Category Archives: Book Excerpt

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

  1. 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. ↩︎
  2. 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. ↩︎
  3. 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. ↩︎
  4. 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).

Related Books

Repeat Photography and Global Warming: An Excerpt from ‘Capturing Glaciers’ by Dani Inkpen

Photographs of receding glaciers are one of the most well recognized visualizations of human-caused climate change. These images, captured through repeat photography, have become effective with an unambiguous message: global warming is happening, and it is happening now. But this wasn’t always the case. The meaning and evidentiary value of repeat glacier photography has varied over time, reflecting not only evolving scientific norms but also social, cultural, and political influences.

In Capturing Glaciers, Dani Inkpen historicizes the use of repeat glacier photographs, examining what they show, what they obscure, and how they influence public understanding of nature and climate change. Though convincing as a form of evidence, these images offer a limited and sometimes misleading representation of glaciers themselves. Furthermore, their use threatens to replicate problematic ideas baked into their history.

Excerpt from Capturing Glaciers

I visited an old friend recently. It had been years since seeing the Bow Glacier. Both of us had changed. I was last in her neighborhood on a winter day so bright and cold it transformed my breath into crystals that shivered and sparkled in the air. She was indisposed, hibernating beneath her billowy robes of winter snow. I had to content myself with a view of her front garden, soft and rounded, blue and white. In summer she presides over one of the most breathtaking scenes on the (for now) aptly named Icefields Parkway in the Canadian Rockies. Perfectly framed by peaks, the glacier perches above the indigo waters of Bow Lake, to which she is connected by thundering Bow Falls and a creek that winds its way through rainbow-pebbled flats. The whole scene can be taken in from the front porch of red-roofed Bow Lake Lodge, set on the lake’s shore by packer and guide Jimmy Simpson. In 1898 he deemed this a good spot to “build a shack.”

I met the Bow Glacier the summer I left home, one of those free-spirited summers that Hollywood films coat thickly with nostalgia. Freshly released from the corridors of teenagedom, I chose a seasonal job that could not possibly advance the career I was preparing for in college but that would give me plenty of time in the mountains: housekeeping at a historic alpine lodge. In my time off I often scrambled up chossy peaks where I met wobbling marmots and grizzlies lounging in full-blooming meadows. I drank from swift, icy streams and camped wherever suited me (because, like many seasonal workers, I believed that national park rules didn’t apply to me). The Bow Glacier looked on with dignified indifference. I stood on her surface, secure in mountaineering harness and crampons (though a couple foolish times not) and marveled at the white westing plains of the Wapta Icefield from which the Bow drains, dreaming of even grander vistas beyond. I knew in those moments I was one of thousands to behold that sight yet felt like the world had just taken form. My happiness was untouchable, not yet complicated by the conundrums of adulthood. I was immortal; death did not exist and time would never run out.

Old friends: The Bow Glacier and the author, 2003.

But time does run. And glaciers, compressions of time in frozen water, are excellent gauges of its passage. Mountain glaciers like the Bow are disappearing at rapid—and accelerating—rates. When Jimmy Simpson pondered building his shack, the Bow cascaded down to a forest abutting the lake in three undulating lobes, with the topmost flaring like outstretched eagle wings. I studied its shape from a black-and-white photograph hanging in the lobby of the lodge. Crevasse-torn icefalls separated the lobes, giving the glacier an intimidating look. It was big. It was beautiful. But the Bow Glacier has since receded. When I arrived one hundred years later, only the topmost lobe remained; dark cliff bands, wetted by Bow Falls, stood where crevasses once churned. The eagle wings were gone, and the glacier’s surface was noticeably lowered. Yet you could still see its toe from the lodge. Today it has retracted even further. Like a wounded spider, it now huddles on the lip of the cliff over which it draped in 2003, barely visible from Bow Lake Lodge.

Photographs of glaciers are about more than just glaciers. They’re also about nature, land, how we can know about such things, and the value we ascribe to them. Grasping this allows us to better appreciate repeat glacier photographs for what they can tell us about global warming, but also how they are conditioned by history and where they fall short.

Dani Inkpen

For many people who are not climate scientists, drastic recession of mountain glaciers like the Bow is clear and persuasive evidence of global warming. Since most folks have never been to a glacier, photographs are often how they learn of disappearing ice. This is achieved through what are called repeat photographs: juxtapositions of old photographs and recent re-creations taken from the same perspective at the same time of year (because glaciers fluctuate with the seasons). Curiosity about the historical photographs in repeat series, like the one hanging in Bow Lake Lodge’s lobby, eventually pulled my carefree summer in the Rockies into the trajectory of a professional life.

My book, Capturing Glaciers, is the result: it is about the people who photographed glaciers repeatedly and systematically to produce knowledge about glaciers and a variety of other subjects such as ice ages, wilderness, the physics of ice, and global warming. Throughout the twentieth century those studying glaciers used photography to capture changes in glacier extent and distribution, but they did so for different reasons and with different consequences. I trace the evolving motivations behind the use of cameras to capture images of ice and concomitantly changing ideas about what is (or is not) being captured.

The book title is thus a double entendre, referring to both the enduring allure of glaciers as repeat photographic subjects that “capture” beholders and the variety of ways people sought to capture glaciers with their cameras. I pay especial attention to the perceived value of repeat photographs as a form of evidence. Doing so illuminates some of the ways repeat photography has encapsulated and conveyed changing ideas about what glaciers are and why they matter. Photographs of glaciers are about more than just glaciers. They’re also about nature, land, how we can know about such things, and the value we ascribe to them. Grasping this allows us to better appreciate repeat glacier photographs for what they can tell us about global warming, but also how they are conditioned by history and where they fall short. It helps us see them not as static representations of the present situation, but as still-evolving elements in a process much bigger and more complex than any photograph could possibly capture.

I take a photograph-centered approach, following the photographs to archival information about the practices behind their creation. The history of how repeat photography was used to study glaciers in North America is checkered and discontinuous. Its value as a form of evidence ebbed and flowed based on ideas about what glaciers were and what knowledge-makers wanted to know. This was more than just a scientific matter. While many of the actors who populate the pages of the book were scientists, producing knowledge of glaciers required an extensive host of characters and institutions. And the meanings of repeat glacier photographs broke the bonds of scientific intention and interpretation, drawing from and circling back to potent cultural associations. We will see, then, that the value of a form of evidence is conditioned by nonscientific elements, including political and practical considerations. Evidence, like objectivity, has a history. And history continues to make itself felt in the present.

Dani Inkpen is assistant professor of history at Mount Allison University.

More from the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series

The Man behind the Boat: Excerpt from ‘Ready All! George Yeoman Pocock and Crew Racing’ by Gordon Newell

Husky crew fever is everywhere with the worldwide release of The Boys in the Boat, the film adaptation of Daniel James Brown’s bestselling book about the University of Washington rowing team that competed in the 1936 Summer Olympics.

