Hockey and art, heritage and politics have come together in the form of one goalie’s mask now on display at the Minnesota History Center.
Mdewakanton Dakota artist Cole Redhorse Taylor with a mask he created that is on display as part of the “Our Home: Native Minnesota” exhibit at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul on Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
The mask, featuring a design by Mdewakanton Dakota artist Cole Redhorse Taylor and worn by Minnesota Wild goaltender Marc-André Fleury on Native American Heritage Night in 2023, is under glass as part of a new display in the ongoing “Our Home: Native Minnesota” exhibit.
On Tuesday, Redhorse Taylor stood next to the display, wearing a special Wild hockey jersey issued to celebrate Native American History Month, and reflecting on this helmet-shaped collaboration.
“People have said to me, ‘This is a moment in Minnesota history,’” Redhorse Taylor says. “From what I understand, that’s why the Historical Society wanted it — because it was such a moment in history.”
Here’s the story behind that moment.
An artist’s start
Going on a field trip to the Minnesota History Center is a rite of passage for kids in Minnesota. Redhorse Taylor, 30, was one of those kids. As Mdewakanton Dakota and a member of the Prairie Island Indian Community, though, he didn’t always see himself reflected in what he saw at the museum as a child.
“There was nothing like this,” he says of the “Native Minnesota” exhibit. But …
“There was one small exhibit which I thought was actually really cool,” he says. “It was an exhibit where there was an oral history of a Dakota girl and her family, a video of her talking about her family history in relation to how the state formed.”
While he was always drawn to history, art was another matter.
“I was taught artistic skills when I was younger, I was taught how to bead, but I didn’t really think of myself as an artist,” he says. “What we know as Native art, Indigenous art, Dakota art, I didn’t know that was considered art — I thought it was a craft.”
When he began taking art classes in his senior year of high school, though, his future was revealed to him.
“I thought, ‘Oh, this is what I want to do,’” he recalls.
After initially planning to major in American Indian Studies and minoring in art at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, Redhorse Taylor transferred to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where he majored in fine arts studio with an emphasis on drawing and painting.
His art studies took him full circle when he was invited to be part of the Native American Artist-in-Residence Program through the Historical Society.
“I decided to research Dakota pucker toe moccasins, which in our language we call ‘Hanyuski,’” he says.
In a way, it was a lost art.
“I wanted to work to revitalize them in our communities,” he says. “I learned how to make them, how to construct them and do the pattern for them, because they’re all done by hand.”
As part of his residency, the artist taught others how to make them, too.
“One of the things I’ll never forget about doing that residency, and why I felt like the people benefited from it, was when an elder said, ‘I haven’t seen this type of moccasin since I was a little girl,’” he says.
A new opportunity
A mask created by Mdewakanton Dakota artist Cole Redhorse Taylor is on display as part of the “Our Home: Native Minnesota” exhibit at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul on Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
So how did the helmet opportunity arise?
“My tribe sponsors the Minnesota Wild through our own enterprises. We have a really good relationship with them,” Redhorse Taylor says. “And one of the things they’ve been doing in recent years, which I never saw as a kid, was they have Native American Heritage Night … and so, because of that, they approached my tribe and they wanted to reach out to an artist, they did a call for art, they wanted to have the artist design a helmet for the hockey mask for the goalie, Marc-André Fleury.
“This event and this cause was really important to him because his wife (Véronique Larosee Fleury) is Indigenous, their children are Indigenous, from Canada,” he says. “So this was really important for him and for me, to see it done. So I put my name in the hat for consideration, and I was chosen.”
The artist, who credits the marketing department of Treasure Island Resort & Casino for serving as the go-between for this creative venture, met with the Wild ahead of the collaboration.
“They gave me some of the parameters I had to work around, like what color palette to use, but otherwise gave me free range,” Redhorse Taylor says. “I knew I wanted to use Dakota floral designs, which is inspired by our material culture, by our beadwork and quillwork, which is inspired by the floral and fauna of our homelands.”
The words used were important, too.
“On the brow of the helmet, I wanted to have the Dakota language featured on that element,” he says. “And so on the element you see, ‘Mni Sóta Makoce,’ which means, ‘The land of the cloudy waters’ or ‘The land of the misty waters’ — there are many translations of that, but that’s where Minnesota gets its name from, the Dakota language. So I wanted to make sure that was highlighted.”
Under glass, the helmet looks like it was handpainted, but that is not how this creative process worked.
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“I didn’t paint the helmet, I designed it,” he explains. “The team at the Wild sent me a template and I went from there, I have software that I use to design things digitally. I sent it off and they said, ‘This is great.’”
