“I started off with the Dutch Moon Bead,” Red Star said. “I looked into it and the Dutch didn’t make these, they only became synonymous with the Dutch because the Dutch would take them to Africa.” She noted that her art usually involves “some kind of nerd research project” into archives and census records. In the diaries of Lewis and Clark, she’d read that the duo stocked up on a type of faceted red trade bead, “because they thought it would just fly off the shelves, but it wasn’t popular at all.” Bright-blue beads, in fact, were the hot commodity; their shade is now referred to as Bodmer blue, after the illustrator Karl Bodmer’s nineteenth-century portraits of Native people.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter