Critical Review

WHITHER ART HISTORY? The Fine Art of Being Indigenous

Author(s): Richard W. Hill Sr.

Source: The Art Bulletin , March 2015, Vol. 97, No. 1 (March 2015), pp. 7-9

Published by: CAA

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WHITHER ART HISTORY?

The Fine Art of Being Indigenous Richard W. Hill Sr.

In 1973 I was part of the curatorial team that organized a major exhibition on the art of contemporary Haudenosaunee (Six Nations, or Iroquois) for the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. Our informal group of artists, composed of sculptor Duffy Wilson (Tuscarora), painter Oren Lyons (Onondaga), silversmith Elwood Green (Mohawk), wood- carver Jake Thomas (Cayuga), and myself, a Tuscarora pho- tographer, decided to elevate our art to its rightful place in the larger art world. We had grown weary of having our art called mere craft or simple tourists' curiosities, dismissed for not being "fine art."

I was right out of art school. Actually, I had dropped out of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and had begun to make paintings that illustrated what I was learning of Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora oral history. In many ways my art was a mirror through which I could reflect on my Indigenous identity and artistic legacy from unknown ancestors. I studied museum collections and

began to realize that the art of my ancestors was collected by ethnographic museums, not fine art galleries. Our art was being measured by an anthropological ruler. We set out to break that ruler.

As we traveled to Haudenosaunee communities in Ontario,

Quebec, and New York to collect art for the exhibition, we did not have preconceived notions of artistic taste. We did not have a set of our own aesthetic standards that we applied to the art that we looked at. It was more important to show the diversity of expression of what it meant to be Haudeno- saunee. So we ended up with everything you could imagine, from the most traditional forms of expression in wood and corn husk to modified traditions of metalwork and bead-

work, and included more contemporary approaches in clay, stone, textiles, and paintings. We even had some decorated milk cans and other folk art objects. It was the largest assem- blage of contemporary Haudenosaunee works of all disci- plines ever shown up to that time.

Basically, we went to the communities and asked: Who are your artists? Artists steered us to other artists. To us it was all about sharing in a unique opportunity. With each artist we talked to, my view of what comprised Haudenosaunee art expanded. When artists explained how they came to be doing what they did, I saw deep' connections to place, to spiri- tual beliefs, to personal identity and collective consciousness.

One of my tasks was to produce the catalog for the exhibi- tion (which, sadly, was never published). I asked Jake Thomas, who had provided a long history for the gallery docents to study as background, if he could contribute a statement on what it means to be a Haudenosaunee artist as

an introduction to this exhibition. What he offered has

affected my thinking about art and my thinking about myself as a Haudenosaunee person.

An Appreciation for Gifted Talents of the Native Peoples

At this time, let us put our minds together and thank the Creator that we are well.

The Creator has given us our body in which we are able to move

about. He gave us life. He gave us power to think. He gave us sight. He gave us heańng. The people on earth are made like the Creator Himself.

When He gave us a name - He gave us a gift to determine the nature of our destiny. When we grow up we are pronounced and

called in a particular manner. We give thanks to the Creator for

our ability and talents which we proudly present to the people (we

are never competing).

We are showing what the human hands may do for our culture as

it is the only thing we have left. This is the way we can express our

minds to the world today so that our culture may be revived.

Now, we the artists and craftspeople proudly present our ability

which the Creator has given us. We forever give thanks to our Cre-

ator for what we are today. Onen.

Jacob Thomas, 1973

By starting as he does, Jake follows an ancient pattern: we are to be thankful, and it is best expressed collectively, willingly, and perpetually. Jake was a traditionalist, meaning he knew how to enact the ceremonies and medicine rituals. He knew

the stories in their original language, and he was an active student of the culture. He made a perfect mentor. He intro- duced me to the concept of the Creator and helped me understand why it is important to always acknowledge the gifts he has given us: At this time , let ils put our minds together and thank the Creator that we are well. Wellness from a Haude-

nosaunee point of view is a state of being in which our mind, body, and spirit are functioning as the Creator intended; it is a state of healthiness and peacefulness. In today's world, surrounded as we are by chaos and violence, it is difficult to achieve such a state. Our cultural worldview reminds

us that it is worthy to still strive for it, even if we never attain it.

By putting our minds together, we expand the power of individual thinking. Our thoughts become larger and stron- ger. It is also a metaphor about coming to agreement - becoming one mind - on any subject matter. When we do this, we have what is known as the Good Mind, and through consensus, we gain unity and strength. For me, this is also a way to appreciate the creativity of our ancestors. We try to put our mind in alignment with those who made things long ago - be it a flint projectile point, handmade ceramic pottery

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g ART BULLETIN MARCH 2015 VOLUME XCVII NUMBER 1

jar, carved antler hair comb, or a decorated cradleboard for carrying your children. Through this older art, our minds can become one across the generations.

