HEALING SHATTERED LIVES

HEALING SHATTERED LIVES HOW SURVIVORS OF MASS SHOOTINGS ARE HELPING A NEW GENERATION

BY ETHAN BAUER

For missy mendo, the news of March 22 came in a text message. It always does. “I love you, are you OK?” A flurry of similar messages daughter or nephew made it out alive. “That leaves you standing there thinking, ‘Well, I guess God didn’t bless me,’” Mauser says. followed. Mendo, 36, usually tries to shut out news of mass shootings and Mauser scrambled to pick up the pieces of his life and assemble them avoid the internet to keep her memories and emotions bottled up. But this into something purposeful once more. To do so, he didn’t need encourtime, the fact that the shooting unfolded just 45 minutes from her home in agement to overcome. He didn’t need dismissiveness or exhaustion from Boulder, Colorado, at her preferred grocery store chain, made the horror people who hadn’t known his pain. But he didn’t know what he needed harder to avoid. either. “You’re just kind of wandering aimlessly,” he admits.

Mendo was 14, a freshman in math class, when two students attacked About a month after the shooting, he traveled to Washington, D.C., to Columbine High School in suburban Denver. She heard the pop of gun- meet other parents who’d lost their children to gun violence. They told fire, then a strange rumble, like students were bang- him he would never get over what happened, and he ing on lockers. She peered into the hallway and saw shouldn’t expect to. But with time the intensity of a stream of teens sprinting toward the exit. Finally, his pain should ebb. Finally, someone had answers. someone yelled a warning: “They have guns, they And he found more understanding among others have bombs, get out of here.” who lost kids at Columbine. “Nobody knew what

At home, a red light blinked on her answering “A HUG FROM you were going through like these other parents,” he machine. In message after message, parents asked if ANOTHER SURVIVOR explains. “We were going through this together.” Mendo had seen their missing kids. That night she IS DIFFERENT Research backs up Mauser’s observations. In a slept between her parents, in her tennis shoes, doing painful arithmetic to figure out which of her classFROM SOMEONE WHO IS TRYING TO CONSOLE YOU,” 2019 paper published in the journal Victims & Offenders, Jaclyn Schildkraut, a professor of crimimates might be dead. Sleepless, she wondered why MENDO SAYS. nal justice at the State University of New York at she had been spared, why others had not, why this Oswego, and an expert on mass shootings, wrote school, why these parents, why, why, why? For weeks about interviews with 16 Columbine survivors and and months, she found no answers, and no one who concluded, “the need to provide social support and understood her pain. This was 22 years ago, before cultivate solidarity among survivors is crucial to pavmass shootings had become endemic to American ing the way to a healthy recovery.” She also found society. Help was hard to find. that the most effective support came from “similar

Today, that has changed. Mendo and others like her are passing on others,” or people who had experienced the tragedy in a similar way. what they’ve learned as survivors to new generations. They’ve been The more similar, the better. After the Sandy Hook shooting in 2014, brought together not by choice, but by circumstance and a shared histo- for example, Mauser was invited to Newtown, Connecticut. He figured ry and experience few can understand. For many, these groups become he’d have nothing to offer to the parents of murdered first graders. “I a second family, a place where they feel safe. “A hug from another sur- thought I had it bad, but I had it nothing like what these people were vivor,” Mendo likes to say, “is different from someone who is trying to going through,” he says. “But they wanted us there.” They asked almost console you.” the same questions Mauser had all those years ago, so he passed along

Just ask Tom Mauser. After his 15-year-old son, Daniel, died at what he’d learned. Columbine, he had nowhere to turn for answers, for relief. People with That simple idea — that survivors are not alone — drives the support good intentions would approach him at the grocery store to tell him groups that have emerged across the U.S. Mendo works for one called The how sorry they were — but also how blessed they were that their own Rebels Project, based in Colorado, founded by Columbine survivors after

survivors need friends to acknowledge what they’re going through, says tom mauser. his 15-year-old son died in the columbine shooting

the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooting. Today, Mendo says, the group works with survivors of over 100 “mass tragedies,” from shootings to bombings to stabbings, in the U.S. and the world.

Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group in New York, counts 251 mass shootings since 2009, with almost 1,500 killed and nearly 1,000 injured. But “there is a dark figure of survivors,” says Schildkraut — people affected by mass shootings in ways that are impossible to count. In his recent book about how gun violence affects American children, Washington Post reporter John Woodrow Cox argues that beyond those who experience it directly, violence also impacts kids who go into lockdown and think they might die, while their parents frantically text them thinking the same thing. Which is why Mendo tells newcomers that whatever kind of support they’re looking for, they’ll probably find it. “It’s the most messed-up club to be a part of,” she says, “but you just love and understand all your members.”

Some survivors from the Boulder shooting have already started reaching out for help. Mendo expects their numbers to rise over time, as their immediate resources begin drying up. Like survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High shooting that killed 17 in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14, 2018. That summer, about a hundred of them visited Denver to meet with survivors of Columbine, Mendo among them, with the same questions that once kept her up at night. One kid had lost his best friend; with prom and graduation and all the other rites of passage looming larger than ever, he asked how to cope knowing his friend wouldn’t be there.

Mendo, who’d recently become a mother, had been asking herself that same question, thinking about all the kids who died at Columbine whose parents would never know grandchildren, about classmates who never had the opportunity to live as she was living. She didn’t have an easy answer, because easy answers don’t exist. So she just told him what she and Mauser and others like them had learned from decades of bitter experience.

“You’re gonna think about those things a lot,” she said, “and you’re not alone.”

for 12 years after graduation, columbine survivor missy mendo avoided columbine. but now she says it’s worth revisiting the trauma to help others

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DON’T RUN IS OUR FEAR OF MOUNTAIN LIONS UNWARRANTED — OR AN ALARM BELL FOR THE CHANGING WEST?

BY ANNA CALLAGHAN

On may 19, 2018, two mountain bikers in their early 30s were riding on a logging road some 30 miles from Seattle and just outside of North Bend, Washington, a small town in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. As they rode, they noticed a mountain lion. It appeared to be stalking them.

They stopped, yelled and stood their ground until the 100-pound male ran away. By the books, it was the right thing to do. But then the lion did something unusual. It returned and pounced on one of the bikers, 31-year-old Isaac Sederbaum. It latched on Sederbaum’s skull with its mouth, shaking him back and forth. This predatory move is intended to snap the neck of prey. Seeing this, the other biker, S.J. Brooks, 32, fled on foot. When Brooks ran, the lion released Sederbaum and pursued Brooks instead.

For Sederbaum, bleeding from wounds on his head and neck, the attack had stopped. But it wasn’t over yet. He saw the lion dragging Brooks into the woods. Grabbing his bike, he knew he had to find cell service. By the time he reached the 911 dispatch officer, it was too late. Officials later found the lion standing over Brooks’ body amongst the brush and trees.

This death was pivotal. A renewed and widespread fear of mountain lions swept through Washington, triggering a new lack of tolerance for mountain lions in the wild in a state that, up until that point, was interested in heeding scientific data on how best to manage the animal. Politicians introduced new legislation, and in defiance of the recommendations of state biologists, Fish and Wildlife commissioners voted to increase hunting limits. It’s a course of events that has repeated itself across the West after someone is killed or attacked by a lion: States react swiftly and definitively against the lions.

So, what’s to come in the western United States, where human-mountain lion interactions — fueled by these shrinking boundaries between human habitat and lion habitat — are certain to rise?

Since the arrival of European settlers in North America, humans and mountain lions have had a contentious relationship. While lions roamed

the country among the Native American population, the colonists arrived with both the tools (steel traps, dogs and guns) and the desire to kill them, which they did after their livestock kept turning up dead.

Early mountain lion policy in the U.S. was ostensibly zero tolerance. Connecticut was the first state to issue a bounty on mountain lions in 1684. Soon, other states followed suit. In 1888, the Utah Territorial Legislature established its own bounty and classified the mountain lion as an “obnoxious animal.” For the next 71 years, hunters in Utah could trade kills for cash. Over the course of Arizona’s 51-year bounty program, the state paid out a sum of $386,150 to hunters who brought in dead mountain lions. In 1901, Teddy Roosevelt took a vacation to Colorado between the end of his governorship of New York and taking office as vice president. A report in the Meeker Herald stated, “Mr. Roosevelt, wanting a little recreation, has chosen to hunt mountain lion for a pastime.” He killed 14 during his monthlong trip. By the early 1900s many states had succeeded in killing off their entire population of mountain lions. And while the cats remained in pockets throughout the West, they were mostly eradicated from states east of the Mississippi.

