Connection with the Land

While at the Native American Museum, I also noted the frequency and manner in which the land was spoken of. Some primal peoples personified the land, such as those native to Indian Neck, Virginia who thought of corn as a woman and the kernels her children. Many native peoples spirituality was intimately connected with the agricultural seasons and human life cycle. This was the case for those native to the Chesapeake area, whose spirituality also included ancestral traditions and medicinal practices.

The museum displayed the art of a woman, WalkingStick, who depicted this connection of native peoples and the land. Fascinated by the relationship of the two, WalkingStick undertook displaying it on canvas. She painted landscape paintings that were overlayed with designs made by the native people of that land. In this way she tied their native identity to the specific landscape.

The text went on to read “Early American landscape painting traditions cast these iconic terrains as a foundation for the advance of American empire. WalkingStick reclaims these landscapes and instills them with the native identity that the early painting traditions had largely erased.” She began combining images of landscapes inspired by her home and travels with abstractions to make two square side-by-side hand-painted paintings. These enabled her to express spiritual themes. The landscape paintings were representative of various snapshot memories, while the abstract pieces represented deeper, mythic memory. Together the paintings represent two kinds of knowledge, empirical, sensory perception of the material world, and internal, spiritual knowledge.

I found the two kinds of paintings that WalkingStick painted fascinating because to me they seemed to communicate not only the landscape, but the spirit of the place, or axis mundi. The accompanying image of her interpretation (or the native people’s interpretation) of the axis mundi impacted my view of the land. Somehow her paintings seem to have captured the heartbeat of the land, bringing it alive for the viewer.