Accessible Arts Classes at

Accessible Arts offered Horizon Middle School and High School students their first art lesson of the year on September 13th. Kit Bardwell, Program Director of Accessible Arts, began the semester’s art and music classes with a lesson on how to use tracing paper to transfer images. A total of five visual art classes were offered where the students explored various mediums that included chalk pastels, watercolors and clay. Beginning in mid October the students switched to music to prepare for a December music program.

Kit, who holds a Masters in Music and is a switch hitter in the art disciplines, plans to engage the students in learning how music is simply organized sound. She hopes this will lead them into experimenting with musical composition. They also plan to have fun with some a cappella singing. Horizon is a private school designed for children with learning disAbilities.

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On the Santa Fe Trail ~ Between Two Cultures
By Eleanor Craig

Another summer, another venture on the open Trail. Each June or July for nearly a decade, teenagers with visual impairments and their adult companions have trekked from the Kansas State School for the Blind into the pioneering past. Every trek is a unique adventure. What made this July’s trip special was the American Indian point of view.

Our pioneers experienced the old trails from the point of view of Indians whose ancient cultures felt the full weight of civilization bearing down on them. We took as our guide the half breed Indian, George Bent. We read aloud from his biography as we made the day-long drive along the Santa Fe Trail from Fort Larned, a U.S. military fort in western Kansas, toward Bent’s Old Fort on the Arkansas River just east of La Junta, Colorado. While we listened to George’s story, the youngsters braided sweetgrass into traditional Indian ropes and friendship bracelets.

George’s father, William Bent, was a fur trapper from a wealthy St. Louis family. In 1834 he built the largest trading fort on the Santa Fe Trail, where George was born, in the same year the great trains of wagons began moving on the Oregon Trail. George’s mother, Owl Woman, was the daughter of a Cheyenne chief, White Thunder. As a young child, George lived mostly among his mother’s family, learning to ride, hunt and fight on the open prairie.

To appreciate how George grew up, our teen pioneers spent a long morning with specialists from the National Park Service at Fort Larned, setting up an eighteen foot teepee, examining its interior furnishing, and learning the etiquette that governed an extended family living in its close quarters. The experience helped us grasp the difference between teepees and our camping tents. Although teepees were often moved from camp to camp, they were permanent family quarters, much more like mobile homes than like the nylon tents we were setting up each night.

At Bent’s Old Fort, where today the National Park Service has built a totally authentic replica, we explored George’s second home. One evening at the nearby Koshare Indian Museum we happily exhausted ourselves learning some of the social dances of the Plains Indians who once traded at Bent’s Fort.

When George was just six, his father abandoned his fort and burned it; some say that was to cleanse it after a cholera epidemic brought by forty-niners hastening west for gold. Shortly afterward, young George went east on the Santa Fe Trail with one of his father’s wagon trains, to begin his education in languages and trade like his father’s people. Late in the 1850s George attended the Webster College for Boys near the Big Bend of the Merimac River, southwest of St. Louis. When war broke out, George Bent left school to take up arms for the Confederacy; he was soon wounded, captured, and returned in chains to St. Louis, where influential friends of his father saw him quickly released.

Defeated and disgusted with all he had experienced of white culture, George rejoined his mother’s people. In 1864 he was living with the Southern Cheyenne on Sand Creek when they were attacked by Colorado volunteers who were under orders to burn the teepees and to kill everyone, even women and children. George witnessed brutal and wanton savagery that day. Just twenty-one years old and thinking only of revenge, he rode for the next eighteen months with the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, burning and killing with equal savagery along the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails. It was the beginning of the Indian Wars, which would end only when the Plains Indians allowed themselves to be confined on Oklahoma reservations.

Our young pioneers were dismayed, not only with the Sand Creek story, but with the parallels they saw between then and now. They reflected on the big questions about violence, cultural conflicts, the fragile integrity of peoples and cultures. To help heal our distress and to make our peace with the painful historical facts, the teens created a healing ritual for our whole group. We enacted the ritual at the Big Timbers on the Arkansas River, a traditional gathering place for George’s Cheyenne people, where his father had built a new trading post, near Fort Lyon from which the Colorado volunteers had marched to Sand Creek. There in a circle under the open sky, we burned some of the sweetgrass braids and one of the youngsters played his Indian flute while one of the staff prayed in the language of his Indian ancestors. Then, each took a small bit of loose tobacco and walked off alone, to make an offering to the universe as each one’s heart directed.

