Not sure how many people would agree with this sentiment found on Oregon City’s Willamette Terrace walkway. But I do believe we can all agree that the city, some 30 minutes south of Portland, is extremely polite. There is a welcome sign, wherever you turn.
You get encouraging advice (if I only knew what “there” is…)
perhaps leading to Eternal Impact, equally mysterious,
or fortification at the end of the road (the fountains themselves long dried out.)
Jokes aside, there is history wherever you look, preserved and displayed in public and museums. A lot of it can be found just looking at the buildings, the murals, the signage they offer, or the names they chose for their establishments.
Jail cells at the end of the alley center top – Masonic Temple center bottom. Municipal elevator from one level of the city to another.
Arch Bridge and original marker
I had come to Oregon City to look at the work of several artists displayed for the day at the Stevens Crawford Heritage House, another place where you can learn about the past. It was empty (still my condition to go inside in public places) on an early Saturday afternoon before a gathering organized by Art in Oregon to celebrate local artists and their work.
This is a collage made of paper clippings by one of the early inhabitants of the house – art always having been present, it seems.
The Craftsman American Foursquare House was built in 1908, and made into a museum after the last owner passed in 1968 and donated the property to the Clackamas Historical Society. It is furnished and equipped with everything original to the period, transporting you into the past. A large room on the ground floor has now been made in to the Mary Elizabeth Gallery, with local art hung there and in upstairs spaces as well.
On view were paintings by Kelsey Birsa, her Livingroom series containing a number of works dealing with the psychological effects of the pandemic and her ways of coping with it. One of the colorful attention magnets was a wall paper she created to reflect the garden surrounding the gallery, one of the few spaces to interact socially given the threat of infection. Her oil paintings, sometimes with added media, gold leaf, newspaper clippings or fabric draped over, were hung on top of the colorful background.
Kelsey Birsa Coping Mechanisms (2020)
Kelsey Birsa Here (2019)
Upstairs you could see some of Natalie Wood’s photographs,
Natalie Wood Were such her Silver Will (2019)
On display for the day were also the work of Clairissa Stephens, in the process of setting up her delicate botanical drawings with silverpoint on a gesso-like underpainting, from ink and pencil sketches.
All three of the artists had participated at some time or another in Art in Oregon‘s unique opportunity to spend a one-month residency at the Heritage House to work on their art in solitude. They are granted 24 hour access to a studio room and facilities (although they cannot live in the house,) in exchange for 20 hrs. of volunteer services at the museum. The Mary Elizabeth Gallery offers a chance to show work at the end, but is not exclusively slated for residents. The next exhibition, for example, is comprised of a huge variety of local talent, opening on September 23, 2022. The Ghost Showfeatures Alycia Helbling, Autumn Cornell, Don Hudgins, Elliott Wall, Erik Sandgren, James Dowlen, Jennifer Viviano, Kelly Shannon Chester, Kristin Neuschwander, Laura Weiler, Leslee Lukosh, Leslie Peterson Sapp, Nanette Wallace, Owen Premore, Tim Dallas – quite a range of divergent styles and media.
Mary Elizabeth Gallery
603 6th St. Oregon City, OR 97045
September 23 - November 1, 2022
RECEPTION: Friday, October 14, 6-9pm
Open on Halloween: 4-7pm
Gallery hours : Friday-Saturday 10-4pm
***
I am regularly drawn back to Oregon City because of the river, the falls, and the not-so-distant past that still affects a complicated presence. The industrialization of the place provided homes and work for many colonial settlers, while displacing the tribes who lived on the land and for whom Tumwater Falls was a place of great existential and cultural significance. A bit of a walkway can be found at the north end of the river, surrounded by informative signs and public art. A view point further south does the same and allows visitors to look at the falls from afar.
Adam Kuby and Brian Borrello are the public artist team that created the Waterfall sculpture at Willamette Terrace Walkway.
Mill after mill, using the power generated by the water for processing lumber, wool, flour and eventually paper, clogged the banks of the river and interfered with access to the falls.
Several years back I had actually participated in a walk through one of the old mills, Blue Heron Paper Company, now condemned, for an extended photoshoot that resulted in this compilation. (If you click on the book in the link and then on full view, you can scroll through the pages. Some of the resulting montages (below) were hung in a show at the Oregon City Hall.)
The site of the bankrupt paper mill, some 23 acres, was purchased in 2019 by the Confederate Tribes of Grand Ronde, who announced the new name for the planned restoration project just 2 weeks ago: Tumwata Village. It refers to the Native name for the falls and reflects the historic tribal connection to the area. Much demolition still going on, lots of rebuilding in the future. Details can be found in a newly launched website: www.tumwatavillage.org.
The planning process itself has been complex, though. Since 2011, much debate involved historic rights, and differing visions for a development that would protect tribal history and also would allow the general public to access the falls. Under the umbrella of the Willamette Falls Legacy Project multiple constituent partners focused on a commitment to public access, environmental and cultural restoration, as well as economic development. Oregon City, Clackamas County, regional government Metro and the state of Oregon partnered with the Grand Ronde Tribe, and eventually the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs were invited by the Willamette Falls Trust, which began as the Legacy Project’s fundraising arm before expanding operations. As is so often the case in projects with numerous participants, conflicting needs, demands and eventually tensions were difficult to resolve.
This spring the Grand Ronde tribe left the project to pursue the restoration on their own propriety bordering the river directly and independently. Information about claims of conflicting interests can be found here and here, and in an OPB interview. Of importance to those of us who are not entitled to take a position, given our lack of historic knowledge and access to innumerable facts, is to remember:
“… these fractures stem from painful histories. None of these confederations, or the boundaries between them, existed before colonization. In fact, in 1855 there was only one western Oregon reservation: Siletz, which is where the tribes that became part of Grand Ronde were originally scheduled to be sent. But President James Buchanan abruptly decided to establish the Grand Ronde Reservation as a second western Oregon reservation instead of an extension of Siletz. On a foreigner’s whim, the tribes became separate peoples.
“Over the years, there’s been a lot of trauma and historical legal wrongs done to the tribes just falling out of that history.” (Ref.)
That is what I am thinking about when looking at this natural marvel, the largest waterfall in the Northwestern United States by volume, and the seventeenth widest in the world. It is 1,500 feet (460 m) wide and 40 feet (12 m) high with a flow of 30,849 cu ft/s (874 m³/s), located 26 miles (42 km) upriver from the Willamette’s mouth. Images below are from last week and from winter months, showing the effects of season on the river.
The horse-shoe shapes falls in September above, January below
The falls are one of the few remaining places to fish for lamprey eels.
September above, January below
Maybe the town itself is not one of the prettiest ever, but the nature at its doorstep is. They both hold a lot of history.
Here is what I currently listen to, water (or sea) foam, in musical form.
TO PUT IT BLUNTLY: I came for the art. Stayed for the history. And left with a mind filled with thoughts about access to education. It all started out, however, with standing at the doorstep of the wrong museum.
Leave it to me and my heat-addled brain to drive to Newport, OR to visit OSU’s current Art About Agriculture exhibit displayed at a Lincoln County Historical Society‘s venue, look up the address for something called “museum” and end up at the Society’s Burrows House. Which was closed. I rang the doorbell and a startled, but exceedingly friendly book keeper tried to figure out who I was and what I wanted. Ah, I was supposed to be at the Pacific Maritime Heritage Center (PMHC) overlooking the bay and the iconic Yaquina Bay bridge!
Good thing that my ridiculously stereotypical German punctuality had left some leeway to make it in time to the appointed meetings across town with the various parties involved in my query to learn more about what’s going on in Newport, OR. Somewhat flustered, nonetheless. Soon absorbed by so much I had to take in.
Let us first look at The Sustainable Feast (August 5- September 30, 2022) a collection of artworks about food production and consumption. It was in the process of being hung by Owen Premore, Directing Curator of OSU’s College of Agricultural Sciences, when I arrived. Curating so many diverse works across two locations (the Visual Art Center at Nye Beach is the second one) is an art in itself – the sequencing as demanding as the mounting. Premore had his work cut out for him, while also training museum staff how to hang and distribute. Consider the statistics:
Number of art submissions to the open call: 290 artworks by 91 artists. Counties represented: 12 Oregon counties, 5 Washington counties, and Kaua’I County in Hawai’i. Artworks selected for inclusion in the tour by a blind jury: 59 artworks by 47 artists. Artworks at PMHC: 49 artworks by 47 artists. Artworks at VAC: 12 artworks by 12 artists
Quite a feat.
I will then turn to what I learned about the Maritime Center and its new Executive Director, Susan M.G. Tissot, appointed at the beginning of May, who gave me the grand tour of the building, related its history and provided much food for thought. Finally I will fill you in with what’s new at Newport’s Visual Arts Center, which is also exhibiting some of the Sustainable Feast‘s displays in the Upstairs Gallery (August 5 to 28, 2022) and has new leadership as well. Yes, it was a full day. Glorious, too.
***
FOR ALMOST 40 YEARS, OSU’s College of Agricultural Science has called on local artists to submit work that helps bring people closer to agricultural resources and research, increasing our understanding and valuing of agriculture, diversity of approaches and innovation in our food system. At its core it is an educational mission, one made possible by significant resources put into the Art in Ag production, including helping the annual show tour across the state for maximal access for visitors. Included is the acquisition of jury-selected art works for the University’s Permanent Collection, which at this time holds fiber arts, mixed media assemblages, paintings, sculptures, watercolors, and works on paper including drawings, photographs, and prints. Permanent collection displays can be found across the state, including at the OSU campus in Corvallis, the Oregon Housing and Community Services in Salem, and the Oregon Food Bank and Wheat Marketing Center in Portland.
The current exhibition shows a wide array of media, and ranges from mediocre to stellar exhibits, a fact I found particularly appealing: this is not an elitist display, but a cross section of artists of all levels interacting with nature, their eco systems, the way food is processed and problems or successes associated with issues related to agriculture. Rather than being in awe, the visitor is drawn in, recognizing our own place and time, exposed to art that is quietly accessible.
I am featuring below selected works that give an impression of the range of media and topics. Go visit the exhibition to get the full sense of artistic talent!
Toni Avery Grey Skies,Golden Fields Acrylic
As a photographer I was of course drawn to particularly strong work by Loren Nelson, David Schaerer, and someone new to me, Craig J. Barber. Whether you depict the simple beauty of a vegetable,
Loren Nelson Bent Pepper, 1999 Black&White Photograph, Archival Pigment Print
or the interaction with the land,
Dave Schaerer Commercial Clam Diggers 2 2012 Digital photographic print
often made harsh by working conditions under a system that has not been kind to or even exploitative and harmful to those it hires, the photographs engage the viewer to think through the issues. This is particularly relevant in a year where farm workers in Oregon, most of them Latinos, have finally been granted overtime pay, something they had been excluded from since the federal 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. Since June and July, Oregon also has new OSHA state rules that protect workers when temperatures soar beyond 80 degree or the air becomes clogged with wildfire smoke.
Craig J. Barber Trimming Rhubarb Photography: archival pigment inks on fine art rag paper
The heat protections require employers to allow workers to take paid breaks to get relief from the heat, provide access to shade areas outdoors and an adequate supply of drinking water, have a heat illness prevention plan and to gradually introduce workers to high temperatures. Some 87.000 farm workers, independent of immigration status, construction workers, forestry professionals, highway workers, and utility personnel will be protected. (Ref.)
Craig J. Barber Hooking Up an Irrigation Hose Photography: archival pigment inks on fine art rag paper
My eye was caught by a mixed media exhibit by a local Newport artist that teemed with detail, helping us understand the biodiversity required for healthy soil.
Carol Shenk Healthy Soil Biodiversity Mixed media – Details below
My interest was piqued by a mixed media installation that informed, in rebus-like fashion, about animal husbandry and intergenerational transfer of knowledge on a Central Oregon sheep farm in Crook County.
Andries Fourie Powell Butte Romneys Mixed media
There was fiber art,
Sheryl LeBlanc Eat Uni and Help the Kelp Fiber arts
unusual bead work,
A. Kimberlin Blackburn A Farmer’s Life with Luna at the Waterfall 2022 Glass beads, acrylic, thread and up-cycled ceramics
gorgeous sculpture of fungi,
Hsin-Yi Huang The Magnificent Fungi 2022 Porcelain fired to Cone 8 in oxidation atmosphere
and a cabbage.
Crista Ames Unfurl Ceramic: stoneware
There was whimsical work combining installation and photography (all the vegetables were photographed at markets by the artist.)
James Erickson Singer Farms Mixed media sculpture
Video installation could be found next to traditional paintings.
Katy Cauker Orchard Late Summer – Carpenter Hill 2022 Acrylic on Canvas
Julia Bradshaw Cafeteria 2022 – Video, Chafing Dish, TV Monitor – you saw empty dishes moving along an assembly line inside the chafing dish, clever.
Mabel Astarloa Haley Decay 2 2022 Oil
***
THE EXHIBITION AT THE MARITIME CENTER is located in the Mezzanine, a space recently refinished, plied with soft carpeting to shelter from uneven floor planks, equipped with beautiful exhibition panels, and with a professional lighting system that tells you right off the bat that Susan Tissot is not a woman of half measures. If something needs done, it will get done right.
30 years of experience in the museum world, including 19 years as Executive Director at different institutions across the western states and Hawai’i, have produced an accumulated knowledge base and varied skill set (think fundraising, grant writing, and above all museum development) that are surely needed in the current situation: cultural institutions all over the place have been battled by economic factors, the closures and difficult working conditions due to the pandemic, with non-profits some of the hardest hit.
What stood out to me in our interaction, though, was Tissot’s infectious enthusiasm for education and her curiosity in conversation. Here was a woman who could have simply made a sales pitch to get her institution on the map – plenty of positive features to highlight, intriguing history of the building to report, neat stuff to show. All of which she did, mind you – I now know the history of a house built by wealthy entrepreneurs, converted into nightclubs and restaurants, and eventual transformation of this beautiful space with its breathtaking views into the current historical center.
The Doerfler Family Theater, for example, is in the building’s basement. There you can directly choose which of 12 short documentaries you would like to see. It also serves as an auditorium for a variety of performances and belongs on a long list of things that hold much potential for this venue. The varied engagement of community members is formidable. To mention just a few, the Board President and retired Director of the Port of Toledo, Bud Schoemake, spent the last 18 years working tirelessly on the building and also oversaw project management of the mezzanine remodel.
Jo An McAdams, the Board Secretary has also been very involved; she is a USCG wife whose husband was a Master Chief. Jo An got the USCG in Newport to help the PMHC do some heavy lifting getting the new exhibit panels here and up on the mezzanine from the shop in Toledo. Joe Novello, a retired US Coast Guard, educator and author who runs the Toledo Community BoatHouse worked with Schoemake on the exhibit panels. Art exhibits are lined up for the near future that will speak to a variety of interests and regional strengths.
The work of three Northwest artists, Cascade Head artist Duncan Berry’s Gyotaku printing on wood panels, McMinnville artist Andy Kerr’s wildlife painting on wood panels and Lincoln City artist Nora Sherwood’s bird illustrations on paper are pretty striking.
The visual art is paired with objects from the museum’s collection, taxidermy specimens including exquisite maritime birds, and a hands-on opportunity that includes wildlife pelts for kids of all ages, courtesy of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Tissot very much wants to provide occasions for the general public, children included, that allow people not just to experience wonder or surprise, but that makes them ask questions, the very first step to become more engaged, be it in science or art.
Not the easiest thing to do, when your institution runs on a staff of 5, and is physically slightly removed from the tourist strip that is Bay Boulevard in Newports’ Historic district, if only by a few steps up a staircase, or a driveway that leads to plenty of free parking behind the building. That distance is enough to have people blindly walk by, not aware of what one misses. I, too, plead guilty of not even knowing about the PMHC, despite annual pilgrimages to Newport with the kids, who would have just loved, loved, loved this museum. (Here, by the way, is an online resource for maritime institutions nationally that you can visit, virtually in may cases. Use it as a teaser and then explore the real thing in Newport!)
Andy Kerr Owl Painting on Wood
Here is an interview where Tissot explains the plan for public programs. Still to come are a free Exhibit Art Talk on August 21, 1-3 pm about how nature is used as inspiration for art with artists Duncan Berry and Nora Sherwood. They also discuss the reasons why they focus on the subject. And on Sunday August 28, 1pm, Skyler Gerrity, Assistant District Wildlife Biologist, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, will be at the PMHC to give a presentation on How to live peacefully with our local black bears.
***
I RECENTLY LISTENED TO AN INTERVIEW with Heidi Zuckerman a young American leader in contemporary art, formerly a curator at the Jewish Museum in New York City and the Berkeley Art Museum. As CEO and Director of OCMA/The Orange County Museum of Art in California, she is building a new, ground-up project with Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Thom Mayne, as well as producing podcasts featuring conversations about art. She talked about her three criteria for a successful institution that serves the public (other than free access which is only a possibility if you have a wealthy and generous donor base. One should be so lucky.) She listed:
1) looking back to look forward – have history as a guide.
2) be mindful of place – anchor yourself locally and within the specifics of your time (awareness of what Covid has done to us and institutions was one example she used.)
3) caring and sharing – be aware of the needs of the community you want to reach, and approach them, invite them, engage them where they are, rather than expecting them to find their way to you.
I was thinking that Tissot’s approach to her work – and partially what PMHC has done since its inception – really fits with these criteria, biding well for the institution. History is preserved, explored, taught; it is anchored in place, focussing on local needs, interests and struggles. (One of her biggest achievements, in her own words, for example, was support for an oral history program (Center for Oral History, Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawai’i at Manoa) that taught younger generations of Hawai’ians about the devastation and horrors of previous tsunamis destroying the islands.) And she is a conversational partner, caring and sharing indeed, not just a representative of an institution, but voicing interest in her interviewer and taking time to discuss shared concerns about how art can be of help in education. She was clearly curious about who she interacted with, something that happens rarely in my reporting experience.
Let’s help keep the PMHC afloat!
***
THE NEWPORT Visual Arts Center, my last stop for that day, has seen its share of challenges as well. After admiring the Sustainable Feast artworks displayed in the Upper Gallery (selective images are posted below,) I was sitting down with Sara Siggelkow, OCCA Arts Education Manager, well known for her important role in Newport’s paper book arts festival, and OCCA Executive Director Jason Holland, who arrived in 2020 after 18 years of experience in various roles at Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California.
The Covid pandemic had a huge impact on the institution given that educational classes and camps could not take place, and performances at the Performing Arts Center had to be canceled. At this point the institution operates with 50% of the original staff, a large decrease for an organization and a major upheaval for those who lost their jobs, some permanently, in a small community where the arts are likely not hiring for some time to come. Lay-offs are always difficult, but particularly jarring when alternative options are slim.
Holland emphasized how much flexibility is needed and day-to-day decision making required to adapt to new and ever changing circumstances. He was excited to be joined in this venture by a new Director of the Visual Arts Center. Ceramic artist Chasse Davidson who operated Toledo Clayworks from 2015 thru 2020, served as Toledo Arts Guild President 2014-2015, and has participated in the Newport Visual Art Center’s Steering Committee since 2020, will join the staff.
Robin Host Crab Season 2022 Acrylic and Paper Collage on Panel
Bill Marshall Quamash 2022 Watercolor
Lisa Brinkman Sophia’s Garden 2022 Eco-prints of sumac, eucalyptus, and maple, cold wax and oils on raw silk canvas
I was fully familiar with the important role the VAC plays for Oregonian artists as a place to exhibit art. I knew much less about its role in education, beyond my general knowledge of summer camps and year-round classes. Both Holland and Siggelkow reported on their venture with the Oregon CoastArt Bus, a vehicle that literally brings art to the people, instead of people to the arts center. Or, to be more precise, brings the chance of making art and thus involvement in art to those who might be stuck in their communities due to lack of transportation, funding, or simply information.
Oregon Coast Council for the Arts is pleased to announce the creation of a new mobile arts-learning platform—The Oregon Coast Art Bus, which will bring creative learning projects to students throughout Lincoln County this summer and beyond. The project has been funded by the K-12 Summer Learning Fund of the Oregon Community Foundation and is designed to address the “opportunity gap” associated with educational challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Oregon Coast Art Bus’s summer initiative will focus on under-served youth populations. The Bus event will be free and families are encouraged attend.
The bus comes equipped with an arsenal of tools to introduce a theme, parks at the local library, or a box store parking lot, or a sports field, and everyone can come and participate. For the last round it was printing of nature’s bounty. Planned for the next round are geometric shapes. Struck me as a splendid idea, and I wonder how many counties in Oregon could copy that approach to help children find access to and grow an interest in art. Here is a detailed article on the project published in Oregon Arts Watch last year.
Looking forward, concerned with place and sharing and caring here as well. Art is in good hands at the Oregon coast. A sustainable feast with our continued support.
Artwork by a child participating in the activities offered by the Art Bus crew.
And finally a note to my regular readers: I will take the rest of the month off, an earned break!, see you in September.
Do you know that moment when you read something and all of a sudden things fall into place, finally a factual reason given that validates previous amorphous feelings? So it was when I read an essay by Brian Sawers in The Atlantic about the origins of trespassing laws, which I’ll summarize below. My inkling that trespassing signs are an expression of power structures more so than a desire to simply protect property, on land and water, was confirmed when I learned about the legal history.
Photographs today are of various fences, keeping people out, as it were.
As one might expect, the history is not pretty. But makes so much sense when you consider the consequences of the abolition of slavery. The criminalization of trespassing started in earnest after the end of the Civil War, starting in Southern states. Punishment for trespassing was seemingly race neutral, but it was very severe. Alabama, for example, applied a penalty of three months’ hard labor. Florida allowed 39 lashes in punishment for trespassing.
What was going on?
Labor control, that’s what was going on. The biggest problem, as the plantation owners and former slaveholders insisted themselves, was to force freedmen into work during the times of Reconstruction. Black Code laws, affecting the (former) slave population were suspended by Union commanders. Under them, many states required Black people to sign yearly labor contracts; if they refused, they risked being arrested, fined and forced into unpaid labor. So how would you get people to work if you lost those threats, in an economy that was based on hard field labor that no-one else wanted to do?
Simple, make it so that the former slaves had no independent access to food or others means of survival, so that they were forced to accept working conditions and substandard wages just to stay alive. Previously, slaves had been assigned small garden plots and permitted to forage and hunt on the plantation grounds, so that the owners could save feeding costs. It was theoretically possible for the 4 million freed slaves to go on living from the land, and selling surplus goods if foraging was successful. It had happened before – In the Caribbean Islands slaves from sugar plantations went to live in the hills, and the British colonialists had to import workers from Asia at great cost.
So hunting and fishing or grazing livestock on private land was outlawed, and labor laws and vagrancy statutes established that allowed courts “to sentence to hard labor “stubborn servants” and workers who did not accept “customary” wages.” The threat of starvation had to hang over laborers to force them into working the fields.
One problem? Most White people also used to hunt on plantation owners’ properties, and did not want to see their traditional rights to be cut. Racist solution:
“Planters proposed and state legislatures adopted a work-around to statewide laws where possible: Many restrictive laws were enacted county by county, singling out majority-Black ones. In some counties, the new laws had to be crafted even more precisely to limit their application to parts of the county with more Black residents. If the new laws applied in areas with white residents, advocates were vocal in calling on all landowners to allow their white neighbors to continue hunting and fishing without interference.“
Northern landowners were just too happy to follow suit soon thereafter, even though labor control was a smaller issue. They did, however, felt they needed to show who was boss and in particular felt that immigrants needed to be severely controlled. The U.S. Supreme Court, for example, upheld a 1909 Pennsylvania law specifically designed to stop immigrants from hunting. The state went a step further and banned immigrants from owning dogs in 1915.
Privatizing the outdoors is, of course, ongoing.
Here is an overview of some of the implications for all of us.
Occasionally, there are small victories. In a small community close to where I live, for example, the 400 acre lake in the middle of Lake Oswego, was cut off for decades from public access by the rich homeowners surrounding the water. This April, a judge ruled that Oregon’s public trust doctrine applies to Oswego Lake, and the public therefore has a right to access the lake through public parks, a sudden reversal in a longstanding battle. If it isn’t about economics, it’s about privilege. Let’s not have the plebs disturb our view, or come close to our gardens…
You might remember what I wrote about foraging and prohibited access in an earlier blog. Here is Alexis Nelson and her co-host, Yara Elmjouie, introducing us to trespassing laws in a quick video.
And for music today there is Wind in Lonely Fences by Harold Budd and Brian Eno. And First Light from the same album, AMBIENT 2.
WE LIVE IN AN ERA where the necessity to decarbonize the world’s energy has become quite clear, even if the oil and gas-based industries fight tooth and nail against abandoning fossil fuels. To mitigate a climate catastrophe, we need to turn to other, sustainable modes for generating the energy that we need. Renewable energy, solar and wind sources, might be our best alternative, but they are facing enormous obstacles, political resistance by the fossil fuel monopoly being one of them. But they also are linked to very high installation costs, a lack of infrastructure, particularly adequately sized power storage systems. Electricity generation from natural sources does not necessarily happen during the peak electricity demand hours and given the volatility in generation as well as load, storage is a huge, but expensive component. Lack of policies, incentives and regulations have not exactly encouraged investment into these alternative sources either.
No surprise then, that we hear renewed calls for nuclear power as a reliable, “clean” source for energy, often accompanied by the promise that the old days of large, risky plants and unsolved storage problems of radioactive waste are gone.
As if.
I attended this year’s Hanford Journey, a day focused on environmental clean-up. Hanford was an integral part of the Manhattan Project which produced plutonium for the first atomic bombs dropped in Nagasaki and released massive toxins into the ground and Columbia river where it operated. The event, sponsored by Columbia Riverkeeper and Yakama Nation Environmental Restoration Waste Management (ERWM,) made abundantly clear that nuclear waste still presents a clear and present danger to our environment and the people who live near the rivers and polluted land. We don’t even have a handle on the current dangers, and yet people are advocating for increased use of nuclear power. Some are even claiming it is our ethical obligation to promote it as the only way to combat a climate catastrophe and promising that everything will be fine with the arrival – coming soon, if you invest in us! – of small modular reactors.
I was visiting as part of a film crew exploring the possibility of making a documentary film about the current state of nuclear power development. The interest in the topic had evolved straight out of our last films, Necessity (Oil, Water and Climate Resistance//Climate Justice and the Thin Green Line) which revealed the particular vulnerability of tribal nations to environmental pollutants. (An ArtsWatch review of the films by Marc Mohan can be found here.)
Both Hanford Journey sponsors were quite helpful in providing an opportunity for all of us to learn about the history of the clean-up efforts, view the site from boat, and talk to and hear from people who are involved in the struggle. The Yakama Nation ERWM program engages in oversight of this process and issues affecting Hanford Site natural resources. Their involvement includes participation in technical, project management, policy meetings on response and natural resource damage actions, as well as oversight of cultural resource compliance. The Columbia Riverkeeper’s mission is “to protect and restore the water quality of the Columbia River and all life connected to it, from the headwaters to the Pacific Ocean.” The organization uses legal advocacy and community organizing in numerous conservation efforts.
Map of the Hanford Site —- Simone Anter, Staff Attorney, Columbia Riverkeeper
IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY, with a sense of purpose and hope delivered by multiple speakers, honoring the legacy of tribal environmental leader Russell Jim and promising to continue his mission of Hanford clean up to ensure the safety of future generations. Davis Washines, Government Relations Liaison, Yakama Nation and DNR Fisheries Resource Program for Superfund Section, talked about the history of the people indigenous to the region and their relationship with the river, the price they paid from the exposure to life-threatening pollutants and the governmental hesitancy to fully keep clean-up commitments.
Davis Washines, Government Relations Liaison, Yakama Nation and DNR Fisheries Resource Program for Superfund Section
Laura Watson, Director of the Washington Department of Ecology, evaluated how few resources are spent and how many more are needed. “The Hanford site is and remains one of the most contaminated sites in the world, and is probably the most complicated cleanup that’s ever been undertaken in human history.” Many more talked about what the situation meant for them and their families, past and present.
Kids were playing in the water, families and friends gathered for group pictures, lunch was served.
Puyallup Canoe Family
I met Ellia-Lee Jim who had been selected to be Miss ’22-’23 Yakama Nation, and chatted with Denise Reed, Puyallup and Quileutea cultural coordinator, who wore beautiful items she made with cedar weaving which she also teaches.
Ellia-Lee Jim
Denise Reed and her cedar woven hat and belt
Multiple nonprofit groups, including The Hanford Challenge and Heart of America Northwest, were on-site to educate and encourage us to become involved with ongoing advocacy efforts. A major issue right now, for example, is the Department of Energy’s attempt to reclassify high-level waste at the Hanford site to low-level waste which will allow cleanup shortcuts and unsafe disposal.
Brett VandenHeuvel, the soon-to-be-former Executive Director of the Columbia Riverkeeper (Lauren Goldberg will be his successor on August 1,) drove us from the Mattawa event site to the river, where boats, run by Tri-City Guide Service, took us out onto the Columbia and to the B reactor — one of nine plutonium reactors built at Hanford. (There was also a hike out to White Bluffs and the Hanford Reach National Monument to view the H, DR, D and F plutonium reactors, which I had to miss.)
Archeologist and ERWM advocate Rose Ferri was our guide on the boat, helping to understand the history of the Hanford Reach, one of the few remaining stretches of river where chinook salmon spawn in significant numbers, a stretch of 51 mile, to be precise, the last remaining free-flowing portion of the 1,212 miles of the Columbia.
Rose Ferri
The National Monument contains an insane number of species overall – details can be found here – all of whom depend on being protected from toxic and radioactive pollution from the Hanford site. Because Hanford is off limits to visitors, the land has been undisturbed for years, a buffer zone between ecological disaster and agricultural industries, beautiful in its sparsity.
THE HANFORD NUCLEAR SITE has been operating since 1943, after the forced removal of the people who lived on the 580 square miles on which 9 reactors were built. 1855 treaty rights to use the land for fishing, hunting and gathering, signed by the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR), the Nez Perce Tribe, and the Wanapum, were often not honored. During the 40 years of plutonium production, cesium and iodine were generated, and chromium, nitrate, tritium, strontium-90, trichloroethene and uranium, among others, leaked into the soil and seeped into the groundwater.
There were some single-shell underground storage tanks for the most dangerous liquids, but the rest flowed freely. The last reactor was shut down in 1987. Clean-up began – theoretically – in 1989 when the U.S. Dept. of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Washington State signed a Tri-Party Agreement. Only in the year 2000 were 2,535 tons of irradiated nuclear fuel in the K Basin along the Columbia River transferred into dry storage. In the following years treatment and immobilization plants were constructed, but will only be fully operative in 2023 from last I heard. Weapons grade plutonium was transferred to South Carolina.
In 2013 we learned that the single-shell tanks leak, and 4 years later one of the PUREX tunnels containing highly radioactive waste partially collapses. Ignoring these warning signs of potential catastrophe, the U.S.Department of Energy decided on a new interpretation of which kind of waste requires most stringent storage requirements in 2019.
“…. “high-level nuclear waste” (HLW) under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) that would exclude some dangerous waste traditionally considered HLW from stringent storage requirements. For over 50 years, the term HLW, as defined in the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (AEA) and the NWPA, required the disposal of this most toxic and radioactive waste in deep geologic formations to protect public health. Energy’s new interpretation opens the door for less robust cleanup and the possibility of more waste remaining at Hanford.” (Ref.)
The Tribes and their allies continue to fight for a comprehensive, fully funded, thorough clean-up. Events like Hanford Journey are one way of getting informations out into the public, and familiarizing those of us who are able to attend and experience the landscape, with the history and the scientific consequences of delayed or compromised action. I wish that information could be even more widely spread.
***
I DROVE BACK TO RICHLAND, WA, across the Vernita bridge ,
and passed by a long stretched mountain, Lalíík, or Rattlesnake Mountain, that I had just seen from a very different perspective. I had been told it was the tallest treeless mountain in the world, sacred to Tribes in the region. It is designated a Traditional Cultural Property (TCP), a property that “is eligible for inclusionn the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) based on its associations with the cultural practices, traditions, beliefs, lifeways, arts, crafts, or social institutions of a living community.“(Ref.) At least that sacred mountain had been cleaned up with funds from a 2010 Recovery Act.
The whole story concerning Hanford and the depth of its operational impact on the Tribes of the region can only be understood if you have a glimpse of what it implies for their culture, never mind their existential dependence on non-toxic fish. Is that incorporated into the narratives that are officially told? I was about to find out.
***
THE REACH MUSEUM in Richland, WA, is a beautiful new structure with a mission statement that asserts inclusivity. Open since 2014, it offers various exhibits, with a permanent one on the Manhattan Project and the Hanford enterprise among them.
The staff is super helpful and friendly, the grounds are gorgeous and represent the beauty of the region. You are greeted outside with lots of affirmative information about the “clean” source of power that is nuclear energy.
You are also immediately made aware by historic photographs of trailer parks (and a real trailer) during the peak employment years of Hanford, that the region benefitted economically during times of hardship due to work opportunities. Some 50.000 people arrived at this remote region, families included. Not a mention though, there, whether these opportunities of housing and work were available to the indigenous inhabitants who were driven from their land by the Manhattan project.
The website for the museum is richly informative and emphasizes a desire to tell stories from differential perspectives and acknowledges their Native American partners “who historically used this region—a gathering place of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, the Wanapum people, and the Nez Perce Tribe who cared for this land since time immemorial.”
As far as I could see, one statement poster, in a gallery that, overall, lays out the developments, successes and trials of the Manhattan Project (Gallery 2,) speaks to tribal presence. Acknowledging expulsion, but not going into anything further.
The focus is on the war effort,
the feats of engineering,
and the impact on Cold War developments.
Overall, a well designed, informative exhibition with a combination of local and (inter)national historical information.
To their credit, some safety considerations are mentioned, however mostly regarding the workers in an environment that was experimental in its newness, with less attention to the continuing concerns. The printed and easily accessible materials in this room were quiet about the continuing poisonous legacy and unsolved problem of long-term nuclear waste storage, however, unless I missed something, which was of course entirely possible after a long, intense day.
What would Albert think?
If you check out the educational resources on their website, the topics of Shrub – Steppe and Geologic Past are fabulously covered. In detail, comprehensive, engaging. The topics of the Hanford Legacy and Columbia River Resources are announced to be coming soon. Given the centrality of those topics as well as the controversy attached to them, in some ways, I wondered why they have not yet been designed. Your guess is as good as mine.
I have no intention to diss a museum I rather liked. I am fully aware how hard it is, particularly during this pandemic, to keep small institutions alive, much less current. But my question about how information about the continual danger of toxic environments, long-term storage of radioactive waste and un-remediated injustice of treaty betrayals reaches the mainstream, remains. This is particularly important now that calls for renewed efforts and investments into nuclear energy are getting louder. It might, or might not be a solution to our energy woes – decisions have to be based on knowledge of all the facts, though. Columbia Riverkeeper and tribal ambassadors work hard and, undoubtedly, effectively in many regards to spread the word. It is time, that the rest of us follow suit.
A shoutout! An accolade! Kudos! Applause! Today’s photographs are dedicated to all who have worked behind the scenes to participate in, prepare for and support Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II project in ways large and small.
Maryhill Museum
Beyond the involved community partners there are staff, there are people who host artists in residence, there are folks who compute and design the technical specs of the structures under the windy conditions of the bluff, there are drivers willing to transport the frames. Three Cheers!
Their numbers pale, though, in comparison to the number of people who, across the nation, have become involved in contributing to another part of this fiber art celebration: the yarn bombing of the museum site and creating remembrance poppies for Stonehenge, a World War I memorial that is part of Maryhill Museum.
Crafted squares echoing Romanian folk patterns decorate the outside of the museum, repository of many donations from Queen Marie of Romania, delivered during her visit for the inauguration of the museum in 1926. Queen Marie’s gift of Romanian textiles provided the basis for a collection of Romanian folk dress that now includes 400 items. The creation below was still to be hung at the museum entrance when I visited.
I think Queen Marie (2nd from left) would approve!
Yarn bombing on trees and structures in the surrounding park also pick up the Romanian folk theme, as well as that of poppies to which I will come shortly.
Louise Palermo, Curator of Education, putting finishing touches on the yarn bombing.
Traditional Romanian dolls celebrating spring, called màrtisors.
***
Imagine being a committed pacifist, a Quaker, desiring to build a utopian Quaker community in the middle of nowhere, setting a faux French mansion on the top of a windy bluff towering above the river, and not a Quaker shows up. Imagine tearing down an inn you built in a small hamlet that burned, in order to establish a full-sized Stonehenge replica as a memorial to the futility of war. All based on the wrong idea that you somehow took home from a 1915 visit to England, that Britons used Stonehenge as a spot for bloody sacrifice to the Gods of war.
Imagine the realization that local stone is not up to the task and so you improvise with slabs of reinforced concrete, made to look lumpy by lining the wooden forms with crumpled tins. That’s Sam Hill for you, the visionary and founder of Maryhill Museum, a man who promoted modern roads across the Pacific Northwest and who made a fortune with utilities and railroads. Unstoppable in pursuing his dreams, a strange brew of steely pragmatism and utopian ideas. Providing us with a remarkable legacy.
Stonehenge was the very first War Memorial to World War I in the United States, finalized in 1929, with an altar plaque dedicated already in 1918. Hard for me to find echoes of pacifism in the original plaque:
To the memory of the soldiers and sailors of Klickitat County who gave their lives in defense of their country. This monument is erected in hope that others inspired by the example of their valor and their heroism may share in that love of liberty and burn with that fire of patriotism which death alone can quench.
Back to our unsung heroes, though: the nameless volunteers. They have knit and crocheted countless poppies, remembrance symbols for the fallen, poppies which are now attached, sown on by hand(!) by yet another group of supporters onto netting covering the stones around Stonehenge. Needed to defy the harsh winds on top of the promontory.
Vonda Chandler, a long standing volunteer at Maryhill was a major support and inspiration for this project, at least one name I was able to glean. Another was Gavin McIlvenna, the Society of the Honor Guard for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier-founding President, who sent an email to the President of the Daughters of the American Revolution, receiving coast-to-coast responses, and some even from Belize.
The museum posted on Facebook as did Maryhill’s Curator of Education, Queen of the Poppies, Lou Palermo, activating a wide-flung net of contacts in the museum and crafts world. Bravo!
Lou Palermo, Curator of Education, Maryhill Museum
This is the current state of affairs, with more packages and boxes arriving daily, a treasure trove of fiber art, poppies filling each parcel. All in need of unpacking and mounting….
The symbol of the poppy has its origins in a poem written by one of the soldiers in the Great War, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a brigade surgeon.
The war-ravaged landscape of Western Europe sprouted these flowers, really a plant classified as a weed, red like the blood that had been so senseless spilled. And the emotional impact of the words, soon published in both Europe and the U.S., had people on both sides of the Atlantic decide to wear fabricated poppies as a sign that the fallen would not be forgotten.
In Europe, Anna Guérin organized French women, children and veterans to make and sell artificial poppies as a way to fund the restoration of war-torn France. Here is a detailed, moving description of her single-minded efforts with archival photographs of many of the original creations. Millions of people in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Belgium, Australia and New Zealand don the red flowers every November 11 (known as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day) to commemorate the anniversary of the 1918 armistice.
On this side of the Atlantic we had calls for remembrance as well, although people wear the poppies on Memorial Day, the last Monday in May. Moina Michael, a professor at the University of Georgia at the time the war broke out, vowed to wear red poppies and to produce and sell them for proceeds supporting returning war veterans. Michael’s autobiographic writings and a time line of the adoption of the symbol across the world can be found here.
***
I was looking around at the landscape so beloved by Sam Hill, Mt. Hood visible from Hill’s last resting place slightly below Stonehenge. Thinking about the fact that wars, and the horrors and loss they inflicted, are not a thing of the past. They have continued across the world, often in places foreign to us and thus more easily ignored but for the soldiers and their families who fought them. Got physically or psychologically maimed in them. Died in them.
We now see a war again, on Eastern European fields that sprout poppies, in Ukraine. Even that war, just a few months old, has already slipped from our attentional radar, as much as we are preoccupied with political upheaval and judicial assaults closer to home.
As the outpouring of fiber art poppies for the museum project confirms, that is not the case for the many volunteers for whom these symbols likely have personal significance. They honor the dead. They miss the dead. They cannot escape the trauma instilled by war that trickles down across generations. Louis Menand’s words come to mind, describing what significant memorial art does:
“It doesn’t say that death is noble, which is what supporters of the war might like it to say, and it doesn’t say that death is absurd, which is what critics of the war might like it to say. It only says that death is real, and that in a war, no matter what else it is about, people die.”
***
On the walkway leading up to Maryhill Museum’s front doors you can spot a sculpture by James Lee Hansen. The bronze is part of his Missive series, which depicts tektites, small meteors, on the front, with some abstract embryonic form on the back. The series incorporated ideas from a book, Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision(1950), which advanced the theory (scientifically debunked since) that cataclysmic events in our solar system changed Earth’s orbit and axis and caused numerous catastrophes that were recounted worldwide in mythology and religion. The sculptor himself wrote the stanza above, talking about a missile. (He has a book New Totems and Old Gods a well as another one, Missive Poems, related to this series.)
James Lee Hansen Missive (1976)
I don’t know about missiles bringing life. Perhaps they might, if arriving from outer space. Seems to me they bring death, and death only, when launched by our own planet’s warmongers. The many, many contributors to the poppy project for this year’s Exquisite Gorge II project remind us of this.
Let their remembrance be a force for peace.
Let the rememberers be recognized.
————————————————————————
THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECTII
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Artists and Community Partners:
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore
It was early Saturday morning, heat already rising before 8 o’clock, when I drove through an eerily empty industrial landscape, filled with discarded machinery along railroad lines, dusty and bleak. Then came a long stretch of undeveloped acres of sage grass and sand, endless pylons stretching upwards into a pristine sky.
Eventually I arrived at the gate of the park that has been on my bucket list, yet another site of the Confluence Project’s art installations that, in their words, “connect people to the history, living cultures, and ecology of the Columbia River system through Indigenous voices.”
The gates of Sacajawea Historical State Park, a 267-acre day-use park at the confluence of the Snake and Columbia rivers near Pasco, WA, were still locked, but the sign informed me that you had to pay for access and warned of contact with birds, since avian flu has been making the rounds. A friendly caretaker let me into a green oasis of mature trees, surrounded by sparkling water, filled with bird song and not a soul in sight. I know, Saturday at 8 a.m. Probably a haven for picnics, family reunions and splashing kids come noon, for those who can afford the Discovery pass on land that was a traditional (free) gathering place for the Plateau tribes for 10 000 years. Until the Nez Perce War of 1877, that is, after which large gatherings at the confluence of the Snake River and Columbia River were no longer a possibility.
The site, a land spit reaching out into both rivers, is of historical note since Lewis & Clark and their Corps of Discovery camped there for 2 nights in 1805 amongst gathering tribes, led to the place by a young Lemhi-Shoshone woman, Sacagawea, who served as translator, guide and life saver to the expeditions because of her ability to secure plant food when hunting was scarce and her function as token to announce peaceful intentions – the presence of women was a sign that it was not a war party. (I am using the spelling that is now assumed to be the correct one, but left it as is in the name of the park. I am also hoping to write about how she and her role is perceived by Native Americans at a later point, having learned that it is complex.)
In any case, fast forward to 1927, when colonial settlers, the railroad and saw mill industries were firmly established in Pasco. The Daughters of the Pioneers of Washington, an organization with the purpose to “preserve the history and perpetuate the sentiment relating to pioneer days in the State of Washington, including historical sites, documents, records, and relics,” decided to celebrate the Corps of Discovery and Sacagawea’s contributions by placing a marker with granite slabs and river stones and build a park around it.
They planted trees, (with later WPA funded development adding over 200 shrubs and 500 trees, American and European sycamore, Norway and silver maple, sweet gum, American linden, black and honey locust, oak, black cottonwood, Lombardy poplar, Russian olive, blue spruce, and several species of pine among them.
Four years later, the group deeded the property to the State Parks Committee, and the transfer initiated more building and improvements. Central to the park named for her is the Sacajawea Interpretive Center, built in in Art Moderne style 1938/40. The museum features interactive exhibits on the Corps of Discovery, Sacagawea and the Sahaptian-speaking tribes of the region, and was still closed when I visited the park. Interpretative signs across the park as well as objects and structures outside inform about some of the history of the site.
I had come for something else, however: Maya Lin‘s seven Story Circles, which invite us to understand the site from a very different perspective, that of those driven from it.
I had just arrived in the U.S. in 1981 when the controversy around Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Memorial erupted. Opponents referred to the wall as an “open urinal,” suggested, for an inscription, the words “Designed by a gook,” and described Lin’s memorial as “a black gash of shame.” The National Review referred to Lin’s design as “Orwellian glop.” Tom Wolfe and Phyllis Schlafly called it “a monument to Jane Fonda.” Ross Perot said that it was “something for New York intellectuals.” (Ref.) Her design, sunken into the ground, consists of black granite slabs inscribed with the names of the dead and missing, but her critics managed to dilute the powerful work, with Veteran organizations, her supposed allies, caving: representational statues were added later, although at some distance. I was in awe how such a young woman could hold her own against powerful force; I was also taken by a design that made you not look up at a sculpture in admiration of particular persons or actions, as so much of the German memorial scene at the time consisted of.
Lin’s reaction and her path forward were captured some years back (2009) in a terrific essay based on interviews by Portland writer Camela Raymond in Portland Monthly. By the year 2000 Lin had turned to the Confluence Project, a series of six outdoor installations at points of historic interest along 300 miles of the Columbia and Snake Rivers in the State of Washington. A collaboration with other artists, architects, landscape designers and the native tribes of the Pacific Northwest, it served her interest in what she calls “memory work,” aimed, in her words, at inspiring reflection of the past, rather than simply mourning what’s lost. In some ways it is a project concerned with restoration instead. Finished projects include, at this date, Cape Disappointment State Park, the Vancouver Land Bridge, the bird blind at Sandy River Delta, Chief Timothy Park, and the Story Circles that I was now seeing for the first time.
“Seven cut basalt circles are laid out in the park and etched with texts taken from tribal stories, Lewis and Clark’s journals, and Yakama elders that explore the native cultures, language, flora, fauna, geology, and natural history of the site. Each of the circles graphically describes a different aspect of this place: the types of fish, native plants gathered, traded goods, the geology of the place, the mythic creation story of the place and at the southern-most tip, a listing of all the tribes who came through the area placed within the only form, not of a circle but of the imprint of a traditional long house that was the architectural form used for their lodge-style meetinghouses.”
What is most striking is how little these structures command attention and how much they have you focus on the environment as a whole. Whether sunk or elevated, they are “down to earth,” blending with the land, reminding us of peoples for whom the connection to land is central to their beliefs and culture and for whom the forced removal from their land is a central trauma across generations.
They allow room to be exposed to other factors shaping the environment as well, the industries and man-made structures that surround what was once a site for tribal gathering, exchanges, trade and celebrations. They make you move around, from one circle to the next and around them, to read the inscriptions (in language that did not rely traditionally on the written word,) with each move opening up different vistas. You will see pelicans, fishermen, the local bridges and, lucky me, wild turkeys in “let’s impress” mode.
