“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.)
***
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.
***
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.
***
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
***
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!
When humans were created, the Creator asked all the animals what they could do to help humans survive, as they didn’t know how to feed themselves. According to the legend, the salmon volunteered to help. Salmon was the first animal to stand up. It said, “I offer my body for sustenance for these new people,’ I’ll go to far-off places and I’ll bring back gifts to the people. My requests are that they allow me to return to the place that I was born, and also, as I do these things for the people, I’ll lose my voice. Their role is to speak up for me in the times that I can’t speak for myself.“
– Traditional story from the treaty tribes of the Columbia, related by Zach Penney, the fishery science department manager at the Columbia Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC.)
I had driven to The Dalles to get a glimpse of the bald eagles that were supposedly congregating in high numbers around the dam. No such luck, wouldn’t you know it.
One lonely bird….A second one if you use a magnifying glass….
Instead there were plenty of other interesting sights, from the snow-capped hills that looked like they were sprinkled with powdered sugar,
to numerous traditional fishing scaffolds perched over the Columbia river.
A perfect occasion, then, for a reminder of what we know about salmon fishing given its central role in the physical and spiritual lives of indigenous people who have pursued it in this region for at least 10.000 years. Salmon are iconic to Northwest indigenous culture and identity, but also the main source of protein across these millennia. The fates of salmon and the Northwest tribes are intertwined and received an immeasurable blow when the Dalles dam was constructed in 1957. The dam inundated the upstream Celilo Falls and Celilo village, the largest trading center for salmon since times immemorial. There was scant compensation for the loss, subpar housing built only for a few permanent residents of the village who were displaced, ignoring all those tribal members who lived on reservations but regularly came to Celilo to fish and trade. It took until 2005 to start building the promised structures and no serious reparations have been paid for the immense loss of livelihoods that depend on salmon fishing. (Ref.)
The runs consist of five species of salmon, Chinook (king), sockeye (red), coho (silver), chum (dog), and pink (humpback) and steelhead, a migratory form of trout. All of them, shown below, existed in abundance, not least because native fishing practices controlled for overfishing. (I got most of my material for today here and here. The second source includes a detailed and fascinating description of the life cycle of the salmon, much more complex than they taught you in 5th grade! More on the history of the tribes that have fished here for millennia can be found at the Museum at Warm Springs – well worth a visit for their photographic collection alone. It was just featured in OR Arts Watch.)
From John N. Cobb, “Pacific Salmon Fisheries.” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), 1921, Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution Libraries
The bad news first: salmon runs have been in further decline, harmed by dams, overfishing, and, by environmental degradations caused by farming run offs, construction and land fragmentation, local logging and mining and now the universal water-heating effects of climate change.
Fish ladders and hatcheries help support salmon, but the runs continue to struggle. Just a fraction of the fish successfully journey from ocean to spawning areas each year as revealed by tagging salmon and collecting DNA samples and other data by the fishery scientists. Hatcheries can increase the harvest, but they also have downsides. They are believed to have contributed to the more than 90% reduction in spawning densities of wild coho salmon in the lower Columbia River over the past 30 years. Why? When domesticated fish breed with wild salmon the genetic fitness of the offspring can be diminished. When hatchery fish are released, they compete for food in the wild and often eat the smaller wild fish. They bring diseases, caused by their hatchery crowding, into the wild fish populations. It is not a solution.
Historically the environmental knowledge of tribal members and their willingness to fight to protect the fish have been one of the few things to ward off complete disaster. The taboo to take spawning fish, waiting periods at the beginning of the upstream runs and limited fishing periods overall all ensured, for tens of thousands of years, that fish would return. And then the Europeans arrived.
The requirements for healthy salmon runs:
“A natural river meanders and sometimes floods, creating quiet side channels that salmon require. The fish also need their eggs, buried in gravel, not to be suffocated in dirt nor swept away. They need them to be nourished by oxygen-rich cool water flowing through the egg pockets. They need enough water in the stream — a dewatered streambed is a salmon graveyard. They need access downstream to the ocean and upstream to their spawning grounds. They need unpolluted water.”
All was affected by the newcomers. Land for farming, cleared down to the water, deprived the rivers of shade for cool water temperatures. Clear-cut riverbanks created silt that suffocated the spawning beds. Irrigating the crops emptied the streams. Dams without fish ladders, needed for flour – and woolen mills, irrigation and later electricity and even recreational purposes (lakes for powerboats…) interrupted up-stream fish travel.
As of 2020, in Washington State alone they counted 1,226 regulated dams (many do not cross streams but contain irrigation ponds, manure lagoons, and the like.)
