A Map to the Next World by Joy Harjo

for Desiray Kierra Chee In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who would climb through the hole in the sky. My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens. For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet. The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit. In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it. Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace. Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our children while we sleep. Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born there of nuclear anger. Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to disappear. We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to them by their personal names. Once we knew everything in this lush promise. What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav- ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood. An imperfect map will have to do, little one. The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s small death as he longs to know himself in another. There is no exit. The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a spiral on the road of knowledge. You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way. They have never left us; we abandoned them for science. And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry. You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song she is singing. Fresh courage glimmers from planets. And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns. When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us. You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder. A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the destruction. Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our tribal grounds. We were never perfect. Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans. We might make them again, she said. Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end. You must make your own map.

EMERGENCE--> DRUM MAKING

EMERGENCE__ "Change Happens one Warrior at a Time. Our people must reconstitute the mentoring and learning–teaching relationships that foster real and meaningful human development and community solidarity. The movement toward decolonization and regeneration will emanate from transformations achieved by direct-guided experience in small, personal, groups and one-on-one mentoring towards a new path." (Alfred and Corntasel 614)__ The drums represent elements and the spirit of reconnection to ancestral homeland and regeneration of ancestral memories by using color and design relationships that collaborate with sacred Indigenous materials. The drums exist in the exhibition as art objects, but as a display reflect the group collaboration, community, as well as the individual who represents their unique tribal diversity. This collaborative experience and exhibition aims to expand both the viewer and the artist’s notion of Indigeneity and American Indian. __ The drums simultaneously hold their own futures outside of the gallery space. The instrument represents the heartbeat for the people, embracing the symbolic strength of the circle. They are created as prayer, in their emergence and existence to become a bridge home, a bridge inviting our ancestors to cross and join with us, walking forward. Their future is returning to ceremony, returning to homelands, bringing new voices and visions with them, through the artists and their families future generations. The artist’s participation and making activate these drums in non-linear temporalities, through remembering and making, an object can become an art practice, a tool. This is the first utterance in remembering how to communicate in re-indigenized and decolonizing languages. This exhibit allows the viewers and the artists to witness a beginning, and to remind us that the drums are a life and they will carry their own memory of a people, so they stand and witness these remberances alongside all of us.

Quote: Linda Tuhiwai Smith

"What kind of spaces am I narrating here and why might it be important to understand such spaces? The very idea of postcolonial spaces is layered with, and evocative of, empires past, present and future, complicated stories and identities, intimate and alienated relationships, shifting borders and contested terrains, ambivalent, partial and contradictory meanings. Within these spaces people live and make sense of their lives. Here is the riddle; they occupy shifting spaces, they shift the spaces they occupy and yet the spaces are the same spaces that existed before. The contemporary spaces I describe have been created by the synergy of other spaces that were constituted decades, centuries and eons ago. Native Americans existed before the idea of America, they exist in the transnational spaces we know now as America and they live in the nation-state of the United States of America." (Tuhiwai Smith 549-550) ----> Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. “Introduction.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. Vol. 19, No. 5, September-October 2006, pp. 549-552. Print.

liberation from myths

"It is important to identify all of the old and new faces of colonialism that continue to distort and dehumanize Indigenous peoples-often pitting us against each other in battles over authentic histories. Colonization is the word most often used to describe the experience of Indigenous encounters with Settler societies, and it is the framework we are employing here. However, there is a danger in allowing 'colonization' to be the only story of Indigenous lives. It must be recognized that colonialism is a narrative in which the Settler's power is the fundamental reference and assumption, inherently limiting Indigenous freedom and imposing a view of the world that is but an outcome or perspective on that power. As stated, earlier, we live in an era of postmodern imperialism and manipulations by shape-shifting colonial powers; the instruments of domination are evolving and inventing new methods to erase Indigenous histories and senses of place. Therefore, 'globalization' in Indigenous eyes reflects a deepening, hastening and stretching of an already-existing empire. Living within such political and cultural contexts, it is remembering ceremony, returning to homelands and liberation from the myths of colonialism that are the decolonizing imperatives." -Taiaiake Alfred and Jeff Corntassel

Symposium 'This is Not a Silent Movie' Overview

The symposium 'This is Not a Silent Movie' held at the Portland Art Museum, along with the artist talks and openings around Portland: I.M.N.D.N at at the Art Gym, 'This is Not a Silent Movie,' at the MOCC, and BURY MY ART AT WOUNDED KNEE at PNCA have made for a phenomenal week of contemporary american indian art exhibits and discussions here in Portland, Oregon.---- The break out talks inspired by the 8 artists who presented led to topics of dismantling and reconstructing stereotypes, essentialist notions, and romanticism that concern the gaze on native american art today. We discussed the role the institutions; academic, art gallery, museum and market place have in participating in perpetuating these antiquated constructs, while talking about how they can be pinnacle in helping instigate change through redesigning curatorial decisions. We discussed different Indigenous artists strategies to tackling and resisting the pushes and pulls of commodification and exploitation, while upholding sacred inherited tribal knowledges and powerfully reinventing and evolving voice and vision through visual art tactics.---- We came to consensus that these conversations must continue and that we need to come together more frequently and incorporate workshops where we embrace MAKING together to build our relationships, bonds, which inspire the questions and dialogue brought up at the symposium.---- Thank you artists, curators, educators, supporters, and students who came to support, listen, engage, and dialogue as community. It was an honor to present and participate. It was so great to meet you all! Sepk' eec'a S? aa Maks

Speech Notes for Presentation at 'This is Not a Silent Movie' Symposium at the Portland Art Museum. Jan. 31, 2014

