Entering the Basketscape. What a wonderful introduction to the final chapter. Julia shares more stories and baskets. Enjoy. Try to set aside your past experiences with art/ art shows and just listen and look. Continue to share your stories as you read.
Let me know if you are having any time frame issues with the final creative project or responses.
Scrape the Willow, Prologue and Chapter One - Response
ReplyDeleteI think the concept of subjective truth is represented by the words “undercurrents” and “unspoken” in this prologue. I appreciated the author’s use of these words/concepts and her rejection of the Western idea of absolute or objective truth in transmitting Julia’s story. In communicating why she chose to do this she writes poignantly, “…from Julia I have learned that veracity manifests not in factual absolutes but in underlying currents of meaning.” (Pg. xx) I thought that this was a very beautiful way to hint at the complexity of meaning present in multiple perspectives of varied circumstances within points in history. I also thought it was helpful that the author acknowledged the subjectivity of her own perspective while writing, as it provided context for her lens while reading Julia’s story.
To be honest, I was not terribly familiar with what kinds of things specifically happened during the process of assimilation for Native Americans. For example, I was extremely troubled when I read about how the boarding schools were intended to “civilize”, as their ideology conveyed a disturbing and false declaration of Western superiority/Native American inferiority. Although I was familiar with the relentless insistence on romanticizing and imposing American expectations with regard to “authentic” experiences of Native people it was enlightening to consider how the standards of “Indianness” were represented in the specimen-like photographic approach of Edward Curtis.
Scrape the Willow, Prologue and Chapter One - Response Continued
ReplyDeleteI can relate to certain aspects surrounding cultural performance. As a teenager, I suddenly became aware of my appearance in relation to others. At that time others began to point out differences such as my non-normative features—my bone structure as an Ashkenazi Jew and my frizzy hair. I am not a vain person, but at the time I felt different and therefore ugly. I began straightening my hair and secretly wished that I would break my nose somehow and have to get plastic surgery. Of course there were other things going on in my life at the time that contributed to my low self-esteem, but I think a lot of it had to do with feeling like an outsider in a primarily Anglo-Saxon Christian population. I was fortunate to have been a part of a wonderful Jewish community through my synagogue, but at school I definitely felt alone. Strangely, as I got older I started to feel like I wasn’t really a Jewish person either. I began dying my hair to make it darker like my father’s jet-black hair and stopped straightening it. I guess I’ve never been quite sure what people expect when they encounter a Jewish person, but I can say that I have experienced intolerance and bigotry, as well as conduct resulting from of peoples’ paranoia/conspiracy theories. On the flip side, I’ve encountered people who are religious who have an idealized concept of “G-d’s chosen people”. To me, it often feels like I disappoint them when they find out I’m not so much religious as I am a cultural Jew. Today, I am grateful to say that I have found a place of personal integrity, which carries forward my ancestors’ stories, my culture, and incorporates my personal experience.
In terms of the tremendous challenges colonialism has posed for Native Americans, I believe I am part of the situation indirectly since my family immigrated to the US from Germany. As an individual, I hope that I can continue to intake more knowledge and keep my heart, eyes and ears open so that I can reduce the tendency to make assumptions.
First I am sorry your childhood was painful at school.Totally unfair.Your story did allow for another view of what it is like to be "other". Thank you.
DeleteScrape the Willow - Part Two
ReplyDeleteReading Julia Parker’s story just the way she remembers it, was absolutely wonderful. I loved the rhythm of the narration, the manner in which she placed emphasis on certain aspects by using short, clear sentences built around key words or ideas; also the way she often addresses her real / imaginary dialogue partners - e.g. “You know what I mean?” (67) – this created for me a beautiful, intimate reading experience, as if I was standing close to her, listening to her words. I was impressed by her strength and modesty. Her life clearly exemplifies the problematic attitude toward Native Americans and the humiliating, offensive situations they were often subject to, as we have seen it described in the first chapter. Julia being called “dirty little Indian girl” (50), being told not to be an Indian (63), being forbidden to talk about Indian ways or to sing Indian songs (58), Julia being asked what her kids are doing outside, sleeping on the lawn (67), Julia being refused a job she was good at (77), being asked to dress up weirdly to look like a “real Indian” (94), or watching the houses in the Indian Village being burned down (87) – all are manifestations of the same attitude of discrimination. However, you cannot but respect this woman’s choice of finding something positive in every obstacle met along the way, and, even more important I think, her decision of not hating back and being aware that every individual is unique and value resides in the nature of someone’s heart, not in the color of the skin. Refusing to use the word “white” is edifying in this regard. “Yes I was discriminated against, but that doesn’t mean you have to carry it through your life. Your life is very important. Every day is history” she says. Even when she acknowledges discrimination, she does it in a temperate manner: “Maybe I shouldn’t say that, but in Yosemite Valley, that was how it was” (82). Personally, I found her words heartbreaking when she said “It is sad – it is so sad that you begin to laugh about it” (67). I can understand and relate to this quite well. I have never experienced situations similar to those described by Julia, but I spent my childhood in a place (communist Romania) where personal identity was heavily attacked in a different manner. My family had its part of sad stories… and yes, life was sometimes tragic, but we used to make jokes about it, and those jokes are now part of what we are, they became a sort of code that we share.