Logging of old growth trees increased fires, destabilizing the riparian woods, again increasing silt. Loggers also built splash dams to facilitate the log floats down river – first backing up water then releasing it in a flash, disastrous for salmon fry. Mining booms created town constructions which in turn excavated river beds for gravel, sand, and limestone. Hydraulic mining required extensive ditch systems and dams. Detritus and chemicals washed into the creeks, destroying spawning beds. And all that even before extensive overfishing continued with no regard to the consequences.
In 1854 a treaty was signed at Medicine Creek which granted the tribes “The right of taking fish, at all usual and accustomed grounds and stations…” – words fully ignored. Many governmental restrictions were aimed at tribal fishermen, while licenses were granted to commercial fishermen and then sport fishermen, increasing the maximally allowed harvest even when it was already common knowledge that the runs were endangered.
“In 1935, the first year Washington kept records, the tribal catch was 2 percent of the catch whereas “the powerboat fleet hauled in 90 percent. According to state records, the entire Indian catch for Puget Sound from 1935 to 1950 accounted for less salmon than taken by the commercial fishing fleet in one typical year” (Ref.)
Eventually tribal representatives tried to fight for their rights in court, which upheld the treaties only to be ignored again by state governments. Tribal activists like Billy Frank Jr. and Bob Satiacum and their supporters staged now legendary fish-ins in the 1970s to protest limited fishing seasons, only to be arrested. This led to the United States Department of Justice filing a case against the state of Washington (US v. Washington, 384 Fed Supp). Judge George Boldt (1903-1984) issued a historic ruling (upheld in appeals) which affirmed the tribes’ original right to fish, which they had retained in the treaties, and which they had extended to settlers. It allocated 50 percent of the annual catch to treaty tribes, changing the ground game for fishing (and making a lot of non-tribal folks intensely angry.)
Restoration efforts are joined, though, by multiple constituencies.
Landowners including farmers, tribal governments, state agencies, conservation organizations, and individual volunteers from all walks of life are replanting riverine forestland, removing invasive species, placing woody debris, installing engineered snags, and reconnecting floodplains to their rivers. (Ref.)
We’ll see if the efforts can outrun the averse effect of population growth, stream bank development and loss of forest cover to fires. Removal of dams continues to be a key issue.
In the meantime here is a clip of traditional salmon fishing and the wise instruction of Brigette McConville, salmon trader and vice chair of the Warm Springs Tribal Council and a member of Warm Springs, Wasco and Northern Paiute tribes: “Whoever works with fish, it’s important to be happy. The old saying, ‘don’t cook when you’re mad,’ that’s true in every culture.”
Here is a poem by Luhui Whitebear, an enrolled member of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation and the Assistant Director of the Oregon State University Native American Longhouse Eena Haws.
None to be found, neither witches, nor butter. Hope defied, again!
Well, it was a trail name, referring to an orange-colored jelly-like fungus that is parasitic on fungi that inhabit decayed logs. (Tremella mesenterica.) That fungus did not make an appearance on my last hike either, but many other beautiful things did during my first excursion to Chehalem Ridge Nature Park.
The 1260 acres park opened a few months ago about 40 minutes southwest of Portland, near Cornelius. The land had been subject to housing developments before the market crashed. Then Metro stepped in in 2010 and purchased the land from a lumber company, with funds coming from the Trust for Public Land, the $6.1 million its largest acquisition. Since then smaller adjacent properties have been added.
Over the last 6 years the park was developed in earnest, by down-cutting the Stinson Lumber’s monoculture of fir trees where possible, planting native shrubbery and conifers, and giving remaining old growth of oaks, cedars and madrona trees room to breathe.
There is a 10+ mile system of trails, some wheelchair accessible, that is shared by hikers, horse riders and bikers in some places.
The parking lot has functional buildings and covered picnic areas, tons of space for kids to romp around. Pets are not allowed in the park, though, to protect sensitive wildlife.
Trails are clearly marked, and in the more crowded areas at the beginning there are plenty of benches so people can rest when needed.
Several view points offer stunning views of the coast range mountain and the Tualatin valley stretching out into the misty clouds.
Many of the trail names come from the Atfalati language, spoken by the Northern Kalapuyas, a tribe among the many that suffered a horrific fate when the colonialists arrived. With the settlers came the diseases. Malaria, transmitted by mosquitos, the potential vector Anophelesfreeborni common in western Oregon until the early 1900s, was brought to Ft Vancouver by traders and spread from there. It reduced the tribal populations in the valley within three years, 1830 – 1833, by 80% (!), an apocalyptic loss. It hit the White settlers as well, but they knew to treat it with Quinine and had the remedy available, if in limited quantities.
