A RT The Gift mosaic by Senora Lynch on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus PHOTO BY JADE WILSON
Preserving the Future Over the past two decades Senora Lynch, a member of the Haliwa-Saponi tribe, has established an expansive arts legacy across the state BY CHRIS KAMMERER arts@indyweek.com
S
enora Lynch squeezes 10 sheets of wet corn husk between her fingers, 10 strands of black yarn pressed in the middle. She ties the bundle at the top with a piece of string, spreads the husks apart one by one like wings, and folds them up and over. The yarn hangs down from the center. “Tie them tight,” she tells a group of students. “If you don’t tie them tight, it’ll all fall apart.” It’s a Tuesday night meeting of the Carolina Indian Circle, UNC’s student group for Native students and allies, and Lynch is demonstrating how to make corn shuck dolls. Once everyone has gathered their supplies, Lynch says a prayer in Siouan, the native language of the Haliwa-Saponi tribe, asking the Creator to give us everything we need— nothing extra or special. 16
November 24, 2021
INDYweek.com
“You all are warriors,” she tells the students. “I know how hard it can be to be Native in a place like this. When I went to school, people used to pull my hair and say, ‘Oh, you think you’re Indian, huh?’” Several of the students are from the same tribe as “Ms. Senora.” And for those who aren’t, she’s still an inspiration. The walkway between the two buildings of the Frank Porter Graham Student Union is an encompassing art plaza called The Gift. It’s a central meeting place on campus. Lynch, now 58, designed the expansive mosaic back in 2004. Lynch, who now lives in Warrenton, grew up near Hollister, North Carolina. Her mother raised seven children on Mills Road—a gravel drive connecting grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who all lived and worked together.
The family fed themselves by vegetable farming and cultivating and curing tobacco. When gathering corn together, Lynch’s mother often told her daughter stories of making dolls out of corn shuck. When she was 12, Lynch asked her mother how to make them. “That was one of the first art or crafts, you could say, that I started learning with my hands,” she says. Soon after, while everyone else worked and played in the fields, Lynch began going to her grandfather James Mills’s home to help him weave baskets and chair bottoms out of split cane, white oak, and elm bark. Mills was one of the original councilmen of the Haliwa-Saponi. In the early 1950s, he held the first recorded tribal meeting on his front porch. Before that, tribal meetings were held in secret. “In North Carolina, you were not allowed to say you were Indian,” Lynch says, referring to “the Plecker Law,” officially called the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which made it illegal for anyone to identify themselves on birth or marriage certificates as anything besides “white, colored, or mixed.” “Our people would write ‘Indian’ on their documents, but they were scribbled out and erased,” Lynch says, sitting in her kitchen among tools and scraps of clay. “After the Indian Removal Act [of 1830], they didn’t want any tribes to gather together. You couldn’t socialize, you really couldn’t dance. People kind of hid away in the woods and they held on to our Native culture by knowing the land and knowing where the water sources were.” This went on for over a century. It wasn’t until 1965, two years after Lynch was born, that the Haliwa-Saponi received official tribal recognition from North Carolina. The tribe reclaimed their fishing and hunting rights. “People started dancing and dressing in our regalias again.” In the years that Lynch helped her grandfather weave, she also learned to do beadwork and make pottery. “I was one of those children that just always picked up on doing things with my hands,” she says. In high school, Lynch began to sketch and draw, and excelled in art classes. “All the Native students got picked on,” she says. “Teachers were disrespectful to our culture, our histories.” One day her history teacher told the entire class, “Any student absent tomorrow is going to get an E” (a failing grade). This was no accident: the next day was “Powwow Friday,” a ceremonial day that most Native students planned to attend. Hearing the teacher’s threat to fail students out of the class for missing one day, Senora stood up and said, “Give me an E.” Years after she graduated, Lynch started teaching fellow Natives around North Carolina, passing down the skills of