In the 1920s, UW was considered an upstart West Coast college as it began to challenge the Eastern universities in the ancient sport of crew racing. Sportswriters scoffed at the “crude western boats” and their crews. But for the next forty years, UW dominated rowing around the world.

The secret of the Huskies’ success was George Pocock, a soft-spoken English immigrant raised on the banks of the Thames and the subject of the late Gordon Newell’s book, Ready All! George Yeoman Pocock and Crew Racing, first published by UW Press in 1987.

“As a youth in Britain, Pocock learned the rudiments of boat building from his father, who crafted boats for young Etonians. Forced to emigrate by straitened economic conditions, he journeyed to the Pacific Northwest intending to find work as a lumberjack. Fortunately for the University of Washington in Seattle, he was persuaded to establish shop there and began making shells of outstanding quality” (Publishers Weekly).

Pocock combined perfectionism with innovation to make the lightest, best-balanced, fastest shells the world had ever seen. After studying the magnificent canoes built by Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, he broke with tradition and began to make shells of native cedar.

Pocock, who had been a champion sculler in his youth, never credited his boats for the accomplishments of a crew. He wanted every rower to share his vision of discipline and teamwork. As rowers from the UW went on to become coaches at major universities across the country, Pocock’s philosophy—and his shells—became nationally famous in the world of crew.

Excerpt from Ready All!

George Pocock’s loyalty to the sport of rowing in general was his hallmark through­out his life but following the Husky crew’s surprise victory at Poughkeepsie in 1923, he found that he must assess his loyalties to the University of Washington and to his staunch friend, [head crew coach] Rusty Callow. He found himself wooed by a number of prestigious universities around the nation.

Harvard made the most pressing overtures. Three members of its rowing committee journeyed to Seattle to offer him many inducements, including a new fully equipped and rent-free boatshop, and a generous salary to maintain the shells and assist the coaching staff.

“I still could not see my way clear to accept,” Pocock recorded, “although their offer was quite magnificent compared to what I was getting at Washington, which was only the use of the garret workshop.”

Delighted, and perhaps surprised, that George had declined Harvard’s generous offer, Callow undertook a campaign on his friend’s behalf. He arranged, through the Alumni Association, the purchase of $1,500 worth of power machinery for more efficient and less laborious production, and boatbuilding space was expanded to the ground floor area below the original shop. The additional space was needed, for Pocock shells had gained overnight fame in rowing circles, and George was well on the way to a virtual monopoly of his highly specialized trade in the United States. The eight shells ordered in the fall of 1923 following the Poughkeepsie triumph were only the beginning. Five of that first big order were for East Coast schools, including Harvard. The others went to Wisconsin, California, and Washington.

Harvard also took delivery of an English-built shell, and George was delighted to receive a clipping from the Boston Globe describing the trial runs of his shell and the one imported from England. As a result of the trials, the Pocock-built shell was chosen to compete in the traditional Yale-Harvard race.

Orders kept coming in, and George and his three-man crew soon formed a highly efficient working team, although none of his employees had any previous experience in boatbuilding. They had, however, worked under George’s supervision at Boeing, and like most of the wartime work force, had been laid off. He was thus able to pick from the best of his former craftsmen, and they quickly mastered their new trade.

George Pocock in the old boathouse, ca. 1940s (Life Magazine photo)

Once the University of Washington won the U.S. intercollegiate rowing champion­ship, the crew quarters swarmed with budding oarsmen. The turnout was so great that many youngsters had to be cut from the squad to reduce it to a size the coaching staff could cope with.

The cuts were an aspect of rowing that never failed to sadden George. “Cutting a squad is a heartbreaking thing, because the virtues of rowing have to be denied to so many fine young men,” he wrote. “It grieved me to wonder how many careers had been frustrated and weakened. lt seemed to me ironic that the outstanding success of Washington crew, which we had worked so hard to attain, was resulting in the denial of rowing’s benefits to many through the sheer number of applicants.”

George was closely involved on a very personal basis with the generations of young oarsmen who came under his benign influence. Every coach during George’s half century on the campus was wise enough to assemble each new squad to listen to the Pocock litany of praise for the spiritual and physical benefits of rowing. Delivered in his gentle, cultured voice, it was far more effective than any loud, impassioned pep talk.

It was a source of great satisfaction to him that many of the crewmen snatched mo­ments from their usually crammed schedules to come to his shop for counsel. He knew that many of them were rowing their hearts out in the little time left from demanding academic schedules. If the annual cutting of crew hopefuls was heartbreak­ing to him, this informal friendship with those who made it was deeply heartwarming: “I so admired all the oarsmen, and since my shop was right at the boathouse, I got to know many of them well. I dare not name any of the hundreds of young men who came to the shop during my fifty years of service to Washington rowing, for fear I would leave some out. But, generalizing, I can say there were all kindred souls, sincerely interested in painstaking work; fashioning natural material into the rowing shells of great beauty.”

Such was the force of tradition in rowing that nothing but Spanish cedar had been considered. But I found the native red cedar to be marvelous material, ideal for the skin of racing shells; impervious to rot and light in weight.

George Pocock

In 1924, the boats were still built with much the same materials George had learned to work with as an apprentice at Eton: “We continued to use Spanish cedar for the skin of the boats, which we obtained in New York in the log, having it sawn into thick planks there, and shipped via steamer to Seattle. The shipping charge from New York to Seattle was $50 for a single log in plank form, and getting them from dockside to the boathouse cost another $50. That was a lot of money in 1924, and it worried me. I knew many schools had only very limited funds to support rowing, and I cried to keep the costs to them of racing shells as low as possible.”

Eventually, George found a better and less costly wood with which to sheath his boats: western red cedar, which he henceforth referred to as “the wood eternal.” George had demonstrated the virtues of Northwest cedar back in 1918, when the U.S. Navy Department conceded that the Boeing-built World War I flying boats planked with cedar were superior to the Eastern-built versions using white pine—and considerably less costly. Tradition, however, is firmly embedded in rowing and shellbuilding, and it was nearly a decade before George ventured to replace the Spanish cedar which had been the accepted material for sheathing the boats over many generations.

“Nineteen twenty-seven was the first year I began using our Pacific Northwest lumber—western red cedar—for planking the boats,” he wrote. “Such was the force of tradition in rowing that nothing but Spanish cedar had been considered. But I found the native red cedar to be marvelous material, ideal for the skin of racing shells; impervious to rot and light in weight. It swells and shrinks very little when seasoned three years, air-dried, as we do. Its cells are complete, each containing trapped air. It is the wood eternal. Some of the first shells we built with it are still in regular use forty-five years later . . . nearly twice the useful life of the Spanish cedar boats.” It was typical of George to be pleased that the use of this amazingly durable material “cut the cost of rowing equipment in half.” This would promote the sport he loved, and for him that was the important thing. “Built-in obsolescence” was not a part of George’s business philosophy.

