pied midden: issue no.18 : land back : wild pigment project

“The only reparation for land is land.” ~ Madonna Thunder Hawk

“…The U.S. capitol building is made of slave-quarried aqua creek sandstone (contains quartz silica with bits of clay and prone to ocherous weathering) and is from 100 million year old earth on Indigenous Patawomeck and Manahoac land of the last several thousand years.” ~ Heidi Gustafson

land back

Working directly with pigments foraged from the land represents, to me, a willingness to confront all that the land carries: its history, its sacredness, its broken treaties, its environmental violations, and also, its healing, its familiarity, its love. 

To bend down and gather up a piece of the land where one stands is to invite responsibility for the knowledge and understanding of these histories. While it may seem logical or acceptable to regard the humble pebble at ones’ feet as both free-for-the taking because it’s “wild” and healthy and safe for human use because it’s “natural,” there are circumstances under which to do so may cause damage, to oneself, or to others. Sacred land need protection — contaminated land needs healing. This is precisely why the foraging and use of ones’ own wild pigments offers actual connection to the land: because it’s an acceptance of, and a deep engagement with these responsibilities. 

In the midst of the tragic scuffle that went on on the capitol this week, I’ve been urging my eyes away from the headlines to focus on another sort of protest, one that’s about the land: the 245-year-plus protest that’s been taking place on this continent since before the United States became an America. That’s how long the #landback movement’s been happening. The effort to restore stolen territory to Indigenous nations begins with land, because land carries all the other things that are part of what the movement calls back: culture back, language back, food sovereignty and clean air and water back. And for many, most significantly, the right to steward and protect the land, back. This is a different kind of ownership than the one transacted through monetary exchange.

That’s why, for the people who gave an extra burst of momentum and volume to Land Back this summer, no amount of money can buy off the land that was stolen from them, not even a billlllion dollars (which is I think about what was offered). In 1868, the Fort Laramie Treaty declared Pe’Sla, which is sacred to the Oceti Sakowin (made up of nearly sixty Native nations) and is also known as the Black Hills, to be reserved for the “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians.” In 1877, smelling gold in them there hills, the U.S. federal government broke the treaty and seized the land. In 1980, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the land had been taken unconstitutionally, and offered a cash settlement, which was immediately rejected, with the assertion, “The Black Hills are not for sale.”

This summer, as a certain someone (hint: currently inciting riots in the Capitol) was preparing to visit the giant monument to white supremacy and colonialism that was carved into that same sacred site in the 1930’s by a KKK sympathizer, the Lakota elders and other activists assembled a road block to greet him. The National Guard was called in fairly instantly to arrest 21 people during this verrrry dangerous peaceful protest, and #landback started to appear with increased fervor on social media. A movement was, if not reborn, re-infused, and at a time when the nationwide effort to confront systemic racism was mounting and bringing new energy to the generations-long campaigns to restore broken treaties and get back Indigenous land.

Has any land actually been given back? Relative to what was stolen, no. But: yes. In small ways, yes. Here are seven examples of land that has been returned to Native stewardship in recent times:

1. Duluwat Island. In June 2004, 67 acres of land, making up most of Duluwat Island, was returned to the Wiyot people. The Wiyot’s World Renewal Ceremony, which hadn’t been performed since it was interrupted by a massacre in 1860, was able to take place on the island once more.

2. Lisjan. In the heart of East Oakland is a traditional village site on Huchiun territory. The site was recently rematriated (finally! a term that makes sense) by Sogorea Te’, an urban organization led by Indigenous women. The quarter-acre village is home to ceremonial space, a garden for traditional medicinal and food plants, and an emergency response hub.

3. 1,2000 acres in Big Sur, California, the home of old-growth redwoods, condors, and red-legged frogs, have been given back to the formerly landless Esselen nation, which will share the land with other groups native to the area, including the Ohlone, the Amah Mutsun and the Rumsen people.

4.This one isn’t exactly land; it’s water. Following a long campaign by the Yurok Tribe and allied groups, four dams along the Klamath River are scheduled to be removed. This is a huge victory, because it means the salmon, an essential part of Yurok life, will be able to run in the river again.

5. The United Methodist Church recently gave back a plot of land in Ohio to the Wyandotte nation of Oklahoma, which once occupied the area before they were forcibly removed. The Church returned the land to honor and celebrate their positive relationship with the Wyandotte people.

6. In what is now Weogufka, Alabama, a group of Indigenous Maskoke people have reclaimed some of their ancestral homelands and are building a de-colonizing community, called Ekvnv Yefolecvlke, to cultivate language and culture and reestablish a number of culturally important species, such as bison and sturgeon. Read more about this incredible project here.

Lisjan traditional village in the heart of Oakland. Image from the Sogorea Te’ website.