My name is Kaila Farrell-Smith and I am a Klamath and Modoc woman. Due to traumas after boarding school and tribal termination in the 1950’s my father Al Smith, left Modoc Pointe our ancestral homelands on the Eastern shores of the Klamath Lake and so I subsequently was raised away from our tribal lands as an urban “half-breed:” half American Indian and half hippie. Much of my source material to begin a painting comes from a desire to reach back through time and know my Klamath grandmothers, here their voices… I want to be in the canoe with my dad as a child collecting wocus, picking berries, living free in our tribal territory. Then this urge is coupled with confusing feelings of displacement, in-authenticity, and NOT knowing. I work to both Deconstruct and Reconstruct this personal romanticism I engage in, bridge fragmented memories and stories to the present and embrace this conflict and duality, which is what motivates my painting process. This piece ‘After Boarding School: In Mourning’ began as an attempt to reclaim and re-enliven Edward Curtis photographs of Indigenous women. As I built up a highly rendered and colorful oil painting of this girl it felt more and more problematic to me, it wasn’t speaking how I envisioned it would, rather it continued the silence and erasure by reinforcing the myth of the noble-savage-vanishing-race. This was infuriating to me and so I forcibly defaced the portrait with oil bars, this gesture or action visually cropped her hair off and I saw the piece emerge. My father and so many Indigenous children experienced the physical and psychological trauma at Indian boarding schools, this act of erasing Indigenous culture, family bonds and resilient tribal knowledge has impacted our entire American Indian communities to this day. This painting speaks of this history and passed on Indigenous traumatic memory through color, form, and oil paint, and it is extremely important that this dialogue is beginning to emerge within the walls here at the Portland Art Museum. I aim to depict the creation, the defacement, erasure, and the beauty that can be found in these disharmonious experiences of attempting to remember or understand Indigenous identity. This source material is infinite: second-hand family stories, colonizing documents (as in this print using my families land sale i.e a Indian Land “rip off” Deed) as well as the European gaze of Native American through photography. A new source material has been my not-knowing my Indigenous language. This is not about victimization, it is about being honest with myself and the extent of valuing and sharing my acquired culture knowledge, while simultaneously owning what I don’t know and why that is. This deconstruction and reconstruction of language and pictorial symbols like abstract American Indian basket designs to rock art petroglyphs has led to an exploration into abstraction with my recent paintings. I have found a formal space that is not as limited by preconceived concepts and the content of explaining personal narratives, which has allowed me explore both formal aspects of painting in relation to the contexts of disharmony, erasure, defacement, violent disruptions, that pair with and often transform into beautiful passages of balance and calm space. Piece from BURY MY ART AT WOUNDED KNEE: Blood and Guts in the Art School Industrial Complex. “Vision Quest Glyphology,” engages Indigenous geologies, including basalt rocks from Nich’I Wana (Columbia River) and from Wy’ East (Mt. Hood), they were collected after coming home from ceremony and are intended to interact as a reference, research, and source material for the paintings inspiration. They double as creating a physical space to enter and be included within the vibrational area surrounding the art. Much of my visceral, experiential and cultural inspiration is supported with academic research and that is usually focused around ideas of re-indigenization, decolonization, and efforts engaged in moving towards post-colonial Indigenous futures and re-defined hybrid border cultures. I am also interested in dialogue about Indigenous and Settler/Colonial binary and acknowledging these intersecting histories. Thinkers that have influenced these ideas are Linda Tuihui Smith, Andrea Smith, Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Gloria Anzaldùa, Lisa Brooks, M. Jacqui Alexander, Taiaiake Alfred, Jeff Corntassel, Cornel Pewewardy, Dr. Michael Yellow-Bird and my father Al Smith. Dr. Yellow-Bird was here at PSU last Friday evening and I was very inspired about his work on neurodecolonization, which he describes as occurring during Indigenous ceremony, drumming, singing practices that attain mindfulness through changes in the physicality of our brains. This mindfulness creates empathy for life even with what are considered in-animate objects. He then described colonizers lack of empathy, which was a result of brain disorder, which inspired this painting. These ideas and use of text are powerful and I see different uses of paint to express different avenues of my artistic interests and practice.

Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy centers on students constructing their own visual language, understanding the nature and importance of their voice in relationship to the complex world outside of the classroom. As I reflect upon my academic career and how I construct knowledge and voice, it is clear my practice has been greatly influenced by an inter-tribal community, Indigenous cosmology, and alternative educational programs focused on family as well as individual student learning styles and experiences. These larger social formats of creating knowledge have been expanded in the communal learning space of art studios and labs and I favor teaching through example, verbal explanations of process, visual presentations of art historical examples, and hands on demonstrations. I learned the most through inter-tribal creation stories and epistemology that teach a holistic approach to learning and pedagogy as well as through course work aimed at imagining an emergence of postcoloniality. Much of my education happened outside of the classroom/studio and in Indigenous ceremony and talking circles. Growing up in these ways taught me the importance of visceral experiences that are led by example, which is stamped firm in my approach towards pedagogy. I do not claim to be beholden of any answers, my only aim is to empower others to critically develop thinking skills needed to make choices, visual and written, that share and express their ideas and individual social locations best. I want the students I work with to experience the process of expanding ideas, identities, and artistic expression through learning the imperative foundations rooted in visual art and design basics like: composition, drawing, grey scale, and color theory. My objective is for each person to have a stronger sense of themselves and what they want to say as innovative human beings in this world. I became a teacher naturally, in Indigenous communities apart of taking responsibility for your people is through leading by example. Some visceral learning methodologies I employ in the classroom include bringing in guest speakers, field trips to local art museums and galleries, shared drawing exercises, and interactive talking circles that function as critiques. These examples provide multiple modalities of learning and interaction for the students building relationships and a sense of trust and community in the classroom that I think strengthens the quality of art making, retention of processes learned, and the verbal aspect of sharing, expressing, and critical thinking.