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Soft medium, hard truths – National Endowment for the Arts recognizes a Navajo quilter
An image of Susan Hudson’s quilt, “Tears or our Children, Tears for our Children,” as displayed at the National Museum of the American Indian
National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (26/9331). Photo by NMAI Photo Services/NMAI-Natl. Museum of the America
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National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (26/9331). Photo by NMAI Photo Services/NMAI-Natl. Museum of the America
Susan Hudson’s studio near Ignacio, Colorado, is often a chaotic mess of brightly colored fabrics and half-finished projects.
“I’m disorganized/organized,” she said with a laugh. “I know where everything is. But I did clean up a little when I knew you were coming for a visit.”
At the time, Hudson was finishing work on her latest show quilt, “Standing Strong In The Face of Genocide.” Trimmed in black fabric, the four-paneled quilt showed a sequence of images focused on a single figure, like frames in a graphic novel.
In the first frame, a Native American boy in traditional clothing stands in front of what appears to be the whitewashed wooden siding of a building. The figure has black braids, leather and velvet clothing decorated in metal and bone, and oyster shell earrings. The light brown area of the figure’s face is blank, with no features.
In the second frame, Hudson has sewn pieces of red fabric on the figure’s pants, shaped like droplets of blood. In the third frame, the figure is slumped down, with a red smear on the wall behind him. The fourth panel has only Hudson’s trademark cursive writing, like lines in a ledger book, dedicating the quilt to the Native children who did not capitulate to the administrators and federal officials who carried out federal Indian boarding school policies.
These frames tell the story of an execution-style killing of a Native American boy.
Indian boarding schools operated for decades across the US, beginning in the late 19th century, as part of an ongoing federal effort to separate Native youth from their families, culture, traditions, and language. Children were forbidden to speak their native language, to wear traditional clothes, and to practice their religion. Their hair was cut, and they were given European names.
Susan Hudson
Kevin Black/Kevin Black
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Kevin Black/Kevin Black
In recent years, federal agencies in the US and Canada have begun investigating the tragic histories of boarding schools.
With “Standing Strong In The Face of Genocide,” Hudson wanted to honor the children who refused to comply with these practices.
“We all know what happened to these kids who went to the boarding schools,” Hudson said. “But what happened to the ones who said, ‘hell no, we’re not doing it’? When you have a defiant child, what do you do with them?”
The idea for this quilt came to Hudson in dreams and waking visions over the past few years.
“I would wake up crying,” she said. “I could smell the blood, the sweat. I could hear the screams.”
Initially, Hudson didn’t know how she would represent the story in fabric. Eventually, she settled on taking the perspective of the person holding the gun and inviting the viewer to imagine the moral difficulty of the decision at hand.
“So you’re standing here,” Hudson said, gesturing toward the quilt where it hung on the wall. “You’re looking at that kid who’s defiant. You’ve got the gun. Are you going to shoot him or not? There were some people who didn’t want to do it. But some said, ‘Yes, we’re killing a dirty Indian…How dare they buck the system!’”
Susan Hudson’s quilt “Standing Strong In The Face of Genocide”
Adam Burke/Adam Burke
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Adam Burke/Adam Burke
Hudson travels to Indian markets across the US. Her show quilts often receive ribbons and awards at some of these shows. And each year, Hudson’s show quilt finds a buyer.
“The quilts know where they’re going to go,” she said. “It’ll go where it’s supposed to go. Some of my quilts have gone to places I never thought they would go to.”
By the end of the summer, “Standing Strong in the Face of Genocide,” had found a buyer.
Hudson’s quilts have been acquired by the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, by the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, and by a number of private collectors.
In September, Hudson was honored as one of 10 National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellows, at a ceremony at the Library of Congress.
A Long and Difficult Road
Long before they became tools of artistic liberation, needle and thread were sources of pain and suffering for Susan Hudson and her family, stretching back to her mother’s enrollment at an Indian boarding school in the 1940s.
“She didn’t learn to sew in the boarding schools. It was beaten into her,” Hudson said. “If she wiggled or anything, she got hit. If her stitches weren’t straight, tiny, and precise, she got hit.”
