Native American Biography: Tanaya Winder, Duckwater Shoshone

 Tanaya Winder is enrolled in the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe, although she grew up on the Southern Ute Tribe, San Ignacio, Colorado.  Her background is Southern Ute, Shoshone, Dine, Paiute and Black,  She is a poet, vocal performer, including performance poetry, school teacher and motivational speaker.  She has several songs on YouTube.  With Cassandra opez she founded As/Us, an online literary magazine to promote women writers.  She also helps manage Dream Warriors Management which promotes Native American artists.  She published a work of poetry, "Words of Love."  She attended Stanford and graduated in English with an emphasis in creative writing.  She has an MFA from University of New Mexico.  I discovered her in the book #Not Your Princess.  

As Indigenous women writers and artists we are continually trying to exist, live and love in a world that doesn't always show its love for us.  This means, part of the artist's caall is to turn past traumas on their head, upside down, inside out, lift it up then put it back down as something changed and transformed so that others can find something beautiful or hopeful in it.  For that beauty and hope to exist we as Native American women must dive headfirst into the muck, ugliness, stark darkness of that wreckage.  This is what we do--we recast wounds in unending light.  And so light, love, and courage are circles we keep coming back to.  Tanaya Winder (Duckwater Shoshone). (From the Book "#Not Your Princess: Voices of Native American Women.

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Black Native American: Edmonia Lewis, Sculptor

Edmonia Lewis attended Oberlin College, a school and town known for abolitionist activity.  She was of Chippewa and African American descent, her mother being native American and her father a freed former slave.  While at school she was accused of poisoning two classmates with wine.  They both became ill after drinking wine she had given them.  However she was found not guilty as her lawyer argued there was no evidence that the women were poisoned.  Lewis moved to Boston after the trial, without graduating.  She says she always wanted to make the forms of things.  With a letter of introduction to William Lloyd Garrison, a famous abolitionist she told him of her desire to "make forms."  Garrison in turn introduced her to Edmund Brackett, a Boston Sculpture.  Brackett took her under his wing, and slowly her work showed promise.  She made a medallion with the bust of John Brown.
Then she made a bust of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who had led a regiment of Black soldiers.  She sold 100 copies of this sculpture.  She relocated to Rome, Italy in 1865, where she would live the remainder of her life.  She visited America frequently.  She continued to make sculptures that appealed to an American audience.  she used the neoclassical style, an updated version of classical art.
"Forever Free" is a famous work showing the emancipation.
Her most famous work is "The Death of Cleopatra."
She also took on Native American subjects, including "The Old Arrow Maker and his Daughter."  She also did a version of Hiawatha.
Moving to Rome allowed her to pursue her art as a woman, as their were a group of women there who supported each other.  Also her African and Native heritage was not a roadblock there.

Information is gleaned from the book Proudly Red and Black: Stories of African and Native Americans, William Loren Katz and Paula A Franklin, Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 1993.