They call themselves the 12th Man — the rabid fans of the Seattle Seahawks who’ve made CenturyLink Field one of the NFL’s toughest arenas to play in. That was certainly the case when, on Sunday, the Seahawks defeated the San Francisco 49ers and in so doing punched a ticket to the Super Bowl.
In addition to “12” jerseys and t-shirts, the concept of the 12th Man now has an in-the-flesh personification with Native flair. Or an in-the-wood one, anyway: Chainsaw carver Jake Lucas of Bonney Lake, Washington, has created a six-foot-tall sculpture of a man-bird, wings outstretched, that has proven an instant fan favorite.
The carver with Spirit Warrior in the back of his pickup truck. Photos courtesy Jake Lucas.
Lucas has some Quinault and Chinook heritage — no more than one-eighth, by his reckoning — and recalls with fondness attending ceremonies and witnessing dances with his half-Native grandmother when he was younger. “I’ve always wanted to carve a Native American dancer,” he says, adding “I also wanted to do something unique to show my love for the team.” The two desires — to borrow a term from woodworking and ornithology — just dovetailed. It took Lucas about three weeks of 12-hour days to make the piece, which he calls Spirit Warrior.
The piece was created on Lucas’s own initiative, and hasn’t been endorsed by the Seahawks. But Lucas has been taking it to rallies in the back of his pickup truck, and says the fan response has been overwhelmingly positive. Additionally, he says that the Native American community has also expressed a great appreciation for the carving. Lucas says he doesn’t know where the piece will end up, but he hopes that the Seahawks or perhaps a local Tribal organization would be interested in acquiring it. He can be contacted through his website, chainsawart.org, where you can also see more exampes of the award-winning work he’s been creating since 2004.
James Madison stands next to his “Transformation of the Seawolf” sculpture in downtown Everett.
EvCC press release
EVERETT, Wash. – See traditional and contemporary Native American artwork by renowned Tulalip Tribes artist James Madison and family members at Everett Community College Feb. 10-March 14.
The “Generations 2” exhibit at EvCC’s Russell Day Gallery will feature traditional Salish and Tlingit artwork in contemporary mediums such as glass, bronze and stainless steel. See the artwork and watch a performance by Native American dance troop Northern Star Dancers at a reception at 6 p.m. Feb. 13 in the gallery.
This is the second family exhibit that Madison, a Tulalip Tribes member, master wood carver and art consultant, has created. It represents the work of Madison, who attended EvCC, his sons Jayden and Jevin Madison, father Richard Madison, grandfather Frank Madison, Sr., uncle Steve Madison and cousin Steven Madison.
The Madison cousins grew up immersed in their culture and learned to carve at their grandfather’s table. Richard Madison, an abstract painter, taught James contemporary art mediums and how to understand European artwork when he was a child.
Many of James Madison’s large-scale pieces can be seen at the Tulalip Resort and Casino, including a 24-foot story pole. His work has been displayed in Washington, New York, New Mexico and Canada, including in downtown Everett and at Everett Community College, and on the TV show “Grey’s Anatomy.” He was named Snohomish County Artist of the Year in 2013. He earned his bachelor’s degree in fine arts at the University of Washington and created a bronze sculpture for Husky Stadium.
The Russell Day Gallery is open 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays, noon to 4 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Fridays and is closed Saturdays and Sundays.
Everett, Wash. Jan. 13, 2014—The U.S. Forest Service is giving visitors to the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest a free pass for Martin Luther King Day. Fees will be waived at more than 74 day-use sites on the forest Jan. 20.
Fee-free days the Forest Service will participate in this year are:
The fee waivers are offered in cooperation with other federal agencies under the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act. Check trail and road conditions or call the Forest Service office you plan to visit for more information.
(PORTLAND, OR) – Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul & Mary fame, will perform a concert for Wisdom of the Elders, a Native American nonprofit in Portland, at 7:30 p.m., Feb. 14, at Augustana Lutheran Church, 2710 NE 14th Ave., Portland. For tickets, visit www.wisdomoftheelders.org/wisdombenefit.
Peter Yarrow, of the famed 1960s folk group Peter, Paul & Mary, will perform “An Evening of Love and Laughter” to benefit Portland-based Wisdom of the Elders, a Native American nonprofit, 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 14, at Augustana Lutheran Church, which donated use of its facility at 2710 NE 14th Ave.
Peter Yarrow, of the famed 1960s folk group Peter, Paul & Mary
Yarrow, who wrote some of the trio’s hits, including “Puff, the Magic Dragon” and “Day is Done,” has merged music and social activism in recent decades.
