Strength and Resilience Through Art

ABSTRACT 

These lessons are part of a visual art unit of study for 5th-grade students. The unit as a whole is meant to foster strength and resilience as its overarching theme. As students work with themes in a choice-based educational approach, they are able to move beyond the skill-based finished product, using art as a means of expression and empowerment.

By looking at the histories and cultures of Indigenous peoples from their own perspectives, we find ways to connect and express our own personal journeys, our individual narratives, and how we are all connected.

It is through heartfelt study with an amazing group of scholars from across the country, highly esteemed professors in the field, and elders from local communities in North Dakota that the information for these lessons has been gathered. My hope is to help students produce work in this unit of study that looks at ideas of identity, resilience, and connection to place.

MY STORY

My name is Jami Hooper, and I have been a teacher in inner-city Memphis, Tennessee, for 22 years. I am currently an elementary art specialist, and previously an AP Art teacher at the Creative and Performing Arts School. My school population consists primarily of African American students, plus an increasing number of Hispanic families from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras.  It seems to me that these students and their families are searching for a sense of place and identity. I also believe that children at this age are in their formative years, and are learning how to establish their own sense of self and identity.  My family heritage as Choctaw, on my paternal side, has continually guided me on my search for identity, so I have empathy for the children in my classroom.  I hope to help them gain strength and find resilience through art projects that help them gain a stronger sense of their identity.

INTRODUCTION

The three lessons in this unit focus on metaphor as a way of expressing things that are contained, held, or carried. We will take a look at literal and symbolic interpretations of traditional art pieces from different tribal nations of North Dakota. We will seek answers to the questions:  What is it that gives us our ideas of place, belonging, and strength? How are we connected to the landscape?  How do we preserve our histories? Students will work with clay, create personal timelines, and consider how utilitarian objects can carry spiritual significance.

 

Lesson One, VESSELS—THE THINGS WE HOLD

  • Materials to Have Ready: red terra cotta clay, containers for storage, clay tools, journals/ writing
  • Approximate Length of this Lesson: 5 – 6 class meetings
  • Tennessee Academic Standards for Fine Arts Education: Create Domain
    • Organize and develop artistic ideas and works.
    • Relate artistic ideas and works with societal, cultural, and historical contexts.

Essential Understanding 

Through art-making, people construct meaning by investigating and developing awareness of their own and others’ perceptions, knowledge, and experiences.

Objectives 

    • Students will be able to use metaphor in the association with self and place.
    • Students will examine the cultural connections in geographic landscapes.
    • Students will examine the concept of resilience as a connection to identity.

Entry Questions merging into Essential Questions

  • Metaphor
      • What is a metaphor?
      • How can a piece of art serve as a metaphor?
      • How can we use metaphors to describe ourselves?
  • Connection to Place
      • What connection do you have to the place where you live?
      • Do you have a deep history in that place?
      • Do you feel a responsibility to protect the land where you live?
      • Can land be owned, and if so, by whom?
  • Identity and Self
      • What makes you you?
      • How would you describe your identity?
      • What things do you carry inside of you?
      • How do these things describe or define you as a person?

Words for Understanding:

affirmation        vessel               resilience          three -dimensional      metaphor

perception         utilitarian         spiral                 two-dimensional

Principles and Elements of Art 

    • We will use the “elements” of line, shape and form, and color in this lesson.
    • We will also use the “principles” of movement, pattern, and unity in this lesson.

Introduction to Lesson One

Vessels are containers that serve the purpose of holding things. We are familiar with ceramics used for utilitarian cooking vessels, serving and storage vessels, pipes, ceremonial items, and other things. Due to their resilience, ceramics have been key to learning about Indigenous cultures.  Clarify that Indigenous is a term that is used to describe first nations, first peoples, people who are not immigrants but have always lived in a place.

Traditionally, clay pots serve a strictly utilitarian purpose in or around the home, typically, but they can also be used as a metaphor for our identity and the experiences that have shaped who we are.  What experiences do you carry inside of you? How do these things form our impressions of ourselves and our perceptions of the world around us?

Resilience is the ability to remain strong through adverse conditions, and remain unbroken. The following questions may be considered when thinking about our own strengths.

What are the things that describe you as a person? What are the most difficult times that you’ve been through? What strategies did you use to get through those times? Who are the strongest people that you know in your life? Can we write our own narratives for the future?

