I came as a young man, refugee from the plains.

Looking for higher ground Where the sun shines through the rain.

The mountain folks & the old cowpolks found peace of mind.

I guess loving Mother Nature makes you naturally kind.

Colorado.. Everywhere I go, Im in your shadow you're calling to me.

Colorado.

The sun's melting the snow making the river flow to the sea.

Everything an Indian does is in a circle.

And that is because the power of the world always works in circles and everything tries to be round.

What does it mean to be Native American?

It means to be proud, to never be ashamed of who you are to to know that.

That our past and our beginning and our, our our history is a whole circle of life.

And the circle of life is, is everyone and everything that comes in contact with you are your teachers.

You leave them something and in turn they leave you something and it's a constant.

The circle of life is a metamorphosis from beginning to end.

It's just this little cocoon that just starts out as a just a little caterpillar and just, you know, grows into a beautiful butterfly, and that's your whole life.

It's just a complete circle.

Our circle consists of all people to the east of the yellow nation, to the south of the white nation, to the west of the black nation, to the north of the red nation.

They say, you mix that all up and it is the dirt of Mother Earth.

Obviously, the circle represents a lot of things.

It represents the path that we take in our life from birth to death.

It represents the sun.

It represents, the shape of our homes.

It represents, time.

That circle has a lot to do with being Indian.

In my regalia, in moccasins, with gourd and eagle feather fan in my regalia.

Imagine me.

Imagine that I sing and dance at your wedding.

I think that people in general, not just Indians, but anybody, has a need for music and has a need to express themselves through dance.

And we have a need to gather socially.

And I think that these social gatherings just naturally bring about dance and music and fun and laughter and all the things that you find at powwows There was a time in American history after Indians were put on a reservation, incarcerated, so to speak, that they were prevented by law from doing certain things.

They had to stop the Sundance.

They had to stop the potlatch in the Northwest Coast.

They had to stop all of their religious dances, which comprised about 90% of all their dances.

They had to stop those.

By law, I mean at gunpoint.

One of the few things that they let them do in the Plains was called the Omaha style of dancing, or sometimes it's commonly called the Grass dance, and it was just kind of an enjoyable dance that had no religious connotation, that has grown to what is now commonly called a powwow.

Powwows for me, are something that are so deeply ingrained in me.

I mean, some of my earliest memories are are of the drum and of going to sleep as a child, you know, in my mother's arms at a powwow and being carried out at 2:00 in the morning, you know, when it's all over with, by my father and and going to bed in a teepee instead of a house.

Powwows mean family.

They mean friends.

They mean, you know, coming in contact with your roots again.

Respecting the elders and listening to what they have to say.

That's where our true heritage comes from.

I think of my grandfather when I dance, I'm far away from them.

It means a lot to me when I see.

When I see them come down from Nebraska.

My parents come down from Kansas to come here and support me.

It means a lot to me as an Indian young lady.

I just feel a lot of gratitude.

I have 13 brothers and sisters.

Most of all of us are all powwow people.

We grew up in Powwow and the arena in that circle.

It makes you so, so proud to be alive and so thankful that.

That you're able to go out there and honor, honor that & keep traditon alive Father.

Full blood.

I honor him when I dance.

Powwow is a social dance, and nowadays there's money involved.

Everything is real competitive.

The women, the northern ones, they dance stationary and the southern, they move in a circular motion.

And the jingles, they have the little jingle cones on their dress.

And then the fancy shawl are the fast movements.

And they have the shawl.

The man is the grass, and their regalia is made up of yarn.

And then we have the northern traditional, which is the bustle, and their outfits have feathers on there.

And then we have the fancy dancers who have the big bustles.

We teach our children at a young age.

You see some of the children in arena, which they call the tiny tots, and some of them children are like probably barely two years old or barely able to walk and are out there dancing.

So we teach our children as early as you know, we can, you know, which is good because you know that, you know, knowing by teaching them they're going to be carrying on our culture and our ways of life after we've gone on.

Some of them are very serious.

You know, you see these little boys that are, you know, traditional dancers and they're they're four years old and they're serious about it.

The powwows to me is a is an indication of unity.

All of a sudden we're realizing that, you know, we have to do this in order to not only teach our children, but come together as one tribe.

It's exciting.

I mean, when we get ready to come to powwow, just like yesterday morning, the adrenaline really gets to pumping because you just start going over in your mind.

Okay, who am I going to meet this time?

Who am I going to talk to?

Who's going to be here?

Who are we going to see from the last powwow?

This is like, this is where you belong.

It's like you're within your own element.

It's like coming home.

Yeah, that's a real good.

Just like coming home.

And this is kind of what we like to convey today.

You know, whenever we participate in a powwow that, you know, look at us.

No matter what has happened to us in the past, you know, we can still stand up and be counted.