“Cumulative evidence suggests that cultural unfamiliarity with the new diseases—that is, people did not know how to treat them—and the lack of effective medicines may have been as or more important than biological resistance, genetic or acquired, in accounting for the high mortalities. The loss of population resulted in abandoned and consolidated villages, the breakdown of social and political structures, and the loss of cumulated knowledge possessed by specialists (in a culture without written records), making the epidemics cultural as well as biological disasters.” (Ref.)
The Kalapuyans lived in tribal territories containing numbers of related and like-speaking, but basically autonomous villages. They were extremely versed in ecological management, treating the land for 4000 years with controlled, low intensity fires in the fall to create open oak savannahs and mixed forest growth.
This maximized the landscape for the products they needed most – seed, textiles, wapato, and forage for game.
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In addition to the wood land trail, I hiked the short side trails of ammefu, which means ‘mountain’ in Atfalati, ayeekwa referring to bobcats,
Bobcat or coyote scat?
and mampał, which means lake and could be a reference to Wapato lake, currently under restoration for a national wild life refuge after having been converted to onion fields by farmers.
Despite the January date, spring was in the air. It must have been the light green, bordering on chartreuse, everywhere. The forest floors covered with the invasive shining geranium,
the moss carpeting stumps, trunks and branches of the trees,
the first leaves of foxgloves, grass, lupines and even some fresh life among the Great Mullein.
The park also seems a magnet for piles. Piles from reforestation
piles from land management
piles from lunch
piles after lunch.
There is so much to appreciate in the land known as the Outside Place (Chehalem) by the Atfalati people. It speaks to the tenacity of life, even under hard conditions.
And if you are lucky you get to walk for a while behind goldilocks, who appreciated her Dad’s lesson on hibernation as much as I did. So much to learn, everywhere you turn. You just have to show up!
More vicarious walks for you all will be in the offing!
In the meantime here is an old Kalapuya prophecy, translated in 1945 by Melville Jacobs.
Long ago the people used to say that one great shaman in his dream had seen all the land black in his dream.
That is what he told the people. “this earth was all black (in my dream).”
He saw it in a dream at night. Just what was likely to be he did not know.
And then (later on) the rest of the people saw the whites plough up the ground
Now then they say, “that must have been what it was that the shaman saw long ago in his sleep.”
And here is a musical depiction of forest moods from a different continent….
Imagine a flood of young men who are uprooted, lack perspective, unable to find employment, frustrated by promises of improvement that never materialized, psychologically fragile because they feel displaced by others who they deem less deserving, and burdened with shame for an uncontrollable situation. Provide them with weapons, and encourage them to band together for ideological causes that clearly identify an “other,” a defined enemy, a target in a deeply divided country. Provide them with markers that signal belonging (to an in-group) like hats, or insignia. What have you got?
No, wrong, country, wrong century, not the Proud Boys and their ilk.
I want to talk today about the German Freikorps, armed paramilitary groups that wreaked havoc in the the years after WW I, from 1918 to about 1923 during the Weimar Republic. About 3 million soldiers returned to Germany from Belgium and France after the armistice in November 1918, experienced by them as a shameful loss. The treaty of Versailles reduced the numbers of German soldiers in a standing army to 100.000 down from a total of 6 million before the war. Many of the former soldiers, in fact almost half a million, kept their weapons after formal decommissioning, and were soon organized into militias that were financed by the government interested in defending Eastern borders, in Poland and the Baltics, and crushing sectarian uprisings in Germany itself.
In a starkly polarized country where the left as well as strongly reactionary forces hoped for political change (and the right-wing myth that the left had betrayed the army stoked hatred,) the armed members of these right-wing militias started to kill members of the opposition, both everyday Germans and famous political players. Leftists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were among them because they had been publicly anti-war. The Bavarian Senat president Kurt Eisner was killed because he was a pacifist. Matthias Erzberger (from a centrist party) was murdered because he had signed the armistice of Compiègne as a government representative. Foreign minister Walther Rathenau was killed because he was Jewish. The militias supported (failed) coups, like the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch where reactionary forces under Kapp tried to destroy the government. Anti-semitism became a battle-cry, Jews being even more abhorred than communists who were active participants in the struggle for political representation.
