pied midden: issue no.11 : diversify outdoors : hosanna white

Dye materials used by members of the Avani collective, founded by Rashmi Bharti.

nearly everything we know

The majority of the knowledge about botanical and mineral pigments in the world today comes from BIPOC communities and individuals. Some of the most experienced pigment workers aren’t on Instagram. Take, for example, the 700 plus artisan dyers and farmers in the Avani collective in Uttarakhand, India, who makes dyes like the gorgeous green extracted from the invasive plant, ageratina adenophora (read more about collective founder, Rashmi Bharti). On this continent, there’s Navaho dyer Irene Clarke, who dyes wool for her woven rugs with blue-grays from Hopi blue corn, rich orange rusts from parmelia molluscula lichen, and pale greens from sagebrush (some fellows are in the process of making a movie about her and her work…). Or Isabele Deschinny, another Navajo dyer and weaver who dyes with 78 different herbs, berries and flowers. She took best of show at the Navajo Nation Fair’s fine arts competition last year and is working on a dye recipe book.

I’ve recently been exploring the work of Aboubakar Fofana, an artist and designer in Mali who does exquisite work with indigo and mineral mud dyes, and also the work of another Malian dyer, Boubacar Doumbia, a contemporary mudcloth artist and founder of Ndomo, an apprenticeship program which trains young people in mudcloth arts. I found Aboubakar Fofana through Botanical Colors, the sustainable textile dye company in Seattle, founded by Kathy Hattori.

My own wild pigments education has been heavily informed and guided by the work of BIPOC pigment practitioners. My mentor, Melonie Ancheta is an endless wealth of knowledge and innovative research and thinking about Native pigment use on the PNWC — and, she’s organizing the first ever exclusively mineral pigment-focused symposium in the country. I’ve also been inspired by conversations with paint-maker Anong Migwans Beam, who lives on Manitoulin Island, in Canada, and Seattle watercolor artist and forager Julie Kim. Last week, Yorta Yorta artist and designer Lorraine Brigdale and I met over Zoom and she showed me silvery mica she gathers on the land. It sparkled in the bright winter sunlight.

The events of recent weeks have opened more pathways for me to connect with BIPOC artists. So much information is being shared, and there’s a rising understanding that highlighting the work of BIPOC artists is a powerful and welcome thing for white people to do, which makes it easier to put away shyness and connect. This is an exciting time, when the massive group effort to end rascism and dissolve white supremacy is kicking open doors for all of us.

black lives matter outdoors

Black Lives Matter, and Black Lives Matter in wild places. My mission with Wild Pigment Project — and really, my life’s work — is to help people connect in intimate, physical ways to the land, through foraging and paint-making, because I believe these bonds are crucial to perpetuating life on the planet. But rural foraging and paint-making aren’t accessible to people who feel unwelcome or unsafe in the outdoors. If BIPOC artists interested in wild pigments can’t explore that interest because they feel unsafe in parks and on forest service land, then this work is failing. And white pigment practitioners and artists like me have a responsibility to actively break down barriers to outdoor diversity.

BIPOC organizations have been addressing the lack of diversity in wild places for years. Outdoor Afro, Wild Diversity, and Melanin Base Camp, to name just a few. They’ve looked at the many ways that National and State parks and other outdoor places in North America create unappealing environments for BIPOCs and have come up with some significant ways that that could change.

Telling BIPOC stories in National Parks by including the Indigenous histories of those places and creating monuments to other POCs and POC events is a big one. So is including diverse images in promotional material for outdoor spaces, and hiring BIPOCs to work as rangers (paid youth internships really help make this happen). And here’s another: demilitarizing the look of the ranger! In the United Kingdom, park rangers changed their look from cop to outdoor enthusiast by donning hooded sports jackets. Perhaps most significant of all — making it easy to get to outdoor places. Making National Parks free for first-time visitors. Having park administrators approach city transit authorities and charter bus companies to figure out ways to make it free/affordable for everyone to get to green spaces. 

