ASTORIA — In May 2023, Cliff Taylor walked into the Astoria post office, a grand neoclassical building that fills a downtown city block. A fan of old-fashioned mail, Taylor often comes here to send books and postcards to friends. But that morning, something stopped him short — a large poster on the wall showing his ancestor, Chief Standing Bear, gazing out from the newest U.S. Forever stamp.

“I don’t know what you’d call it,” he said. “A big advertisement of Chief Standing Bear — his postage stamp on the wall. It was incredibly moving, surreal, and just beautiful to me.”

For Taylor, Ponca poet, writer, and storyteller, the moment carried both pride and reckoning — the convergence of public recognition and private memory. His great-great-grandfather was no ordinary figure: Chief Standing Bear (c. 1829–1908) was the Ponca leader whose 1879 court case first established that a Native American was a “person” under U.S. law.

That case became a landmark in American civil rights. After the U.S. Army forcibly removed Standing Bear and some 700 Ponca from their Nebraska homeland to Indian Territory, many died along the way, including the chief’s daughter and only son. Determined to bury his son in their ancestral ground, Standing Bear led a small group back north, defying government orders. They were arrested at Fort Omaha for leaving the reservation without permission. At his trial that spring, Judge Elmer Dundy issued a historic ruling: “An Indian is a person within the meaning of the laws of the United States.”

Now, 146 years later, the Postal Service had printed 18 million stamps bearing the chief’s image. For most Americans it was another commemorative issue. For Taylor, standing in the quiet marble hall, it felt like a personal restoration.

“When I was young, my dad told me, ‘We’re descendants of Chief Standing Bear,’” he recalled. “But this was in the ’80s, and it was a completely different cultural climate. He told me, ‘Don’t tell anybody this.’”

Taylor’s father had been shaped by survival. His grandfather, Cliff Sr., was a Korean War veteran who had endured the boarding-school era. “For them, being an Indian was equated with danger. It was dangerous to be an Indian, and especially to be an Indian of any significance,” Taylor said. “My dad’s worldview was, ‘We’re here to survive, we’re here to fight, they’re still trying to kill us — so don’t let anybody kill you.’”

For years that caution became its own inheritance: silence as survival. Like many Native nations, the Ponca were terminated by the U.S. government in the mid-twentieth century. In 1990, their federal recognition was restored — but not their land. Taylor, raised in a Nebraska trailer park, was nine years old when recognition returned.

“So that’s how it was. I carried that version of my identity probably into my twenties,” he said. Then came a turning point: Taylor began learning from medicine people, elders, and relatives engaged in cultural revival. Only then did the story start to shift. “I started sun dancing, participating in ceremonies, watching this thing I was told to keep secret become a source of pride and beauty.”

Over time, he saw Chief Standing Bear’s presence re-emerge in public life — a statue in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C., a new high school in Lincoln, Nebraska, bearing his name, and now the postal stamp — a small square of paper carrying the weight of history.

“Carrying that whole story into the post office and seeing him elevated nationally in this beautiful stamp was … awesome,” Taylor said. “I mean, I want to be frank — was it our people’s land back? No. Is there still a tremendous amount that needs to be done? Yes. But it was still a very beautiful thing.”

In many ways, Taylor said, the spirit of that moment—the journey from secrecy to celebration—is woven into the art show he has curated. “There’s still so much that needs to be done for our Native people, we’re still fighting for so much,” he said. “We’re still invisible to most Americans — but we’re making some of the most badass, beautiful, public progress imaginable.”

Out of that lineage — and out of years of reckoning with what it means to carry it forward — comes his newest project.

Indigenous Visions: The Exhibition

Taylor, 44, made his home in the Pacific Northwest a decade ago. He is the author of five books, including The Shining Hands of My Ponca Ancestors (North Dakota State University Press), described by one reviewer as “a poetic memoir and storytelling odyssey of personal and communal restoration.”

This November and continuing through Dec. 21, Indigenous Visions, an art show curated by Taylor, is on exhibit at the Anita Building, 1312 Commercial Street in downtown Astoria. The gallery showcases works by ten Indigenous artists from the region across a range of media — photography, painting, beadwork, video, and sculpture/installation. Alongside the visual art, a chapbook produced by Taylor will debut at the exhibit, featuring work by eighteen Native writers and poets.

“This show has many aims,” Taylor said, his face lighting up, “to educate, enlighten, spark, inspire — even to transform how non-Native people understand their relationship to Native reality, which pervades the entire continent.”

When the doors open at the Anita Building, visitors enter a space alive with color, texture, and story. Taylor compares the diversity of voices to “a forest of conversations,” expressing what it’s like to be Native today.

A Forest of Voices

The artists and poets in Indigenous Visions span many tribal nations, each exploring what it means to create from within — and against — histories of erasure. Their works are rooted in place yet push beyond geography, speaking to shared experiences of resilience and renewal.

Ashley Frantz (Makah) — A photographer and video artist, Frantz explores Indigenous feminism, queer identity, and relationships between culture and land, inviting audiences to reflect on their own connections to community. What follows are glimpses of the artists whose work fills the gallery, drawn from their own statements and visions.

