FORT WASHAKIE—Sarah Ortegon’s home studio sits high on the Wind River Reservation, where sweeping views of the mountains meet the constant Wyoming wind. What looks at first glance like a dedicated creative space is simply her living room. Canvases, beadwork supplies and the subdued glow of natu ral light fill the space where she raises her 4-year-old son, two rescue cats and a French Bulldog with her husband.  “I don’t have a studio,” Ortegon says with a soft laugh. “I just make art in my home.” Growing up, Ortegon always turned to art — particularly beadwork — as a form of quiet expression.  A ‘quiet’ expression Born in Denver to an Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho mother and white father, she spent summers on the reservation with family, where she learned beadwork from her mother in what she describes as small, stolen moments. In a bustling family where she was the 10th of 12 children, art offered a way to express herself without “taking up too much space.” Sarah Ortegon taps into beadwork skills she learned from her mother to make regalia for her 4-year-old son. (Rebecca Huntington/WyoFile) “My dad was a preacher, and so I had to, a lot of the time, be quiet because he was studying,” she recalls. “It was hard to be an actual kid, and so one of the ways in which I expressed myself was quietly, which is basically what art is.” Making art is also freeing. “You can use as many colors as you want,” she says. “You are not limited in what you create.” For Ortegon, that early sense of restraint shaped the beginning of a lifelong creative path. While in college at Metropolitan State University in Denver, she began exploring the “tension” between the identities she carried. Art became a bridge — a place where she could reconcile social expectations in a predominantly white community in Denver with the freedom she experienced when embracing her Native heritage. Coming home to create In 2025, after three decades of splitting her time and life between Colorado and Wyoming, Ortegon made the decision to move permanently to the one place that always felt like home — the Wind River Reservation.  Finding suitable housing, however, has been a significant challenge, Ortegon says. Her family spent several years on a waiting list for housing and still rents a home today.  But, despite the hurdles, Ortegon says that returning felt right. “My mom said it fairly well the other day,” she says. “She said: ‘You know, no matter where you go as an Indigenous person, there’s always a certain connection that you feel going back to a certain area.’” For Ortegon, that certain area is the Wind River Reservation, landscapes heavily featured throughout her art.   “The pace of life out here is less stressful,” she says. The slower rhythm, combined with the landscape she adores, has given Ortegon more space and time to create. The Wind River Range appears in her artwork, not just as backdrop but as a living connection to place and memory. “This place always felt like home to me growing up, because my aunt and uncle, George and Shirley Enos, gave me the freedom to play outside — to go swim in the Bull Lake and to go play in the ditch, and to play on bikes and run away from rez dogs … I wouldn’t trade [those] summers for anything,” she says. Ortegon observed that her mother was happiest on the reservation.That, combined with the presence of her uncle and aunt, made her feel deeply connected to the place.  With more “room to breathe,” she has returned to meditation, movement and the canvas with clearer intentions. “Now I have the ability to create things that I feel like make the world a better place,” she says. Healing through art and motherhood When Ortegon and her husband welcomed their newborn son, becoming a mother shifted her perspective as an artist even further. Watching her growing son explore the world with unrestrained energy has become part of her healing from intergenerational trauma. “I don’t want him to feel the way I felt,” she explains. Where she once had to suppress emotions, she now makes space for her son’s feelings — toddler tantrums and all — offering hugs when he’s ready. “I want to provide [to him] what I would have wanted as a child.” This intentional parenting is part of breaking cycles, Ortegon says. Her mother, who learned beadwork in boarding school at St. Mary’s Episcopal School for Indian Girls in Springfield, South Dakota, shared that skill with Ortegon and her other daughters in brief moments of respite from her everyday responsibilities as a wife to a man whom she had met when she was only 17.  Because Ortegon and her five sisters often crowded into their basement in Denver while her brothers stayed elsewhere, beadwork became a medium not just to pass time, but also a road to learning who she was. “[The basement] was underground — not a whole lot of light — not a whole lot of things to do,” Ortegon says. “I think that that’s one way that my mom felt like she was helping us pass the time by giving us this gift of beadwork. “It felt like it kept us afloat. My dad was a preacher, but as a teenager — at least for me — my whole life wasn’t revolving around reading the Bible. It was around wanting to learn who I was, and so [beadwork] helped me learn who I was.” Today, Ortegon sees her own motherhood as continuing that thread of resilience that her mother bequeathed to her. Art, too, plays a similar role.  “I want the world to be a more beautiful place because I know how hard it can be, and I see how devastating different aspects of different people’s lives can be, and how lonely it can be,” she explains. Her work often blends painting and beadwork, carrying forward traditions while creating new expressions of resilience and joy.  “Maybe if I create an image, someone could look at it, and they could receive just a little bit of joy. And I think that sometimes just one word, one image, one thought can change somebody’s life.” A platform for Native American culture Recent artistic opportunities have affirmed the power of personal voice and cultural connection for Ortegon. In 2024, she was part of multidisciplinary Indigenous artist Jeffrey Gibson’s project for the Venice Biennale, a global art and culture festival often described as the “Olympics of the art world.”  Dancing, like Ortegon’s visual art, offers her healing and connection, but through the medium of movement. At the Venice Biennale, she was to perform a jingle dress dance — a Native American and First Nations women’s ritual — which was conceived around 1920, at a time when traditional Indigenous dances and ceremonies were still banned in the United States via federal policies like the Religious Crimes Code of 1833. As one of 26 dancers featured at the Venice Biennale — where Gibson was the first Native American to represent the United States — Ortegon faced a unique challenge. Due to travel complications, her regalia — the sacred traditional clothing and accessories — got lost with her luggage. Because of the weight of the dress embellished with rows of metal cones, or jingles, transporting it in her carry-on bag had not been a possibility.  Unlike outfits associated with many other non-sacred dance forms, tribal regalia are culturally and religiously significant items, which is why Ortegon recalls feeling “naked” without hers.  “It showed me the power that our stories hold,” she says. “I could have gone up there and danced in my regular skirt or dress, but it wouldn’t have been as impactful as having the story behind the jingle dress.” To Ortegon’s relief, the dress eventually arrived the midnight before her performance.  Following the dance, Ortegon remembers feeling an all-encompassing sense of gratitude.  “I was appreciative of the chance to represent my tribe and our nations, but I was also appreciative that Jeffrey Gibson — as also a Native artist — felt called to include other Natives with him … That is one example of how someone with that stature can help others. He did that on an international level, and it was just awesome to be a part of.”  Painting solutions and hope As a Native American artist, Ortegon often paints solutions before they arrive. For a mural on the side of a Patagonia store in Denver, she crossed out the words “Mount Evans,” the official name for the highest peak in the Mount Evans Wilderness in Colorado. The summit had been christened after John Evans, the second territorial governor of Colorado, who was behind the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre — where the U.S. Army carried out a surprise attack on a peaceful village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people — killing over 230 women, men, children and elders.  Sarah Ortegon stands in front of a mural of Mount Blue Sky that she painted on the outside of the Patagonia store in Denver. (Courtesy photo) On her mural, Ortegon replaced the peak’s then-official name with “Mount Blue Sky,” a title chosen and recommended by the Colorado Geographic Naming Advisory Board to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, based on the recommendations of tribal leaders and communities. The new suggested name was rooted in cultural significance for both tribes affected by the 1864 tragedy; while the Arapaho are also known as the “Blue Sky People,” the Cheyenne hold annual life-renewal ceremonies using the same term.  Two years after Ortegon painted her mural supporting the initiative, the name “Mount Blue Sky” was officially adopted.  “I wasn’t [officially] part of the name change. It’s just what I wanted to see happen, and it happened,” Ortegon says. The day the Colorado peak was officially renamed in September 2023, Ortegon says it snowed on the mountain, which she saw as a sign of purification. The Wind River Reservation, like many Indigenous communities across the country, faces significant challenges. Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives (MMIR) remain a persistent crisis, with Indigenous people in Wyoming experiencing homicide rates several times higher than the state average for White people, alongside facing ongoing gaps in law enforcement and justice system responses. Families continue to seek answers and accountability in cases that have stretched for years. “There’s no way for me to make things happen,” Ortegon reflects. “But if I paint it, maybe it’ll come true someday.” Looking forward As someone who discovered her passion for art as a child, Ortegon encourages young Native artists to follow their intuition. “In order to express yourself, you don’t need a degree. Don’t let anyone put you down for what you’re doing. Life will reveal itself to you as an artist,” she says. “Your main focus as an artist is expressing yourself and sharing what you feel you need, whether it be trauma that you need to get out of yourself, or whether it be wanting to make the world a better place.” As an artist, Ortegon also lives by the same hope she encourages in other Native American creatives: “Maybe in just some small little drop in a bucket, I am hopefully making the world a little bit better than when I came into it.” The post On Wind River Reservation, artist Sarah Ortegon finds healing via visual expression appeared first on WyoFile . ...read more read less