In Memoriam: Pat Courtney Gold (1939-2022)

by Emily West Hartlerode

Amid the busy year-end holidays, OFN received sad news that 2007 National Heritage Fellow, Pat Courtney Gold passed away on July 11, 2022. We delayed our announcement to give space from holiday distractions to let this news to have its own time.

Wasq’u basketmaker and citizen of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Pat Courtney Gold, grew up on her nation’s reservation where the Columbia River basin and high desert region meet in central Oregon. In her youth, she was taken to a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school, went on to earn a B.S. in mathematics and physics from Whitman College, and became a professional mathematician and computer specialist.

Pat wears a white linen shirt with pink ascot scarf. In the palm of her left hand, she holds a basket in progress. Her right hand gestures, palm up. Sunlight highlights her hat and shoulders on an outdoor stage.

Pat Courtney Gold presents at OFN’s 2013 Arts in Parks series. Photo, Riki Saltzman.

 

Childhood visits with her mother to museums displaying traditional Wasq’u artwork inspired Pat to study and help revive the full-turn twining technique, unique to her community. The result was a resurgence of Wasq’u “sally bags,” twined root-digging bags with a traditional function for harvesting and storing traditional food. “The baskets were important because those were our containers,” Pat said. “We would catch the salmon, filet them, dry them and sell them as filets or we would pound the filets into a powder salmon-like pemmican. That’s what we traded. So the baskets were constantly being made because when we would trade the salmon we would trade a container and all. I always thought that was an interesting way to keep the skill of making baskets going” (11/11/2021 interview by Wisdom Of the Elders). It’s impossible to overstate the significance of awakening this sleeping tradition, which restores Indigenous wisdom and knowledge, revitalizes cultural form and function, and embodies Indigenous values and pride in ways that have therapeutic impact on intergenerational trauma.

Indigenous woman's hands hold a small, cup-shaped basket of natural brown and black weave.

Pat Courtney Gold presents at OFN’s 2013 Arts in Parks series. Photo, Riki Saltzman

By 1991, Pat was following a new career path dedicated to the preservation of her cultural heritage. She became a participant in Oregon Folklife programming in 1995 during Oregon Historical Society administration by folklorists Carol Spellman and Nancy Nusz. Pat’s work was widely recognized for artistic excellence and merit. She was a 2001 recipient of the Oregon’s Governor’s Art Award; a 2003 honoree of the First Peoples Fund Community Spirit Award and their 2004 Cultural Capital Fellow; and the National Endowment for the Arts bestowed upon her the highest honor given to traditional artists, the Heritage Fellowship, in 2007. She accepted numerous speaking and exhibiting opportunities in the Pacific Northwest, nationally (including the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian), and internationally (China, New Zealand, Canada, and England). She also helped found the NW Native American Basket Weavers Association.

Two Indigenous hands hold a basket mid-creation with cordage. An amber ring on her right thumb and her left fingers are nestled among the weavers.

Pat Courtney Gold presents at OFN’s 2013 Arts in Parks series. Photo, Riki Saltzman

Like so many of our nation’s finest traditional artists, Pat explored her creative boundaries beyond traditional structures. During Pat’s 2009 Eric and Barbara Dobkin Native Artist Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research (Santa Fe), Pat utilized SAR’s collections to research and gain inspiration for what became her two-dimensional wall hangings. One of these weavings is proudly displayed in the IARC vaults. SAR’s documentary video of Pat’s time in residency provides a heart-warming glimpse of the thoughtful way she explored her culture, her relationship with the land, and her expressive creativity.

Pat has shoulder-length black hair held back by a white, brimmed sunhat, and tinted eyeglasses. She stands in the foreground, circled by four women watching attentively. Hanging in Pat's left hand is a basket in-progress and her right hand points to the strands. Tall evergreen trees tower in the background.

Pat Courtney Gold presents at OFN’s 2013 Arts in Parks series. Photo, Riki Saltzman

 

Pat was engaging audiences through Oregon Folklife Network programming as recently as 2016, and giving interviews as recently as Nov 2021. In her public presentations, Pat married the skills of a trained mathematician and traditional artist, describing baskets as spirals and twining as binary computation. She captivated Indigenous and non-Native audiences alike, weaving left- and right-brain perspectives like cordage. Many have been blessed by Pat’s gifts of time and talents. We celebrate her life and trust that her invaluable impact on culture in what is now Oregon will endure.

Artist Spotlight: Francisco Bautista

Francisco Bautista, a Zapotec fabric artist, is a 2021 TAAP award recipient.