To my BIPOC readers: if you have ideas about how Wild Pigment Project can better represent and reach BIPOCs, and push for outdoor diversity, I’d be grateful to hear your thoughts. If you know BIPOC artists or pigment practitioners who you think could benefit from Wild Pigment Project, I’d love to connect. And to my white readers —  I welcome your introductions and ideas as well — in addition to your participation in focusing, in your social media accounts, or your friend groups, on how to dramatically increase diversity in the outdoor places you love.

Urban foraging for food and medicine, of course, is practiced in many BIPOC communities. For recent immigrants, foraging is a way connect with the community, their culture, and the environment. Not only does urban foraging address food justice issues, it’s a good lead in to foraging for ink and paint materials as well. Supporting inner city community gardens fosters opportunities for people to connect with the land where they live and the plants that grow there. The fight for the survival of community gardens in Manhattan and the Bronx through the incredible group More Gardens formed the basis of my education as an activist and showed me the significance of cultivating relationships with nature in cities.

happy birthday, ground bright!

July marks Ground Bright’s first birthday. It’s been a year since I started writing this newsletter and mailing out little packets of pigment every month. That first month, 22 (yes, it’s my magic number!) people signed up for Ground Bright. The first pigment was a green celadonite pigment I gathered on the banks of the Willamette River. I donated $32.68 to Kommema Cultural Protection Agency, an organization chaired by Kalapuya elder Esther Stutzman, dedicated to researching the Kalapuya Peoples.

This month, Ground Bright donates 22% of net profits to Rural Organizing Project, a group based in Cottage Grove, Oregon with a mission to bring rural folks together to fight racism and inequity. They organize protests, and host a podcast called Rural Roots Rising to interview rural Oregonians from diverse backgrounds. Hosanna White, contributor of this month’s GB pigment, Golden Vein, lives near Cottage Grove. She chose ROP to be our donee.

Rural Oregonians protest for Immigrant Justice.

start where you are

Together with the subscribers and contributors and the many of you who spread the word about Wild Pigment Project, we’ve raised more than $2,000 since last July for land and cultural stewardship groups that support Indigenous communities and/or land stewardship in the places where the pigment contributed to Ground Bright originates. To me, this is reciprocity in action, however small scale; a giving back to the place that provided. And sure, $2,000 may be small change, but for an artist who’s lived for years with a lesser balance in my bank account, it feels fantastic. I’ve proven to myself that you don’t have to wait to make money to start giving money, especially when you do it as part of a community effort. You can start where you are. I think a lot of people have been proving that to themselves lately!

golden vein

Hosanna White and I first crossed paths when I taught a class in paint-making at a solstice gathering. We hadn’t seen each other in a very long time, until a friend of mine told me, “You have to talk to Hosanna! She keeps telling me about all the special minerals she’s finding, and she’s been making lots of paint!” Hosanna had really run with the inspiration she found in the class, even going on to teach it herself recently. She’s also co-directed an incredible mentoring program called Nature’s Mystery, which helps girls going through the threshold years between kid and grown-up by guiding them to have powerful experiences outside. She’s a painter and a potter deep into exploring open pit firing. She lives in community on land in rural western Oregon, and processes huge quantities of fallen acorns to make into flour every fall. 

Since we live in roughly the same area, we decided it would be fun to go together to the place where Hosanna had already gathered a lot of the pigment for the month. On our trip, we hatched a plan to co-describe our experience. What follows is the result.

Hosanna’s writing appears in regular font — mine is in italics. She photographed the first two images — the rest are mine.

may 19th, 2020

It's one of those typical Oregon spring days, where the whole drive out past the lake, through the countryside, and up the forest road was an unapologetic downpour. Yet, the moment we step out of our vehicles, the clouds clear and the sun greets us. I'm excited to share this special spot with Tilke.