Since 1993, Wisdom has served the Native American Community through cultural programs, including a Northwest Indian Storytelling Festival and a collection of video oral histories of Native elders.
Recently, the organization has begun to focus on the effects of climate change on Native communities; its Wisdom Radio for this season focuses on the issue. Joining Yarrow will be his son Christopher, who will sing and play the washtub base. The younger Yarrow, a Portland resident, plays with local bands Baby Gramps, KingniK and Tevis Hodge Jr.
Tickets, which range from $5 to $60, can be purchased through www.wisdomoftheelders/wisdombenefit. The $60 sponsor ticket includes a meet-and-greet with Yarrow and book signing.
What: Peter Yarrow ‘s “An Evening of Love and Laughter,” a concert benefiting Portland-based Wisdom of the Elders
When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 14
Where: Augustana Lutheran Church, 2710 NE 14th Ave., Portland
Tickets: $20 general admission; $15 seniors and students, $60 sponsor tickets, $5 children 14 and
The ASUW American Indian Student Commission is hosting the annual Winter Powwow! The Winter Powwow venue will be on the University of Washington Campus in the newly renovated Husky Union Building (HUB) Ballroom. This year’s AISC Winter Powwow will be on Saturday, January 26, 2013!
Head Staff:
Host Drum- Young Society
MC- Carlos Calica
Arena Director- Jason Stacona
Head Man- Dan Nanamkin
Head Woman- Elese Washines
Northern Cloth Traditional Special (All Ages) Sponsored by Elese Washines & family
This is a zero tolerance event. No drugs, no alcohol, no fighting.
UW Students, Faculty, Staff and the Seattle Community is welcome!
Grand Entry is at 1pm!
If you are interested in being a vendor at the Winter Powoww, you can find a Vendor Contract here: 2013 ASUW Powwow Sales Agreement. Vending spaces are on a first come, first serve basis. Please fill out the agreement and mail to:
ATTN: Winter PowWow, Student Activities Office, HUB, Box 352238 Seattle, WA 98195 with payment by Cashiers Check or Money Order. Please make your cashier’s check or money order payable to the ”University of Washington”.
Payment along with the sales agreement must be received by Friday, January 18, 2013, as space is limited and will be allocated as we receive payment. We have limited 10 ftx10 ft spaces available so a prompt response will help ensure your presence. Your load-in and load-out times will be included in a confirmation packet sent to you once we receive the sales agreement and payment. Publicity for the Powwow will be included with your confirmation packet.
Vendor Contracts must be received by January 18, 2013 by 5:00pm.
When people talk about American Indian women novelists, the names that come to mind are typically Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich and Joy Harjo. But there are many worthy yet lesser-known American Indian female fiction writers whose names do not trip off the tongue. Here are some of them:
Debra Magpie Earling
Debra Magpie Earling
Earling, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation, published her award-winning Perma Red in 2002. The novel recounts the hardships suffered by Louise White Elk, a tale based on the true-life story of Earling’s aunt. Twenty years in the writing, Perma Red tells “a story that has burdened my family for years,” says Earling.
In describing the difficulty of getting the book written, which included a fire that destroyed her first 800-page draft, and getting it published, which included a decision to revise the ending because publishers would not accept a novel in which the protagonist dies—the real Aunt Louise died at 23 of exposure after a car accident—Earling says, “If you have a story that you need to tell and you want it out in the world, there’s some tenacious spirit that we [writers] all have.”
Earling has taught creative writing at the University of Montana, where she is a full professor, for the past 22 years.
Perma Red won the Western Writers Association Spur Award, the Medicine Pipe Bearer Award for Best First Novel, a WILLA Literary Award and the American Book Award.
Earling is working on a proposal for a second novel and hopes eventually to write a novel based on the life of Sacajawea. “She was a traditional woman… some accounts suggest she was as young as 14 years old when she was traveling [with Lewis and Clark]. She saw the true coming of the white man and the movement westward in a way that no one else had the opportunity to see. My biggest dream is to write that novel,” says Earling.
Linda LeGarde Grover (University of Minnesota, Duluth)
Linda LeGarde Grover
Author of two award-winning book-length collections of interconnected short stories, Grover, Bois Forte Band of Objiwe, is a professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.
Grover’s novels are based on her long-standing academic research interest—looking at how federal and state Indian policies affect Ojibwe families. As an undergraduate, “I began my research on boarding schools in northern Minnesota and that became the foundation for everything I’ve done.”
When she was doing the research for her master’s the chairman of her committee suggested she give fiction a try. “I started out by writing a story, and then another one that was connected to it. I ended up with a box of stories and put together eight of them when the University of Georgia Press sent out a call for manuscripts. That became The Dance Boots,” which was published in 2010 and won the 2009 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the 2011 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize.