Visuals

  1. The teacher will show a map of the tribal nations of North Dakota.
  2. The teacher will share examples of Mandan coil pots from Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, ND.  Also, it is worth noting that Mandan women made bell-shaped holes in the ground (called “cache pits” today) where they stored dried corn, beans, squash, and sunflower seeds) inside their homes (called “earth lodges” today). These pits, indoors and outside, were also vessels, of a sort, that held precious things, as did their leather bags (called “parfleches”) hanging on hooks inside the earth lodges.  See: https://www.nps.gov/knri/learn/historyculture/earthlodge.htm
  3. The teacher will narrate:  The Lakota neighbors of the Mandan say that in the old days, things were written in the hearts and minds of the people. They say that today all the laws are written on paper and they will be forgotten or ignored. As a way to preserve our memories, I ask that we make clay vessels that will symbolize containers for things that we carry, things that we hold within ourselves.

Create:  Vessel Making

Instructions: The vessels can be constructed using rope-like pieces rolled from clay and then coiled upon one another, as we build up the shape of the piece of pottery. The clay is blended together until there is no trace of the ropes of clay entwined to form the pot, no deviation in the thickness of the walls, and therefore no weaknesses. Remember, we are looking for strength!  The vessels will be fired by the teacher and returned to the students later.

Explanation of Time Spiraling: While students are smoothing and shaping their vessels, the Teacher could share the Native view of time as nonlinear. Instead of following a line, time is thought of as circular, cyclical, or spiraling, much like the coils we are constructing. The spiral is a sacred symbol that represents the journey of life, taking a labyrinth-like passage that leads to the source. Spirals are the oldest  known symbols used in spiritual practices.

Explanation of Pottery’s Connection to the Earth: Pottery has a connection to the land.  Clay comes from the earth.  Fired clay becomes pottery or ceramics.

Visuals

  1. The teacher will show the class some pictures of cliffs near Billings, lines of color, passage of time, layers.  Ask again: how do our connections with the land help form our sense of self?  What is the meaning of Indigenous?
  2. The teacher introduces “The Red Road”: During an excursion, Archaeologist Erik Holland pointed out that the gravel on the road we were traveling was red because it was made from the bands of clay on the cliff tops, excavated, and commercially processed into road gravel.
  3. The teacher explains: The “Red Road” is a metaphor for living a spiritual way of life. The Oglala medicine man and holy man, Black Elk, spoke of all the people on the red road as being part of one interconnected circle of people that made a sacred hoop (another shape worthy of our attention). Only you can walk your journey, but many people are on the road.
  4. The Teacher shares a YouTube video (7 minutes), where April Fallis, a Dakota Elder (Crow Creek Sioux Tribe) speaks about walking the Red Road, part of the Oceti Sakowin Essential Understandings:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbRFqngHLQw

Closure / Assessment 

  • As a part of the closing reflections, students will look at the Seven Lakota Life Values: https://sites.google.com/site/sguvcte/seven-values-of-lakota-life
  • These values are: prayer, respect, caring and compassion, honesty and truth, generosity, humility, and wisdom. 
  • Students will consider these values and write seven affirmations about themselves on pieces of paper that will be rolled into scrolls and placed within their vessels.
  • The teacher will share an example:
    • “That’s the way I try to live my life—in wolakota—in peace, in balance, in harmony. It’s a philosophy, it’s a way of life…. Every day, when you walk on earth, you try to live in balance with whatever task you have at hand.”  — Jace DeCory, Oceti Sakowin Elder

Extending the Lesson along the Trail 

Teachers adapting this lesson to a different, place-based location might consider vessels from other cultures, such as hazel and cedar basketry to the west or birch bark baskets to the east. Here are some videos that highlight these vessels:

Lesson Two,  WINTER COUNTS—MEMORY KEEPERS

  • Materials to Have Ready:
    1. Images to share with students to help convey the symbols used in winter counts.  
    2. Heavy brown roofing paper, which can be torn for irregular edges, would be an excellent base for simulating a hide or as a basis for a timeline.  Have enough paper for multiple pieces of different sizes.
    3. Chalk pastels would be an excellent medium for students to create their timelines.
    4. Black china markers for outlines and details.
  • Approximate Length of this Lesson:  4 class meetings
  • Tennessee Academic Standards for Fine Arts Education: Connect Domain
    • Create art based on personal experiences, current interests, and surroundings.
    • Synthesize and relate knowledge and personal experiences to artistic endeavors.

Essential Understandings

Through art-making, people construct meaning by developing an awareness of different perspectives, knowledge, and experiences.

Objectives 

    • Students will interpret the symbolism found on the Winter Count Buffalo Robes.
    • Students will be able to create symbols for historical events within their lives or what they would like to see themselves become in the future.  (Native ways of thinking about time often connect past, present, and future.)
    • Students will discuss the significance of their art work and explain their personal imagery.

