In an art world dominated by non-Indian curators and experts, being "Indian" was confined to an ethnographic fiction of storytellers, dancers, and medicine men attired in traditional clothing and regalia, in which the colonization of indigenous lands and peoples is left to the margins like an Edward S. Curtis portrait. These are the…

Pablita Velarde, renowned artist and lecturer, recalls some of the Tewa legends handed down orally through the generations. She heard her grandfather and great-grandfather relate these tales on cold winter evenings at Santa Clara Pueblo when she was a child. The six stories told by Old Father Story Teller are "The Stars," which ties the…