From the moment Charlene Moody was invited to be part of the Sensing Sasquatch show at the High Desert Museum, her mind was filled with images. As she started to sketch, she “had the idea of incorporating buffalo hide, because of the big thick texture that this animal has on its body,” she said, “similar to what is described, to what Sasquatch has.”
Moody is one of five artists selected to create work for the museum’s show, on view through Jan. 12, 2025, in Bend. The show looks at the past, present and future of Sasquatch through an Indigenous lens.
Moody reached out to the Yakama Nation in Washington, where they oversee a buffalo herd. “We went old school and did a trade,” she said. She’ll be creating a mural for the Yakama Nation to use in an auction. “I’m using my talents to help them with something that’s going to benefit the herd up there and I can use this for the exhibit down here.”
She spent hours washing and raking out the nine-foot-tall buffalo hide. “The fur is really dirty,” because buffaloes spend their days rolling around, “doing buffalo things,” she laughs. The size of the buffalo hide is part of the point. She wants the work to stop museum visitors in their tracks. To have that “uneasy feeling of, yeah, this is out there and maybe you should be respectful” when visiting the woods.
Growing up, Moody heard stories of Sasquatch from both sides of her family. “I’m an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, but I’m not just Warm Springs, I’m also Yakama, Modoc, Miwok and Southern Paiute.” She hopes to bring all of those views into her representation of Sasquatch. “I want to make sure I’m respectful to those different tribes that I represent in this one art piece.”
Moody knows not everyone who visits the museum will share her views on Sasquatch. Some see it as just a pop culture myth. And that’s fine, but she suggests “maybe keeping those opinions to yourself if you come across someone who believes it. That’s their own personal view, and this is my own personal view. Coming with that respect and understanding for one another, I think, is important.”
After washing the hide Moody dried and smoked it over a fire for many hours, infusing it with the smoke of juniper and cedar root. “They’re both medicinal to our people. So I’m just putting that good medicine into this artwork.”
“Around Us Watching,” a multimedia piece by Charlene Moody (Warm Springs), part of the High Desert Museum's show "Sensing Sasquatch."
Courtesy of Kyle Kosma
The buffalo hide became the back of the artwork, cut into the shape of a towering Sasquatch. On the front, Moody depicts the face with her own interpretation of Indigenous rock art found along the Columbia River, and an image of a family gathered around a campfire. “Maybe they’re sharing stories or legends of Bigfoot and everything like that.” Hidden somewhere in the painting is a secret Sasquatch. Just like in the woods, you often don’t know where it is, but it’s there.
At the show’s opening in March, visitors gathered around Moody’s creation, touching and smelling the buffalo fur and listening to her personal stories of Sasquatch. Moody hopes that her work makes people think more deeply about what it means to walk in the woods, to be part of the natural world. “When people approach my work, I want them to have an experience that comes from within their heart. Something that they feel deep inside.” And she hopes the work will spark “a little interest in the Native people of the areas they live. It’s like, you know about Sasquatch, let’s learn about the tribes here.”