American Indian Movement of Colorado: Honor the earth, IMPACTED NATIONS, art exhibit

Impacted Nations is an art exhibit developed and organized by Honor the Earth

Art: Forever Indian
Politics, pollution and the past haunt and inspire a powerful new show of contemporary American Indian art.
Mary Abbe, Star Tribune
Last update: March 02, 2006 – 3:27 PM

Fresh air, clean water, fertile soil, sunny days. The gifts of a bountiful Earth are simple, familiar and often threatened. For American Indians, whose traditional lifestyles and spiritual values are rooted in the cosmos, the environmental devastation wrought by many aspects of contemporary life tears a hole in the very fabric of existence.
Many of the environmental traumas that appear today in communities nationwide -- from polluted water to toxic waste dumps and nuclear fallout -- have plagued reservation lands for decades.

In "Impacted Nations," a proud and informative show of more than 50 paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture, more than 40 Indian artists grapple with environmental and spiritual themes. Organized by Honor the Earth, an Indian foundation and political advocacy organization based in Minneapolis, the show runs through April 15 at Ancient Traders Gallery in south Minneapolis.

Beautifully rendered in a rich variety of styles -- from traditional painting to contemporary ledger drawings and colorful Pop-style images -- the art has a tough-minded political edge that sharpens its impact. Helpful text panels explain the tribal history and legends behind many of the images. Beyond raising consciousness about environmental issues, the show provides a meandering road map to policy change, proposing that renewable wind and solar power replace such energy sources as coal, oil and nuclear power......

Across the country, reservation lands have been exploited and abused by industries seeking copper, coal, uranium, oil, wood, water and other resources. The politics are complicated and the treaties and government policies rarely straightforward, as many of the artists' texts explain. Jack Malotte, a Western Shoshone who lives near a nuclear test site in Nevada, used images of glittering, lyrically beautiful mushroom clouds and missiles rising from the desert to illustrate what his homeland would look like as a nuclear "ground zero." More bitterly, Navajo painter Brando Welhelm shows a Hopi maiden attacked by top-hatted "war pigs" on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. The painting, he explains, is a parody of an incendiary 1804 anti-Indian picture by John Vanderlyn. full article

Honor the Earth's mission statement

Our mission is to create awareness and support for Native environmental issues and to develop needed financial and political resources for the survival of sustainable Native communities. Honor the Earth develops these resources by using music, the arts, the media, and Indigenous wisdom to ask people to recognize our joint dependency on the Earth and be a voice for those not heard.

Honor the Earth describes Impacted Nations as "an artistic collaboration that portrays the conflict between Native peoples' cultural and spiritual relationship to the earth and the political and economic forces that undermine that relationship and our ways of life. As you will see in the artists' interpretations of dams, oil exploration, coal mining, and nuclear power, the United States energy policy has, for decades, negatively impacted our communities."