Mission student's ledger art selected to hang in Congress

May 4—Cedar Hunt sits on a stool with colored pencils and watercolor paints arrayed on a table before her. She sketches a shape and dabs color on a painting as we talk in the art classroom at St. Ignatius High School.

The high school senior creates ledger art, a form of narrative painting developed by Plains Indians in the late 19th century to depict their history using materials at hand — in this case the paper ledgers used at trading posts to document transactions.

Her recent painting, "Girl on Horse," won the Congressional Art Competition for Montana's First Congressional District, represented by U.S. Congressman Ryan Zinke, and will hang in the halls of Congress for the coming year.

The painting is both sophisticated and unusual, in part because horse and its rider are floating off the page, giving it a three-dimensional quality. And instead of ledger paper, the backdrop to her painting is a school attendance sheet, dating back to the 1940s.

The bound books of attendance records were given to art teacher Caitlin Shelman and the Salish teacher a couple of years ago to use for ledger art. "What's really cool is so many kids have relatives who have names in these books," Shelman said. "So people find their names in Cedar's work."

One student offered to pay $100 for "Girl on Horse" because their grandfather's name was on it. That was before Cedar learned it was selected for the Congressional Art Award.

Cedar is a member of the Bloods, a Canadian band of the Blackfeet Nation. She grew up on the Flathead Reservation, the daughter of photographer Stephen Hunt and Chelsea Brave Rock, an accomplished bead worker.

Cedar points to a pouch, intricately beaded with a girl astride an appaloosa horse, and says it emerged from a sketch. "I literally was just doing it for fun," she said. "I'm a pretty fast worker — I constantly work on it until I feel like it's done."

Her art teacher agrees. "The thing about Cedar is she will get away from any class she doesn't have work in and come in and work. She's always grabbing her work and taking it places."

That dedication pays off. In a release, Zinke praises her work as "a great ode to the roots of Montana."

Cedar says she's familiar with two contemporary Blackfeet ledger artists, Terrance Gardipee and John Pepion. As a child "I would see ledger art all the time and I'd be like, wow, I really want to try that because our people did it," she says.

In addition to muscular, stylized horses, she adds symbols to her work — a feather, shapes that represent people, or a beaver "because my Indian name is Beaver Woman." Words, like her own name, or a user name for an online game she used to play, also appear on the attendance sheets, like clues to the artist's identity.

The horse's blanket in "Girl on Horse" is patterned after a blanket a friend of hers uses for Sun Dances while the appaloosa is her own horse, Max. The rider, a "plume feather woman," and her steed are prancing through a field of lavender ("I just thought it was pretty"), and the borders of the painting are black and white — traditional Blackfeet colors; the horse wears a traditional mask too.

"I put things in there so people know I'm Blackfeet," Cedar says. "Any native person who looked at this would know a Blackfeet person did this."

According to Shelman, ledger art often has stylized flattened forms painted or drawn on the paper. "But Cedar has taken it to a different level of taking those, but then popping it off the page so it has that unique feel to it."

Cedar also paints girls, like herself, in an artform often dominated by images of warriors. Along with school attendance sheets, she sometimes uses pages from the Mission Valley News, published in the early 1970s, as a background.

Shelman urged her to enter the contest when it was announced this spring. "I literally had just gotten this piece done and I put it in," Cedar says.

Her dad's phone number was on the application, so he received the congratulatory phone call from Zinke.

"It's just so weird to me that it's getting recognized," she says. Another of her pieces is on display at the State Capitol, alongside works by other students from across Montana.

Cedar has made art "as long as I can remember," but is taking her first art class this semester.

Although she's been encouraged to study art in college, Cedar isn't sure what direction she wants to take after graduation. She's been accepted at Salish Kootenai College, the University of Montana, and a college in Portland, and is interested in studying wildlife and biology.

"We're very outdoor people. We go horseback riding and trail riding," she says. "I also powwow a lot — we're close to our traditional ways."

Whatever course she chooses, "my parents are very supportive with anything I do."

No matter what she does, art is apt to remain a constant thread. "I just kind of do whatever ... I like to work outside in the mountains. Just set up my things, have my horses in the field and I just draw them."

"I feel like Native people are really good at art and don't get the recognition that they need," she adds. "I feel really proud to be recognized for this type of stuff."