![]() | A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(August 2022) |
Martha Redbone | |
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Background information | |
Birth name | Diane Fulmore [1] [2] |
Born | New York City | February 6, 1966
Origin | New York City, New York, [3] and Kentucky, United States |
Genres | Rhythm and Blues, Folk and Soul |
Occupation(s) | Singer, songwriter, composer |
Years active | 1996–present |
Labels | Dome Records [4] |
Website | martharedbone |
Martha Redbone (born 1966) is an American blues and soul singer, who has won awards for her contemporary music. Her music is a mix of rhythm and blues and soul music influences, fused with elements of Native American music. [5] She self-identifies as having Choctaw, Eastern Cherokee, Shawnee, [6] and African-American ancestry.
Diane Fulmore was born in 1966, [2] in New York City. [3] Martha spent time with her maternal grandparents in Harlan County. [6] She wrote that she spent much of her childhood in Black Mountain, Kentucky, with her maternal grandmother, whom she identifies as being of Eastern Cherokee and Shawnee ancestry, and her maternal grandfather, whom she identifies as being of Black and Choctaw ancestry. [3] [6] She has never conducted a DNA test. [6] She wrote that she moved back to Brooklyn, New York, as a child, "but we went back to Kentucky often for ceremonies." [3]
Redbone became a musician and singer, combining music styles with Black American and Native American roots music. She began performing under the name Martha Redbone in 1996, using the nickname "Redbone" given to her by her father. [1] She was mentored by Junie Morrison of the Ohio Players and Parliament Funkadelic where she honed her skills as a professional songwriter and producer. Since bursting onto the scene at the 2002 Native American Music Awards, she has earned a reputation as a collaborator, performer, educator, and mentor across native North America and in some cases abroad. In early 2007, Redbone's Skintalk won The 6th Annual Independent Music Awards for Best R&B Album. [7]
Her 2012 work, The Garden of Love – Songs of William Blake, sets Blake's poetry to music that draws from rural influences of Appalachia: English folk, African American, and Native American traditions. She tours nationally with the Martha Redbone Roots Project. [8] The New York Times said her voice holds “both the taut determination of mountain music and the bite of American Indian singing.” [9]
Redbone is married to Aaron Whitby, and the couple has a son. [6]
The Shawnee are a Native American people of the Northeastern Woodlands. Their language, Shawnee, is an Algonquian language.
Lowell Fulson was an American blues guitarist and songwriter, in the West Coast blues tradition. He also recorded for contractual reasons as Lowell Fullsom and Lowell Fulsom. After T-Bone Walker, he was the most important figure in West Coast blues in the 1940s and 1950s.
Redbone is an Native American/Dené rock band formed in Los Angeles, California, in 1969 by brothers Pat and Lolly Vegas. All members during their commercial peak and success were of Mexican American and Native American heritage, which was heavily reflected in their songs, stage costumes, and album art.
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The Choctaw Freedmen are former enslaved Africans, Afro-Indigenous, and African Americans who were emancipated and granted citizenship in the Choctaw Nation after the Civil War, according to the tribe's new peace treaty of 1866 with the United States. The term also applies to their contemporary descendants.
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The Bacone school or Bacone style of painting, drawing, and printmaking is a Native American intertribal "Flatstyle" art movement, primarily from the mid-20th century in Eastern Oklahoma and named for Bacone College. This art movement bridges historical, tribally-specific pictorial painting and carving practices towards an intertribal Modernist style of easel painting. This style is also influenced by the art programs of Chilocco Indian School, north of Ponca City, Oklahoma, and Haskell Indian Industrial Training Institute, in Lawrence, Kansas and features a mix of Southeastern, Prairie, and Central Plains tribes.
The Native Writers' Circle of the Americas (NWCA) is an organization of writers who identify as being Native American, First Nations, or of Native American ancestry.
On the eve of the American Civil War in 1861, a significant number of Indigenous peoples of the Americas had been relocated from the Southeastern United States to Indian Territory, west of the Mississippi. The inhabitants of the eastern part of the Indian Territory, the Five Civilized Tribes, were suzerain nations with established tribal governments, well established cultures, and legal systems that allowed for slavery. Before European Contact these tribes were generally matriarchial societies, with agriculture being the primary economic pursuit. The bulk of the tribes lived in towns with planned streets, residential and public areas. The people were ruled by complex hereditary chiefdoms of varying size and complexity with high levels of military organization.
Kim Shuck is a Cherokee Nation poet, author, weaver, and bead work artist who draws from Southeastern Native American culture and tradition as well as contemporary urban Indian life. She was born in San Francisco, California and belongs to the northern California Cherokee diaspora. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and also has Sac and Fox and Polish ancestry. She earned a B.A. in art (1994), and M.F.A. in Textiles (1998) from San Francisco State University. Her basket weaving work is influenced by her grandmother Etta Mae Rowe and the long history of California Native American basket making.
Valjean McCarty Hessing was a Choctaw painter, who worked in the Bacone flatstyle. Throughout her career, she won 9- awards for her work and was designated a Master Artist by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in 1976. Her artworks are in collections of the Heard Museum of Phoenix, Arizona; the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma; the Southern Plains Indian Museum in Anadarko, Oklahoma; and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian of Santa Fe, New Mexico, among others.
Mary Adair is a Cherokee Nation educator and painter based in Oklahoma.
Pretendian is a pejorative colloquialism describing a person who has falsely claimed Indigenous identity by professing to be a citizen of a Native American or Indigenous Canadian tribal nation, or to be descended from Native American or Indigenous Canadian ancestors. As a practice, being a pretendian is considered an extreme form of cultural appropriation, especially if that individual then asserts that they can represent, and speak for, communities from which they do not originate. It is sometimes also referred to as a form of fraud, ethnic fraud or race shifting.
The Tribal Alliance Against Frauds (TAAF) is an American non-profit organization dedicated to exposing individuals and organizations that have falsely claimed to be American Indian, as well as to educating the public on the harms to American Indian sovereignty caused by identity fraud. The organization employs certified experts in American Indian genealogy to conduct genealogical investigations of individuals who have profited from fraudulent claims of American Indian heritage.