Art and Regeneration at the Liberty Bank Building in the Central District

As we approach the new Liberty Bank Building on Union we can see from a block away that it is special. Its bold white with orange and brown accents stands high above surrounding buildings, a dramatic contrast to the innocuous developments on two corners of 23^rd and Union, what was once the heart of the black community in the Central District.

Coming closer we see a striking African inspired pattern on the roofline overhanding the sidewalk. On the wall of the building is a “brisket” weave pattern interrupting the regular rows of bricks. The older bricks of the pattern come from the original Liberty Bank, the first African American owned bank in the Pacific Northwest, opened in 1968.

As a result of red lining, this neighborhood in the center of Seattle, became a concentrated black neighborhood. In 1968 national civil rights legislation made discrimination in housing, sales and rentals illegal and the Seattle City Council unanimously adopted the same laws.  In that same year Liberty Bank made it possible for African Americans to buy homes in the Central District, or anywhere else if they wanted.

When I moved to 20^th and Union in 1997 ( an early but not the earliest white here, some of my neighbors came a good ten years earlier), middle class professional blacks who survived the crack epidemics of the 1980s and early 1990s were still here. But they were mostly elderly. In the next twenty years, the neighborhood has become dominated by white “settlers” not unlike the innundation of whites who almost destroyed the indigenous population in Seattle in the 1850s.   At the same time, the cost of housing has escalated, affected by the massive tech boom here, and the character of the housing, increasingly closed off condominiums with private garages, has destroyed neighborliness. Many small buildings with neighborhood businesses have been sold to developers who build larger, more expensive spaces. We treasure those landlords who are resisting this trend (I am so fortunate on my block on Union between 20^th and 21^st to have three such landlords).

Enter the six story Liberty Bank Building! It is on the site of the original Liberty Bank. Not only are the people involved committed to enabling African Americans to return to their historic roots with affordable and low income housing, they also built the Liberty Bank Building with 30 percent Women and Minority Owned Business Enterprises (WMBE).  87 per cent of the apartments have Black renters. All the commercial spaces are going to Black owned businesses, most notably Earl’s Cuts and Styles who has been across the street for decades.

This success would not have been possible without massive efforts on the part of many different groups, notably Africatown, Capitol Hill Housing, Byrd Barr Place and the Black Community Impact Alliance. Africatown has been particularly visible, and vocal under the dynamic leadership of Wyking Garrett,  son of the irrepressible Omari Garrett and grandson of one of the original founders of the Liberty Bank.

He is seen here speaking at the ribbon cutting. See my husband’s article about that in the Leschi News.

My main focus here is to examine the stunning art installations some easily visible to the passerby, others inside the lobby and partially visible from the street.

I can’t think of a building since the government supported art projects of the 1930s with such an extensive art program focused on narrative. All the pieces address either the history of the Liberty Bank or the Central District.

To begin with the outside. Esther Ervin inset an original safe deposit box into the center of her “drum benches” along Union.  She has smoothed them off to make a comfortable place to site and patterned the wood in a basket weave. She highlighted the top of the base with a tile design in Afrocentric colors.

Look up at the building and you see the etched glass panels by Ervin that outline the red lined Central District. In the right weather they reflect onto the building where you see plaques with poems by one of my favorite poets, Minnie Collins. Here are two of them.

Walk around to the entrance of the building framed by a square open gate with more safe deposit boxes inserted into the two sides (including their original hinges).

Dominating the façade is Al Doggett’s stunning mural celebrating creativity in the Central District, music, dancing and political resistance. It sweeps above our heads, filling the entire six floors of the orange façade. Doggett explained the design challenge of keeping the flow of the design in spite of all the windows.

Just beyond the entrance and visible from the street ( through a window) is Aramis Hamer’s mural ”Liberty” with multicolored hands reaching for a gold chain spelling out Liberty, referring at the same time to freedom from the chains of slavery, the chains of prison and the gold chains of hip hop performers. In the sky  bills fly with the faces of the founders of the Liberty Bank.

In the courtyard Esther Ervin’s three bronze salmon with swirling designs  “Struggle Against the Current” swim over reeds in a channel that will fill with water when it rains. They point directly to the difficulties that African Americans face in life.

Inside the building the art visible only to those who live there or those who visit features Al Doggett’s large mural that details the history of the Central District.  It names and depicts businesses, places, and people, some of whom are still with us. He unifies the complex composition with an undulating musical line emanating from a saxophone player and dancers and culminating with a choir of children and adults.

Doggett was also responsible for the panels outside the elevators identifying the twelve parks in the neighborhood named for outstanding African American leaders who lived here.

Opposite the elevator doors Doggett created one more mural called Ancestral Masks of Diversity, which honors the range of different ethnic groups of the CD, Native American, African, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Mexican.

Just inside the main door of the building is a large concrete support that includes the door of the original bank vault and four intense works by Inye Wokoma. The next blog post gives more detailed discussion about these works.

Lawrence Pitre depicts African Americans as they get loans from the bank,

Ashby Reed used a palette knife to invoke the streets of the CD in a semi abstract composition.

Finally Lisa Myers Bulmash created collage portraits of the architect of the original bank, the new Liberty Bank Building, and all nine of the multicultural founders of the bank. These collage portraits include a volume of an encyclopedia at the center, inset with a oval metal coin purse opening with varying images of the Statue of Liberty. The bow tie is a drawer knob. Bulmash is a master collage artist and every detail is meaningful from the fabric of the clothes to the background.

The commitment to art at the Liberty Bank Building is impressive. Al Doggett as Creative Director and Esther Ervin as Project Manager spent three years on the project, including their own significant contributions. So often these days art is an afterthought on new construction, or an afterthought, or non-existent.

In the Liberty Bank Building we have the start of the new Central District proudly establishing a unique presence,and pointing to the future.

Across the street, Africatown and others will be  in charge of part ofthe full block to be developed. The original development here was part of the 1960s initiative to stimulate inner city growth.

Mary Coss’s “Groundswell” Tells About Salination and Climate Change

 

 

 

During a recent residency, Mary Coss was growing barnacles on Willapa Bay, the second largest estuary in the United States (over 260 square miles!)

 

The artist described the process to me in detail:  first she coated a wire mesh with cement snags to attract the barnacles, then dragged it over an oyster bed and left it for the barnacles to forage for food. Barnacles grow very slowly so a resident scientist kept track of the barnacles growth after she left.

