Students create native crafts

Darrell Mitchell, a local woodworker, went from room to room giving everyone a chance to smell the white mountain sage and say a prayer.

Marilyn Cleveland, an elder in the First Nations Educational Cultural Center, waived the incense smoke from the sage over her head as a means of prayer for the event.

“This is a smudge stick,” Cleveland said. “It’s like a prayer. We do this when we start the event. What it is is like a cleansing thing. When I put the smoke over my head, I said to the Creator, ‘let’s have a good meeting. Let’s enjoy ourselves today.”

Wednesday night, FNECC had its weekly craft night and potluck dinner. The event spanned five different rooms, each with different crafts, such as beading, and included traditional Native American food, such as elk soup and hominy.

Mary Connors, FNECC program assistant and secretary, said the new director, Brian Gilley, created the weekly event three years ago.

“Our center is not in the way of anywhere else,” Connors said. “It allows people to focus on the arts and cultures. That’s going to bring people together and create a community. The craft nights are traditional native art.”

Conners said she considers Cleveland, who is Cherokee Indian, a jewel to the FNECC and a respectable beadmaker for craft nights.

“Whenever they need anything, they call me,” Cleveland said. “I do a lot of Native American crafts. We made moccasins, we made shawls, we made a lot of our regalia here.”

Cleveland said that she learned her valuable craft from her grandmother, and the beadwork to her is more than just artwork.         

“When she taught me the art of the beadwork, she also taught me the prayers that are put in my beadwork,” she said. “That’s why I can’t hardly sell my beadwork, because it’s like selling my religion. I don’t teach the spiritual part of it because that was for me to learn ... I don’t teach the spiritual part to everybody.”

Brenna Two Bears is a senior at Bloomington South High School. She is registered as Ho-chunk and is also half Navajo and a fourth Lakota. Two Bears said that through learning crafts and meeting people like her, she has gained a better sense of her culture.

“I think it’s just getting together and remembering who we are,” Two Bears said. “Me and my sister are the only natives at South, so being here and seeing all these natives, it’s like nice to be with people that understand where you’re coming from. You don’t have to explain yourself.”