Listen to a short excerpt from Bautista’s TAAP interview with OFN Interim Director Emily Hartlerode and graduate employee Jenna Ehlinger. Bautista worked with his son David for the TAAP program.

Francisco Bautista

Bautista was born in the town of Teotitlán de Valle in Oaxaca, Mexico. He grew up learning to weave from his father and grandfather, both of whom made a living weaving. In 2003, he and his wife moved to Sandy, Oregon, where they began weaving and taking their rugs to Saturday Market in Portland and other shows in Oregon. As a member of the Portland Handweavers Guild, he has demonstrated Zapotec weaving at several fairs and shows, including Art in the Pearl.

Bautista has taught workshops about the Zapotec method of natural dyeing in Sandy and Bend, Oregon. In 2017, he shared his Zapotec weaving tradition with non-Zapotec immigrants from Mexico through a program sponsored by the Sandy Public Library at Sandy Vista Apartments. Additionally, he volunteers in many demonstrations and teaching programs throughout the community.

This excerpt was edited and produced by OFN graduate employee Lillian DeVane

Western Women’s Traditions Featured at High Desert Museum

by Riki Saltzman, Folklorist, High Desert Museum/Folklore Specialist, Oregon Folklife Network

During the weekend of May 14-15, 2022, the High Desert Museum featured three programs with culture keepers from the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Lake County, and Grant County. The culmination of nearly two years of documenting traditions in the High Desert and around eastern and central Oregon, these public programs appealed to a wide range of interests. All this was made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, Folk & Traditional Arts program.

Starting off the programs on Saturday, May 14, was a Plateau Beading Workshop with traditional artists H’Klumiat Roberta Kirk and her granddaughter AnposKawín Tashina Eastman.

This three-hour beading workshop went an hour over to teach 20 workshop participants the techniques to create a beaded animal charm suitable for a backpack, keyring, or purse. Participants had a choice of several basic designs, or they could use of their own.

We all quickly learned that simpler was better–and easier! Kirk and Eastman brought with them a large variety of beads and showed everyone how to pull off a strand from the larger bunch; the challenge was not to spill beads everywhere.

Next, they showed us how to wax the cotton twine and then pull a threaded needle through the template, thread 6-8 beads, and then use another needle and twine to tack down the beads after every third or fourth one. This was much more challenging than it looked when these master artists demonstrated.

You have to use both hands, hold down the beads with one, and then keep the second needle and twine separate from the first for tacking.

While many of us were frustrated while we beaded the outline of our designs, eventually we caught on and worked more quickly.

Although no one completed her beaded piece, Kirk and Eastman showed us how to finish them at home by gluing the beadwork to a piece of tanned rawhide and attaching a keyring, then beading the edge, and finally cutting off the excess rawhide for a completed beaded keyring.

Besides patiently showing us all how to do this painstaking beading for a small design, Roberta and Tashina also showed off their own artistry with a display of beaded regalia, from dresses and belts to hair ties and more.

Roberta Kirk is a featured artist on the Oregon Folklife Network’s Culture Keepers Roster and Tashina Eastman will soon be listed as well. Kirk has also received many honors including the (Oregon) Governor’s Art Award (2020), the First People’s Fund Community Spirit Award (2020), and Traditional Arts Recovery Program funding (2022) as well as having served several times as a master artist for Oregon’s Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program.

The evening of May 14 featured Western Poet, novelist, and storyteller A.K. Kathy Moss of Prairie City in Grant County. Mentored by Baxter Black and Waddie Mitchell, she is an experienced and lauded cowboy poet and has performed throughout the west including at the Grant County Fair and the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV. The International Western Music Association named Moss the 2021 Female Poet of the Year. She also won their award for the Cowboy Poetry CD of the Year in both 2020 (for “They Come Prancin’”) and 2019 (for “The Truth”). Moss is also featured on the Oregon Culture Keepers Roster.

 

 

 

 

 

 

During her performance at the High Desert Museum, Kathy Moss kept an audience of over 60 attendees riveted with her tales and “cowboy” poems about lady buckaroos, ranchers, cows, and horses ubiquitous to eastern Oregon.

Her moving poetry enthralled audience members with stories about horse training and driving cattle. Moss spoke from own knowledge and experience about riding horses, running cattle, doctoring cattle, and a memorable night searching for and finding a newborn calf. Moss brought to life the many characters she has known, especially the women involved in rawhiding, horse shoeing, night-calving, and cowboying. Her keen ear for language augmented with video Long Hard Ride, song sung by Joni Harms – YouTube from Oregon’s ranch country led her audience through the hills and ranges many of us see only from the road.

