[ad_1]
Last week, I visited the university with my students. Common Seeing: Meeting Points’, Sara Siestreem’s and The Earth’s exhibits at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. After the talk, I was unable to speak after hearing their honest and profound descriptions of the emotional truths that art had revealed for them. One of them said it clearly: What do you do with the grief that I feel right now?”
We were able to see art that made us reflect on the reality of melting glaciers and the expulsions of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral homelands. The unmanageable waste created by over-consumption and the death in Korea of the last Tiger, among other painful environmental realities. The grief was palpable.
What can we do when we are faced with such grief? This is a good question.
On my way home, I remembered Gail Tremblay’s (Mi’kmaq and Onondaga) 2018 basket titled “How long will it take to re-invent a world where everything people invented depended on snow, frozen food, ice, and digging through it for cold water?.” To make the basket, Tremblay weaves film from a 1967 documentary that depicts a Netsilingmiut Inuit family as static in time, a people from the past. She uses old film, but retains traditional basket weaving techniques to tell a story about Native creativity and presence in the modern world. This story combines ancestral storytelling techniques with more recent ones.
Tremblay’s work reminds us that we can tell innovative, healing stories in the face of the grief produced by colonization, genocide and climate change. Many have been lost, yet Indigenous artists continue creating and fostering life.
The other piece that provided a similar answer was Siestreem’s (Hanis Coos) “Aretha Franklin reigns supreme 1942-2018.” This ceremonial dance cap is life changing. Materials used include Pacific abalone buttons and African beads, as well as dentalium shells and sweetgrass from the Philippines and Columbia River sweetgrass. Siestreem’s work honors those who contribute materials in the tags that describe her art. Her pieces deploy Hanis Coos’ traditional weaving techniques and ceremonial traditions alongside cultural influences from other PNW Native communities, Caribbean Taino and Mexican collaborators, African aesthetic practices and materials, etc.
Tremblay & Siestreem invite you to connect with your ancestral knowledge and traditions, to recover them, weave and create from them, and to learn respectfully from our neighbors. Their art turns the grief caused by climate change and genocide within us into opportunities for healing stories of coexistence with one another. These stories are necessary for all life to thrive on Earth. They offer a way for us to face our grief.
We are grateful to these artists and others for making themselves vulnerable to us all and providing a place of refuge, hope, and a pathway to follow that can bring life out of the grief that could otherwise dimm our creative fires.
Alai Reyes-Santos has been a monthly contributor for The Register-Guard.
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: An earlier version of this story mispelled the name one of the artists. Sara Siestreem is her real name.