Epiphany Couch (Puyallup, Yakama, and Scandinavian/Mixed European) — An artist and writer whose archival pigment prints are featured in the gallery. Her work engages ancestral knowledge and opens new ways of understanding; her poetry appears in the Indigenous Visions chapbook.

Paige Pettibon (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes) — A multidisciplinary artist whose work has been shown nationally at venues including the Tacoma Art Museum and the Smithsonian Institution. Pettibon builds cultural bridges through art rooted in Indigenous knowledge and exploration of self. She also contributes to the chapbook.

Zozo Fish (Diné, Ojibwe) — Through painting and woodburning, Fish depicts the natural world “to bring awareness to the beauty around us and to protect all plants and animals.”

Clarice Ironwill (Mohave, Chemehuevi) — A self-taught beadworker whose creations have supported humanitarian charities and help fund her education at Linn-Benton Community College.

Chanti Mañon-Ferguson (Mazhua, Nahua, Osage) — A Portland-based painter whose work weaves nature, connection, and grief, reflecting personal and collective healing.

Ameyalli Mañon-Ferguson (Mazhua, Nahua, Osage) — A beadworker combining traditional techniques with contemporary style. Her art serves as both cultural expression and activism.

Sophia Anderson (Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe) — A watercolor painter and beadworker whose work reflects growing up on traditional coastal land on Willapa Bay, and, after four years in Seattle, the transition back to her tribal community.

Lee A. Gavin (Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation) — A visual storyteller whose photography and videography center Native life across reservation and urban settings. He is a recipient of awards from the Indigenous Journalism Association, and one of his photos appears on the chapbook cover.

Todd Lawson (Clatsop-Nehalem) — An architect, artist, and fabricator, Lawson’s installation recreates the inside of a Clatsop-Nehalem plank house. Images by other artists will be projected onto a hearth within. As Taylor described it, the work “will allow viewers to cross the threshold that divides the art and the artists from the gallery goers. People are going to suddenly find themselves a part of the art.”

“Now We Re-Member”

Alongside the visual work, the Indigenous Visions chapbook extends the conversation through poetry and prose, exploring what it means to be Indigenous today. The 37-page publication, available at the gallery, features 18 writers — poet laureates, publishers, educators, journalists, and storytellers — reflecting on identity, belonging, and continuance. Taylor calls it “a Whitman sampler” of many voices and experiences.

Contributors include Rena Priest (former Washington State Poet Laureate), Laura Da’ (American Book Award winner), and Anthony Hudson (aka Portland’s premier drag clown Carla Rossi, whose first book Lamp Back: Plays and Other Grievances is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press). Felix Furby focuses on language revitalization and Two/Spirit inclusion; his poem ixt tilixam / whole person is written in Chinook Wawa and English. Other writers include Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., Nat Andreini, Epiphany Couch, Kristi Harrison, Pixie Lighthorse, Justin Haith, Rodney Douglas II, Amanda Hawk, Felix Furby, Kara Briggs, Kariel K’iteix’ Galbraith, Addylen Threeirons, Ruby Hanson Murray, Cliff Taylor, and Paige Pettibon.

As an Indigenous writer who wrote for twenty years before getting published, Taylor said, “I know how hard it is to be a Native writer, poet, artist and be unseen, invisible, stamped with the outsider status the mainstream treats as permanent.” With this show, he hopes to “melt it away — both in the lives of the artists here and those who will hear about it.”

He credits Steph Littlebird, who curated an Indigenous art show at the Anita Building in 2021 and invited him to participate. “I got to have the experience of being a supported, loved, Indigenous creator, writer.” Taylor wanted to create a platform for other “Native creatives” and found a “brilliant and generous super-power” in Liz Harris, who provided the gallery space and secured a Ford Foundation grant. “Truckloads of gratitude to Liz and the Anita Building for everything she’s done to make this show happen.”

Postage Stamp

That day at the post office, Taylor bought a sheet of Forever stamps honoring Chief Standing Bear. Later that year, at his tribe’s annual powwow, he saw a relative wearing a necklace with a medallion made from a single stamp encased in plexiglass. Taylor was inspired. “I want to do that with my stamps—make some really cool Chief Standing Bear necklaces.”

He paused, then added, “He’s not just inspiration to me; he’s still alive. I’ve got to try and carry on his example. Even this art show — how can we be a transformative, cultural force serving our people? This is a question I’m always asking myself.”

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The exhibit Indigenous Visions opened Nov. 8 and continues through Dec. 21 at the Anita Building, 1312 Commercial Street in downtown Astoria. Gallery hours: Noon-4 p.m. Fridays-Sundays, or by appointment: contact theanitabuilding@gmail.com. Admission is free.

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This story was originally published in the November 2025 edition of Hipfish Monthly, covering arts and culture in Astoria and the northern Oregon and southern Washington coast.

Also see Reviving the ‘lost’ art of Eugene Landry, Mike Francis’s 2023 story for Hipfish Monthly and Oregon ArtsWatch about an exhibit of work by the late Shoalwater Bay tribal artist, curated by this story’s author, Judith Altruda.