Join us for our third event in our Indigenous Roundtable Series. The event is online, free, and open to all.
Register here for this online event, or https://form.jotform.com/222286091809157
Creative Agency & Leadership in the Arts
-A panel discussion with Mandy Smoker Broaddus, LaNada (Lenny) Peppers, and Amy Sings In The Timber. Moderated by Salisha Old Bull.
Join the Indigenous Initiatives Committee of WMCI & Open AIR for a facilitated panel discussing the value, obstacles, and approaches to Indigenous creative agency and leadership in the arts. Panelists will speak to their personal experiences as artists and arts community leaders.
About the speakers:
Mandy Smoker Broaddus
Mandy Smoker Broaddus is a member of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana. She worked as the Indian education director for the state of Montana for ten years and is currently employed by the non-profit, Education Northwest as a Practice Expert in Native Education. She was appointed by President Obama to serve on the National Advisory Council on Indian Education.
She holds an MFA from the University of Montana in Missoula, where she was the recipient of the Richard Hugo Fellowship. In 2019 she was recognized as an alumna of the year by the University. She served as co-poet laureate for the state of Montana, alongside her longtime friend, Melissa Kwasny from 2019-2021. In 2021 both were named Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellows. Her first collection of poems, Another Attempt at Rescue, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2005. Her graphic novel, Thunderous, was published in 2022, co-written with Natalie Peeterse. She has also received a regional Emmy award for her work as a writer/consultant on the PBS documentary Indian Relay.
LaNada (Lenny) Peppers
Lenny Peppers is a storyteller. She is Tsétsêhéstâhese (Northern Cheyenne) and Apsáalooke (Crow) and is of Kawaik (Laguna Pueblo) ancestry. She spends her days working to tell stories from an indigenous perspective and approach through her work in comedy, filmmaking, art, poetry, photography, fashion, music, and of course, writing. She works within both fiction and nonfiction platforms with the goal of breaking down westernized frameworks and indigenizing the art and media industries so that there are more opportunities for future Native artists and writers to contribute without the hurdles that she had to overcome. She offers her research to the public through several podcasts including SJW: Social Justice Weirdos and Hourgasm, both of which deal with breaking down social issues and working to decolonize ideologies surrounding them. Lenny is also currently pursuing her fifth degree-- a Ph.D. in Tribal Critical Race Theory in Art and Media. Her other degrees include journalism and Tsétsêhéstâhese/Native American/Indigenous studies and filmmaking with a special focus on art and media as tools of resistance.
Amy Sings In The Timber
Amy is an artist who moonlights as an attorney. She serves as the Executive Director of the Montana Innocence Project - an organization dedicated to freeing the innocent and preventing wrongful convictions in Montana. Human rights and social and racial justice have been the focus of her life's work - both as an artist and an advocate. Amy resides in Missoula with her son and daughter.
In addition to art and the outdoors, Amy is deeply passionate about eating really good bread.
About the Moderator:
Salisha Old Bull
Salisha Old Bull was born in Eastern Montana and raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Western Montana. Her mother is Salish and her father is Crow so she has a well-rounded bundle of Indigenous teachings from the Montana area. She is married to Shandin Pete and has 5 children. She was an aspiring artist as a child but chose to follow a different career path. She kept art in the background of her life and expressed most of her creativity through beadwork. She was taught to bead by her maternal grandmother, Rachel Arlee Bowers when she was a very young child and considers her earliest memories of beading at about her second grade in elementary school. She has been beading since that time and has supplemented her life educationally with five post-secondary degrees. She gains inspiration from traditional ecological knowledge from both Salish and Crow tribes and uses this imagery within her artwork. Aside from beading, she enjoys painting, photography, digital art, and drawing.