The western red cedar shells were dubbed “banana boats” in rowing circles. The term was not derisive, for they proved to be faster as well as far more durable than the earlier ones, as George explained:

“The name banana came from the fact that the western red cedar boats had an unusual amount of camber, which curved them like a banana. This feature was not built into them. As in the past, they were built on an I-beam which was perfectly straight. The camber appears after they are built and when they are being used for their intended purpose, carrying a crew on water, and is caused by a strange characteristic of this wood. While it shrinks or swells very little across the grain, lengthwise it will swell or extend as much as an inch in the sixty-foot length of an eight-oared shell. During construction, the cedar skin or planking is attached to the framework in a very dry condition, therefore its shortest natural state. When completed and in use, the woodwork naturally takes in some moisture and the cedar wants to swell lengthwise, but the frame­ work will not let it. So compression builds in the skin and the ends of the shell come up, hence your ‘banana boat.’ We like it, because when you have that compression in the shell, it makes it very lively to row.”

“Our banana boats,” he recalled, “being very successful, were copied by other build­ers who were ignorant of the qualities and virtues of the western red cedar and constructed them of plywood or mahogany or Spanish cedar. These materials, not being able to swell or extend lengthwise, could not put compression in the boat as ours had. These copies were dead, no life, no spring on the catch of the oars. They might just as well have been constructed of metal!”

George was reluctant to talk of “fast shells.” Only the crews who manned them made them fast or slow. He expressed his opinion this way:

I cannot help saying right here, not having publicly or in advertisements boosted our boats, which gives me a right to say it: whenever a foreign boat wins a race or foreign oars are used, the makers crow about it from the rooftops as though the boat won the race and not the crew. We have always revered the crew. They and they alone are responsible. We try to give them a boat that will do them justice.

The late Gordon Newell was the author of several books on maritime history, including Pacific Tugboats and Mighty Mo, The U.S.S. Missouri: A Biography of the Last Battleship.

The Infamous Voyage of the Khian Sea: Excerpt from The Toxic Ship by Simone M. Müller

In 1986 the Khian Sea, carrying thousands of tons of incinerator ash from Philadelphia, began a two-year journey, roaming the world’s oceans in search of a dumping ground. Its initial destination and then country after country refused to accept the waste. The ship ended up dumping part of its load in Haiti under false pretenses, and the remaining waste was illegally dumped in the ocean. Two shipping company officials eventually received criminal convictions.

In The Toxic Ship, historian Simone M. Müller uses the Khian Sea‘s voyage as a lens to elucidate the global trade in hazardous waste—the movement of material ranging from outdated consumer products and pesticides to barges filled with all sorts of toxic discards—from the 1970s to the present day, exploring the story’s international nodes and detailing the downside of environmental conscientiousness among industrial nations as waste is pushed outward.

From the Introduction

Often the rotor blades were audible before the helicopter became visible. The weather had been mediocre since the ship had anchored at Big Stone Beach. Two small inlets, defining the lower end of Delaware Bay, sheltered it from the waves and winds of the Atlantic. Looking out to sea—one of their pastimes since they had been grounded—the crew could observe waves with crests just about to break and a sea garnished with foam. When they heard the sound of swirling air cut by metallic blades, it usually meant that members of the US Coast Guard were approaching by boat. At the beginning of the ship’s nearly three-month stay, the coast guard had come frequently to check on what they called inoperable equipment and outdated charts, two almost laughable details given the dilapidated freighter’s signs of wear and rust. The ship’s papers were not in order either. Its stay at sea had outlasted its insurance coverage and other certificates. Technically it was a renegade ship, since Liberia was withholding its flag until the ship’s papers were renewed.

Sometimes, the coast guard had been accompanied by guys in white hazmat suits, who had crawled all over the ship’s cargo with their gloves, their test tubes, and their clipboards. Captain Arturo Fuentes Garcia was not sure what exactly these people were doing, but he knew it had to do with his cargo and would determine whether the ship could proceed up the Delaware. He also knew that their activities were of great interest to the journalists circling above in the helicopter, like vultures waiting for the lions to finish their meal.

When Garcia had taken over as captain of the freighter Khian Sea, he had expected nothing out of the ordinary. It became the voyage of a lifetime. Fuentes, a native of Honduras, learned about the job in November 1987, when the Khian Sea had already been roaming the greater Caribbean for over a year. The ship had left Philadelphia in September 1986, carrying about fifteen thousand tons of incinerator ash destined for the Bahamas. The ship was owned by Lily Navigation, Inc., and chartered by the Amalgamated Shipping Corporation, both registered in the Bahamas. The latter had a contract with the Philadelphia waste-hauling company Paolino & Sons. Paolino, in turn, had a multimillion-dollar contract with the city of Philadelphia for the disposal of up to two hundred thousand tons of incinerator ash for fiscal year 1986–87. To add to this complex arrangement of international stakeholders, the ship was sailing under the Liberian flag (at least until its papers expired). For Fuentes, these different involvements mattered little. His main contact partners were two Americans, John Patrick Dowd and William P. Reilly, president and vice president of the Annapolis-based company Coastal Carriers, which was the US representative of Amalgamated.

Mostly it was Reilly who told Fuentes where to take the ship. After the original plan to unload it in the Bahamas had fallen through, Fuentes was directed to sail to the port of Gonaïves in politically fractured Haiti, where Coastal Carriers had secured a landing for the ship’s cargo as topsoil fertilizer. Years later, when he testified to an attorney with the US Department of Justice’s Environmental Crimes Section about what happened next, Fuentes would say the ship had “bad mojo.” In the middle of unloading, Haitian soldiers had ordered them at gunpoint to stop. Under cover of darkness, Fuentes set sail to take the Khian Sea back to Philadelphia, abandoning part of its cargo at Sedren Wharf in Gonaïves, but US officials ordered them to anchor in lower Delaware Bay and confined the crew to the ship.

With morale low and nerves strained, Captain Fuentes then committed his first major crime by disobeying direct orders from the US Coast Guard and taking the Khian Sea back out to sea. In news interviews and later court testimony, Reilly and Dowd from Coastal Carriers made it sound as if they had been blindsided by Fuentes’s move, but that was questionable. Fuentes next took the ship across the Atlantic to West Africa, the Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe, through the Suez Canal, and across the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia, always on the lookout for a new site to unload the cargo. Meanwhile, an international network of environmentalists, US officials, and the media hunted the renegade ship. They managed see through its attempts at disguise, such as changing the ship’s name from the Khian Sea to the Felicia, the Pelicano, and finally the San Antonio. It was a game of cat and mouse that, most of the time, Fuentes lost.

The Toxic Ship scrutinizes the tensions inherent to a world where, since at least the mid-twentieth century, we have been facing the issue of growing amounts of hazardous waste combined with finite planetary disposal spaces and acute, and increasing, social and economic inequality.