Grover’s second novel-length collection of stories, The Road Back to Sweetgrass, is expected to be published in 2014. In 2008, the manuscript won the Native Writers Circle of the Americas First Book Award. The novel is arranged in four sections, each of which has linked stories that do not follow a linear timeline. The format for both books, says Grover, “seems to me a natural way of Native storytelling that has existed for a really long time. I never thought, ‘I’m going to write a book.’ I said to myself, ‘I think I will write a story.’” The old traditional stories, says Grover, are linked stories that are all part of a big picture. Grover’s research on boarding school families, beginning with the Dawes Act and continuing to the present, is integrated into Sweetgrass, which depicts people who, like herself, grew up during the era of federal termination policy.
Linda Hogan speaking in Binger, Oklahoma in 2008. (Wikipedia)
Linda Hogan
Hogan, Chickasaw, won a National Endowment for the Arts fiction grant in 1986, a Guggenheim for fiction in 1990, and a Lannan Award in 1994. She has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, The Wordcraft Circle, and The Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association.
Hogan’s first novel, Mean Spirit (1991) received the Oklahoma Book Award and the Mountains and Plains Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize the year that honor went to John Updike. Solar Storms (1997) and Power (1999) were both finalists for the International Impact Award.
Hogan’s writing reflects her commitment to cultural conservation and traditional ecosystem knowledge, among other interests. “The spiritual tradition is part of all of my work, my daily life, because it acknowledges the life of the earth and all that lives on it. I do not place any life above other life. I watch how the forest is important to water, both to aquifers and to calling down rain, even to communication with other trees, and the ground it exists in and the Earth is filled with so much life inside it, a terrestrial intelligence we no longer understand. But our people of the past knew,” she says.
In addition to her extensive and highly-praised oeuvre as a poet, Hogan is a renowned nonfiction writer. Her works include Dwellings, A Spiritual History of the Land; and The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir. She is currently working on another novel.
Hogan says of her novels, “I am working on re-telling our past. Still, even with all the research, I am merely a writer trying to put it all together. We have all been brilliant people and it is an incredible world even now, ongoing in its creation and we are participants in it.”
Formerly a full professor at the University of Colorado, Hogan now lives in Tishomingo, Oklahoma, with “a wild mustang who turned out to be a Chickasaw pony” and a wild burro.
Sara Sue Hoklotubbe
Sara Sue Hoklotubbe
Hoklotubbe, Cherokee, grew up in northeastern Oklahoma near the banks of Lake Eucha, the location that is the setting for her mysteries. She worked at the University of Oklahoma for more than 20 years in finance. No wonder the heroine of her novels, Sadie Walela, is a banker!
Hoklotubbe describes her beginnings as a writer: “It was a long journey and I started late in life… I loved English in high school, but when I got to college my focus switched over to political philosophy. Out of college the first thing I needed to do was get a job, which I did in the banking business. That was 1974. I always thought I would do something else—this was just going tide me over for a little while.” Twenty years later she was a VP at the bank.
But the job took “so many hours a day I really couldn’t focus on anything else. Then my husband and I got married in 1997. When we moved [to Hawaii] I couldn’t get a job…. It was a new situation for me.” Given the opportunity to think about what she actually wanted to do, Hoklotubbe decided, “I’d really like to try to write. I was 45. I went to the community college and took some non-credit classes in creative writing. It was just like someone flipped on a switch inside me.”
She soon decided to try to write a book about how badly women are treated in the banking business. The book started out with a bank robbery. “But it just took a 90 degree turn and ended up completely different. I just wanted to tell a good story; I wasn’t trying to write a mystery…. I really liked the way [Tony Hillerman] was able to convey things about the Navajo culture and the way of life, and yet it was in a good story. I wanted to do that for my people. So I guess unconsciously that’s how I ended up writing a mystery.”
Hoklotubbe was named Writer of the Year by Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers in 2004 for her first novel, Deception on All Accounts(Sadie Walela Mystery), 2003. The American Café(Sadie Walela Mystery), 2011, has won several awards, including the 2012 WILLA Literary Award given by Women Writing the West, the 2012 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award for Mystery/Suspense, and the 2012 Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers award for Mystery of the Year. Hoklotubbe’s third mystery, Sinking Suspicions, is expected out in fall 2014, and she’s working on a fourth.
