But she found time to become a voracious reader while hiding to avoid chores, and she managed to save scraps of paper on which her father had drawn animals. When she was 13, she saw the 1953 movie “Moulin Rouge,” about the French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and decided to become an artist.
Pursuing higher education despite financial challenges, and despite being discouraged by instructors — they told her that women couldn’t be artists and that “Indians don’t go to college,” she said — she earned an associate degree from Olympic College in Bremerton, Wash., in 1960; a bachelor’s degree from Framingham State University, in Massachusetts, in 1976; and a master’s from the University of New Mexico in 1980.
The University of New Mexico would later award her an honorary doctorate, as would Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Well into the 1980s, Ms. Smith was still making modestly scaled, largely abstract paintings and works on paper. It was only around the end of that decade that her work got bigger, messier, more explicit and more complicated.
“In the 1980s, I was talking to Andy Ambrose, my partner, and I told him, ‘I don’t think anybody’s listening to me. I’m not getting my messages across,’” she remembered in 2023. “And he said, ‘Well, think about an icon. Maybe you need an icon.’ And then I began thinking about what are the things that my tribe might see the most? And I thought about a woman’s cut-wing dress, a man’s war shirt, a man’s vest, the canoe, the buffalo, the horse and the coyote.”