I take Julia’s story as a valuable lesson; I hope to use it as a reminder of how important is in life to strive to do your best, to welcome any challenge and learn what you can from it, but also to have the courage to protect what you cherish deeply. It is fascinating how her life philosophy found expression in the art of basketry. She speaks so beautifully about her first basket: “I think it is in a good place. It is still floating around out there somewhere. My first basket went away and we are still waiting for it. It will come back if the spirits want it to come back. Yes, if it is supposed to come home, it will come home” (82). Also compelling is the way she uses her art to give voice to those too easily silenced or mystified, maintaining authentic traditions alive. The story of her baskets, revealing the process of their creation and the journey they were destined to into this world, is the story of the people and is important to be known.
Beautifully told.
DeleteScrape the Willow - Part Three
ReplyDeleteOverall this was an interesting reading, but I just want to pinpoint and briefly comment on a couple of ideas that particularly caught my interest.
The first one is the discussion around the status of basketry in Western culture and its classification as “lowbrow”, based on gender and class prejudice. Although I was somehow familiar with the general context of this problem, what took me by surprise was the identification of basketry and its makers with the “sensual Other” (119). What intrigued me here was the approach to this notion of sensuality. After reflecting upon it, it just looks obvious now that, for Western people, sight was the preferred mode of perception for a very long time, other bodily perceptions like smell, sound, or touch being underestimated or neglected. This issue connects with that of art vs craft and aesthetics vs utility, but leaving this aside, it just seems so absurd and unfair to nature, to privilege sight over the other senses and disconnect intellect from body. As Valoma says, many cultures consider the” body, skin, and multiple organs as sites of perception, analysis, and memory” (122) – by not doing this, Western cultures played a quite dangerous game in my opinion, in a sense that this approach produced fragmentary visions and unbalanced attitudes towards art.
Another idea I want to mention is that of selective accommodation and adaptation seen as evolution in tradition. I resonate with this and I totally agree with the author when she says that careful embrace of “new materials, methods, and motivations need not be seen as an erosion of tradition, but rather a successful strategy of preservation” (141). She suggests that a rigid tradition is a vulnerable one which faces the risk of dying. I remember going a year ago to a concert of Native American music at Texas Tech Museum. The performers were members of the same family where the elders were transmitting the art to the young ones. They performed mainly traditional songs and dances, but I remember being somehow surprised by a couple of songs that used traditional instruments, but had a modern sound and lyrics. However, I didn’t think less of these songs, on the contrary, I considered that they suggested continuity and communicated the real concerns and feelings of the performers, making their art stronger, lively, and connected to the present. I like and respect Julia’s belief that nothing is pure in this world and dichotomies (in this case modern vs traditional) are sometimes misleading and treacherous. I think there is great wisdom in this.
Lastly, I would have been interested in a citation for the paragraph where Valoma explains how ethnic Europeans “readily erased their own cultural heritage” (143) when they first came to America, refusing to speak their languages of origin with their children, Americanizing their surnames etc., which later made them “disoriented in a perceived cultural and spiritual wasteland of fast-food establishments and strip malls, dissociated from their lineages and dislocated from their ancestral lands”(144). Honestly, I think that this is a more complex matter than what Valoma seems to suggest here, but I would really like to know more details on this subject. Does anyone have any suggestions?
I think what Valoma was speaking of was over decades and differed from culture to culture. There are parts of rural the Carolinas, Tenn. and Kentucky that still speak old English, Minnonite communities speak high Dutch and today on the southern boarder Spanish is the first language. Yet, the wasteland of fast food is everywhere.
DeleteSection 2
ReplyDeleteRe: Time frame on the responses, I just want to get though this week at the Summer Discovery Art Program. I am spending more time than I anticipated. I will catch up this weekend.
In the first chapter the author removes herself as much as she to provide history and context, and it was packed with critical theory. If the book was like the first chapter throughout, it would be pretty academic-y, which is not what Valoma wanted for this book. Parker had to find her patch to her cultural heritage and identity. Parker speaks of instances in which she feels innately connected to her culture like she feels like she can speak her people’s language, and surprisingly has done so in her sleep. There is something called ancestral memory, mostly it is about ancestral trauma, which is the belief that we carry the memories of our ancestors, particularly trauma. There is science on it, but I have not researched it in depth.