Simone M. Müller

Fuentes’s problem was the cargo and its purpose: mounds of black incinerator ash, interspersed with bits of half-burnt paper and pieces of metal. It represented the remnants of Philadelphia’s waste, material that US traders had repeatedly tried to sell as fill material for land reclamation, fertilizer, or building material. The issue was not the cargo’s texture or its musty smell, but minute particles of heavy metals and dioxins in material intended for use in sensitive ecosystems and relatively unprotected production contexts in countries of the global South. No matter what those people in the white hazmat suits had found out from testing the ash, the label déchet toxique—the Haitian term for toxic waste—had stuck to the ship throughout its journey of more than two years. Always sailing on the verge of illegality, Fuentes eventually broke more laws, marine and otherwise, by dumping the cargo in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

By following the journeys of the Khian Sea and other waste-carrying ships from the United States, The Toxic Ship scrutinizes the globalization of hazardous waste, environmental justice, and environmental governance in the latter half of the twentieth century. Starting in Philadelphia, the story takes in Panama, the Bahamas, Haiti, Honduras, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria, Italy, Norway, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, the Philippines, and Singapore. The book opens by reviewing the emergence of environmentalism in the industrial world in the 1960s, a trend that was followed almost immediately by the creation of the first waste-trading schemes with countries of the global South. The story centers on the 1980s, the height of this unequal trade, before considering instruments of global environmental governance implemented in the 1990s, such as the UN’s Basel Convention (passed in 1989 and implemented in 1992), and the Organisation of African Unity’s Bamako Convention (passed in 1991 and implemented in 1998). The Toxic Ship ends in the early 2000s, when the partial cargo of incinerator ash that the Khian Sea had abandoned in Haiti was returned to the United States.

The international trade in hazardous substances is a broad term for a trading network that moves items ranging from hazardous waste to banned pesticides and nonmarketed consumer products. It has received considerable attention from environmental, health, and human rights activists, investigative journalists, administrators, policymakers, and scholars. Most activist literature examines the trade through a normative lens and the framework of global environmental justice and environmental racism. From this viewpoint, the Khian Sea is the flagship of the evils of the global waste economy. It and other ships like it represent all that is ethically despicable, and yet the Khian Sea’s activities were mostly legal, part of a multimillion-ton and multimillion-dollar trade in hazardous waste between countries of the global North and those of the global South, marked by substantial differences in political stability, economic opportunities, and environmental and health and safety regulations.

What led a city like Philadelphia, with a large African American population, to export hazardous waste to Panama, the Bahamas, or Haiti, and what induced local agents to import it (legally) for use in sensitive ecosystems? How did the actors involved in the global waste economy endure the conflicting pressures born from the fact that hazardous waste would not go away, but had to be disposed of somewhere?

The Toxic Ship scrutinizes the tensions inherent to a world where, since at least the mid-twentieth century, we have been facing the issue of growing amounts of hazardous waste combined with finite planetary disposal spaces and acute, and increasing, social and economic inequality. The book examines the structures and dynamics underpinning a global system that appeared to be based simultaneously on toxic colonialism and voluntary exchange, yet which was ultimately premised on different valuations of human life.

Simone M. Müller is Heisenberg Professor for Global Environmental History and Environmental Humanities at the University of Augsburg. She is author of Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks.

More from the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series

Land of Enchantment: Excerpt from Wide-Open Desert by Jordan Biro Walters

Throughout the twentieth century, New Mexico’s LGBTQ+ residents inhabited a wide spectrum of spaces, from Santa Fe’s nascent bohemian art scene to the secretive military developments at Los Alamos. In Wide-Open Desert, historian Jordan Biro Walters shifts focus away from the urban gay meccas that many out queer people called home and brings to life a vibrant milieu of two-spirit, Chicana lesbian, and white queer cultural producers in the heart of the US Southwest.

Drawing on oral histories, documentaries, poetry, and archival sources, Biro Walters demonstrates how geographic migration and creative expression enabled LGBTQ+ people to resist marginalization and forge spaces of belonging. Significant figures profiled include two-spirit Diné artist Hastíín Klah, literary magazine editor Spud Johnson, ranchera singer Genoveva Chávez, and Cherokee writer Rollie Lynn Riggs. Biro Walters also explores how land communes, art circles, and university classrooms helped create communities that supported queer cultural expression and launched gay civil rights activism in New Mexico. Throughout, Wide-Open Desert highlights queer mobility and queer creative production as paths to political, cultural, and sexual freedom for LGBTQ+ people.

From the Introduction

Uncovering the lives of sexual and gender nonnormative New Mexicans was a challenging task because of the paucity of written sources on queer history in the state. My project began with a series of thirty oral histories. Since the 1970s, oral history projects with queer people have been a critical resource for excavating the queer past. I collected oral histories in cooperation with the LGBT Educational Archives Project, devoted to preserving LGBTQ+ voices, particularly in the Southwest. Many of the interviews have been preserved and are available at the Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico Libraries, as part of the Bennett Hammer LGBT Collection. By design, these interviews are constructed to yield diversity in terms of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and region.1 To rectify gaps in my oral histories, I also draw on interviews conducted by others. Taken together, I examine the lives of well-known queer people such as homophile activist Harry Hay and queer author Paula Gunn Allen as well as the experiences of ordinary queer folks, such as the Chicana lesbian couple Nadine Armijo and Rosa Montoya.

My initial conversations with participants began with a simple question: What was it like to identify as queer and live in New Mexico? I used “queer” in my initial question to encapsulate the wide spectrum of sexual and gender identities, but participants self-identified their sexual orientation and gender identity, and I employ their own terminology here. I teased out this large question with three overlapping themes: living conditions, social life, and forms of organization against discrimination. As I listened to their intimate life histories, I realized that interviewees narrated their lives through movement and pathways. Most had a mobility narrative, but their tales of movement were different from the typical rural-to-urban migration stories embedded in LGBT literature. Their stories also illustrated an unruliness of racial, class, and gender dynamics that transgressed an easy understanding of New Mexican queer lives. I needed to be committed to making race and gender as central as sexuality.

Personal narratives and visual and textual queer evidence, some public but most private and unpublished, represent a site wherein queer people conceptualized their place within a homophobic nation and found a means for spreading sexual subjectivities.

Jordan Biro Walters

The oral histories that unfolded made me focus less on spatialized settings and more on the circulation of sexual subjects and knowledge. I puzzled over how to reimagine traditional ways of uncovering queer lives—using cities themselves as a documentary source for interpreting queer pasts, police records and jury trials to uncover same-sex acts, and vice culture, particularly bars, for revealing publicly visible queer cultures and as agents for resistance. I consulted a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on the “rural turn” in gay and lesbian history that elucidates how queer sexualities and subjectivities manifest in rural locations.2 I structured my own project without the geographic dualisms of urban and rural, opting for a state-based approach that views the varied landscapes of New Mexico as interconnected—though, admittedly, much of the queer past I have documented takes place in the northern part of the state. I also take geographical detours to Arizona, Nevada, California, and elsewhere. When people or ideas moved, I followed them.

