Tammy Faw Faw is an Otoe-Missouria and Ioway artist whose creativity is guided by purpose, responsibility, and love for her people. With a Fine Arts degree from Kansas State University, Tammy moves fluidly across various mediums, including illustration, graphic design, sewing, and painting, blending traditional knowledge with contemporary techniques. Every piece she creates is grounded in revival. She’s committed to bringing back what colonization tried to erase, to revive what was once old and forgotten, and to breathe new life into it. Her art is a testament to the fortitude of our ancestral knowledge and memories, still carrying our cultures forward with every thread, brushstroke, and word of the generations now and yet to come. This conversation is a window into that world, a world where art is not just expression but a remembrance and reclamation.
Q. How do you navigate the balance between protecting what’s sacred in Otoe-Missouria culture and sharing your work in public or educational spaces?
Rather than sharing knowledge specific to Otoe-Missouria culture, I find it easier to relate my work to other Native communities and explain how similar or different our ways are.
Q. You’ve been deeply involved in reconnecting the Otoe-Missouria people with their ancestral homelands in southeast Nebraska. How does that reconnection manifest in your artwork?
In 1997, I moved to Manhattan, Kansas, with my ex-husband and our daughter, who was five at the time. I enrolled at Kansas State University to complete my Bachelor of Fine Arts. While there, I realized how close we were to where our Otoe-Missouria people had lived in the 1700s and 1800s. We began taking small trips to cemeteries, ruins, county museums, the Big Blue River, and other places we might have been back then. From then on, how beautiful it was never left my mind. It was obvious that turning that land into farms was done intentionally, and how sad it was that we were forced out of that area. When I began learning more about my own ancestry and our history in the area, it started to manifest in my art through the use of antique maps and mixed media, such as photographs.
Q. What are some of the traditional teachings or creative methods that you carry forward in your work? Are there specific materials, symbols, or stories that hold a recurring presence?
When someone asks me to make an Otoe-Missouria dress for them, I ask if they have photographs of their family so that we can try to reproduce those designs, giving it greater meaning to them. I never use those designs on anything but traditional clothing for those families, so it still holds that importance for them.
As we come from Woodlands people, floral designs are a significant component of our style. Growing up, I was told we don’t use straight lines, but now, more and more, we are seeing a mix of the two styles. I try to make my designs bigger and use colors that others might not.
Q. In what ways do you see your art contributing to community healing and cultural revitalization, especially for younger generations coming into their identities?
My art was healing for me, so I believe it can be that for others as well. All of my art ties back to my identity as an Otoe-Missouria and Ioway woman. There are bits and pieces of my story in each piece of art I create, whether it’s a painting, an outfit, earrings, or something else.
Q. What are your hopes for your art, for your people, and for how our stories are remembered, honored, and carried forward?
I hope that more of our stories are written down, recorded, and made available to our tribal public. COVID-19 took many of our elders and people in general. When folks pass, you don’t know what you’ve lost until you want to ask them about something. I hope that the stories behind our art carry forward; that is something that is often lost for many artists as they pass on. There is not always a record of their feelings, motivations, and reasons for creating each piece of art.
Q. What first called you to create art, and when did you begin to understand it as a living expression of your cultural identity and survival?
My art teachers in Perry, especially in high school, first encouraged me. Before that, my friends and cousins would come over to my grandma’s house. We would use old typing assignment papers and draw on the backs. One of my cousins would copy the styles of Indian Art that were popular in the 1970s. Mr. Garvey, my art teacher, gave me names of Indian artists to look up and draw inspiration from.
In a way, my cultural identity and my art have always been linked together. I didn’t attend college immediately after graduating from high school, so I had some years of living experience under my belt before I decided to enroll. When I finally did, I knew that I wanted to do art.
That’s where my art and my cultural identity become one and the same. They told me to paint and create art of what I knew. So, I wanted to make art of Indians, our lives, and our belongings, but my professors were not very supportive and discouraging in many ways. They told me that Indian art was not profitable and I wouldn’t be able to live off of it, but back then, nobody made a good living off their art. I kept painting what felt good to me, and it has paid off.
Q. How do your experiences as an Otoe-Missouria woman, mother, and knowledge keeper influence the stories you choose to tell through your work?
Most of my pieces center around my great-grandfather Wanosa, who was an Otoe-Missouria chief and spiritual leader during the late 1800s. His message was similar to that of many such leaders, to reject living as white citizens, to abstain from drinking, to treat others with respect and dignity, to feed and house the less fortunate, etc.
During this time, the government was pressuring the Otoe-Missouria to accept allotments. So he was fighting a big fight at that time, trying to turn the world back around the opposite way.
He has been a great influence on me, even though I never met him. My grandma Lizzie Washington Dailey told me stories about what a great man he was, that he took care of orphans, helped other Otoe-Missouria and Indians out in the world, and wanted our way of life as Indian people to carry on.
A lot, if not most, of my art is created with that line of thought in mind and with that at the forefront.
Q. Your artwork often centers on memory, land, and language. How do these themes intertwine in your creative process and your daily life?
I get inspiration everywhere, from plants – if I see a cool-looking leaf, I’ll keep it or make a design out of it. I find myself studying vines, flowers, and leaves, trying to envision how they would look. I draw inspiration every time I go outside.
There’s always something I want to make or do; it’s always on my mind. Once an artist has an idea in their mind, they must get it out. They have to make it a reality. When I was younger, I would go to powwows and take a notebook with me, sketching while I sat.
I didn’t grow up speaking Otoe or Ioway. My grandma didn’t speak it very often to us, and my grandpa didn’t live in the home. At the time I grew up, it was well after the most damaging effects of formal education, like boarding schools, had occurred. Language loss was pretty much complete in our family.
However, my daughter was always drawn to these grammar books produced in the 1970s. Her work with the language and interest in revitalization provided a way for us to collaborate on projects where I could illustrate and she could utilize language to educate.
Q. Can you walk us through a piece that felt especially significant or transformational, either in what it expressed, how it was received, or what it helped you process?
My piece, “Jiwere-Nut’achi Woyąwe,” was a truly transformational experience for me and my art. I used a photo that I took during the Otoe-Missouria Encampment, showing the arena and the singers in the middle. I saw this picture after we got home and I knew I wanted to make something with it.
It was transformational for me because I got to do something that I didn’t learn how to do in school, which was to use graphic design while keeping the photograph in the background. I used separate photographs of my daughter and her friends at powwows to make the dancers.
It took me a long time to finish during Covid because I hadn’t tried something like that before. It was fun to teach myself how to make the figures look realistic. When I was in school, we were learning the basics of these design programs. It was fulfilling in that way, as I could teach myself this new skill.
It depicts women dancing, like during a round dance session. I wanted to show that women are the backbone of our tribe and that they don’t get the respect that they deserve, so I wanted this piece to be that respect to them.
Tammy Faw Faw’s work is a living archive, a blueprint for how we hold on to what matters and carry it forward. She creates because it’s in her bones, like the stories of her ancestors, that demand to be remembered.
