By Mark Berkey-Gerard

Each morning before Lemuel Hill opens the art gallery at the American Indian Community House, he burns sage in a prayer of thanksgiving.

The journey from the San Carlos Apache reservation in Arizona to New York City has been arduous for the 30-year-old artist. He left the reservation when he was 11, lived on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles between the age 15 and 21. When Hill arrived in New York two years ago with $250 in his pocket, he soon found himself sleeping in Central Park when his paycheck from a job at a coffee shop did not cover the rent.

Like many young artists, Hill was drawn to the city by opportunity, diverse culture, and the inspiration of being surrounded by talent. However, he did not expect that the Native American community itself would help him become established.

"There are many aspects of Native American culture here," Hill said of the over 75 different tribes-such as Cherokee, Lakota, Cree, Oneida, Osage, and Mohawk-represented in New York City. "I’m learning about peoples that I’ve never heard of. It’s a constant learning experience. And it’s helped me maintain my identity."

With the assistance of a job-training program at the American Indian Community House, a non-profit organization that offers a range of social services, he became the assistant manager of the only the native owned and operated art gallery in New York City. And he has an opportunity to work on his own art--mixed-media Day-of-the-Dead-style dioramas that explore comic and tragic themes, decorated with found objects that serve as indigenous, religious, and modern icons.

Hill readily acknowledges that many symbols of Indian culture are absent from the urban landscape.

"New York City is an alien thing for people who are Native American, what they represent and what they stand for," he said, noting the lack of natural surroundings and the frantic pace of the city.

Nonetheless, he says he has found a home, meaningful relationships and a sense of community in the city.

Lemuel Hill is just one story in the urban American Indian’s saga in New York City.

Currently, there are approximately 35,000 American Indians living in the five boroughs, with an additional 12,000 in the surrounding metropolitan area. In the past, certain industries have produced ethnic pockets of Native Americans, most notably the Mohawk tribe that settled in Brooklyn while working in construction on the city’s most famous skyscrapers.

But today there are no distinct neighborhoods or geographic locations around which to build a sense of community. So venues of visual and performance art-both traditional and contemporary-often become places that draw the community of diverse tribes together. According to census data, as many North American Indians live outside reservations areas as on them. For many indigenous peoples, artistic expression has become a way to forge a sense of place and identity where ever they live.

Native Americans artists can be found in nearly every aspect of the New York arts

scene -- from community performances at a Bronx library to Broadway plays, from craft and jewelry fairs to Soho galleries, from pow-wows to ballet, from drum circles to jazz bands.

According to Rosemary Richmond, director of the American Indian Community House and a Mohawk who has lived in the city her whole life, New York is unique in that many people come specifically to establish themselves as artists.

"The New York City Indian community is made up of a lot of Indian people that come from across the hemisphere because they want to be in some facet of the arts," Richmond said. "They come from all over for specific reasons. They’re not just coming from outlying areas to the city that’s local to them."

A regular schedule of native cultural and artistic events draws visitors from around the city, upstate, New Jersey and Connecticut.

In an elementary school gym on the East 19^th Street, a traditional pow-wow features women dancing in shawls and jingle dresses-elaborate outfits with hundreds of shiny beads and chimes. Men dance in fancy dress with brightly colored blooms of feathers, and others join in jeans, basketball jerseys and sport coats.

Lower Manhattan will host this fall’s five-day Native American Film Festival that screens nearly 50 documentaries, animation and feature films. A past festival premiered "Smoke Signals," the first film written directed and produced by native filmmakers that received worldwide distribution and acclaim.

In a round performance stage at the American Indian Community House, the oldest women’s ensemble in the country, Spider Woman Theater, is currently performing a show entitled "Persistence of Memory" about enduring social marginalization through humor. The ensemble, accompanied regular performances of poetry, dance and musical performances, comprise the annual "Indian Summer" arts festival.

But New York’s American Indian artists stress that they are not just trying to create the Sante Fe of the East.

"Sante Fe is a specific market for Native art," said Diane Fraher, an Osage-Cherokee artist who moved from Oklahoma over 20 years ago and founded Amerinda, a coalition of Native artists in the city in 1987. "New York City is one of the centers of Western culture. Native artists come here to establish themselves and to have their work be recognized."