As I searched for evidence that might reveal flows, practices, and dimensions of an alternative mapping of sexual geographies that linked disparate locations, this line of inquiry led me to art and literature. Personal narratives and visual and textual queer evidence, some public but most private and unpublished, represent a site wherein queer people conceptualized their place within a homophobic nation and found a means for spreading sexual subjectivities. For most of the twentieth century, LGBTQ+ Americans lived in a homophobic climate where disclosing their sexual identity in mainstream society brought fear of persecution, an environment that prevented the development of an art movement centered on overt homoerotic content until the 1970s with the birth of the modern gay liberation movement.

Queer artists and writers, through various forms of creative expression, indirectly conveyed sexual difference and gender variance. As queer art historian Jonathan D. Katz argues, portraiture alone is a rich “untapped” archive. Katz explains, “we have literally thousands of images—paintings, sculptures, watercolors, prints, films, and photographs—that eloquently attest to forms of sexual desire and association long before the advent of our modern lesbian and gay identity.” Many artistic works have queer themes, but such themes often pass undetected.3 I scrutinized poetry, fiction, little magazines, documentaries, and queer male erotic photography as expressions of self-love, points of connectivity to find other queer people, and spaces to imagine belonging. My use of art and literature as evidence provides a useful corrective to dominant narratives of twentieth-century American LGBT history—white, urban, and male—and recovers the experiences of lesbians, queer people of color, and, to a lesser extent, bisexuals, asexuals, and nonbinary people.

Oral histories and queer creative evidence consulted for this project offered only a partial history of New Mexico’s queer past. Not until I paired such materials with archival collections, government documents, university records, and newspaper articles was I able to uncover how queer cultural development overlapped with and inspired the beginning of sexual politics in the American Southwest and, to an extent, the rest of the United States.

This is particularly evident during the Cold War, when the security state effectively shut down sexual politics in New Mexico and stifled queer aesthetics. World War II ushered in a different kind of mobility, as millions of Americans moved toward the centers of an advancing nuclear industry centered in the American West, including New Mexico. Newcomers to the state prioritized an appreciation for high-technology enterprises over artistic sensibilities and embraced heteronormative conceptions of settlement—homeownership, men as the primary breadwinners, and the nuclear family ideal. Nationwide, queer people came under attack, and the perception of “homosexuals” as security risks transformed queer openness in the art world. Pervasive homophobia and concerns about gay people in the arts eroded visible networks of support for queer artists.

Nonetheless, LGBTQ+ artists’ and writers’ creation of works despite a national climate of homophobic censorship is a significant and overlooked aspect of the burgeoning sexual equality movement. Queer New Mexicans produced a body of work on queer expression. The stark and beautiful landscape of the state has long inspired the region’s peoples to make art and literature that evinced their sense of sociocultural distinctiveness. Two-Spirit Pueblo potters and Navajo weavers created the earliest pieces of queer art. By the 1920s white gay and lesbian artists and writers who migrated to northern New Mexico produced queer art and literature that tackled themes of their emotional lives. Latinx queers added their representations beginning in the late 1970s, when the first wave of Chicana lesbian writers, as they called themselves, wrote their formerly silenced histories. Over several decades, both subtle and explicit queer cultural production opened sexual discourse, which served as a foundation for the later triumphs of the modern gay liberation movement.

Santa Fe was a particularly vibrant site of the artistic expression essential in the construction of a southwestern queer identity politics. In contrast, other desert states, such as Nevada and Arizona, took first steps toward establishing queer community in the postwar era through their bars, nightclubs, and, beginning in 1976, through gay rodeo circuits that offered a space for rural LGBTQ+ people. The political histories of queer New Mexicans began much earlier and reveal an alternative way to understand the creation of a different type of identity politics focused on cultural activism—blending creative activities with activism to advocate for sociopolitical change in society. When cultural activism is knit together with other forms of conventional political activism, New Mexico emerges as a critical site of the national fight for gay and lesbian civil rights.

  1. For a further discussion of my methodology, see Jordan Biro Walters, “Uncovering Queer Voices in New Mexico through the Process of History” (paper presentation,
    American Historical Association Annual Meeting, New York City, January 2–5, 2015).
  2. See, for example, Colin R. Johnson, Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013).
  3. Jonathan D. Katz, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2010), 16, 14.
Picture of author Jordan Biro Walters wearing a blue blazer and smiling.

Jordan Biro Walters is associate professor of history at the College of Wooster. For more information, visit her website.

Image of book, Spatial Dunhuang, stood up at an angle to show spine

Experiencing the Mogao Caves: Excerpt from Spatial Dunhuang by Wu Hung

Constructed over a millennium from the fourth to fourteenth centuries CE near Dunhuang, an ancient border town along the Silk Road in northwest China, the Mogao Caves comprise the largest, most continuously created, and best-preserved treasure trove of Buddhist art in the world.

Previous overviews of the art of Dunhuang have traced the caves’ unilinear history. In the newly released Spatial Dunhuang, renowned Chinese art historian Wu Hung examines the caves from the perspective of space, treating them as physical and historical sites that can be approached, entered, and understood sensually. The book includes more than 100 photographs as well as diagrams that further illustrate the actual experience of the people who built and used the Mogao Caves. Here, we feature an excerpt and share a look inside the book.

The scholarship of an era must have new materials and new questions. Utilizing these materials to explore questions gives rise to new trends in the scholarship of the time. Scholars who can participate in these trends are said to be yuliu (“entering the currents,” to borrow a phrase from Buddhism). Scholars who cannot participate in these trends are said to be buyuliu (“not entering the currents”). This is a constant principle in academic history past and present. It is not something that cloistered scholars would be able to comprehend.

—Chen Yinke, “Chen Yuan Dunhuang jieyu lu xu”

Written nearly a century ago, Chen Yinke’s words can still be considered a “constant principle in academic history past and present,” but they require us to rethink the relationship between “materials” and “questions” in academic research.1 It must be noted that, when we invoke this passage now, “the time” no longer refers to 1930, when he wrote that text; it is the present, ninety years later. In the intervening time, Dunhuangology, or Dunhuang studies (Dunhuang xue), has grown from an obscure sideline into a broad field of knowledge, and the art history of Dunhuang has matured out of virtually nothing into a distinct branch of scholarly research.2

When Chen wrote that passage, scholars around the world had just recognized the historical value of the hidden manuscripts discovered in the Library Cave at Dunhuang. People saw only the tip of a vast iceberg, the rest of which was still waiting to be explored and understood. The state of Dunhuang studies is decidedly different today. Most of the Dunhuang manuscripts held in institutions all over the world have been reproduced and published, and the beautiful sculptures and wall paintings of the Mogao Caves have been repeatedly presented in massive, gorgeous catalogs. Without leaving the house, people can now use the internet to enter the virtual caves that the Dunhuang Research Academy has replicated with 3-D technologies. Are these still “new materials”? My answer would be both yes and no; the key is whether there are new questions leading us to explore the unknown dimensions of this data. Chen’s idea that “the scholarship of an era must have new materials and new questions” should thus be reinterpreted: whereas the newly discovered Dunhuang manuscripts and artworks led to new research questions a century ago, today new questions compel us to re-excavate these materials. Without research there would be no new questions, but if there were no new questions, any materials, even if previously unknown, could only support the existing view.

