A provocative exhibit at NYC's Met Museum takes a new point of view

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/04/ [login to see] /a-provocative-exhibit-at-nycs-met-museum-takes-a-new-point-of-view
Perhaps the most surprising object in the exhibit "Water Memories," now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is a denim jacket. It's a Wrangler knock-off, with a red felt thunderbird on the back and a line of blue beads along the sleeves and waist.

Yet the exhibit is about the significance of water to Native American tribal nations, and how it is portrayed in their art. How does a jacket relate?

"The thunderbird is a sacred image to the Anishinaabe people," said Patricia Norby Marroquin, curator of the exhibit. "It actually represents a thunder cloud."

The beading represents water droplets, she said. The thunderbird and beading were added by the then-19-year-old Rick St. Germaine and his mother, Saxon St. Germaine, from The Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians in Wisconsin.

Rick St. Germaine wore the jacket when he participated in the Native American occupation of the Winter Dam in Wisconsin in the early 1970s. Norby saw the jacket in a small midwestern museum and knew she needed it in the exhibit, because she wanted to represent different generations of Native Americans and examine how their art speaks to their activism around water.