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Memory
and Imagination:
The Legacy of Maidu Indian Artist Frank Day
by Abby Wasserman
Oakland Museum of California Spring 1997 magazine
"Memory is a subjective thing; all experience is," says
Oregon anthropologist Rebecca Dobkins, the exhibition's guest curator,
who wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the artist. "But memory
necessarily involves imagining the past, and so memory is not some
kind of unfiltered truth or reality or object we can project outward
into Day's paintings. Without imagination, we would have no memory.
We must use our creative modes of thought to construct from the
past what gives meaning to our lives in the present. Even though
Frank Day himself spoke of his work as though it was documentation-and
he stressed that it was the truth and he could take you to it --
what moves me is the incredibly creative spin he put on memory."
| Without
imagination, we would have no memory. We must use our creative
modes of thought to construct from the past what gives meaning
to our lives in the present.
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We know more
than we realize. As tree rings record the life of a tree, we record
the past through gestures, experiences and particularly language.
If we also live in an ancestral environment where prominent features
of the landscape are virtually unchanged between generations, we
can intuit a lot about our ancestors' influences and experiences.
Environment
is probably the most important link on this chain to the past, and
a basis of identity for many people. Frank Day's home environment
was the northern California region of the middle fork of the Feather
River, one of the most beautiful places on earth. The sentinel-like
Bald Rock overlooks hilly, forested country one side and a breathtaking
river canyon on the other. The swift, singing river in its bed of
white, water-sculpted boulders, the fragrant vegetation and sweeping
upward vistas are unforgettable. Such a place resides in the heart
of a people. This still-remote, bountiful and regenerating place
is Konkow Maidu country.
Day's mother
died when he was two, and spent his early childhood in the Berry
Creek area with his father, Billy Day, and grandmother. He then
lived eight years away from home in a boarding school for Indian
children. As a young man he left California, traveling throughout
the west, returning to his home territory only in the 1930s. He
took up painting after his legs were injured in a serious accident.
His first subjects were non-Indian, but soon his interest changed
to Maidu themes, and his calling became communicating what he knew
and felt about the ceremonies, stories and experiences of his people.
He found his
first supporter in anthropologist Donald Jewell of American River
College and his student Lyle Scott; later, there would be others.
With the coming construction of the Oroville Dam, great expanses
of traditional Konkow country were going to be flooded, and so a
lot of "salvage" archaelogogy and anthropology were in
process. This coincided with Day's mission to share his culture,
and he did so through many avenues -- talking, writing, tape recording,
singing and teaching dance; but chiefly and, most powerfully, by
painting. In 1973 his reputation as an artist had spread to art
dealer Herb Puffer, who wrote asking to handle his work at Pacific
WesternTraders in Folsom. Puffer played a supportive role for the
last three years of Day's life, encouraging him, buying and showing
his art, and providing him with materials.
Language is
where we store our experiences and observations. It is the repository
and indicator of culture, forming over time through the life of
a people. Frank Day was translating the Maidu language into visual
terms. "Day believed that one's language shapes the way one
views reality," Dobkins says. "He felt that Konkow Maidu
speakers view the world differently than English speakers do, in
part because of that language.
"The linguist
Edward Sapir says we don't all live in the same world with just
different labels attached. Frank, not knowing Sapir, believed that
knowing the Konkow language was the route into the Konkow world
view. Rather than translating into another language, English, having
to rely on imperfections of translation, he would do it visually.
In the English language there is no translation for 'acorn wedge'
in Konkow because non-Indians don't use this tool. Showing a basket
and its use, a roundhouse and its use, rather than telling about
it in English, was for him an intermediate level of translation.
It was not as good as knowing it in Konkow, but it was better than
learning it in English, because it was coming from his mind."
Like many strong
and imaginative individuals who put themselves forward, Frank Day
had a vision and pursued it. His father had been a headman, a leader
respected by his contemporaries. More of a loner, Frank nevertheless
put on his father's mantle, dedicating himself to communicating
Maidu culture, and his influence reached to anthropologists and
young Indian artists and dancers.
"Often
when we think of artistic influence we think of style issues, content
issues, composition issues, that artists are responding to or working
against some element of another's art," Dobkins says. "Frank
Day has meant something more of a holistic influence. In other words,
his example of affirming Maidu traditions, saying they are worthy
of celebrating, worthy of artistic energy, gave younger people affirmation
they needed."
