It is rare but called for to share insight to inspiration as it happens.
it happens though and it is an idea that has to get out. Looking back on totem poles and story poles. They are treasures of things you might not have understood at the time but come back to. I was reluctant to be an artist because it was looked down upon. Years in embracing that it’s my calling in moving into sculpture from the first time picking up a pencil meeting paper it’s something that came naturally.
I’m reminded of a conversation with my fellow artist friend Andy Everson who inspired me to keep pursuing digital art as a valid medium. “why don’t they question call us out for using pencils and paper”? In doing public works for years engaging with people who want to have curiosity into Native American work. There is a loaded word of ‘authenticity’. It is a perception that this was made by a real Indian.
As a sculptor in this region I also find the phrase that is overused “low man on the totem pole”. It serves to convey that you are not important. David Boxley Sr. talks of this and it resonated with me. It brought me back to my first mentor I learned to carve with Steve Brown who was called out for being non-Native working with Nathan Jackson. There is reverence for many sculptural styles and what they mean but there is a powerful message to working on this Thunderbird I’m nearing completion of that took years to understand.
If you imagine the pole as beings stacked literally on top of one another the strongest figure is the one holding the weight of them all.
On another level of that thinking of where that log came from and how long it took to grow.
Any cedar we carve today is at least 300 years old to be able to endure the weather and the storms over generations of human lives. How many birds nested in that tree and how many squirrels and raccoons climbed up and down in the battle of nature to survive? How many people hid behind them for fear of their lives and lost their lives to feed that tree?
Cedar here is a medicine to our culture that has roots that hold to the land. in the quarantine I think about how blessed I am to be able to work on these ancestors and tell a story with them and learn from them.
The time is on us to look at that because that salmon are disappearing along with the trees. Losing connection and being the bridge between our generations shifts our focus from looking up vs what is right in front of us.
I takes a village to raise a child. Fed by the experience of uncomfortable times that we grow from.
The hardest thing as a carver is working thru the knots. But when I think of them as branches that held strong for the birds I watch fly in the sky. Or shelter a raccoon or squirrel. Of if it was there for me to climb on as a child to see how high I could climb and get in trouble for. They are part of so much more than I’ll ever know and it keeps me working and thinking about how amazing it is to reach out and even write like this in hopes I could be that branch.
I go back to old lectures I gave as an artist when I was looking at what I thought I knew. As the saying goes if I only knew then what I know now. There is something about growing pains and this may even be one of them but I’m still growing and learning how much we are all connected with roots that go deeper than we know.
I’m reflecting on the Songs of the sky world pole and how it brought the people together. I hope in this time people can come back together with an appreciation for what they’ve overlooked and what I just thought of as a normal in my life. Our families gathered often and in contrast I had a lot of friends who didn’t know their relations at all. It was a stark reality to me that by being around them I needed to learn more and experience what it is to make something all the while value the medium I work in would be equally important.
Carved by Adam McIsaac, designed by Qwalsius - Shaun Peterson
Nothing of this scale happens alone but it’s from roots we are connected to with the people who understand what it is to devote their life to a skill.
An eagle flies in the sky the was born in a nest that grew from a tree