Tilke and I first met seven years ago, which was also the first time I had ever considered that paint-making was accessible and not just some industrialized process and product. We spent a few short hours together at an ancestral skills gathering crushing rocks and painting with the gritty powders. I have always been a lover of color and felt so grateful to her for bringing this knowledge and new passion into my life. Over the years both of our relationships with pigments have continued to deepen.

We get out of our cars and stand in the rain, smiling big smiles and staring at each other, the hug we can’t hug between us. “I wish I could hug you!” and “I know!!” are our greetings. We walk, socially distanced by the bump of the road, and Hosanna tells me about how she found this place one day when she took a drive to explore the area, but with no destination in mind. “I stopped to turn around just when I saw that the name of the road was something relating to ‘earth’ and ‘fire’, and I’m a potter so I was like, I have to go up there. Only three days earlier someone had mentioned that there was a large, historic kaolinite deposit somewhere in the area. When I got here, I actually DROVE up this road we’re walking on, and it was terrifying and I almost got stuck. But, it’s an incredible place. I’m so excited to show it to you. Just look at this.” 

The ground is covered in multicolored stones. We stop every few feet to pick them up and take in their richness. Bright yellow ochres, purple hematites, iron oxide, and pure white!  Tilke rubs her finger on a vein of white in the road way and its smooth and creamy. “It’s just paint already, right here!” she says. 

The steep embankment cut by the road continually reveals captivating geological masterpieces of iron-stained paintings. We stop to revel in the hues, the contrasting colors, the textures of the stones. The iron stains look like toad skin, like leopard print, like an ancient language.  Some minerals allow the iron to soak in and saturate, while others are washed on the surface. The beauty and peacefulness of this moment is my favorite part of working with pigments.

Hosanna is searching the rock wall behind some Doug Fir saplings growing in the road way. This spot is familiar to her. “Here it is!” she exclaims, and I follow along six feet behind her. The bank is a sulfurous pale yellow, collapsing in chunks of violet-white in places and stained all over with veins of rust. Hosanna moves away so I can see what she’s looking at — a flush of tropical sea-green dapples, enamel-hard, like fish-skin speckle. I find a flake at the base and hold it up to the pale yellow so I can really see the turquoise. “This place is crazy!” we say. “There’s so much going on here!”

We are in our happy place. We are in a mist, the forest is quiet, the air is fresh. We are walking in an open air gallery. We later learn that this site has attracted much attention since the 1930’s, but it wasn’t about the view or the numerous mineral masterpieces. As we meander further, we see why.

We arrive at a large quarry; a triple-tiered ascension of collapsing pale grey-white eroded slag.  At its base, melted plastic, beer cans, charred wood, and some shattered laptop motherboards. Tilke confirms my wondering, saying she thinks that this must be the historic kaoline quarry I'd heard about.  She remembers her jar of white kaolinite powder at home, which she uses to make gesso, and says the white powdery rock in the quarry looks just like it.  

By the 1940’s, this place had mined and shipped away 15,000 tons of clay. The openness of the mountain is looming. We scramble up the steep slope, where we find an excavated cavern just big enough to duck in.  The hollow is made of ochre. It is the walls and ceiling. It is soft to touch and crumbles to the ground. The yellow is stark against the gray-white kaolinite all around. I am thrilled to find some soft limonite for the solstice Ground Bright contribution, to add to the many limonite rocks I’ve already ground and prepared.

While Hosanna crouches in the ochre hollow, I become transfixed by an unusual coloration on some of the rock shards in the slag. The body of the rock is itself the same pale, dusky grey, but it's shot through with fluorescent orange intrusions that I first mistake for lichen. I break one of the rocks open and inside is a small pocket of cherry-red with a honeycomb texture. I instinctively feel wary. It reminds me of something special and poisonous. So red...must be prized as a pigment. Could it be cinnabar, I wonder? Cinnabar, otherwise known as mercury sulphide, is a bright red mineral, oft referred to as "the most toxic mineral known to humanity." I hastily put it down and take a picture.