When Day first
started painting, self-representation for Native Californians was
unusual. They were an almost invisible people. The 1960s and 1970s
saw emerging activism and efforts to raise public consciousness
on issues such as Indian education. Speaking into his tape recorder
in August,1974, Day showed he, too, was trying to raise consciousness.
"One of the reasons I'm doing this is to make these things
clear, that one day it may be used for a good purpose. It's going
to shoot all of your imaginations of what a California Indian is,
because you don't know it. You don't know much about 'em, unless
you are one....The hardest part is how the suffering is, because
you'd have to be born like one."
Younger native
artists, listening to Day's stories and seeing his paintings, felt
empowered and inspired. In the exhibition, illustrating some of
Day's legacy, are works by three of the artists he influenced --
Dal Castro, Harry Fonseca and Judith Lowry. Another artist, Frank
Lapena, worked with Day to form the Maidu Dancers and Traditionalists,
some of whom make traditional regalia, sing, drum and dance, carrying
on the essence and spirit of their forebears. Herb Puffer and his
wife, Peggy, provided space for their rehearsals and performances.
"Harry
Fonseca always says that Frank Day was magic in more ways than one,"
Dobkins says. "It's, to me, the phrase that captures Day. He
was mysterious; he was mystical; he was exasperating; he was magic
in the good sense, and maybe in the more difficult sense. Any charismatic
person is powerful and sort of overwhelming, and that is my feeling
of Frank Day."
Rebecca Dobkins
never met Frank Day, but through her research she has come to know
him in a certain way. His great accomplishment as a painter, she
believes, is that over time his increasing creativity and skill
went hand-in-hand with trying to communicate his Maidu world view.
This view, full of dignity, joy and beauty, does not turn away from
death or suffering. Sorrow, loss and displacement are frequent and
powerful themes in his paintings, represented poetically and symbolically
as well as literally.
The Maidu men
and women in his paintings live in another age, carrying on lives
of stability and harmony in and around the central roundhouse. They
hunt, fish, cook, care for their children, play games; they dance,
engage in healing practices, die and mourn loved ones. The attitude
of the artist towards these shades the non-Indian reaction to them.
Without preaching, he leads us to the heart of his interpretations
of Konkow Maidu people's inner lives.
As the Konkow
world is beautiful, it is also dangerous. Displacement is a frequent
theme in the work -- as are the actions of rising, falling, spitting
out, grasping and letting go. As the Earth Trembles (1967) shows
the Maidu world in chaos. A roundhouse is in flames, a hot spring
gushes forth from a gash in the earth, children are helpless, a
woman, bound to a tree, watches in horror as her man is dragged
to his death by a white horse symbolizing white colonization.
Other paintings
simply illustrate conflicts that exist in nature: King Snake and
Rattlesnake (1962) shows traditional enemies in a life-and-death
struggle. Two Eagles (1967) is a fierce air battle. Mourning at
Mineral Springs (1973) illustrates a spring turned sulfurous by
upheavals during an earthquake. A man has been poisoned by the surfurous
water and is mourned by howling coyotes. The palate is somber, the
shadows are deep and dramatic, and dark clouds advance.
Transformation
is a constant in Day's work -- and spirits, humans and animals merge
and interact. Nature is the setting: water -- creeks, falls, pools
and rivers; land -- hills, mountains, gullies, crevices, plains,
rocks, stones, trees, plants. The imprints of animals and humans
cross on the earth; the clouds, stars, sun, moon, sunsets and sunrises
mark the passage of time. Fire burns, cooks, heals, carries spirits
to the next world.
The paintings
are full of motion and opposites -- a shaman rises, a hunter falls,
a whirlwind spits out ill doers -- yet there is a sinuous connection
between everything. In the glowing painting Ishi at Iamin Mool,
Day's recollection of a meeting with the famous Yahi Indian when
he was a child with his father, everything is connected. This was
apparently a few days before Ishi, his hair shorn in mourning, came
out of hiding in Oroville and fell into the white man's curious
world. Day paints a healing circle of sun, water, touch, tree and
sky.
This painting
is also important because it shows Ishi as a man of healing power
and dignity, his hair long -- not shorn and forlorn, as he appears
in the earliest photographs. No one knows if Day really saw Ishi,
but it is possible, and he says he did. This is the kind of memory
he could bind with imagination and interpret with the wisdom of
a man of mature years who reflected deeply on the nature of things.