A few decades later — once the mountain lions were either dead or good as dead — America’s attitude toward them shifted dramatically. During the zeitgeist of the late 1960s cultural revolution, both perceptions and policy started to shift. Acceptance of the animals ended bounty programs across the country, and many states moved to reclassify them as game animals. Now, instead of states paying for a dead lion, they charged hunters for the chance to kill one. In Utah today, the going price for a lion tag is $58.

Mountain lions became a conservation success story, and researchers were finally able to study them in earnest. As their population began to rebound, they started to return to their historic ranges, eventually showing up

IN THE UNITED STATES, UNDEVELOPED LAND IN LION COUNTRY IS BEING DEVELOPED — FURTHER BLURRING THE BUFFER BETWEEN HUMAN AND LION HABITAT.

a young mountain lion finds cover in the north-facing forest of mount timpanogos in utah’s wasatch range

fresh mountain lion tracks descend to the provo canyon, where deer are abundant

cats that feel threatened by people or pets will usually retreat into higher country, steep terrain or trees

in states from South Dakota to Connecticut. At the same time, the human population was growing, and metro areas and mountain towns such as Salt Lake City and Boulder, Colorado, began to sprawl. In the 1990s, mountain lion attacks — and deaths — peaked, with four fatalities, a number not seen since. The stories gripped the public.

The town of Idaho Springs, Colorado, is 2 miles long and three blocks wide, give or take. It hugs the edge of Interstate 70 and is hemmed in by the Rocky Mountains. Colorful Victorian-era homes line the streets, holdovers from the town’s founding in 1859 when gold was discovered. It was once rambunctious and bustling — home to 12,000 people during its peak — but by 1990 it had long been quiet, and the population had settled to under 2,000.

In 1991, 18-year-old Scott Lancaster was in the middle of his senior year at Clear Creek High. He had an easygoing nature, an affinity for tie-dye and Birkenstocks, and was professedly in love with his girlfriend, Heather. He’d recently let his grades slip so low that he wasn’t able to compete for the Nordic ski team, of which he was the star. It didn’t matter — he was far more interested in biking and had his eyes set on a pro cycling career.

Lancaster had a free period in the afternoon and often used that time to run a few laps in the hills above the high school for training. On the 14th of January, Lancaster grabbed pepperoni pizza from 7-Eleven for lunch and headed out on his run. At some point during his second lap, Lancaster was attacked by a mountain lion and dragged uphill. Despite being within view of both the high school and the freeway — and it being the middle of the day — no one saw him. Or heard him scream.

The mountain lion killed and ate the boy, and his body — “hollowed out like a pumpkin” — wasn’t found until two days later, recounts David Baron in the book “Beast in the Garden.” On that January day, Lancaster became the first human killed by a mountain lion in Colorado’s history.

Big biological questions arose. Were mountain lions losing their fear of humans, and more importantly, once again looking at us as prey? The answer to the cause of this horrifying death, Baron says, can be found in the landscape, society’s changing relationship with wilderness and mountain lions’ increasing adaptability to suburbia.

“This is what our nation is becoming: a country where people build new homes on undeveloped land, pay to preserve the open space beside it, attract animals into their yard, and — by embracing wilderness and wildlife — alter the very nature of what they presume Nature to be,” Baron writes. “The future of America looks a lot like a place in Colorado where, on a mild winter’s day in 1991, a large cat killed a young man and ate his heart.”

Is that true? Well, sort of. In the U.S., undeveloped land in lion country is increasingly being developed, which is blurring the buffer between human habitat and lion habitat. But does the future of America look like more people being preyed upon by mountain lions?

“That was a fearmongering book. There’s no evidence of that,” Mark Elbroch, scientist for Panthera, a global wild cat conservation organization, says. There are lions everywhere, and these gruesome deaths are the outliers, not the norm. “There are definitely cats on the outskirts of towns all the time in the West, in people’s yards, living in between us all the time.” Most encounters with mountain lions are one-sided: The lion sees you, but you don’t see it. If there is an actual encounter, people typically employ the right behaviors (stand your ground, make yourself look bigger, don’t crouch down, yell, throw rocks) and the lion moves on. They usually hunt from dusk to dawn, a time when most people are asleep. In the last few years as doorbell cameras have increased in popularity, they’ve been picking up roaming lions at night. Without those, the sleeping residents would be none the wiser.