LeAnne Howe at Wadi Rum, Jordan, in 2011. (Photo by Jim Wilson)
LeAnne Howe
Howe, an enrolled Citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, has an extensive publications list that includes fiction, poetry, screenplays, creative non-fiction, plays and scholarly articles. She is a faculty member in the creative writing program, a professor of English and American Indian Studies, and an affiliated faculty member in the Theatre Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
“In teaching creative writing,” she says, “I try to advocate for stories that come from someplace inside the students themselves, the stories they carry—how we embody as tribal people our land, our landscape, our community. So in my mind these two prongs of teaching [creative writing and American Indian Studies] work together.”
She is working on her third novel, Memoir of a Choctaw Indian in the Arab Revolts, 1917 & 2011, set in Allen, Oklahoma, and Bilaad ash Sham, which she visited in 2010-2011. Bilaad ash Sham, she explains, was a “region that included what is now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, all the way over to Jerusalem.” The region was broken up after the Arab Revolt of 1921 when the British and French imposed the borders that created modern Middle Eastern countries. “There’s no such thing as Iraq, there’s no such thing as Syria in the way it’s shaped now. Those were imposed borders. It’s a very similar process to what happens to tribes here in terms of this is your border, this is where you live. These kinds of colonial processes are not dissimilar… I’m well-known for choosing time periods and comparing those time periods through the experience of tribal people, so this is another project in line with Shell Shaker and Miko Kings.”
Shell Shaker (2001), Howe’s first novel, won the American Book Award 2002, Before Columbus Foundation and was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award 2003. Howe was chosen as the Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year for Fiction in 2002. Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007) was selected as the Read-in Selection for Hampton University, 2009-2010. Howe is the recipient of the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas.
Evelina Zuni Lucero
Evelina Zuni Lucero
Lucero, Isleta/Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, is winner of the 1999 Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas First Book Award for Fiction for her first novel, Night Sky, Morning Star, published in 2000. She is working on her second, Sovereign Seven, a story about Indian gaming.
Night Sky, Morning Star was developed from another novel that made the rounds but did not get picked up. Lucero took the one chapter in that book that everyone liked and built a story around it. The characters are based partly on people she knew in high school in Nevada, but the story is an act of imagination. “I had a lot of fun discovering who the characters were,” she says.
Lucero is chair of the Creative Writing Department at the Institute of American Indian Arts, following a stint as a journalist for tribal and national Indian news publications.
Her second novel is a challenge, says Lucero. “I thought that since I’ve written one novel, the second one should be easy, but it turns out that every book, every set of characters, has its own life. It took me a while to figure that one out.” This book is based on a short story she wrote in the late 1990s about the State of New Mexico’s conflict with the pueblo and Apache tribes over casinos with high stakes gaming. “It was a major conflict between the tribes and the state; eventually the tribes were successful.”
One of the historical figures Lucero encountered when she was doing research on the arrival of the Spanish in New Mexico was a “true life Native person who tricked the Spanish into thinking there were huge kingdoms of gold to the East as part of a plot of the Pueblo peoples to lure them onto the plains where they would travel until they got weary and tired—the idea was to do them in.” The Spanish, who first entered New Mexico in the 1540s looking for land to settle and to find riches, had heard stories of about seven cities of gold. The concocted story fit right into their expectations, Lucero says.
The novel, which Lucero describes as the “intersection of history, myth and the imagination,” marries the whole idea of modern-day casinos to the mythological Seven Cities of Gold, not coincidentally the basis for the name of one of the first casinos in northern New Mexico. “The casinos are another good trick that Native people came up with to lure non-Natives and get some enrichment and benefits out of that whole arrangement,” says Lucero, who hopes to finish the novel during her sabbatical next year.
Lee Maracle (Photo courtesy Columpa C. Bobb photography)
Lee Maracle
It was a dark and stormy night in Sardis, British Columbia, when Lee Maracle, Sto:Loh Nation, discovered she was a novelist as well a short-story writer. “There was a storm at the house and I was terrified,” she says. “I started writing so I wouldn’t hear the thunder. I had 80 pages written before anyone came home and the storm stopped.” She was so engrossed that “a tree fell on my house and I didn’t notice.” So far she has four novels to her credit: Sundogs: A Novel, 1992; Ravensong, 1995; Daughters are Forever, 2002; and Will’s Garden, 2002. She is working on the fifth, which will be a continuation of Ravensong, telling the story of the little child named Celia. “People kept asking what happened to her,” says Maracle.
Maracle teaches in the Aboriginal Studies Program and the Centre for Indigenous Theatre and she is the Traditional Teacher for First Nations House, all at the University of Toronto. She is one of the founders of the En’owkin International School of Writing in Penticton, B.C. In addition to her novels, she has published poetry and several non-fiction works.
