He hand-paints drums for Tacoma’s tribal graduates. ‘They feel pride being Native’

Tala Brown smiles while accepting the drum adorned with two hand-painted eagle feathers. It’s Tuesday, May 21, and the 18-year-old is one of dozens of students being celebrated at the Indian Education Program’s graduation ceremony in Tacoma.

Brown is an enrolled member of the Athabaskan Tribe who’s part of the program’s class of 2024 at Tacoma Public Schools. The student’s eyes lit up while talking about the significance of the moment.

“I hold a lot of value to it,” Brown said, gesturing toward the drum. “My brother graduated a couple of years ago, and so I knew that I was going to get a drum. And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh.’”

For more than a dozen years, artist George Zantua has been painting drums for Tacoma Public Schools’ Native graduates. The 80-year-old recalled how when he was a kid in Tacoma, Native students had a much harder time.

Zantua’s mother didn’t like to tell people about her Native background, he said. Those days, anyone who wasn’t white was discriminated against.

“It’s a big deal nowadays,” Zantua said. “Kids, they feel pride in being Native.”

Zantua explained that the eagle is a special animal in his culture; its feathers are used in blessing ceremonies. It’s a bird that can fly a mile high and still detect mice darting in the grass below. Because of that, he said, eagles represent vision: both in terms of the exterior and interior realms.

Kids graduating from high school are leaving the world ready to learn new things and become adults, he said.

“Having vision is one of the most important things that they can have when they go out there,” said Zantua (Tsimshian/Haida). “The drum and the eagle feather is one of the things that represents that idea best, I think: that they are walking out in the world with vision and learning to understand what the world is.”

Joshua Schenck, 17, also received a drum that Tuesday. An enrolled member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, the student plans to pass the instrument down to future generations.

“I’m definitely going to hang on to it,” Schenck said. “There’s only a few Natives left in our family, and they’re going to die eventually. So it’ll be me and my brother and our cousins left, and after that, I plan on just giving it to our kids.”

Graduation rates of Native students

Growing up, Zantua lived in a dirt-floor home without plumbing or electricity. No one on the reservation went to school back then, he said, and there certainly wasn’t anything like the Indian Education Program.

David Syth, assistant director of Indian Education for the district, said Native kids have been historically prone to high dropout rates, a phenomenon that he attributes to poverty.

In Washington, American Indian/Alaskan Native students during the 2022-23 school year had the steepest dropout rate of any demographic: 18.1%, according to the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. That’s nearly double white students’ dropout rate of 9.4%.

One of the Indian Education Program’s main goals is to get kids across the graduation stage on time, Syth said. His team monitors data like student attendance, discipline and missing assignments and provides families with various resources. They offer information on scholarships for higher education, too.

“Anything we can do to give them a positive memory of their experience in Tacoma Public Schools — not only the academic part, but the supplemental cultural support that we try to provide,” said Syth (Crow/Blackfeet Nation).

Syth estimates that Zantua has painted as many as 600 drums, made from wood hoops and deer skin, for IEP students over the years. He thinks that the number in 2024 is 50.

As a kid in Montana, Syth didn’t benefit from the same types of programs that are around today. He said he feels blessed to offer support for Native kids in Tacoma and sometimes receives “heartwarming” thank-you letters from former graduates.

“We all become part of each other’s story,” he said. “George will always be a part of these kids’ story with the drum that he’s hand-painted.”

Orcas as a ‘spiritual animal’

Zantua does more than just paint drums for Native graduates: He’s also an artist by trade.

Growing up Zantua hated school and would doodle when he was bored. A teacher took note and encouraged him to pursue that talent, and he did. The Wilson High School graduate (today called Silas High, 1202 N. Orchard St.) eventually began selling his work.

Today Zantua’s paintings have been displayed in Tacoma’s art and history museums. One award-winning piece from 2020 — made of acrylic on canvas — depicts orcas swimming among bubbles.

Orcas appear in many of Zantua’s paintings; he sees them as his “spiritual animal.”

When Zantua was a child, he and his great-grandfather went out canoeing and witnessed bubbles floating by in the water. The elder told Zantua that the bubbles had come from an orca.

If you listened closely, the story went, you could hear important messages as the bubbles popped: secrets of life that the orcas had gleaned from visiting Mother Earth .

As for the hand-painted drums, Zantua recalled his grandmother telling him that playing them — thud-thud-thud — signifies Mother Earth’s heartbeat.

Zantua looks forward to his continued involvement in the Indian Education Program: “I see some of the kids nowadays coming up — they’re some really smart kids, you know,” he said. “They really want to be able to do well in this world. To me, that’s important.

“I’m 80 years old now,” he added, chuckling. “So I’ll probably be 100, and I’ll still be doing this same thing.”