 

Then she met scientist Roger Fuller † through the “Surge” project, a pairing of scientists and artists organized through the Museum of Northwest Art by former Executive Director, Christopher Shainin.

She learned that barnacles are the “canary in the coal mine” for water salination.

 

Groundswell, the last of a trilogy of works called Silent Salinity

(see her website for information on the other two), dramatically presents the first step of salination in the wild: barnacles attaching to fresh water sedge, a three sided grass.

 

Sedge likes freshwater and it is being starved as the fresh water rivers recede with decreasing rainfall leading to decreasing flow. This is a specific on the ground visualization of one manifestation of climate change .

 

Coss recreates that changing landscape in her gallery installation: the sedge is wire and paper pulp), and salt invades not only the sedge, but encroaches on us in the corners of the gallery.

 

Coss referred to it as a “dystopian landscape.”

 

 

Hanging above the salinated sedge you see a single line of writing in wire quoted from Roger Fuller’s essay on salination:

 

Silent Salinity: Net Loss

Scientist Roger Fuller’s pondering the state of the estuaries and the impact of global warming:

 

“I was out stomping through the mudflats in my hipwaders today, and discovered a bulrush ghost meadow. A small field of stumps, like a miniature forest clearcut. In the upper intertidal zone of brackish estuaries, tall, dense, verdant meadows of bulrushes grow, creating a tidal jungle of vegetation that hosts a myriad of critters and a far-reaching food web that spreads its strands through birds, crabs, and fish, even reaching as far as our dinner table.

 

But this was a ghost meadow I found, a slim reminder of a lush ecosystem once present, now vanished. Poking up from the deep, brown mud were stumps…3 inches tall, less than an inch thick, triangular, almost woody, stumps. Coated by years of mud and algae. A few sprouted barnacles. Easy to miss. Here and there a small plant poked up, but the tall, lush meadow was long gone.

 

There has been no meadow here for at least 8 years of my memory, and aerial photos confirm that I haven’t lost my mind, yet. I never noticed the change until today, the gradual retreat of a once lush ecosystem.

 

Makes me wonder what else has disappeared while I’ve been busy paying attention to other things? Perhaps that first barnacle was a sentinel of change, marking a salinity threshold silently crossed as the interplay of river and tide shifted. Or was it a shift in the food web, a small change in some quiet, unobserved corner of the complex web of life in which the bulrush is enmeshed?

 

It reminds me of the idea of “shifting baselines”…we think what we see today is the way it’s always been, when in fact things are slowly shifting and changing, right beneath our rubber waders. Without data, we have no sense of what we’ve lost, of what we’ve gained.

 

Far up the shore there is still a remnant of marsh, pinned against the dike with no place left to shift. How long will this remnant last? Will anyone notice when this meadow too slips away, when it becomes a ghost meadow?”

 

The entire poem is written in wire on the end wall. Here is a detail where you can read the word “barnacle”

 

 

In addition to the salt encrusted sedge, and wire poetry, the installation includes a large wave which Coss described as “nature itself coming through”. The wave is manifested in a large structure of wire hung with billowing blue fabric. On it the artist projected flowing water. The wave seemed to be actually overcoming us in the gallery as it descended from the ceiling and, at the same time, the salt is spreading toward us on the floor.

 

The second image is the view from the window on the street. We see a salt encrusted screen and the wave. Coss inserted wire writing with her own poetry into the wave.

 

Coss succeeds in giving us what she calls a “visceral” reaction to climate change. The salt makes the huge story of climate change and global warming intimate. Perhaps that is because we all know salt, it is both physically part of our bodies, and a substance that we experience daily in our lives.

 

We also know that too little can kill us and too much, as we see in Groundswell, can also kill.

 

 

‡Scientist Roger Fuller works at the Skagit Climate Science Consortium and is a spatial ecologist with Western Washington University’s Huxley College of the Environment. He has expertise in estuarine ecology, restoration ecology, climate change impacts, climate change adaptation, and decision-support tools.

 

PS Read the book Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky to really understand how crucial salt has been historically.

Elizabeth Gaskell and the politics of workers and women in the 19th century

During the six weeks that I have been recovering from my hip replacement surgery, I have been reading and listening to the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell. First I listened to Ruth, then read Wives and Daughters, and finally Mary Barton. It turned out that Ruth is a midcareer book, 1853, Wives and Daughters at the end of her life, left unfinished 1864-5, and Mary Barton her first novel, 1848.

She is best known for North and South, which I read a long time ago, and Crandell, also a BBC series, which I found less compelling than the three above.

As a married Victorian writer ( she was married to a Unitarian minister who worked with the poor, an important fact that contributed to her insights.) Gaskell had six children, half of whom died. The death of her second child led to her novel Mary Barton.

 

I was riveted by this novel. the characters are vivid, the plot intense ( so intense that I had to listen to it in little bits to avoid being overcome with anxiety), the politics beautifully incorporated into the narrative.  It was written the year that Marx published his Communist Manifesto. In the novel, not only does the heroine avoid becoming a fallen woman by her own insight, but she saves her lover from being hung for murder. But the real confrontation in the novel set between 1838-42 in Manchester at the time of the beginning of the Chartist movement (featured also in the miniseries Victoria on Netflix now), is between the working class and the owners of industry. At first it is a march to London to ask for improvement of the horrible conditions of poverty of the working class, then it is a strike with a demand for more pay, then it is an act of revenge against oppression, and in the end it is an amazing communication between an articulate impoverished man and the owner of a foundry whose son has been murdered in revenge for oppression.   This exchange ends with their shaking hands, a symbol of communication between workers and owners, and as Gaskell states so eloquently, the grief of the owner at the loss of his son is then channeled into advocating reforms for workers.

Ruth is about a woman who does fall, but then by good luck is saved, by a dissenting minister. She is eventually found out, and shunned as is her son, and she ends as a nurse to those dying of the plague, finally catching it and dying as a result from the man who brought her downfall.

Wives and Daughters is different kind of book. I read the praise for this late work as her “best work” but I disagree. It is focused on the very subtle gradations of difference in class in a small town, micro differences, indicated by behavior, politics, dress, and social customs. It was fascinating ( and also had a strong female heroine), but I found Mary Barton as the real powerhouse story. Gaskell is a later generation than Austin, and I find her much more compelling because she incorporates the politics of the oppressions of the working class and womens vulnerability to downfall and strength to survive into her stories.

If you want a good read this winter turn to Elizabeth Gaskell.