Maracle is a member of the Red Power Movement and Liberation Support Movement; her political and social views are integral to her writing, she says. Sundogs is set during the Oka crisis between the Canadian government and the Mohawk Nation, while Ravensong deals with the flu epidemic of the 1950s, and Daughters tells of the healing that is possible within a dysfunctional family.
Among the points Maracle stresses is the importance of readers paying attention to emerging First Nations writers, a few of whom she mentioned. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Mississauga Nishnaabeg, has just published Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories & Songs, her debut collection of short stories. Cherie Dimaline, Ojibway and Métis, published her first novel, The Girl Who Grew A Galaxy, last June. Canadian poet Katherena Zermette, Metis, is the first Native woman writer to win the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry, which she received for North End Love Songs.
Conceptual artist Cassandra Canady’s illustration of what the Red Curtain Foundation for the Arts in Marysville could look like. — image credit: Courtesy image.
MARYSVILLE — The Red Curtain Foundation for the Arts has entered the next phase of settling into its new home in Marysville, but it needs the public’s help to complete the transition.
Scott Randall, president of the Red Curtain Foundation for the Arts, started the nonprofit organization in June of 2009, and in June of 2013, the group moved into the former Dunn Lumber building in Marysville.
“The next step in the process came on Dec. 3 of last year, when I was doing a site walkthrough of the facility with the building commissioner and the fire marshall,” Randall said. “I asked them what we would need to do in order to start operating from this building sooner.”
The Foundation won’t be hosting concerts or plays from the Dunn Lumber building for a while yet, but if Red Curtain can raise the funds to get the facility in shape to meet the current regulations for fire safety and ADA compliance, then the group can provide a space for classes, meetings and other small events, to help it generate semi-regular revenue toward the down payment that needs to be made before more significant renovations are performed.
“We’re looking to add extras, to tear up pavement, and to put up and knock down walls, but we can’t do that now, because we don’t actually own the building yet,” Randall said, noting that the Red Curtain Foundation for the Arts is still operating under a lease agreement with Dunn Lumber. “In the meantime, because the facility has had hardly any updates since it was first built in 1967, we need to upgrade its fire system, make its restrooms ADA-compliant, put up new exit signs and install new doorhandles. And we need to do all of that immediately, before we can begin to offer even scaled-down programming on a regular basis.”
Beyond that, Randall eventually plans to install sprinkler systems and redesign the building’s exterior to include an enclosed space outdoors, but while conceptual artist Cassandra Canady has illustrated what Randall hopes the fully refurbished facility will ultimately look like, and engineer and architect Doug Walter has even drawn up a schematic for its interior layout, Randall himself knows that the Marysville community will need some persuading.
“What I’m finding is that folks in Marysville are very excited about having the Red Curtain Foundation for the Arts in their town, but they’re still saying, ‘Okay prove it,'” Randall said. “By hosting these smaller events to start with, we can prove that this center can be a benefit to the community. In an ideal world, it’d be nice to generate enough donations and revenue to have our facility fully ready for the art season this fall, maybe even by launching it with a concert, but if it takes us a while longer, at least by taking care of the immediate concerns, we can do enough good stuff to sustain ourselves and show some of what we’re capable of.”
Jacob Lucas’ chain saw art is show on Wednesday, January 15, 2014. The Bonney Lake artist spent more than three weeks creating the tribute to the Seattle Seahawks and the 12th Man. (Joshua Trujillo, seattlepi.com)
Jacob Lucas has always been an artist. He has painted, worked with clay, blown glass, drawn and went to college for graphic design. But it is the magic he creates with a much less elegant tool that has been buzzing on social media and captured the attention of Seahawks fans recently.
Lucas spent more than three weeks finessing a Western red cedar log with his collection of 22 chainsaws. The stunning result of his work —a 7-foot-tall tribute to the Seahawks, the 12th Man and Native American culture — has been shared and “liked” online countless times.
“I’d like to see it on display in the CLink,” he said Wednesday after trucking the finely detailed creation to the Virginia Mason Athletic Center in Renton, where the Seahawks train.
The Bonney Lake artist first noticed chainsaw art at the Puyallup Fair when he was 13. He saved up money and purchased a saw. Unfortunately, it was stolen about two weeks later.
He mostly forgot about the unique art form until his grandmother paid for him to attend a class a decade later.
Since then his skill with a STIHL has led to a full-time career turning logs into masterpieces.
Lucas has 20 carvings lining the main drag in Bridgeport, Wash., near Omak. The award-winning carver has also been commissioned to create custom carvings.
Lucas hopes to have his Seahawks carving on display Friday at a rally for the team.
Click through the gallery above to see the detail work he put into the carving. You can see more of his work on his website.
