All the matriarchs in my family have been members of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota. All were sent away to government boarding schools, to realign their cultural heritage. All became outsiders in both the native and the white world. Everybody comes to their own cultural truths, and mine is that I am the product of the governments plan to educate the Indian and in the process annihilate the problem. I can trace my Native heritage back six generations to Ita ta Win (Wind Woman), born in the 1830's. I have the writings of my great grandmother, photographs and native beadwork, my mother's baby moccasins, yet I am a white woman. If you meet me you don't believe I have native blood. This fact, how we view one another, plays a big part in my image making. Everyone always misunderstands everyone else. My work is about the difference between what is true about the unknown and what is imagined.

At some point artists need to ask what is at stake in their work. Where the work states their belief system. I am like most writers; I combine personal experiences with fiction, except I am not a writer. As a visual artist I incorporate the passions that drive me personally into a bigger reality. The history of my art making has referenced the homeless, prisoners, police, hyenas, unsavory characters that pose a threat or danger, lead fishing sinkers that look like bullets, fish hooks, references to small pox, floating feet, facts and myths about how the west was won, porcupine quills and squashed and rusted beer caps. All of these are linked, either through threat, rewritten histories, or metaphor. I use the simplicity of suggestion to force the viewer to read what the work is about, what truth I want them to take away with them. It is about the longer view-nothing is separate, permanent, fixed or owned.

As a product of two worlds, I have a longing to merge a double self into a better and truer self. My work has always been about inequity in society, the fact that there is always an "under dog." There is danger, there are lies, and there are forgotten truths.