Entry Questions 

    • Where and how do we encounter images in our world?
    • How do images convey meaning?
    • How can the viewer “read” a work of art as though it were a text?

The teacher will share an exemplary poem:

For the earth he drew a straight line,
For the sky a bow above it;
White the space between for day-time,
Filled with little stars for night-time;
On the left a point for sunrise,
On the right a point for sunset,
On the top a point for noontide,
And for rain and cloudy weather
Waving lines descending from it.

From ”The Song of Hiawatha” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

This lesson will encourage the investigation of visual text and how we use symbols in our everyday life. We will consider:  How can symbols express ideas and communicate across different cultures?

The teacher will share another example:  In Native American cultures, the horse is a commonly used symbol for success, freedom, courage, strength, power, wisdom, and loyalty.

The teacher will ask:  What characteristics would you use to describe yourself? What kind of symbol would you choose to represent your personal qualities?

Vocabulary Words (to be learned in the course of the lesson):

narrative, visual literacy, linear/spiraling, collective history, iconography, winter count, buffalo robe

Principles and Elements of Art

LINE: As with any kind of flat edge color, a clean edge is most accentuated with heavy outlining. Whether with oil pastels or paint, students will be creating a flat, smooth color within an outline.

SHAPE: Within this lesson, ideas are expressed as visual text that incorporates symbols. These images should be simplified and constructed through shapes.

COLOR: Traditional colors used in Native American art such as red, yellow, black, and white are found from natural dyes and pigments.

THE FOUR SACRED COLORS –  Many Native Americans view the world as having four directions. Each direction has a special meaning and color associated with it. The Lakota use the colors black, red, yellow and white to represent the four directions. For some, the colors represent the four seasons and the changes we make on our journey through life. These are also the four colors of maize kernels.

The teacher will share an example:

The Lakota Medicine Wheel consists of four sections representing the four directions. These sections are inside a circle and are indicated with sacred colors:  http://aktalakota.stjo.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=8592

Introduction to Lesson Two  

The Lakota people keep their collective memory alive in pictographic records called Winter Counts. One such winter count, the Brown Hat Winter Count, reaches back to what ethnologists and historians might call “myth-history,” to circa 901 CE. This history dates back hundreds of years but also comes toward the present, recalling the arrival of the horse in 1692, the first horse-stealing raid in 1706, intertribal conflict, contact with traders, smallpox, shooting stars, eclipses, comets, sun dances, white bison hunts, conflicts with federal soldiers, treaty making, the arrival of settlers, the boarding school and reservation era, and human survival.

In visual arts, there are several types of literacy. A literate person is able to read and write, but does our reading include only text? Or, can we read a story with visual language?

Art students consistently engage in communication, by interpreting and constructing visual imagery. This gives us the tools we need to relate personal, historical, or contextual knowledge to our art pieces and to tell a story.

With this lesson, students will be able to construct their own narratives, and convey their own stories through visual text. This should be done with the selection of symbols to represent ideas, events, places, or things of meaning. Why is it important to remember our histories, and who are the memory keepers in our family?

Students will consider where their starting points should be in their own, personal timelines. After selecting a starting point and a direction for our work, students will be asked to work within a theme and to create personal symbols. Suggestions for individual stories include representations of our histories, current ideas of our identity, or goals and affirmations for the future.

Teacher will share some examples:

    • Looking back:  Family memories record significant historical events, such as births, moves, weddings, or when a child learned to walk, ride a bike, play soccer, or attend a new school.
    • Looking forward: How would you describe your goals for the future, where you hope to be, or what you might like to be doing?
    • Today:  In your personal timeline today, where are you?  Who you are now?  How do you describe yourself at this moment in time?

Discussion of Symbol and Iconography

The teacher will share information about pictograms and ideograms as types of visual language. Pictograms are pictures that resemble what they signify. They are still used today to communicate information. Many people around the world are familiar with the pictograms indicating such things as airports, public facilities, and non-smoking areas (indicated by a cigarette in a circle with a diagonal line across it). Ideograms are pictures that represent ideas and can often be understood without the aid of written language, like a heart for love.

Waníyetu Wowápi Wičhóȟ’aŋ
The Winter Count Tradition – by Dakota Goodhouse

According to the First Scout, Blogspot http://thefirstscout.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-high-dog-winter-count.html :

“The winter count is a pictographic mnemonic device in which the Lakȟóta people recorded outstanding events. Each image represents a year and a story. Some Lakȟóta say that they would gather in the fall to discuss the year’s events and to decide what to remember for the year. Others, they would gather in the spring, the beginning of the new year for the Lakȟóta people, when bison calves are born, when the new leaves unfold, when the ice breaks, and when the geese return.
The pictographic record was recorded on tanned bison robes in general, but as bison began to diminish on the Great Plains, the native peoples turned to recording their history on buckskin and cloth; it was recorded on a variety of things such as tipi liners and even the outside of the tipi.”