We feel fear in order to protect ourselves from legitimate threats, but we also feel fear when our lives aren’t immediately at risk (a big spider, flying on a plane, etc.). Most of us humans are skilled at imagining the worst-case scenario. So how do we perceive whether our fear is warranted?

Experts point to the numbers. In the last 100 years, less than two dozen people have been killed by mountain lions in North America, and no human has ever been killed by a mountain lion in Utah. (For perspective, around 20 people are killed every year by cows.) A person is far more likely to be struck by lightning or drown in their own bathtub than to be attacked by a cougar. “It’s this latent, intuitive sense of danger. It’s not based on statistics or probabilities of being attacked,” David Stoner, Utah State University mountain lion researcher, says.

Stoner is right; the odds of being killed by a mountain lion are extremely low, but does it matter? Does low probability affect our fear? Not really. And especially not now, when encounters are becoming more likely.

Mountain lions continue to demonstrate a strong aversion to humans, but they are adapting their behavior to a changing environment. According to research by Montana’s Headwater Economics, since 1990, 60% of new singlefamily homes in the U.S. have been built in what’s called the “wildland-urban interface,” or the zone where undeveloped wildland meets human development. Prime real estate is often also prime lion habitat. While mountain lions are capable of surviving virtually anywhere, their survival is dependent on deer, and deer are attracted to human landscapes. Towns close to the mountains, in places like the Wasatch Front and Colorado’s Front Range (which has one of the highest mountain lion densities on record in the country), provide respite for deer during the winter when they must retreat from the snowy high country. A study from the University of Michigan showed that deer are attract-

“THERE ARE CATS ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF TOWNS ALL THE TIME IN THE WEST, IN PEOPLE’S YARDS, LIVING IN BETWEEN US ALL THE TIME.”

the photographer flying above mount timpanogos looking for mountain lions

ed to the light of urban areas. In these urban areas deer herds also find a consistent, sustainable food source.

“It’s all about the food,” says Stoner, who co-authored the study. “So what happens?” Deer develop an affinity for human habitats, and food security trumps the mountain lions’ fear of those humans, so they follow their prey into town. Climate change and drought may also drive deer and lions into towns in order to access reliable water sources. “The problem with human conflict with deer and mountain lions in urban areas is really just getting started,” Stoner says. “This is not a problem that is going to go away.”

In 2017, a police officer killed a charging mountain lion just outside of downtown Salt Lake City. “Typically they’re not in the city seeking people, they’re trying to find their own habitat and have just gotten a little bit lost,” Riley Peck, a wildlife program manager for the Division of Wildlife Resources, told Deseret after the incident.

The Mountain Lion Foundation estimates that there are fewer than 30,000 mountain lions in the U.S., and the density of those mountain lions varies widely. In Utah, the highest mountain lion density is in the northern part of the state where it’s the wettest, and also where the majority of the state’s population lives: the Wasatch Range from Provo north to the Idaho state line. “What part of the state do we have two opposing factors: very low hunting pressure combined with very high habitat quality?” Stoner says. “The Wasatch Front. Specifically, right behind Salt Lake City.”

There’s no data to predict how many more encounters could occur, but as the boundaries between human and mountain lion habitat are harder to identify, researchers see interactions on an upward trajectory. “There’s almost no real management intervention that can be employed to alleviate this, and this is true of many cities in the West,” Stoner says. “I think what we’re seeing now is really just the front end of what’s going to continue to be a real conundrum in Western communities for the foreseeable future.” Elbroch agrees. “The trajectory we’re on is that things are just going to get worse unless we can figure it out, and all I know is that we haven’t figured it out.” In his book, “The Cougar Conundrum,” Elbroch says, “Every mountain lion story in the news eventually comes down to hunting.”

What he means is that after incidents like the mountain biker death in 2018, states often turn to hunting to try to address the problem of negative interactions between humans and lions. The ethos being if you kill more lions, there will be fewer lions around to kill people. That’s exactly what happened in Washington. “The state rocketed up mountain lion hunting beyond the levels that their own state biologists have recommended,” Elbroch says.