It is a hallmark of all of the sites I have seen so far that they combine the beauty of an idea or a work or art with some functionality, always educating about what was encountered at the time of the Corp’s arrival, from the perspective of those displaced. The fish-cleaning table at Cape disappointment is a central concept to all the Salmon people, but it can – and is! – also be used for the actual gutting. The bird-blind at 1000 acres has the names of the bird-, fish and animal species encountered by Lewis & Clark at the time engraved on its walls; these walls consist of open slats, though, that allow the environment, the river, the woods, the sounds of the birds to be present for your senses, speaking to continuity.
The erasure of memory that is often concomitant to the forced dissemination of a people is given a counter weight in this land art. The Confluence Project goes beyond that link to the past, however. They have an incredible education library that connects to detailed information for each site. For Sacajawea State Park, for example, you can learn about the history and the environmental concerns from multiple compilations. Besides sections for History and Ecology there is much material on Living Culture, informing about indigenous life ways, sovereignty, tribes today and offering an interview collection.
You can also learn about the consequences of the structural hierarchies that resulted from settler colonialism extending into the present. Here is just one example, from a Confluence podcast featuring three Indigenous scholars and activists, Bobby Conner, Emily Washines and Deana Dartt, discussing the memorializing of history. I learned that the scientific assessment of acceptable toxicity levels of the water in the Snake and Columbia river (both polluted by run-off from the nearby Hanford nuclear reactors and threatened by an underground plume of radioactivity,) is based on the amount of salmon consumed by non-Native Americans. That amount is a minute fraction of what tribal members consume whose diet and culture centers around fish. Toxicity rises to levels that induce cancer and other health problems for this previously healthy population whose dietary customs, driven by economic necessity as well, were not factored into the equations.
It is not all about the past. It is about the long shadows reaching into a present which has not been freed from structural and systemic factors that affect the very existence of the tribes of the Plateau. A shift from White to non-White perspective incorporated in the way that the Confluence Project and Lin’s art tell stories alerts us to the connections across time. We have to show up, though, and listen. If necessary, on a Saturday, early in the morning, spared all distractions.
I was driving back home along Highway 14, parallel to the river, renewable energy sources in sight, but also the dams that so dramatically altered the landscape and the life of its inhabitants. It is a blessed landscape, with all its harshness, in need to be, at least, protected, at best restored in ways that make living here long-term sustainable. For all.
“Guns symbolize the power of a minority over the majority, and they’ve become the icons of a party that has become a cult seeking minority power through the stripping away of voting rights and persecution of women, immigrants, black people, queer people, trans people – all of whom have been targeted by mass shootings in recent years.” –Rebecca Solnit
Agnotology is another word I had to look up in the dictionary. It refers to the study of ignorance, and the ways in which ignorance can be the outcome of acts of interference with your learning. Ignorance, then, not just as the absence of knowledge, but the product of cultural or political processes designed toprevent you from knowing.
(Photographs today are from the museum at Fort Sumter, the site of the start of the American Civil War, and graves of the fallen in Charleston, South Carolina, mostly decked with confederate flags and visited by birds.) I approached the monument by boat a few years back.
According to Proctor the “cultural production of ignorance” has been instrumental for the tobacco and fossil fuel industries. It is now embraced by the gun lobby as well. (I am summarizing what I learned here.)
Think of things that can make you sick: tobacco, sugary foods, chemicals applied for agricultural use, poisoning ground water, to name just a few. The industries peddling these commodities are focused on certain propaganda. You can cast doubt on the scientific linkage between cigarettes and cancer, for example. You can shield producers and sellers from scrutiny. And you can shift the debate to issues of “personal responsibility.” Same for things that sicken the planet: you can cast doubt on the relationship between fossil fuel use and climate change, protect the oil industry from scrutiny, and shift responsibility to the consumer, rather than reveal structural policies that harm.
With regard to guns that kill: you can prevent research from being done (or revealed) that shows the true causes for gun violence, including objective measures of what freely available gun access implies. You can spare the industry any liability, and you can blame individual factors, like mental health, or loosening family structures, or grooming teachers, or sexual mores or video games – you name it, all with the goal to prevent policies that curb the unconstrained purchase of arms.
And last but not least, you can sell alternative “legal scholarship,” which eventually makes it upstream to the courts when interpreting 2nd Amendment origins and meanings.
Given the amount of misinformation, what DO we know about the history of gun laws? The first law prohibiting guns for certain people was enforced in Virginia in 1633. No guns for Native Americans. Other colonies followed suit. Enslavers, too, wasted no time (Source here):
As early as 1639, on the other hand, laws were requiring White men to be armed to be able to act as militias controlling the enslaved population.
Eventually the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution was written not to favor individual gun use but for the protection of these slave-controlling militias, so that no-one could disarm them and disadvantage the Southern, slave-holding states who needed their might.
Note the phrasing in the museum annotation (below images of slaves) above. “only a small percentage…” as if that makes it less egregious. The rest was sold into slavery in the Caribbean and Brazil, with North American interests in plantations fed there as well. And they brought sickness to the continent! How dare they?
Below the focus on the variability of slavery experiences almost suggest there were some conditions that weren’t as bad as others, and prosperity demanded it!
Fast forward to the 20th century. The NRA early on approved of legislation limiting access to certain weapons, like the National Firearm Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968. Things changed, though, with the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement and the New Deal, expanding the powers of government and altering structural hierarchies of US society. Fierce backlash happened among those seeing their status threatened, and a push towards unfettered arming of men. In the 1990s we saw a growing militia (Christian white power) movement in response to Clinton’s gun laws. (Think Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas.) These extreme right wing forces subscribe to the “insurrection theory” of the 2nd Amendment, which says that the 2nd Amendment protects the unconditional right to bear arms for self-defense and to rebel against a tyrannical government. If and when a government turns oppressive, private citizens have a duty to take up arms against the government. The Proud Boys were just one division that put this into action, among other things, during the January 6th storming of the Capitol.
By 2007 the majority of justices on the Supreme Court had been appointed by presidents who were members of the NRA. In D.C. vs. Heller, Scalia argued that the 2nd Amendment protects an individual’s right to own guns (unconnected to a well-regulated militia), but vaguely implied that there were limits to the right, frustrating both gun control voices and the NRA folks who had never seen a limit they liked, as far as their own desires were concerned
If you can tolerate a style of writing that does not shy away from a somewhat excessive use of expletives, I highly recommend reading Elie Mystal’s Allow Me To Retort, an analysis of the Constitution in extremely accessible form, with insights into the 2nd Amendment in particular. It is a short, brilliant primer. Here is a review that captures everything I felt after finishing this book.
A radical change to the law is expected to be handed down by the Supreme Court this month, expanding 2nd Amendment rights. Here is is the Brennan Center for Justice‘s full analysis of what we will likely face. It is worth noting that once the door has been opened to prohibit the government from sensible regulations, as is expected here with regard to carrying guns, other regulative power might soon be taken away as well: environmental protection, public health requirements, work place safety, to name just a view.
It is no surprise, then, that the teaching of history as it unfolded, and of the conditions some try to maintain (most Americans want stricter gun laws), is anathema to those who want to turn the clock back, weapons in hand to meet a government that does not please them (after they meet their neighbors, who do not please them either given the neighbors’ quest for righting the injustices of a racially segregated society.) They do everything to obscure and obfuscate the knowledge that could empower true democratic policies and decision making and impact the sales of deadly military-style weapons and the ideological purposes they serve – agnotology in action. A Supreme Court undermining majority rule acts as the hand maid.
The quality something has when it is possible for you to know in advance that it will happen or what it will be like
(often disapproving) the quality somebody/something has when they are exactly as you would expect and therefore boring – Oxford English Dictionary
It has been quite a while since I wrote my last Art on the Road essay, more than two years, in fact. Predictably so, given the pandemic’s impact on traveling. I am still restricted to short car trips, but mobile now, and so hopefully have interesting things to report across the next months.
Sculpture near the artist’s wood shop
Predictability and its opposite, unpredictability, currently loom large in my mind, given the fact that we’ve seen such sudden changes in a world that considered itself, at least from Western nations’ privileged perspectives, relatively stable. Now the horrors of millions dead from or afflicted by the lasting damage of a virus have been joined by the terror of an unprovoked war in Europe, with unpredictable outcomes in a world filled with nuclear weapons.
Sculpture near the artist’s wood shop
Humans like predictability, given its relation to something we crave: a sense of control and protection from randomness which threatens our longing for a rational, just world. As societies we have created norms, both legally and customary, to allow us to predict and trust. Those who defy these norms are usually disliked at best, punished at worst. This rule comes with exceptions, though. People versed in political or militaristic power struggles often favor unpredictability to seed chaos and fear. And those in the sciences and the arts who approach problem solving or creation in unpredictable ways often come up with the most creative solutions.
Sculpture on the artist’s house wall
Another dimension of predictability is what we are trying to predict, based on our understanding of how the world works. Once upon a time, Newton gave us a basic model for prediction: express the immutable laws of the universe in formulas, plug in the data, and do the math. That might work if we want to know when a dropped ball hits the ground, but that’s not nearly the full spectrum. We have trouble predicting psychological behavior given the many visible and invisible factors that affect our minds. And when we do predict outcomes we often have no clue about the underlying cause – just look at the internet’s prediction markets that allow people to place bets on future events. The resulting odds can accurately predict outcomes (who gets elected, what show will thrive) without giving us insight as to why these things will happen.
Sculpture near the artist’s wood shop
And then there is the (un)predictability of the material one works with. Which brings us at long last to the artist I want to introduce today, sculptor and woodturner Christian Burchard. He works with wet and unstable wood which often, if not always, behaves in unpredictable ways. (In fact, today’s title is a riff on the title of a lecture, Predictable Unpredictability, he and another artist, Pascal Oudet, gave at the prestigious Chicago’s SOFA (Sculptural Objects Functional Art & Design Fair) some years back.)