Moss also brought several copies of her book series and her award-winning CD to sell and sign.  

The next day, May 15, High Desert Museum visitors had the pleasure of meeting cowboy hat maker, farrier, and cowboy Lisa Robinson from Lakeview in Lake County.

Robinson brought a few of her finished custom hats, talked about her cowboying work, and did some reshaping and hat-steaming for those who brought their hats.

Robinson, who grew up in a cowboying family in south central Oregon, spent the years from 14-40 cowboying and horse shoeing. About 10 years ago, she learned to make quality, custom-made western hats of 100% beaver for working cowboys. She knew from experience that good hat makers who make custom hats are hard to come by, so she set out to learn how with the goal of eventually retiring from her physically demanding work as a farrier. In early 2014 she apprenticed with two skilled master hat makers, Mike Moore who owns Buckaroo Hatters in Tennessee, and JW Hats in Salt Lake.

As she explained to the audience, she doesn’t use wool, rabbit, or blends because they don’t hold up as well.

Beaver hats keep their shape through wet, snow, cold, and hot sun. They don’t bleed dye, and they don’t shrink. As a working cowboy (she and her husband, Paul Robinson, run their own small ranch as well as run cattle for other ranches), she knows the value and necessity of a well-made, well-fitted hat; she tailors her individuals and has her own special identifying mark—dots on the ribbon band, which, along with the look of her beaver felt hats, she can spot from a distance.

Lisa Robinson’s thriving business, Top Knot Hats, builds custom hats and also reshapes, sizes, or refurbishes old ones with new ribbons, sweatbands, and more. Robinson is also on the Oregon Culture Keepers Roster and is available for talks and demonstrations within a hundred miles of Lakeview.

Traditional artist Esther Stutzman receives 2017 Governor’s Art Award

Alina Mansfield

(left to right), Oregon Arts Commission Chair, Christopher Acebo; Esther Stutzman; Governor Kate Brown (photo, courtesy of the Oregon Arts Commission, ©2017)

 OFN is pleased to announce that Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program (2013) master artist Esther Stutzman received a prestigious 2017 Lifetime Achievement Governor’s Art Award for her work in Oregon as a traditional Kalapuya/Coos storyteller. OFN nominated her for the 2017 Governor’s Art Awards, Oregon’s highest honor for exemplary service to the arts, which Gov. Brown revitalized after a 10-year hiatus. Ms. Stutzman was recognized during a ceremony that preceded the 2017 Oregon Arts Summit on Oct. 6, in Portland.

In addition to being a 2012 Oregon Folklife Network TAAP awardee, Esther Stutzman (Kalapuya/Coos) is the primary storyteller for Mother Earth’s Children, an American Indian theatre group that has performed for school assemblies and a variety of events and conferences for the past 42 years. Stutzman also works with Title VII Indian Education programs and Arts in Education Programs throughout the state of Oregon as a cultural resource specialist with children as well as with teacher in-service programs. She has been a long-time presenter for the Oregon Chautauqua History Series and is a recipient of several folklife awards formerly administered by the Oregon Historical Society. She recently shared her Tribes’ Mother Wolf and Coyote stories at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History in Eugene for their Wolf Talks celebration.

 

TAAP Artist Profile: Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim

 

Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim is master Palestinian embroiderer. Born in the city of Safad in northern Palestine, her family fled to Syria and Jordan in 1948. After attending boarding school in Ramalla West Bank, Abbasi-Ghnaim returned to Syria to attend Damascus University, where she majored in art history. In 1980, her family immigrated to the United States. Abbasi-Ghnaim has dedicated herself to practicing and teaching her traditional craft. She has lectured and taught about Palestinian traditions at the University of Massachusetts, the Oral History Center of Cambridge, Portland State University, and Lewis and Clark College. She has collaborated with the World Affairs Council of Oregon and the Middle East Studies Center to participate in the “Teach the Middle East” forum, a set of workshop designed to train youth and K-12 educators about Middle East culture and arts. Since 2000, Abbasi-Ghnaim has taught workshops and classes in public schools in Beaverton, Milwaukie, Gresham, and Portland.