The experience was so traumatic, that Hudson’s mother never spoke of it to her daughter. But when Susan Hudson learned to sew from her mother as a 9-year-old girl, she felt the sharp edge of that trauma nonetheless.
“I got a taste of the brutality that she went through,” Hudson recalled. “I hated sewing. I hated it. When I was in my 20’s I finally asked her why and then she told me the story. She goes, ‘I’m going to tell you once, and I’m never going to tell you again.’”
Still, Hudson kept sewing. As an adult and a single mother, she made shawls and star quilts and sold them at powwows.
“When I started making star quilts, it was mostly to survive,” she said. “To buy food for my kids, to buy them shoes.”
Then, around 15 years ago, an artist friend told Hudson he thought her quilts were boring and challenged her to make more original work. That friend was former US Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, whom Hudson has known since she was a teenager. Campbell is a jeweler, and he was willing to share his knowledge of the art world with Hudson.
“I was pissed off at first,” Hudson said. “After I shared a few choice words and calmed down, I realized Ben was right. That was the kick in the butt I needed. Those puzzle pieces came together, and I knew that I was chosen for this.”
Hudson started to learn more about the artistic side of quilt-making. She realized, too, that her family history, as well as the visions from her most vivid dreams, were stories that could be told through her quilts.
Visions, dreams and history
Hudson’s human figures have no facial features. At first glance, they seem like paper dolls, but every material detail has a story. Beadwork, leather, yarn, and fabric are arranged into richly detailed narrative scenes depicting some of the most traumatic chapters in Native American history. From the legacy of Indian boarding schools to the Navajo Long Walk, when people were forcibly removed from their homeland in the 1860s.
“Every one of us Natives, we’re descendants from boarding school survivors,” said Hudson.
One quilt, “Tears of Our Children, Tears for Our Children,” depicts boarding school trauma. In one frame a row of children are dressed in colorful, traditional regalia. In another, their hair is cut, and they’re wearing drab, institutional clothing. In the bottom frame, children sitting in wagons are guarded by cavalry soldiers with guns.
“The mothers were trying to get their children,” Hudson said. “And the soldiers would shoot them if they tried to get their children. But this little girl represented my mother.”
Emil Her Many Horses was immediately drawn to this quilt, when he first laid eyes on it at the Heard Indian Fair and Market in Phoenix, Arizona. He’s a curator at the National Museum of the American Indian and a member of the Oglala Lakota nation.
“She was telling the story in a new medium–cotton fabric,” said Her Many Horses. “And there’s a lot of detail that she took the time to stitch into this quilt. And so I thought this would be something that would add to our permanent collection.”
In addition to Hudson’s family histories, Her Many Horses noticed the ledger art references in her work.
The Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, has two of Hudson’s quilts in its collection, including “The Beginning of the End,” another quilt documenting Indian boarding school history.
“The details that Susan puts into these quilts are just amazing,” said Diana Pardue, chief curator at the Heard Museum. “There’s an incredible intricacy to the work. At first, your eye looks at the overall quilt, and then you start realizing there’s a very complex story embedded in the artwork, and as you look closer, you learn something more.”
Ironic award
Success with collectors and museums has led to more national recognition. When Hudson received word last Spring that she would be honored by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the irony was not lost on her.
“Congress is giving me this award because I make quilts showing the atrocities that Congress did to our people,” Hudson said.
In September 2024, Susan Hudson stood on the stage of Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to accept a medal from the NEA. In her speech that followed, Hudson’s words pierced the silence of the theater.
“I should not be standing here receiving this award,” she told the audience. “I should not be having to make these quilts to talk about the atrocities that happened to our people…. My descendants will remind your descendants of the things that happened to our people.”
After a long pause, Hudson released some of the tension with a touch of humor.
“But I appreciate the award,” she said with a smile. The audience roared with laughter and showered her with applause.
Through the soft medium of quiltmaking, Hudson has found a way to share hard truths–stories her family members would only speak of in whispers when she was growing up.
“You know everybody was talking about it quietly,” she said “But no, I don’t care, I’m going to talk about it because that’s my story. That’s my history. My family tree.”
