When Iktomi and Anunk Ite and her family were banished from the underworld, they were also prohibited from returning to it. Therefore, in order to get the meat and clothing from this world to the Pte people in the underworld, Iktomi had to enlist the assistance of animals. In this case, he chose a wolf as a messenger to carry the gifts through the earth to the underworld, and instructed the wolf that after he arrived among the Pte people he should choose a strong, brave young man to communicate with.

Angela Babby says, “I love wolves, and I wanted the wolf in my mosaic to have a very regal, kind of spiritual feel.” Her remarkable glass mosaic captures the sequence in the emergence narrative when Iktomi loads parfleche saddle bags onto the back of the wolf, takes him to the entrance of the cave, and tells him to deliver it to a brave young man of the Pte people.

The wolf almost certainly would have carried saddlebags made from rawhide and packed with the gifts from Anunk Ite. All such containers are called “wokpans” in Lakota. Some are cylindrical, some are shaped like suitcases, and some are flat like envelopes. Long, flat, envelope-shaped wokpans were often used to store dried food. Sometimes a number of families would stash their wokpans in a shared underground cache. Wokpan envelopes most commonly were made in pairs with nearly identical geometric designs. Each woman would identify her wokpans by their design, which she created and which was hers alone. A woman could therefore easily identify and retrieve her wokpans from a shared cache.

The power of Angela’s art is in the meticulous process of cutting and grinding and painting small pieces of colored glass, then assembling them into luminescent scenes that evoke the painstaking detail of beadwork artists in the past and present who use glass beads to build complicated and intricate patterns. Angela says,“It’s the vivid colors brought together in different ways that cause the emotional impact that I’m trying to accomplish.”

“People say that my art is all about process,” Angela laughs. “That’s absolutely true. I love the process of constructing the artwork, piece by piece. I think a lot of Native artists work like me. We appreciate the traditional quillwork and beadwork that’s really labor-intensive.”

Iktomi gave the pack to a wolf and went with it to the entrance of the cave that opens down through the world. He told it to go and watch the people under the world and when it saw a strong and brave young man to speak with him alone, and to give him the pack and tell him that there were plenty of such things in the world.