Wookiye Win: Digging for Artistic Inspiration (And Watercolor Pigments) in Nature

Transcript

[Sound: Native Lights Theme Music]

Wookiye Win: Lately, there's always paintings going on. Every day I feel like I need to do some type of watercolor painting, because it is so relaxing. You know? It just makes me feel complete for that day and I got to create something. So every time I do a painting or paint with watercolor. It just makes me feel really great.

Leah Lemm: Boozhoo, hello. Welcome to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. I'm your host Leah Lemm. Miigwech for joining me. Native Lights is more than a podcast and radio show. At its core, it's a place for Native folks to tell their stories. Each and every week, we have great conversations with wonderful guests from a bunch of different backgrounds, musicians, healthcare advocates, community leaders, artists, language warriors, you name it. They have a wonderful mix of passions. So we talk with them about their gifts and how they share those gifts with their community, and it all centers around the big point of purpose in our lives. So it's another day, another week, another opportunity to amplify Native Voices, and I'm really excited to share with you my conversation today with Wookiye Win. Wookiye Win is a Dakota language teacher for the Dakota Language Nest Preschool program at the Institute of Child Development, and that's on the U of M campus. And her passion is to speak Dakota at school and at home. She and her husband have five kids together, and he's also a language revitalizer. Wookiye is also an artist. And she listens to a bunch of audiobooks, so we get along great. But I'm really excited to share this conversation with you, because she's got some new work coming up, and I'll try not to give it away too much up top. But she makes her own watercolors. How cool is that? So please enjoy my conversation with Wookiye Win.

Wookiye Win: Hi.

Leah Lemm: Nice to meet you. Cool. Well, I'm super excited to chat. Can you please introduce yourself and tell me where you're joining me from?

Wookiye Win: [Greetings in Dakota.] I'm so happy to be here. I'm honored. My English name is Katie Bendickson, and my Dakota name is Wookiye Win. I am joining you guys from my home in St Paul, Minnesota.

Leah Lemm: Wonderful. And how are you and how is your family?

Wookiye Win: Well, I'm doing great, keeping busy, and the family is doing good. My husband and I, we have five children together. We're a blended family, and so one of our middle children just graduated from Central High School in St Paul, yeah. We have some older adult children who are off doing their own thing.

Leah Lemm: All right.

Wookiye Win: We have a seven-year-old together and yeah. And then we have a one daughter. So we have four sons and one daughter. Yeah, we're all just having a good time.

Leah Lemm: Yeah, wonderful. And is there anything that you're kind of thinking about right now? Like, for example, I just watched K-Pop Demon Hunters, and I loved it. I'm obsessed with the music. It's a way that I'm connecting with my kid. And I gotta say, I'm checking out more like K-pop bands and things like that that I never expected. That's my little thing I'm thinking about right now. How about you?

Wookiye Win: Yeah, wow. As for me, like I said, I'm keeping busy mainly with art, my art project. So what's on my mind right now is my series of the 13 moon squash paintings that I'm working on. So I've been making those and really, really enjoying the process. But that's on my mind right now, right now. Today, I worked on and finished two moon paintings, maybe three, and right on my desk is ["Planting Moon" in Dakota], which is "Planting Moon." And so I'm working on that one. I'm probably gonna be working on it when I'm done talking with you. So that's what's been on my mind. Also, well, the only news that I could think of right now is my mural. It's at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus at the Child Development Lab School. It's on my website, and there's a blog about it like that. Some news also about music. Lately, I've been listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. My husband I got to go see them in concert a couple years ago. And listening to some audiobooks and enjoying the weather.

Leah Lemm: Yeah. What are you listening to for audiobooks?

Wookiye Win: I really try to branch out and listen to/read nonfiction. I should try to read more fiction, but I just can't. So I'm always listening to and reading nonfiction that is, you know, real and true stories and stuff like that. So I've been listening to books by the author Dolores Cannon, and she's a quantum hypnosis therapist. And so she wrote some books about, from the people that she did some quantum hypnosis therapy with. So I've been listening to that, and it's very interesting to me. It's metaphysical, and it's some super cool stuff, aliens and star people and things like that.

Leah Lemm: I love that. I feel like I don't have enough time to think about that stuff, but when I do, it's nice to just like, imagine anyway. That's really neat. Well, let's talk a bit about you and kind of your work and how you contribute to the community. Do you have a highlight reel? What would you like to highlight over the course of your career?

