'All the world is somewhere else... I am the mask. I am the bird. I am the animal. I am the spirit... I transcend with the being of the mask.'
Chief Robert Joseph, Kwakwaki'wakw (Kwakiutl), recalling his youthful experience as a ceremonial dancer, 1998
'There are three things that maintain a culture - language, religion and art. You lose these three and you lose the culture completely.'
Jackie Paisho, Pikuni (Blackfoot) bead artist, 2005
'You say prayers when you start a basket and you let it know that it is going to be started, to be created and when you are finished, you end with prayers to let it know that its birth is complete.'
Frank Turtle, Yubi-Wailaki, painter and basket maker, 1999
'Art comes from a deeper source somewhere - it's part of the act of just living; you know, let's put on the beans and get the clay out.'
Rina Swentzell, Tewa-Santa Clara Pueblo artist, author and schollar, 1994
For Rina Swentzell, clay can be 'a gritty reminder of the land, a way to hold the places of her ancestors between her fingers.' I tried my hand at gritty reunions last week with a lunge at gardening. Soft and green at the work, my blistered palms sent me to the sidelines to let the weeds have their ancestral way.
The same hands scribbled quotes, shards of artist truth scattered through Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collection last month. At the time, I felt the author-artists pushing me out of my complacency, where everyday tasks outweigh the urgency of grappling with my far, forgotten roots. Then of course those same tasks led me down the road of practical oblivion, my bits of penciled wisdom moldering in the dust.
My people were Swiss and English, poor orphaned clans. My clay - my songs, my words - forget or deny their sacred worth. Ironic, and perhaps deserving, that the peoples who appropriated this land often sacrifice the very ties to Europe that might redeem their streak of stubborn independence. Stark individualism relegates our heritage to a wan relic of a lush communal presense just beyond our consciousness.
Prayerful art, say the land's native prophets, might yet be our salvation.
Photo Edward S. Curtis, Blackfoot Bear Bull
- Susan Weber's blog
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Re: All the world ...
Interesting thoughts. My immigrant roots are two generations past, but I think of myself in the company of Irish and American poets and artists, an "outside cousin" of those addressed by William Yeats in "Under Ben Bulben":
Irish poets learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All of out shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into the clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.
Yeats.
His poems are like prayers to me, as I take pen or brush in this digital age -- but I also feel the breath and spirit of even more distant American cousins -- Black Elk, Langston Hughes, Mark Twain, Emily Dickenson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Bob Dylan; and among the painters, Childe Hassam, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol. As different as their work might be from mine, I feel a kinship with them, as I am their cousin of the brush and pen.
Call me Ishmael...
Thanks for the post, Susan. It makes us think about our art in a continuum.
How quaint, yet how true.
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Water Color Visions