Monthly Archives: February 2024

Remembering Virginia Beavert (Tuxámshish), Yakama Scholar and Linguist

The University of Washington Press joins the Yakama Nation, Northwest Native tribes, and the many individuals, organizations, and institutions grieving the loss of elder Virginia Beavert, who passed away on February 8 at the age of 102.

Beavert, who was also known by her Yakama name, Tuxámshish, was a noted Native scholar and linguist and a tireless advocate for tribal culture and traditions.

Virginia Beavert (1921–2024). Still photo from Confluence Project.

“UW Press is honored to have published three books in collaboration with the legendary and deeply knowledgeable Virginia Beavert,” says press director Nicole Mitchell. “Through these works, her learning and wisdom will continue to reach students in Native communities and beyond for many generations to come.”

Ichishkíin Sinwit Yakama / Yakima Sahaptin Dictionary, coauthored with Sharon L. Hargus and copublished with Heritage University, is the first published dictionary of any Sahaptin dialect and documents the Ichishkíin dialect spoken by the Yakama people of Eastern Washington. The Gift of Knowledge / Ttnúwit Átawish Nch’inch’imamí: Reflections on Sahaptin Ways, authored by Beavert and edited by Janne L. Underriner, includes cultural teachings, oral history, and stories (many in bilingual Ishishkíin-English format) about family life, religion, ceremonies, food gathering, and other aspects of traditional culture. Anakú Iwachá: Yakama Legends and Stories, coedited with Michelle M. Jacob and Joana W. Jansen, presents stories that Yakama elders recorded in several dialects of the Ichishkíin language that Beavert collected and translated into English.

Below, longtime UW Press executive editor Lorri Hagman reflects on Virginia Beavert and her work.

When I began working with Virginia in 2013 on The Gift of Knowledge, she was, at the age of 92, already a legend in her own time. In 1986, at 65, when most people would have settled into retirement, she earned her bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Central Washington University. That was followed by a master’s degree in bilingual/bicultural education from the University of Arizona in 2000 (at age 79) and a PhD in linguistics from the University of Oregon in 2012 (at age 90). Virginia was still traveling from her home in Wapato, Washington, to the University of Oregon in Eugene to mentor students and teach the Ichishkíin language, and she had published her 560-page dictionary and the first edition of her collected Yakama legends and stories—monumental contributions to scholarship. Now she was eager to transform her doctoral dissertation into a book for general readers, especially future generations of the Yakama Nation. That book, The Gift of Knowledge, narrates stories from Virginia’s own life that exemplify Yakama lifeways and values.

My quintessential Virginia memory is a story she told when we met in Eugene, Oregon, for what turned out to be a leisurely three-hour breakfast. Horses played a big role in her own life, but this horse story is about how her mother, as a child, was stranded alone overnight and was protected by horses from wolves. It is included in The Gift of Knowledge:

My mother had an experience when she was young where horses saved her life in the mountains. She was taking care of them during a berry picking trip to the Trout Lake area. An Elder told her to take the horses to a certain meadow to graze. She was to leave them and walk back to camp. It was already past noontime and she did not question the request. She rode her own horse bareback, and towed the horses together with a rope halter, the head of one horse to the tail of the one in front, and navigated them in that way.

It was getting dark when she reached her destination. She hurried back toward camp but it became so dark she could not see the trail and was forced to get down on her hands and knees and feel her way. Soon she heard the timber wolves at a distance; they came nearer and nearer. She said she began to feel sorry for herself and was thinking that her relatives did not love her; that they wanted her to die. As she was feeling her way along the trail she felt something warm and soft. It was the nostril of her horse, Taḵawaakúɬ, who had come back to rescue her. She took hold of his tail and he led her back to the meadow. The wolves were following them all the way.

In the meadow all the horses gathered around her. Her horse lay down, and she slept on his belly to keep warm until morning. The wolves were not able to reach her because the horses surrounded and protected her. In the morning she went back to camp and no one mentioned anything. No one apologized to her or wanted to know how she had made out. She explained that that was the cultural way. They wanted her to find a spiritual power from the mountains. While she was asleep she acquired that power. She was a healer for women.