Wookiye Win: Yeah, so I'm an artist and I'm also an educator. I teach Dakota language. And I've been an educator, you know, for my entire, most of my career, since I began, you know, college many years ago. So that's always there. It's my passion to revitalize Dakota language and to always speak it and always learn more and remember to keep up on it. Just never give up on it. So that's always there in my work, in my personal life as well. Around COVID time, I got into doing paintings, started doing some watercolors and some illustrations. There was a need for Dakota artists and Dakota illustrators. And, you know, someone asked me to do a logo for an event, a Dakota event. I have to give credit to my husband for that, because he is also a language revitalizer, Dakota language revitalization effort, and it was a Dakota event that was going on, and he said in the meeting that I am an artist. And then I was like, oh, right, you, that's true. I guess I am an artist, because I never thought of myself as an artist, quote-unquote, but I've always done art. You know, growing up. I love to draw. In elementary I was the kid that people really like noticed my art and my drawings and would comment on it and all that kind of stuff. And I kind of grew out of doing drawings and everything. And I've always been doing sewing and beading, and always been making my own regalia and doing beadwork for my regalia, because my mom's an artist, and so she taught me how to make my first pair of moccasins. And ever since she taught me how to bead some moccasins, you know, back when I was a teenager, and when I was the fancy dancer, she taught me how to make some and then ever since then, I've been making beaded moccasins. I'm always working on a pair, and I don't know how many I've made so far, but there's always beaded moccasins in the works. Lately, there's always paintings going on every day. I feel like I need to do some type of watercolor painting, because it is so relaxing, you know? It just makes me feel complete for that day. I got to create something. So every time I do a painting or paint with watercolor, it just makes me feel like, you know, just really great. I love the colors, so I prefer to use paint rather than drawing, but I do need to practice doing some more drawings. So if there was a reel going on, it would be Dakota language mixed with watercolors and illustrations.

Leah Lemm: That's so cool. That's like the highlight reel. Yeah. You're listening to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. Native Lights is produced by Minnesota Native News and AMPERS, with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Today, I'm speaking with Wookiye Win, an artist and educator. She teaches the Dakota language for the Dakota language nest preschool program at the Institute of Child Development. How would you describe your visual art, then your paintings? How could you describe them to somebody who can't necessarily see them while they're listening?

Wookiye Win: My subject of choice is plants and animals. Native plants and animals are what I prefer to draw and paint when I'm traveling, whatever I see. The local animals and plants there are very inspiring. So I'm always drawing plants and animals. Specifically, my favorite animal is birds. Any kind of birds are my favorite. I like a whimsical style. So it's not perfect. It's like, go with the flow, not imperfect. It's not very realistic looking. But you know, you can see what the subject matter is, you know, obviously. So I love working on paper. I prefer working on paper. I always have, you know, paper with me, and I always have my watercolors everywhere I go.

Leah Lemm: Yeah, that's great. And I'm just looking at the Dakota Moon series now on your site, and I can see what you mean. It's almost like a little bit dreamy, yeah, it's not super detailed, but you can, like, fill in the blanks with your imagination.

Wookiye Win: That's a good description.

Leah Lemm: And I love the…is that a pink Moon with the strawberry and…

Wookiye Win: Oh yeah, yeah, yes, that one was done with acrylic ink. I was experimenting with some acrylic ink on that one, but I and that's what I do. I don't just stick to only watercolor. I do like to experiment once in a while. I'm making a new 13 Moon series right now, and I do like to use my handmade watercolors. The new series I'm working on now, the Strawberry Moon, is made with my handmade watercolors. The main color I make is a pink color, which is made from pipestone earth pigment. So that's another thing that I would put in my reel is making my watercolors. I have a lot of artists in my family. So my dad, he's a pipestone carving artist, and he makes pipes, and he has a pit where he mines at Pipestone. I kind of grew up—I have fond memories of being in Pipestone as a child. You know, it takes a long time to get that stone out of there, so we would spend plenty of time there. But even these days, you know, my dad taught my sons, and also my husband, he passed on his knowledge of pipestone carving.

Leah Lemm: Oh, wow.

Wookiye Win: So that was kind of recent, and that's when I was getting into my watercolors, and there was all this pipestone dust there, kind of messy. But I was like, hey, this, I bet I could do something with this, you know, because otherwise it's like, we could put it back, just give it back to the earth. But there was a lot of it. So I thought, I wonder if I can make paint with this. I YouTubed it and looked it up. That's how I kind of learned new art skills, is YouTube and looking stuff up. But yeah, I looked up how to make watercolors, and then I realized that that's yeah, I could totally make watercolors with this earth pigment, I've been doing that ever since, like, around 2020, when I started doing watercolors.

Leah Lemm: So you have pipestone dust. And then how do you get pipestone dust from dust to a painting?

