreds of generations. It’s an opportunity to do things that are sustainable, in balance with the land.”
Patrick is a member of eastern Oklahoma’s Fife family, which parlayed sewing for the family into The Fife Collection, a business incorporated in 1978 by her mother and aunts.
‘It was a more formal version of Muscogee dress,” Patrick says. “They were in a lot of fashion shows.”
The eight children of James and Carmen Griffin Fife all took up some form of art, Patrick says, including leatherworking, quilting, flintknapping and bow-making.
The Fife Collection is no longer officially incorporated, “but we still have a small collection,” Patrick says.
The Choctaw people are known for their pottery, says Thompson, who started teaching himself as a child.
“By high school, I made pieces that survived firing, then I found some really good teachers. For my dissertation, one of the things I studied was Choctaw ancestral pottery.”
Indigenous art is beautiful, Thompson acknowledges, but it’s more than that: it’s deep community heritage.
“Basketry is probably the traditional art that Choctaws are best known for,” Thompson mentions.
But those baskets, fashioned from river cane, weren’t just to sit on a shelf.
“Southeastern tribes created earth mounds, a form of monumental architecture, one basket load of dirt at a time,” Thompson says.
Handcrafted items for sale in the FAM Store include pottery, beadwork, jewelry and ribbon skirts. The Choctaw Cultural Center in Durant offers beadwork, basketry, jewelry and craft kits to make moccasins or do beadwork.
Other venues to view these pieces include the Chickasaw Nation’s Exhibit C at the OKANA Resort, Red Earth Art Center in Oklahoma City, Sharp’s Indian Store in Ponca City, McKee’s Indian Store in Anadarko and Southwest Trading Company in Tulsa.
