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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And we are talking about an exciting art gallery opening coming up starting on April 3rd. This is Undammed at the Goudi'ni Native American Arts Gallery at Cal Poly Humboldt. And joining me is the curator of this exhibit, Brittany Britton. Welcome to the Econews Report.

BRITTANY BRITTON:

Thank you. Thank you for having us. I'm really excited to talk about this exhibition.

WHEELER:

And Brittany, you were so kind to bring along two special guests, artists who are participating in this show. Would you like to introduce our artists?

BRITTON:

Yeah, I got Annalia Norris here and Lyn Risling, who have been two champions for this exhibition. Lyn called a bunch of people on my behalf, being like, hey, we need to support Brittany with this exhibition, which was so sweet. And Annalia Norris, for her part, I saw a piece of hers that was at Oregon State University last year, and I was just like, this has to be in the show, this is gonna be a show, and we're gonna make it happen. So that's been the impetus for this, and an opportunity for us to celebrate such a historic moment. And I'll let them say a bit about themselves.

WHEELER:

Lyn, would you like to go first?

LYN RISLING:

Sure. My name is Lyn Risling, and I've been an artist for many, many years, since I can remember as a young, young little girl. But I've been doing a lot of acrylic paintings for the last 30 years or so. I attended school at UC Davis as an art major and ended up getting a master's in social services at Humboldt quite a few years now, back when. But I have devoted, after I retired from Humboldt, with a job there for about 18 years, I decided to leap into just being an artist, as well as being just involved in family and my culture and those kinds of things. So I've been doing art for quite a while, up and down as far as being able to devote many hours to it. There are some periods of times where I don't do a lot, but, but I really enjoy it. And I am happy to be able to give some of that to my community as well.

WHEELER:

Well, thrilled to have you on the show and thrilled to be able to exhibit your art at this show. And Aaliyah, would you like to talk about yourself, introduce yourself to our listeners?

ANNALIA NORRIS:

I am a graduate from University of Oregon with a Bachelors of Fine Arts, and when I finished school, I moved home here on the river. My art has taken many different paths, and it definitely isn't something I get to do or practice all the time because I do all kinds of different things as far as food sovereignty and working with the land and community organizing, those kinds of things. So I definitely use my skills as my tools that help me in the classrooms, in the community. I've just really enjoyed my art journey, definitely incorporated it in the organizing aspect and using my vision of how we can speak to our community.

WHEELER:

So Brittany, how about let's go over some of the basics of this show. Tell us about where, when people can come and see this art and most importantly, perhaps come to the opening reception for the show.

BRITTON:

Yeah, definitely. The Goudi'ni Native American Arts Gallery is located here on the Cal Poly Humboldt campus. We're located in the Behavior and Social Sciences building, the big, tall five-story building that's the most recent building compared to the new construction on campus. We're on Union and 16th Street, closest to that intersection, first floor, BSS, room 104. We're stoked to have folks up here. There's some parking nearby, that's campus parking as well as metered parking for the city, but it is a short hike up the hill if you want to park in, just city four-hour parking.

So we're going to open for regular hours starting that Friday. April 4th, we are open Wednesday through Thursday, 11 to 5, Friday 11 to 3, Saturday 11 to 2. We're closed over the weekend from Sunday through Tuesday, but we're also open via appointment if you just can't make our open times. We're more than happy to accommodate folks. But that being said, our opening reception is Thursday, April 3rd from 4.30 to 6 p.m. I have a feeling we're going to be here a little bit longer just because of the interest of the exhibition, and we'll have some light refreshments as well.

WHEELER:

Very cool. This is also a wonderful timing for the show. Cause it coincides with California big time. Can you tell us about California big time and this good synchronicity between these two events lining up?

BRITTON:

Yeah, definitely. We, as a gallery that focuses on Native American arts and things like that, we always try to make our spring exhibitions sync up with the big time. It's a great captive audience. We're just up the hill. So it's California ceremony, ritual, dance, music, vendors. Hey, if you are looking for some great beadwork, some abalone, great fry bread, anything like that, some canned jams, that's going to be the place to be. So that's at, I believe, the West.