Fearing a civil war, the government did not punish the Freikorps members who had supported the coups and let them retreat, and even paid their wages. Many of these now floating veterans organized themselves loosely afterwards and eventually drifted into a growing Bavarian party: the NSDAP. In total, and that in itself a frightening fact, in a few years about 354 radicalized right wing killers where systematically protected by the German legal system, getting away with murder without punishment, while 10 of the 22 leftist killers received the death penalty. (Ref.)
That’s a political assassination every four days or so in a country smaller than Montana across the span of four years. We are not living in these times.
“Born of war, defeat and compromise, the new German republic was reeling from the effects of wartime rationing, material deprivation and the millions killed or wounded. The horrors of the Somme, the Marne and Verdun did not end so much as trickle back into whole towns, villages and cities, which had to accommodate the countless returning invalids, with their missing limbs and gashed faces, their damaged psyches and shell-shocked nerves.….more than four million people died as a result of armed conflicts throughout Europe in the first five years after the war, a number greater than the combined wartime casualties of France, Britain and the United States. Vicious cycles of civil war, revolution and counterrevolution meant that, between 1918 and 1923, the European continent was “the most violent place on the planet.” (Ref.)
But there are parallels that we ignore at our own peril. We do see numerous electoral successes by right-wing and authoritarian candidates in the United States, Britain, Poland, Hungary, Italy, India and countries in South America. The resentment towards globalization and cultural pluralism, combined with racist and anti-semitic ideas attitudes, echo the invective aimed at the Weimar Republic by nationalists and conservatives during the 1920s. We also face a disturbing increase in right-wing political violence across the world. A long but brilliant description by Anne Applebaum of the current slide towards autocracies can be found here.
In our own country cries for violence to be permitted are on the rise. So are little veiled comments by politicians that foment chaos and violence – just look at the January 6th evidence. And we have no way yet to measure the psychological ramifications of a pandemic that has blanketed us with death and given further rise to political division around the (enforced) mechanisms to combat the scourge.
Without invoking an analogy, we can still learn from the mistakes that were made in the 1920s, (in)actions that promoted if not installed a dictatorial regime that claimed to provide a way out of the chaos and reinstate power hierarchies of yore, so desperately longed for by the shaken German people. We can look at the role of the legal system.
“One of the most crucial failures of the Weimar Republic was the failure of its courts to uphold and defend the constitution. Court judges and state prosecutors tended to side overwhelmingly with right-wing offenders; the Kapp Putsch of 1920, for instance, in which right-wing nationalists attempted to overthrow the government, resulted in just a single conviction.”
I don’t know if the train has left the station already. The appointment of ideologically biased judges, the vagaries of the American Jury system that is so open to manipulation, the fact that politicians get away with explicit calls for violence without major legal ramifications, are cause for worry. As congress-woman Ocasio-Cortez, after being the target of a video from a republican congressman depicting her being killed, said: “core recognition of human dignity, value and worth is a line that cannot be crossed.” If we forgo accountability, we open the floodgates.
This point is acknowledged even by some truly conservative thinkers. Aaron Sibarium, associate editor at the Washington Free Beacon, writes about the “Weimarization of the American Republic” here. I don’t agree with his both-sides are extremist approach, but he has interesting things to say about the fact of and mechanisms towards polarization that are implicated in rising threats of violence, the judiciary included.
Not mentioned, of course, is the very pragmatic, rational first step a country could take: curtail the absurd amount of lethal weapons that have deadly consequences in political violence. For all we know, our very own Supreme Court will march in the opposite direction come June. As I said: look at the legal system…the parallels there are frightening. Germany turned brown, the signature color of the Nazis. We know who contributed.
Photographs today are from the city of Weimar, from a trip I took there some years back.
The LA Philarmonic had a program last year called “The Weimar Republic: Germany 1918-1933″, selected by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Here are two of the pieces that were part of it (I only found them performed by other companies.) Kurt Weill’s Berliner Requiem and Hindemith’s strange one act-opera Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen.
the leading sheep of a flock, with a bell on its neck.
an indicator or predictor of something.
– Oxford English Dictionary
Two years ago I had the opportunity of portraying numerous artists of a project called Exquisite Gorge, offered by the Maryhill Museum of Art. 11 printmakers, in collaboration with community partners, carved an original artwork each for an assigned section of the Columbia River, all of which were ultimately connected in a two-dimensional, 66 ft long representation on the grounds of the museum. Each artwork portrayed a section of the river itself and linked to the next section, forming an “Exquisite Corpse.”