When people visit the Mogao Caves, the place they see is certainly not arranged in chronological order. Rather, caves of disparate sizes are laid out unevenly and often overlap, transforming a one-kilometer-long cliff face into a magnificent yet disorienting honeycomb.

Wu Hung

In this book, I have chosen to re-excavate materials related to the art of Dunhuang through the perspective of space, in the hope that this perspective will help reveal new layers of meaning for these materials. I say this because, although there are countless overviews of the art of Dunhuang, the framework is generally temporal. Guided by the dynasties of China’s past, these accounts present a linear history of the Mogao Caves and the other cave complexes at Dunhuang. Of course, this is an effective, and one might say indispensable, method. But we should also note that its foundation is history, not art; the latter encompasses the synchronic presence of architecture, sculpture, and painting in actual space, not diachronic events and biographies in a history book. When people visit the Mogao Caves, the place they see is certainly not arranged in chronological order. Rather, caves of disparate sizes are laid out unevenly and often overlap, transforming a one-kilometer-long cliff face into a magnificent yet disorienting honeycomb. This “undigested” spatial experience is what conventional art historical narratives want to overcome: by classifying and dating heterogeneous caves according to content and style, and then reorganizing them into a linear historical progression, conventional art history creates a neat sequence out of the Mogao Caves. This sequence exists only in texts, however. Having “absorbed” the tangible yet chaotic caves into an orderly chronological development, this sequence supplants the actual place and hinders perceptions and explorations of space.

In an essay on the relationship between time and space, the psychologist and art theorist Rudolf Arnheim wrote: “The time dimension possesses no sensory medium of its own,” but space “is directly embodied in the visual world.”3 In this sense, this book’s proposition to reinvestigate the art of Dunhuang from a spatial perspective entails two basic methods. First, we will take the caves as they actually are as the focus of sustained art historical investigation and elucidation. Second, we will attempt to understand the caves’ historical meaning beginning with visitors’ experiences. These two methods fuse with and complement each other in the concept of space, because space is humanity’s perception of the objective world, rather than the objective world itself. As Arnheim defined it: “What we call Space, then, is the perceptual system that controls the relations between independent object systems.”4 With regard to the Mogao Caves, this perceptual system transforms the caves into features such as dimensions, shapes, directions, distances, proportions, areas, borders, and centers. It also connects the appearances of the caves seen from different distances into the continuous experience of space—from the mountain range on the horizon, to the cliff face covered in caves, to the thousands of deities emerging from the darkness inside the caves. The instruments used to sense space are, first, the body and, then, the eye. Reinvestigating the artistic materials of Dunhuang from the perspective of space requires activating the body’s key role. When recently discussing how to look at a work of sculpture, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote: “Clear your mind. Let your body tell you what’s happening. Then your mind may start up again, pondering the work’s significance.”5 This provides an appropriate explanation of this volume’s title—Spatial Dunhuang: Experiencing the Mogao Caves.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
2. Zhao Shengliang, Dunhuang shiku yishu jianshi, 37–41.
3. Arnheim, “A Stricture on Space and Time,” 653.
4. Arnheim, “A Stricture on Space and Time,” 649.
5. Schjeldahl, “Richard Serra Will Jolt You Awake,” 74–75.

Wu Hung is Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of fifteen books and anthologies, including Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture and Contemporary Chinese Art: A History.

Read an excerpt of one of the books that inspired the documentary film “Promised Land” — Join us for a free screening in Seattle

In Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place, Second Edition (published Spring 2017 in the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series), Coll Thrush brings the Indigenous story to the present day and puts the movement of recognizing Seattle’s Native past into a broader context.

Native Seattle and several other UW Press titles (including Chinookan Peoples of the Lower Columbia edited by Robert T. Boyd, Kenneth M. Ames, and Tony A. Johnson, and the forthcoming Chinook Resilience by Jon D. Daehnke) helped form the framework for the documentary “Promised Land,” about the Duwamish Tribe and Chinook Nation fight for federal recognition. “Promised Land” filmmaker Sarah Samudre Salcedo says:

“The book not only informed our film’s research for the Duwamish, but so well described the tribe’s modern day struggle for recognition that it inspired our focus to the broader federal policies that eventually drew our attention to the Chinook story, and stories like it across the nation. Those histories and struggles are so well-documented in these books and our film wouldn’t have made sense without them and the appearance of the authors within the documentary.”

We are thrilled that Seattle Theatre Group (STG) is hosting a free screening of “Promised Land” at the Neptune Theatre on July 6 and bringing the Duwamish Tribe and Chinook Nation’s struggle to the people of Seattle. Both tribes will be on hand before and after the show at tables in the lobby, and at a post-film panel discussion, to talk to the community. University Book Store will also have a table at the event to sell our books. Doors open at 7 p.m., the Duwamish and Chinook start drumming at 7:30 p.m., and the film starts at 8 p.m. We hope you can join us!

In celebration of the screening event later this week, we feature the following excerpt from the new preface to the second edition of Native Seattle:

Please join us for this special event:

STG & Tall Firs Cinema present
Promised Land
Special Guests: Duwamish Tribe, Chinook Nation, and the Filmmakers

Thursday, July 6, 2017
Doors at 7 p.m.
Event at 8 p.m.

Come early at 7:30 p.m. for preshow songs and drumming with the Chinook Indian Nation and Duwamish Tribe.

Post-film Q&A with Chinook Nation, Duwamish Tribe, and Tall Firs Chinemas.

Free and open to the public. All ages / bar with ID. GA seating – first come, first seated.

RSVP on the STG site

RSVP on Facebook

Save

SaveBeyond the federally recognized tribes, Seattle’s urban Indigenous community has also become increasingly visible in the decade since Native Seattle was first published. Performers like Red Eagle Soaring, a dance and theatre ensemble made up of Indigenous youth of many backgrounds, took stages across the city. Artists such as Seminole-Choctaw filmmaker Tracy Rector, whose “You Are On Indigenous Land” photography installation, made up of intimate portraits of members of her community taken by her and her colleagues, received praise from the local press. And in 2015, Blackfeet legal advocate and jurist Debora Juarez successfully campaigned for the city council, representing the city’s northernmost district. A far cry from the place of Indigenous people in the city’s consciousness in earlier eras—symbols of a vanishing race or threats to urban order—Indigenous women and men have become important players in the city’s cultural and political landscape.

