Email
PrintPreserving culture
Walter Echo-Hawk helps raise funds as the first chairman of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation.
When the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation opened formally in April in Portland, Ore., it made history — as the first permanently endowed national foundation to support the work of American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native artists. The organization also made headlines — as the recipient of $10 million from the Ford Foundation.
“Its time has come,” says Walter Echo-Hawk of Tulsa, the foundation’s first chair.
Throughout the country and throughout his career, Echo-Hawk has worked for the Native American Rights Fund. Born on the Pawnee Reservation in Oklahoma and a proud member of the Pawnee Nation, he has been active in litigation and legislation to protect tribal cultures.
Currently “of counsel” at Crowe & Dunlevy in Tulsa, he assists the firm’s Indian law and gaming practices unit. Recently, he served in a leadership role during the feasibility study of a new organization and then became its chair.
Native arts service organizations have been campaigning for a national foundation for a decade. Until now, giving funding to artists who expressed native culture had been considered “almost radical,” Echo-Hawk says.
“For many years, the government policy was to assimilate native people into mainstream society and essentially stamp out attributes of native culture,” Echo-Hawk said in a New York Times article. The huge corporation foundation apparently thinks otherwise, Echo-Hawk told TulsaPeople.
“Ford has always been a force supporting the native sovereignty effort,” he says.
What he calls a “remarkable social movement” during the past generation led to the creation of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., and the Institute of Native American Arts in Santa Fe, N.M. Many native people see the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation as “the third pillar of this national cultural renaissance in tribal communities,” according to Echo-Hawk.
“Native art and culture is the foundation of tribal sovereignty,” he says. “It’s literally the glue that has held tribal communities together, often in the face of adversity.”
Each of the 560 federally recognized Indian tribes in the United States has its own tribal government and cultural aspects.
“This new foundation addresses cultural sovereignty,” Echo-Hawk says.
Echo-Hawk is an oil painter and describes his wife as “a master craftsperson,” specifically, a bead worker. Their son is a practicing painter and musician in Colorado, and his uncle is a local oil painter.
“Most Native American families have a number of artists or crafts persons in the family,” he says.
The foundation is fine-tuning its grant-making process, and Echo-Hawk hopes artists can apply for funding by 2010. “Artist” is a broadly defined term that applies to all facets of contemporary art — song, dance, music, film — as well as traditional art forms.
Supporting tribal museums and tribal art associations is one function of the foundation. Eventually, the group will fund artists in communities and make gifts to arts service organizations. The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation also will nurture and preserve endangered art forms and hand down traditional skills to generations. Additionally, the group will promote master apprentice programs and encourage up-and-coming artists.
Most importantly, especially to its new chair, the foundation will provide a voice for cultural policy — one to which, so far, people are now listening.
