Curve-billed Thrasher

 

At the Museum

 I spent another hour at the big current exhibit at the Albuquerque Art Museum.  All the works in the exhibit are from the McMichael Canadian Art Collection including these two shown on their website:

There are several examples in the exhibit of animated masks operated with pull strings.  In my picture below the dorsal fin and mouth of the fish figure are opened and closed with strings.

My notes on the images are a bit muddled.  I think the big beaked figure in the glass case is by Henry Speck, Jr.  In the background are pieces by Norval Morrisseau.

Henry Speck Jr. created the three large pieces in the picture below.  The two framed drawings were done by Speck Sr.

The information accompanying Speck Jr.'s work points to an interesting aspect of the cultures of the groups along the Coast of the Pacific Northwest:  the hereditary chiefs are also artists.

This small mask by Beau Dick is said to represent a Wood Bug.

There are only a few pieces in the exhibit that go back beyond the mid-19th Century.  The governments of the U.S and Canada did their best to stamp out the indigenous cultures and nearly succeeded.  Archaeologists and collectors saved some things, but much of the provenance was lost in the process.  Contemporary indigenous artists have taken up the challenge of preserving and carrying forward the traditions and skills of their ancestral predecessors.

A Small Memory Recovered

The West Seattle House (Google Earth Screenshot)

I have been poking around in the dim corners of my memory, trying to retrieve some fragments related to any awareness of the previous indigenous residents of the neighborhood I lived in as a child in West Seattle. 

Aside from some references to Chief Seattle heard in school, the only actual contact I could recall with a living Native American was from around the age eight or nine when I had an Inuit friend of about the same age as I.  Originally from Alaska, he lived just down the street in a house even more modest than the one I lived in with my mother and grandparents after the war. His name was Marco.

I remember Marco as a handsome little guy with dark hair and dark eyes.  We often played together at war games as boys of that time did, fighting valiantly and dying dramatically.  A favorite locale for such dramas was about a mile to the southwest of our street -- a bluff overlooking the beach with steep, sandy slopes that were mostly covered with trees, including a few madrones with papery red bark. People in those days seemed unconcerned that children our age might be wandering about by themselves for much of the day.  I remember going often to the bluff, or in later years even down to the beach to spear flounders in the shallows.

The Bluff (Google Earth Screenshot)

Once, when we were scrambling around on the bluff's steep slopes, we came across a covey of valley quail which scooted noisily ahead of us through the brush.  One of the birds flew up into a tree close by. Marco picked up a fist-sized stone and threw it with perfect aim, hitting the quail which fell dead to the ground. I could not have been more surprised and amazed if Marco had suddenly flapped his arms and rose into the air.

Rethinking the Value of Art

The Albuquerque Art Museum has brought another fine exhibition to town: Coast to Coast to Coast: Indigenous Art from the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. What most caught my interest in the show was the selection of traditional art from the Northwest Coast.  After a quick walk-through my first thought was to wonder at how I had grown up in Seattle and undergone sixteen years of "education" there without achieving a better understanding and appreciation of the area's indigenous art.  There are some obvious personal and social reasons, I think, but a large part of the educational deficit was the absence of native voices in the process.  What brought home that idea was the opening presentation by two Canadian indigenous experts on the subject of the show.

I had developed an interest in anthropology during my time at the University of Washington, but somehow it was not channeled into the local access that was available to native cultures.  Instead, I wandered off to explore a bit of the Northwest Amazon which my months there only gained me a superficial view of the possibilities of learning about traditional societies.

Most of the art  discussed by the presenters was recent work by Canadian indigenous artists.  I have never been very interested in museum-directed work of that kind, but the discussion did point to the importance  of the underlying motivations and history.  The brief comments on the role of art in the traditional cultures of the Pacific Northwest, however, really sparked my interest in the subject.

I was particularly taken by the explanation by Bonnie Devine about the Potlatch as a key element of a sustainable economy.  Of course, that subject was touched on in my college classes, but I only remember it being presented as kind of an aberrant curiosity.  Devine's few words on the topic made the tradition of giving away precious art objects seem perfectly rational and practical.  Thinking the next day about that viewpoint brought me to the idea that a modern day analogy might be the history of the Free Software Movement.

So, I am looking forward now to several more visits to the current exhibition at the Art Museum and to spending some time exploring the available literature on the subject.

A Little Snow for Albuquerque

 The city's Spring-like weather has been interrupted by a bit of winter.

The jasmine is undeterred.

The Morning Cat

Zapatistas: the power of an Indigenous uprising in Mexico

Friday, January 26, 2024 – Zapatistas: the power of an Indigenous uprising in Mexico

Subcomandante Marcos, left, one of the more recognizable spokesmen following the Zapatista uprising in 1994. (Photo: Oriana Eliçabe / Flickr)

Another excellent presentation on Native America Calling. I happened to catch the end third of this program as I was driving to the grocery store.  The speaker was anthropologist, Dr. Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo. She pointed out that the Zapatista uprising was the first and only indigenous rebellion in which women's rights were juridically institutionalized from the beginning. The other two presenters, both from the University of Arizona, were excellent as well in their discussion of the thirty year history of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas which started with an armed uprising on New Years Day, 1994. 

Update:

I went looking for books this morning at my local thrift shop and chanced on The Zapatista Reader from 2002, edited by Tom Hayden with articles by a number of my favorite authors.

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Update: After looking through recent news stories about Chiapas my impression is that the 30th Anniversary of the Zapatista insurrection was an opportunity for some nostalgic excesses.  The story told by the Native American Calling program seems largely based on information that is now very out of date.  The community solidarity which characterized the early years of the Zapatista movement appears to have become scarce in the face of the challenges from drug cartels and migrant trafficking along with the effects of the pandemic.  It seems the situation in Chiapas has come to closely resemble that of the rest of the country in regard to poverty and violence.