Alice Blue Legs
Lakota [Pine Ridge] quillworker (1925-2003)
Alice Blue Legs (July 26, 1925 – January 2, 2003) was a Lakota Sioux craftworker, notable for her quillwork. She received a 1985 National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and was a featured artist for the documentary film Lakota Quillwork—Art and Legend. Her work was seen in the epic film Dances with Wolves and exhibited in museums such as The Children's Museum of Indianapolis, the Heard Museum, the Sioux Indian Museum. Examples of her work are in the permanent collection of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board at the Washington, D. C. headquarters of the United States Department of the Interior and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.
Early life
Rosaline Alice New Holy was born on July 26, 1925 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, near Grass Creek, in Shannon County, South Dakota to Julia (née Kills at Lodge) and Joseph New Holy. After her mother's death in 1937, she was raised by her father, his second wife, and her grandmother. She attended the Oglala Community School, graduating after completing high school.
Career
New Holy remembered her mother and grandmother, Quiver, doing decorations and medallion work when she was small and she learned some techniques from her grandmother, but both had died when she wanted to learn the craft. Her father encouraged her to learn the traditional quillwork skills of the Lakota and though he encouraged her, he would not touch the quills as they were women's objects. He showed her samples in magazines of various designs and through trial and error New Holy taught herself the craft.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q56167036. VIAF identifies the subject as 21686387. The Library of Congress control number is no00039972. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1925, 2003, 1985 and 1937.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alice Blue Legs” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.