WHEELER:

That will be on Saturday, April 5th.

BRITTON:

So the big time is Saturday, April 5th from 11 to 6 at Cal Poly Humboldt at the Forbes Complex West Gym.

WHEELER:

Awesome. Brittany, one more question for you, and then we can turn to our artists here. You said seeing one of Annalia's pieces at Oregon State University was part of the impetus for this show. Can you tell us more about why this show, why focus on this Undamned theme for this show, and what it means to you as the curator of this exhibit?

BRITTON:

Definitely, to back up to the Goudi'ni Gallery, we are the only Native American-focused gallery in the California State University system. UC Davis has the Gorman Museum, which is Native-focused as well, but it's pretty thin when you're thinking about Native-focused spaces like this. I feel very blessed to have been the gallery director here since 2020. I'm also a Hoopa tribal member, so this is near and dear to my heart, especially as an artist, too. It's astonishing that I get to do this for a job.

Part of our work here at the gallery is to focus on and champion Native artists from our region. When you look at coverage of Native artists broadly within the nation, you're gonna see things like Pacific Northwest folks, Southwest folks, Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, kind of folks in the middle, and then California gets kind of ignored, and especially our kind of area of California. Even though if you are familiar with artists in our region, it feels like they're everywhere, right? Like Native artwork in our region is everywhere. You're gonna see it on cars, you're gonna see it in people's tattoos, you're gonna see it on jewelry, it's everywhere. Like we know it here and we love it if you're a part of it, but outside of here, nobody knows who we are. So part of our mission is to promote and champion arts from our region.

With that being said, we do have a focus on exhibitions that have to do with science, sustainability, environmentalism. We do wanna have that facet in this space, and this had kind of been on the hopper for a while, especially when the dams had started coming down. Like I was still astonished, like I'm still shocked that that happened in my lifetime. I'm extremely shocked. And we were, and we have this opportunity, we have the space, but why not have this like longer term celebration that's visual, but also educational? We're gonna have a whole timeline up front.

And part of it is I saw the piece by Anna Lea on Instagram, and it was amazing. It was this installation of rubble and detritus from the dams being blown up. And it was protest art and protest banners and things like that. And it looked like the explosion of the activist work and the dams coming down in a moment, in a visual piece that you could see. And that was the main impetus for it. I was like, okay, I know where that's going. It's going in the back, we'll figure it out. And then I just gotta get everything else to go along with the show.

WHEELER:

Very cool. I, I've been so inspired by the, the movement to get these dams out. I just grabbed my piece of iron gate dam, a nice chunk of concrete. Annalia, I know that you have been spending probably almost all of your adult life working towards this. You have been involved for many years and art has been part of the movement for getting the dams out. Can you talk about, can you talk about this? The, the, the way that you've incorporated art in protests and how this has helped this movement achieve this, this fantastic reality. Absolutely.

NORRIS:

Yeah, I've spent the last 20 years of my life, yeah, dedicated to community organizing and just keeping the momentum going behind Dam Removal and not giving up. We all had a vision and we stuck together and saw it. And yeah, art played such a huge role in the movement. As with any kind of revolution or campaign, art is really at the forefront, right? That's what people see. That's what moves people. So it's so important to include that in your campaigns, in your voice.

And yeah, I mean, with this campaign, we had to be so creative. So art wasn't only in these visual pieces, but also in the way that we practiced our activism. So like at, for instance, at rallies, we would do like theater art, like die-ins and big puppets. And yeah, the banners that we painted, like those played such a huge role in getting our messaging out. And then the t-shirts, like I became like a t-shirt designer for the last 20 years. No, I only did like four of them. But everyone had our t-shirts on and they wore them, like across the world, people were wearing our t-shirts that said, Undam the Klamath or No Amount of Stalling Will Stop the Dams From Falling, Klamath River Rise Up. So all these messaging, it was this, yeah, it was just seen everywhere. We got our message out everywhere by t-shirts, by posters, by banners. But then also it was a voice in our protests.

