With Indigenous People’s Day on Oct. 14 and National Native American Heritage Month in November, it’s important to highlight contributions to the art world made by Indigenous artists. Many Indigenous histories are particularly intertwined with the history of Madison.

Did you know humans have inhabited the Madison area for about 12,000 years? Many different tribes lived nearby, but the Ho-Chunk Nation was the primary tribe living in Madison during the time of European colonization in the Midwest, according to the Campus Planning & Landscape Architecture website.

The Morgridge Center for Public Service wrote that after and during the U.S. gaining the Wisconsin territory in 1783, settlers of different origins started wars with Native Americans of the area, often because the U.S. government forcibly removed Native people from their lands and homes in Wisconsin.

This seems like a story from long ago, but Indigenous people in Madison are still subject to the effects of generational marginalization and education systems that focus mainly on Western perspectives of history.

When I was a first-year student at UW, I lived near the Lakeshore Path. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the names of all of my dorms and dining halls (“Dejope” and “Four Lakes Market”) reflect the history of stolen Ho-Chunk land our university is built on.

If you take a stroll through the area, you will see what looks like small, uplifted hills in the grass. These are actually effigy mounds or Indian burial mounds. UW is believed to have the largest amount of effigy mounds to be found on a college campus, as reported by the Campus Planning & Landscape Architecture website.

It’s beautiful we can witness this, but I also can’t help but feel a little horrified at the fact that while we acknowledge this land is stolen, it doesn’t change the fact these sacred mounds exist in plain sight on our campus. For a map of more burial sites on campus, visit the UW Archaeological Sites website.

Though obvious wrongdoings of colonizers in the U.S. seem like history, the effigy mounds in the ground symbolize, to me, reasons why we must continue to stand up for justice for Indigenous peoples everywhere. Part of this is celebrating Indigenous joy through highlighting art.

One piece that stands out to me is “Ts’u’uts” by Jocelyn Olivera. This oil pastel with gold leaf and gold trim is on display at the Overture Center as part of the “Her Art: Positive Self-Expressions of Teenage Girls” exhibit. Painted as an appropriation of the notorious “The Kiss” painting, this painting shows two gay, Indigenous women of Yucatan openly expressing affection and agency, Olivera wrote in a statement.

Olivera is a senior from Beloit Memorial High School and an incoming freshman at Aurora University. In high school, she participated in hobbies like ballet, jazz, Folklórico and more. She strayed away from art in high school, but rediscovered her love for it with the help of a supportive art teacher, according to a statement by Olivera in the Her Art Catalogue.

“In my art, I refer to my personal experiences as a young Latina and aim to create vibrant pieces that show the highs and lows of Mexican culture,” Olivera said. “My hope is that when young women look at my art, they find comfort, representations and a part of themselves.”

Similarly, the School of Education Gallery hosted an exhibit called “UW-Madison Alumni: A Legacy of Indigenous Perspectives.” The exhibit featured many artists, with one being Joe Feddersen. Feddersen emerged as an artist in the 1980s as a new generation of Indigenous artists.

He received his MFA at UW. Currently, he lives on the traditional lands of Nomad, Washington, as a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes. Starting as a printmaker, Feddersen has expanded into painting, photography, large multimedia, collage, glasswork and basket making, according to his website. The Badger Herald got the chance to speak with Feddersen to learn more about his story and artwork.

Feddersen said his time at UW had two main themes — his desire to explore other ways to make art outside of printmaking and his beautiful mentorship with the iconic Ho-Chunk sculptor and installation artist Truman Lowe. Feddersen was already well known for making these landscapes, called “Rainscapes,” by the time he attended UW.

They are a series of lithographs and have been on display across the U.S. One I find very beautiful is “Nocturne,” a Rainscape donated to Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, according to their official Facebook page.

“Nocturne” looks like a vast white and blue space, almost meditative, with splashes of thin red and blue raindrops falling like gentle arrows. It seems like I’m looking at the space through a camera lens and the rainwater has made the lens a bit blurry. But, Feddersen wanted to make sure he never got pigeonholed into printmaking.

Some of the different media he works with now resulted in his “Sally” bags, which are traditional woven bags and glass baskets. These forms each can uniquely take up space. Like many of his works, it’s visible he blends traditional symbols and figures with contemporary techniques and shapes. This, he said, is about letting his workflow naturally out of his head and into the physical realm.

“When you talk about those differing iconography, it’s about letting all of my histories come together in my work and not filtering it out,” Fedderson said. “The traditional and the contemporary.”

One part of UW Feddersen said he’s immensely grateful for is the mentorship he received from Lowe. Truman Lowe, now sadly passed, was an acclaimed artist and professor at UW. Feddersen and others hold Lowe to a high level of respect and honor.

Feddersen also said mentorship programs like the one he had with Lowe are what educational institutions need. He said to ensure they are up-to-par, they should be consistently worked on, especially in institutions where Western perspectives and art are taught a lot more regularly than other cultures’ perspectives.

“It’s wonderful to go to a school and actually see somebody with your own background and that’s really important,” he said.

For young artists or Indigenous students looking into a career in the art world, Feddersen said he would highly recommend not staying in your studio all day. He said one must go to events and try to meet two new people a month. Art is not a spectator sport.

There are many other Indigenous artists in the Madison area, so I encourage you to check out the work of artists, curators and art historians such as Kendra Greendeer, George Cramer, Tom Jones, John Hitchcock and Truman Lowe, to name a few.

Note: I understand some individuals prefer the term Native over the term Indigenous, but I will mostly be using the term Indigenous in this article for inclusivity purposes.