George Bent resigned himself to confinement on the Cheyenne reservation in Oklahoma, where he lived a long life. He spoke several languages and was employed as a translator between federal agents and the Indians. He corresponded regularly and for many years with noted ethnographers and historians, contributing significantly to the scholarly archives of Southern Cheyenne history and traditions. Because George’s experience and understanding spanned two cultures, fourteen pioneering teens grew in experience and understanding in the summer of 2006.

Accessing Information ~ A sensory Experience
By Ann Cunningham

Five years ago, I decided to write, illustrate and publish a book. I wanted to create a picture book that children who are blind or visually impaired could share with their friends and family. Sadie Can Count - a multi-sensory book is our first of what I hope will be many books. However, my journey toward this goal started when I was a kid myself.

I remember I was four and my aunt was getting married. Even though I would not be at her wedding, I knew it would be magical. I had dreams about it and I wanted to make drawings of the church and the beautiful bride! The bride walks in her white beaded gown. The long veil trails after her. Her eyes are steadfast on her waiting groom. Her nose points true north, her hair is held high upon her head…ears, this could be a problem. She needs ears and I am not sure how to draw them. I try one shape, erase as unsatisfactory and try another, repeatedly until at last, success! I have learned how to draw ears! What a day. I will apparently never forget that success, it is now 53 years later, I am an artist and still thrilled by that lesson.

What exactly happened? I was very young, I couldn’t read or write, I don’t even think I could talk very well, but I could dream and I wanted to share my dreams and thoughts with my family. I wanted to hear what they thought about the wonderful things I was imagining. I could do this through art. It was not easy and I did need to learn how. However, it was a skill even my little hands could master well enough to share some of my thoughts satisfactorily.

Fast forward to 1991, I am a stone sculptor and I am hanging a show of low relief slate sculptures. They are pictures of people and I suddenly wondered, “Could anyone who is blind figure out these pictures?” It was an idea I had tossed around for years until one day I finally took action and connected with the Colorado Center for the Blind (CCB). I brought artwork to the Center for a tactile critique. I quickly learned that some things I was doing actually did communicate my ideas and many other things did not. I also found out why. It wasn’t long before I was not only creating large bas-relief artworks of tactile fairy tales but I was also teaching art classes at CCB.

Each fairy tale features a variety of materials; slate, marble, limestone, ceramics, bronze, wood, gold and silver leaf. Large print and Braille text accompany each sculptured panel, and personal tape players with original music and narration are available. Additionally, a taped American Sign Language telling of each fairy tale is shown on TV monitors, which accompany the exhibits. We wanted to open the doors to as many people as possible so that they could share the experience with their friends and family.

For years, we hauled literally tons of artwork and displayed exhibits in dozens of venues, including conventions focusing on blindness. I also completed a commissioned exhibit depicting Erik Weihenmayer’s historic ascent of Mount Everest, which is now on permanent display in Baltimore, Maryland at the National Federation of the Blind.

One day I asked some parents of blind children, “What do you need?” They answered, “We need books.” Five years later, we finally have a book. I started out working on this project alone but along the way, my husband Charlie jumped in to offer his help.

I now dream of children, who are blind or visually impaired, being able to express themselves through their own pictures. Pictures can easily express emotions, relationships, complex ideas and designs, things that are frequently hard to put into words.

Our kids need the tools to make drawing accessible and we need the pictures to teach them how to interpret graphical information.

Sadie Can Count is a good place to start teaching picture recognition; it has pictures of common objects that you can easily gather. Sadie Can Count features spot pictures, which are clearly defined objects on a plain background. Our next books will continue the learning process so that children will build the skills, step by step and learn to interpret pictures of greater complexity. At the same time, children should be encouraged to create their own artwork expressing the ideas they want to share.

If you need help getting started with ideas about materials and techniques for your children, Accessible Arts is a great resource. If you would like guidance using our book, Sadie Can Count, please visit our website and review our free Parent Teacher Guide at www.sensationalbooks.com

Access to the arts can give your children access to information and the ability to share their ideas with the world, a thrill that can last a lifetime.