And we got ... we went back to Omaha at one point and like the creativity that came out of that, those actions there was so, so neat. I mean, we made fake newspaper covers that we covered all of the newspapers and at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting. So when the people got in line and grabbed the newspaper, it was all about Klamath dam removal. So those are the types of things that played into this, this movement. And so, yeah, I just, I don't think we could have done it without it.

WHEELER:

I've always thought that the T-shirts were a cool unifying part of this movement. You'd show up and you could, you could see whose team people were on, right? By, by the, the shirts. And it seemed to create a sense of community. And I know people fondly collect all of the shirts from, from over the years. And there are some really cool ones. Lyn, can you talk to me about being an artist, being a native artist and keeping culture alive and what that has meant to you as an artist and how that informs your work?

RISLING:

Well, I've been involved in ceremonies and the culture since I was young through my family, my grandfather, and my aunts and uncles, my dad, and lots of people around me. And it was a time back in the 60s, I would say, was where the movement really took off. And it was kind of a renaissance, you might say, of our culture and traditions. And there were people that were my age, like college age, let's say. Some of us did go to college. And I was fortunate and able to learn a lot through that experience.

My father and another man, my father, David Risling Jr., and his colleague, Jack Forbes, started a program at UC Davis that was the first Native American Studies program. And from there, it grew a lot in other campuses. But it was also during the time of Alcatraz and American Indian movement and civil rights and all those kinds of things that were happening. So it was an awakening for Native people to look at themselves and think about their ancestors and their traditions and things that had been lost and language and what had happened through boarding schools and all the things in their history.

And where are we today and moving forward and looking at ourself and helping each other to bring pride back and looking at the problems and how can we solve those. Our education for our young people was not very good at that time. So that was one part of it. And our tribal rights, our sovereign rights, like water rights and fishing rights and all those things that started to come into play. And there was a lot of activism during that time. It has really continued and gone on through today, including the dam removal. And so I was at a really exciting time when I moved back up to this area and started reconnecting with my tribal roots, so to speak, through my grandfather and aunts and uncles and other people in our communities. I'm a tribal member of the Hupa tribe, but I'm a Karuk descent and a Yurok descent through my grandfather and grandmother.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report, talking about an exciting art gallery opening coming up starting on April 3rd. This is Undammed at the Goudi'ni Native American Arts Gallery at Cal Poly Humboldt.

RISLING:

So yeah, I got to be part of this renaissance of bringing back ceremonies that hadn't been practiced for a long time. So I was involved with the rush dance at Kadameen, and then later on, my husband and I were instrumental in bringing back one of our ceremonies, the Ihook ceremony, which is a puberty ceremony for Kadook girls. And through all that experience, I began doing my work more seriously in terms of incorporating my cultural experiences, my ceremonial experiences, through my artwork. So that is, was, and continues to be a big part of my work, is these traditions, these ceremonies, and being able to express those things, you know, through my art.

NORRIS:

If I could just add to that, I just want to pay homage to those folks that, yeah, came before us. Awok, BDT, and Julian, and all the artists that played such a huge role in the no-go road and all these movements. Our people have been fighting forever for our land, and so for me, I always looked up to those artists that had that message in their art. That was always an inspiration to me, so I'm really thankful for that. Yeah, it's just always been part of our culture here, is resistance.

RISLING:

Yeah, that's definitely true, definitely.

WHEELER:

Lyn, one thing Brittany said before is that for folks outside the area, they may not be familiar with the art of Northwest California, the Native art of Northwest California. What are the themes or iconography or things that distinguish the art here from other areas? What would people be looking for to realize something is distinctly Yurok or Hupa or Krook?

RISLING:

Well, a big part of our traditions are our baskets and our basket weavers and the designs that are woven into those baskets. And you'll see those designs in probably all of our contemporary artists' work. And some of them are weavers, like Annalia, and some people do traditional art and contemporary art through painting. I'm a regalia maker. I've done a little bit of basket weaving, but not a lot. And I have great admiration and respect for those weavers and those artists that go way, way back, our ancestors. To me, they were truly artists, and I feel like their art continues today through our own hands today. They're in our DNA, so to speak, and we still connect to those places where they came from.