But this approach actually could have adverse effects. Evidence suggests that we’re seeing more conflict between humans and mountain lions in the areas where hunting is the heaviest. A study by a team at Washington State University (ironically, the mascot of WSU is the cougar) suggested that reducing the number of lions hunted for sport would actually reduce negative interactions between mountain lions and humans, pets and livestock. In 2012, Washington state heeded this data, lowered its hunting quota and saw a marked reduction in these negative interactions, but after the 2018 death, Elbroch says, “all of that’s been thrown out the window. There’s no connection between human safety and lion hunting, but people believe there is.”

“WE’RE SEEING THE FRONT END OF WHAT’S GOING TO BE A REAL CONUNDRUM IN WESTERN COMMUNITIES FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE.” In 1990, Californians voted to make it illegal to hunt mountain lions for sport. To this day, California is the only state to have done so. It also has the lowest rate of human-lion interactions per capita in the country. Under the depredation law, the public can apply for a permit to kill a lion that poses a risk to public safety or livestock, but only after they’re tried nonlethal methods twice. The first radio-collared mountain lion killed under the depredation law came in January 2020 after a lion known as P-56 killed a dozen livestock belonging to a single landowner. A different landowner requested a depredation permit in 2016 after 10 of their alpaca were killed and an L.A. Times headline read: “P-45 mountain lion faces the death penalty after alpaca slaughter, sparking protest.” The landowners received death threats from the community and ultimately rescinded their request. This doesn’t mean that all Californians are protective of mountain lions and want them to remain in the ecosystem. In 2019 alone the state issued 194 depredation permits and an average of about 98 are killed each year under the system. For many of these issues with landowners who have a small number of livestock, the solution is often pretty simple: building a taller fence or putting livestock in a closed shelter at night. “I’d love to see a shift in legislation that demands that people protect their livestock, and if they can’t then they should be helped,” Elbroch says. “How do we get society to shift towards being accountable for themselves?” This debate over mountain lions is nuanced at almost every juncture, and as scientists continue to learn more about this elusive animal, they hope to be able to determine the right way to coexist. But regardless of the data, it will come down to convincing the public.

“We’re not ready as a society to live with mountain lions. I would love to say we are, but we’re not,” Elbroch says. “We would need to be accountable for ourselves and our belongings. We would need to actually believe that these animals have a right to live and are essential to healthy ecosystems. Not just that they have a right to be out there, but that we want them to be.”

THE STORY THAT STARTED WITH A SOUND HOW ONE NAVAJO PHOTOGRAPHER PASSED DOWN A HISTORY OF HEALING AND BROUGHT HIS FAMILY CLOSER TOGETHER

BY MARY M c INTYRE

The jingle dress project began as a dream cradled in the dark- dancing in colorful dresses with small metal cones attached, the air jingling ness of 2020. with the sounds of their dance. The spirits in his dream told him that mak-

It was early spring and the COVID-19 pandemic was just beginning ing the dresses and performing the dance would help his daughter heal. to ravage the world. With international travel banned, shelter-in-place He told his wife about the dream, and she set to work making four dresses, orders set, businesses closed and people losing their jobs, the world was their colors corresponding to the Ojibwe sacred colors. She finished each in turmoil. dress with rows of metal cones to create the jingles. Once completed, the