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I met with the artist at his Southern Oregon wood shop and house, which hold vast collections of his work. It was pretty much a chance encounter. I had come to Ashland to interview his partner and was introduced to Burchard who graciously agreed to talk to me as well and show me around the next day. The beauty of the accumulated wooden objects, turned, carved, polished, raw, strewn about or stashed in shelves outside the usual formal displays one encounters in exhibitions and galleries, caught my eye as an artist. The story behind them caught my ear as a writer. No titles, no dates, no artist statements about this or that series, just the artist and his creations, addressed as “my acrobats” here or “my books” there, a tangible relationship.
Burchard collects, cuts, turns, dreams wood. Almost exclusively the wood of one of the Pacific Northwest’s most distinctive, evergreen hardwood trees, Arbutus menziesii, known as Madrone. It grows on drier, lower elevation sites, coastal bluffs and in the mountains. Drought tolerant, it doesn’t need particularly rich soil and can live up to 200 years, growing to about 75 feet or more in height under ideal conditions. Madrone is culturally significant to the PNW Coast Salish First Nations. Legend has it that during the great flood Madrona trees provided an anchor for their canoes to hold steady and not drift away.
According to Elder Dave Elliot in Saltwater People, “W̱SÁNEĆ peoples traditionally do not burn Arbutus for firewood because it is an important actor in the origin of their people. Some elements of the trees could be used, such as the bark and leaves for medicines. The extent of this tree’s meaning as a symbol of life and resilience cannot be measured.” (Ref.)
Madrone trees that I photographed along the Pacific Coast
The tree, seeking sun, often grows in crooked ways, with lots of burls, interesting shapes, perfect for a sculptor exploring new form. Working with the wood when it is still green, though, introduces not just unpredictable outcomes: how will it warp and flex when it dries? It also contains a serious element of risk – when you put it to the lathe, careful to turn, creating a form, will it snap and break at the last minute? All the work in vain, a good piece of wood ruined? Will charring or bleaching, carving or chiseling enhance the character of the wood or obscure it?
From the series Baskets and Vessels
Burchard is not a stranger to risk taking, in fact I am tempted to describe him as a perennial risk taker, on many levels of a life intensely lived. Judging by the results, and the deep laugh lines around his eyes, it has served him well. Then again, the concurrent losses might not be visible to the stranger, even one who felt the familiarity that so often spontaneously arises when one ex-pat meets another.
Christian Burchard, sculptor and woodturner
The artist and I are both of the same generation, have left our shared country, Germany, within three years of each other some 40 years ago, lived in the same city, and had the travel bug even before we emigrated, spending some chunks of time abroad (Australia and Asia for him, South America and Africa for me.) It cannot have been easy for Burchard. He comes from a distinguished family of politicians, bankers and lawyers who played a significant role in the history of the Hanseatic League, a great-grandfather serving as mayor of its largest city, Hamburg and its immense harbor. Think Thomas Mann’s seminal novel The Buddenbrooks, just in a different town. The small network of patrician families ruled for centuries as a kind of oligarchy, providing mayors, senators, clergy and lawyers, fed by the wealth of a huge merchant imperium and shipping companies. Aristocracy was disdained, as were Jews, even assimilated ones, and a strict separated class system was de-facto maintained despite the official version that in the Hanseatic city each and every inhabitant was of equal standing. You could purchase the right to be a citizen of higher standing (Großbürgerrecht) only with true wealth and that right was then inherited by male heirs, allowing you to serve in political office.
From the Series Spherical
True democracy was, in other words, in short supply, pride, on the other hand, was not. There are reports of Burchard’s ancestor, the mayor Johann Heinrich Burchard, that he ordered the portrait painter Heinrich Kugelberg during the creation of a mural in the ballroom of Hamburg’s city hall to remove the image of a young man kneeling to receive baptism because “Hamburg’s citizens don’t kneel in front of anyone.” (Ref.)
This is a montage depicting the Hamburg City Hall, seat of the mayor, from my series Seeing Strange (2018)
There was some rise and fall of individual families, but across the centuries it was a prestigious, exclusive lot that ran the city’s business, courts and politics, intermarried, and accumulated wealth. Diligence, responsibility, reliability and predictability were all high on the list of values of the Hanseatic classes as was devoted service to their city and a cooly analytic approach to trade. To be born into this world came not just with silver spoons but also intense pressure to perform and uphold those class privileges. If you did not, complete ostracism was one of the possible consequences. I remember the years after my uncle (by marriage), a descendent of another famous Hamburg mayor, Heinrich Kellinghusen, walked out on my aunt, unannounced on Christmas Eve, no less, to move in with – the scandal ! – a purported prostitute, and I was told that no-one ever talked to him again.
From the series Vessels
Others, however, seemed to escape that fate. Another Hamburg lawyer and senator of the Burchard branch, Wilhelm Amsinck Burchard-Motz, became deputy mayor of Hamburg in 1933. The election of the new Senate under Nazi leadership that March prompted him to switch party allegiance from the DVP to the NSDAP. That seemed not to matter in post-war Germany where he served as the chairman for the German Association for International Maritime Law and as Vice President of the German Golf Association and Chairman of the Hamburg Country and Golf Club in the Lüneburg Heath, as exclusive a club as they came at the time.
(Here is his portrait by artist Anita Rée, an insanely gifted avant-garde painter in the 1920s. An assimilated Jew, she converted to Christianity and was expressly anti-semitic herself, only to get sucked into the maws of rising fascism. She committed suicide in 1933.)
Portrait of Wilhelm Amsinck Burchard-Motz by Anita Rée, late 1920s
Another mayor who served the city recently for 7 years is now the German chancellor tasked to bring the world away from the brink of nuclear war. Here is a perceptive portrait of the man from the New Statesman Journal, describing Olaf Scholz’ hanseatic profile and demeanor, assumed to bring us safely through this crisis.
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To defy the strong expectations to follow in the footsteps of your forbears and give up much privilege if you don’t, must have required an iron will by Christian Burchard, an intense wish to control his own fate, or a kind of desperation to get away from it all. After apprenticing as a furniture maker in Germany, he escaped to the US in 1978, at age 23, studying sculpture and drawing at the Museum School in Boston and at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver BC.
Burchard’s Wood Shop
Burchard opened his own studio in Southern Oregon in 1982, supplementing his income with furniture making and house construction, building a house for his own young family, all the while garnering more and more recognition as a gifted wood sculptor. The list of exhibitions is long, he is represented in various private and public collections, and he regularly is invited to the important craft shows of the Smithsonian, or the American Association of Woodturners. In fact, preparations for a cross-country trip, bringing new work to the Smithsonian in D.C., were in full swing during my visit.
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It is pretty predictable that you find common ground when you share the experience of immigration. There is a tacit understanding that things are lost as much as gained. There is an unspoken agreement that you know some things that are hard to explain to those who did not leave a complicated past behind. In our conversation this became explicit only due to the timing of Putin’s unpredicted, if feared, invasion of Ukraine that very day. The topic of war and its associated frights and horrors was inescapable during a post-war German childhood, stifling and paralyzing at times, guilt-laden or guilt-avoidant, depending on your family, always hovering in the background. Nothing we could control, it controlled us.
All the more it is interesting to see an artist commit to a path – working with unstable wood – where control is ephemeral as well. Maybe it is exactly the balance he craves: where lack of control once created sorrow, here it results in visceral beauty. Something emerges, authentic, if scarred, from unpredictability and takes on a life of its own.
The Lathe
There is a vitality to his small books, a fluttering sense of just opening or just closing, as you wish. But Burchard exerts spatial control as well, introducing his own visual blueprint in his latest framings within quilt-like configurations or wall sculptures. A sense of order direly needed in an environment where climate change has become an agent of chaos.
Wall Sculpture and objects from the Books and Pages series
The beautiful land that he and his partner live on, the goats he rears for making cheese, the pond that is necessary for sustaining their independence with a vegetable garden, are all affected. To meet the danger of the ever closer, encroaching fires, they had to rip out many trees, bushes, much vegetation, fire proofing the buildings. He – half-jokingly – referred to a recently acquired van as something useful for flight, should it become necessary, which brought me full circle to the imagery of our childhoods as related by our parents, the firestorm from bombs destroying large parts of Hamburg and the flight from the invading forces in Berlin and parts further East.
The artist with his goats, and views from his property
Recent psychological research in the study of memory has turned from looking at memory exclusively as the processes involved in preserving the past, to exploring how it is used to predict the future. We have the tools – and the choice – of looking back or looking forward.
The meaning I found in Burchard’s work reflected that dual function. It also reminded me of Antonio Gramsci’s future-oriented declaration:
“I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” ― Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci: Prison Letters
The sculptures express the optimistic view that the imperfect, the warped and twisted and charred can all connect us to a vision of nature’s beauty, but they also point to the possibility of acquiring a new life after an old one ceased to exist.
Acrobats
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On my 5-hour drive home from Ashland I left the highway for a break and found a small pond with picnic benches, close to a campground. (Why anyone would want to camp next to I-5 is a mystery to me. Solving it has to wait for another day.) I stopped next to a park-service van and took the left-over from the previous day’s sandwich to the bench. A woman in park service uniform was pacing at the edge of the water, searching for something. It turned out she had nursed a duck, severely injured by aggressive geese, back to health the previous summer, driving over 40 miles every other day to bring food, water and splints for the creature. She had seen the duck during the winter as well, fully restored, but now it was gone. I got the story in more detail than I can relate, her worry for the bird gushing out of her. Her final words before she drove away were willfully optimistic: “Perhaps he found a nice wife and they are off to build a nest.”
