Tag 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

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).

Related Books

Civil Rights under the Northern Lights: Excerpt from Black Lives in Alaska

Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest maps the trials and challenges African Americans have encountered in the forty-ninth state. The earliest arrivals, many of whom worked as whalers, prospectors, and service members, did not always stay long. Others put down roots and lived full lives in Alaska. These Black individuals fought for greater inclusion and helped establish Alaska’s modern civic institutions, contributing to the political and social life of the state even as they endured racism and fought injustice.

The excerpt below touches on Alaska’s history of race relations and civil rights. This history reminds the reader that the currents of discrimination and its responses—self-activity, activism, and perseverance—are American stories that might be explored in the unlikeliest of places. Even as it reveals the specific context of the state’s complex history, Alaska’s Black history encompasses the themes of the larger nationwide freedom struggle and enriches the history of people of African descent in North America. —Ian C. Hartman

Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest by Ian C. Hartman and David Reamer

In the summer of 1962, African Americans and other area activists joined together to picket Carrs, Alaska’s largest grocery store chain. Clarence Coleman, branch president of the Anchorage NAACP, wrote to Roy Wilkins at the national office in New York City: “The first picket line in the history of the Anchorage NAACP began its task of protesting the hiring policies of Carrs Food Center here in Anchorage today 31 July 10 am Alaska Standard Time.”¹ Coleman’s statement was not quite true. Five years earlier, Joseph M. Jackson and James E. Owens organized area workers and set up a picket outside of the Local 341 Laborers and Hod Carrier Union Hall. They and others sought an inclusive union for African American and Alaska Native workers and called for greater transparency in promotion guidelines. Owens stated that direct action “was the only way we’re going to get equality.”²

The picket of Carrs in Anchorage’s Fairview neighborhood was a watershed moment in the history of civil rights in Alaska. Many in the Black community took issue with the grocery store’s apparent refusal to hire African Americans to work in any capacity beyond sanitation and other so-called menial, low-level jobs. In one correspondence Bernard J. Carr Sr., an owner of the grocery store chain, conceded he had “two Negro employees,” a garbage collector and a janitor. But he continued, “The time is not right to hire a Negro checker.” Activist Pat Berkley recollected, “They [Carrs] didn’t want to hire any Blacks. And of course, Pop Carr…wasn’t to hire any Blacks because he had hired one [who] became very friendly with a white girl that worked there, so that was the end of that.”³ Still, the NAACP suggested the grocer benefited from a base of African American patrons and, as such, should hire and promote a few as employees. At its Fairview store, over 30 percent of the clientele was Black, yet not a single African American worked in management or any position that interfaced with the public.⁴

In response, men and women took to the picket line outside of Carrs to raise awareness. Though she was seven months pregnant, Anchorage resident and activist Pat Berkley helped organize the picket and led the women to march on the line during the day; the men walked in the evening. Cars and pedestrians “booed and laughed at [us],” Berkley remembered.⁵ Despite some negative reaction, the picket seemingly worked; owners agreed to hire a more diverse workforce. Organizer Joseph Kline summarized the terms of the agreement: Carrs grocery would “hire one person immediately. The second within thirty days and the third sixty days after the first.” These positions were supposed to include a clerk, cashier, or grocery checkers, all of which afforded a greater possibility for advancement than the menial positions that the picketers accused Carrs of reserving for Black workers.⁶

Unfortunately, Carrs failed to hire three African Americans within the agreed-upon sixty days, but the NAACP kept up its pressure, and the grocery store eventually complied. Richard Watts was the first man Carrs hired as a result of the picket. He became the first African American bagger at the store and stayed with the grocer for over forty-five years. In accordance with what the activists envisioned, Watts did not remain a bagger for long. He ascended the chain of management; by the end of a long and distinguished career, Watts had become a district manager and participated in the local business community as a member of the board of directors for the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce.⁷

The picket of Carrs in Anchorage’s Fairview neighborhood was a watershed moment in the history of civil rights in Alaska.

