When Saynday Pulled Us Into This World, Teri Greeves (born 1970)

Teri Greeves is noted for her innovative appropriation of Native American beading traditions. Fashioning rawhide into a tree and embellishing it with beaded figural representations, Greeves recounts the origin myth of the Kiowa in which the hero Saynday pulls the first people out a tree trunk. Greeves explains: The story goes that one day Saynday was walking along. It was the time before the sun had come to this side of the world so he was wandering around in the dark, hands out stretched, searching. Eventually he ran into something that was rough and hard. It was the bark of an old Cottonwood tree. Running his hands around the trunk, he felt an opening and being that crazy old trickster, he stuck a hand down into it feeling deeper and deeper into the darkness. Suddenly another hand grasped his hand. A sane person would have run away but Saynday, being Saynday, grasped the hand back and started to pull. The first man emerged from the underworld through the hole in that old cotton wood tree. He was the first Gkoy-goo K’he to come into the world.
Saynday didn’t stop though. He kept reaching into the hole and pulled out several more people, men and women, from the underworld. Soon he had the hand of a woman. She was pregnant and due to her size, she got stuck in the hole. No more people could emerge from the underworld and it is said that is why the Gkoy-goo, the Kiowa are small in number to this day.
- Artist Statement (2010)