SHAKOPEE, Minn. – For years, Sandy White Hawk has been invited to bring the Wabléniča Ceremony to Indigenous communities around the country, welcoming home fellow adoptees taken through adoption and foster care. Using cultural items to “wipe off the smog of shame, sadness, and hurt from the shoulders of all who stand in the circle,” healing can begin, the founder of Minnesota’s First Nations Repatriation Institute writes in a new memoir released Dec. 6.
Ceremonies, sweat lodges, and sundances have been key to White Hawk’s own recovery from a traumatic past as a Sicangu Lakota woman, she describes in “A Child of the Indian Race,” published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press.
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Mother-daughter bond
The cover of “A Child of the Indian Race” was designed by Dyani White Hawk Polk, 46, her eldest daughter. White Hawk Polk was 4 years old when her mother garnered the strength to pursue sobriety and had begun to find healing through cultural reconnection.
Her mother’s journey inspired the cover image for the memoir. Titled "Wačháŋtognaka | Nurture", it is one in a series, called “Takes Care Of Them,” of four screen prints depicting Northern Plains style dentalium dresses. The red dress print was inspired by her mother’s red powwow and ceremonial dresses.
Nurturing is one of the infinite ways Indigenous women uplift their communities, White Hawk Polk explained. The color blue on the dress print, Wówahokuŋkiya, depicts the leadership of elders; the yellow, Wókaǧe, is creation, and Nakíčižiŋ, or green, represents the tribe’s ability to protect.
An award-winning visual artist and independent curator, White Hawk Polk has multiple fine arts degrees and has participated in residencies in Australia, Russia and Germany. Her work is featured in museum collections across the U.S., including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Whitney Museum of American Art, Akta Lakota Museum, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and numerous others.
White Hawk Polk describes these pieces as pulling from the continuity of her art, “heavily rooted in porcupine quill work, beadwork, and the art forms that were historically really held up and nurtured by Lakota women.” Each style is inspired by a different time period of traditional Plains-style dentalium shell dresses. Each print is named individually with a quality that expresses how women in Indigenous communities care collectively for children and elders alike.
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