Oklahoma: A View of the Center

Preface

In the summer of 2003 a group of twenty-five educators converged at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, under a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship titled "Working from Community: American Indian Art and Literature in a Historical and Cultural Context." It was six weeks of intensive study of American Indian art and literature to further more thoughtful scholarship on indigenous culture and to encourage teaching strategies that might integrate native topics into general courses on art and literature. Under the direction of Gail Tremblay (Onondaga/Mi'kmac), artist, critic, and professor at Evergreen, along with Mario Caro, then a professor at Evergreen and now at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, the seminar was a provocative, engaging, and dynamic discussion of topics related to American Indian culture. It included a stellar lineup of guest lecturers, including writers LeAnne Howe (Choctaw), Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), and Ofelia Zepeda (Tohono O'odham) and artists Corwin Clairmont (Salish Kootenai), Frank LaPena (Nomtipom-Tunai Wintu), Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora), C. Maxx Stevens (Seminole), and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (Diné/Seminole/Muskogee). Participants were also introduced to members of the Makah Nation in Neah Bay, Washington, and to local artists such as Greg Colfax (Makah).

The following dialogue began as a collaborative presentation delivered at the seminar. After putting the notes from our original presentation into written form, we developed this paper through e-mail and telephone exchanges over the years that followed. We present our ideas in conversational form to preserve the quality of a dialogue and the spirit of collaboration among colleagues. The conversational form departs from conventional scholarly analysis, yet it is not without precedent and remains viable as an alternative discourse to the prevailing academic model, which presumes the superiority of an individual critique. Shared among three scholars, American Indian and Euroamerican, our work is an alert, ongoing activity of love and fun.

Our focus was, and still is, twentieth-century Oklahoma artists and writers. While Oklahoma has not been recognized in mainstream America as a major center of cultural activity, it has been and continues to be a fertile ground for American Indian creativity.

In our dialogue we explore the shared subject matter of a select group of twentieth-century Oklahoma artists and writers, uniting the divide between the visual arts and literature for a more comprehensive perspective while revisiting the pervasive question of the connection between artist/home/place. We have selected five themes as the organizing principle of our discussion. These themes emanated from the works of art themselves. Based on our shared knowledge of "Oklahoma" art and literature—and this was broadly defined by the three of us to be work produced by artists and writers connected in a wide variety of ways to this specific place—we felt that the categories of travel, loss, memory, transformation, and dance would aid us in our exploration of the significance of Oklahoma as a cultural center.

Ruthe Blalock Jones (Delaware/Shawnee/Peoria), artist and current director of art at Bacone College, provides background information on the Bacone style of painting that emerged from the Bacone College School of Art, an important center of painting since the 1930s, and describes the relationship of her own painting to this long-standing Oklahoma art tradition. American art historian Cynthia Fowler discusses key works by artists C. Maxx Stevens, Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, Steven Deo, and Anita Fields, all of whom have strong ties to Oklahoma and work in media outside of the painting tradition. American literature scholar Maria DePriest highlights particular tribal, urban, and academic perspectives about Oklahoma in the works of Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, LeAnne Howe, Carter Revard, Rennard Strickland, and Craig Womack. Like the visual artists, the writers figure Oklahoma as both a physical and psychic umbilical cord, a primary relation available for interaction.

Introduction

CYNTHIA FOWLER: The artists and writers we selected for our discussion work in diverse, even contradictory styles. But they share an important connection in their choice of subjects. This connection is often lost when categories such as...