Virginia grew up in a traditional, Indian-speaking household. Her maternal grandmother was a shaman, as were her father and mother; her great-great-grandmother was an herbal doctor and midwife. As a child, she was surrounded by people who spoke Nez Perce, Umatilla, Klikatat, and Ichishkíin. Until she went to school at age eight, her life was spent learning about the world around her, along with skills such as food gathering and the use of medicinal plants. Her work on Native languages began at age twelve, when she met linguist Melville Jacobs while she was working with his student, anthropologist Margaret Kendell, as liaison and interpreter for the people Kendell interviewed. When Jacobs discovered that Virginia was a fluent speaker of the Klikatat language, he taught her to read and write the orthography he had developed to record Klikatat stories, and she began a lifetime of work on Native languages.

During World War II, Virginia joined the United States Air Force, serving as a wireless radio operator at the B-29 Bomber Base at Clovis, New Mexico. After the war, she bought herself a thoroughbred horse, which she rode in races and rodeos, and she earned a living as a medical secretary. Her stepfather—a multilingual speaker of Ichishkíin and southern Salish dialects who had worked with University of Oregon linguist Bruce Rigsby to record oral histories and legends—convinced her to return to school and study anthropology.

She went on to teach courses on Native American languages and cultures at Central Washington University; Yakima Valley College; Wapato High School; Heritage University in Toppenish, Washington, on the Yakama Reservation, where she was the director of the Sahaptin Language Program; and the Northwest Indian Language Institute and World Language Academy at the University of Oregon.

Virginia was the first woman elected as secretary-treasurer of the Yakama Nation’s General Council and served on the council from 1974–85. She was a 2006 recipient of the Washington Governor’s Heritage Award; 2007 Central Washington University Alumna of the Year; 2008 recipient of the Ken Hale prize of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas; and 2008 recipient of a Distinguished Service Award, University of Oregon.

—Lorri Hagman

The Role of the Arts and Artists in Social Justice Movements: Editor Laura Kina on the Critical Ethnic Studies and Visual Culture Series

The Critical Ethnic Studies and Visual Culture series encourages innovative interdisciplinary antiracist work that challenges and transforms our understandings of race, ethnicity, and the visual.

As we prepare for the College Art Association (CAA) annual conference, taking place in Chicago from February 14 to 17, we are pleased to announce the inaugural series publications: Resisting the Nuclear: Art and Activism across the Pacific, edited by Elyssa Faison and Alison Fields, an interdisciplinary collection featuring historians, anthropologists, artists, and activists who explore the multifaceted forms of resistance to nuclear regimes; and Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art by Andrew Gayed, building on global art histories and transnational queer theory to illuminate contemporary understandings of queer sexuality in the Middle Eastern diaspora.

Below, series editor Laura Kina shares more about what critical ethnic studies brings to the study of art and visual culture and how books in the series explore the role of the arts and artists in social justice movements, as well as the kinds of projects that will be considered and how to get in touch.

I am trained as an MFA visual artist—a painter who has been working in Asian American/Asian diasporic arts communities for over thirty years where the dividing line between artist, curator, activist, organizer, and community historian has long been blurred.

My entry to writing and editing grew organically through curating shows of fellow artists and working on public scholarship and archival work with my DePaul students for the Asian American Art Oral History Project and the Virtual Asian American Art Museum. I have since had the privilege of working with the University of Washington Press for two co-edited anthologies—with Wei Ming Dariotis, War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art, and with Jan Christian Bernabe, Queering Contemporary Asian American Art.

