8 NOVEMBER 28-DECEMBER 4, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Native Truths DANIELLE SEEWALKER BLURS THE LINES BETWEEN ART AND ACTIVISM. BY EMILY FERGUSON “I think my whole existence is very political, in a way,” says Danielle SeeWalker, “because we weren’t supposed to be here.” SeeWalker, a Hunkpapa Lakota and a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in North Dakota, is sitting in a chair in the corner of her Denver studio, just below a portrait that her father painted of her when she was young. The young Danielle has an infectious grin, her hands propping up her head over a background of warm yellow. SeeWalker will have to move her studio in the coming months; it’s located inside the Evans School in the Golden Triangle, which will be redeveloped. But for now, it is fi lled with her multimedia works, whose motifs reference her heritage and Native history, as well as personal and historical photos that inspire her. A buffalo hide covers the fl oor, and her tribe’s fl ag is tacked to one wall, hanging above another that represents the Land Back movement. A neon-pink sign reads “Mitakuye Oyasin,” a Lakota saying that loosely translates to “We are all related.” Most of her artwork comprises portraits of Native people whose faces are bare except for one detailed eye. And in that small portion of the painting, a weighty story is clarifi ed in glances of hope, trauma, suspicion, gentleness. The series came from a dream that, in its telling, sounds more like a premonition. A woman with one eye came to her, SeeWalker remembers. She was clothed in an elk-tooth dress, and cascades of long, white hair fl oated around her. “In the dream, she kept following me really closely, and I knew she was from a dif- ferent time,” the artist says. “When I would look at her, her face was sort of a blur...except for this one eye. It was almost like she was trying to speak to me through just looking at each other.” The dream lingered with the artist long after she woke up. And SeeWalker soon uncovered the woman’s message. “I believe it to be speaking up through my art,” SeeWalker says. “You need to tell our sto- ries. You need to speak up. You need to bring narratives from an Indigenous perspective and put it out there. Because you don’t often hear those sides of the narrative of history.” SeeWalker’s art proudly emphasizes her people’s history, but this pride goes beyond the canvas, from art to activism. “To me, there’s not a fi ne or hard line drawn between the two,” she says. In this year alone, History Colorado has highlighted SeeWalker’s work in a major exhibit; she’s painted murals for the ChromaFest Mural Fes- tival in St. Paul, Minnesota, as well as the Denver Walls fes- tival and Colfax Canvas. She’s just returned from painting with Babe Walls in Atlanta and is getting ready for an upcom- ing show in Philadelphia. She’s done all of this while working a full-time job at Michelin, man- aging its accounts with federal entities ranging from the FBI and CIA to the National Park Service, U.S. Border Patrol and the U.S. Postal Service. Some- how, it hasn’t gotten in the way of her productivity. SeeWalker’s most recent project in the art world in- volved curating an exhibit of Indigenous artists’ work titled This Is Native Art, on display through February at the Colorado Capitol. “This is a historical show,” she notes. “This has never been done before, an all-Native art exhibition in the Capitol.” Usually, when SeeWalker is in that build- ing, she’s fi ghting for Native American rights. One of the fi rst bills she helped push banned the use of derogatory American Indian mas- cots at schools ranging from the elementary to the university level; it was signed into law in 2021. SeeWalker and other Indigenous women worked alongside legislators for years to establish the Offi ce of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives, which also created a missing-persons alert program at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation in 2022. SeeWalker moved to the Mile High City because of her job. She’s worked for Michelin since 2011 and was based in Illinois and South Carolina before coming to Denver. “It allowed me to be back closer to home and had the qualities of life that were important to me — access to some of the best outdoors, a large Native American community that I could be involved in...and a more liberal community in general where I could raise my kids comfortably,” she says. “When I moved to Colorado in 2018, there were two main objectives I wanted to do when I was here: get integrated back into the Native community, because I knew there was such a great community of Native people here, and I wanted to immerse myself in the art community,” SeeWalker recalls. “And I did those immediately.” She credits Babe Walls, for which she is now an organizer, with kick-starting her art career in 2020, when the all-women and nonbinary mural festival approached her to participate. SeeWalker hadn’t created a mural before, but she jumped at the opportunity. She and local artist Romelle painted an entire residence in Westminster with a mural high- lighting Native women and drawing attention to the missing and murdered Indigenous relatives crisis that she would spotlight at the Capitol for the next two years. Her art career quickly picked up, moving beyond Colorado and even this country. See- Walker was in Amsterdam last year to install a mural celebrating street art and graffi ti for the STRAAT Museum. Next May, she will go to Gaza, where she plans to contribute a mural on the West Bank. The Palestinian Artists Consortium reached out to her this spring to contribute to an online symposium held in June, not long after it learned of an incident involving SeeWalker that made headlines around the world. In May, the Town of Vail removed See- Walker from its Art in Public Places resi- dency program because of a mixed-media piece she’d created months earlier relating the tragedies of American Indians and Pal- estinians, titled “G Is for Genocide.” Rep- resented by the ACLU, SeeWalker fi led a civil complaint against Vail in October, on Indigenous Peoples Day. She admits she’s somewhat nervous about installing a mural on the West Bank, but art as a means of resistance is in See- Walker’s blood. “If there’s an opportunity for me to collab with a Palestinian muralist there and work together to create a piece in solidarity, I would love to do that,” she says. She’s also working on the Red Road Proj- ect, which she started with her best friend, Carlotta Cardana; their fi rst show was in Italy in 2013. “It’s all about documenting Native people as we exist today, a photo- documentary project,” SeeWalker says. “We’ve had exhibitions all over the world for that. My best friend does all the photos, and I do the writing for it. Currently, it’s on tour for four years; that started in Walnut Creek outside of San Francisco, which was one of our biggest U.S. shows so far.” The two artists founded the Red Road Project after SeeWalker became increas- ingly frustrated with the media’s depictions of Native life. “Why are they not reporting on the language revitalization, or the amaz- ing artwork that’s being done and put out there by these people? Or the rich beauty, the culture and all the great things that are happening in Indian Country?” she says. “Those stories never get told. And I was talking to my best friend about it, and she’s like, ‘Well, why don’t we tell those stories?’ And that resonated with me. Something my dad always told me was, ‘If you don’t speak up, Danielle, nobody’s gonna do it for you.’” Her artistry comes from her dad’s side, SeeWalker says, adding that her aunts and uncles are also talented, self-taught artists. For her own art, she has developed a distinct approach to her subject matter that brings to mind the expressionistic, multimedia work of such artists as Deborah Roberts, but with a style unique to SeeWalker. Based on her dream, SeeWalker’s current series of mixed-media works include bright as well as muted colors creating portraits of Native people, with line designs placed around the singular eyes and dots along the clothing that portray elk teeth stitched in traditional dresses. In her latest painting, “Everyone talks about having a seat but this table ain’t for us,” two women in elk-tooth CULTURE continued on page 11 KEEP UP ON DENVER ARTS AND CULTURE AT WESTWORD.COM/ARTS Danielle SeeWalker in her studio. CHRISTIAN HUNDLEY
