Paige Pettibon, descendant of the Bitterroot Salish of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Black & white, highlights the complexity of Indigenous identities, and uplifts shared community values through a range of artistic mediums
Part one of a five-part series in collaboration with the Museum of Pop Culture, with support from 4Culture.
In collaboration with MoPop for their “WA Untold Pop Culture Stories” series, MoPop wanted to focus on the stories of King County pop culture creators in order to ensure that a more accurate representation of culture artists in America are preserved for future generations.
As a queer Ojibwe woman I came to this project hoping to bring varying Indigenous stories, identities and perspectives to the forefront. Oral histories are traditionally how many Indigenous people have passed down our culture, customs, and tradition. Through this series we recognize Indigenous pop culture voices, experiences, and perspectives with the intention of honoring and celebrating their unique story.
The first in the series is Paige Pettibon, a mixed-race descendant of the Bitterroot Salish of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Black & White, raised on Coast Salish territories alongside one of the country’s largest urban Native populations. She draws on her lived experience to create images that highlight the complexity of Indigenous identities, and uplift shared community values. Paige works across many media, from digital design to painting, writing, handcrafted jewelry, and public art.
We sat and connected for over an hour about her exhibition “Homesick” that was “the canvas of storytelling,” and how she would “weave threads of cultural heritage and identity, drawing upon the rich tapestry of traditions and wisdom passed down through generations.” She expanded on how her work has strengthened her connection with her culture, language, families, and ancestors.
“It really changed how I started interpreting art,” Pettibon said. She went on to explain how Indigenous languages and visual language helped her to pair traditional narrative with visuals while helping her connect with land.
“It was like my spirit was guiding me through this and saying, this is for you,” Pettibon said. “But there was community that also was helping me guide my journey through this exploration of nature with an Indigenous paradigm, with these Indigenous stories. The stories that I learned from folks in this area, I don’t take for granted. And they really share histories of place, and animals, and plants, and creator, and purpose, and great change that has happened with settlement. And being able to understand these stories through the language, because English doesn’t always have the right words to express the things that we need to express as Indigenous people.”
In that same exhibition, Pettibon mentions the “eternal quest for belonging,” so we talked a bit about her identity as a Black and Native woman who didn’t grow up on her ancestral lands and how that impacted her sense of belonging.
“I always have to remind myself I know who I am,” Pettibon said. “I know how hard my ancestors worked for me to be here. And it wasn’t easy. And surviving was a very difficult thing to do… I am not going to let someone take that away from me again, from my people, from my ancestors, from my parents, my grandparents. They didn’t work as hard for me to deny all the parts of me.”
Pettibon shared her thoughts about femme art, and the concept for the breathtaking painting “Water and Womb,” art as activism, how connections to the land are incorporated into her art, and so much more.
“I think of myself as, like I said, a creator that likes to create hope,” Pettibon said. “And I feel like we are at a deficit of people of color being represented in art completely and making art. And so I’m just going to. I make femme art because I like femme art. They’re going to look different. Femme has a magnitude of expressions. And then I’m also going to make art of people that are Brown because there’s not a lot of it. I mean, growing up, if I saw that, that would have maybe changed the course of my life.”
You can find the full length interview here. The interviews were recorded and saved in the MoPop Online Collections Vault with over 1,000 others.
To find out where to catch her next show you can follow her on Instagram and you can purchase her art or jewelry right from her website.
