Welana Queton (Osage, Muscogee, Cherokee)
Welana Queton is from the Osage, Muscogee, and Cherokee Nations. Her Osage name is Me-tsa-xe, meaning Sacred Sun, a name designated for the first daughter of the Bear Clan and belongs to the Osage Zon-zo-lin District.
Welana has over twenty years of experience working within museums and collections. She specializes working with Native American ethnographic collections as it is her joy to work with cultural materials of her ancestors. She developed and co-curated the inaugural exhibition, WINIKO: Life of an Object, at the First Americans Museum featuring a loan from Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of the American Indian. Her reflection of the work is in her essay, Reconciled Truths: Re-establishing the ancestral and spiritual connection with material culture, published in WINIKO’s exhibition catalog.
As a writer and independent curator, Welana has other published works in exhibition catalogs including her essay, Family Expressions, for museum exhibition Fluent Generations: The Art of Anita, Tom, and Yatika Fields and her poetic essay, The Star that Moved over the Earth, for exhibition Hearts of our People: Native Women Artists.
Currently, Welana works at the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, OK as the Mellow Fellow for Native Art. She also serves on the Osage Nation Foundation Board of Directors.
Welana is the creator of the Wahzhazhe (Osage) Puppet Theatre and serves as the Artistic Director. The puppet theater brings to life Osage oral stories and histories using awe-inspiring large-scale conceptual puppets created through a community-based collaborative process and powered by Osage members of all ages. They keep the culturally rooted stories of their Osage ancestors alive as they present a method for contemporary Osage to discover their worldviews and values to maintain tribal identity while educating the broader public on Osage culture.