While we can’t change the past, we can be champions for a future of cultural equality. I wanted to learn more about contemporary Native American heritage. I’d like to share two standouts
Susan La Flesche Picotte was the first Native American woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, graduating from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1889. A member of the Omaha tribe, she grew up on the Omaha Reservation in northeast Nebraska, where she once watched a native woman die because the local white doctor refused to give her care. Since that memory was what inspired her to become a physician, she eventually returned to Nebraska, where she established a private practice serving both Native American and white patients. Two years before her death from cancer in 1915, she achieved her life’s dream when she opened her own hospital on the Omaha Reservation—the first hospital built on Native American land without government assistance. Today, the Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte Memorial Hospital in Walthill, Nebraska, is home to a museum honoring her legacy. 🏥
When he was elected to serve Colorado in the U.S. Senate in 1992, Ben Nighthorse Campbell was the only Native American serving in Congress and the first Native American to serve in the Senate in more than 60 years. Descended from a Portuguese immigrant and a Northern Cheyenne Indian, he had many lives before he was a lawmaker. He was a Korean War veteran, an Olympic judo wrestler, and even a renowned jewelry artist. When he retired from the Senate in 2005, his major achievements included passing legislation to secure Native American water rights, protect wilderness areas, prevent fetal alcohol syndrome, create Colorado’s Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, and establish the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. 🎖
Happy Thanksgiving to you and your loved ones 🦃🌽🥧🍷
From BestLifeOnline: 13 Important Native Americans You Didn’t Learn About in School
Now available 🌟 This new limited edition bookmark, Beyond the Nonsense was released last week for free at Brookline Booksmith. Originally made in the aftermath of Trump’s acquittal and shelved due to lockdown, I decided to make Summer Love to embrace the warmth of the season. The surreality of Nonsense now suits the spirit of Halloween as well as the election season 🎃👻🤢😱
If you’re in the Boston area, drop by the shop to peruse the books and collect your own bookmark 🤗
Preview of my conversations with people about their tattoos. Was really fun to connect with folks who’ve bonded with my paintings, especially during these months of Corona isolation. Have a peek 🌟 Thanks to Jenny, Magdalena, Jordan, Sarah, Thomas & Angel, Lynn, and Jocelyn 🥳
New painting Vivarium Voyager. Created over the summer for Light Grey Art Lab’s World Roulette show 🌟
My four random prompts were: high humidity, advanced prosthetics, ghosts, in the new scientific age✨
⚡️⚡️⚡️
The once beautiful and lush land was no more. The words of worst case scenarios went unheeded. Hubris has a history of repeating itself. Young Tyrell had enjoyed school before it ended. He’d taken to making terrariums to foster plants, in jars larger on the inside based upon principles of the Tardis. His mother was duly impressed. She had been a pioneering roboticist and she was ready. Together they fashioned a means of traversing the cataclysm.
The roads of their neighborhood fissured with steam followed by fire. The asphalt bulged then cracked open into underground caverns. Mother and son had finished in the knick of time. They climbed inside and pulled the cork into place. With a creaking of gears and gliding of pistons the mechanical legs lifted them off the inhospitable ground. They wouldn’t give up so easily. “Time for the new age,” said Tyrell as they advanced. But their confrontations had only begun. Below them hands of bone clawed like spiders. Uncoupled souls arose, unwilling to be denied what they had in life taken for granted, peered through the glass with envy…