We are now entering the second iteration of this artistic adventure, Exquisite Gorge II, which will exhibit the skills and creativity of 13 fiberartists whose works will align the very same sections of the Columbia River as last time. I will follow the creation of these three – dimensional art works closely and also portray the community partners involved in multiple aspects of the project, including opportunities to inspire and educate about fiber arts. The culminating event will be on Saturday, August 6, 2022 at Maryhill Museum of Art, where each free-standing “exquisite corpse” section will be brought together to reveal the continuous sculpture formed by upright three-dimensional frames.
In some ways, this first essay is the bellwether then, an indicator of what’s going to be happening across the next many months. The title, however, was mostly chosen because it relates to sheep (wethers are castrated rams, to be precise, who were leading the flock while fitted with bells to allow shepherds locate the sheep across a distance.) The phrase also points to those who establish a trend, and we will discuss that as well. How’s all this related to art? Well, the fiber for many fiber art projects has to come from somewhere, and in some cases the source is, you guessed it, sheep.
“…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–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Jessica Lavadour Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore
I loved the 3000 year-old Greek tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece as a child. I mean, heroes, adventure, boat trips, flying sheep, dragons, magic, revenge, what’s not to love? Jason’s first wife Medea, I guess; who’d love a woman who kills her own children? But then again, she was betrayed by him after she had helped him acquire the golden fleece that secured him a throne. I would also likely not have loved the fact that the story described, certainly by the time Apollonius composed it in the 3rd century BC, the Hellenistic colonization of the lands around the Black sea. I had, of course, no clue about such things in the late 1950s.
The pre-history of the myth, by the way, is much older. Excavations of the 1920s and 30s, in central Turkey, uncovered Indo-European tablets from a Hittite civilisation dating to the 14th century BC. One of these has an account on it of a story similar to that of Jason and Medea. Fleece played a considerable role as symbols of prosperity; Hittite clans from the Bronze Age hung them to renew royal power. For the ancient Etruscans a gold colored fleece was a prophecy of future prosperity for the clan. (Ref.)
My son sent this when he saw the portrait above…. must have done something right in my child rearing.
Sheep have claimed symbolic roles beyond their fleece, of course. Egyptian deities were depicted with rams’ heads. Christian symbolism had a field day with innocent lambs led to slaughter, shepherds guarding their flocks, sheep being the most cited animals in the Bible with over 500 mentions. Composers like Bach, Händel, Britten, to name just a few, integrated biblical verses about them into their music. Poets would pick up the symbolism, most memorably in William Blake’s Lamb. Novelists would hone in on the image of the Black Sheep, one of the earliest in 1842 by Honoré de Balzac. The tale of two brothers competing for inheritance, of power and cruelty of life has certainly parallels to the old Greek myths. (It turns out, by the way, that wool that has black strands in it can only be sold for a fraction of the price of white wool, because it makes even dye lots much more difficult to achieve.)
And who could forget the invisible sheep in a box in The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella that pointed to the sheep’s possible role in uprooting the horrible seeds of fascism, represented by Baobab trees? Or one of the funniest science fiction novels of all time, Connie Willis’ The Bellwether, whichperfectly captures both the way fads are generated and science progresses by stumbling into lucky breaks?
Let’s look at the real thing, though, not just the symbolic use.
The gods certainly allot a share of unpredictable woes to sheep farming, a complex enterprise. The animals provide meat (lamb and mutton,) wool and pelts for textiles (here’s where the art project comes in!,) and milk from the emerging dairy sheep industry. It has been an industry in steady decline in this country, from a record high of 56 million heads in 1942 to 5.17 million heads as of January 1, 2021, according to USDA statistics.
There are multiple reasons for this downward slope: higher feed and energy costs, land disputes and fencing, losses to predators and/or disease, a consolidation of the sheep packing industry and competition with cheaper products imported from other nations. Add to that the fact that conservationists are often in conflict with sheep farmers for areas critical to each group, and that wool in clothing has been replaced to a large extent by synthetic fibers. Meat consumption has declined as well, from an average per person consumption of 4.5 pounds annually in the 1960s to just 1.17 pounds in 2020. Climate change is also having a potential effect on sheep farming with the epic drought showing effects. Range sheep operations rely on grazing on native pasture lands, some of which are increasingly regulated and permit-dependent due to endangered species protection. Clearly, it is an uphill battle. One, it turns out, that some young people, reconnecting to the land, are willing to fight.
Meet Merrit and Pierre Monnat who started a sheep farm in 2014 near Goldendale, WA.
M+P Ranches has grown from fewer than 10 coarse wooled sheep to almost 300 fine wooled Targhee and Rambouillet ewes and grown in size to about 320 acres. The sheep move from pasture to pasture, grazing on dry sagebrush country, perennial grassland and alfalfa fields throughout Klickitat County during the warmer months. In winter they are grazing further East and are fed hay provided locally, to ensure that the ewes produce enough milk for the lambs that start to be birthed in February.
