It’s spring 2022, and after adapting to a new 100% online art teaching job, and recovery from a serious Christmas bout of COVID-19, I’m crawling up out of the dungeon with some exciting news to share!
“Ancestral Plane” was chosen as the cover art for Chadwick Allen’s groundbreaking book about Indian burial mounds, Earthworks Rising – Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts…and it’s finally here!
Watch Me Read a Particularly Poignant Passage Here (minute 6…video is 10 minutes long!)
Earthworks Rising – Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts also has 6 color plates of my mound based art within it!
Allen (Chickasaw ancestry) is Professor of English and American Indian Studies, Co-Director of the Center for American Indian & Indigenous Studies and Associate Vice Provost at the University of Washington. His work centers around studies of contemporary Native American and global Indigenous literatures, other expressive arts, and activism.
Author of the books Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and New Zealand Maori Literary and Activist Texts and Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies, he is a past President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) and editor of the journal Studies in American Indian Literatures.
Chapter 4 of his Earthworks Rising book is entitled “Wombed Hollows, Sacred Trees.” It revolves around my earthwork themed art and is inspired by my photo collage titled “Ancestral Plane.” The focus is on burial mounds in particular, and my work is presented “in conversation” with the poetry of Allison Hedge Coke from her book Blood Run, which testifies to the need to protect the remarkable ruins and sacred remains of the Indigenous North American city of Blood Run.
I can’t wait to read this cutting edge book about how Native writers and artists engage ancient earthworks in contemporary works!
Excerpt
To give you an idea of the content, here is an excerpt from Re-scripting Indigenous America: Earthworks in Native Art, a previous essay published by Chadwick Allen.
"The work of the mixed media artist Alyssa Hinton, of Tuscarora and Osage descent, continues the theme of unseen peoples and unseen worlds existing beneath or within Indigenous earthworks. Her vibrant photo-collage titled Ancestral Plane, part of her Spiritual Ground series completed between 1996 and 2000, depicts a burial mound constructed in the deep past and now overgrown with trees not as the site of death, colonial nostalgia, or raw material for scholarly careers but rather as the site of Indigenous rebirth and regeneration. In her artist’s statement, Hinton describes the image as “the cross section of a burial mound, breaking open to reveal remnants and remains of cultural relics and people. Trees draw upon these vestiges for sustenance while the embryo also is fed to support its new life (re-awakening/re-birth). The hawk, able to see the ‘unseeable,’ is the messenger of change landing, reminding us of our potential.” In Hinton’s Indigenous and gendered script, the ancient burial mound is more seed than sepulcher; when conditions are appropriate, it opens of its own volition, rather than be opened by desecrating looters or archaeologists, to reunite upper and lower worlds. And it is this seed, represented in the central figure of a blue human embryo, that enables contemporary Indigenous communities to realize the power of their erased, revised, or rewritten potential, perhaps to rebuild their worlds and thus to script their lives anew."