I have to ask the question, who gets to write history?

And if it's only the guy that knows how to write, then I think we have a very narrow idea about what history really did.

The only history that that a lot of people pay attention to is that that's been written down in the last 200 years, or that that the European has, has written down or was involved in.

I think many of those books are being rewritten now, and nobody is trying to be politically correct.

They're just trying to tell it the way it should have been told in the first place, that there was another side of the issue.

When in actuality there were probably many, many different tribes, prehistoric and historic and, well, contemporary too that have lived and lived in Colorado.

When my ancestors got here was long before this was a state, long before it was even a territory.

It was just an area.

And the Plains people, the Cheyenne and the Lakota and the Crow in the north, and then the Kiowa, the Comanche and a number of other ones in the south on the eastern side of the state.

That was pretty much their territory.

The mountains was controlled predominantly by the Utes, which are still here.

Prior to that, we had the Anasazi and, you know, down at Mesa Verde, we had probably the Fremont Indians, which were another prehistoric tribe.

There are many Indians in this state, probably 25,000 just in the Denver metropolitan area alone.

They come from all over the place.

We don't change our ways.

Our beliefs or our feelings.

Just because we live in the cities.

You know, we still relate to our Indian culture and our traditions.

We still practice them every day.

They live in the white man's world and they enjoy a great part of it.

But they always, always go back to their traditions.

They don't give up their traditions.

It's a it's passed on to each generation, to their children's children, and it's something that they don't ever want to lose and I know will never be forgotten.

We are truly blessed because we were born and die soon within a true circle of motion, like eagle rounding out the morning inside us.

We pray that it will be done in beauty, in beauty.

The eagle flies high in the sky and it flies over the different terrains in different areas, through the rain, through the storm, over the storm.

You know, the Eagle is a brother.

We call him my brother.

You know this brother.

It's one of those one that carries his, carries our messages between us people and the creator.

You know.

You know how far he gets up so far, you know.

And that's why he's he's kind of the closest to the creator.

If the eagle was sitting there, the expression is before us there will be a good, good day, maybe a good feeling.

Maybe you all have a wonderful day.

Maybe you will see something even even greater than what you imagine.

You know what you.

What you see with the eyes.

When my husband and I were married while we were saying our vows, and while the medicine man was blessing us, there were two eagles that were circling right above the wedding ceremony.

And that was that was very important.

We use an eagle feather or an eagle plume in our car, like a Catholic would use a Saint Christopher medal.

You know, you keep it there for protection.

There was a battle between two tribes.

And as the sun was going down one day, this this battle was very continuous.

And at the end of one day they were retreating.

But as they were retreating, one of the warriors had lost his feather, his eagle feather.

So he confronted his leader and his chief, and and so the chief confronted the spiritual leader and told him about this.

And he said, we must retrieve that eagle feather, for it is his.

And that is so that evening a group went back to find this eagle feather.

But in the meantime their enemy was setting up an ambush, and as they set up the ambush, they knew that the tribe, that the warriors were going to come back to retrieve this eagle feather.

So as these warriors came back for this eagle feather, they were captured.

And right then, right then the captured warriors started singing their dead songs, because in that type of situation, they knew they were going to die anyway.

And so what happens was the tribe that had captured these warriors took another step and they said, because of this eagle feather, we have one thing in common, and that is the respect that we carry for this object.

And so they blindfolded their enemies and they took them back to their camp, and instead of killing them, they gave them gifts.

And they they honored them by telling them that we respect you for the reason that you were willing to give up your life for this one eagle feather.

I feel like I float in the air just as the eagle would do with the eagle.

With the feathers that I'm wearing.

This eagle has a power which no man knows.

No man can express, no man can say.

And it's the greatest power that anyone could see which is sacred.

We don't speak of these things.

I would guess that all artists in any of the arts would tell you that when it's magic, it happens in spite of them rather than because of them.

But it comes in a very magical way, and that's when it's the best.

You don't choose things, they choose you.

I write poetry, but I can't bring myself to call myself a poet, and I can't bring myself to call myself an artist or a sculptor.

And and I think it's because I hold those things in such high esteem.

My heritage was Lakota, my family.

I was painting a lot of landscapes and doing extremely well with that, and I just got tired of it and I felt I needed to do something else that was really driving me, and I started painting the people again, Indian imagery emerging from flowers and turning into clouds and feathers floating and riding alongside.

And it was really quite fascinating to me because it seemed to be a sort of incredible journey backwards, because it was the same kinds of things that I drew as a child.

What we know about the wind, we only know because of what it moves.

And since the beginning of time, the wind was so important to all people, so very important because it determined what weather was, what kind of weather determined consequently then what they wore, how they lived, where they lived, how they dressed, what they ate.

It's God speaking.

That's the wind blowing.

