Adobe Gallery Blog
Watercolor Painting of a Male Yellow Hornet by Oswald Fredericks - C3626A
White Bear (Oswald Fredericks) spent most of his life as a Hopi artist and story teller working for various youth organizations. One of his accomplishments was the carving of the Goldwater Kachina Collection which now resides at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. His second major accomplishment was collecting oral histories of Hopi people. These oral histories were the basis of Frank Waters' Book of the Hopi.
White Bear was born in Old Oraibi on February 6, 1905 to Charles and Anna Fredericks. He attended the Oraibi Day School, was sent to the Phoenix Indian School then on to Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, and Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma. From this point he moved to New York, where he taught Indian Lore to the Boy Scouts. He then became the head instructor for arts and crafts for the YMCA in New Jersey and spent time at Shawnee-on-the-Delaware as a workshop instructor in Indian music.