Wherever I go I predictably meet people who are passionate about something. What that something might be – a life devoted to being independent and making art, a year devoted to saving a duck – is unpredictable. What I do know, though, is that I am glad to be on the road again, encouraged by people who put their faith in a possible future, during times when dark forces try to drag us back into an oppressive past.
Below is a presentation by the artist.
Music today is by Tuvan Throat singers which hold a special place in Burchard’s life.
Join me on a walk? Take your rubber boots – the Pineapple Express has arrived, an atmospheric river that transports moisture from the tropics to the northern areas of the planet in great masses. In simpler words: it has been pouring.
And this is the foot path …..
I needed to get out yesterday to get away from the news, so many horrors all at once. Nobody able to predict what will happen next, how to approach a situation where the unchecked power over weapons destroys lives, a people, potentially the world as we know it. The reactions in favor of greater militarization in Europe are understandable but go so against the grain of what a nation – Germany – has tried to do for decades in acknowledgement of its history. All of a sudden there are billions available to fill the coffers of the weapons industry, when poverty and houselessness and lack of social services are unabated. Let me hasten to add, I do not have a clue what the right thing is to do, with the stakes so insane. And I do understand that you cannot defend yourself against unlawful, imperialistic military invasion with bare hands.
Much mud carried by the fast stream
The refugee situation is raising ambiguous feelings as well. It is great how hundreds of thousands of fleeing Ukrainians are welcomed in neighboring nations. It is horrifying that people of color have been treated very differently, not just in general (think Polish treatment of Syrian refugees) but in this particular instance – Black and Brown students studying in Ukraine not allowed across the borders, pushed out of trains and busses, humans of a second order. The internet is full of suggestions that Africans make it immediately to Romania which is set for flights to Ghana, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.
And then there is the situation of the Jews whose fate is so tied to the history of Ukraine, the unspeakable terror against them during WW II, whose Holocaust memorial at Babyn Yar has been bombed by Putin yesterday. Their status as refugees, outside of Israel, has been a double edged sword. Or even within Israel – it is the occupied West Bank that will house the influx of Jewish Ukrainians, complicating things for the Palestinians.
I was thinking back to an essay describing the experiences and difficulties of Eastern European Jews emigrating to Germany in the 1990s when Germany accepted a contingent of Jewish refugees to polish its own image, to signal repentance of past deeds.
I also remembered Hannah Arendt’s words, so applicable to the moment. In the link, her short essay We Refugeesis printed in full after her portrait.
Windfall
But lest we forget, there are also people in Russia whose life will take a devastating turn as we speak, who have few choices for protest or action to change what is decreed from above. Here is a short essay from 2 days ago by a young Russian Jew who is grieving.
And then there is a novel about a survivor of another war in Ukraine, that comforts us with a tale of resilience. Here is an excerpt of Kurkov’s Grey Bees.
Nature on my walk pretended that nothing had happened. Ignored the fact that it was so warm that everything seemed to explode in growth spurts several weeks early. An unstoppable push towards renewal.
A few of the small birds were happily chirping along, including a female ruby crowned kinglet, a miracle to catch with the camera since they move at lightning speed. (Below are Towhee, song sparrows, a female junko, killdeer and the kinglet.)
The geese did their thing, coming and going.
The wild currants joined the chorus of plants in a landscape that defiantly put up some color against the grey sky.
As did the rest of the flowering beauty:
The pussy willows, in different stages of growth, seemed to suggest that tears can be beautiful adornment, and that they will roll off by themselves – well, my mind prone to anthropomorphising suggested that, but I did not complain….
Spring is all about renewal. Renewal is also humanity’s highest good, enshrined in democracies who are willing to take risks, accept the unpredictable, renounce the statism that aristocracies or authoritarian regimes want to enshrine. Renewal is about a livable future, not an oppressive past. It is upon everyone of us to support that project of renewal, within and beyond our borders.
When the rain got too hard I found a shelter, and some earlier visitor had left something behind. At least the kids here can still assume that nothing has happened and engage their fairy worlds. Wish it was true for every child in the world.
How do you persist as an individual, a group, a people, when insult is added to injury in a never ending stream of violations, ignorance – willful ignorance -, appropriations or plain, colonial hostility? What are the sources for resilience, when you face scarcity, displacement, disrespect and racism in continuity?
These thoughts went through my mind while standing in a sun-lit, silent landscape on the Washington side of the Columbia river near Horsethief Butte, the quietude only occasionally interrupted by the calls of birds of prey.
I was looking across the Temani Pesh-Wa Trail, lined by pictographs (rock paintings) and petroglyphs (rock carvings) that were created by the First People who lived in the Gorge and the surrounding uplands. The introductory panel read: Honor the Past, Respect the Present.
The story of these particular stones is one of sorrow and resilience, with little honor or respect from most of us non-indigenous folks when it comes to their fate in the last century, until they were placed at Columbia Hills a few years ago.
Nobody knows how many of these images existed along the shores of the Columbia. It is estimated there were about 90 or so sites between Pasco and The Dalles. The rocks before you were about to be submerged when the floodwaters rose from yet another dam, the inundation of the John Day Reservoir. The U.S.Army Corps of Engineers cut out just a few of them in time and they were relocated under the guidance of Chief Gus George, (Rock Creek Indian) in the small town of Roosevelt, Wa. Stored there, in a small, unprotected park, they were subject to vandalism and decay, given that the community simply did not have the means to protect them from visitors who came to do rubbings, or worse. Several disappeared, taken as souvenirs or stolen by collectors, who knows. (I found much of the information for today here and here.)
Relocated again in 2003, they spent an interim decade in Horsethief park until they found a final home at the Temani Pesh-Wa Trail in 2012 with the help of the Wanapa Koot Koot working group that consisted of representatives of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon, the Nez Perce Tribe and government administrators. Tribal elders and cultural specialists engaged to present tribal values and respect for the original creation of their ancestors. The site is open 7 months of the year and some of the paths only accessible with a guided tour, leading to the cliff face that depicts Tsagaglalal, or “She who watches” in the Wasco-Wishram language.
Vandalism and theft is a physical attack on heritage objects. Another is appropriation of imagery that does not belong on t-shirts, mugs or any other tourist trap merchandise. But there is also an issue with the use of language and interpretation of something that is rooted in a different culture. As early as 1719 Cotton Mather (on the East Coast) described “writing on stone.” Across the centuries the images caught the interest of archeologists, anthropologist, plain old explorers and people interested in the history of their region. Guesses about origins and interpretive or value judgements proliferated.
Eventually people settled on calling them rock art. Stop that!, argues eminent Native American artist Lillian Pitt carefully and Jon Shellenberger (Yakama), who holds a BS in Anthropology and MA in Cultural Resource Management, passionately.
“Petroglyphs/pictographs are not art. They are sacred images that represent significant cultural themes, messages, beliefs to a Tribe. They were not created for aesthetic purposes. They were created to teach, warn, or record those not yet born. Even though we may think that they are pretty, beautiful, pleasant to look at, those are not the values inherent in the images you see. those are the values that you as the viewer are placing on the image. Please stop calling them rock art. “
“There is a lot of meaning conveyed through petroglyphs/pictographs. Some of that meaning is known and some of it is only known by certain individuals within certain families. Many tribes didn’t have a written language and depended on oral tradition to perpetuate their culture. These images are a manifestation of the culture as it relates to the environment. They demarcate sacred sites, warn people to beware, indicate the presence of animals or plants, and are at times prophetic. Elders are still learning about the meaning of specific petroglyphs and its only in certain stages of life that they are able to understand their meaning.”
Contrast that with an interpretive sign at another petroglyphs site at Death Valley National Park:
Indian rock carvings are found throughout the western hemisphere. Indians living today deny any knowledge of their meaning. Are they family symbols, doodlings, orceremonial markings? Your guess is as good as any. Do not deface – they cannot be replaced. (bolded by me, source here.)
Licence is given to impose our (non-native) interpretations and stereotypes on objects as if we have the same amount of knowledge or insights as the living descendants of those who created the images, or tribal archeologists and anthropologists. Our fantasies of renewal and closeness to nature, of a long lost authenticity that we associate with Indian tribes, are superimposed on the carvings, when we have no clue what they really meant in the context where they were created.
“The stakes in the interpretation of rock art are substantial. Interpretations of(pre)historic rock art’s original meanings and functions, especially when passed on to the public through guide books, museum displays, and interpretive materials at rock art sites, have the potential to shape perceptions of Native Americans, challenging or reinforcing dominant perceptions of indigenous cultures and histories.” (Ref.)
Native Americans, like Lillian Pitt, explain the nature of these carvings as part of religious ceremonies, hunting rituals, or for the purpose of communicating important messages. Some were private, done by young people on vision quests, others public. Pictographs were painted with pigments derived from coal, iron oxide deposits (hematite and limonite,) clay and copper oxide. Ground into powder and added to a binder of fat, bolded, eggs, urine, saliva or plant juices, they were applied with fingers. Petroglyphs were achieved through carving into the rock, pecking, scratching or scraping with a harder hammer stone.(Ref.)
They all have in common a spiritual nature which requires that the sanctity of the place where we encounter them (even if they have been moved 4 times in 50 years… ) needs to be respected. Not my place of origin, not my culture, not my knowledge base – but a sense of linked humanity, a desire to communicate shared across the millennia.
It was easy to feel awe and reverence, on that bright morning, myself a tiny speck in a large landscape,
surrounded by ground squirrels and bald eagles,
and goose tracks,
facing a small tree that symbolized resilience, defying a barren location.
Nez Perce songs today for music. If you are interested in seeing work of contemporary Native American artists, visit Maryhill Museum, which opens again March 15th!
