sacred and silly

Mother and Child

Aukemah (Marian Terasaz), Nʉmʉnʉʉ/Comanche, 1938

In Mother and Child, Marian Terasaz depicts a Comanche woman caring for her newborn infant. She sits comfortably on the ground, embracing her child’s cradleboard, and her posture, unbraided hair, and downcast eyes create a sense of intimacy, peace, and safety. Even though the baby’s face is not visible, the swaddling clothes bulging through the cradleboard’s laces indicate the infant’s presence.

Terasaz has portrayed the woman wearing a cream-colored braintanned buckskin dress with detailed geometric beadwork along the sleeves. The brightly colored sash around her waist seems to fall against an implied floor line, and the thinly cut fingertip fringe from her sleeve drapes over her leg to the floor. The cradleboard, painted a vivid blue, is anchored to a wooden lattice adorned with two stars made from brass upholstery studs. The foot of the cradleboard has two painted flaps with peyote-stitch beadwork, a technique in which the beads are stitched together tightly with thread in horizontal rows and then fastened by thread and red-dyed horsehair tassels. In the lower left corner, the artist inscribed her Comanche name followed by the date: “Aukemah –’38.” Flatstyle paintings such as this have a representational, narrative approach, presenting the viewer with solid color fields and a limited or nonexistent background.

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Young Mother and Child

*** Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Committing to End a Culture of Violence ***

On this day in 1945, the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, Nagasaki was bombed. These weapons of mass destruction were built on our ancestral homelands, forever linking us to the people of Japan.

For three decades, Tewa Women United has collaborated with partners and coalitions like Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety (CCNS) and Communities for Clean Water to hold Los Alamos National Laboratory accountable for past, present and future emission of toxins that poison our land and waters. We've collaborated with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and Union of Concerned Scientists.

In 2023, we joined other Affected Communities and signed on to a statement to ban nuclear weapons:

"Nuclear weapons do harm every day. From the mining of uranium to the creation of the bomb and the everlasting radioactive waste, our planet carries the scars of so many nuclear sacrifice zones. Nuclear colonialism has disproportionately impacted Indigenous Peoples and marginalized communities. Indigenous Peoples lands were taken. Bodies were used, people were bombed."