Lloyd Henry “Kiva” New:
So anyway, that's what I was doing when this school was about to become converted from a typical Indian boarding school to the Institute of American Indian Arts. In 1968 or 1969, the Rockefeller Foundation made a kind of a survey through the southwest of what it might do in reference to the development of Indian art and crafts.
And so they had a conference in Tucson, at the university, in which they invited Indian craft people, museum people, anthropologists…well, you can imagine the group who would be invited to such a conference to talk about maybe what could Rockefeller do.
Well, as it turned out, the concept that I proposed, which was this.
But I didn't believe you could do much about altering the natural flow and direction that was taking place on the reservation or in the natural Indian settings. That traditional crafts and traditional expressions would live, as long as people believed and felt and maintained the kind of a tribal, culturally distinctive setting for those things to continue in. And that Indian people would just sort of naturally take care of those things. And they would live as long as Indian thought in those directions lived.
But what was bothering me in my observation was that in many cases, old fine artistic expressions of Indian people was going by the board. And the new generation, the young Indian adult or the school-age youngster, was not coming up with an equivalent quality statement in his time to match that that had gone before him within the framework of Indian heritage and culture.
And that I felt that we, someone, should concentrate on that problem as a research of what indeed will young Indian people be doing. Will they continue doing what their grandfathers did, or will they start demanding something that's more appropriate to their times and their style of life?
So, well, as it turned out, out of the conference, there was a nearly $100,000 grant given to the University of Arizona. And I was appointed as the co-director of it with some of the university staff. And we took 15 or 20 young kids from about 15 to 21 for three summers, six-week sessions, and just experimented.
We had a lot of Rockefeller money, so we could give a youngster 10 yards of canvas and beautiful, expensive brushes, and all the paint he wanted, and any kind of paint he wanted.
Gold, silver – if you were a jeweler, if you needed silk to do fabric printing on, or if you needed a loom to try weaving on, we had just a real field day of an opportunity working with young Indian people to see what they would do if no one said to them, “As an Indian you must think this way or you must express yourself along this line.”
Because, I may be a traditionalist and I may feel that, as a young Navajo, the only future for you is to continue doing beautiful Navajo rugs on an upright loom like had been done for many years in your tribe. And so, there wasn't really much being done in the system. There was no arts training in the school to speak of.
A lot of the rather active adult art programs that were sponsored by the Bureau and the Indian Arts and Crafts Board – latter half of the 30s, 70s, 40s – were dying out. And so, we were kind of a revival of the government obligation to do something about this.
And the Indian Arts and Crafts Board called the head of Indian education in 1960 and said, why don't you do something about this? And she said, well, I'm perfectly willing to, and I would like to, except it doesn't seem to be policy.
But to make a long story short, they changed the policy, and the under the Secretary of the Interior's instructions to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs at that time, they set open a school.
So, they put people on it, they conceived the Institute of American Indian Arts, its basic charter. And in 1960, six months before the school opened, they came to me and said, how about coming and being our arts director? And I said, well, I've got a very complicated life of my own that's very enjoyable and very rewarding, but I am interested, as you know, because I've been in all these special projects and just completed the Rockefeller Experience. So I will come, but only on a consultation basis.
So, I came up and became involved in the dream, the scheme of the hopes of the formation of an institution that would really give Indian people a chance to experiment educationally in the arts on a broad scale.