The Creator has given us our body in which we are able to move

about. He gave us life. He gave us power to think. He gave us sight. He gave us hearing , The people on earth are made like the

Creator Himself .

This passage connects us to our Creation Story and how the Original People were first formed and instructed about how to live on this Great Turtle Island that is known as North

America. Our physical bodies were made from the flesh of our Mother, the Earth, in the form of clay. The Creator shaped the clay into the form of a human, then breathed his sacred breath into that figure to animate it. So, with each breath we take while alive, we relive that original moment of creation of human life. Our body affords us a great mobility and dexterity. Yet our culture connects us to ancestral places no matter where we may be. One way that Mohawk people greet each other today is to ask: What kind of clay are you made from? The response would be, "I am of the Wolf (or whatever family clan you are from) kind of clay from the Mohawk Valley (the ancestral homelands of the Mohawk Nation)." We are all of the clay from the Mother Earth.

The Creator gave us his breath that creates our living energy, our life force. This energy or force then drives the ability of our mind to have creative thought. We were given free will so that we are conscious of the choices we make. We

have an awareness of values, beliefs, morals, and ethics. In

many ways the old art is an expression of how our ancestors manifested those gifts of spirit. If we see ourselves as sacred beings, we can see ourselves as a reflection of our Creator, perhaps best understood as the original source of our creativ- ity. The gift of our mind is the ability to think abstractly, to create symbol and metaphor, and to see the unseen.

Jake acknowledges our ability to see and hear. These are essential faculties needed by artists - the ability to sense things about us and, in addition, to see the unseen forces at play. See- ing is the mind's ability to sense shape, form, color, texture and previsualize what the finished piece might look like. It is also to understand context and meaning, which influences what we make with our hands. Hearing can be inspirational as well, as some of the sounds of nature can trigger visual mem- ory - dare I say, "cellular memory." Through this internal recall, we can bring deep culture forward to our conscious mind, think about it, play with it, and create new ways to express it. Hearing also has to do with communicating with an idea, as if creativity were like an internal conversation between your mind and the artistic idea. When our elders advise us to listen with our hearts, they are speaking of intuitive thinking. Listening, from an Indigenous point of view, is an essential way of comprehending, without a whole lot of analytic assess- ment. Once we comprehend something, then we can commu- nicate what we feel about it, and this produces the art.

When He gave us a name - He gave us a gift to determine the nature of our destiny. When we grow up we are pronounced and

called in a particular manner. We give thanks to the Creator for our ability and talents which we proudly present to the people (we

are never competing).

Although we come from a communal society and collective rights that go beyond basic human rights, we cherish our unique identities within the parameters of the collective. Each Haudenosaunee person has a unique Haudenosaunee name. They say that this is so the universe, and all of its powers, understands who we are and can engage in a rela- tionship with us. In reality, most everything has a unique name in our ancestral languages - birds, animals, fish, plants, villages, and land features. Our languages paint a visual pic- ture of what those names mean. In this way, when we speak the language of our ancestors we are revisualizing (repaint- ing) the cultural metaphors that they inherited. In this way, we immerse ourselves in the pictures our mind creates. Art can capture the essence of that mind picture we carry, and viewers can immerse themselves in that mind thought of the artist. It is a different kind of transpositioning or transforma- tive experience than is talked about in art school. But it is a real experience nonetheless.

In the Haudenosaunee view, when our bodies were shaped in the womb, the forces of the universe placed inside us a valuable gift of one sort or another. We are given this gift so that we can manifest cultural matters in profound ways. Some people are naturally good storytellers. Others have great memories and can recall historical events in great detail because it was described to their mind's eye by their mentors. Some are excellent dancers who seem to almost float across

the ground, which elevates our own dancing when we witness their feet moving. Others can handle clay with tender care and delicacy to produce stunning pots or smoking pipes. Some are beautiful singers, who through their voice and the rhythm of the music transport us to higher states of being. As Jake suggests, this gift is the springboard to our destiny.

Destiny is a strange thing to understand from an Indigenous point of view. It does not mean an inevitable conclusion to one's life path. It is more like a directional energy that, if acknowl- edged and respected, can enhance your ability to express your- self. By nurturing its presence in your life, without arrogance or false pride, you become more real. I saw this in my father, Stan Hill, who at the age of fifty-five gave up his career as a Mohawk ironworker and decided to start carving antlers. My father never showed much artistic ability before then, so it was almost laugh- able when he said he wanted to become an artist.