Charles Dickens admired her and published her work in his magazine Household Words, but if you look at her career, it is amazing how many magazines were available for publishing at that time, and how much she published.

PS I just read that mothers tend to not appear in Victorian novels, and it is true, none of the female heroines in Gaskell have living mothers, one has an unfortunate stepmother.

 

Martin Luther King Day 2019

 

Martin Luther King said it all

“A Nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military deense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

 

As our government shutdown was going  on and on, and ordinary  dedicated Federal employees Americans were standing in line at food banks, the outpouring of love at the MLK March was deeply inspiring.

 

Before the march I went to a workshop on understanding Hate Groups which had some amazing statistics on reporting and non reporting of hate crimes. This is how it was described.

The Truth About Hate Groups and Hate Crimes.

It’s time to take affirmative action against hate. This workshop examines how white supremacists and neo-Nazi groups proliferate. Bias crimes go unreported. Mainstream media cover only the most violent offenses. FBI hate crime statistics are inaccurate. The result: communities get a false sense of security. In this workshop you’ll learn about how malicious harassment cases are – and aren’t – reported. Participants will learn how radical right organizations recruit and retain members, why defectors abandon the movement, and what their stories tell us about stopping hate. The session will end with individual action plans to “stop hate in your own community.”

 

Presenter: Former civil rights reporter Lonnie Lusardo is a cultural competency professional and author of From Hate to Compassion: How Seven Former White Supremacists Transformed Their Lives, due for publication in 2019.

 

Then the March came with its powerful multiracial, multi ages message of love and resistance.

 

 

Jack Whitten’s Odyssey: A New Perspective

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jack Whitten made his name  as an abstract painter in New York City beginning in the 1970’s and had a solo exhibition in 1974 at the Whitney Museum! During the 1960s and 1970s in New York City he was friends with musicians, poets, writers, and other artists. It was a time of mixing media, but he made a name for himself as a painter of large abstract canvases that were purchased by the likes of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

 

One publication stated at the time of his death

“And as a black artist, he resisted the period’s prevailing impulse of racial representation to explore the plastic and metaphorical possibilities of paint.”

Artsy Editors Jan 23, 2018

I will return to this point at the end of the post.

 

Other artists honored Whitten with these words:

“Jack would preach that art was one of humanity’s last bastions, and abstraction was where we as black artists could truly be free.” Shinique Smith, artist

 

“Whitten was always trying to find a celestial dimension in the most prosaic materials.” Massimiliano Gioni, curator

 

“To talk to Jack was to recognize the beauty and richness of existence, the possibility in even the dimmest times.”

Andrianna Campbell, curator

alll quotes from Artsy Editors Jan 23, 2018

 

All of these quotes about Jack Whitten as an abstract painter, as well as frequent references to his experimentation with materials give insight into his current exhibition of his sculpture at the Met Breuer .

 

It is astonishing that they have never before been shown except in small exhibitions in Greece. The sculptures reveal an intricate and layered mind, that brought together the cultures of Africa and Europe on the South coast of Crete, where he lived part time starting in the 1970s. Because I have spent quite a bit of time in Greece, I loved these sculptures. They were stunningly original, lovingly created from various materials, both found detritus and beautifully worked woods, and suggest a calm inner joy that is balanced and exuberant at the same time.

 

At the entrance to the exhibition (see top of post) stood Lichnos, 2008. The name refers to a “spiny bottom-dwelling fish,” used in “a Greek Fisherman’s stew.” Composed of specific types of wood, carob, black mulberry, the piece is set on a pedestal of whitewashed concrete cinder blocks that immediately made me think of the whitewashing my sister-in-law in Greece does to her house every year. It is the same lime wash used here.   What stopped me in my tracks is the huge creative eccentricity of the piece, the juxtaposition of unlike parts to make an assymetrical whole. The stringy character of carob wood makes it hard to carve, echoing the challenge of catching the Lichnos.

There are more references here embodied in the found

materials, to Africa, to Alabama. And as we walk around the work it seems to be a strange beast seeking to escape confinement. The stunning polished red colored carob wood is flame like.

 

These two installation shots suggest one of Whitten’s inspirations must have been Brancusi (the lower installation is a small show at the Museum of Modern Art). We see the same exploration of materials, of the base, of meticulous aesthetics, of elusive content.

But he is absolutely original, a word I rarely use (nor do I often write about abstract art.) But I strongly felt the layers of content in these works bringing together so many different traditions, mythologies, types of knowledge.

Phoenix for the Youth of Greece, 1983 is one of the earlier sculptures. It includes mulberry wood, olive wood, bone, glass and a small piece of writing. Underneath is an”ossuary”, cluster of bones made of jaws of small fish and above a mysterious parchment with the phrase

“Using the bones from the past, we can understand the present and foresee the future.”

The soft olive wood frames the hard shiny mulberry.
But all of these materials suggest a larger story or myth, illusive, but still very present.

 

In addition to the layers of mythology in the sculpture, another series of work, the “monolith series” payed homage to great African Americans, in a medium that Whitten developed, hand made acrylic tiles: these stunning works, shimmer in the light, as the “portrait” emerges from its surfaces. But again, they are basically abstract works, with homage to such people as Chuck Berry, James Baldwin, Eduard Glissant, Terry Adkins and Mohammed Ali. The one below is to Chuck Berry. (Black Monolith XI Six Kinky Strings: For Chuck Berry)

The riveting complexity of the surface evokes music, and certainly that is another crucial reference point for Whitten.

It is exciting to be confronted with a body of work by a well known artist that has never been shown before. All of these works are a revelation. Here is the Tomb of Socrates.

with wild cypress, black mulberry, marble, brass and mixed media

It is shaped like a shield, with all sorts of found materials . At the center is a black stone that suggests the philosophers skull. As we know Socrates died by drinking poison because a new political order ganged up on him and declared him dangerous. We need this piece today to remind us of what happens when governments reject knowledge.

 

Why have these sculptures never been shown before? I came up with the idea of logistics. They were all made in Greece, they are fragile, they are embedded in that landscape, that history, mythology, that geography, not far from Africa. Perhaps Whitten felt he wanted them to stay there, whereas his abstract paintings are very much a part of US American post World War II world.

 

He was one of a handful of African American artists to succeed throughout his life in the mainstream. Was he simply better than those who have less recognition, or was he less threatening because he did not pursue political content. Thinking about the tone of approval in the quote at the beginning of the article, abstraction was certainly more illusive as a means of speaking than the unavoidable imagery of a Charles White ( who was also successful, but in a different arena) .

