In keeping with our Friday Feature theme of this month, today we’re going to build our virtual sculpture garden with the works of two different artisans. In recognition of the fact that school’s out, we’re also going to bring the children into it and give them a safe and happy place to spend this early-summer day.
Gardens for children have long been a theme in the literature of the dominant culture. To this day, the two most famous examples are books more than a century old: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, from 1910 (in serialized format; published whole in 1911) and A Child’s Garden of Verses by Scots author Robert Louis Stevenson, dating back to 1885. When I was perhaps seven or eight, I discovered an old book in the local library, one that dated to about the same era as The Secret Garden, that told the story of two lonely little girls at an English boarding school, girls sent away. feeling homesick and forgotten, who somehow in their exile found each other and together found a secret area on the school grounds they turned into their own beautiful garden. For a child of my background, exiled in other ways, it was a revelation, something magical, this notion that I could build my own safe and beautiful garden getaway, if only in mind. I had no friend to help me, and no means with which to build an actual garden with real flowers, but I spent hours each day with tiny sticks and stones, digging in the dirt, building my own structural garden in miniature, imbuing it with beauty and joy and laughter and a best friend that existed only in imagination, but were no less real for that. The title of the book has long since been lost to memory, and no amount of searching has turned up a name, much less a copy.
Still, for the better part of a year, it saved the inner life of a lonely little girl.
In our cultures, storytelling is very much a way of life, but one that often takes a form very different from that of mainstream literature, children’s or otherwise. For children, particularly, our stories are at least as often lessons are they are entertainment, the product of a fundamental recognition that children learn better when they’re having fun. We’ve talked about the practice of indigenous storytelling here before, in the context of these very sculptural pieces, the little versions of classic Pueblo storyteller figures:
One of the hallmarks of indigenous culture is storytelling. It’s a way to pass the time where few other forms of entertainment may be readily available, true, but in our cultures, it’s much more than mere leisure-time amusement. It’s more than what today we might call “family bonding” time, and more than a way to build relationships among the older and younger generations. It’s also much more than a way to teach lessons, although it’s that, too.
It’s a way to keep culture itself alive.
Our stories are as varied as the peoples (plural) who tell them, and as the people (singular), as well. A survey of tribal nations within the same geographic region, the same ethnic subgrouping, or the same language family will turn up variations of very similar traditional stories. And yet, within those same groups, the same stories vary within other subgroups, as well. And thus you get dozens, perhaps hundreds of nations with their own origin stories that have basic similarities and yet vast differences; nations from all over the country that tell stories of how their own ancestors were given/invented the drum, the dreamcatcher, the jingle dress; variations within the same nation as to details of those stories, or even their fundamentals.
Stories tell our children where they came from. They tell us who we are. They tell us how to live, how to walk the red road, how to go well through life according to the old ways that Spirit has given us. They tell us how to be wise, and how to be wary. They teach us the meaning of courage and honor and respect and the sacred. And sometimes, they do all these things while making us laugh, such as when Coyote decided to lie in wait for the maidens picking strawberries.
In our virtual sculpture garden of today, I like to envision a garden at the old village itself, one in which four grandmothers are seated nominally at the cardinal directions, in a loose circle of sorts. At the center of their circle sits an old village house, one that ties them all together by ancestry and history and tradition. Each has a collection of grandchildren on her lap, and on this day, the elders take turns telling stories to entertain all of the children of their extended family.
The first grandmother is the one above, one with three grandchildren seated on her lap. They sit quietly and obediently, but talk animatedly about the stories. From their collective description in the Other Artists: Sculpture gallery:
This little storyteller is fashioned from the local micaceous clay by Wings’s cousin, Aaron Mirabal (Taos Pueblo). Here, it’s a grandmother with three grandchildren on her lap, all dressed traditionally and colorfully. Grandmother’s hair is coiled into two Hopi-style butterfly rolls, in Aaron’s trademark style. She stands 3.5″ high (dimensions approximate).
Micaceous clay; paint
$155 + shipping, handling, and insurance
To her left around the circle sits one of her peers, an elder of smaller stature but similarly dressed, and one holding two younger children. From their description:
This tiny storyteller figure fits in the palm of your hand. Created by Aaron Mirabal (Taos Pueblo), it consists of Grandmother with two children in her arms. All “wear” traditional dress, but grandmother herself also wears her hair in Hopi fashion, in two large butterfly rolls, a feature that is one of Aaron’s trademarks. Figure stands 2-3/8″ high (dimensions approximate).
Micaceous clay; paint
$75 + shipping, handling, and insurance
These are, of course, the iconic figurative pieces now known in the world of Southwest Native art as “storytellers.” They have a long and storied history, one that predates the “official” version by a very long time. As I wrote here last year:
It’s an art tradition that, according to the dominant culture’s “collectors” and “experts,” has existed only since 1964.
Ask a Pueblo elder, and she or he will tell you differently.
