Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World through Stories

Aadizookewininiwag and the Visual Arts: Story as Process and Principle in Twenty-First Century Anishinaabeg Painting

297 Aadizookewininiwag and the Visual Arts Story as Process and Principle in Twenty-First Century Anishinaabeg Painting dAVid stirruP In old times, the artists were the keepers of memory, the recorders of events, the markmakers of prayers, and the shamen who brought the unseen world into view. —JAune QuiCK-tO-see smith Discourse, theory, cognizance, and the transference of knowledge are parts of a creative, oratorical, dramatic process through which our narrative history and story—oratory—were crafted, understood, and transferred systemically, both locally and nationally. —Lee mArACLe Seeing is mandatory; conclusions are optional. —gerALd mCmAster 298| David Stirrup in his preface to NARRATIVE CHANCE, Anishinaabe writer gerald Vizenor asserts that “native American stories are told and heard in motion, imagined and read over and over on a landscape that is never seen at once.”1 the natural imagery, ubiquitous in Vizenor’s writing, is literal— “words are heard in winter rivers,” he continues; “crows are written on the poplars”—but, with its emphasis on the visual, on the ocular, and on the explicit relationship he describes between telling, hearing, imagining, and seeing, that imagery refers also to the represented landscape. Whether we see the word “landscape” in formal european terms as a compositional descriptor , burdened with colonial connotations; or more simply as the literal canvas itself, the artistic “ground”; or more fully as the complex terrain— the histories, conversations, legacies—with which and in which the artist engages, we, as viewers, tend rarely to see that landscape all at once, as a singular “event.” rather, i argue here, we are invited into a discursive space in which the artist is always already participating in a dynamic exchange, revising and revisioning, reimagining and reconceptualizing those selfsame stories, histories, and contexts. this essay will explore the vitality of the relationship between art and story, visual and verbal, in contemporary Anishinaabe art.2 i will argue that story, as represented by three examples of painting (as) story, can be understood as process rather than product. As such, story is intrinsic to the ongoing circulation and construction of meaning between audience, painter/writer/ teller, text, and source. it is that circulation—in which stories, works of art, and so on exist not as products or artifacts, but as participants and spaces for participation—that constitutes the ground of knowledge of Anishinaabeg studies and enables discourse around questions of responsibility, personhood , community, and sovereignty. Looking specifically at the ways in which three contemporary artists—Andrea Carlson, star Wallowing bull, and Jim denomie3 —both use and create stories as major components of the complex layering of their “landscape” aesthetic, i will explore how their narrative forms resist easy classification according to art-historical conventions (though i will refer to them as landscapes here) and confront questions of representation and aesthetic/intellectual sovereignty. i will show how all three draw from different elements of native narrative arts to form interpretive containers for the consideration of objects, ideas, and stories, engaging among other things in “the crucial social and aesthetic project of establishing indigenous sovereignty, or collective agency, over representational practices.”4 Carlson, for instance, calls directly on the genii loci of Anishinaabeg stories, while denomie invokes Plains ledger art Story as Process and Principle in Painting| 299 (absorbing non-native art and photography of the American West in the process), and Wallowing bull uses a whole range of traditional patterns and forms from different indigenous traditions, alongside the dream/vision as source. All three create spaces that, while realistic in one sense, are also dreamlike—imaginative, recuperative spaces where stories and histories, loaded objects and inferences are folded into the discursive field of story as established by the aforementioned aesthetic ground. in considering paintings in these terms, i seek to understand story not as a codified or definitive category, but as a method of engagement, a means of relaying, participating in, generating, and understanding experience. the relationship between image and word/story in Anishinaabeg artistic traditions is ancient. this connection, in numerous forms, persists, from the pictographic knowledge recorded in petroglyphs and birch-bark scrolls, for example, and in contemporary quill and bead work, through the work of the Professional national indian Artists inc.,5 and successive artists such as blake debassige and Leland bell, rene meshake, Ahmoo Angeconeb, david beaucage Johnson, and david bradley, to name a few. this indicative sample is interested in practice—particularly the established relationships between Anishinaabeg heritage, story...