(gentle music) - [Melanie] Being labeled an artist was definitely a shock.

I think there's a wide variety of us, and learning more about each of them individually has also helped open my eyes to the entire realm of artists.

- [Maria] There's thousands of us within North Dakota and Minnesota.

I think that focus of having all of our own stories and how we strive to kind of continue to do the things that we're doing is very important.

- We entered into a partnership with the North Dakota Council on the Arts to provide five indigenous artist fellowships, William Breen, Bill Breen, Dakota digital artist, Stuart Lonus, who is professionally known as Stuart James, a hip hop artist, Frankie Morin, a comic book artist, Maria Cree, musician, works with the Red Willow Collective, Melanie Schwab, who's doing traditional arts.

As the artists have talked about, we have our culture and traditions.

We wanna remain who we are, but we live in a modern world, in a contemporary world where culture is constantly changing and evolving, and so their representation of how that culture changes and evolves is so important.

(gentle music) - I'm Melanie Sue Schwab, and I am Hunkpapas Sioux from Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

I'm a traditional Native American artist.

I focus on beadwork, quillwork, and traditional tanned hides.

So I am flushing off, scraping off the flesh from this side, so I'm scraping down.

This would be the internal side of the animal.

This is a deer that I shot this fall, so I'm just scraping down all of this membrane to start softening it.

Then I'll flip it over, do the other side, scrape off the hair, and then after I've scraped it once or twice, then I will put on a brain mixture.

So I take pork brain, blend it up, put it on there.

That'll again soften that membrane, and then I'll scrape it off again, and I'll do that process a few times.

So it started back in 2015 when I was getting married.

I wanted to incorporate something traditional into my wedding aspect.

My husband's a cowboy, so we always joke that I'm the Indian, he's a cowboy.

So I wanted some moccasins for my wedding that I had created myself.

So that was the first thing that I learned how to do was bead moccasins.

From there, I began hunting more with my husband and family and thought that there was so much more of the animal that could be utilized.

So I started learning how to traditionally tan the hides.

So after the hunt, I go through and I break down the animal, get all the flesh off, scraping, stretching, tanning.

From there, I use that hide to create moccasins.

I'm currently working on a Sioux traditional women's dress, which is going to be very interesting and a long process.

Well I have a lot of dreams, but the funds are gonna be used to kind of develop business that I've started.

I call myself the Modern Sioux, and I'm going to be buying some equipment to document the process of everything that I'm doing.

So when I'm tanning traditional hides, I'll be able to record everything from start to finish, put it online so that people that don't necessarily live in the area can learn online as well.

Then I'm gonna build a website that kind of tells a little bit more about me and the things that I am doing and events that I might be holding to show my work.

And then eventually I would like to purchase some kind of area to do everything at that's not inside my home.

I think people are always stunned to hear that everything that I'm using, the material that I'm using, the hides specifically come from deer that I've hunted myself.

I think that's always very much a shock that it's not something that's bought overseas and imported.

(upbeat music) - My name is Maria Cree.

My native given name is Yellowbird Woman.

I'm an enrolled member of Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.

I am a Community Organizer within Minot, North Dakota for the last decade.

Essentially what I do is I book DIY all ages events for the last 12 years, and so what I usually do is I collaborate with local artists, print makers, art makers.

We're trying to utilize a lot of this grant to get more video art within what shows.

Trying to just collaborate as much as we can with that.

So essentially for the music collective, the hope with the grant is to acquire more equipment, just to utilize more at our events because we don't have a solid space currently, we utilize a lot of local venues.

♪ I feel good ♪ ♪ Hey, send me the chills ♪ My grandparents are Francis and Rose Cree.

They were really well known Ojibwe people within North Dakota.

They're mostly well known for their basket weaving, which essentially was red, brown, and scraped brown willow, and it's something that's been handed down for multiple generations.

I was very fortunate enough to learn how to do that.

Currently, right now, our button making is just a way for us to promote.

Everybody loves buttons, trinkets, any little junky thing.

I am obviously a sucker for those things.

Button-making is something that I feel like is very integral within punk community and the way that we merchandise.

The goal with Red Willow Collective is creating more spaces for BIPOC youth, and by BIPOC youth, I essentially mean Black, indigenous, and people of color and a lot of queer youth.

I am queer myself.

We hope within this state, by utilizing our two spiritedness, is to kind of normalize what is normal within our community.

I also think being like a modern res kid on top of it, I feel like punk has taught me a lot about that and how to be vulnerable and how to be open about that.

And so me doing things like this, or even applying for a grant defeats the humbleness part, but it's also something that I think is very important because I want multiple generations under me to eventually have space to feel like they're allowed to talk about these things, to feel like they have access, to be able to show their art.

- At the end of the fellowship, they will be participating in a Capstone presentation, and I'm really excited to hear what they come up with and what their journeys are like because each one is so different and sort of needing different things.

It'll be really interesting at the end of the fellowship to hear how they've grown and what they've done to grow.

- Sacred Pipe Resources has been such a great aspect to our community to add for Native American youth to just find outlets for things to learn and do.

They've actually brought in a lot of educators to help teach some of these classes, and I do teach myself, so I'm so thankful that they put together this fellowship with the North Dakota Council of the Arts just to give everybody an opportunity because these grants aren't easy to come by.

- I think the biggest thing about understanding Native art is that for us as a people, as indigenous people, art is not something separate from ourselves.

I really like the artists that were selected because they do represent that diversity of art forms and how the work that they're doing is changing lives.

- [Announcer] Funded by the North Dakota Council on the Arts and by the members of Prairie Public.