Visualities: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art

Seeing Memory, Storying Memory: Printup Hope, Rickard, Gansworth

161 seeing memory, storying memory: Printup Hope, rickard, Gansworth susan Bernardin So much of the story is carried by memory. —eric GansWOrtH, artist’s talK, cOlGate uniVersitY, OctOBer 30, 2008 in a self-portrait entitled SEEING WITH MY MEMORY (2000), mohawk artist shelley niro invites the viewer to consider the seen and the unseen. the artist holds onto a tree at tutela Heights at six nations in Ontario. a recurring setting found in niro’s work, including her film It Starts with a Whisper and her painting Tutela, tutela Heights memorializes indigenous people forcibly displaced and offered sanctuary at six nations. according to niro, many tutelos later died of influenza.1 taken together, niro’s painting and provocative title beg the question: what are the mechanisms of memory that could make this place, people, and history visible? looking back at viewers looking at her, niro stages a scene of layered interaction between the artist’s imagination, the lived and shared memories imprinted on and by the land, and the manifold perspectives of viewers who may come into contact with the painting. do viewers share her vision or do they envision other memory trails? Or is this scene simply elusive? Seeing with My Memory balances the primacy of indigenous memory against the ongoing threat posed by forgetting: its reckoning of grief—of almost incalculable loss—shares a clear-eyed, if coded, vision of continuance. niro’s pairing of title and painting reminds us that the relationship 162| Susan Bernardin between the textual and visual is vital not only for eliciting response and unleashing meaning, but also for inviting story. By “seeing” with her memory, niro echoes an invocation made in n. scott momaday’s seminal memoir The Way to Rainy Mountain. Pairing his father’s drawings with his account of Kiowa, settler, and personal memory, momaday retraces the geographical movement of his ancestors from emergence to ensuing migration through the Plains. momaday aims to experience firsthand what his own grandmother “could see more perfectly in her mind’s eye,” despite her never having seen the places carried in memory by Kiowa tribal history.2 like niro, momaday thus suggests the constitutive power of remembered story, understood as a way of seeing across time and place. at the same time, both artists help us to see what has been invisible for too long in discussions of native american literary studies: the informing, vital lens of indigenous visual arts. With his mixed-genre works of poems and paintings, momaday himself has long made visible rich interconnections between the visual and verbal. From elizabeth Woody to Wendy rose, Joy Harjo to Gail tremblay, many native writers speak in multiple, mutually constitutive languages of literary and visual arts. For their part, diverse native artists such as edgar Heap of Birds, Jaune Quick-to-see smith, George longfish, and Phil Young have turned to words as equally constitutive features of their versatile visual works. Yet the active and ongoing communication across these and other aesthetic fields has often gone unnoted in the practice of native literary studies. How do we access the language(s) of these interconnections? turning to what carol lorenz calls the “verbal-visual nexus in Haudenosaunee art,” we can find one method for tracing these relationships.3 this essay considers how the selected visual work of two tuscarora artists—melanie Printup Hope and Jolene rickard—offers cues for reading the mixed-genre work of eric Gansworth (enrolled Onondaga, lifelong resident of the tuscarora nation and its vicinity). through their visual and textual stagings of cultural memory, all three artists embrace interactive, richly layered forms of communication with viewers. like niro, their work compels viewers to respond by making connections, asking questions, and sharing story. understood through Haudenosaunee visual languages made particular by tuscarora and individual memory, these works suggest strategies for reading within shared indigenous systems of meanings. at the same time, the kinship between word and image in Haudenosaunee contexts invites considerations of speaking across indigenous aesthetic systems, or what chadwick allen calls the “trans-indigenous.”4 akin to scholars such as allen, malea Powell, chris teuton, Qwo-li driscoll who locate indigenous literatures as part of Seeing Memory, Storying Memory| 163 a broader aesthetic system of related practices such as beadwork, basketmaking , and dance, the artists here direct us to the unsung importance of visual arts in indigenous literary practice and interpretation. Vital siGns shelley niro’s invitation to...