For another example, see Carnegie Buffalo Robe for images of contemporary artist Thomas Red Owl Haukaas, M.D. (1950- ), Sicanġu (Brulé) Lakota/Creole, such as the Brain-tanned deer (Odocoileus sp.) hide, ink, commercial paint, nylon sinew, 1995.  https://nsew.carnegiemnh.org/lakota-nation-of-the-plains/winter-court/

“Groups of people record their history even when they do not have written languages. They do so by passing down events orally or by recording them pictorially. The Lakota people recorded their history by creating winter counts, which are drawings of historical events on animal hides or muslin. In the past, every Lakota band had a keeper of the winter count. Once a year the leaders reviewed the important events of the previous year and together selected the single most significant one, which the keeper added to the long list of annual pictographs, consisting of as many as 200 entries. He could recite the story of each successive winter on this lengthy winter count, thereby passing on history orally. Such memorable events as smallpox epidemics, wars, government-mandated school attendance, and the move from tipi to cabin were noted on the winter counts. Tribal members could recall the year of their birth by the event associated with their birth date.”

By the 1930s the tradition of the winter count had generally ceased. Dr. Thomas Red Owl Haukaas created the Carnegie Winter Count from a 1990s viewpoint, including social and political issues that have affected the lives of Lakota people up to modern times. In this unique contemporary winter count, Dr. Haukaas depicted 125 yearly events affecting his tribe, the Sicanġu Lakota people on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. Haukaas began the winter count with the creation of the reservation in 1868–1869 and ended with the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ encounter with Native Americans. Since there is no count keeper, he created a guide book that gives an explanation of the icon for each year.

The Smithsonian Institute has a wonderful online resource called Lakota Winter Counts: https://historyexplorer.si.edu/resource/lakota-winter-counts  See the image below of “Flame’s Winter Count” from the Smithsonian’s collection.

Another pertinent example can be seen with the “High Dog Winter Count Robe” found at the North Dakota Heritage Center in Bismark, ND.  See:  https://www.history.nd.gov/textbook/unit3_1_highdog_intro.html

Create Timelines

In preparation for the creation of timelines, the teacher will once again ask students:  How do we use symbols in our everyday life? How can symbols express ideas and communicate visually across different cultures?

The teacher will distribute pieces of heavy brown roofing paper, either in rectangular shapes that simulate hides, or other shapes that might be imagined to support timelines.  The edges can be torn so that they are irregular, something like the edges of hides.  Remind students that timelines were not linear for Native Americans.

Closure and Assessment 

How does engaging in the creation of art enrich people’s lives? How does making art attune people to their surroundings, or sense of place?

How do people develop an understanding of their lives and the lives of their communities through art-making?

Part of the closing reflections would include small group discussion of personal meanings and interpretation.

A hero’s journey can be found as a recurring theme in Joseph Campbell’s book, The Power of Myth. Campbell’s depiction of upheaval, challenge, and the victory of overcoming adversity defines archetypal symbols. Campbell refers to “[hu]mankind’s one great story” by saying, “narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.”

If we can create our own narratives, we can be warriors in our own victory dance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lesson Three, PARFLECHE—WHAT DO WE CARRY AND WHAT DO WE LEAVE BEHIND?

  • Materials to Have Ready: brown paper, oil paints or pastels, writing paper and writing implements
  • Approximate Length of this Lesson:   4 class meetings
  • Tennessee Academic Standards for Fine Arts Education:  Connect Domain 
    • Synthesizing and relating knowledge and personal experiences to artistic endeavors.
    • Relating artistic ideas and works with societal, cultural, and historical context.

Essential Understandings 

Through art-making, people construct meaning by investigating and developing awareness of perceptions, knowledge, and experiences.

Objectives 

    • Students will be able to use metaphor in the association with self and place.
    • Students will examine the cultural connections in geographic landscapes.
    • Students will examine the concept of resilience in connection with identity.

Entry Questions and Essential Questions 

    • How do objects, places, and design shape lives and communities?
    • How does engaging in the creation of art enrich people’s lives? How does making art attune people to their surroundings?

Vocabulary Words (to be learned in the course of the lesson):

parfleche, incising, utilitarian, geometric, balance, value, repetition, closure, affirmation, ingrained trauma

Principles and Elements of Art

For this lesson we will be looking at line, shape, and color and texture, as well as rhythm and pattern.    

