Eugene artist Yvonne Stubbs chronicles discovering Indigenous heritage along with her Black family line with Bloodlines: A Personal Journey Through Art, Memory and Heritage. The collection of works — including paintings, ceramics, collage, fiber arts and mixed media — hangs at the Eugene City Hall Gallery through February. Stubbs tells Eugene Weekly she had no idea she had Indigenous ancestry in her family when she began the process, tracing parts of her family back to Oklahoma and the Freedmen of the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations. Freedmen were descendants of enslaved African Americans emancipated after the Civil War, some of whom had Indigenous ancestry. In the 1860s, treaties promised freedmen full citizenship within the Five Tribes — the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek/Muscogee and Seminole — some of which enslaved African-Americans both before and during the Civil War. Along with her art, Bloodlines features the documents through which Stubbs discovered this previously unknown chapter of her family history. Stubbs, a University of Oregon graduate in painting and sculpture, has lived and created art in Eugene for nearly 40 years. Through Bloodlines, she says she learned her grandmother and grandfather were born on an Oklahoma Chickasaw reservation. She was aware her family came to Oregon from Oklahoma via Missouri, but beyond that, the story was lost to history. As a young person, she says, “I asked my mother, well, where did we come from? I really didn’t know.” Through the work in the show, Stubbs says, “I’m trying to incorporate the African American and Native Americans together. I wanted to find a way to present it to the world because people don’t know that some Native American people owned African people, and sometimes they intermarried.”  — Will Kennedy

Bloodlines: A Personal Journey Through Art, Memory and Heritage artist reception is 2 pm to 4 pm Friday, Sept. 12, at City Hall Gallery, 500 East 4th Avenue. Admission is free.