Female

BIRTH AND BACKGROUND
Silverstar Red Crow was born Michaele Sortomme to bohemian artist/educators during an earthquake in the 1950's, in the Southern California beach community of Newport Beach. Her father was Richard, one of the core members of the Laguna Beach Sawdust Art Festival and a progenitor of Art Therapy; he raised all his children to swim before they walked and meditate before they talked. He was a student of Emhoff in the early 1930’s, and member of the Taos Ten, a group of artists who shaped modern watercolor technique from the Taos School which was founded in the later 19th Century. Richard was the first white man allowed to paint the Green Corn Dance at Taos Pueblo, where he resided with the Pueblo’s governor, Adam Trujillo. Her mother, Sarah, was a mixed-blood American Indian (Muscogee Creek/Blackfeet) educated for seventeen years by the Sacred Heart. She became an educator and painter of American Indian Dancers. Silverstar was born to hold brushes and prompted to read big books, always encouraged to go deeper and farther than people around her, regardless of age or gender. A code of personal excellence was demanded in her household. Her childhood held few compromises.

ACADEMIC EDUCATION
Silverstar was quickly accelerated through grammar and secondary school, attending college from age fourteen through eighteen. She majored in anthropology and modern literature, attending the now defunct Thomas Jefferson College in Allendale, Michigan. She was greatly influenced by her personal mentors, Allen Ginsberg and Baba Ram Dass, who visited her campus several times per year. One term before graduation, she made the choice to leave academia for a full-time career as a spiritual practitioner of the Old Ways.

SPIRITUAL EDUCATION
Before starting college at fourteen, her father Richard, yoga practitioner since the 1920’s, passed her the Cobra Breath, officially beginning her spiritual career. Shortly after the initiation, she was introduced to Master Hamid Bey, from the Coptic Temple Master System of Egypt. He chose Silverstar as a student, personally guiding her spiritual education until she left college at eighteen. The radio announcer and author, Thom Hartmann, was also a student of Hamid Bey during the same time period, though they have never met.

Because of the careful tutelage of her parents and Master Hamid Bey, she was ready for solo work at eighteen, specializing in exorcism, Astrology, Numerology and the Tarot. Dreamwork and Spirit Speak were the areas of specialization in her late twenties. Because of her propensity for movement and sign, she was led to seek out teachers in Native Traditional Dance in her thirties, studying with the now passed Elders Paul Whitehead and Pauline Ricks from the Siletz Reservation in Siletz Oregon. Movement through Spirit Sign and Dance led her more deeply into the active Shamanic Realms and a life of service to the indigenous and Pagan communities. Through hard work and service, she earned her first name, Silverstar, in 1993 through Bill White Eagle Wilson, and the right to wear her last name, Red Crow, in 1999.

SHAMANIC AND ART MENTORS
Silverstar’s greatest and most loyal teachers and guides have been from the Spirit Realms. She was gifted--or some say cursed--with multiple past-life memory, giving her an unusual perspective of the world and relationships woven through time. Her personal line of incarnations has gifted her with a variety of talents including multi-media painting. She has produced acrylic canvases, watercolor landscapes, murals, drawings, sculpture, jewelry design, collage, icons, beadwork, Regalia and hide work. Her memory is an endless source of inspiration. Her personal Ancestors have been careful and thorough guides and have taught her to thrive despite physical limitations.

ART AND WRITING CREDITS
She thanks her father and mother for setting an artistic life-course and for implanting a fiercely self-motivating demeanor in all projects undertaken. Silverstar was a core founding member of the Rio Grande Artist Cooperative in Santa Fe New Mexico from 1984 to1989. She moved to Oregon in 1990 and opened two galleries, one in Newport, 1990-1992, specializing in Oregon forest and ocean watercolors and one in Carlton, 1995-1999, specializing in American Indian and Goddess Art. Her artistic tour de force was created in 2008, a mixed-media fourteen-part icon series highlighting her personal family history called “The Art of Family”.

She has written articles for Sage Woman and Pan Gaia, offering an indigenous voice to a largely Pagan audience. Over the years, she has produced several volumes of spiritual how-to information, liturgy, rituals, a song book and seasonal sacred food recipes that have never gone to commercial press. Her first novel, a saga of reincarnation and the struggles of multiple time zones, The Emancipation of Giles Corey, was just completed in November of 2009. It includes fourteen maps, twenty-nine chapter drawings and three full-sized acrylic-on-canvas paintings for book cover choices. Currently, she is working on her second novel entitled, The Sabbats of Sophia, based on the last line of ancient Goddess Priestesses of the Balkans, greatly influenced by the Jewish Diaspora of the First Century CE. She also has plans to consolidate volumes of her how-to manuals into workbook form by 2011/12.