 

But I will say that for Whitten it was not only what was in style,  it was definitely not because he wanted to hide behind it in order to be safe. Abstraction worked with his abstract way of understanding the world. His abstraction is not an empty gesture, it is an act based on wide ranging exploration of ideas.

 

Based on the homages quoted above , it is clear that he was held in a certain amount of awe by his colleagues and fellow artists. I wish I had known him. Perhaps I would know the answer to my question.

 

There is no doubt though that he was deep, poetic, and incredibly willing to take chances. He came from deep poverty in Alabama in the 1940s. His father died when he was five, his mother left with seven children to raise alone. She must have been a remarkable woman.  He went to segregated schools but was already interested in shop and music. But what a leap to end up as a major painter in New York City already in the early 1960s.

 

So the mystery of life and success remains, is it initiative, luck, mentoring, perseverance, charm, talent. We know that for a black man in the art world of the 1960s and 1970s in New York City, brains alone was not enough. The fact that his experiment with materials fit with what was acceptable at that time is a conjunction of time, place, person, inclination. He may also have been just lucky in his timing.

Late 60s and early 70s the art world was shifting from its exclusive focus on white men making abstract paintings, but diversity was not yet established  as a crucial consideration ( it still isn’t). He slipped in then, and off he went.

 

But to return to the sculptures, which I can’t help feeling are his greatest art. Why were they never shown? Because they didn’t “fit” what the art world wanted? Or because he saw them as personal and informal explorations. I want to believe that he saw them as an ongoing exploration, a synthesis of all his ideas. They were not ready for the world until after he died.

 

Thank goodness we have them now.

 

 

Charles White: Humanist

 

 

 

The huge mural by Charles White, “5 great American Negroes” overwhelms us before we even enter the Charles White retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

 

In this first mural Charles White created for the government sponsored WPA mural program, Sojourner Truth leads a march of freed slaves that recedes into the background in a tapering curve on the left. In the center, Booker T. Washington promotes his famous Tuskagee College to potential benefactors standing at a lectern with Frederick Douglass behind him holding a grieving slave. In the right foreground, George Washington Carver peers through a microscope and behind him Marion Anderson performs against a blue sky; the two are linked by a young man reading and a mentor pointing dramatically toward a future.

In the mural White has successfully juxtaposed carefully observed portraits of well known African Americans by placing them in a succession of deep and shallow space. Portraiture and powerful black bodies, with a particular emphasis on hands and gestures, characterize much of his work throughout his career.  Four other murals during these years, are represented in the exhibition by studies and sketches such as the vivid detailed carbon pencil over charcoal portrait of Paul Robeson. We see Robeson as a powerful but troubled person, a brilliant talent and political activist who payed a heavy penalty for that during the McCarthy era.

 

 

The stunning Charles White retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art foregrounds the artist’s deep commitment to presenting the humanity and dignity of African Americans.  He died young (1918 – 1979) at age sixty one, and saw profound changes in the US and his own life, but he always followed his own vision

 

“For me, the thing that matters most is not the form per se, but the depth of the content. I may experiment with new compositional forms, but my chief concern is always with expressing a particular feeling or emotion.”

 

In his earliest years as an artist in the 1930s, as with many African American artists who became prominent after World War II, the WPA programs provided professional acknowledgement, the support to make art, and a sense of community. African American artists who joined the federal programs were often self educated in art in public libraries and classes, also sponsored by the WPA. The artists in Harlem and Chicago had a community of supportive musicians, poets, writers and visual artists which proved invaluable in their early development.

 

More rural artists especially in the South were isolated before the government programs began, excluded from white public libraries and access to any art training.  The community centers and art schools the government sponsored provided both jobs and a sense of personal support. I am thinking here of the less famous, but also extraordinary James W. Washington,Jr.  who joined the WPA program in Gloster Mississippi, based entirely on his own study  and survival skills in the Jim Crow South. He went on to have a successful career as a sculptor in the Northwest.

 

As I looked at White’s portraits, as well as his anonymous individual figures,  I could feel the challenges that these people overcame, I could feel their anger, and their hopes, their poignancy and power, resilience and resistance, strength and dignity.

 

 

White declared “I like to think that my work has a universality to it, I deal with love, hope, courage, freedom, dignity – the full gamut of human spirit. When I work, though, I think of my own people. That’s only natural. However, my philosophy doesn’t exclude any nation or race of people.”

 

 

During the 1960s White’s work altered dramatically. His drawings became much larger, dominated by a single figure. General Moses (Harriet Tubman) 1965 sits legs apart, with arms on her knees, hands crossed in front, her expression one of anger. She sits in front of a wall of massive rocks cut unevenly (and brilliantly rendered by White). This work created at the height of the obsession with abstraction in American art, defies us in every way and the large figure defies the world.

 

In 1966 White created several large figure drawings with the title J’Accuse, based on the anti semitic Emile Zola drama in 19^th century France.  Each of the five works suggest different emotions. In this drawing we have the enigmatic African mask carried on a woman’s head covered with grass and swathed in a voluminous robe. We see her immense strength in the voluminous robe and determined expression, even as the African sculpture gives her spiritual power that alost seems to lift her  up.

 

White stayed with the figure, increasingly embedding it in a large textured surface. The complex drawing awes us with his mastery. The figures engage the interior lives of people challenged by life. They honor resistance to oppression through strength and love.

In his series Wanted Posters  ( above no 17, 1971) he conveys the injustice of the system through subtle facial expressions and deep compassion.

 

 

Just a few years before he died, he was still experimenting with new formats, media and content, as in Sound of Silence, a black man with a large conch shell at his center, suggests symbolism, but ambiguously. Is the shell protecting him? empowering him? We don’t know.

 

 

 

Indeed with Charles White, it is easy to make glib comparisons with white mainstream references, that are often completely inadequate. The most glaring example of this type of comparison is with Our Land, 1951.  A powerful and defiant woman holds a pitchfork as she looks out from her doorway. In the catalog she is repeatedly compared to Grant Wood’s American Gothic (which White would have known in the Art Institute of Chicago). She could not be more different from the pale, insipid farmer and his daughter. White’s woman with her giant hands and assertive posture is clearly saying don’t come here or this fork will be a weapon. I immediately thought of the artist Clarissa Sligh’s story of her uncle who was killed and left on her mother’s doorstep when she was ten years old and he was twelve. This pitchfork holding woman protects her family with her working woman’s hands and her very sharp pronged fork.