Wookiye Win: Right? That's a great question. So there's a process to extract the pigment from the dust, and that's the smallest particles of the of the dust. Because if you think of it like glitter, you have like, super fine glitter, and then you have like, the big, chunky glitter. That's the difference. You want to extract the smallest particles/pigments from the earth pigment. And so there's a process to that. Basically run it through a coffee filter, and then mix it with water, and kind of stir it up, and then the heavy pieces fall to the bottom, and then the lightest pieces are up in the water, kind of floating around. And so that's the ones I try to capture. So I pour it through a coffee filter, and then it's on the coffee filter, and I let it dry, and it's like a, it's a very fine powder by then. And so that's how I make the watercolor. Watercolor is very eco-friendly, and I love that about it as well. That's the other thing I love about watercolor is, you know, it's friendly to the earth. I make it with gum Arabic, which is just a sap from a tree. I buy it at the at the art store, and I mix that with the earth pigment. I add a little bit of honey and a little bit of clove oil to have those, anti-mildew, anti-mold properties to the watercolor and then that's basically it. And it makes quite a bit and watercolor again. The other thing I love about it is it lasts so long. I can make so many paintings with just a small amount of watercolor.

Leah Lemm: So you have earth pigments, and you know, one of them being pipestone dust. I take it's like a pinkish color? What other colors do you use with other materials?

Wookiye Win: I collected some ochre. At the time when I was collecting it, I didn't realize that that's what it's called, but I was down visiting some people in Alabama and the earth there, like, if you look around, it's a nice red color, like, everywhere you look. And I was just like, wow. I wonder if I could make something with this really pretty color of earth. I took a little bit home on the airplane, and when it was in the suitcase, going through the security, they stopped me because of my little clumps of earth, of clay, that I had. It was kind of funny.

Leah Lemm: So it's kind of like what I just looked it up here, kind of like a, I want to say, like a yellow orange?

Wookiye Win: Yep, like an orange color. And then there's yellow ochre, which I also collected from there. So there was two, two different colors, a yellow and the orange.

Leah Lemm: Okay, it says the color intensity varies based on the level of iron oxide and other materials present. Yeah, some ochre.

Wookiye Win: Yeah. So that's what they probably teach you whenever you take a class. But I just, I just did it.

Leah Lemm: I just look at it looks good, yeah? So pipestone, ochre. Do you use like, berries?

Wookiye Win: So I've also experimented with making inks. Yeah, so I one year, not this spring, but last spring, I went and collected some nettle. If you collect nettles in the early springtime, you know that's the best time to use them for tea and making stir fry or soup with them, and stuff like that, which I have done in the past. But this time, I collected them specifically to make an ink out of them. And so to do that, I live in St Paul, and I usually call down to the Ft. Snelling State Park for when I need to harvest stuff and gather things, forage things. That's the word I'm looking. So I went down there and I asked if I could get some nettle and when I was planning it, some people were telling me, "Oh, why are you asking?" I was like, "Well, I always, I don't know. I always ask." So I do. So I collected some from there and I brought it home. And basically, you just boil it, and the color goes into the water, and then I take out all the plant fibers, and I have just the water, colored water. Then all to have to do is keep boiling it down and just boil it all the way down until it's like a very concentrated color, very concentrated mix of, you know, a little bit of water and mostly whatever pigment is left in there. And then, in order to make it user friendly, then I added gum Arabic, again, to that, that little bit of liquid that was left at the bottom of the pan. Yeah, and it was the ink, and I added some clove oil, even though I thought I needed some so I was like, maybe I'll throw some clove oil in there. And I made some paintings. I threw it in the fridge. Honestly, I didn't paint with it right away. I don't know why. It was just, it just wasn't calling to me until, like, six months later, I finally took it out of the fridge and I made a lot of nettle ink paintings with it. Yeah. Experiment with that. And I also experiment with, you know, natural dyes, plant dyes, such as marigolds, you know, things that people who do, artists who use natural dyes, they know all the plants already that are great for dyeing. And so I kind of look that up online too. And so I have experimented with a lot of different plants, and I've come to find out that natural wool yarn takes on natural dyes like so nicely. And so I have a lot of naturally dyed yarn in my studio waiting to be used for something. I also like to dye paper, because I just really love to work with paper. I dyed some paper with cedar water because when somebody has a cold or they're not feeling well, if you boil cedar, the steam kind of helps to heal their sickness and stuff. So I was using that one time, and I was steaming some cedar, and then what's left is like the water, and it's a beautiful amber type colored water that's left in. So what I did was I put my watercolor paper in there, and I put some other kind of paper, white paper, in there, and it dyed to that kind of that color. So I have a lot of paper dyed with, like, cedar water, yeah. And so I just experiment all the time with natural dyes. So now I have, like, all of these materials and I and for some reason I haven't used them, because I'm just waiting for the right moment. I have a plan in my head on how I'm going to use all of my naturally dyed materials, which is going to be my next step after I take a break from probably watercolors and gouache and stuff, but I'm going to be working with mixed media, experimenting with, you know, mixing fiber art, fiber and paper and paint, acrylic and all that kind of stuff. So I have a vision for that of a plan. Yeah, right.