Originally from Texas, Merrit moved to the PNW for internships on farms, and ended up working on Vashon Island, WA, where she met her husband. Pierre, growing up in Seattle, spent many childhood summers on a relative’s farm in Wisconsin. Later he got involved in vegetable farming in Washington, and was ready for farming on his own when they got together. They built the business, quite literally, by hand: the barns, the service buildings, the fences.
The Monnats live in a farmhouse that is over 100 years old, reached by dirt road. Their products – meat and wool – are distributed locally through farming co-ops, and in direct sales from their website. In addition, they have horses, and have built a greenhouse that adds produce to their list of products, appreciated by restaurants that insist on farm-to-table quality.
It is a work-intense and relatively isolated life, with little time for anything else. It took multiple years to find a foothold in the community, although by now the couple feels integrated and appreciates the advice handed down from older farmers. The farm work is augmented by shearing services that Pierre offers with a mobile trailer, a labor that requires intense skill, focus and concentration to avoid harming the live stock. If you hire yourself out to do this you are also dependent on the owners doing the right thing – not feeding the sheep on the day of the procedure and keeping distractions like dogs etc away from the live stock. It can be nerve wracking. It will be fascinating to watch him do a shearing demonstration in front of a live audience at Maryhill Museum during the exhibit opening in August.
In a state that mirrors the national trends, Washington sheep farming has seen a reckoning since the 1950s. By 2019 most of the state’s farm flocks consisted of 24 or fewer sheep being raised at diversified, family-owned farms, with only one last big range operation still featuring a flock of about 5000 heads. (A terrific historical overview of the issues can be found here.) The aging of farmers and their retirement without successors is a serious problem. Primary producers over 65 now outnumber farmers under 35 by more than 6 to 1.
But perhaps ranchers like the Monnats are the bellwethers for a younger generation of people willing to explore something new without the traditional ways of easing into an established family business. Young farmers pursuing the fleece – white, not golden. Not exactly Jason and Medea, but defying the gods nonetheless, with intense work, passion and determination, not the dark arts.
They are part of a movement that contributes to the growth of the local food movement and could preserve mid-sized farms in the country. They are more likely than the general farming population to grow organically, limit pesticide and fertilizer use, diversify their crops or animals, and be deeply involved in their local food systems via community supported agriculture (CSA) programs and farmers markets. (Ref.) And in our case, they connect to local individuals and organizations focussed on art, whether they are providing wool for artisanal processing or education for projects like the Exquisite Gorge II. Let them be bellwethers, by all means!
Rams are kept in the barn for the winter.
And in the building next to the barn the new renters arrived, Margo Cilker and her husband who is a cowboy. Cilker has her first album out to rave reviews, including one on Oregon Arts Watch. Here is one of her songs, That River from the album Pohorylle.
One of the pleasures of writing an independent blog is the fact that I can cover topics I know absolutely nothing about, simply because I find them fascinating. You, of course, have a similar choice: you can explore new territory or decide to skip it, since it might involve some effort to listen in new ways. And listen it shall be: this week I am introducing a number of different artists who employ sound in order to map aspects of our world as linked to the past, present and future, or to capture ephemeral processes.
What they all have in common is that they are art – devised as sound sculptures in some cases, associated with visual images (painted, sculpted or digitally created) in others, or plain compositions using sound collected from the environment or electronically generated. I cannot tell if I am more fascinated by some of the underlying ideas, or the art works that result from the ideas. I guess it varies.
Today I will start with two artists who are about the present and the past. Wednesday’s segment will introduce two artists who explore the linkage between sound and psychological processes extending into the future. The two installments are meant as a package, examining working with sound from four different angles. I don’t expect anyone to listen to any of the links in full – that would cost a lot of time – but a bit of sampling will give you a taste of what’s out there and maybe instill curiosity for more.
Composer Bill Fontana is one of the pioneers of sound art in the U.S. with a career spanning five decades and taking him to international acclaim. He collects site-specific sounds and generates sound configurations from those recordings that reflect aspects of the site and are intended to shape our visual interaction with the site or visual surrounding. Working with acoustic microphones, underwater sensors (hydrophones) and structural/material sensors (accelerometers) that sample the environmental sounds, he creates “sculptures” with the input, musical transformations that are centrally experienced by the listener.