When Stuart Sepulvida arrives at St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Parish in Tucson, Ariz., for Mass, which he attends most mornings, he passes a display honoring local soldiers and encouraging parishioners to pray for their safety. Hundreds of small cards record their names: Robles, Arenas, Grajeda. A portrait of Pope Leo XIV hangs across the lobby.
Mr. Sepulvida, 81, is a Vietnam veteran whose patriotism and Catholicism are deeply intertwined. He voted for President Trump three times but has never felt more betrayed by an American president than when Mr. Trump denounced Pope Leo as “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”
“It was very disturbing to me to hear both of them clashing like they did,” Mr. Sepulvida said, standing outside the church one morning this week. Now, he is reconsidering whether he will vote Republican this year.
The Republican Party is struggling to hold onto the support from Hispanic voters who helped propel Mr. Trump back into the White House in 2024. Yet as many party leaders have acknowledged the urgent need to stop the backsliding among Latinos, the president has enraged many of even his strongest supporters by clashing with the pope.
On Easter Sunday, Pope Leo, the first U.S.-born pontiff, spoke of the need to “abandon every desire for conflict, domination and power, and implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars.” Within days, Mr. Trump, who has led the United States into a war with Iran, said the pope was “catering to the radical left” and posted an AI-generated image portraying himself as a Jesus figure. Mr. Trump later deleted the image, saying he thought it depicted him as a doctor.
“It just isn’t what a president should do,” Mr. Sepulvida said. “The pope speaks for his people. He is beyond politics.”
Mr. Trump won 55 percent of Catholic voters in the 2024 election, compared to 43 percent who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris, according to Pew Research Center. The most sizable gains came from Hispanic Catholics. While Joseph R. Biden Jr. won their votes by a 35-point margin in 2020, the Democratic advantage shrunk to 17 points in 2024. Now, just 18 percent of Hispanic Catholics said they support most or all of President Trump’s agenda, according to a poll from Pew released earlier this year.
If the president’s quarrel with the pope sours more Latinos on the Republican Party, it could affect midterm races across the country, including in South Florida and South Texas, where Republicans have notched important victories in predominantly Hispanic districts in recent years.
In Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District, which stretches from north of Tucson to the Mexican border, voters were still grappling with the fallout this week.
The district is roughly evenly divided among Republicans, Democrats and independent voters. Nearly a third of the district is Hispanic, and there is a significant population of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as a large Catholic community with deep history in the region. It also has one of largest numbers of military veterans of all congressional districts in the country.
“The president is looking for a lot of attention from everything,” said Maria Ramos, 60, who regularly attends weekday Mass at St. Francis. A registered independent, she usually votes for Democrats but often declines to cast a ballot if she views a candidate as too liberal. “He believes he can put God in his place. He’s meddling in countries that he’s not in control of — he wants to control the world.”
“It is not just a very serious lack of respect — it is a mortal sin,” she said, shaking her head. One word comes to her mind again and again, she said: disgust.
Like so many others in southern Arizona, Ms. Ramos has several relatives who serve in the military — a path they saw to both serve the country and as an entry into the stable middle class. Many of them, she said, voted for Mr. Trump for president.
The Tucson district is now widely seen as one of the most competitive in the country. Republican Juan Ciscomani narrowly won the district in 2022, in part by emphasizing his biography as a Mexican immigrant and a devoted father of six children. He is also an evangelical Christian, a group that has driven much of the growth among Hispanic Republican voters in recent years.
Mr. Ciscomani declined a request for an interview, but when a local radio host asked Mr. Ciscomani what he thought of Mr. Trump’s comments “as a man of faith,” the congressman declined to criticize the president but said, “You can trust that you won’t see any meme like that coming out of my account.”
JoAnna Mendoza, the Democrat challenging Mr. Ciscomani this fall, has made her 20-year career in the U.S. Navy and Marines a key aspect of her story on the campaign trail. While she rarely speaks about her religious background and no longer considers herself a practicing Catholic, she said she briefly considered becoming a nun as a teenager. She criticized Mr. Ciscomani for not condemning the president’s remarks.
“You can’t make faith a central part of your campaign and then allow this to stand,” she said in an interview.