Palestinian embroidery features minute cross-stitching, most easily compared to counted cross-stitch. But the craft involves much more than a decorative art; stitches and design combine to tell stories with colors, symbols, and patterns. Abbasi-Ghnaim continues a centuries-old tradition that Palestinian women have employed to record their cultural observations. As Abbasi-Ghnaim explains, “Embroidery is the unwritten language transferring stories from woman to woman in silence. Needle and thread are the tools for documenting the history of their lives … The stories behind the patterns, the colors of the thread, and the fashion of traditional Palestinian dress are just as important as learning the cross-stitch and is something that can only be preserved through teaching and mentoring the younger generations.”

Abbasi-Ghnaim earned Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program awards with Oregon Folklife Network in 2012, 2014, and 2018 and worked extensively with the OFN’s predecessor folk and traditional arts programs in prior years.

To learn more about Feryal, check out her daughter’s book, Tatreez and Teahttps://tatreezandtea.com/

TAAP Artist Profile: Obo Addy

Obo Addy (January 15, 1936-September 13, 2012), Ghanaian Drumming, Portland (Multnomah), 2012

Obo Addy was a dynamic musician, generous teacher, and gifted composer. The son of a Ga wonche (medicine man), Addy was designated a master drummer at the age of six in Accra, Ghana. His life’s work was to share his culture through music, dance, and drum.

During childhood, he recalled, “I was constantly surrounded by … drumming, dancing, and singing …. My siblings and I listened, observed, and helped as needed when my father performed various spiritual ceremonies and rites. From these proceedings I learned about the power of music, drumming, and rhythms. In rituals, I first learned to play bell. Later, I was allowed to play drums. In between these events and lessons with my father, I played on my own and with other musicians at social gatherings in town. As a small boy, I knew that I wanted to be musician.”

In 1969, the Arts Council of Ghana employed Addy as a Ga master of the national music. He and his brothers performed at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich and toured internationally until Addy moved to Portland, Oregon. Addy was one of the first native African musicians to bring worldbeat (a fusion of traditional folk music and Western pop music) to the west. In 1978, he and his wife, Susan Addy, created Homowo African Arts and Cultures to promote Ghanaian music. Addy, who taught at Lewis and Clark College, created programs and curriculum to demonstrate the connections between African and African American music and dance, which he taught and performed around the United States.

In 1996, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Obo Addy a National Heritage Fellowship, the highest honor a traditional artist can receive in the United States. His numerous recordings include Wonche Bi (2002) and Afieye Okropong (2003), released on the Alula label. In 2011, Homowo became the Obo Addy Legacy Project to further honor his contributions.

To learn more about the Obo Addy Legacy Project, check out their website: http://oboaddylegacyproject.org/

Announcing the 2016 TAAP Awardees

By Brad McMullen

The Oregon Folklife Network is proud to announce six new 2016 Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program (TAAP) awardees! These extraordinary master traditional artists and culture keepers exhibit excellence in their abilities, and a passion to pass on their knowledge, skills, and expertise. TAAP provides a stipend to these master artists to teach a promising apprentice from their own community, Tribe, or cultural, religious, or occupational group.

This year’s TAAP teams will be working a range of traditional skills, from traditional rawhide braiding to dentalium shell piecework to Tazhib.

1g6a1773Marjan Anvari (Lake Oswego, OR) is a master of traditional Tazhib (gilding), Persian illumination patterns. She will be teaching her apprentice the finer points of this ancient cultural art, which involves adorning the margins of books with beautiful patterns of plants or geometrical shapes with gold as well as colors like azure, blue, green, vermilion, and turquoise.

 

 

 

armstrong_jack_artist

Jack Armstrong (Lakeview, OR) is a cowboy and master rawhide braider. Armstrong will be working with his apprentice to create tightly and evenly braided gear and a variety of decorative “buttons.”

 

 

 

Jose Antonio Huertahuerta_jose_antonio_artist (Springfield, OR) is a master of Mexican cowboy (charro) horseback rope work. This is his second TAAP award for which he will once again be teaching charrería (rope work and riding).

 

 

 

kirk_roberta_artist-copy

 

 

Roberta Kirk (Warm Springs, OR) is a master shell dress maker of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation. For this second TAAP award, Kirk will be teaching her apprentice the specifics of dentalium (shell) piecework.

 

anitamenon2016Anita Menon (Portland, OR), founder of the Anjali School of Dance, and master of Bharatanatyam will be teaching Nattuvangam, the art of playing cymbals during Indian classical dance.

 

 

 

hosseinsalehi2016Hossein Salehi (Beaverton, OR), founder of the ArtMax Academy, is a master musician who plays the Santoor (trapezoid-shaped hammered dulcimer-like string musical instrument). Salehi will will be helping his apprentice to refine his musical skills.