(fading chiming music) - [Narrator] On this episode of Postcards.

(drum chiming music) - So when I go out and teach a big part of that is bringing that art gift out in people.

- It's cool to see historical things, but it's even cooler when it was your own family that you're studying.

- I do all sorts of different things when I'm making things out of wood.

And I like it all.

(chiming music) (orchestrated music) - [Narrator] Postcards is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A. Cargill philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yigal Julene on behalf of Shalom Hhill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a Prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota on the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails, and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

The lake region arts council arts calendar, and Arts and Cultural Heritage Funded Digital calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in west central, Minnesota.

On the web at lrac4calendar.org.

Playing today's new music plus your favorite hits 967Kram online at 967kram.com.

(chiming music) - I really don't know of anybody else who does what I do.

Nobody does traditional paint pigments with the traditional methods bone, the bone brushes.

So I'm trying to keep that alive.

(chiming music) I am a traditional Buffalo hide painter.

(chiming music) Hide painting is something that was so important to our people.

Buffaloes were our main source of food, clothing, any kind of implements for our utensils for eating, every part of the Buffalo was used.

So I really feel that it's an important to express that to people who don't really value how important that was to our people.

So when I was encouraged to become a traditional high painter by Frank Shortey, and he was a really famous hide painter in Rapid City, South Dakota, and he said, "I think you have to get to be a hide painter."

So I took that serious because when artists look at each other, I mean, they just have this kind of a special gift to see that in someone else.

(chiming music) It takes many months to work in a hide, to do a hide painting.

So over the months you just feel the spirit of the Buffalo.

And I know that I'm putting everything natural down on that Buffalo, that hide, not as someone said, "massacring it with the barn paint" (laughs).

(chiming music) - I love working with this on a hide.

(indistinct) So yeah, that's kind of a little demonstration.

Women were traditionally the painters of Buffalo hide so a lot of people don't know that.

I just feel like it's something that came into my life as I meant to be, to carry that on.

I really believe women to start a decorating the hides because as women, we like to decorate our homes.

(laughs) So I really feel like that's how it got started, maybe not, but I like to think that it's just a lost art that I've tried to preserve.

This is hide painting, traditional hide painting.

Yeah.

(chiming music) I am actually enrolled in Sisseton Wahpeton, Dakota Oyate in Sisseton under Lake Travis Reservation in South Dakota.

I came to Minnesota to work and I really felt the connection to this is my roots and really felt an interest in finding out more about my Dakota heritage.

One day it was like, I have roots (laughs).

So I applied for a job over with Shakopee Mdewakanton Dakota community, and came back.

And I think when I came back to Minnesota, I just really literally felt the connection.

My great, great grandfather, Taoyateduta or Little Crow was Dakota chief.

(chiming music) Taoyateduta or Little Crow, I've always known that he was my great, great grandfather.

My mother wanted her children to know, to carry on that connection.

I come from an era when it wasn't popular to be a native.

There was just a lot of racism towards Indian people back in when I was growing up.

So I really didn't wanna tell anybody that I was a great, great grandfather of a chief (laughs).

So all that connection to my heritage was kind of buried somewhere in my life until just recent in recent say last 10 or 20 years, maybe.

(chiming music) So when I was asked to come here for work by the community, I really felt like it was meant to be.

I felt like I came full circle back to my roots.

And so I really felt the connection to this place, Upper Sioux Pezuhutazizi Kapi, they call it, the place where they did for yellow medicine.

I love it here, it's just a really special, it's a great place for me to work as an artist, the trees, the land, the landscape, the spirit of my people are here.

So it just really inspires me as an artist.

And I've got more bead work, this goes on the belt.

So this is the bead work that I'm gonna be wearing, this outfit.

And I think the contrast, the gold, it's just gonna be beautiful.

And then this is gonna be my purse, which is (speaks foreign language).

This is a (speaks foreign language).

I had to get this done really fast.

So I decided to use just acrylic paints to do this design, using acrylic paints and brushes, which I'm really finding it difficult (laughs) to use the brush.

So, yeah, that's what I'm working on now.

In most recently, I worked with the Southwest Minnesota Arts Council, and they asked me if I would do some projects over the summer to the local areas.

So I was like, yes, what an opportunity.

I never turned down an opportunity to share art.

So I thought that given in that time space that I had beading a medicine bags would be perfect project.

There isn't really anything you can't do.

I always tell people who are artists or wanna really explore their creativity, not to just focus on one thing, because art is a gift.

So many times people will say, oh, I can't do that.

I can't bead, or oh, I can't paint, but that's not true, you can.

So when I go out and teach a big part of that is bringing that art gift out in people.

That's the way I look at it.

(indistinct) This one I made, and this is actually what we're gonna be making tonight.

The same style, the same leather.

The hide that is in your kit is smoked.

If you want to open up your little package, you have everything you need, lay it out there.

And we're gonna begin to start.

(chiming music) Art has taken me a lot of places.

I really feel my art artwork takes me back to connect with our people and to bring that forward into today.

It's a real connection that I feel that art is giving to me to give back to the people, it's amazing.

(chiming music) - My name is Kyle Vos.