How can we decolonize artistic practices, pedagogy, curatorial, and art history? How can we use the arts to work towards land back; rematriation; reparations; abolition; and boycott, divest, and sanction movements? What should be made visible and what must remain opaque or only shared within specific communities? . . . These are some the challenges critical ethnic studies brings to the study of art and visual culture and that we look forward to exploring in the series.
Laura Kina

Coming out of community arts that center collaboration, I began to see intersectional and interdisciplinary scholarship on art and visual culture from social justice movement building and BIPOC knowledge making its way into the academy and popular culture. For example, terms such as settler colonialism, anti-Black-racism, structural racism, and decolonization have entered our everyday lexicon through diverse political movements including the 2016–17 #NoDPL Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, the 2020 racial reckoning in the US led by Black Lives Matter, and the current protests against the occupation of Palestine and the war in Gaza. In the last few months, Palestinian symbols of resistance—like the kufiyah, watermelon, and white kite—have also entered mainstream visual vocabulary. In the art world, questions of labor rights, censorship of artists, and questions of who is behind funding art institutions and their accountability has made headlines.

How, where, when, and who tells the stories of these complex histories through the arts? How can we decolonize artistic practices, pedagogy, curatorial, and art history? How can we use the arts to work towards land back, rematriation, reparations, abolition, and boycott, divest, and sanction movements? What should be made visible and what must remain opaque or only shared within specific communities? How do we engage visibility without falling into the trap of neoliberal visibility politics?

These are some of the challenges critical ethnic studies brings to the study of art and visual culture that we look forward to exploring in the series.

The first two works in the series, Resisting the Nuclear: Art and Activism across the Pacific and Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art, reflect the goal, as outlined in our 2020 call for book proposals, to focus on art, new media, art history, visual anthropology, visual culture, craft, fashion, and other forms of cultural expression that brings together works that take up decolonization and social justice with an interdisciplinary and intersectional emphasis on race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, disability, and gender.

The series is committed to featuring books that center visual arts and media by, for, and about people of color, with themes of anti-capitalism, reparations, abolition, sovereignty, and the afterlife of slavery. Books in this series will feature critical work on white supremacy, settler colonialism, land dispossession, resource extraction, and cultural appropriation.

Aligned with the dynamic character of critical ethnic studies, the books in this series engage themes of borders, migration, diasporas, and transnationalism, and the relationship of the visual to these movements.

We welcome books that highlight not only the work of artist-activists and the role of the arts in social justice movements but books that bring together art with critical work about artistic practice. We especially encourage single-authored books, including monographs and accessibly written books that cross disciplines and reach out to wider audiences, including artists, students, and other readers interested in visual topics. We will also consider well-crafted and innovative anthologies and edited volumes.

Please send book proposals to Larin McLaughlin at lmclaugh@uw.edu.

Laura Kina is an artist and a Vincent de Paul Professor in The Art School at DePaul University. She is the coeditor of War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art and Queering Contemporary Asian American Art.

The Critical Ethnic Studies and Visual Cultures series advisory board includes: Iyoko Day, Mount Holyoke College; Sarita See, University of California, Riverside; Guisela Latorre, The Ohio State University; and Amy Lonetree, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Related Books

Missouri Pettway’s Gee’s Bend Quilt: An Excerpt from ‘Stitching Love and Loss’ by Lisa Gail Collins

In honor of Black History Month and this year’s theme of “African Americans and the Arts,” we feature an excerpt from Stitching Love and Loss by Lisa Gail Collins, which captures the long history of African American quilt making through a moving account of Missouri Pettway’s cotton covering—a Gee’s Bend “utility quilt.”

In 1942 Missouri Pettway, newly suffering the loss of her husband, pieced together a quilt out of his old, worn work clothes. Nearly six decades later her daughter Arlonzia Pettway, approaching eighty at the time and a seasoned quiltmaker herself, readily recalled the cover made by her grieving mother within the small African American farming community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. At once a story of grief, a quilt, and a community, Stitching Love and Loss connects Missouri Pettway’s cotton covering to the history of a place, its residents, and the work of mourning.

Placing this singular quilt within its historical and cultural context, Collins illuminates the perseverance and creativity of the African American women quilters in this rural Black Belt community.