Yet, from somewhere deep inside him emerged an artist with the ability to transform hard antler and bone into objects of extreme beauty and power. His destiny lay within that decision to use his mind and his hands in a different way from what he had done for nearly forty years.

It all started after my brother was killed in a car wreck and my dad went on his version of a vision quest to seek to under- stand what had happened and why. He headed to Alaska to climb mountains bigger than any building he erected. While climbing, he saw an eagle for the first time in his life. It swooped down and sank its sharp talons into a large salmon. For a moment, both of their lives hung in the balance. The fish might have pulled the eagle into the water. But the eagle persevered and recouped its strength and flew on. It was in that decisive moment that my dad's life took a new path. Once he got back home, he sold his construction company and made a carving of that eagle and salmon. An artist was born. Or: his destiny revealed the artist within.

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WHITHER ART HISTORY? 9

Jake speaks to the calling that all artists feel, the inner drive, the relentless passion to see what the artistic materials have in store. In my father's case, the spirit of the eagle and the spirit of the moose ander called to him. It was not a heavy-duty mystical experience. It was simply a real voice to him. He chose to pursue it. So, too, do clay, stone, shell, wood, feathers, and corn husk call to other artists. So, too, do

cloth, fibers, glass beads, leather, paint, photography, or digi- tal wonders call to others. This calling is part of our natural maturing, we find what is most comfortable and most enabling for us.

The bit about not competing is very important. Unfortu- nately, the Native art world in N.orth America has turned into a massive art competition that ranks work as good, better, best and rejects a whole lot more. This caters to a pride and egomania that are counterintuitive to the Indigenous frame of mind. Instead, we are to be thankful, and remain humble,

about our ability to transform natural materials into objects of beauty and power. It is equally part of the destiny of those materials to collaborate with us. They give themselves to us. Their transformation is our service to our humanity. We cer- tainly acknowledge the abilities of others, but we are not meant to put the artist on a pedestal. The contemporary art world wallows in the cult of personality, often to the detri- ment of the art of the collective. Thus, most of what we have

produced is exported from our communities, or it becomes so expensive that our rank-and-file neighbors cannot afford it. Our art is often colonized away from us.

We are showing what the human hands may do for our culture as

it is the only thing we have left. This is the way we can express our

minds to the world today so that our culture may be revived.

In this passage, Jake provides a personal perspective on the value of the arts in restoring, preserving, or enriching our cultures. Colonization has had a devastating impact on our people. The boarding-school experience attempted to wipe out Indigenous creativity. Through this strategy, the Ameri- can and Canadian governments and various church denomi- nations hoped to educate the inherited languages, cultures,

and arts out of the young Native students, and replace them with Western values. However, even genocidal policies of church and state could not succeed in destroying Indigenous cultures. Perhaps the spirit of the earth, as manifested through what Indigenous people create, was too powerful to defeat. We are still here, still connected to our ancestral pla- ces, connected to the spirits of our ancestors, and still think- ing about the future generations.

Art becomes our gift to those faces that are yet to be born. By means of the art we create today, they will have a lens through which they can see us and themselves. Art is not a robotic expression of tradition. It is a dynamic stage on which we play out our lives. Sometimes changing circumstan- ces require us to extemporaneously create a new movement of thought. Art transforms itself. It is not static. It remains relevant to the lives of each generation. New materials, new techniques, new ideas enter our worldview. We assimilate ideas into our cultural pattern, or rather, we enculturate newness to be more reflective of our lives; we then Indige- nize the newness, and blend it with what time and countless

generations have proven to be true. We have no need to col- onize others, or force people to believe what we believe. We simply share what we have been made to make. Our "destiny" lies in what we make because it can influence the future generations to keep the culture going. We are not sol- itary artists. Instead, we are connected to a larger vision of what it means to be Indigenous. We teach art as a way to explore what that relationship can mean to each of us. In this way, the art may be familiar, but never redundant. We are not done being us, so our art is evidence of our personal and group explorations in being Indigenous.

Now, we the artists and craftspeople proudly present our ability

which the Creator has given us. We forever give thanks to our Cre-

ator for what we are today. Onen ( Parting expression).

Richard W. Hill Sr. is senior project coordinator at Deyohahage - Indigenous Knowledge Centre , Six Nations Polytechnic [PO Box 700, Ohsweken, Ont., NOA IMO Canada].

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