Julia Hamer-Light

In 1970, Oglala Lakȟóta artist Arthur Amiotte (b. 1942) knotted dried thíŋpsiŋla, a root that has sustained Lakȟóta communities through generations of harsh winters, into one of his wall hangings. A web crocheted around a bent bough reflects the plant's relational networks, while knitted shapes below resemble burrowing roots. Though Amiotte began his career as a painter, he increasingly worked with repurposed fiber media, hand-tanned hide, and found materials to make wall hangings after 1969. That year, he returned home to the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, to develop a Lakȟóta cultural art education curriculum at a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) school. My dissertation engages Amiotte’s artistic and pedagogical praxis as a microcosm of broader transformations within Native self-determination movements and modernisms in the United States. I define Amiotte’s experiential education curricula and collaborative fiber practice as two aspects of Lakȟóta ecological pedagogy, understood as his relational ethics dedicated to the vitality of Indigenous cosmology, community, and land. 

My chapters move chronologically and thematically. Chapter one establishes the political stakes of Native cultural art education programs during the 1960s and 1970s by following Amiotte’s early artistic and pedagogical training. Chapter two contends that Amiotte’s work as both an artist and educator must be understood together by examining how his fiber practice evolved as part of his Lakȟóta ecological pedagogy on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Chapter three considers how Amiotte and other Indigenous educators participated in the BIA Art Vans program to elucidate connections between art education, colonization, and federal Indian policy. The final chapter explores how Amiotte, his grandmother, and two aunts extended relationally based pedagogy into a colonial exhibition space through a curatorial practice guided by Lakȟóta values of collaboration and generosity. Ultimately, my project establishes the political importance of creative pedagogy in Native art history by describing how Amiotte disrupted colonial programs of teaching and displaying Native art. Within this single-artist study, Amiotte’s work on the Pine Ridge Reservation emerges as one center in the growing field of multiple modernisms in the United States.