There they were in the fields, this Monday. Hundreds and hundreds of them. So much for social distancing….

Usually at this time of year Canada Geese would gather for the migration back North. Many of them now stay here, having found both food sources and breeding grounds that suit them. They are really amazing in what they pull off, once in flight. They can fly up to 1000 km a day, which means they could fly around the world in 48 days, if they’d wish to. But they wish to stay.

Looking at them reminded me of Inuit art that has depicted them for ages.

Traditional stencil,

modern stone cut and stencil,

Litographs,

Carvings,

Acrylic and ink on paper,

And these artworks, in turn, reminded me of a small, riveting exhibit at the Portland Art Museum that I had a chance to explore earlier this year before everything shut down. Akunnittinni: A Kinngait Family Portrait exhibited the works of three Inuk women, grandmother, mother and daughter, Pitseolak Ashoona, Napachie Pootoogook, and Annie Pootoogook respectively. Their work was intimate, direct, jarring. They described the world as seen and experienced by them, providing autobiographical narratives as much as a glimpse of historical and cultural episodes that taught me much about Inuit culture and the resilience of women in a violent world, violence to which the youngest artist succumbed in 2016, and which was born by the older ones, during a time where husbands would rent out their wives by the hour to traveling sailors.

It was fascinating to see three generations describe their lives, and display an astute summary of the mundane, the quotidian, the cultural influences of later years on the first nation lives. PAM’s Center for Contemporary Native Art picked a winner (the exhibition was curated by Andrea R. Hanley (Navajo.) I will be eager to go back to the smaller galleries, once the museum is open again, and let me be surprised at what I find.

Oh, to be a bird, and just leave it all behind, hide in that big gaggle in the safety of numbers, wander through the fields with less of a sense of past or future and just living in the moment of grazing. There is some continuity for them as well, though – they mate for life! And geese, believe it or not, often live for up to 24 years.

And here is Mother Goose….

And here is a bonus Ravel – really a much more interesting piece, and we can just pretend we walk along some fields in Spain….