Alfred Young Man

Alfred Young Man, Ph.D. or Kiyugimah (Eagle Chief) (born 1948) is a Cree artist, writer, educator, and an enrolled member of the Chippewa-Cree tribe located on the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation, Montana, US.

Born in 1948 on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Browning, Montana, Young Man is the ninth child of fifteen brothers and sisters.

His father Joseph Young Man White Horse (Sau-sti-qua-ńis) and mother Lillian Katherine Boushie were both Cree and fluent in Cree and English.

Young Man's paternal Cree grandmother Theresa Ground Woman Big Springs spoke Cree only and was married to Don't Talk Many White Horses, a Blackfeet Indian man.

Since Don't Talk was deaf, he went by the nickname Deafy (pronoun: Deé-fee).

Young Man attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico (1963–1968) where the German painter Fritz Scholder was his painting teacher for two years (1966–68).

The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts retains a considerable number of Young Man's paintings in its collection from the five years he spent there.

Young Man stayed in government Indian boarding schools at various times and places until he was 20 years old when he went to the Slade School of Art in London, England, in 1968, which was the first time ever that he attended an all-white school for any length of time.

His memory of the Cree language is sparse and he speaks and understands only a little.

Young Man went on to study painting, film history and photography at the Slade School of Fine Arts, University College London in London, England, for four years (1968–72), where he met many famous and influential artists and musicians, amongst these were Pop artist's Richard Hamilton and David Hockney who were visiting artists and who stopped by his painting studio on random occasions.

While at the Slade, Young Man was tutored and mentored for two years (1970–1972) by Bernard Cohen; another tutor was landscape painter William Townsend (1909–1973).

The director of the Slade during Young Man's time at the school was Sir William Coldstream, founder of the Euston Road School.

While in London, Young Man met Jimi Hendrix just a month before the famous rock musician died in September 1970, introduced to Hendrix by Steven Stills of CSN&Y, who was cutting what Stills described as his pink giraffe album in a sound studio in London.

Young Man has been an art teacher since the early 1970s, beginning on his home reservation at the Rocky Boy Elementary School (1973–1974), after which he moved to the K.W. Bergan Elementary School in Browning, Montana, on the Blackfeet Indian reservation for a short time.

Young Man earned his M.A. at the University of Montana (1972–74), where George Longfish (Seneca-Tuscarora) was his teacher and mentor in the Graduate Program in American Indian Art.

He continued on to the Flathead Valley Community College in Kalispell, Montana (1975–1977), where he helped found the Total Community Education television training program.

When that program came to a close, he moved on to the University of Lethbridge in 1977, where he eventually became chair of Native American studies (1999–2010).

Pedagogically Young Man teaches his courses from the Native perspective, something unheard of when he began teaching Indian fine art at the University of Lethbridge in 1977 and something that, even today, very few if any Native art professionals of whatever category claim to do.

Young Man served as chair of the board of the Society of Canadian Artists of Native Ancestry, which was involved in convincing the National Gallery of Canada to include First Nations art and artists in its collection.

He taught in the Faculty Exchange Program at the University of Lethbridge/Leeds University Leeds, UK, in 1985 and the Faculty Exchange Program University of Lethbridge/Hokkai Gakuen University Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan, in 1992.

He graduated with his doctor of philosophy degree (Ph.D.) in anthropology from Rutgers University in New Jersey in 1997, where he studied anthropology as a student of William Powers.

He is a former Department Head (2007–2010) of Indian Fine Arts at the First Nations University of Canada in Regina, Saskatchewan and former Chair (1999–2007) of Native American Studies, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada.

He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Lethbridge and University of Regina.

He remained tenured at the U of L up until 2007 when he chose early retirement and began work as department head of Indian Fine Art at the First Nations University of Canada in Regina, Saskatchewan.

In addition to his teaching activities at the First Nations University, Young Man also worked as archival curator and custodian of the school's 1500 piece art collection.

In August 2010 his employment at FNUC was terminated along with approximately 52 other professors and support staff, due to financial exigency budget cuts.

Most recently in terms of his lifetime, Young Man did an artist/writer's residency at the Lab 26 Tejiendo Identitdad Entre Las Culturas Originarias de America, Galeria de Arte Contemporaneo Paul Bardwell, Centro Colombo Americano de Medellin, Medellin, Colombia in 2011.

He has spoken at numerous conferences and other venues held on every continent on the planet throughout his long professional career.

His Montana birth certificate lists him as being 13/16th Cree by blood-quantum, his full sister, Shirley, is listed as 16/16ths.

He was appointed in 2015 Adjunct Professor to the Art Department, University of Calgary.

Deafy was stricken with scarlet fever as a child in the late 19th century, as many Blackfeet children of his generation were, rendering him mute.

Theresa and Deafy communicated their entire married lives using Indian sign-language.

Theresa outlived Deafy to the approximate age of 113 years.

Young Man's maternal grandfather Edward Boushie was Cree/Métis and Edward's wife Eliza was also Cree from the Erminskin Reserve in Hobbema, Alberta.

Young Man grew up in East Glacier Park, Montana and spoke Cree as a child.

Like nearly all Indian children of his generation, when Alfred was six years old he and his siblings were taken away to Cut Bank Boarding School, a Bureau of Indian Affairs government school located a short distance north of Browning.

Physical punishment was an everyday occurrence and Cree and Blackfeet traditions and customs were illegal to practise under US government law.