 

Kellie Jones’s essay in the catalog “Charles White, Feminist at Midcentury,” provides a much needed  new perspective on activist African American feminists in California. We all know that the history of feminism in the art world has been woefully controlled by a group of white women in California. Jones essay gives us a fresh start.

Another great insight from the exhibition is White’s life long close friendship with Harry Belafonte. Indeed, Belafonte narrates parts of the audio in the exhibition. They inspired and encouraged each other. Music played a major role in White’s life and many of his portraits give us famous singers such as Mahalia Jackson and Bessie Smith.

 

Every one of these paintings and drawings is riveting aesthetically and in its expression of a powerful persevering humanity. We feel these people from the inside, rather than passing over them from the outside because of the color of their skin.

 

I watched a discussion online between one of the (white) curators of the exhibition, and the (white) director of the Museum of Modern Art. A question from the audience came as to why White was so neglected after he died. In the answer there was no reference to racism in the art world ( nor did that word occur at any point in the discussion). But it is obvious that white art history still practices tokenism when it comes to artists of color. Thank goodness the three museums showing this major exhibition are finally giving one of the great twentieth century artists his due.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

World War I America at the Museum of History and Industry and some personal history

 

 

 

As we approach the hundredth anniversary of Armistice Day for World War I on November 11, over very own Museum of History and Industry is hosting the only exhibition on that subject on the entire West Coast. Armistice Day began as a protest against the horrors of war. It has evolved into a celebration of veterans, a very different purpose. This exhibition covers the full range of the issues raised by war, emphasizing the massive changes in US society.

 

First organized by the Minnesota History Center in partnership with the National Constitution Center and other institutions, MOHAI has added a significant Seattle component.  Leonard Garfield, the dynamic Director of the Museum, commented at the opening, much of what we see in today’s Seattle began during World War I.

 

I was happy to see the anti-war movements, led by women like Jane Addams, at the beginning of the exhibition. Addams  led an outcry with other women against the war as well as founding the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom after the war, an organization that is still in existence today.

 

 

Women are prominent throughout the exhibition: Seattle Mayor Bertha Knight Landes organized women’s clubs to support the war;

Alice Paul, a leader of women’s suffrage, protested in front of the White House, was imprisoned and then went on hunger strike. Here are some of her supporters.

 

 

Mme C J Walker, the first female self -made millionaire through her famous hair care empire, supported the African American troops and spoke out for Civil Rights.

 

Women also volunteered with the Red Cross as ambulance drivers and nurses and joined the workforce here.

 

 

Other themes were massive industrialized war machinery, home front consumerism, conscription -with an emphasis on African Americans in the exhibiiton – here is a picture of the Harlem Hellfighters who performed outstandlingly in the Meuse Argonne battle,

 

the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, popular culture such as newly invented sound recordings, Charlie Chaplin’s movies, and Houdini.

 

There were new treatments for veterans with disabilities (300,000 documented cases.)

 

The show concludes with anti immigrant furor,

the Red Scare,

and the Seattle General Strike of 1919.

 

The exhibition adopts the new techniques for exhibiting historical artifacts that incorporate our input with touch screens, and other tricks.

For example we are asked to judge punishment based on the 1917 Sedition Act that was applied to Edward Snowden.

But, looking at an artifact like a gas mask cannot convey the feeling of a young soldier when a call goes out to don the mask as a green cloud of poisonous gas descended. Not to mention that we cannot possibly grasp the horrors of war.

 

 

Part II Personal History

I got a distant sense of the horrors because my father ( in the end First Lieutenant) Rutherford H. Platt, fought in World War I and wrote up the history of his “Battery F 323^rd Field Artillery.”  It details their movements and actions in training, travelling to France, their participation in the battle of the Meuse-Argonne ( in the “Argonne Forest” as you see just dead trees by then) and Verdun (September – November 1918) in which half of the deaths of American soldiers occurred.

He and his fellow soldiers in Battery F were fortunate in being held in reserve most of the time, although they did experience frequent fire fights and constant shelling, a traumatic experience that often went on for days and meant instant death if a soldier took a direct hit. The shells were fired without seeing the target however, and so frequently missed. But the constant sound, stress, and possibility of death meant huge trauma.

 

The book frequently refers to the caring and condition of the hundreds of horses who hauled the equipment up and down muddy hills, and uneven roads. Although we may have seen War Horse, the dramatic play about one World War I horse, we forget how many thousands of horses were in the war and how many died.

 

 

Aerial warfare was a newly destructive force in 1918 that the book dramatically describes, juxtaposed to the now archaic observation balloons that were frequently strafed by airplanes.

 

The chaotic communications, endless hours spent standing ready and waiting for the next order to move, and the ever present mud, lack of sleep and food, and anxiety, are true of all war experiences. Following the armistice, Battery F marched for two months through Germany, then finally returned home in May.

 

My father never talked about his war experiences.

 

But for some strange reason, he woke us up every morning with “reveille” an echo of his army experience.

 

He also published the war stories of one of the officers that trained him to be a soldier. Mr Archer USA is an “oral history as told to R.H. Platt” of an Army professional who signed up at 16, immediately went to Cuba at the same time as the Rough Riders,  went into the “Forbidden City” during the Boxer Rebellion and spent years in the Philippines serving under Pershing who went on to be head of all American Forces in World War I.

 

Part 3

Many US soldiers lost their lives in 1917-1918, but it cannot be compared to the horrific slaughter of young men from Great Britain, Germany and and other countries. My British husband’s father and all but one of his uncles (who was a conscientious objector) fought in the war, one died, all were traumatized. His uncle, Charles Carrington, spoke and wrote of his experiences as a 20 year old officer,

giving us minute detail on the huge challenges (such as silently carrying rolls of barbed wire in a zigzag trench at night), the horrific sound of the war with the newly created industrial guns, and his training of young men to be sent off to die as late as September 1918.

 

But the greatest loss of life occurred after the war with the Influenza epidemic. Seattle again is featured as proactive in preventing its spread.

 

Leonard Garfield declared about the exhibition at MOHAI “WWI America tells a huge story – with consequences that continue to ripple through our world and our community today.”

 

How true that is! We are now in permanent war, and permanent anti war movements. Boeing is one of the largest military contractors in the world and of course, anti-immigrant hysteria escalates with each passing day. Our environmental catastrophe started escalating in World War I and the military continues to emit tons of toxic chemicals and pollution.

