This is a dress that I designed and I wore,
and I danced in it for about five years.
It's really based upon traditional Lakota designs.
I grew up on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
And I'm a member of the Hunkpapa Standing Rock Sioux tribe.
My grandmother and aunts taught us how to bead from a very early age.
They made sure that we had the appropriate clothing, beadwork, and dresses.
This was just something that they grew up doing and taught us to do the same.
I grew up around a lot of Native American art, but we were raised on the reservation where we
didn't have museums.
When I went to college and I started taking art history, I wanted
to learn about art of the world.
However, I did notice that museums rendered us all nameless and faceless.
Museums often name the white men who created art, but for a lot
of Indigenous peoples, only their tribe is named, and it's not often even the tribe that
the nation calls itself.
It's always the colonizers' name of the tribe.
This has impacted efforts
to make Native artwork visible.
Native peoples have been dehumanized since contact.
There's a sculpture of Hiawatha in the courtyard,
and that has been how America sees Native Americans for a long time:
this mystical, noble caricature that's been defeated;
his head is looking down at the ground. It's rather depressing.
The world likes to see American Indians in the past, and that's something
that causes a lot of difficulty with being seen today in America.
Museums collected pieces
like that and display them prominently to this day without
a counter-narrative in the same space.
In 2015, The Met curated a show called "Artists of Earth and Sky,"
and my dress was selected as one of the central pieces of the exhibit.
The Met hadn't had a major exhibition with
contemporary Native American works ever.
You know, 2015, that's pretty late,
but it's better late than never.
The dress is now part of the American Wing collection.
When I hold the dress, it is about my grandmothers—what they've taught me—
and I become overwhelmed with gratitude.
The dress is a conduit for communication and dialogue between peoples,
and not just people that live in this timeframe, but also people who lived before and people
who are coming after us.
Museums have traditionally put us in the ethnographic section.
Adding our contemporary Native art to the American Wing is recognizing the people of today,
the survivors of colonialism, and
changing the narrative of how The Met sees America.