Leah Lemm: Yeah. She'll manifest the plan, and it'll be amazing.

Wookiye Win: It's gonna be amazing.

Leah Lemm: Well, that's really awesome. I'm glad. I'm glad we got to the behind the scenes there with your art too. You're listening to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. Native Lights is produced by Minnesota Native News and AMPERS, with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Today, I'm speaking with wo Kie win, an artist and educator. She teaches the Dakota language for the Dakota language nest preschool program at the Institute of Child Development. So you're an artist and educator with revitalizing Dakota language. Is there a bridge there between art and language for you?

Wookiye Win: Well, there's a huge need for Dakota illustrators. So that's kind of how I started illustrating. There's a huge need for Dakota language teaching materials. That's the other way, such as children's books. I have two children's books that I have illustrated, monolingual Dakota language books. That's usually the bridge. When I'm doing my art, the subjects are in my mind, the Dakota name for them is always how I'm thinking about them. When I do paint certain subjects, what I paint about is important I want to the more I learn about Dakota stories and culture. It's inspiring to paint. I recently learned more about the Dakota constellations as an adult, you know. I learned a lot of things about my culture. One of them is the Dakota constellations. So that inspired me to create art about the Dakota constellations, and not only that, but teach others about it through art. I've done some workshops at Mia. I did a Dakota constellation watercolor project for one of their family nights. I made like little stencils of each constellation so that the kids and the families could easily make their own constellation and watercolor that even write the name of it in Dakota under it. So I'm an educator, so I also teach people how to use watercolors. Or anything that I do I usually go and teach other people about how I do watercolors. I know some people have asked about natural pigments and how to make watercolors from earth pigment. So when I do that, I incorporate Dakota language lessons along with my art lessons. Yeah, they're together. So, yeah.

Leah Lemm: That's fantastic. Well, you know, let me ask you, kind of as we were wrapping up our conversation, what keeps you motivated to do this work? Day in and day out, you know, when you wake up in the morning? Sometimes I have to, you know, encourage myself a little bit, but then I remember amplifying Native voices. It's super like motivating. What is it for you?

Wookiye Win: Not every day I'm motivated to speak Dakota or do a painting. But every day, Dakota language slips out here and there. My husband and I, we both speak Dakota language with our youngest child as much as we can. Like my husband has only been speaking Dakota language to our youngest one since he was born, since our youngest was born, and that was, you know, so, wow. That's the motivator is being around my youngest one is to speak Dakota, because when I speak English to him, I feel like, oh, I could be saying this in Dakota. And so I bet that's one of my motivators. Is passing it along to the next generation, you know? Especially my own child. There's that for every day. And then, you know, like, I mean, some days I don't do a lot of colors, but almost every day I do use my journal. The motivation is that it doesn't have to look great. It doesn't have to be something. It's just putting paint on paper, and that's fine, you know? That's the other thing: That it doesn't have to be perfect. And I don't have to show anybody my art piece of I don't want to, is the other thing too.

Leah Lemm: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. And thank you for sharing your gifts. It's just so fun to, you know, talk to somebody who's creating, and it just makes the world a bit more beautiful every day. So I appreciate that.

Wookiye Win: Oh, you're so welcome. I really appreciate you talking with me. I'm so happy to share about art and Dakota language.

[Sound: Native Lights Theme Music]

Leah Lemm: Wookiye Win. What a great conversation. Is there anything that you got into during the COVID era, like Wookiye got into painting and watercolors and illustrations? I did some painting too. Gosh, what a great way to spend the time. And I didn't really keep it up. I've painted a couple rooms in my house. But I think she really inspired me to maybe pick up a paintbrush and smoosh a couple paints around on the canvas here. It's just such a lovely way to pass time and make something physical out of your imagination. How about that? So chi-miigwech, Wookiye Win. Thank you for taking time to chat with Native Lights today. I'm Leah Lemm. Miigwech for listening. Giga-waabamin. You're listening to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. Native Lights is produced by Minnesota Native News and AMPERS, with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.