For Eugene Tapahe, a Navajo photographer, art shows were getting dresses were given to four women, and he showed them the dance he saw called off — one after another. “The shows are how I make my money, in his dream. The women began dancing. By the end of the night, the little so the cancellations started really affecting me. It was getting dismal,” girl who had been sick with the flu was cured and dancing with them. he says. By May, the Navajo Nation had the highest infection rate in the The power and symbolism of the jingle dress dance spread from the country. Eugene doesn’t currently live on the reservation, but much of his Ojibwe people in Minnesota to the Lakota and then westward into Monfamily still does. Late in the spring, his aunt passed tana and south into the Four Corners region. By the away after contracting COVID-19. “I was really an- 1980s it was being performed by most of the nation’s gry because, for safety reasons, we couldn’t bury her Native communities. Because of its origins, the jinon our family land, and we couldn’t come together to gle dress dance is called “the healing dance,” and it celebrate her life,” he says. Then came the dream. Asleep at home in Provo, “I WAS WATCHING A HERD OF BISON, THEN I involves light footwork in rhythm with drumming and singing. The dance is now popular in powwows Eugene was transported to a grassy meadow in HEARD THE SOUND throughout the Midwest and western United States. Yellowstone National Park, a place he’s been many OF JINGLES. These social gatherings are not ceremonial but fotimes shooting photos, connecting with the land and I SAW WOMEN IN cus instead on celebration and competition dancing, his family. The sun was setting over the verdant, rolling horizon. “I was watching a herd of bison, then I TRADITIONAL JINGLE DRESSES. I FELT LIKE and anyone is welcome to attend. The fancy dance, jingle dress dance and others are known as intertribheard the sound of jingles,” he recalls. “I saw women THERE WAS HOPE.” al dances, meaning that members of any tribe can in traditional jingle dresses start to emerge. First five, dance them. However, the dresses, music and dance then 10, 20, 30 of them were dancing in the mead- steps at powwows are different from the traditional ow. I felt a calmness and healing. I felt like there was ceremonial dances since they are being performed in hope.” When Eugene awoke the next morning, his public rather than for ceremony. dream remained with him, crystallizing in his mind, reminding him of the For Eugene, these aspects of Native culture are an important part of stories he’d heard about the healing power of the jingle dress. He knew he who he is. “I grew up with the tradition of ceremony,” he says of life on needed to make his dream a reality. the reservation near Window Rock, Arizona, where he was raised by his grandmother. “She had a little home without running water or electrici• • ty. We lived by the sun and herded sheep. Grandma was very traditional. We both loved life on the reservation.” Window Rock is the capital of the Navajo Nation and lies on the Arizona-New Mexico border, just The jingle dress dance originated during the influenza pandemic of 1918. south of the Four Corners region in the southwestern U.S. As the story goes, a young girl of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe people Continued on page 46 was very sick with the virus. One night, her father dreamed of women Continued from page 40

THIS PAGE: SUNNI BEGAY, ERIN TAPAHE, JOANNI BEGAY AND DION TAPAHE, THE DANCERS OF “ART HEALS: THE JINGLE DRESS PROJECT,” AT BEAR MEDICINE LODGE NATIONAL MONUMENT (DEVILS TOWER), WYOMING, NATIVE LAND OF THE LAKOTA, ARAPAHO, CROW, CHEYENNE AND SHOSHONE PEOPLE. OPPOSITE PAGE: PICTURED AT MONUMENT VALLEY TRIBAL PARK, ARIZONA, NATIVE LAND OF THE NAVAJO PEOPLE.

After growing up in the rural southwest, Eugene’s path to photography wasn’t a direct one. He left the reservation in 1985 to attend BYU and, after graduating with a bachelor’s in fine arts and graphic design, he went back to the reservation in 1992 to work at the Navajo Times newspaper. “I found creating layouts pretty boring,” he laughs. “I told the editor such, and that I was more interested in reporting. One day, he handed me a camera to shoot a rodeo. That was my first photography experience.” Eugene learned by trial and error on the job. “It was really just a happenstance. It wasn’t like I totally loved photography, but I started getting into it and it totally changed my perspective.”

After Eugene’s dream about the jingle dress dancers, he knew he had to share his vision through his camera lens. “I told my wife and two daughters about it. We agreed it would be amazing if we could make this dream a reality.” They started planning a photography project to re-create the dream with his daughters as dancers. But two dancers weren’t enough, so they told their family friends, the Begay sisters — Sunni and JoAnni — about the photography project and asked if they were interested in joining. With the two sisters as additional dancers, “Art Heals: The Jingle Dress Project” was coming to fruition.

Eugene and the dancers’ first stop to shoot photos was the Bonneville Salt Flats. During the shoot, the group started talking about where to go next and discussed the idea of taking photographs of the jingle dress dancers at state and national parks as a sort of land reclamation for Native people. Soon, Eugene, his wife, Sharon, and the dancers — Dion Tapahe, Erin Tapahe, Sunni Begay and JoAnni Begay — were heading north to Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone to create an image of what he saw in his dream. His goal was to use the curative powers of the jingle dress to aid with the COVID-19 pandemic. In Eugene’s words, the project is about capturing “a series of images to document the spiritual places our ancestors once walked, and to unite and give hope to the world through art, dance and culture to help us heal.”

The six of them traveled throug the Intermountain West, the Pacific Northwest and across the Great Plains to the Midwest — all the way to Washington, D.C. — capturing images along the way. Sometimes, they were out in the wilderness alone. Other times, they were in the middle of deserted cities, visiting landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, or in crowded streets, paying their respects to George Floyd’s flower-covered memorial in Minneapolis.