The land is so important, it's a big part of our art, even if it's a visual image, or digging in the dirt to get roots, or whatever it is. So I think that's a big part of it. And the regalia that we do and our ancestors did also has many design work in it, and shells and nuts, pine nuts and things like that, that are incorporated into our contemporary work as well. In my work, I use a lot of basket designs in the landscape, as well as other parts of the work. And we inspire each other as artists, too. The artist that Annalia mentioned, like BDT, he was a great inspiration to my work, and I think a lot of us artists that came during that time and since then, and continue today, I think we all have that. He inspired a lot of people, and he was a bold fighter for his culture and his people. And so that definitely has been an inspiration.

WHEELER:

And Annalia, building off of something Lyn said, combining the traditional and the modern. As an artist who incorporates traditional elements into her art, but also uses very modern forms, do you have any thoughts at this intersection between the historic and paying homage to the culture, and then also reinventing it for a new time?

NORRIS:

Yeah, I mean, art is this different language, and so it has to evolve. We have to always stay connected to where we came from, to our roots, and always, so to speak, weaving that into our contemporary art, like it's so important. I don't know, just taking elements from our surroundings, like, yeah, this art is our voice of what represents us and how we want to be represented, and so it's important to combine both and knowing, like, we're living in this different world, and so we have different tools that we have to use now, and so, yeah, being able to hold on to these ancient skills, but also be able to speak with what we have around us.

WHEELER:

So Lyn and Annalia, have you seen the other pieces that are going to be part of the show and do you have a favorite by some other artists that you want to plug and highlight and what you might find inspirational about that piece?

RISLING:

I have not seen any of the other people's work yet.

WHEELER:

Okay, well then you'll get to be delighted at the reception as well.

NORRIS:

Well, there is one piece. I was fortunate because I went to install the piece, but I saw on the other end of the gallery from my piece is this pedestal with, and Brittany, you'll have to remind me who made that piece, but it has like, I don't know, it's like these fish bones from the fish kill, like not petrified, but anyways, preserved fish bones from when the fish kill happened. And to me, that was such a, when I walked in and saw that and the opposite ends, it just made a huge like aha moment for me. Like, and it brought me to tears to see that we came that far from the fish kill to like the dams exploding and being just a pile of rubble. And yeah, that really struck me as powerful, so powerful that we seen from beginning to the end.

WHEELER:

So, so Brittany is joining us via Zoom and is now in the gallery itself. It looks like Brittany, do you want to talk about some of the other pieces that are in this show?

BRITTON:

Yeah, the piece that Annalia is talking about actually is by two artists, a couple of Becky Evans, who is non-native, and by Bob Benson, who's Tsnungwe. I wanted a piece from the two of them because of Becky's experience and hard work, honestly, doing the 30,000 Salmon Project, where she was doing artwork in the schools, talking about the salmon kill. She went out in 2002, out to the rivers, told Bob, I heard about this is happening, we're watching this happen, I want to go pick dead salmon out of the river and put on a HAZMAT suit. And Bob was like, cool, let's go. I guess I'm not. He didn't want her to go on her own. So he went up to Pecwan with her and she just pulled dead salmon out of the river and buried them in the ground for a year because she wanted the bones to show like what happened, like to have actual record of what happened.

So that's a collaboration piece by the two of them with the stacked rocks that kind of reference home and the foundation of our literal homes and the river and the bed and even this like funereal kind of structure in some way. It's a really nice, dark, like this is what happened and this is why the dams had to come down, right? It's about salmon, it's about the water, it's about the ecosystems that are dependent on all of that, which also includes us, right? So it's really cool seeing the rubble of the dam echoing the rocks that are the foundations of the rivers in a way. Yeah, it's been really cool.

