These Indigenous Beadworkers Are Infusing Tradition With a Sense of Humor

Like Meserve, Gray’s work is decidedly modern and non-traditional—especially given her Muscogee background. “My Muscogee tribe has historically had very little to do with beadwork,” she says. “This used to make me very self-conscious, as if my work was somehow generic, invalid, or even inappropriate.” Still, she wanted to blend elements of pop culture into the medium. “Now, I am actively attempting to reconfigure my own brain to look at something I’ve made and think, ‘This is Native art.’ It’s Native because I’m making it.”

Both artists credit their cameos on Indigenous-led programs like Reservation Dogs and Rutherford Falls for allowing their more unconventional ideas to shine through. They agree it’s a refreshing change, to be able to challenge notions of what Indigenous design can, and should, be on a mainstream level. “Too often Natives are seen as primitive or stuck in the past, to the point that the idea of Natives existing in the modern world is a foreign concept,” says Meserve. Gray adds, “There is a bright future for Indigenous people, and it’s going to be an ongoing process to assert ourselves as living, breathing, contemporary people. Pop culture has taken so much from Indigenous people in order to become what it is today; My own process is taking bits and pieces back.”