 

“WWI America” Museum of History and Industry

Sept 1, 2018 to Feb 10 2019

MOHAI will be hosting these important events: October 3 “Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseased: The Spanish Flu Epidemic,” October 20 “Fashion during World War I” October 20, and December 5 “Dissent:Patriotism or Treason?”

On the weekend of November 11, the 100^th anniversary of the Armistice, Bells for Peace will ring nationwide at 11am.  MOHAI will have a series of events from Saturday to Monday (https://mohai.org/exhibits/ww1-america/check for details).

Carletta Carrington Wilson’s “letter to a laundress”

 

 

 

 

Carletta Carrington Wilson addresses her  “letter to a laundress”  to her great great grandmother, but her profound photo/poem installation currently on view at the Kittredge Gallery in Tacoma  (only until September 29) honors the work of all those who, in her words, “took in wash.”

 

She found photographs of anonymous laundresses in the archives of the Farm Security Administration, most of them taken in the late 1930s by such well known photographers as Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott and Russell Lee.

 

The “letter” is a poem written in blue script on the photographs, and recited by the artist in a pod cast as we view the work.

Mounted on fabric, the photographs are pegged to a line, and hang above our heads. As we walk between three lines of closely packed “laundry” the poem unwinds, describing, the many steps of doing laundry before the advent of machines and drip dry fabric.

 

Carletta has identified ten steps

each with a single word:

Wash Soak Starch Wring Boil Pin Rub Scrub Hang Press.

 

 

 

 

The photographs are arresting, suggesting the real labor of doing laundry and how it evolved. Some of the photographs are actually from the late nineteenth century, early washerwomen, using a  washing stick to stir laundry in a tub, others are using a washboard, that iconic object now seen only as a relic (several are included in the exhibition).

 

The separate steps, such as an iron wringer

now so lost to us,  appear in these FSA photographs.

 

The women rarely look up or out, never at the camera, the photographer. We have all types of women from those dressed in a muslin shift to elegant women in suits and shoes with heels.

 

Carletta Carrington Wilson deeply feels words, their meanings, double meanings and symbolism. Thus here, as offered by the artist, is a shift from laundry to something more sinister:

“hoist baskets tote tubs lug those loads every bundle extends a line

a line awaiting a line awaiting its hangings.” And suddenly as Wilson wrote the poem, she realized the double meaning of hanging as also lynching.

As the artist said in a lecture “The lines of the poem lead the reader away from the mundane duty of washing clothes to a disturbing image of lynching. Thus, we are led into the awful reality that links these women beyond the ordinary task of laundry.

“Post emancipation, in the late 19th and early 20th century there was a rise in the number of lynchings in the south.  These mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, cousins and friends knew, were related to, heard of, witnessed and buried someone who had been lynched.  They, also, washed the clothes of someone who participated in a lynching. I was just speculating, but this was confirmed by a woman who spoke to me after one of the artist talks”*

 

 

This exhibition includes other intense works as well: across one wall is a series of fabric works called “field notes” from 2014 with Carletta’s trademark layers and meanings hidden in their patterns and textures.. You can spend a long time exploring these works, which are, as the artists suggests, like landscapes. One of her themes in her work is the “text of textiles” the steps from cotton into cloth and the metaphors that emerge from fabric.

 

 

Then there are simple cut out house shapes, what the artist calls “wordless books.” in a series called “knot my name haint my house”. They refer to the fact that 90 percent of enslaved people were illiterate. The blue around the doors is called ” ‘haint blue’and was used to deter ghosts”  the artist explained.

 

On one wall a “knotted line” again has double meaning, the names are (k)not names, but the names given by slave masters, here taken from a plantation inventory. The artist elaborated

“The idea is that once a person become enslaved their lines of descent are knotted.  Each time a person is sold, with each name

change and change of place of bondage the loss of knowledge of familiar ties becomes, increasingly, knotted and unknown.”

 

 

 

 

The “blood knot” lies below “2 resist dying”, another title with more than one meaning. two indigo blue wall hangings in dye resist. The artist describes the work “2 resist dying” as referring to both the resist-dye process and, also, that of a man and woman resisting their enslavement.

 

Underneath is a “blood knot, “a tangled pile on the floor invoking the intermixing (knotting) of blood among people involved in the slave trade. The artist specified “The “blood knot” represents the knotted blood lines of Africans, Europeans, Asians and Indians as a result of the global trade networks formed during the transatlantic slave trade.  ”

 

 

Carletta Carrington Wilson poet, collagist, historian, one of the most intriguing creative minds I have known. Here’s hoping this exhibition can move to a major museum soon.

 

*Thank you Carletta Carrington Wilson for sharing this text and other information and images for this blog post.

Three inclusive events in Seattle give me hope

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first event was the 55th anniversary of the March on Washington sponsored by Mt Zion Baptist Church, the oldest African American church in Seattle and a pioneer of Civil Rights Leadership under the Reverend Samuel B McKinney.

Here you see our new police chief Carmen Best marching with us. Low key, not putting herself forward.

 

We marched down 19th street from Union St. to Mt Zion led by the “filthyfem corps,” a trans group of fantastic musicians.

then a series of speeches outside and inside the church.

Inside we had staggering music and poetry and presentations from a wide range of different people

 

It was a moving and memorable event.

 

The march launched the campaign to repeal I 200 and the encouragement to sign the petition for  I 1000 that will negate I 200. I 200 eliminated Affirmative Action ( we are one of only 8 states that have repealed it). It was an early example of Tim Eyman and allies such as Wade Connerly from California,  pushing through a right wing petition. It said “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” I 1000 would repeal that. It is hoped to put it before the State Legislature in January.

 

 

In the video taken by Christina Lopez two youth  (seen here) recite the vast impacts of the tossing out of Affirmative Action for workers, students, and many other groups. A bell tolls after each statement. 

Inside we had speakers that included a rabbi, Daniel Weiner, a leader of the American Muslim Empowerment Network, Aneelah Afzali (a fabulous speaker), Native American spoken word, by Quinault Indian Nation member, Heather Upham,  Legislators, community activists, ( such as Jorge Baron, head of NWIRP) Reverend McKinney’s daughter, Dr. Lora-Ellen McKinney, who honored over eighty people who “fought for freedom, justice and the dignity of all people”. Here she is with a photo of the famous Jacob Lawrence.

