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Last week, I visited the university with my students. Common Seeing: Meeting Points’, Sarah Siestreem’s and The Earth’s exhibits at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. I found myself struggling to find words after listening to them talk with such honesty about the emotional truths art had revealed for their lives. 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 removal of Indigenous peoples’ ancestral homelands. The unmanageable amount of waste created by over-consumption and the death the last tiger in Korea were just a few of the many painful environmental truths. The grief was palpable.
What can we do about such grief? That 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. Yet, so much has been lost and yet Indigenous artists continue foster and create 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 encourage us to connect to our ancestral knowledge and traditions, retrieve them, and weave and create with them while learning respectfully from our neighbors. Their art transforms the grief of climate change and genocide into opportunities to weave healing stories of coexistence and co-creation that are essential for all life on Earth. They offer a way for us to confront our own grief.
We thank these artists and all others who, by sharing their art, made themselves vulnerable to everyone. They have provided a refuge, a spot of hope, and a path to follow that can help us get out of the pain that could otherwise dampen our creativity.
Alai Reyes-Santos has been a monthly contributor for The Register-Guard.
