>Let us talk about artists. Truth and Beauty. Etc.
Ray,
I am stunned! What a tremendous response to my innocent and half-hearted
little posting! The artist not as purist able to stand back from his
contemporaries, detached from their foolish ways, but very much swept along
by the currents of his historic times, participating in seeking out,
vilifying and even killing, "the other". But as I at times defend
economists, I must say a word in defense of artists. Many sold their souls;
others did not. I have a book on my shelves called "Arrested Voices" by
Vitaly Shentalinsky, which chronicles the fate of writers who refused to
compromise themselves and fall in with what was interpreted as "good"
writing by the Union of Soviet Writers in Stalin's Russia. Shentalinsky
spent several years poking around the archives of the KGB researching their
fate. What happened to them? Why, they simply disappeared into the gulag
and died there. Even their writings have largely died. There is little
interest now. Times have changed. What was all that about anyhow?
Some people who did not fully fall in into line were not shipped off,
writers like Boris Pasternak and Maxim Gorky. Gorky is easy to explain. He
was a revered icon and became something of a pal of Yagoda's (head of the
OGPU which became the KGB). Pasternak and others, such as Bulgakov, were
simply either to big or, at the time, too little, to be touched, or perhaps
they fell into line enough to satisfy the state. But anyone touchable who
held the wrong mirror, one which did not praise Stalin or the Soviet State,
was removed.
On the topic of white/native relations, I've read enough to know what you
are talking about. It is a dirty history in which the whole of the state was
guilty, not only the government or the army or anyone else in power. North
of the 49th parallel, we like to think that we have a cleaner record than
the US or Latin America, but this may not be entirely so. The Beothuk were
hunted to extermination in Newfoundland. Disastrous losses occurred when
Indian tribes allied with either the French or British during the French and
Indian Wars. Massacres happened in our west in the late days of trading and
early days of settlement. Our residential school system was an instrument of
deliberate cultural destruction - often destruction of the person as well.
And countless lives were lost because of "virgin soil" diseases, even in
relatively recent times. The Mackenzie Eskimo population was virtually
wiped out at the turn of the century because of contacts with whalers. And
in the 1920s, an influenza epidemic took away a third of the population of
the Mackenzie Valley.
In spite of all of this Canadian Aboriginal people were, amazingly, able to
retain the essentials and spirit of their art forms. In recent decades they
have increasingly chosen to deny us the exotic and have instead begun to
adopt cross-cultural forms which continue to speak about them but which also
speak to us. Some recent paintings I've seen seem to come out of a mist.
Unnervingly opaque forms appear, reminders of what they cannot, and we must
not, forget but also can no longer fully know. One recent painting is based
on Wounded Knee. Quite appropriately, it hangs in the lobby of the Indian
Affairs building here in Ottawa, though it is partly hidden by a bush. It
is a very dark scene, with all kinds of figures sketched in and only partly
recognizable - a KKK man, an SS Colonel, a conquistador, some bureaucrats.
They are standing around an open ditch full of corpses. Big Foot is in the
painting, dead on his back, arms upraised, as in the famous photograph. He
is also sketched in, as though he both was and was not.
I know you may find this difficult to believe, but I would suggest that many
Canadians of European descent, perhaps many Americans as well, are as
haunted by the image of Wounded Knee as are people of American Indian
descent. In the Americas, Wounded Knee was one of the last nexuses between
what might have been and what actually became. I went to the site of the
massacre several years ago. It was something of a pilgrimage. I had just
read Peter Matthiessen's "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse" and wanted to see
the Pine Ridge Reservation and Wounded Knee with my own eyes, perhaps to
confirm that what I had read was really true. Sometime before my
pilgrimage, the US government had tried to turn Wounded Knee into a national
shrine, complete with a stylish observation and education building. All
that was left of the building was a pile of rubble. It had been completely
leveled by bulldozers. I didn't stay around very long. I got the
impression the locals didn't want guys like me hanging around, pilgrims or
not.
Ed Weick
