Cultural Keepers: Saving the Stories

Cultural Keepers:  Saving the Stories

Once, my ancestors painted themselves for war and ceremony, carved images on bone and rock, carried amulets and charms, told stories, recited histories and created myths.  They must have.  Even my family name means “traveling minstrel”– story-teller, performer, and myth-maker — but the English, Irish, Dutch, French and Swiss blood that joins the Welsh in my veins creates a new pulse without any real heritage markers.  The rich, palpable cultural framework for mark-making and myth-telling has been lost in me over generations.  Now we make marks and tell family stories without cultural guides.  But those stories are ours, the only ones we have.

I am the elder of my clan.  My husband is the last of his.  We link our ancestors to our children.  Family stories are still held in mirrors and inkwells, plates and platters, but cultural markings and imagery, ceremonies and rituals — all have disappeared or been subsumed into a larger amorphous amalgam.  This is exactly what Aboriginal elders in desert Australia fear, too.  Native American communities in North America share the same issue –the loss of specific cultural identity. 

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In a “portrait” of aboriginal artist Rusty Peters (Gija – Juwurru), Nicolas Rothwell, author of the book Another Country, discusses the impetus for mark-making among indigenous people, and one of Peters’ themes — “the role of memory in man’s progress”: “…But this reinterpreting, this painting at the boundaries, is not some arbitrary, vaguely modern quest for theme: it is an artist’s response to changed conditions.  Peters aims not just to analyse those changes and understand the mind’s course in their midst, but to show through art — to teach.  Of course the art is intended for the mainstream connoisseurs and the gallery-goers who admire it, but he has another target as well — the young Gija girls and boys of Turkey Creek and the outlying East Kimberley communities, whose path in life is hard.

“The old people put their stories on the rocks,” says Peters, “and we know them still.  Some of the old law used to take three or four months in the bush, in the early days.  I’m trying to pass that knowledge on — but the young people don’t listen.  A lot of young people know a little of the culture but not the language.  I have deep worry for the young people: they smoke ganja, drink, hang themselves.  In my day, we didn’t do those things.  I’m painting for them too — to try to give them their traditions.”  (p. 165)

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I can recite a few stories many generations old, but the relationship to a larger specific culture is gone.  There are no Welsh songs or iconography, no sudden need to eschew vowels for strings of consonants. My French is rudimentary, Dutch non-existent, Gallic an unsolved mystery.  I feel closer to those with a similar life-philosophy than to those with a cultural set of marks.  

I still seek to preserve the few stories I have, though, and wish I’d listened closer when my mother recited her stories time and again.  Now that she’s gone, I have lots of questions.  And just like I was, my daughters aren’t particularly interested in family stories.  “Take pictures, Mom and write it down.  They’re your stories, not ours.”  But someday, the stories I know will be their stories, and when I’m gone, they’ll have lots of questions, too, no matter how much I write down and how many pictures I take.  

There are no cultural morality-tales in my family except in religious contexts that grow distant and dilute. And because of unpreserved heritage, because the dominant culture subsumes the minority, my descendents will never be able to point to a stylized and patterned image and say, “This image is Raven.  Now, one day Raven …”  

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The annotation of artist Susan Point’s (Coast Salish – Musqueam) show at the Seattle Art Museum (URL below) makes a similar case:  ”In the late 19th century anthropologists encouraged some artists to draw images of clan crests and body painting designs to add to their research data.  By the late 1920’s Native artists were using drawings and watercolors, both as teaching tools for younger artists and as a means of income.  Forty years later, a new generation of Northwest Coast artists turned to serigraphs, thus launching what has become a major form of artistic expression for artists from Puget Sound to Southeast Alaska.”  

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Is each of us a “living bridge”?  Columnist and radio host Amy Goodman so designated folk singer and song archivist Utah Philips (URL below) for his attempts to keep the songs of the labor movement alive.  Phillips said: “The long memory is the most radical idea in America….No, our people’s history is like one long river.  It flows down from way over there.  And everything that those people did and everything they lived flows down to me, and I can reach down and take out what I need, if I have the courage to go out and ask questions. “

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It’s clear that preserving culture in some form is a human imperative.  We need to know where we come from, and we need to pass this on to others.  It’s cross-cultural and timeless.  It’s human.  How do we, the elders of today, preserve what’s come before, so it can be applied to what comes after?  What morality tales must be performed before attention is paid? What myths must be sung?  What marks must be made to preserve the “long memory”?

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Photos:  Top right:  Burnet sisters, including Elizabeth Burnet Parker (standing), 3rd in 8 generations of girls with the name Elizabeth in our family, about 1870.  Middle left:  A family tintype, c. 1880, Hewes relatives.  Lower right:  Betty Bell Baker, my mother, in the striped sweater, mid-1920’s, Beverly Hills, CA.  Source:  family archives.

To explore further:

• To see Rusty Peters‘ powerful paintings: http://www.artnet.com/Artists/LotDetailPage.aspx?lot_id=C27BC53CFFF0A054818EC504BA18E3D1 or http://www.moragalleries.com.au/rpeters/

• To see Susan Stone’s exceptional serigraphs and collections of other indigenous work, including aboriginal work from Australia, visit the Alcheringa Gallery online:  http://www.alcheringa-gallery.com/artists.html?do=view&artist=67

• To read Amy Goodman’s complete article on Utah Phillips, go to http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/365106_amy30.html

• To find out more about Nicolas Rothwell’s book Another Country, go to Glee Books (www.gleebooks.com.au) or Dymocks (www.dymocks,com.au) or ABC Books (www.abcbooks.com.au).  Or follow his column in The Australian (www.theaustralian.com.au)