When the beadwork artist Beverly Moran starts working on a new horse mask, she knows the piece will require as many as 300,000 tiny glass beads, but she doesn’t dwell on that number.
“I don’t even really think about it,” she said. “I set all these little goals and milestones for myself while I’m beading so it’s not so overwhelming.”
A member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Ms. Moran, 67, started teaching herself to bead when her daughter, now 31, was just a toddler and the two of them began attending powwows.
“I thought, well, if we’re going to dance, I have to know how to make our dresses,” Ms. Moran said in a recent interview. She bought a pair of beaded moccasins from a pawnshop in South Dakota and partially took them apart to study how they were made.
Eventually, she was making traditional buckskin dresses with fully beaded tops, along with purses, moccasins and other accessories — first just for herself and her daughter, then for juried Native American art markets, where she began to win awards.
Dance regalia led to horse regalia, and lately Ms. Moran has drawn attention for both types of work from art collectors, horse lovers and other artists.
The first time she tried her hand at making a mask for a horse, Ms. Moran said, the result was beautiful but not functional: The holes for the eyes and ears were not large enough or spaced correctly for a horse to wear comfortably and safely. (She noted that piece now belonged to a collector.)
In 2015, the year after she retired from a long career working for various federal agencies, Ms. Moran got her first horse. Now she has five, so if she needs to check the fit of a mask, she only has to walk out her back door on her three-acre property in Los Lunas, N.M.
Since her retirement, Ms. Moran has beaded a set of sparkly regalia — not only a mask but also a matching saddle blanket and other pieces — with geometric designs on a sky-blue background. Her bedecked horses have won ribbons at events such as the Horse and Rider Regalia Parade at the annual Gathering of Nations Powwow in nearby Albuquerque.
Emerson Sam, a Navajo horse shoer and trainer who helps Ms. Moran get her horses ready for the spotlight, said the animals always seemed to know when it was showtime.
“You got feathers on them, you got beadwork on them, you got, you know, buckskin fringes all over them,” he said. “They love it,” he added.
In her home studio, which has cupboards filled with jars of Czech glass beads in bright colors, Ms. Moran talked about both beadwork and horses as part of her cultural identity. Born and raised in Aberdeen, S.D., she said she grew up proud of her heritage — her mother is Hunkpapa Lakota and her father was Turtle Mountain Chippewa — but as a child she was not steeped in Native American culture.
Even when she spent summers with her maternal grandmother, on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, she felt a bit like an outsider, she said. Her grandmother spoke Lakota and English but, Ms. Moran noted, she had been raised in such a trying time for Native people that she did not want her children to speak her Native language.
As an adult, Ms. Moran set out to reclaim her cultural roots through her dancing and beadwork. Today, she signs her work using her grandmother’s maiden name, Bear King.
Deep Connections
In the American West, the bond between tribes and horses is deep, in some cases dating to the 1600s.
The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian explored the relationship in an exhibition years ago called “A Song for the Horse Nation,” curated by Emil Her Many Horses. (His surname is the Lakota name of his paternal grandmother.)
He said in a recent interview that from the time they first came into contact with horses, many Northern Plains and Plateau tribes, especially, started making decorative objects for the mounts that were special to them, using dyed porcupine quills, feathers, pigments and all sorts of traded materials.
European glass beads became available in the early 1800s — they were called “pony beads” because traders brought them by pack pony — and smaller “seed beads” followed a few decades later, he said.
Mr. Her Many Horses, who still works at the museum and is also a beadwork artist, said he had made horse masks himself, but he beaded designs onto a plain background of deer hide rather than creating a fully beaded surface as Ms. Moran did.
“That is some amazing beadwork,” he said of her pieces. “It takes a long time to sit down and do something like that.”
Stitch by stitch
Ms. Moran said it took her about nine months to make a mask, beading seven hours a day, usually every day of the week. Before she begins, she maps out the piece on graph paper, but the only lines she draws on the soft, traditionally tanned hide are the outside border and the outlines of the ear and eyeholes.
She beads those elements first, then fills in the rest of the design, row by row, keeping track by counting every bead. She usually picks up seven seed beads at a time with her needle — in the size she uses, the seven add up to about ⅜ of an inch, end to end — in a technique sometimes called a lazy stitch.
The beadwork artist Hollis Chitto, who is Mississippi Choctaw and Laguna and Isleta Pueblo, said he admired the clean, straight lines she was able to create with beads that can be less than uniform. “I don’t think anybody does lazy stitch as well as she does,” he said in a phone interview. “She’s kind of elevated it to, like, precision lazy stitch.”
A mask that Ms. Moran took to last year’s Santa Fe Indian Market is in the process of being sold to a museum for close to $50,000. A collector also bought a used mask that the artist had taken to the market just to display; it had been worn in parades by her American paint horse Midnight Dream.
These days, Ms. Moran is working on a completely new project with this year’s Santa Fe Indian Market in mind — a contemporary version of the woolly chaps worn by Northern Plains cowboys in the 1800s. Hers will be functional but a bit of a fashion statement, she said, with designs beaded into the top of the chaps, or yoke, and longhaired Tibetan lambskin covering the pant legs. There will also be a beaded vest.
She has also started a new mask for Midnight Dream. Horses, she said, are like family: “In our Lakota way, the horse is a relative, not an animal.”
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