While they may not be huge areas of land, these places, and the organizations behind them, are signs of something significant. They’re points in a growing network. When I look at a program like the one in its early stages now — the TEK Chico Project, which aims to create a trained workforce of Indigenous land stewards that can complete longterm contracts with the USDA to manage local forests — I jump up and down with excitement. The Chico project founder Ali Meders-Knight is a Mechoopda tribal member, mother of five, basket weaver, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge practitioner who also plans to start a school where students will learn about Traditional Ecological Knowledge by becoming intimately familiar with specific groups of both Native and invasive plants. (Much thanks to Kelly Moody of Groundshots Podcast for interviewing Ali and sharing this exciting news with us! You can listen to the whole, mega-inspiring interview here). 

“Indigenous sovereignty is climate action.” This is the healing cry of Idle No More, another women-led organization, this time based in Canada, of urban and rural Indigenous people working hand in hand with non-Indigenous allies to build a global movement for Indigenous rights and the protection of land, water and sky. It’s getting easier and easier to link hands (ok, just metaphorically, obviously — you win for now, covid) with like-minded people and give back to the communities that work to steward and protect the earth. This is reciprocal foraging— giving back for the gifts in our hands.

kalapuyas thriving

My personal connection to Land Back is through an incredible Yoncalla Kalapuya woman, Esther Stutzman. Twenty years ago, Esther read in the local newspaper that it was “so sad that the Kalapuya were an extinct people.” She and the other 300-plus Kalapuya people who grew up mostly in Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde or Confederated Tribes of Siletz communities after their ancestors were forcibly removed from the Willamette Valley, begged to differ.

Esther, who learned about Kalapuya culture and values through the oral tradition of story-telling passed to her by her grandmother, has done a lot to transmit Yoncalla Kalapuya culture in many different contexts. She’s told traditional stories publicly for decades, and she runs a language and culture camp for kids every summer. She’s also worked closely with a citizen group, the Citizens’ Planning Committee, in Springfield and Eugene, to establish a set of fifteen boulders carved with Yoncalla Kalapuya words, called ‘Talking Stones,’ in a large natural park that spans the two cities. The placement of the Talking Stones in the park led to the renaming of a major bridge (the ‘Whilamut Passage Bridge’) in the area with a Yoncalla Kalapuya word  — a big triumph for the whole community.  

Esther’s family has what I wish were not an unusual history. They lived in Western Oregon on the Upper Umpqua River and shared a valley with the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua. Esther told me that in 1848, the Applegate family contacted Chief Halo, her great-great-grandfather, and asked if three Applegate brothers could come and establish farms in his valley. The story has it that Chief Halo, also known as Camafeema (meaning “ferns-on-the-ground”), felt that the Applegates were good people who would help the Kalapuyas defend themselves from other settlers who were less-than-friendly. He wasn’t wrong. In 1856, when Superintendent of Indian Affairs Joel Palmer began the removal proceedings to the permanent Grand Ronde Reservation in the Coast Range, he started with the Kalapuya people. Chief Halo refused to go, saying, at gunpoint, “I will not go to a strange land.” And Charles Applegate, it’s said, came to his defense and offered to allow Chief Halo and his family to remain on his land claim, building a house for them there in Yoncalla. 

I met Esther in her house on that same land. She lives next door to Susan Applegate, a descendant of the original Applegate family. The two have a marvelous, supportive friendship, and have many stories that I hope to hear some day about how they met each other and came to live side by side on the land of their ancestors. Susan is a marvelous painter who, working with Esther, has made beautiful detailed images of Yoncalla Kalapuya lifeways. 

This lovely photo of Esther Stutzman at the Northweast Indian Storytelling Festival was taken by Treothe Joseph Bullock on October 26th, 2014, and is from his blog at treoth.wordpress.com, at this link.

I’ve named this month’s Ground Bright pigment, which I foraged here on Mohawk Kalapuya lands, in honor of Esther’s ancestor, Camafeema. 22% of Ground Bright’s net proceeds for the month will go to support the summer camp which Esther runs (though of course not for now— ‘can you imagine trying to socially distance 60 kids???’ Esther wrote to me in an email this week.) According to Susan, though, when the kids do come back, there’ll be a nice surprise waiting for them: land. Someone has rematriated a piece of land to Esther and the Komemma Cultural Protection Association, where the educational camp can happen, and where they can grow an Indigenous garden. See what I mean? Slowly but surely.

me and other animals

So, this is the time in the newsletter where I usually highlight the work of the Ground Bright contributor, and this time…it’s me. I feel a little shy! Ok. Phew. Here goes: I have something exciting to share. I’ve been invited to exhibit my work in a group show at form & concept gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, opening this month on Jan. 29th. I have a lot of respect for form & concept. Over the years I’ve seen the gallery exhibit a wide range of artists, many them doing radical work and engaging issues of racial, social and environmental justice. ‘form & concept’ is nested in Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, run by Sandy Bennett, who established form & concept to “expand and explore the boundaries of perceived distinction between art, craft and design.” She even says, “We believe that these realms are interdependent and form the nexus of creativity in today’s world”! Well, I do too. 