Later, I'm glad I did. After a little research, I find out it’s not cinnabar, but another poisonous mineral, called realgar, which contains arsenic. Like cinnabar, realgar was used to make a bright red pigment for centuries in both Asia and Europe. Orpiment, often found alongside realgar, was one of the few clear, bright-yellow pigments available to artists until the 1800s, though its toxicity and incompatibility with other pigments made artists uneasy. 

The walls of white are captivating. It’s hard to forget though that this place where we stand was opened up by machines. As we climb further up the road, we see the work of machines on the landscape in the endless expanse of Oregon clearcuts extending into the horizon. The colors we’re collecting are a part of this place. Their paint will continue to tell these stories. We walk with this complexity, savoring the beauty of the natural world, and feeling the grief of its loss.

The variation in the stones at our feet is somehow a comfort. The stone body of the ground itself is pied, molten, unpredictable, and impervious to ordering. Well, almost. Hosanna points to a sort of color wheel of stones on the ground —purples, yellows, red-pinks, with white at the center. 'I made this with my four-year-old friend Sequoia last time we were up here,' she says smiling. 

I recognize the wheel from Hosanna’s Instagram feed, where the beauty of its perfect gradients had stunned me from the small square on the screen. The richness and variation of its colors had felt nearly impossible then. Here, on the vastness of the hillside, in the enormity of the endless clearcuts, surrounded by its many pied stone brothers and sisters, it’s much smaller, and more possible, and….so much more beautiful.

what’s mine? i mean, what’s a mine

Looking for pigments at the old mine with Hosanna was a first for me. I’d actually never done that — foraged at a mine for pigments. 

The place was filled with wonders that completely entranced me…that the deep dark Earth could be this multi-colored! This varied! This brimming with surprise and wonder. It’s one thing to pick up stones on a river bank, which is how I’ve foraged most of my pigments. It’s another to see whole walls of undulating color, in bright unusual hues. Northern Paiute elder Wilson Wewa Jr told me how messed up he thought mines were — how mining the Earth for pigment felt absolutely wrong. He told me, ‘If it feels right, it’s right. If it feels wrong, it’s wrong.’ There’s no question that a mine feels wrong. But is it wrong to go there? Is there something good that can come of visiting a hurt place?

I don’t know if it’s right for me to be there, least of all gather pigments there. Gathering sand or rocks by hand, and picking up human trash, all while witnessing the place and understanding that this is what it takes to make things out of metal — feels like an important teaching.

The mine was a bizarre, open, gaping anomaly. I think Hosanna describes it well with the phrase “opened up by machines.” In the midst of forests removed by machines. I’ve lived in Oregon for nearly two decades now. I’ve slowly learned how to walk in the clearcuts and see what remains in the wreckage — the new plants, the body of the earth itself. But being there doesn’t make my stomach hurt any less than it used to. And, the violence to the earth wrought by mines is a deeper and more lasting violence than any other we perform here. Metal and large-scale mining may well the the origins of what’s gone wrong.

The spot we visited was last mined in the 1940s, not for its kaolinite so much as for its aluminum, as part of the war effort. I feel different, having seen it, and walked in it, and touched it. Just as touching ochre and seeing it become paint shifted my relationship to pigment from “red-that-comes-in-a-tube” to “red-that-comes-from-the-ground,” the mine has connected me to what it means to build a world out of the rock body of the Earth, with explosives, machines, and fire. Not just because I’ve seen it, but because I wanted some of what was there.

Thank you for reading. Please write, if any of this moves you to share your thoughts with me. I love to hear from you.

Until Next Time,

<3 Tilke

*** Addenda: I just learned, in an Instagram post by ochre whisperer Heidi Gustafson, that a 46,000 year old sacred Indigenous ochre rock shelter in the Juukan Gorge in Western Australia was blown up on June 1st by the mining giant Rio Tinto, despite years of protest and action by the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people. The devastation is unfathomable.