Each woman came to the project with her own conception of the jingle dress and of how to use the dance for good during the pandemic. Erin, Eugene’s eldest daughter, recalls her first experience seeing a jingle dress in third grade. “I was in an ESL class, but I didn’t need to be there — I spoke English very well,” she says. “One of the tutors was Native American and she realized I wasn’t learning anything. She came over and talked to me about her tribe and being a jingle dress dancer in powwows. After school, she invited me and my mom to go to her home to see the dress and learn about the dance. It was an impactful moment; having this powerful role model made me feel confident in expressing myself and helped me find myself as a young Native woman.”

Since the jingle dress dance didn’t originate with Navajo people, Erin’s family traditions didn’t include this specific dance. But as it gained in popularity through intertribal powwows, she began dancing in jingle dress competitions. However, it wasn’t until 2016 during the Standing Rock Movement and witnessing a ceremonial jingle dress dance that Erin and and her father felt the real healing power of the dance. For Dion, her younger sister, it came a few years later when BYU put on the annual university powwow. “My parents took us to watch the jingle dress dancers and I clearly remember the way they composed themselves,” she recalls. “They were strong women, representing their culture. It’s been really amazing, years later, to be able to dance as one.”

At its core, the traditional Ojibwe jingle dress dance is for healing. Dancers move as one with the drum. “When you’re dancing, it’s very powerful,” Erin says. “I don’t think people really know the full power. You as a dancer have to be healthy in mind, heart and spirit because you are the pathway of healing for other people. It’s incredible to have this positive impact on other people.” Sunni chimes in, “It brings good energy to the audience, but it has helped heal me as well, to remember all the good in the world.” With all the gloom of the past year, the dance has been a way to bring comfort to their community, to strangers along their journey, and also to themselves.

The timing of Eugene’s “Art Heals: The Jingle Dress Project” — coinciding with the pandemic and the ensuing difficult times — was important for both Eugene and the dancers. Eugene’s art market sales dried up overnight, while the pandemic derailed the women’s plans of graduating from BYU, applying to law school and starting careers. As Dion recalls, “It was hard to find hope at the beginning of the year, but through this project we’ve been able to provide hope for ourselves and others.”

Before the project began, the women felt strongly about using their education to support fellow Native and Indigenous people, and this project gave them even more incentive to push for equality and basic human rights by showing the power of their Native traditions in bringing people together. The women experienced the gift of dance and ceremony in times of hardship, and after dancing with members of the Ojibwe tribe where the jingle dance was created, they felt respect and understanding for the traditional dress itself. They witnessed the unrest in the streets of Minneapolis following Floyd’s murder and saw firsthand the brutal outcome of inequities that plague our nation. Erin, who graduated in 2019 with a degree in journalism, says, “When I first got interested in journalism, I typed ‘Native American’ into the search engine of a major news outlet. Everything that came up was negative, really violent stuff.” Reporting on Natives, she found, wasn’t being done by their own people. “Until now, we Native Americans haven’t been able to share our own stories; an outsider had to do it for us. With the advent of social media, it’s much more accessible for anyone to put their voice out there. Natives can share our unique experiences and stories. We suddenly have people shedding light on all these different topics.”

Erin has witnessed this cultural shift just over the past five years. She continues, “Instead of remaining a topic of history, people are realizing we’re still here.” She is currently applying to law school and hopes to pursue human rights, acting as a voice for the voiceless and an advocate for underserved or underrepresented groups.

Sunni has a similar long-term outlook. Her current studies in political science and American Indian studies at BYU are in preparation for a law degree, her main interest being tribal policymaking. She is seeing change on the horizon. “As a child, I grew up around strong Native women, but when it came to power, they were never in charge,” she says. “They were never involved politically. But now, I see many women getting involved in politics. It feels like the norm. I’ve been surrounded by so many Native women in the past few years and they are fierce. They have a mission. To have the power of education behind us, it feels exciting.”

After traveling all year to complete the project for fall gallery shows, the group had experienced so much, but they’d been too busy to return to the Navajo Nation. Then, they visited Monument Valley. “It felt like we were coming full circle,” says Sunni. They hadn’t seen family and friends on the reservation in months. “My dad always taught us that you go out in the world, learn as much as you can and, whatever’s good, you bring it back.”