Excerpt from Stitching Love and Loss

Not long after her husband Nathaniel’s passing, Missouri Pettway set out to create a quilt of his worn familiar clothes with the expressed intention “to remember him, and cover up under it for love.”¹ Led by her intention to find comfort in his memory, she made her way through the steps in the quilt making practice that was her birthright. Seeking sanctuary and softness, she wound her way around this healing pattern, stitch by stitch, piece by piece, with the crown of her head bowing toward her heart. Missouri Pettway’s deliberate pursuit of this path—of this sustaining resource and practice deeply rooted within her homeplace—supported the grieving quilt maker and surviving spouse in making her way from holding the pieces of her loved one’s clothes in her hands and on her lap to being held by the precious utility quilt she conceived of them. Her quilt, as remembered, was done by design. From its initial conception, the ultimate aim for her completed covering was to cover her, to wrap it around her body and being—to remember her husband and experience their love.

At the heart of Arlonzia’s enduring memory of her mother’s quilt made in mourning lies a love story. This is absolutely no surprise; love is why we grieve. As remembered by the couple’s eldest daughter, the covering’s creation and its intended use were steeped in yearning. Following the early loss of her husband of over two decades, Missouri sought to cover her body with cloth that had recently covered his own. Clothing and cloth never again to be needed by him were now needed by her. Guided by intention and desire, she turned to a most intimate of art forms—one, like a second skin, that holds the body and moves with the breath—and created and completed her yearned-for quilt.

Missouri Pettway’s daughter Arlonzia Pettway sitting on her porch in Gee’s Bend, 2003. Photograph by Linda Day Clark.

After Missouri Pettway completed her quilt—after the sackinglike backing had been brought around front to form and finish its edges—how might its presence and use have helped tend to her loss? Her extant textile and her daughter’s enduring testimony are silent on this matter. I would like to imaginatively consider—grounded by an understanding of grief as at once a profound experience of distress and a profound expression of love—some of the ways Missouri Pettway’s utilitarian quilt made of her late husband’s work clothes may have been of sacred utility.

Beds know grief and for good reason. While lying in bed, there is no longer the need to hold oneself up or carry one’s weight. As a result, effort lessens and loads lighten. As grief can be exhausting and heavy, this can feel like a welcome respite. Beds physically support and stabilize the body, enabling ease and inviting rest. Quilts can assist with this, too, offering a warm cradle or caress. Supported and held by her bed in this way, perhaps Missouri Pettway’s sage and simple act of pulling her cotton quilt over her body sent a soothing signal to her mind that it was now the time for a soft pause or rest. Once swathed by the sheltering cover of her quilt, perhaps its gentle heft furthered this calming, steadying effect. With all hope, she rested in this way: braced beneath by her bed and protected on top by her cover. The former supported the weight of her body; the latter supported the weight of her grief.

Lying under her quilt, with its familiar fabric touching her skin, may have felt something like a familiar embrace. And perhaps this felt sense, this experience of seeing and feeling her loved one’s well-worn and well-remembered clothes in this way, offered the quilt maker a tender path to feel his love, remember his presence, and closely carry his memory. As memory, emotion, and the sense of smell are linked and share wide-open doors, perhaps his lingering scent, alive within the warp and weft of the cloth, also offered an opening to cultivate and continue their connection.

Missouri Pettway’s work clothes quilt, created largely out of her husband’s worn clothing while she was newly experiencing his loss.²

With the sounds and silence of the night and the giving way of the light, grief can give way to a more private, solitary mourning. While under cover of the night—and a quilt—being in bed can provide a place for needed rest and desired communion, as sleep can serve as a site of reunion, a place where lost loved ones can be found. At the same time, lying in bed leaves us alone with our innermost self and our secretly whispered words, leaving us with little choice but to meet face to face our suffering and fears. For while the body is quiet and still—while it has nowhere to go and nothing to do—the mind continues to move, sometimes, distressingly, with increased intensity. When Missouri Pettway was engaged in the seemingly solitary step of piecing her quilt top, this purposeful task may have enabled the quilt maker to shift between processing and, mercifully, pausing the pain of her loss. By contrast, this protective pacing—direct reckoning with one’s shaken inner world paired with a respite from it—was probably difficult to come by while lying awake in bed within the thick grip of grief, where the only pause to pondering the enormity of her loss was likely the elusive release of a deep sleep.