The show my work will be part of is called Family Room, and the theme focuses on chosen family and queer living spaces. Curator Jordan Eddy (also the form & concept director) says the room in the gallery reserved for the show will feel a little like that moment in Where the Wild Things Are where Max’s bedroom hovers between inside and outside. The room will seem at first like an ordinary living room, but on closer inspection will reveal depth and mystery affiliated with wild places. Though I didn’t make the work that will be in the show with any of this in mind, I’m extremely honored to be included in such a vision.  (That image, btw, in Sendak’s book has haunted me since the moment I first saw it. When I was invited, as a kid, to choose the carpet and wallpaper for my bedroom myself, I tried to get as close to that bedroom-in-transition as I could, with somewhat disturbing results. Think: giant bunnies with cabbages on a black background. Very 80s. The sky-with-rainbows-and-clouds paper was out-of-stock.) 

The paintings in the show (one of which includes the pale violet ‘Camafeema’ pigment) are part of an ongoing series I began in 2017, called Other Animals I Almost See. It’s an expression of my longing to see non-human animals, in their bodies, not as cartoon silhouettes of their shapes, but as people engaged in their own relationships and emotions. Seeing other animals used to be, for humans, a common experience. Now, the bodies of other animals are so rarely glimpsed in urban and suburban Westernized life that those of us in such settings associate animal shapes mostly with children. When we do see other animals, we see them far away, or fleetingly, as smears or flashes. And yet, this is still seeing, This is what we have.

The first half of this series was painted in 2017, during a time when I was foraging for pigments, but still holding back on using them exclusively in my paintings, partly because I wanted to understand more about the history of the land where I was foraging before I embraced the pigments whole-heartedly. The second half of the series was painted this winter, 2020, and almost all the pigments are ones I gathered myself. The only exception is gamboge, a brilliant yellow toxic sap from a tree in Cambodia. It was so much a part of the first set of paintings that it felt important to bring it into the second set, and I still have a small chunk of it left from my pigment-buying days, so I used it. Much could be said about the history of this brilliant sap — another time.

Oh, and there is one other piece of mine in the Family Room show. It’s a giant, extremely heavy set of map drawers that I’ve spent the last few years filling with color tests and altered, painted found objects — seeds, nut husks, driftwood, waste wood, rocks, plastic flotsam, wasps’ nests. Jordan thought it would be perfect in the room, and serendipitously, his family happens to live in the same town as I do. When he visited for the holidays, he drove here in a rented van, into which he and two of his (very kind) siblings loaded what we affectionately dubbed ‘drawer-beast’ (her official name is GUIDELINES FOR TOUCHING EVERYTHING HERE) into the van, where she fit with, I kid you not, precisely ONE inch to spare. Jordan and I were ecstatic.

If you’d like to see the contents of drawer-beast, I think you’ll be able to take a virtual tour, starting on Jan. 29th. You should be able to find details at the form & concept website as we get closer to the date.

To see more of my work, you can click on over to tilkeelkins.com or check me out on Instagram at @tilkefinn.

pigment poetics

And one last piece of news from my end: this Spring, I’ll be co-teaching a course, called The Poetics of Pigment,’ with the amazing artist-poet-educator Daniela Naomi Molnar. Daniela founded the Art and Ecology program at Pacific Northwest College of Art, is a faculty member of Signal Fire’s Wide Open Studios educational trips, and teaches a range of topics with the Sitka Center for Art + Ecology, Literary Arts, and Portland Fine Art Guild. Her haunting paintings about the spaces left behind when glaciers vanish were recently featured in the LA Times.

The course we’ve crafted together is a deep delve into pigments and poeisis, pigments and cultural/social/ecological history, pigments as collaborators, and more. We’ll also have a very special guest (TBA) leading one of the classes. It’s a thinking/reading/discussing/writing kind of class, not a skills and techniques class. I’m totally stoked to have this opportunity to really explore the ideas and poetry inherent in pigments with Daniela, who has devoted much creative time and research to the topics of color and pigment. We’ll be doing mini meditations, creative visualizations, and all sorts of riveting stuff. Enrollment opens on January 18th, so please stay tuned until then for details. If you know you’re interested, feel free to write to me at info@wildpigmentproject.org. The class is filling up already!