I'm just a farmer that's been farming through the generations with my family.

And I'm the, I guess the fifth generation to be at this farm.

(orchestrated music) B.F. Lindsey my grandfather's grandfather is the one who started this farm.

He came here in 1883.

He actually left in 1884 for a little while, came back in 1885.

Him and his two or three of his brothers, they were gonna go out to California to try to mine gold.

They ended up not making it all the way there.

They made it to Colorado where they tried their hand in mining silver.

This was B.F. Lindsey's.

He was given this on his 13th birthday on March 30th, 1870.

And it was just a little, kind of, not really a toy, but kind of a toy pistol that he could use.

And he shot when he was a kid, had a little rifle stock.

You could put on it.

(chiming music) Well, I think if I wasn't born into this family farm, I would've liked to go into the field of history to study history, maybe teach history, or just to be involved in history in some way.

I just think that I got the best of both worlds here when I had, I can farm with my family and I can have a little museum of family history on the side.

And I think that's kind of unique and special that I can do both.

I can be involved in history and the collection of history.

And I can also be a part of my family's history with taking on the farm for one more generation.

(chiming music) I believe the house was built in 1885.

It could have been 1884, the original foundation started and he left it to his daughter and her husband.

And it's been passed down every generation.

And we've just been farming here ever since.

And every generation has kind of grown just a little bit.

My dad would say that my grandpa was the reason this farm was so successful.

And I would say that my dad is the reason this farm is so successful.

So I hope one day to have a kid who might say that about me.

I'd hope.

One thing I wasn't, as I was never pressured to wanna stay here and farm.

So I wanna stay here for my own self.

I was never told that "You're a farmer, this is what you wanna do."

My dad said, "You go out and do whatever you want to do."

And I just decided that I'd rather farm than do anything else.

(chiming music) This chair was made in 1830 and if you pick it up, you can still see the bark that's underneath of it.

That's still the same bark that they wove the chair out of in the first place.

So this chair is at least 180 years old.

There's a few spots where it's been fixed, but that might've been six to over 100 years ago already.

But for the most part, the chair's in really good shape for being that old.

(upbeat music) I was actually up in the attic searching when I first built this museum for old family heirlooms and stuff, and that's where I ended up finding my great grandfather's World War I helmet and gas mask.

And I ended up finding this flag up there that had 45 stars on it.

So I found that was actually out of big stick, wrapped up in an old garbage bag, really old garbage bag, hanging in the rafters of the attic.

When I got it down I couldn't find anyone that knew it was up there, and knew what it was or remembered it.

So people that were born in the 1920s, my grandfather's brothers and sisters, none of them have ever seen it before even knew it was up there.

I looked up the years that the country had 45 states, and I believe it's 1896 to 1908.

So that flag must have been made in that time period.

(chiming music) The safe was made in 1885, which I thought was kinda unique because that's the year that this farm officially started, the safe is a good spot for me to keep the things that I wanna keep fireproof in case for some reason, this building ever went up.

I still have the photo albums and the written history of my family.

(chiming music) My great uncle Case, who would be what now, 96 years old.

This is him at about, I would guess 10.

And they could tell that this was Case on the horse because he's the only one in the family that wore bib overalls, everyone else wore regular jeans.

This is Holy Alexson.

He would be marry Lindsey or Mary Alexson, Lindsey's father who migrated over here.

One day, he went out working some ground.

He tied his horses to a post at the end of the field or a tree at the end of the field 'cause he saw what he thought was a wolf.

And apparently he's the guy who shot the last wolf in Murray County.

(humming music) The artifacts are cool, but the written history to me is so much cooler that I have.

History written by my grandfather's grandparents.

And I can read it and go through what they experienced.

A lot of it from the same location, just 100 years or 125 years apart.

My grandfather Frank, his grandmother, her name was Mary Alexson and she ended up marrying B.F. Lindsey.

So that's where the names combined there.

She was the first historian in our family, I guess.

She kept really diligent notes and diaries her whole life.

So she can track our Lindsey side of our family back to the 1780s and '90s over in Ireland.

She can track Alex inside the Swan yard side, back to Norway and the routes that they take when they came migrated in the mid 1800s.

So she wrote down the story she heard when she was a little girl, so that she could pass them onto the next generation.

And some of those stories now, or when she wrote them was 100 years ago or more.

And she was talking about the story she heard as 100-year old stories then.

So this trunk here is the one that part of the family migrated from Norway in, and it's full of just some old family blankets.

Some of these belonged to my great, great, great grandma.

And like this was Jake Vos is my great grandpa's service blanket after the war, he got it in 1919.

And actually some of those blankets were made during the great depression out of like feed sacks.

So they would have feed sacks and just use the old feed sacks.

Sewed altogether to make blankets out of them.

This was made by my grandma when she was a young girl.

(chiming music) I think that building this museum, it really made me appreciate what every generation before me went through.

(chiming music) They went through hard times, and then the next generation went through hard times, and the next generation went through good and bad times, and everyone put in work so I could have this farm next.

And I appreciate every single generations.

They put their life into it, into this farm.

(chiming music) It makes me appreciate what they did in putting this together and collecting history that my family has gathered.

