Artwork copyright Cara Romero. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Artwork copyright Cara Romero. Photo courtesy of Washington State Arts Commission, 2021.

Artwork copyright Cara Romero. Photo courtesy of Washington State Arts Commission, by Dennis Dehart, 2021.

Wakeah, 2016

Cara Romero
(American | Chemehuevi, born 1977)

Location: Kamiak Elementary, Pullman

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Wakeah is a photograph from the “First American Girls” series by artist Cara Romero (Chemehuevi). The artist creates images about positive, self-representation of Native women. Romero notes that “I’m always asking myself, ‘Where do we not see ourselves represented accurately?’”

Wakeah is a true representative of Wakeah Jhane Meyers, a Kiowa/Comanche Pow Wow Dancer. Plains Indians are the most commonly used tribe to stereotype and represent all Native American women. Often, mainstream misrepresentations wear an inappropriate pattern of fringed buckskin, large “pony beads,” and skimpy feathered headbands. Wakeah is wearing an authentic Traditional Southern Buckskin dress used to compete in pow wows. It took five family members over a year to make her regalia. Romero celebrates the love that a family puts into the transmission of those unique cultures. It is a celebration of traditional art while acknowledging the modern Indigenous woman and her unique identity.

Romero uses the life-size doll box to highlight all the objects’ details, their beauty, and historical accuracies. The doll box is like an action figure box which includes the clothes and accessories suited to the role. Romero uses high fashion lighting to look “right off the runway” but also for the viewer to embrace the high fashion masterpiece of the regalia. Each of the doll boxes in the series use an electric color that screams, “I am modern!”

This artwork is part of a curated collection by RYAN! Feddersen (Okanogan and Arrow Lakes) at Kamiak Elementary, Pullman School District, in Eastern Washington. RYAN! drew inspiration from the school's namesake, Chief Kamiakin, and his five wives. Her curated collection honors the essential and often under-recognized role that matriarchs play in history by highlighting Indigenous artists whose work connects with activism, collaboration, resistance, and community building.

This artwork was acquired for the State Art Collection in partnership with Pullman School District.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) is a contemporary photographer who blends fine art and editorial photography. Disillusioned by portrayals of Native Americans as bygone, Romero realized during university that making photographs could do more than anthropology did in words. “When we as Native people explore new artistic tools and techniques, such as photography, we indigenize those media.”
An enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, Romero was raised between contrasting settings: the rural Chemehuevi reservation in the Mojave Desert, California, and the urban sprawl of Houston, Texas. Romero’s identity informs her photography. Her art practice is also shaped by years of study and an instinctual approach to representing Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural memory, collective history, and lived experiences from a Native American female perspective. She states that "It is definitely a goal of mine to create thoughtful content that makes people think of pre-conceived notions of Native America, that challenges those perceptions, that creates multiple narratives, that all comes from a place of empowerment and celebration—a celebration of resistance." She lives and works between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Chemehuevi Valley Indian Reservation in California.