 

and much more. It was wonderful to have everyone coming together. The singing of”Lift Up Your Voice and Sing”  by Josephine Howell,  brought tears to our eyes, the music captured by Christina Lopez. 

 

Likewise the Mayor’s Arts Awards two days later reached out to many communities with awards to individuals:

Fulgencio Lazo, my good friend and outstanding artist,  who connects us to Oaxaca Mexico.  Studio Lazo, an organization of artists and community members especially showcases the creativity of Latino artists, writers and musicians.

 

 

Tarik Abdullah a local chef artist, innovator, and community activist. His culinary creations honor traditions from North Africa and the Mediterranean;  his artistry comes through not only in his food, He cooks with the younger generation by teaching week long summer camps called “In the Kitchen with Chef T”

 

Karen P. Thomas a musican who is encouraging non binary identity for singers traditionally divided into Men’s choruses and Women’s choruses. She has been artistic director and conductor of Seattle Pro Musica since 1987.

 

Jorge Enrique Gonzalez Pacheco,  a Cuban poet and film maker. He is Founder and Chief Programmer of the Seattle Latino Film Festival (SLFF),

Paula Boggs, musician, public speaker, fundraiser and philanthropist. She is also a Board Member of numerous for-profit and non-profit organizations. Boggs and the 6-piece Paula Boggs Band traverse jazz, world, rock and Americana.

 

For the first time, cultural categories were broadened beyond traditional definitions of art and culture. I think it was a great idea. I was also happy to see the move to individuals who build community, instead of mainly established cultural organizations (although they are all exceptional also).

 

 

The third event was “Decolonizing Immigration” at the Seattle Public Library on the same night as the Mayor’s Arts Awards.

Organized by Davida Ingram, it also made a point of being inclusive.

We began with wonderful music by D’Vonne Lewis and Pathways.Passageways—Drummer D’Vonne Lewis’ new group celebrates the Black Diaspora from Seattle’s rich African-American jazz heritage to rhythms from South Africa, Central America, and Senegal. Passageways is: D’Vonne Lewis, Ari Joshua, Alex Dugdale, and Thione Diop.

We had the history of immigration law by Enoka Herat of the ACLU who also defined what “decolonizing immigration” means. Notice “Turn and Talk” : we were asked to speak to our neighbor about our own story.

 

“To decolonize immigration, we must decriminalize and demilitarize enforcement against Indigenous, Black and Brown people. We must build a system that centers the power and humanity of immigrants, recognizing that migration- for love, opportunity, health, refuge is a fundamental aspect of being human.” Enoka Herat

We also had an interactive dance led by the incredibly charismatic David Rue that we all took part in. We were divided as an audience into three rhythms. Rue also spoke as an immigrant from Liberia ( indigenous Liberian, in contrast to the Americans who were encouraged to migrate there in the “back to Africa” era).

 

Ken Workman Duwamish Tribe fourth generation great grandson of Chief Seattle opened the event.

We heard from three poets learning English as a second language in a special program at the library. Their poetry that is published in a small book Learning to Love America

here is a short excerpt from Roberta Mocanu , born in Romania

My Roots

“I am an immigrant

Of the world

Why don’t you listen?

When I tell you my roots are bleeding”

….

Tom Ikeda spoke of Japanese detention camps and later oppressions, The Japanese are acutely aware of the illegality of detention and its arbitrariness.

I left as David Rue was speaking about his journey from Liberia.

Other participants who spoke were
Ellany Kayce Native activist
Graciela Nuñez Pargas Journalist,
Hodan Hassan social activist, feminist, climate justice organizer

Tuesday Velasquez

There will be a podcast which I will link when it is online.

 

It was not simply a sit and watch evening:  the message was you are part of the community, you are part of the issue, you are part of the story. You are part of the solution.

Hats off to everyone. All in one week. Hurray for Seattle.

 

Indigenous Artists and Contemporary Environmental Issues Part II

The despoliation of Indigenous reservations through fossil fuel extraction, pipe lines, uranium mining, and many other disastrous environmental policies, is a subject of the work of several prominent

Indigenous artists. Currently on view is the work of John Feodorov in the exhibition “In Red Ink,” curated by RYAN! Feddersen at the Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner

His four part work “Desecrations” :

#1the Coal plant

 

#2 the pipe lines

#3 the yellow radiation house

 

#4  fracking cracks in the earth

 

 

He painted these images on specially woven white Navaho rugs created by Navaho master weaver Tyra Preston.

Feodorov explained that as he painted on the rugs, he felt he also was committing an act of desecration:

 

“The series responds to ongoing environmental threats to traditional Diné lands and communities (including toxic pollution caused from uranium mining, coal burning, and fracking), as well as the exploitation and pollution of indigenous land around the world. But, it also refers to my hesitation in painting upon Tyra’s beautiful weavings.

 

“Just as Native lands are under constant threat, so are Native cultures. For me, these rugs act as metaphors for both land and culture. By painting upon them, perhaps I have also desecrated them? My mother taught me that weaving is a sacred art, taught to our Diné people by Spider Woman. So it was with some hesitation and great respect that I decided to undertake this series. Understandably, Tyra asked many probing questions of me before agreeing to participate, as well as consulting with a Navajo elder/medicine man from her community. I wish to thank Tyra Preston for weaving these gorgeous rugs, without which this series could not have been realized.”

 

A second Navaho artist is addressing nuclear pollution on the reservation: Demian DinéYazhi’ (photo by Patrick Weishampel) is currently showing an installation at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington as a result of winning the Brink Award. His work includes poetry, sculpture, and video intersecting to create a powerful statement.

 

It begins with confronting us as viewers with a manifesto presented in segments on a video screen:

 

“By entering this space you have agreed
To become a lifelong agent
Against humanitarian
And environmental injustice
You have agreed to forfeit your racist misconceptions
of Indigenous identity & respect the sacredness
of Indigenous traditional practices
You are not stepping into the past or staring into a
Picture plane void of Indigenous inhabitants
You are not glorifying western historical inaccuracies
Or romanticizing the cowboys and Indians narrative
By entering this space you agree to never again place
Your hand over your mouth in a mock “war cry”
Or teach your children to be ignorant of the
Indigenous peoples whose land you
Have claimed as your own
From this moment onward you have agreed to learn
The history of the Indigenous ancestral lands
That were stolen & continue to be stolen
Through settler colonial violence
&environmental genocide
By entering this space you have agreed to center
Your politics, social movements & institutions
Of knowledge around the Indigenous peoples
Whose lives & cultures were forever altered
In pursuit of this post-apocalypitic
heteropatriachal colonial nightmare”

The space itself includes more poetry presented in a slide show and with reference to a huge uranium spill that occurred at Church Rock, New Mexico in 1979.

