Always Making Something with Her Hands

By Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer (Choctaw Nation), Artist in Business Leadership Fellow 2015

In 2007, Molina Parker (Oglala Sioux Tribe) began beading full-time as her primary source of income. In 2016, she received a First Peoples Fund Artist in Business Leadership grant, which enabled her to purchase higher quality supplies and packaging. After the fellowship, she entered and won or placed in several art shows, including the Santa Fe Indian Market (SWAIA).

Molina was awarded a 2019 First Peoples Fund (FPF) Cultural Capital Fellowship to research, design, and etch markers with cultural designs for memorials in the local cemetery. She resides with her husband, Bryan, and their daughter, Bobbi, in Red Shirt, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

“I haven’t had much time to do anything,” Molina told her friend, Wade Patton (Oglala Lakota, 2017 FPF Fellow) when she arrived at a show recently.

Molina started pulling out bags and boxes of her creations for him to see. And more bags and boxes. And more!  

Surprised, she laughed, “I didn’t even know I did all of this!” Things are quiet for Molina in the rural setting of Red Shirt, so far removed from city life. But she finds herself working from midnight to 4 a.m. because living in the country is only quiet at night or when her five-year-old daughter, Bobbi, isn’t home.  

“She is like a force of nature,” Molina says. “This girl is on a level 10 all the time. Yet whenever she tells me that she thinks my work is beautiful, it keeps me going.”

Molina grew up primarily in Rapid City, where she lived with her mother, aunt, brother, and cousin. The two single moms raised their kids with steady attention from grandparents. Molina’s grandmother taught her to make jewelry. Though a drill sergeant of sorts, she was patient.

“My grandmother liked things done very particularly,” Molina says. “If I messed up, she would say, ‘Take it apart, do it again until you get it right.’ I knew she was right, that I shouldn’t be trying to rush. And I think about that even now. There are shortcuts I could take, but I don’t.”

Molina was attending the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when she and her cousin, Douglas, received the call that their grandmother was fast declining. They drove all night to South Dakota, and the whole family was there to say goodbye.

“My grandmother always did things with her hands,” Molina says. “Art has always been in the family, and now Bobbi does it. She’ll come home from school and bead or paint or color. She’s always doing something.”

You might say Bobbi gets it from her mother and great-grandmother.