"I think
that certainly he is, at these shining moments, doing what he set
out to do: translate the Konkow language, the Maidu world view,"
Dobkins says. "He doesn't do that in a strictly documentary
way; it's these elements of imagination that richly and emotionally
convey the sense of connectedness with earth, one another, animals."
Asked her favorites
among Day's paintings, Dobkins cites Fish Dancer , "an image
of such joy to me. A fisherman has caught an enormous sturgeon and
is dancing in its skin. These were incredible fish! It would have
represented a tremendous force of will to have caught one. The joy
the fisherman has -- the painting is full of life.
"Another
painting that's very moving is The Burning, in part because of the
great detail in the painting, the sense of the person being honored,
clearly identified by the dance regalia. The fire itself, smoke
coiling out of canvas, the dark night, the light of the fire, the
presence of the spirit effigy. As an anthropologist I find it a
remarkable image, that he represented it in this painting is important
in recording of Konkow culture. That's an excellent example of what
Day was trying to do.
"I like
all of the roundhouse paintings," she continues, "because
of the loving care that went into painting the details of their
construction, the different settings they're in, the one at night
is a serene image. He also did Home of a Tribal Leader from a photograph,
showing his father and friends, which he embellished by inserting
details to bring the scene to life. The photograph is supposed to
be unadulterated reality; he illuminates it with memory."
It's not the
first time Day's work has been exhibited at the Oakland Museum of
California -- in 1984 and again in 1986, Day paintings were part
of group shows -- but this time, says Carey T. Caldwell, Chief Curator
of History, the museum is participating in a new way. "In the
process of Rebecca's research, and in our own work to further document
our collections, we realized that our founding curator, Charles
P. Wilcomb, had assembled a number of objects from the Berry Creek
and Bald Rock area during Frank Day's childhood. One was collected
in Billy Day's camp. Many of these are very rare objects of their
type, and one is the only known example in museum collections anywhere.
Through outreach
efforts in conjunction with the exhibition, we are seeking to create
a situation where there can be more reunions between people and
objects. We are expecting a number of people who are direct descendants
from those who made and used objects Wilcomb collected."
Frank Day made
70 hours of tape recordings, some with an interviewer, many of them
alone. He said that he was talking for people in the future who
would use his tapes to good purpose. At times during her study,
Dobkins believed he was talking to her, though he died when she
was in high school. She has always gravitated to older people. "I
find their reflection on experience so important to understanding
what life's all about without having to reinvent every square inch
of it," she says.
Her mother,
Betty, was an historian and a gifted storyteller, both historical
stories and also family stories. "She made my grandmother and
maternal great grandmother living presences in my life through her
stories. She helped me understand that stories are what make us
who we are. Stories about our family inform us about where we come
from, and stories of the past inform us about where we go as a people
and society; and stories shape and enrich present experience."
Rebecca Dobkins
brought this curiosity to her study of Frank Day, and was rewarded
by patience. "He spoke very much in a stream-of-consciousness
manner," she says. "Very little of the recordings or writings
are clearly organized or punctuated. They do not follow concise,
linear lines at all. They seemed rambling and confusing at first.
But the more I listened, the more I understood that part of what
was true for him was that everything had so much meaning, associations,
layers of memory, that his way of expressing it was through digression,
embroidering and coloring, in paintings and the language."
Placing together
of Day's paintings with objects familiar to him, some used by people
he knew, makes this exhibition a very personal one. In the years
of research, Dobkins came to know Frank Day as any biographer comes
to know her subject; but eventually, academic interest was exceeded
by her sense of involvement with a remarkable person.
"Part
of the process of doing biography is trying to get into someone's
head, or skin, or self," she says. "What initially was
very difficult was that his world and his world view are so much
a Konkow Maidu view, one not my own, and no amount of academic research
could help me fully understand that world. His paintings in particular,
but also his talk, have helped me think about that world. I feel
he's inseparable from it. The more I've gotten to know him, his
work, his words, the richer and more complex a human being he seems."
Art is a more
direct medium than words, when the art is good. The immediate, visceral
impressions one receives from Day's best work show that in painting,
he discovered the rhythm and heart of his message to the world.
NOTE: This
article is copyrighted. No reproduction, complete or in part, is
allowed without written permission. Write Editor, The Museum of
California Magazine, Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St.,
Oakland, CA 94607.
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September
13, 1997 to November 30, 1997