Redhorse Taylor’s design was then reproduced on the helmet.
“I thought it would be digitally printed on the helmet, but they actually had somebody reproduce my designs with an air spray or spray paint that’s specifically for those helmets,” he says. “I give this company credit for reproducing my design so well. The way it looks is exactly like the mockup I made.”
November 2023
It was Friday, Nov. 24, 2023 — the day after Thanksgiving. At the Xcel Energy Center in downtown St. Paul, the Wild were celebrating Native American Heritage Night as they prepared to face off with the Colorado Avalanche.
At that time, new directives from the National Hockey League prohibited players from wearing specialty jerseys, masks, stickers, decals or tape for theme nights — a response to backlash against players who declined to wear Pride jerseys. Minnesota jerseys created for Heritage Night and auctioned off for charity were not worn on the ice that night.
But the mask?
Fleury, who was not scheduled to play that night, still took to the ice: He wore the mask during warmups.
Minnesota Wild goaltender Marc-André Fleury wears a mask, created by Mdewakanton Dakota artist Cole Redhorse Taylor, during warmups before a NHL hockey game against the Colorado Avalanche in St. Paul on Nov. 24, 2023. The mask is currently on display as of January 2025, part of the “Our Home: Native Minnesota” exhibit at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul. (Bruce Kluckhohn / Minnesota Wild)
In a subsequent silent auction, the mask was purchased by the Minnesota Historical Society for $35,100, with the money benefitting the American Indian Family Center and the Minnesota Wild Foundation.
Later, Fleury explained his decision to defy the NHL.
“It was to honor Native Americans in all of Minnesota, Prairie Island, there, trying to help them,” Fleury told the Pioneer Press. “To wear the mask for 15 minutes, and they raise a good chunk of money to help the family center on the reservation, to me I just thought was the right thing to do, and it was an honor for me to represent them.”
It was quite a night for the artist, who attended the game.
“I didn’t have any contact with him, so I didn’t know what he was going to do,” Redhorse Taylor says. “So when he showed up on the ice during the practice round and he was wearing the helmet, I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’ I was just so excited. I was on a suite level and I almost fell over the balcony, I was jumping up and down. I knew it was bigger than everything, it was bigger than me, it was bigger than all that.
“Everyone was sending me videos of it and pictures of it and it was just everywhere, it was everywhere, it just made a huge splash that he stuck it to the man and said, ‘I’m going to wear this,’” he says. “And he didn’t have to do that. But I’m forever grateful to him that he did.”
It was only later that Redhorse Taylor learned it was the Minnesota Historical Society that placed the winning bid for the historic helmet in the silent auction.
‘I was really happy,” he says. “I knew, because of my relationship with the History Center, I knew it would live forever here and that people would have access to it.”
Fleury is pleased, too.
“I am very honored that the Minnesota History Center has my mask on display as part of this wonderful exhibit,” said Fleury in a statement provided through the Wild on Wednesday. “It is incredibly special for me and my family. We appreciate the time and effort everyone has put into this, and hope visitors enjoy it!”
A curator with the Historical Society explained why the helmet was important to Minnesota.
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“This mask is at the intersection of contemporary Native arts, sports memorabilia, and current discourses on the tension between sports and politics,” said Angelica Maier, curator of 3-D objects, in a statement. “Bringing the mask into the MNHS collections will further our ongoing effort to bring forward, tell, and preserve Minnesota’s stories.”
The Pioneer Press has learned that neither the Wild nor Fleury were fined over the helmet.
‘Living and thriving’
In addition to the helmet, the public can view other works by Redhorse Taylor that the Historical Society acquired, including a pair of Dakota Hanyuski (Dakota pucker toe moccasins) of smoked leather and glass beads, as well as Ledger art, drawings of Dakota people wearing COVID-era masks while surrounded with plants used for medicinal purposes, such as sage and cedar plants. There is also a glass photograph of Taylor by Shane Balkowitsch.
Along with the helmet, the works illustrate that Native art is not relegated to history.
“One of the things that our Native communities combat is the misconception that we no longer exist — because people have in their minds things that are very stereotypical, from Westerns and other things,” says Rita Walaszek Arndt, a member of the White Earth Ojibwe who is the program and outreach manager of the Native American Initiatives Department at the Minnesota Historical Society. “But we are living and thriving today.”
The work of Redhorse Taylor, Walaszek Arndt says, is an example to “showcase that, but also to identify some of the things from our histories that continue to show up in our contemporary life today.”
More info can be found at mnhs.org/historycenter/activities/museum/our-home.
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