Artists and performers within the community include opera singers, photographers, classical musicians, filmmakers, painters, dancers, sculptors, and television, film and theater actors.

"We have many classically trained artists that draw from their heritage and also cut it in the mainstream," said Fraher. "Good work is good work."

Despite a diverse and accomplished community, the first obstacle many American Indian artists still encounter is basic recognition.

"A lot of people think there are no Indians left, that they’re dead, and the only place to see them is in a museum," said Richmond. "Through the arts, we give exposure and experience to our community, provide income to those artists, and provide information to the general public that is more palatable than talking directly."

Overcoming general ignorance is something that Jim Cyrus, an African-American director of the Performing Arts department of the American Indian Community House, confronts daily. Cyrus serves as a contact for film and television studios and modeling agencies that do not know who else to call. He has worked with everyone from Disney, who needed help finding the voice of Pocahontas, to Ms. Ross and her fourth grade class in New Rochelle, who needed a storyteller.

"I get calls from people, who are astonished when I say there are 35,000 Native Americans in the five boroughs," said Cyrus, who then breaks into rendition of a common phone conversation. "They say, `Really, I’ve never met any.’ And I say, `What do you think they look like?’ And what they mean is--buckskin, beads, braids--the way they look in the old movies."

Cyrus says studios and agencies also look for a distinct visual image of tribes like Sioux, Commanche and Cherokee, but often ignore the tribes of the East Coast and Central and South America. He tries to make sure that Native Americans get to play Native American roles, but also wants his actors to be seen for other roles.

"We showcase talent so that the community at large knows that there are very talented, trained Native Americans who can play Shakespeare," Cyrus said.

Still other obstacles arise from within the community.

The venues for cultural events, even in a city the size of New York, are limited. Despite outreach efforts, many urban Native Americans are unaware of community events or performances. Sometimes tensions grow between different tribes or organizations competing for limited resources. Still others voice dissatisfaction with large institutions like The National Museum of the American Indian located in Lower Manhattan that hosts a wide range of exhibits, lectures, and tours.

"What comes from within the community is so much more meaningful than what comes from the government," said Fraher, adding that most museum exhibits honor "people that are dead."

The American Indian Community House, in particular, finds itself increasingly burdened with providing social services-HIV education, job training and substance abuse programs-for its urban clients, with fewer resources going to the arts. Across the nation, American Indian communities remain some of the poorest areas, with high rates of unemployment and limited opportunity.

"Our primary focus is to upgrade the economic status of American Indians," Richmond said. "Most of our energy goes to provide basic services to make that possible."

However, most believe that the body of work and performances by Native Americans in New York City grows each year and that in general they bond together across tribal lines in ways that are unique to the city.

"People think that Indians are one homogenous group, but we’re not," said Richmond. "There are over 550 some odd nations. Each of them having different cultures, different ways of doing things, different customs, different beliefs. There are certain things that are common to all of us, but beyond that we’re different people. But in an urban setting like this, we work together because it’s in our best interest."

Gerald McMaster, a Plains Cree artist and curator of current art exhibition at the National American Indian Museum entitled "Reservation X" that explores the idea of place, says that notions of Indian communities are constantly changing. Some Native Americans are moving back to reservations, some are choosing to live in urban areas and suburbs, some live lives between the two. McMaster says that within the art world, he sees a trend toward creating new places that are less fixed, but still vital.

"The urban American Indian phenomenon is a quest for space, for identity and community," said McMaster. "Art makes an attempt to maintain those connections."

Lemuel Hill smiled and surveyed the opening of a photography exhibit he helped organize at the American Indian Community House gallery. Black-and-white graphic photography, color documentary-style portraits, and mixed-media canvases by three different Plain’s Indian artists are featured in an exhibition entitled "In Plain Site." The comfortable atmosphere of the space provides a place for people to meet and socialize as well as view artwork.

Elivra Colorado, a Chichimec-Otomi actress from Mexico stood next to Anthony Two Moons, an Arapaho photographer who grew up Virginia. Both now call New York City home.

"When we have the gatherings, the arts, the memorials, the pow-wows, I think there is a sense of joyfulness," Hill said. "Native Americans have to be serious about a lot of things. But these are times to be lighthearted. Overall, we gather to be thankful that we are still here."

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