“I’m out on the prairie there, near the Blackfeet reservation up in Montana, way out in the bush. The ancient Sun Dance grounds are like somebody took a thumb and pressed it into the ground, and the Sun Dance grounds are inside that depression, and inside this depression is a creek, so you have water, and they had been using those Sun Dance grounds for a very, very long time. So, Day 1 it snowed, it’s July and here it is snowing. Day 2 it rained like crazy. Day 3 it started to hail really hard at night, the last night, and then it got completely quiet. I’m sitting there thinking, Well, I’m not afraid of anything, and then I hear this thunder come rolling across the prairie that sounded like a cannon. And so I think, Well, maybe I better start praying and saying I’m not afraid of anything, right… And it rolled, made a boom, then rolled back the opposite way, made a boom again, and then got quiet again. So I get up on my hands and knees and peek out and I’m seeing 2 ½ to 3 mile high chain lightning walking towards the Sun Dance grounds, and it is not making a sound. And I’m like, Oh my goodness, what is going on here… I find out later that that was Thunderbird Woman, and she was coming to give a blessing to the camp. It was kind of rattling seeing something like that because you know how dangerous lightning can be, but it was very quiet. So I ended up painting Lightning Walker, and it took me about 6 years to paint because it was so complicated, as in, how do you have these elements and pull them all together. So the buffalo skulls that went across the bottom were the thunder that we heard prior to Lightning Walker coming toward the camp, and the Abalone shell has smudge in the shape of a thunderbird inside, because that was Thunderbird Woman and I wanted that connection.”

—Chholing Taha

Chholing Taha was born in Ontario near the Six Nations Reserve to a Cree mother and who she thinks was likely a Mohawk father, because she spent her earliest years on the reserve among the Mohawk tribe. When she was just 3 years old her mother disappeared, and she was left in a rooming house on the U.S. – Canadian border, soon to be adopted out to a non-Native family. To this day she does not know what happened to her mother. And yet her intense early memories of her mother and the reservation have shaped her entire life and artistry: “I think that for Indigenous people, when they get displaced, and they have a few memories of where they were from, they hang on to them. You’re afraid you’re gonna forget them, and you just hang on to them really hard.”

Taha started drawing when she was a very small child, and as she grew up feeling like she didn’t belong in the mainstream world nor quite in the Native world, she feels she always carried within her what she refers to as a special lens. Resolving her two-worlds experience became for her a kind of mission, leading her to get involved in ceremonies like the sun dance, traditional night lodges, fasts and sweats, which helped her to such an extent that without ceremony, she really doesn’t know quite where she would’ve ended up. “The ceremonies were like a life preserver, and my internal spirit or being or lens recognized that life preserver, and I was able to grab onto it. Being in ceremony, suddenly through that lens you have, all becomes crystal clear.”

Taha’s art strives for us to focus our lenses, just as she focuses her lens through her very practice. Hers is a holistic artistic practice striving to communicate and commune with her own heritage and experience, at the same time encouraging others to find understanding and resonance with their own lived and inherited experience. “Wisdom finally comes when we realize we’ve all been affected by colonialism,” she sagely remarks. “[Not everyone] thinks they’ve been affected, but they certainly have, intensely.” Ultimately, Taha’s art emboldens us to align our own lenses so that we might open ourselves up to better understanding our own experience in the world.

by Will Fraser, Birchbark Books and Native Arts