Across Tucson, Latino Catholics, regardless of their past voting preferences, were similarly quick to condemn the president’s remarks.
When Cecilia Taisipic, 71, heard about it, she said, she winced with shame about her vote for him in 2024.
“I thought he would make the country better, but apparently it’s the opposite,” she said as she left Mass at St. Francis earlier this week. She is so fed up with politics, she said, that she is unlikely to vote at all this year. “When it comes to my faith, I don’t like anybody to challenge it. Now I don’t want to hear anything on the news. I just want to pray.”
Matilde Robinson Bours, 63, teaches a weekly Spanish Bible study class at St. Thomas the Apostle Parish, and like nearly all of the women in her class, she immigrated from Mexico decades ago. She has voted for Republicans in nearly every election since she became a citizen. Though she has never liked President Trump, she said, his comments about the pope enraged her more than anything else he has said or done in the past.
“This surpassed everything, every social and political norm — this is personal to all Catholics,” she said. “The arrogance and ego is disgusting. To think that he is God? The pope has every right and responsibility to talk about peace.”
Still, Ms. Robinson Bours said, nothing will stop her from supporting Republicans again this year. She has been delighted that her adult children have stopped supporting Democrats in recent elections.
“Almost everyone I know thinks the way I do,” she said.
Patricia Martinez, 86, who has attended the same Bible study as Ms. Robinson Bours for years, shook her head in disagreement. She said she cannot imagine voting for a Republican who supports Mr. Trump.
“This is different — this shows he is out of his mind,” said Ms. Martinez. “We have to have basic respect and teach that to people in this country.”
Patrick Robles, a 24-year-old native of Tucson, spent years alienated from the Roman Catholic Church, but returned to his faith more recently. “The craziness of the world sort of caused me to seek some sort of answers,” he said. Now, he attends Mass at the St. Augustine Cathedral in downtown Tucson, a few blocks from the office where he works as an aide to Representative Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat.
Mr. Robles said he saw Mr. Trump’s battle with the pope as both a personal affront and a political opportunity.
“The president is basically trying to draw a line between Catholics and what we perceive to be patriotism,” he said. “I believe we can be both.”
Last week, he texted one of his uncles who has supported Mr. Trump in every election asking him what he thought.
“I’m afraid we need divine intervention,” the uncle replied.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., takes questions at a news conference at the Capitol on Tuesday.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
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J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Speaker Mike Johnson, R.-La., is forging ahead with his latest proposal to renew a key American spy power. His bill, revealed Thursday, is largely unchanged from a previous plan which failed in a series of overnight votes earlier this month.
The program at center of the debate, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), is set to expire on April 30.
FISA 702 allows U.S. intelligence agencies to intercept the electronic communications of foreign nationals located outside of the United States. Some of the nearly 350,000 foreign targets whose communications are collected under the provision are in touch with Americans, whose calls, texts and emails could end up in the trove of information available to the federal government for review.
For almost two decades, privacy-minded lawmakers from both parties have sought to require specific court approval before federal law enforcement can conduct a targeted review of an American’s information gathered through the program. The lack of any such warrant requirement helped sink an effort last week to extend the program for 18 months, as well as a separate vote on a five-year renewal.
Trump officials, like those in past administrations, have argued that such a warrant requirement would overburden law enforcement and endanger national security. Johnson’s latest proposal would reauthorize the program for three years, but does not include a warrant requirement. Instead, the bill calls for the FBI to submit monthly explanations for reviews of Americans’ information to an oversight official as well as criminal penalties for willful abuse, among other tweaks.
“I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country,” the president wrote on Truth Social last week, advocating for the program to be extended without changes. “I have spoken with many in our Military who say FISA is necessary in order to protect our Troops overseas, as well as our people here at home, from the threat of Foreign Terror Attacks. It has already prevented MANY such Attacks, and it is very important that it remain in full force and effect.”
Glenn Gerstell, who served as general counsel at the National Security Agency during the Obama and first Trump administration, says Johnson’s reforms look like an attempt to find a middle ground.