Loss and longing might be felt especially acutely as one rests the body and tries to transition into sleep. For the long nights of mourning are a time when those who are grieving a loved one are pressed to confront what they are achingly coming to realize is true: someone they love is no longer here with them on earth. That come morning, they will still be in mourning. If Missouri and Nathaniel Pettway routinely shared a bed, his missing presence would have perhaps been especially potent and palpable while lying under the warm weight of her quilt of his clothes—the now empty space that had recently held his body figuring as stark evidence of his physical absence and his lingering scent serving as a direct door to memory.

Intimately associated with life and death, beds are bound with sickness, dying, and death as well as birth. Sites of healing and love as well as loss and remembrance, beds are where we often take our first breaths and sometimes our last ones. Following nearly a year of sickness and sorrow, Nathaniel Pettway likely died at home. Struggling for nearly a year with a terminal illness, he may have spent the very last part of his journey on earth in bed, as both caregiving and homegoing commonly happen here. Bound by bed and hopefully wrapped within a warm and comforting quilt, his shrouded body, likely weak and weary, readied for eternal rest. And during this extraordinarily difficult and delicate time—when life narrows to the four corners of the bed, while its meaning infinitely expands—Missouri Pettway may have sat bedside, caring for her husband, providing a reassuring presence and supporting his dying needs. Perhaps during his final hours, she, along with other family members, kept vigil posed in prayer.

The bed where Nathaniel Pettway made his transition may also have been the same one where Missouri mourned his loss. As such, it may have been both the site of his dying and his passage and a place of her mourning and remembrance. Moreover, this soft space where the husband and father was cared for before passing on and crossing over may have also been the site where the couple’s children were conceived and first breathed life. This bed—their bed—was a place of passage. On it, with all hope, Missouri lay under her quilt of Nathaniel’s clothes and fully experienced what she had expressly sought: “to remember him, and cover up under it for love.” Embraced in this way by her quilt—tucked under its protective cover—she may have tended her grief, remembering her husband, who had recently lay dying and been laid to rest, processing his long illness and early death, facing her fears for their family’s future, feeling the immensity and finality of her loss. Held and supported by the quilt of her own creation, she likely sought the strength and found the faith to make it to morning and begin a new day. And ever so slowly—at the pace of healing—moving toward the time when the memory of her beloved would feel less like pain and more like peace, sustained by the love that lies here.

Nathaniel and Missouri Pettway’s children, Lovett and Loucastle (carrying pail), walking toward the cabins in 1937. This gathering of log and plank structures was previously the site of “the quarters,” the place where enslaved individuals and their families had lived on the former cotton plantation.³

Residents climbing the steps to a log and plank house.⁴

Arlonzia Pettway on the porch of her updated “Roosevelt house.” It was not until the late 1930s and early 1940s—as part of FDR’s New Deal programs—that a sizable number of Gee’s Bend households were able to purchase their local land and build modern homes on it. Although she took numerous trips well beyond the Black Belt, Arlonzia Pettway defined herself as a lifelong resident of this place. Photograph by Linda Day Clark.

Notes

Arlonzia Pettway, quoted in John Beardsley, William Arnett, Paul Arnett, Jane Livingston, and Alvia Wardlaw, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2002), 67. ↩︎
Missouri Pettway, Blocks and Strips Work–Clothes Quilt, 1942, cotton, corduroy, and cotton sacking, 90 x 69 in. National Gallery of Art, Patron’s Permanent Fund and Gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Courtesy of Hazel Marks. ↩︎
Arthur Rothstein, Footpaths across the Field Connect the Cabins. Gee’s Bend, Alabama, 1937. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, reproduction number LC-DIG-fsa-8b38853. ↩︎
Arthur Rothstein, Cabin with Mud Chimney. Gee’s Bend, Alabama, 1937. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, reproduction number LC-DIG-fsa-8b35932. ↩︎

Lisa Gail Collins is Professor of Art and Director of American Studies on the Sarah Gibson Blanding Chair at Vassar College. Her books include The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past and New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (coedited with Margo Natalie Crawford).