Indigenous institutions are also on the rise. Daybreak Star cultural center, located in Discovery Park and founded by the activists who took over Fort Lawton in 1970, remains a crucial resource for many people in Seattle’s Indigenous community, including hosting the annual Seafair Days powwow. At the University of Washington, meanwhile, wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ (Intellectual House) opened in 2015, after years of organizing by activists both within and outside the UW community. It serves as a center for Indigenous concerns on campus and is already a much sought-after venue for academic and other events. But wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ’s place-story goes deeper than that. According to Tseshaht Nuu-chah-nulth professor Charlotte Coté, “when you walk into Intellectual House, you really do feel the spirits of their ancestors. This is not just a building.” Designed by Cherokee-Choctaw architect Johnpaul Jones in a style reminiscent of the longhouses that once graced the nearby Duwamish community of Little Canoe Channel, wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ was described by organizing committee member Denny Hurtado of the Skokomish Tribe as “a home where we can share our culture with the non-natives, and build bridges amongst us.” And down at the Pike Place Market, Nooksack artist and entrepreneur Louie Gong has opened the famed market’s first Indigenous-owned business, Eighth Generation. Together, all of these new additions to Seattle’s Indigenous landscape speak to the ongoing work of the city’s Indigenous community to be seen, to create, and to flourish.

Seattle’s Indian-inflected self-image has also continued to grow and change. In 2008, for example, the city unveiled a new trail circling Lake Union that was named after Cheshiahud, the Duwamish man who had once lived on the lake’s shoreline. Nearby, at the Museum of History and Industry’s new location, the 1950s diorama of the Denny Party no longer serves as the starting point of the city’s history; instead, a gallery curated under the guidance of local tribal members reminds visitors that they, as was Denny, are on Indigenous land. In 2014, meanwhile, the city council ruled unanimously to rename Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples Day, making Seattle one of the first cities to reorient itself in relation to a long-honored and much-excoriated commemoration of colonialism’s ultimate bête noir. That same year, the Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl, and even that victory was framed in part through Indigenous imagery: the Burke Museum displayed a Kwakwaka’wakw eagle transformation mask thought to the be the inspiration for the football team’s logo, while during the team’s victory parade, running back Marshawn Lynch received a drum from Lummi tribal member John Scott. Lynch’s beating of the drum received worldwide attention and once again highlighted Indigenous presence in the city. Finally, in the years to come, the city’s much-debated redevelopment of the waterfront will feature the work of Puyallup artist Qwalsius (Shaun Peterson), whose Coast Salish–style works will push back against the North Coast imagery so associated with Seattle’s public image.

In the midst of all this, with the deepest place-story of all, the Duwamish remain. Despite being denied federal recognition yet again in 2015—a decision the Department of the Interior described as “final”—the tribe’s members continue to fight for legal and cultural recognition. In the wake of the 2015 ruling, more than fifty Duwamish people and allies protested at the West Seattle home of Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, and in one newspaper account of the decision, tribal chairwoman Cecile Hansen stated firmly, “we’re not invisible.” This is true. As they had during the 2001 sesquicentennial of the Denny Party’s landing at Alki Beach, the Duwamish continue to make their presence known in very public ways while attending to their own cultural revival. Former tribal councilmember James Rasmussen, for example, is one of the leaders of the Duwamish Cleanup Coalition, whose goal is to continue the work of remediating the Superfund site that is Seattle’s only river, while the tribe’s dance group T’ilibshudub (Dancing Feet) often performs around the city and elsewhere. Most notably, the Duwamish opened their long-planned longhouse and cultural center in 2009, just across West Marginal Way from the site of their ancient town of Crying Face. The tribe has also been involved in documenting its own history, perhaps most importantly through the work of University of Victoria graduate student and Duwamish descendant Julia Allain who collected stories of many of the tribe’s leading families. These activities and others show that federal recognition, as a colonial legal framework, does not necessarily determine Indigeneity: as Indigenous people around the world have asserted, they can exist regardless of someone else’s rules.

None of the events described above have happened without significant Indigenous activism, as has been always been the case throughout Seattle’s history, in which Native people have had to struggle to claim a place in the city and to combat the stereotypical images of the doomed, vanished Indian. In doing, so, they have exhibited what Ojibwe journalist and scholar Gerald Vizenor has called “survivance.” Survivance, a neologism that connotes both survival and resistance, speaks to something beyond simple persistence:

Theories of survivance are elusive, obscure, and imprecise by definition . . . but survivance is invariably true in native practice and company. The nature of survivance is unmistakable in native stories . . . and is clearly visible in narrative resistance and personal attributes, such as the native humanistic tease, vital irony, spirit, cast of mind, and moral courage.

The character of survivance creates a sense of native presence over absence, nihility, and victimry. Survivance is a continuation of stories, not a mere reaction . . . survivance is greater than the right of a survivable name.

Nothing captures this notion of survivance more than the 2015 protests against oil giant Shell, whose enormous drilling rig was anchored for a time in Elliott Bay. Hundreds of “kayaktivists” took to the water to speak out against drilling and block aquatic access to the rig, but this was more than the usual Seattle environmentalist action. There, among the brightly colored plastic watercraft, were tribal canoes, leading the charge in defense of the earth. Such is survivance; such is the truth that Seattle’s Indigenous history is far from over.

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The Tao of Raven: An Alaska Native Memoir

In The Tao of Raven: An Alaska Native Memoir (published Fall 2016), Tlingit elder Ernestine Hayes explores the challenges facing Alaska Natives in their own land and recounts her own story of becoming a professor and a writer. This powerful follow-up to her previous memoir Blonde Indian asks: what happens once the exile returns home? The 2016-2018 Alaska State Writer Laureate will soon visit Washington State for a series of book events.

The following excerpt from the book’s prologue tells the story of Raven and the Box of Daylight:

At a time so long ago it can be measured neither by following the moon’s slow dance nor by tracing the sun’s brightened path, had moon and sun then been part of life, darkness was upon the face of the world. This circumstance made it difficult for human beings to conduct their ordinary lives. For example, how much more difficult to impress one another when decisions are made in the dark. How much more difficult to recognize an ally, how much more difficult to praise another’s significance, thereby increasing one’s own importance. How much more difficult to confront a shadow, to challenge the gloom. In an unbrightened world, light does not reveal itself. It must be stolen.

Please join us for these events:

Saturday, February 25, 5 – 7 p.m. // Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington, wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ – Intellectual House, “Sacred Breath: Writing & Storytelling” featuring Ernestine Hayes, Raven Heavy Runner, and Elissa Washuta, Seattle, WA, RSVP required

Sunday, February 26 at 4 p.m. // Village Books, Bellingham, WA

Monday, February 27 at 7:30 p.m. // Third Place Books, Seward Park, Seattle, WA

Liberated. Reclaimed, some might say.