“There’s not a lot of really substantive changes to the statute, but some gestures are made to people who are worried about privacy and civil liberties,” Gerstell said. “It seems like a pretty reasonable compromise that is going to be satisfactory to the national security agencies and yet at the same time represents some gesture to the privacy advocates.”
“This is not a reform bill and it’s not a compromise,” Elizabeth Goitein, a privacy advocate and senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, wrote on X. “It’s a straight reauthorization with eight pages of words that serve no serious purpose other than to try to convince members that it’s NOT a straight reauthorization.”
A bipartisan reform deal is still out of reach
Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, told NPR on Wednesday, before the release of Johnson’s new proposal, that lawmakers were working on a bipartisan solution. He said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., was in touch with Johnson on the issue.
“There’s a lot of work being done here,” Himes said. “We’re sort of working out a process that will be inclusive rather than exclusive.” Himes said he was negotiating with Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and constitutional law scholar, on a reform proposal they hoped could preserve and reform the program — reauthorizing it with bipartisan support.
But Johnson’s new bill appears to fall short of the inclusive approach Himes hoped for.
NPR obtained a memo written by Raskin to his colleagues urging them to oppose the bill, which he said “continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans’ data.”
“FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans’ communications without any review from a judge,” Raskin wrote.
FBI agents must receive annual training on FISA and are generally barred from searching for information about people in the U.S. if the goal of the search is to investigate general criminal activity, rather than find foreign intelligence information, and those searches need approval from a supervisor or an attorney.
Republican hardliners — who sunk Johnson’s last reauthorization attempt — also don’t all appear to be on board for Johnson’s latest revision. Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, a past chair of the Freedom Caucus, said “we’re not there yet” in a video he shared to X on Thursday.
“I didn’t take an oath to defend FISA, I didn’t take an oath to defend the intelligence community,” Perry said. “We can’t have them spying on American citizens and, when they do, there has to be accountability and I haven’t seen any that I’m satisfied with yet.”
The House Rules committee meets Monday morning, the first step toward advancing the renewal bill toward a vote.
President Trump announced a three-week extension of a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon that had been set to expire in a few days, after hosting a meeting between Israeli and Lebanese diplomats at the White House on Thursday.
Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group that has been attacking Israel from southern Lebanon, did not have representatives at the meeting and did not immediately comment on the announcement. The prime minister of Israel and the president of Lebanon also did not comment.
A successful peace agreement would hinge upon Hezbollah halting attacks, which Lebanon’s government has little power to enforce because it does not control the militia. Lebanon’s military has mostly stayed out of the fighting and is not at war with Israel.
The cease-fire, which was scheduled to end on April 26, would last until May 17 if it takes effect as Mr. Trump described it. Before the cease-fire was brokered last week, nearly 2,300 people were killed in Lebanon and 13 in Israel. Since then, the number of Israeli airstrikes and Hezbollah attacks have been dramatically reduced, though the two sides have continued exchanging fire.
The Lebanese Ambassador to the United States, Nada Hamadeh, credited Mr. Trump for extending the cease-fire, saying that “with your help and support, we can make Lebanon great again.” Mr. Trump replied, “I like that phrase, it’s a good phrase.”
Asked about the potential of a lasting peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon, Mr. Trump said that “I think there’s a great chance. They are friends about the same things and they are enemies on the same things.”
But Lebanon and Israel have periodically been at war since Israel’s founding in 1948. Israel has invaded Lebanon for the fifth time since 1978, incursions that have destabilized the country and the delicate balance of power between Muslim, Christian and Druze communities.
In the hours before the president’s announcement on social media, Israel and Hezbollah were trading attacks in southern Lebanon, testing the existing cease-fire.
Mr. Trump said the meeting at the White House had been attended by high-ranking U.S. officials, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the U.S. ambassadors to Israel and Lebanon.
Earlier on Thursday, an Israeli strike near the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh killed three people, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Hezbollah claimed three separate attacks on Israeli troops who are occupying southern Lebanon, though none were wounded or killed.
Hezbollah set off the latest round of fighting last month by attacking Israel soon after the start of the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign in Iran. Israel responded to Hezbollah’s attacks by launching airstrikes across Lebanon and widening a ground invasion of the country’s south.
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