pied midden: issue no.10 : listen to how it feels : wilson wewa jr, nancy pobanz
Reference library of sixty raw earth pigment colors collected by Nancy Pobanz in the high desert of southeastern Oregon, from 1997 to 2010. Photo courtesy of Nancy Pobanz.
coyote writings
“How do you feel about a person like me, a descendent of white settlers, gathering pigments and using them?” I asked Northern Paiute elder, Wilson Wewa Jr., not too long ago. I’d had a very vivid experience on some land in the Oregon desert, and, curious about its history, had called the Warm Springs Desert Museum. They told me that I’d been on Northern Paiute land, and gave me Wilson Wewa’s phone number.
“If it feels right, then it’s right,” Wilson told me. “If it feels wrong, then it’s wrong. You listen to how it feels. I gather lots of different pigments — yellow and purple and white and red,” he added. “I go out there in the east and gather a special white pigment. But then there’s a mine out there that mines that pigment and that’s just wrong.”
Wilson said I should buy his book, Legends of the Northern Paiute, on Amazon. He said I’d find a story in it about the place I was curious about. He told me some details of the story, which lent credence to the vivid feelings I’d had on the land. I ordered the book so I could read more. And, at the back, I found Wilson’s reflections on the significance of “Coyote writings” on Northern Paiute land — pictographs (paintings on rock) and petroglyphs (carvings on rock) made by ancients.
Wilson writes that the Coyote writings are not made by just anybody. They’re sacred writings created by holy people — medicine men — who held exclusive rights to use the ceremonial red ochre commonly used in most of the pictographs. More rare are the writings made with white, black, or even yellow paint, Wilson says.
I especially like his description of the Coyote writings:
“[T]here are representations of snakes and lizards and water bugs, and even those writings and images that people call mythical creatures. Well, among our people, even to this day, there’s a few of us left that believe in the reality of those creatures. They’ve never left. They’re still here.
These are things that make those sites holy. It really causes me deep anguish when I visit sites that have been vandalized, sometimes with spray paint, charcoal, or white chalk. […] To the Indian people that’s very disrespectful, because to us those holy places are just like a cathedral or a church. They’re just like an archive you might find at the Vatican or in the Smithsonian. They tell a story about the people that were here — and the people that are still here. It’s part of our continuing history.” —- excerpt from Legends of the Northern Paiute, by Wilson Wewa Jr.
When I asked Wilson if he used the pigments he gathered to make paint, he said no, he used them for ceremony. But he mentioned that once he had met a woman who had a collection of pigments from all over the desert, pigments she used for paint. About a year later, I met that woman myself. Her name is Nancy Pobanz, and she’s been collecting and painting with stone pigments since 1996.
Artist Nancy Pobanz on location as artist-in-resident, near Burns, Oregon.
pigment revelation
Nancy grew up in Ontario, Oregon, in the high desert. As a young adult, she left the desert and sought out the lushness of green vegetation — in Washington State, and for a time, in the Philippines. As a kid, she’d grown up helping her mom, a potter, dig wild clay. He dad, who travelled for work, had a multi-colored collection of soil samples he’d gathered from road cuts, admiring their variation. But it wasn’t until Nancy returned to the desert for a visit after years in green places that she came to share her dad’s love of desert hues. On the drive out to Ontario, she was struck by the beauty in the variegated hills, and gathered a wide range of pigments during the trip, thinking she’d bring them back to her studio and match them with her set of acrylic paints. In a flash of insight that would transform the way she worked forever, she asked, “Why try to copy these mineral pigments with my acrylic paints when I can just use the earth itself?!”
Notating, by Nancy Pobanz; dry pigments on paper. Image courtesy of Nancy Pobanz
Pigment chart; dry pigments on paper. Image courtesy of Nancy Pobanz
In 2016, Nancy teamed up with archeologist Patrick O’Grady, of the University of Oregon Museum of Natural & Cultural History, to become the artist-in-residence at Rimrock Draw Rockshelter, an archaeological dig in Harney County, Oregon. The site is an important prehistoric archaeological dig that is changing the way scientists look at Paleoindian emergence in North America.
Nancy camps with the crew for four-to-six weeks each summer, and spends hours observing the painstaking process of excavation and analysis while engaging in her own creative practice — drawing, writing, and taking photographs. Occasionally, Wilson Wewa Jr and other Northern Paiute elders come to have conversations with the team that is slowly uncovering the dwelling place of the ancient desert ancestors in the name of science.