The Carrs boycott anticipated more extensive changes in Fairview that had come about by the middle of the 1960s. During this decade the neighborhood emerged as a center of activism and civic engagement in Anchorage. Its reputation as one of Anchorage’s most diverse communities only grew, as did the fear that city leadership might continue to neglect the needs of its residents. After the redevelopment and so-called urban renewal of Eastchester Flats, roughly the southern tier of Fairview, men and women on the community council grew more determined to ensure the existing neighborhood would not be left out as Anchorage leadership plotted new recreational outlets for residents. Olivia Holland, Ben Humphries, and John Parks, all active on the neighborhood council, led an effort to set aside land for a park and later spearheaded an effort to deliver public transportation throughout Anchorage. These efforts took considerable effort but would yield tangible results for the residents of Fairview in the decades to follow.⁸

Beyond the Carrs boycott in Fairview, activists protested and organized against mistreatment and discrimination elsewhere during the early and mid-1960s. In Anchorage and Fairbanks, residents established employment workshops to organize letter writing campaigns and rallies and to reach out to area businesses to connect minority job candidates with desirable employment. The workshops in Anchorage organized pickets at Caribou-Wards and Woolworths; one woman in Anchorage, Lillian Morris, took a lead role in the Woolworths pickets and led the area employment workshop. Fairbanks activists also organized a picket of Woolworths in their hometown. The efforts paid off, at least to some extent. Sears, Roebuck and Company agreed to interview and hire qualified African American, Native, Filipinx, and Mexican applicants. The Spenard Caribou-Wards hired two Black salesclerks and agreed to file and retain applications for a longer period, a concession to the employment workshop. The Anchorage Woolworths hired a Black employee for the first time. These efforts did not approach the level of equity that the Employment Workshop ultimately desired, but they represented a small measure of progress.⁹

Ian C. Hartman is associate professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

David Reamer is a public historian and journalist who writes for the Anchorage Daily News.

Notes

¹ Clarence V. Coleman to Roy Wilkins via Western Union Telegram, August 1, 1962, Papers of the NAACP, Part 27: Selected Branch Files, 1956–1965, Series D: The West, ed. John H. Bracey Jr., Sharon Harley, and August Meier. Available on microfilm at the Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage.

² For reference to the picket on the Local 341 Laborers and Hod Carrier Union, see Papers of the NAACP, Supplement to Part 13, the NAACP and Labor, 1956–1965, edited by John H. Bracey Jr. and August Meier (folder 14), available on microfilm at the University of Alaska Anchorage. For additional reference, see Meier Randall Keenan, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Vintage, 2000), 284.

³ Charlie Mae “Pat” Berkley, interview by Bruce Melzer, c. 1982–1983, Bruce Melzer oral history interviews, Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage.

⁴ NAACP News Letter, Papers of the NAACP, Part 27: Selected Branch Files, 1956–1965, Series D: The West, Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage.

⁵ Charlie Mae “Pat” Berkley, interview by Bruce Melzer, c. 1982–1983.

⁶ Joseph H. Kline Jr. to Roy Wilkins, March 3, 1963. Papers of the NAACP, Part 27: Selected Branch Files, available on microfilm at the Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage.

⁷ For a brief report on Richard Watts’s career at Carrs, see Christine Kim, “Carrs’ First Black Worker Recalls His Rise through the Ranks,” February 19, 2010 on KTUU. For the announcement of Watts on the board of directors for the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce, see “Anchorage Chamber’s 2013–14 Board of Directors Announced,” Alaska Dispatch News, September 12, 2013.

⁸ “City officials tour Fairview neighborhood park,” Anchorage Times, August 2, 1967, 1.

⁹ Dianne Anderson, “Protest Group Gets Results, With and Without Picketing,” Anchorage Daily Times, August 13, 1968, 3.

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

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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

Wednesday, 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.