Everything in here is from this house in this farm, this family.

It's cool to see historical things, but it's even cooler when it was your own family that you're studying.

(chiming music) (orchestrated music) - When I was about 10 years old, my mom's dad's and my grandpa on my mom's side made us grandkids, a wooden whistle out of a Willow branch.

And so for an hour he stood there and whittled this whistle with a pocket knife.

And at the end there was a whistle.

And I thought that was so cool that he had just done that.

(upbeat music) I was always a maker or a builder.

So I was always tinkering with making things, little toy video cameras that we'd play with, things out of cardboard, all sorts of stuff.

But when you're old enough to kinda use sharp things, it's exciting.

And so I kinda made that leap into the woodworking.

(upbeat music) - [Child] Can I Help You?

- [Joe] Did you get me?

- [Child] I think so.

(Joe laughs) I got man.

- I always thought it'd be fun to invent a game where you put a bucket on the ground and train land or wood chips in the bucket (laughs).

I do all sorts of different things when I'm making things out of wood, and I like it all.

And so I'll work on something and I'll kinda get bored on it and do something else.

I went through a long phase of doing cowboy figurines, and then I moved into chip carving.

And you basically make little triangles.

You put the knife in at an angle that you just learn to feel, and I'm gonna try to get all my cuts to meet down at the bottom center of that triangle.

There comes a triangle.

Chip carving is a...

I kinda call it quilting on wood.

And so you removed geometric patterns out of the wood.

And I really went into a chip carving phase when I was probably just out of high school, did that for a few years and finally took a class in chip carving.

So I'd mostly self-taught with all the stuff.

I didn't really have any woodcarving classes to start with.

So I was figuring things out on my own.

And then you kept going, it's like, oh, I don't wanna quit, I wanna finish (laughs).

(chiming music) When I got a job and got a house, I had a garage and a space for better tools.

And I kinda went through this evolution where I started doing hand tool woodwork.

And so I'd build boxes and dovetail things, but I loved hand tools and not so much power tools.

I have plenty of power tools now, but I really like hand tools.

And it's something about the silence of it.

And the way the sharp steel can cut wood and shape wood.

That's just really fun and fascinating.

(bright chiming music) When we were ready to have our first boy, I wanted to make him a baby rattle, but I didn't have a lave and they're expensive.

And I didn't know if I'd really liked using it.

So I wanted to build one that you just power yourself.

And I thought that was so cool that you could have a lave that you could power yourself.

And so I went to work a couple of weekends and put this lave together.

And so I've found that kind of a pattern online.

It wasn't a complete pattern.

So I had to fill in some of the gaps.

It's really fun to...I've got an electric lave now, but I've forgotten how fun this thing is to use.

And it just works by this pump.

It's a little bit like a bicycle, but you just pump it.

(lave roaring) And the faster you pump, obviously the faster you could lave, but.

(lave roaring) So this is a honey dipper I'm working on.

And so you just get it going.

(lave roaring) (chiming music) I make spoons.

I make little bird figurines that are called comfort birds, and people love comfort birds.

And they're designed to be comfortable to hold in the hand for people that are maybe going through painful medical treatments or something like that.

I do all sorts of different things, and I like it all.

And I'm looking for more things to do.

Sometimes I think I do too much 'cause I just focus on something and get good at it.

But I just like trying all sorts of different things.

(upbeat music) - What inspires me as a woodworker is two things.

The simplicity in woodworking, you can do lots of cool things with very simple tools.

And there's just something about the way sharp steel shapes the wood, that's just really rewarding.

The second thing is just the beauty in wood.

And I like wood as a material, and I'm not quite sure what it is about it, but it has structure inside and you sorta have to learn how to work with it or read it to know what piece of wood can do what, or will cooperate with doing something.

And so a lot of my pieces, the shape that I make it into is secondary to the prettiness of the wood inside.

(chiming music) So this year is my first year being in the Meander Art Crawl.

I've been wanting to do it for a number of years, but just couldn't figure out how to put the time into doing it.

It's really given me the motivation to put more work into what I do and to find new things to do.

And it's given me the motivation to come up with new designs and new ideas.

Excellent job - [Woman] Thank you.

(chiming music) Woodworking throughout my life has taken me on a journey from just a fun hobby thing to do to an escape from stress.

As I've gone through my career, you kinda get more and more responsibility in your work.

And with that comes sometimes oftentimes more and more stress.

And so I found that in times when I've had more work or life stress, I've kinda dove more into woodworking or started a new kind of woodworking.

(chiming music) So I've gotten more serious about it.

And oftentimes it's been an escape from something, and it's a relaxation thing to anyone that has anything they like to do or has that sensation of getting lost in a project.

And that's what woodworking has been for me.

(upbeat music) (humming music) - Postcards is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the Citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by, Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yigal Julene on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a Prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails, and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

The Lake Region Arts Councils Arts Calendar, and Arts and Cultural Heritage Funded Digital Calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in west central, Minnesota.

On the web lrac4calendar.org.

Playing today's new music plus your favorite hits, 96.7kram.

Online at 967kram.com.

(fading upbeat music)