Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a fearless artist and indefatigable supporter of her peers who brought the full complexity of contemporary Indigenous experience into unmistakable view, died on Jan. 24 at her home in Corrales, N.M. She was 85.

Her death was announced by Garth Greenan Gallery in New York, which represented her. The gallery said she had pancreatic cancer.

Ms. Smith’s abiding artistic medium was collage, in the broadest sense of the word. With a wide range of works — including mixed-media canvases and conceptually tinted assemblages, as well as drawings and paintings that Joshua Hunt recently described in The New York Times as “Kandinsky turned loose in the American plains” — she seamlessly married a host of personal and political references with influences from European, American and Native art history.

Writing about a 1980 show of pastels and charcoal drawings for Art in America, Ronny H. Cohen noted that Ms. Smith drew on the narrative pictography and decorative abstraction of the Plains even while taking cues from artists like Paul Klee, Joan Miró and Robert Rauschenberg.

What held all these sources together was a consistent color palette of red and brown; a distinctively back-and-forth sense of composition in which a striking central image was often balanced by an undertow of peripheral figures; and Ms. Smith’s unerring instinct for narrative.