Dye bundle with seagrass ties, before and after unfurling. Photos by Equitable Opportunity Scholar Shereen Hussain Khan.

scholarships

Last July, Wild Pigment Project established its Equitable Opportunity Scholarship to provide funding for artists self-identifying as members of underinvested or marginalized communities or populations. The Scholarship was granted to two artists, Shereen Hussain Khan, in South East England, and Simone Johnson, in Brooklyn, New York.

Shereen applied her scholarship to Australian dye legend India Flint’s ‘Conscious Clothing’ online course. India generously gifted Shereen with an extra course, called ’String Things.’ She been describes her experience with the courses here:

There was a period where I felt a bit lost in pigment. I was not sure in how many directions pigmenting material could go. Embarking on the course, I was gifted an extra course in string theory. A place for those fingers that like to twiddle and twist. A place for that box of scraps, not quite long enough for most things, but too much to waste. There are seasonal things, the yucca, the sweetcorn husks and a patch I found of seagrass, nourishment for the gut, hands and hearts.

All these things questioned in the past,

so fibrous but how to make them work.

The look out beyond a given roll of string,

to oh wow, how long a piece of fabric becomes.

I had worried about that point where I need to bundle and I would run out of string.

There was now many a way to work with the tides

a summers breeze,

the falling leaves

and fabric from a rainy day.

Puzzles to many problems solved, with a piece of scrap

Sometimes a plait.

Turns out I need longer to work on my leaf printing abilities. I cheated the leaves by shoving in waste petals. I found that one bundle does not pull all the colour from the matter and the more patient you can be with leaving a cooked bundle, the bigger the surprise. India makes black from iron; decomposition can do that too like two types of elemental decay to renew and working with circles within cycles. The whole process enabled a ground approach and a learning more about the gentle aspects in nature around us and with an ever-changing environment. It has left me thirsty and more grateful to the slow, innovative and natural process in the harmonies between earth, nature and water.

Here's the before the frost bundles, with Seagrass for a salty string mordant and flower choices inspired by my Aunties curry mix, a bit of this and a bit of that. (see images above)

I’ve really enjoyed corresponding with Shereen these past few months. She’s sent me volumes of incredible research she’s done on pigments and color. Thank you Shereen, for sharing these, and also for your brilliance in connecting so many aspects of pigments together in a rich web!

You can find Shereen’s work on instagram at @shereen.h.k

1. Eastern Prickly Pear from Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Queens, New York 2. Rocks from Bundy Hill Swamp in Pawling, New York  3.Earth pigment from the Graniteville Swamp in Staten Island, New York  4. Graniteville Swamp in Staten Island, New York.

All photos by Simone Johnson

Simone Johnson chose to apply her scholarship to a remote Wild Pigment Project mentorship with me. Simone is an artist whose practice includes painting, dance, writing and performance, and a long-term project called ‘Painting Wetland Medicine.’ Here’s what Simone says about our time together:

Where to begin! I have thoroughly enjoyed learning about wild pigments from Tilke. When I started Painting Wetland Medicine I knew that I wanted to make interpretative drawings and paintings of wetlands with mineral paints, but I had no idea I would later develop an interest in plant based pigments and ink making, especially after Tilke introduced me to ink maker Marjorie Morgan. I also really love clay and want to explore clay and pottery more, and how this can be incorporated into my project. Learning from Tilke has been wonderful, we have talked about reciprocal foraging, color, memory, alchemy, opening up lines of communication with land and listening, geology and different ways to get to know a place. All of our conversations are being applied to Painting Wetland Medicine and just my life in general.

I'm currently crushing up rocks from three different wetlands in Munsee Lenape, Canarsie and Wappinger lands (areas in New York), researching the history of wetlands in the U.S. and creating a wetland steward/wetland sanctuary community. Thanks so much Tilke for sharing your thoughts, ideas and experiences with me, I'm really excited to continue growing in my wild pigment practice! 

Simone has posed mind-opening questions that have stimulated many areas of research for me. I’m very honored to have been chosen for this collaborative exploration with you, Simone. Thank you so much for all we’ve shared… so far!

You can find Simone’s work at dancewithsimone.wordpress.com or on instagram at @sjj.nyc

coming this way…

Here at Wild Pigment Project, I’m doing a little work on a fund raiser for the next round of Equitable Opportunity Scholars who, by the way, are offered the opportunity to study pigments with anyone they feel drawn to study with, anywhere in the world. The event will be an…auction!…of pigment sets donated by pigment practitioners and artists. It’s going to be pretty fabulous, I think. If you’d like to donate pigment sets (three pigments or more, in whatever form you love: dry pigment, ink, paint or dye) and/or you’d like to be on a list to receive info about participating in the auction, please email me at info@wildpigmentproject.org.

Or, if you just wanna say hi, hello, I love to hear from you always!

All for Now… 

Stay With the Land,

<3 Tilke

A frosty winter morning here in Kalapuya lands. Photo by Tilke Elkins.