 

I am going to insert here Emily Pothast’s excellent article in the Stranger, based on her interview with the artist:

 

“In July of 1979, a breached dam at Church Rock, New Mexico, sent more than a thousand tons of radioactive waste tumbling into the Puerco River. Despite being the largest release of radioactive material in US history, the incident received almost no media coverage. Many residents who used the river for irrigation weren’t even notified, and the governor denied local requests to declare Church Rock a federal disaster area.

 

“Nearly three decades later, a team of public-health researchers linked the negligence to racism. The Puerco River flows through what settlers call the Navajo Nation—known in the Diné language as Dinétah—and the spill primarily affected rural communities on the reservation.

 

“Today, abandoned uranium mines dot the landscape like open wounds along what was once Route 66, lit up by garish neon signs advertising “Indian jewelry” to non-indigenous tourists. Many of these sites have not been cleaned up, and probably won’t be cleaned up.”

PHOTO BY EMILY POTHAST
“There are two pieces in the current exhibition by Demian DinéYazhi’ at the Henry Art Gallery that address this ongoing history head-on. The first is in beauty it is restored, a circular neon sign that glows like uranium but also reflects the balance of Navajo cosmology and the power of ceremony to make things whole again. The second is Hey Jolene, a visual poem projected from an analog slide projector onto a billboard-shaped screen. Its text extends the metaphor of toxic phosphorescence to the warm glow of an alcohol-soaked liver. Unlike many of the artist’s pieces, which pair texts with family photos and images of landscapes, the background behind these words is crimson.

“I use red a lot as a way to maintain an indigenous aesthetic,” says DinéYazhi’. “This is actually my finger pressing against the camera lens pointed toward the sun.”

“As for the text: “It’s about a friend who passed away a few years ago on her reservation. It’s one of the only pieces that addresses a specific individual, but this story line is very similar to every other indigenous person’s story within the Gallup region.”

 

“The artist’s hometown of Gallup sits just outside the Navajo Nation, some 17 miles south of Church Rock. DinéYahzi’ describes it as a colonized border town, a place where indigenous and Western worldviews intersect.

 

“The way land art has been constructed within contemporary art practice is to usually leave a mark against the land,” says DinéYahzi’. “Within an indigenous framework, it’s not about leaving your mark on the land, it’s about honoring a region as much as possible. Photography is a safe site to have an experience of the land that isn’t necessarily continuing in this legacy of taking or extracting.”

Another site of colonization that the artist’s work addresses is gender. “The Navajo tribe had four to five different gender systems,” they explain, adding that now there are elders who side with the assimilationist agenda as an expression of trauma incurred through settler violence. “Coming back to the ceremonial framework is a way to heal as a community.”

 

Thank you Emily Pothast for this clear explanation!

 

 

 

 

The third visual artist who has addressed contamination on Indigenous reservations for many years is Gail Tremblay. I have frequently reviewed her exhibitions on this topic which include video interviews, poetry by Arthur Tulee, large felt sculptures of lungs contaminated by cancer, and scientfic images of cancer contamination.

 

Here is one piece I wrote about at Daybreak Star gallery for the literary magazine Raven Chronicles in 2002:

 

“Iókste Akwerià:ne: It is Heavy on My Heart A room sized installation with large felt sculptures or organs with cancerous tumors, DVD, audio tape of singing, color copies of cancerous organs and cells, small felt sculptures of spiderwort, normal and irradiated.

The installation takes us over, rather than the other way around. It has a larger than life scale.  Built out of felt, huge tumors grow on Lungs and Diaphragm and the Thyroid Gland. The cancerous tumors inhabit the room on the scale of human bodies, they invade our spirits, they invade our feelings. The felt surfaces seduce us with their beauty, but at the same time, the organs speak to us. Unlike the mute dolls, these organs speak;  tell us their story, they testify, through the voices of many different Indians and many tribes, through images of cancer infected fish and polluted landscapes.  They weave a tale of betrayal, the old tale and the new tale. The tale of the nuclear industry, its assault on traditional native lands, its campaign to deposit its waste on Indian lands, its careless removal of Indians or cajoling of Indians with money. The elders speak of the illness that the nuclear industry and its invisible radioactivity causes in their tribes, birth defects, growth delays, leukemia, skin diseases, asthma, heart disease, cancer, breast, lung, colon, prostate. They reply with legends, with poetry, with a clear alternative to the stealing of the insides of the earth, they speak of their way of life, their principles of living in the land, but not gaining from it.  Grand Canyon, Navaho, Hvasupai, Laguna, Acoma, Shoshone, Peyote Yakima Colville, Wishwram, Prairie Island, Apache Choctaw. Sioux. These are the tribes of the tellers of the tale.

 

The poet Arthur Tullee wearing a bright red shirt recites his exquisite poems of legends of death,sickness, and healing. ”

 

In addition to these three artists we have the wide and ongoing resistance by writers, poets, visual artists, activists and the general public to the Kinder Morgan pipeline outside of Vancouver. The link is to a poetic video by an articulate young Indigenous woman.

 

As of today, arrests are going on, and the destruction of protest camps is continuous. But the resistance is strong.

The Transmountain pipeline is on an existing route, but the plan is to triple its capacity. The protests have been in Burnaby outside of Vancouver BC all summer. Currently the Canadian government is looking for a buyer, since Kinder Morgan did back down and the government bought it with public funds -so much for Pierre Trudeau’s environmental credentials.

“Those arrested included 50-year-old Rita Wong, a poet and professor at Emily Carr University who organized Friday’s action on behalf of missing and murdered Indigenous women, according to a statement from Protect the Inlet, one of the many groups that oppose the Trans Mountain pipeline.

 

“The expansion of this pipeline would pose an increased risk to Indigenous women through displacement and man-camps, as well as everybody on Earth, through further climate destabilization,” she said in a statement, adding that “more people to make the connections between violence against the land and violence against Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.”

 

“Wong was placed in what looked like a black lawn chair and carried away from the scene Friday

 

“Mairy Beam, Kathryn Cass and Deb Wood, who are all in their 60s, were also arrested.

 

“I was nervous, but also very proud to take a stand and to take a stand for Mother Earth and to stand for my granddaughters,” Beam told CTV News.”