Introduction to Lesson Three

The teacher’s introduction to this lesson begins with discussion of imagery found in the painting titled, “The Heirloom,” by Tom Lovell (1976), https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/The-Heirloom/05DDAC33A1633274.

In this painting we see a Victorian dresser and mirror sitting abandoned on the side of the Oregon Trail, drawers spilled open and discarded. Lovell wrote: “It has been estimated that 10,000 wagons passed over the Oregon Trail in one year. As the way grew harder and animals weakened, heavier household articles were discarded. The trail was marked by their effects that had become casualties. Two Sioux Indians ride by and pause to sadly note the beginning of the white man’s pollution of their world, which continues to this day.”

What strikes me the most when I look at this painting is how the warrior is leaning from his horseback, looking at his reflection in the dresser mirror. This painting would initiate conversation as a point of reference about things that we carry and things that we discard or leave behind.

  • What value do we put on material things?
  • What are some things that are important to you that are not material possessions (such as, perhaps, love, trust, or freedom)?
  • What do we take with us? What are some things that are worth leaving?
  • What things do we pass down to the next generation, and why?

These questions will lead to discussion of resilience among Indigenous people, having strength to withstand innumerable hardships, but refusing to be defeated. How do we face our own life experiences and come through personal challenges? What strategies did we use?  Has overcoming these life events helped instill a sense of pride and strength?

The teacher will introduce the concept of the parfleche, a rawhide container, like an envelope, that was an important cultural item prized in many Indigenous cultures.  It was sometimes incised and always drawn and painted with patterns and colors that had a cultural meaning, which could vary from tribal nation to tribal nation.

The word parfleche comes from the French and entered Native American languages in the 18th and 19th centuries.  The meaning refers to a defense against arrows, because the rawhide was tough enough that one could not only carry things in the bag but defend oneself against being shot by enemy arrows.  So, here again, we have a metaphor for survival, strength, and resistance.

What did Native Americans keep in their parfleches?  On the Plateau, some people gave them as wedding gifts, putting things that a couple might need in their new life together:  clothing, personal items, tools, and dried meat.  Here again is a connection to the moments of significance on our timelines, such as marriages!

Teachers can refer to various websites, especially those hosted by museums, to learn more about the parfleche and borrow images for sharing with students.  See, for example: https://ciscosgallery.com/blogs/library/native-american-parfleche

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian has an example of a heavily incised parfleche:
https://americanindian.si.edu/static/exhibitions/infinityofnations/plains-plateau/064077.html

Because we will be using paper, incising might be difficult.  But perhaps scratches could be made in thickly-applied paint.

Sometimes, parfleches could be decorated with pictographs, symbols such as we have seen and painted on winter counts:  https://www.pinterest.it/pin/464222674066834314/

Create a Parfleche Envelope

The teacher will distribute pieces of brown paper that simulates rawhide for the creation of parfleches.  Students will construct a parfleche envelope, folding the brown paper into sections and tabs. Students will create stories from abstract patterns utilizing line, shape, and color. Geometric patterns are sometimes seen, along with repetition.

This project would be well suited to paint or oil pastels for large geometric patterns. These papers can be finished with fixative and then folded into sections and tabs creating an envelope. The State Historical Society of North Dakota Museum Division has wonderful illustrations and directions to create a Plains Indian parfleche. https://www.history.nd.gov/activities/parfleche.pdf

A finishing component of this project involves creating and inserting things of personal significance that could be held within the envelope.

Students will be asked to write on paper four things they wish they could leave behind or change from their past (resolutions for closure) and four things they wish to bring about in the future (affirmations).

Closure and Assessment 

Art is a way for children to interpret meaning in their world. Resilience is a result of finding peace with the past and moving with strength into the future. These lessons will hopefully encourage students to feel empowered as change agents in their own lives.  A discussion about their take-aways from this lesson will help the teacher assess the degree to which students understood its objectives.

The teacher’s parting point:  In February of 2012, Edgar Heap of Birds came to the University of Memphis as a visiting artist. He is an internationally known Cheyenne Arapaho painter, and his work articulates the current day struggles of American Indian peoples for social justice. In his lecture entitled “Heads Above Grass, Indigenous Voices of Political Public Art,” he described the effect of “ingrained trauma” that Indigenous people have endured for hundreds of years. In the closing part of his speech, he says, “In life the act of hiding or being purposely hidden by others may have once had its place in terms of surviving troubles of the past. This tactic, as an act of preservation is useful no more. To confront collectively our shared histories in total and exchange the truths of the nation, by artistic means, will generate a fresh and healthy beginning.”