For example, he has composed subtle variations of the music of the Golden Gate Bridge, a live audio/video installation created for its 75th anniversary in 2012, now in the collection of SF MOMA. Here is a link to some of his acoustical visions – the bridge piece can be heard in the third segment.
Another sound sculpture can be found in Rome, in the entry hall of the National Museum of 21st Century Art. He connects Zaha Hadid’s architecture of the building with the acoustic, harmonic and rhythmical qualities of the water that has run in Roman aqueducts since time immemorial. Well, since Roman times. Ok, 2000 years.
You can hear the sculptural sound and the underlying source here.
Miami Beach at Night
And here is a link to one of his most recent projects, Sonic Dreamscapes that connects sounds of the Miami seascape under threat of climate change to our auditory cortex, making the listener aware of the fragility of our world. This multimedia installation was installed in Miami Beach in 2018.
The installation cycle begins during the day with individually recurring auditory recordings answering each other from different spatial points in SoundScape Park. By afternoon, the “musical vocabulary” will grow as additional sounds are added to the repertoire. As the evening approaches, environmentally inspired abstract videos will emerge on the video wall, allowing visitors to experience a myriad of floating sounds and meditative images.
Where Fontana is about connecting us to the sound of places with an eye on change across time, Satch Hoyt is a sound artist concerned with the sounds of people, their movements across space in the past and preserved echos in contemporary music. In addition to actual sculptures that interact with sound installations (link here, scroll down and click on the strips below the images to get to the sound,) Hoyt has an ongoing multi-media project in the works, Afro-Sonic Mapping, which traces specific traditional African music from centuries ago to the contemporary musical styles of the African diaspora.
Street Art in BerlinRemembering Colonial Times….
The project connects archival recordings of African music from Congo and Angola, collected by European anthropologists of the late 1800s and found in Berlin’s ethnology museum, to the urban music in the suburbs of large contemporary Portuguese and Brazilian cities. Turns out, the musical patterns transmigrated to today’s urban music, linking Luanda, Lisbon and Salvador da Bahia, or Dakar, Cali and Lima. With examination of aural histories, interviews and musical exploration with local African musicians to whom Hoyt brought the old recordings, and with collaboration with modern musicians across continents, he re-imagined the sounds, rhythms and melodies, rarely recorded in bygone periods of colonialism and slave trade.
Two years ago the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin offered the first large presentation of the project. Paintings, lectures, videos and 2 concerts attracted big crowds across a full week.Here is some of the music interspersed with an explanatory interview with the artist. The focus was on the lusophone triangle, between the large Portuguese speaking regions of the word, Portugal, its former African colonies (Angola, Mozambique) and Brazil, mapping the sounds, back and forth. I am not sure that Hoyt’s goal to “bring back the music to the places of origin where it was recorded and create some kind of sonic restitution in a postcolonial world, a transformation,” can be accomplished, I certainly would not know how to judge that.
But I find the idea of mapping the network of historical pathways of rhythms or melodies which were, other than language, the only things that could be brought and kept during torturous migrations, fascinating. Musicians acting as archeologists, digging out old artifacts under layers of later civilizations. Sounds of spaces or historical sounds, recorded and re-coded for us to sharpen our listening, to form connections – art as mediator.
Photographs today are of San Francisco, Miami and Berlin, respectively; the Democratic Republic of Congo has to wait for another life time….
When seeking beauty under my nose (my goal this week,) the city of Tigard is not necessarily the first place that comes to mind. Home to box stores, multiplexes, industrial sites and bathed in exhaust fumes from the unending traffic at the intersections of 99 W and Rt 217, this small community never beckoned for a visit. Well, that could change.
I discovered its Outdoor Museum, open since 2019, by accident. Visiting an amazing upholstery store (waitlist 6 months! should tell you all) to deal with a couch abused for 26 years by boys, dogs and a lounging blog writer who shall remain nameless, I walked down the main street of downtown Tigard, looking at small shops, street cafes and public art until I came to the Rotary Plaza.
A ¾ mi heritage trail begins here, commemorating individual families representative of the history and changes of this community.
Multiple rusty, angular panels mirror the inactive railroad tracks that run parallel to the trail, and display stenciled and printed information about diverse individuals who shaped the history of the place. Historic photographs bring the stories to life, reminding us that although change ultimately happens only through collective efforts, it is individuals who drive and sustain the collective.
The installations were executed by Suenn Ho who’s firm Resolve Architecture has, among others, a large portfolio in the realm of civic and educational design. Five Oaks Museum (check out their on-line exhibits!) provided the documentation. Various art works by contemporary artists are also on display along the way. In truth, it struck me as a hodgepodge of mediums and styles that were far more authentically representative of a community creating a memorial to its history than any uniformly curated exhibition could ever be. It captures caring about a place, rather than depicting it from an elevated perspective.
