Dust

This portrait of the artist’s great-great-grandfather, Dust, is based on a photograph of him by Fred E. Miller, a Bureau of Indian Affairs clerk circa 1898–1910. It comes from a series of prints in which Red Star explores her family’s genealogy, incorporating patterning from Indigenous star quilts. The artist explains, “I happened upon the design for the background as I was reading a book about Crow astronomy and cosmology. It explains that the Crow are a people of stars. There’s a saying that the star people are going to return to earth and come get us. I developed the idea to use constellations, incorporating Dust’s name within the pattern itself.”