‘Solitary’ by Nancy Pobanz; dry pigments on paper. Image courtesy of Nancy Pobanz
Pigment chart; dry pigments on paper. Image courtesy of Nancy Pobanz
Nancy writes about her experience in the desert:
As artist-in-residence on the Rimrock Draw Rockshelter archaeological site, […] I am filled with an enormous amount of inspiration for my work. O’Grady’s interest in having me join the dig is that he believes the combination of art and science leads to a more holistic understanding of the site and landscape. As he has said, I bring an approach that’s already earth-based since I work with raw earth pigments that I have collected in southeast Oregon since 1996.
During the field season, I camp with the crew off the grid in the high desert for 4 - 6 weeks. Camping near the site enables me to immerse myself in the locale and to study in-depth the natural history of the region. It is well worth the extreme inconveniences of camping to experience the full impact of life in the high desert/sagebrush steppe land.
“Place” is essential to the conception of my ideas, so it is important that I spend a considerable amount of time in the field. My documentation includes drawing, taking photographs, collecting earth color, making color studies and hiking the terrain. I draw the crew at work, as well as the landscape, the plants and animals; I twist sagebrush, milkweed, dogbane, cattail and other native fibers into cordage; I boil sagebrush and bitterbrush to make ink; I shape bone to make tools and writing implements; I cut large feathers into quills; and recently learned from noted lithic analyst Dan Stueber to peck stone to make “paint pots.”
For the crew, I teach drawing, talk about my process and my use of pigments and point out that color is everywhere. While the digging is going on, I check excavated bits of possible pigments (however, for me, it’s like a pig sniffing out truffles: I don’t get to keep the colors!) and have taught the crew to test for color with the same technique.
There are many possibilities where scientists could engage artists to enhance their research while expanding the vision of what art can be. As Pat has stated, “We talk about the left and the right brain - we need to put those hemispheres together - it’s all one brain.”
Thank you, Nancy, for sharing your work with us! And thank you, also, for your kind contribution of pigment for this month’s Ground Bright subscribers. ~ WPP
Pigment from Comb Wash, Utah: contributed to Wild Pigment Project by Nancy Pobanz for this month’s Ground Bright subscription offering.
not time to give up on bears ears
Nancy Pobanz was given this sunrise-colored iron oxide pigment by a friend who gathered it years ago in a place where it made up most of the landscape (the dirt roads there are all this color!), in Comb Wash, Utah. Comb Wash is just south of Bears Ears National Monument. In case you haven’t followed the Bears Ears controversy, the Monument was proclaimed by President Barak Obama in 2016, in recognition of its sacredness to five Native nations — the Navaho Nation, Hopi, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni. In 2017, the administration of the dude-who-shall-not-be-mentioned reduced the original Monument lands by 85%, from over two-thousand square miles, to a mere 315 square miles.
Legal teams have filed lawsuits to challenge this drastic reduction, which many legal scholars say is not authorized by law, under the Antiquities Act. This winter, according to the Grand Canyon Trust, a group of investment managers representing $113 billion in assets sent a letter to fossil fuel and mining companies, urging them not to take advantage of the gutted monument protections. The investors warned that logging junipers in the desert with a chain dragged between tractors, drilling for oil, and mining for uranium in sacred sites containing pictographs and ancient dwellings was unlikely to sit well with the public, and could put companies “at significant risk of public backlash and stranded assets, should… protections be restored by the courts or by future administrations.” Um, yeah.
The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition is heavily involved in the legal proceedings and needs as much support as they can get. The Tribes have drafted a plan for the future of Bears Ears designed to protect the health and well being of many future generations of humans and other beings.
22% of this month’s Ground Bright proceeds will be donated to the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition. If you know someone who would like to subscribe, now’s a good time to spread the word.
That’s all for now! If you’d like to read back issues of Pied Midden, now it’s easy. Just go to NEWS on the Wild Pigment Project website.
Also — do you think these newsletters are too long? If you’ve made it this far, maybe you don’t, but — I’d love to hear your thoughts! Please write to me, Tilke Elkins, at info@wildpigmentproject.org.
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Tilke
