Students tap into Native American art projects

The approximately 250 students who attend Cayuse Prairie School have embarked on art projects with a larger purpose.

Each grade level is working on an art project inspired by Native American culture and history. Once finished, the students’ artwork is photographed and transferred onto fabric to create quilts that several eighth-graders and community members are sewing.

The school is donating the quilts to Sparrow’s Nest of Northwest Montana, which serves homeless teens, and youth served by Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), according to Cayuse Prairie special education teacher Laurie Lutgen, who is spearheading the projects.

On Nov. 21, seventh-graders met with their first-grade buddies in the school lunchroom to put the finishing touches on wall hangings, one the projects Lutgen came up with. Sitting down, the seventh-graders picked up strands of raffia from piles in the middle of the tables and showed the first-graders how to tie the wall hanging together.

The wall hangings consisted of thick squares of paper students made. Seventh-grader Danica Luehr said her grade learned about Native American pictographs, or symbols, and painted them on the handmade paper. Her buddy, first-grader Teaghan Roe, explained how her grade level created a layered diamond-shaped symbol they cut out of construction paper.

Other grade levels, such as the fourth-graders, had a lesson in ledger art, and eighth-graders tackled star quilts.

Lutgen was tasked with coming up with art lessons as a participant of the Montana Teacher Leaders in the Arts program through the Office of Public Instruction and Montana Arts Council and was given $300 for materials.

The Montana Teacher Leaders in the Arts program aims to provide professional development for kindergarten through 12th-grade educators in rural communities so they can support and mentor colleagues in integrating art and the state’s Indian Education for All initiative in the classroom through a “culturally sensitive lens,” according to a press release from montana.gov.

Without a dedicated art instructor at Cayuse Prairie, teachers are tasked with incorporating it into the classroom curriculum. Lutgen said she was interested in taking on the professional development opportunity to help her colleagues with some of work involved in planning art lessons.

“I love art,” Lutgen said, noting that she wanted to get students excited about creating, too.

Through the program, she spent a week at the Salish Kootenai College in Pablo immersed in art education. She returned to Cayuse Prairie bubbling with ideas to link to the Indian Education for All theme this year of the role of indigenous women, which is why star quilts became an overarching focus. Lutgen said she learned that indigenous women turned to quilting as buffalo hides became scarce on reservations. A star quilt was given to honor someone.

“Every class is doing something that has to do with star quilts and making art projects regarding that,” she said.

While spending time in Pablo, she also learned the importance of reciprocity in Native American culture, among other topics.

“So if you take something, you use something, which is fine, then you need to replace that or better,” she said. “So I am teaching every kid in this school the concept of reciprocity, whether that sticks or not, but that’s the point of it because we are giving back.”

She also has an online crowdfunding campaign at www.donorschoose.org to raise $560 by March to purchase a sewing machine geared to beginners for the eighth-graders to continue sewing the quilts. Some of the eighth-graders have completed about five quilts to date, with more coming until the fabric and quiting batting runs out, according to Lutgen.

In April, Montana Teacher Leaders in the Arts will reconvene in April in Livingston to present on their projects.

Reporter Hilary Matheson may be reached at 758-4431 or hmatheson@dailyinterlake.com.