It's God telling us of our sins, of our evil or our good deeds and blessing us or not blessing us.. I'm Stormy Hollingsworth, I'm Colorado Ute and Basque descent.

I modeled for artists from all over the country.

The finished product actually is always an amazement because I've learned with artists that no artist ever paints me the same, and a great part of that is their interpretation as well as what I'm giving the spirit I'm giving.

So each artist is actually painting a different spirit of me, and not necessarily always a spirit of me per se.

It could be a spirit of Sacagawea or any interpretation of what they're looking for in the stories that they're telling.

And through my modeling, I put on my Native American dress and I become Indian.

I can feel my people and and I can I can look in the skies and feel the wind in my hair and and suddenly I go back a hundred years and I'm there and I know what my people feel instinctively.

And I'm sure that's part of my intuition, is part of my genetics.

I'm sure.

The reason I like to do it is because I'm able to to portray a heritage that I has always been alive inside me.

And the Indian history is so important.

So much of it is unknown.

And through art, the artists keep it alive.

I have no children and so in essence, this is my legacy.

The all the art pieces that are done.

I'm leaving something behind.

And I think it's very important for every individual to leave their mark.

They're my children.

They're pieces of me.

My name is Niko Strange and we're at Eagle Plumes Trading Post in Allens Park, Colorado.

I work as an art appraiser and a consultant also, so I've had the the joy of seeing a lot of different types of art.

I see tradition changing.

I mean, it changes continually.

It's not static.

You know, you're expressing yourself and to express yourself as an Indian.

Some of those traditions come through in ways that you might not realize, or in ways that the viewer of the art might not realize.

We represent only arts done by American Indians.

We carry jewelry and rugs and pottery and beadwork, and we try to run the whole gamut between contemporary and historic.

We do handle a lot of contemporary Indian art.

We feel that it's important because the artists are still living and they can speak about their art.

And it's also important, I think, to the Indian economy back on our reservation and other reservations that we buy from.

When I have a chance to spend a quiet moment with a piece of art, it brings a lot of things to mind.

One thing that's special about Indian art and good Indian art is that in general, Indians have patience.

I think that they're able to slow down and not rush things, and I think that comes across in their art.

You do see sort of recurring themes or recurring motifs throughout.

One thing that's really interesting is that the use of the color red, and to most Indians that I've talked to and in a lot of places that I've read that color represents life, it represents blood, you know, it represents the life force that that keeps us alive.

It started in 1990, and it started because of a discussion that I had with my son, his affiliation, his friends who were gang members.

And so there I started to understand that my son was moving a distant for me.

That was his way of saying, you know, he was asking for my help.

And so today, me and my son, we have become closer in understanding each other, in friendship as a father and a good friend in the Lakota tradition, our girls are not allowed to sit on the drum.

But we ask permission.

We ask permission from our elders and also of other drum groups.

And this is a contemporary drum group consisting of the youth of keeping the circle to keep them away from the temptations of gangs and drugs.

And so now we gave that understanding that not only do our boys need the help, so do our girls.

And so we face that our women are very important.

Our young ladies have to be on this drum in order to understand their strength as well.

We have a structured way of presenting this drum to educate our young kids.

The first rule is that we specify in this group group is to learn to say no against drugs and games, and also with alcohol.

And the secondly of all is to teach them the respect of their parents and their elders.

The third of all is to teach them the respect of getting involved in their education, their academics.

So there the rules are laid that if you are going to be on this drum group, you must have hold all these responsibilities.

The sound of the drum, it comes from the air and then the skin of the animal stretched over, which means that it has it has its life that dedicated to that drum.

That drum is very sacred.

And the person that's drumming that, they got to have that great spirit and they got to have a clean mind.

Some of our adults do not understand the truth of this drum.

They only see the outside and they only hear the noise, but they have yet to understand the meaning of what the circle was about.

That circle is also sacred to our Indian people.

You can't just go out and do things in it.

It's like our heartbeat.

It's like the thunder you hear and it when it goes, it keeps, drumming.

And then the cry of the lady that you hear with her mouth and that represents the thunder.

Everything is significant.

The drums are significant.

The reason the drum is round, it represents the universe, and the beating is the heartbeat of the nation.

They say that the Godhead, their their Great Spirit is speaking to them through the heartbeat of the drum.

And that's very important.

And so I teach these kids, please help our elders, help the younger generation, and that'll structure them to maybe look at themselves with a better self-esteem.

And so if I ever was to leave, I would like these kids to say, yeah, you know, I think my uncle Jean, poor bear, would wanted to have us here physically in the eyes of the people, then to whether to pull out the wallets and say, here's money, I cannot be here.

But then, at least now I am here and I'm ready to help the people.

And that's the most important thing.

Grandfather, my heart looks toward you.

Red Sage of Sunset, evening star.

The night hawk sings your name.