Here is a look at the displays. The trail starts with Harry Kuehne who built successful businesses in what was then called Tigardville (later shortened to Tigard by the railroad that wanted no confusion with Wilsonville, one of the near-by stops.) Lover of horses, he was owner of a livery stable that rented horses and carts to the general public and traveling sales men who arrived by train. He later branched out to add a farm machinery shop – his story is cleverly used as an entry to the changes that arrived across time, from rural outpost to connection via railroad to the arrival of the automobile and how all that influenced what farmers grew or businesses adapted to.
Those who are commemorated along the trail are testimony to the increasing diversity of the community. The story of Peter Hing represents the contributions of immigrants from China.
The story of John and Annie Cash does not shy away from reminding us of the constitutionally ensconced anti-Black discrimination in our state.
Next we encounter community leader Evangelina “Vangie” Sanchez who fought tirelessly for educational opportunities and integration of Latino children and families.
Then there are Yoshio Hasuike and Sachiko Furuyama. Although he was born in Tigard he did not escape the fate of internment during World War II.
I somehow missed taking a picture of the last station in this series, commemorating Baχawádas Louis Kenoyer, the last known speaker of the Tualatin Kalapuya languages, who provided testimony of this ancestors and his life on the Grand Ronde reservation. Luckily the story can be found here.
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Along the way, three sculptures by Christine Clark, commissioned by the City of Tigard, pick up the rusty tone of the commemorative plates and guide us along the time-line of people’s experiences: Live, Settle, Advance. (2020)
Live (full and detail)SettleAdvance
Mosaic artist Jennifer Kuhns represents important features for the region in Tualatin Liveblood (2020) with blue mosaic inlays in flowing patterns. They suggest water, the Tualatin river and Fanno Creek being nearby, and show added objects that were important to the tribes of the region.
Add to the eclectic mix two murals who face each other by Joshua Lawyer and MJ Lindo-Lawyer: here is the explanation for the work from the Downtown Tigard Public Art Walking Guide:
“Supported in part by a $75,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant and funding from Washington County Visitors Association, this mural was commissioned by the City of Tigard as part of the Tigard Outdoor Museum project. The mural depicts the Kalapuyan people – a Kalapuya group, the Atfalati, were the Tualatin Valley’s earliest inhabitants – and what they valued most.
The design showcases large animals as spiritual guides. The wolf leads a young woman on her fishing voyage – an activity that had deep cultural significance to the Atfalati, and which remains very popular in the Tualatin Valley to this day. The other contains references to historic cultures, local wildlife, and water. The two mirroring artworks painted under the 99W underpass show a contrast in color. One is lit up in mainly orange hues, while this mural is muted in blue colors. The dueling colors depict the two extremes of summer and winter. The seasons were vitally important to the Kalapuyan people, who based their seasons on their crop. The murals’ artists chose to depict the duality of nature, with a cooler scene shown here, and then a warmer, brighter scene shown on the opposite wall.”
Joshua Lawyer (2020) I found my kind of humor on his website…. MJ Lindo-Lawyer (2020)
I liked the fact that all of these women were depicted in modern clothing, placing them here and now in a continuum of their native culture, preserved through their elders.
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At the end of the trail you can cross over into Dirksen Nature Park which offers a loop through old growth forest and savannah and eventually leads across Fanno Creek back to where you started, a total of about 3 miles. (Step by step hike description can be found here.)
At the very beginning there is a new playground that displays serious creativity (and likely serious money.) Yet not a kid in sight when I walked by.
That was very different at about a kilometer south where an old playground with rickety structures was teeming with children of all ages and one lonely port-a-potty sported a line. I had to rest for a while and sat on a bench next to picnic tables where some 12 year-old beauties were trying out nail polish, happily chattering away in Russian. Little boys were chasing each other and screaming in Spanish, and two harried moms called to Ahmed and Arjaf, respectively, that it was time to go home. I was thinking about all the settlers that I had just learned about and how happy they would be to see Tigard as a place that made it possible for all to call it home, meeting and mingling at work, at play – and hopefully at the outdoor museum to understand how integration, both legally and factually, had to be fought for by courageous immigrants and their allies.
So where shall we go next?
Music today is from the Mosaic Concert (New music and art by NW women) presented by Cascadia Composers. Lisa Neher’s compositionLook withinis played by the Delgani String Quartet.
