That doesn't mean they believe they should return to hunting buffalo and living in tee pees; those ways are irrevocably lost. It means holding on to the essential elements that define them as a people and applying them in the twenty-first century. The arts have always been a vehicle for a people to express their culture and Natives have been no exception. The trick is though to bring the arts into the current century.

Visions For The Future: A Celebration Of Young Native American Artists, published by Fulcrum Publishing, is a record of the first annual exhibit of works by young Native Artists sponsored by NARF. The purpose of the Visions For The Future shows is to not only encourage the work of Native artists, aged 18 to 35, but to act as a bridge between the generation of Natives who began the fight for sovereignty and rights in the 1970s and the young people who weren't even alive during that time.

To that end the artists were asked to submit works that reflected NARF's focus on the modern day battles that face Native Americans. Education, sovereignty, natural resources, civil rights, land claims, and ensuring the continuation of cultural and spiritual traditions in the twenty-first century. By having them express those themes based on what they see around them, the hope was they would be able to take the first steps in changing people's view of just who Native Americans are today and to help people understand the realities facing them.

Today's young natives are just a liable to be involved with hip-hop and house music, make use of the Internet, and skateboard as their European, Asian and African contemporaries. So you wouldn't really expect them to be doing beading or making pottery like their great-grandparents did, any more than you'd expect a young Italian artist to be painting like De Vinci or Michelangelo. "When a person learns that I am an artist," says Bunky Echo-Hawk, "predictably they ask if I do beadwork or make pottery." Historical or replicated art, as he refers to it, has nothing to do with his world as a young Native American today, nor any of the other artists whose work appears in this book.

Cultural and spiritual events like Pow Wows are still a part of their lives of course, but so are toxic waste dumps on reserves, addictions, and poverty. In an essay he contributed to this book called "Bullets In The Chest, Arrows In The Back" — a reference to the war chiefs of old who rode in the front lines of battle risking both being shot by the enemy and hit by friendly fire -- Bunky Echo-Hawk wonders how someone can live on a reserve with a toxic waste dump and create art work that omits that reality. Why not weave a blanket with bio-hazard warnings woven into the pattern, he asks.

Today's Native artist faces the bullet of colonization in that no one is interested in seeing modern Indian life depicted. The public at large is in love with the image of the stoic, feathered warrior, and the doe-eyed Pochahantes. They don't want to see pictures of Sitting Bull being interviewed by Larry King or a Chief wearing a gas mask. The arrow in the back is the easy acceptances of assimilation and the capitulation by so many Natives who are more than willing to give the public what they want instead of reality.

The work of the 13 artists included in this book, the 13 of the 130 who applied and were selected for the show, are in all mediums: photography, pen and ink, paint on canvass, silk screened posters, and even tattoo designs. Each of the images in some way reflects something about the present day Native circumstance. Some of them are celebrations of the way in which traditions like Pow Wows are continued today, others, like Bunky's works depict realities that nobody wants to admit exists.