Raven has always and not always been around to be amused at the pitiful antics of self-important human beings, and no doubt he found amusement in the ill-composed conditions of a darkened world. But, although he may have discerned intrigue and opportunity, although he may have sensed illicit adventure, although he could well have been distracted by wonders that he alone could see, nevertheless Raven decided to do something about the darkness.

Raven knew about an old man who lived with his daughter in a well-fortified house in an isolated place at the top of a river far away. This old man, it was said, kept in his house precious bentwood boxes in which could be found answers to the darkness. It was said that this old man guarded these boxes even more carefully than he guarded his daughter. He allowed his daughter to venture outside the house for such purposes as gathering roots and collecting water, but never did he allow his precious boxes to be removed from his house or even to be opened, or even to be looked upon, or even to be named.

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Remembering Pearl Harbor 75 years later: Excerpt from “Emperor Hirohito and the Pacific War” by Noriko Kawamura

Wedemperorhirohito-kawamuranesday, December 7, 2016 marks the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii that thrust the United States into World War II. Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe will visit Pearl Harbor with US president Barack Obama later this month, making Abe the first Japanese leader to visit the site of the attack since 1941 (Washington Post). This excerpt from Emperor Hirohito and the Pacific War by Noriko Kawamura explores the decision by Japan to go to war with the United States.

The final decision to commence war with the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands was made at the imperial conference on December 1. The nearly two-hour-long meeting simply formalized the decision for war that had already been made a month earlier, and “His Majesty, ever the silent spectator of the scene,” as Robert Butow puts it, “left the chamber.”  It is not too difficult to document the emperor’s personal agony and hesitation to sanction the final decision for war. Deputy Grand Chamberlain Kanroji Osanaga recalled in his memoir,

The anguish he [the emperor] suffered on the eve of war with America was extreme. . . . At such times the emperor would be in his room alone. . . . But we could hear him pacing the floor, sometimes muttering to himself, and we knew that something had happened again, and was worrying him, but it was not our place to ask what. The pacing would continue for a long time, each step resounding painfully in our minds, so that we wished to stop up our ears.

On November 26, the emperor suggested to Tojo that the jushin attend the imperial conference to deliberate the war question, but the prime minister did not accept that idea.  Instead, the emperor invited eight jushin to a luncheon on November 29 and listened to their opinions for about an hour afterward. Although recognizing the grave situation Japan was facing in the wake of the failed negotiations with the United States, most of the jushin expressed doubts or hesitation about making a hasty decision for war, but without directly saying that it was not the right time to go to war.  If the emperor was looking for a strong voice against war from the jushin, he must have been disappointed. Later he recalled, “The opinions of those who were against war were abstract, but the cabinet argued for war by providing numbers to back up its case, and therefore, to my regret, I did not have power to curb the argument in favor of war.”

On November 30, the day before an imperial conference was to be convened to endorse a final war decision, the emperor briefly withheld his order to convene the meeting, after being told by his brother, Prince Takamatsu, that the navy still had lingering doubts about going to war with the United States. Neither the emperor nor his brother was able to get rid of worries that Japan might not be able to win the war. The emperor consulted with Kido, who in turn advised him to summon Navy Minister Shimada and Chief of the Naval General Staff Nagano and ask for their candid opinions.

According to Navy Minister Shimada’s November 30 diary entry, the two admirals had an audience with the emperor for twenty-five minutes in the evening. The emperor asked them, “The time is getting pressed: an arrow is about to leave a bow. Once an arrow is fired, it will become a long-drawnout war, but are you ready to carry it out as planned?” Admiral Nagano expressed the navy’s firm resolve to carry out an attack, upon receiving an imperial mandate (taimei ), and told the emperor, “The task force will arrive 1,800 ri  [4,392 miles] west of Oahu by tomorrow.” The emperor turned to Admiral Shimada and asked, “As navy minister, are you prepared in every aspect?” Shimada replied, “Both men and supplies are fully prepared and we are waiting for an imperial mandate.” The emperor continued, “What would happen if Germany stopped fighting in Europe?” The navy minister replied, “I do not think Germany is a truly reliable country. Even if Germany withdrew, we would not be affected.” At the end of the audience, “in order to make the emperor feel at ease,” in Shimada’s words, the navy chief and the navy minister guaranteed a successful attack on Pearl Harbor and the navy’s resolve to win the war at all cost. The navy minister observed that “the emperor appeared to be satisfied.”  After the audience, the emperor told Kido that Shimada and Nagano were “reasonably confident” about the war, and consequently he approved of holding an imperial conference the next day, as originally scheduled. This was the point of no return.

Thus, the role that Emperor Showa played in Japan’s decision to go to war with the United States could be compared to Max Weber’s discussion of the absolute monarch who is “impotent in face of the superior specialized knowledge of the bureaucracy.” The emperor was personally against war with the United States and exerted his influence to delay the war decision for one and a half months; but his influence was circumscribed within the nebulous triangular power relationship among court, government, and military. Emperor Hirohito eventually succumbed to the persistent pressure of the military bureaucracy and accepted the argument that war was inevitable and possibly winnable. But though Hirohito eventually sanctioned the government’s war decision, he was never free from the fear that his country might lose the war.

December 1 is World AIDS Day

December 1 is World AIDS Day. This excerpt of Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco’s Two-Spirit Community, by Andrew J. Jolivette, looks closely at the ways in which the Two-Spirit community has been impacted by HIV/AIDS and offers a path toward a better understanding of and by the Indigenous world.

Burning sage fills the room at the Native American AIDS Project in San Francisco with pungent smoke. It’s a cold winter day when I begin my first focus group with gay, Two-Spirit, and transgender American Indians who also identify as mixed-race. As each participant enters the room, I introduce myself and explain that the goal of this project is to understand how we can reduce rates of HIV/AIDS infection in American Indian and Indigenous communities. I also suggest that this is a story about healing, not about sickness. This is, I tell them, a story that will produce meaningful interventions for other American Indian people in San Francisco and across the United States.

As prayers are offered for the office space to become ceremonial and safe, I can see the members of the group begin to stand closer together. One participant, an older man in his fifties, speaks first. His tone, as he tells of his transition from the reservation in Nevada to urban life in San Francisco, is one of authority. He describes unbelievable trauma and yet there is hope in his message. He recalls a time when San Francisco was a beacon for gay, Two-Spirit, and transgender Natives, but explains that there has since been a decline in leadership within the community. Other participants are nodding in agreement. A transgender participant in her early forties suggests that the only way a community can heal is if it remains a community. I hear the relevance of this insight to HIV prevention efforts: focusing on behavioral change at the individual level causes a greater degree of stigmatization and isolation, which in turn increase harmful behaviors and lead to higher HIV transmission risk. Continue reading →