According to the received wisdom of the outside world, the “inventor,” so to speak, of the storyteller was a woman named Helen Cordero, of Cochiti Pueblo. If you read closely, however, you’ll see that “inventor” is perhaps too strong a word, even there: Supposedly, she was creating pieces to the specifications of a white man who was a collector and “expert.” [And, yes, like it or not, I will virtually always put the word expert in quotation marks when talking about non-Indians, because while they like to style themselves “experts” on our cultures, I have yet to meet one who actually is, their own and their peers’ assertions to the contrary notwithstanding. The actual experts on Indian cultures are Indians.]
As one biographer notes, Cochiti Pueblo already specialized in a sculptural art form known as the “Singing Mothers,” speculating that the collector in question had that imagery in mind when requesting small seated adult figures overrun with small children. The same book quotes Ms. Cordero herself as remembering her own grandfather, ” a really good storyteller,” surrounded by his grandchildren, as she visualized how to fulfill the collector’s commission.
The account makes perhaps too much of whether Ms. Cordero’s first such storyteller was male. The fact of the matter is that elders today who were alive long before the magic date of 1964 can remember sculptors and potters in their own families making just such figures, male and female alike, holding children in their arms, on their laps, on their shoulders, the adult depicted with mouth open in a circle to tell the old stories and sing the old songs. And today, of course, the styles vary among the Pueblos, and among the artisans within each Pueblo. One Taos Pueblo artist makes both Grandmother and Grandfather storytellers, and it’s always interesting to see the confusion on people’s faces trying to decide which is which; invariably, they get it wrong. In her work, the adult with the hair tied up in a traditional bun is the grandmother, while the one with the two long braids is the grandfather. Today, of course, male members of the Pueblo who dress traditionally tie their hair up in the bun, as do married women — but in the old days, the men wore their hair in two long wrapped braids. Her style harks back to an older time, giving it layers of additional meaning. It’s a stylistic execution that’s also reflective of the storytellers that Wings, born in 1949, recalls from his own childhood among an extended family full of artists, including potters and sculptors who made such pieces.
I should note here that none of what I say minimizes Ms. Cordero’s own contributions to the larger body of work made up of what are now called “Pueblo storytellers.” She was, by whatever designs of humans, fate, or Spirit, the person who midwifed the style’s entrée into the world outside Pueblo societies generally. Her own work now occupies a place of broader historical significance, is much in demand, and is very valuable by any measure.
I continue to repeat Wings’s own stories here, because it matters. The Native artisans who have long since walked on deserve better than the erasure dominant-culture “expertise” affords them. They deserve recognition for their creations, their talents, their status as the parents and progenitors of what are now whole schools of art no longer limited to the people to whom the style belongs, but mimicked by non-Natives, as well.
Still, it’s time to move around our garden to our next set of stories and the woman who tells them. Like our first grandmother, she is a bit taller, and likewise holds three grandchildren. Like the children to her right, these are a bit more rambunctious, a bit more fidgety: One tries to climb over her right shoulder, while another holds onto the back of her left. From their description:
Aaron Mirabal (Toas Pueblo) has formed this traditional storyteller out of the Pueblo’s micaceous clay. Grandmother holds two children on her lap while one peers over her left shoulder. All are shown in traditional dress, while Grandmother herself wears her hair in Aaron’s trademark Hopi-style butterfly rolls. Height is 3.5″ (dimensions approximate).
Micaceous clay; paint
$155 + shipping, handling, and insurance
And at last, we come to our final grandmother, another petite one holding two very young children. Like the woman to her right, she’s chosen to wear white traditional dress, perhaps a concession to the June heat, and has dressed her grandchildren similarly. From their description:
It’s a storyteller figure sized to fit in the palm of your hand (or take her place on a shelf or mantel), coaxed from local micaceous clay by Aaron Mirabal (Taos Pueblo). Grandmother holds two children on her lap as she passes down the old stories and lessons to them. All “wear” matching traditional dress; Grandmother’s hair is coiled into two butterfly rolls, Hopi-fashion, in what has become Aaron’s trademark style. Figure stands 2-3/8″ high (dimensions approximate).
Micaceous clay
$75 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Finally, amidst the attentive grandmothers and laughing children, we come full circle to the heart of it all: the old Pueblo village house. We’ve looked at the role the village homes play in the culture here, their centrality to daily life as well as to the broader history, culture, spiritual traditions, and art. of the people.
This piece is also by one of Wings’s relatives (as are the storytellers above, by a different cousin). From its description:
Taos Pueblo sculptor/potter Martin Romero has created a miniature Pueblo house with horno (oven), in the shape of the Pueblo’s iconic multi-story architecture. House and horno are the people’s own local micaceous clay, glowing with warm metallic flecks of sunlight. The arbor and ladders are real wood, pieces cut and meticulously stripped by hand, then fashioned into reproductions of the traditional arbors and pine ladders found at the actual village homes. Measures just over 5.5″ long by 3″ high by 3.75″ deep (dimensions approximate).
Micaceous clay; wood
$175 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply
This miniature version of the heart of the Pueblo’s old village is the perfect center for our virtual sculpture garden for children: After all, it is their heritage and their legacy, their history and their identity, rendered in the very earth of the garden itself.
If you listen closely, perhaps you’ll hear the stories, whispered on the soft summer winds.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