The other piece that I'm very excited about is a timeline and a map that our Native American Studies interns created. So I've existed in this sphere, being a Native person, grew up in Hoopa, lived out here on the coast. It wasn't my wheelhouse for my fight, right? I was like, cool, other people who know what's happening got this taken care of. I'm going to go be an artist and kind of fight other stuff. So for me, it's like I knew that these dams existed. I knew what was happening. I was in high school when the fish kill happened and it felt like the apocalypse. But I didn't really know what led to that in a way. And we weren't really learning that in school. We would talk about the dams at home, but my interns, what I wanted, and part of this was selfish, they made a whole timeline from contact with tribes in our area, loss in the area of the entire Klamath Watershed, to the point when the dams are created, to the point when Bureau of Reclamation s's up, and then the fish kill happens. And then what led to the legal fights, the protests, everything that led to the dams coming down.

And then a spiral that kind of speaks to, we're not done, right? This fight isn't done. The dams are down, but what's next? There's more dams. We need water flow beyond just the dams being down, right? So it was a little selfish on my part because I just literally wanted to just lay out the information for me. I want to see what this is. And they did such a good job. I'm very excited about it.

WHEELER:

So Lyn, spirals, I've seen a couple of your pieces of art and spirals seem to be incorporated in a number of them. Can you talk about that as an image for you that is kind of a recurring motif and what that means in your art?

RISLING:

Sure. Spiral can mean a lot of different things. It can be the spiral of the seasons, it's kind of just the spiral of life, so to speak. It's also, to me, represents the spiritual world and the life cycle, and the life cycle of humans, life cycle of plants, life cycle of animals, life cycle of salmon. So in the pieces that I have there at the gallery, I guess I could mention that I did a couple of the pieces that are there before I did this last piece, after the dams came down. So when the, this was back in 2005, I worked with these group of students at McKinleyville High School in this program called the American Indian Academy at the time, and I got a grant through the Humboldt Area Foundation to do some type of community project.

So I was able to contact the school and arrange for that, and then I chose a theme, and I chose salmon as the theme, and what the importance of salmon is to our tribal people in this area. And so from that, it was a basic art class, so I was teaching art design, basic drawing, the color wheel, all those kinds of things, and some basic painting skills, and then working our way up to these four large panels that we created, six by six feet panels, that had to do with salmon. So we were, the students were helping research about traditional stories that had to do with salmon, and the traditional fishing methods that we have used through time, and also the life cycle of the salmon. And then, what was going on today with the fish kill and the dams, and at that time locally there was some hearings going on around the issues of the dam, where people could come and talk to representatives of, I guess it was the Federal Energy Regulation Commission, and there was people that were representing fishermen, commercial fishermen, farmers, environmentalists, and tribal people mainly, and other people that were interested.

Anyway, so I was able to bring a couple of our students to that, so they could see firsthand what was going on in that realm. And the students and I went, some of them went down to the Indian Education Conference down in the Sacramento area, and they did a presentation with a PowerPoint about the panels that we had created, and about what was going on with the fish, the dams, and all of that. And so it was a very educational time, not just for the students, but for myself, and brought a lot of awareness to all of us.

And then eventually, we did a presentation to the whole school during the Indian College Success in Both Worlds Day, and then eventually, since we didn't really have a place to put them, I talked to the United Indian Health Clinic at Pottawat, and they welcomed to hang the pieces in their lobby, and so they've been there ever since. So it's nice to have them visible in a large community-wide space where a lot of people come, not just tribal people, but other people as well. So there's two prints of those in the show, they're G-clay prints, along with the recent painting that I did. Yeah, so they all have spirals, I think.

WHEELER:

Well, there are a lot of wonderful pieces to see at this show. Brittany, let's get one quick plug again for the hours that people can come and see the fantastic art. Yeah, sure thing.

BRITTON:

Our opening reception will be Thursday, April 3rd, from 4.30 to 6 p.m., here at the Guditni Native American Arts Gallery. Our regular open hours will start that Friday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and Wednesday and Thursday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. We're closed Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and we are also open via appointment. Just contact me at rbg.humboldt.edu.

WHEELER:

Well, Brittany and Aaliyah, Lyn, thank you so much for joining the Econews Report. Thank you. Thank you. All right. I look forward to seeing all of you at the reception and come out to see it. It's some fantastic art. Become inspired and celebrate the work of artists and activists in getting out these four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River. Fantastic stuff.

All right. Join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.