I saw that Parker always felt like an outsider, first as an orphan, then as an outsider to her husband’s tribe. Reading about Parker’s devastating losses at childhood was heart wrenching, but some of the things she said about being in boarding school and the ways she wanted to present herself to the social world reminds me that we are all colonized in some ways whether we realize it or not. Beyond the obvious of course, but culturally and socially colonized. for example, she was so accepting and grateful of boarding schools, but for her, being an orphan, she did not experience the violence of being ripped away from your family, being stripped of your language and culture. She was blind to that. Although, she didn’t experience physical and maybe not emotional violence, there are others that did, and I feel that it is wrong to dismiss the violence countless others have endured. I think in some ways she doesn’t see the ways in which she has been colonized. Nevertheless, she found her roots, as being Pomo and Coast Miwok. As far as appropriation, I think supporting the craft of a culture is a positive thing. The fact that Parker was not Paiute, and represented the community and traditions is not a bad thing at all. Everything she did was to preserve that culture that she was integrated into. Had it been someone exploiting them not for the gain of the culture, then that would be oppressive and an act of cultural violence. Since most first people’s custom, being that they are matriarchal, is that the husband join the woman’s family, but since Parker was an orphan, this was reversed, she joined his family and this complicated her social consciousness. That is part the basis of her feeling like an outsider.
This chapter provides an excellent spectrum of authenticity and appropriation. In Mexican American culture, we have specific costumes or practices. I never grew up celebrating Dia de los muertos, and my tortillas suck. I fail at domesticity, and I am not Catholic, not even Christian. There are so many things about Mexican American culture that is cliché, but it feels wrong to me when I do it. If feels like I am appropriating my own culture. Just like if I were to dress “chola” or “perfom” chola, it would be wrong because it is not who I am. So identity is very fluid, up until someone crosses a boundary of cultural appropriation.
I wonder how many of us are unaware of our total situations culturally/emotionally when we are focused on surviving. I think the work done by so many to help each of us begin to understand what happened and is happening all around us has to be ongoing. My father was raised in poverty in East Texas. He played football to go to college and have 3 meals a day. He didnot consider the damage to his body. He joined the Air Force and fly in planes without UV protection. Before he died he began to understand how he was "ripe for the picking" when he came to sports and the military because he believed they were the only way out of his family situation.
ReplyDeleteJulia is a great storyteller, I enjoyed her stories because she reminded me of my grandmother, not only on the way she told stories but because she is a hardworking person who is always thinking of her family. I truly appreciate that everything she did was for her family and how brave of a woman she is, because she always stood for what she believed.
ReplyDeleteIt is kind of ironic how baskets went from being considered low key all the way to art, I'm glad Native American women ended up being recognized for their work after all the struggles they had to go through. Julia has done a great job in keeping their heritage and culture alive since most of those ladies are gone. During this chapter I enjoyed reading about the details and rules of basket making and its process. I would have never imagines some of the rules they have such as not weaving during their cycle or when being sad. It was good to have an idea of the process, from the importance of the materials all the way to the story the basket transmits. I think the way she compares baskets to humans makes a lot of sense, like when she talked about imperfection in baskets like humans are far from being perfect, or when she compared us to a basket know; the basket starts with a knot (small) and grow, just like us we just keep growing and learning.
The connection they have with nature is fantastic, how they took advantage of what natured offered and how respectful they were to it. We should all appreciate nature the way they do. I do believe some people are born with a creative spirit and Julia is definitely one of them. It was good to read about the prayers they did when searching for materials and how positive everybody was. Reading about the struggles of her life and losing her loved ones was something extremely sad to read but the way she kept going and her philosophy of "letting go" is something to admire, always positive and full of joy. I still believe their friendship added something beautiful to the story and it is wonderful how Valoma knew from the first time how talented and full of knowledge Julia is. I enjoyed the book, it is a book full of history and culture, truly made me admire Native American women even more and the pictures were very helpful to understand their work and the process.
Remember that Julia Parker is one person, this is her voice and she does not speak for all Native Americans or First Nation Peoples.
DeleteScrape the willow until it sings – Part 2:
ReplyDeleteIn this chapter, discussed about bad living condition like live in tent cabin with no water, so much hard work they do for their bread butter. (p66) and kid sleeping in the lawn and worked as laborer. (p67). This is so depressed and feel bad also that’s remind me, earlier, people who do domestic work in our house; usually women and their daughter they suffered a lot. They have very small houses where they need to go out to fill the water for drinking and other needs. In old houses they don’t had bathroom inside house. Their husbands usually don’t do anything for earning, just drinking. “The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act of 2009” under 14 years are not allowed to do any kind of jobs, it’s a punishable offence.
I would like to share about Indian Tribe called Santhal, which is one of the largest tribe in India and known as fighter. I studied them about when I was in school. Their territory belongs to Northeastern and East India such as Assam, West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and Jharkhand. Santhal exists from pre- Aryan period. They live in forest and depend on trees, haunting, fishing and farming etc. They have makes music instruments and basket from plants. Tradition passes from generation to generation. They are good at dance and playing instruments flute.
Another famous one is Bhils, Bhil means bow and known as bowmen and situated in Rajasthan, northwestern side of India. They consider as hunters but currently for surviving they practice agriculture. Their talent is sculptures and for Pithora painting. Their main festival is Baneshwar fair, famous for Ghoomar and Gair dance.
Thank you for sharing a story of another group of individuals that live with the land.
DeleteRemember many laws do not apply to Native Groups on a reservation...they have their own laws. And although alcoholism is a HUGE issue within most Native groups this was not a point Julia made.