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Chris Edaakie |
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Behind the Story: I-Am-Going-But-I-Shall-Return The story of Chris Edaakie and the School Healthy Lifestyle Program of Zuni Pueblo (pp. 5-17 in Beginner's Guide to Community-Based Arts) was the last story to be completed by Keith Knight and me. It also took the most hours to be finished (about 200 in total) over 16 months.
Keith and I were introduced to Chris Edaakie, his mentor Edward Wemytewa and the Zuni Pueblo through Dudley Cocke, Director of the Roadside Theatre at Appalshop in Kentucky (the same place where Tom Hansell works). Roadside Theater began an informal relationship with the Zuni in 1984 that resulted in the development of a touring cross-cultural play plus a book and audio disc chronicling the project entitled Journeys Home: Revealing a Zuni/ Appalachian Collaboration. It's a wonderful piece, and the process of reading and listening to the material made me think there was an important story here that we needed to tell first in our Beginner's Guide. Check out these excerpts from the Zuni/Appalshop book and CD (no extra charge for seeing my personal margin notes).
No doubt, one of the best things about the creation of the Guide has been the incredible places I have had the chance to visit and learn about, and when I went to visit Zuni Pueblo and the School Healthy Lifestyles program for three days (March 14 to 16, 2004), I knew that it was going to be a life-changing experience.
One thing you will not find very often in reviewing any of my materials about Zuni Pueblo is the word "art." Both the word and the concept are conspicuously absent, and yet in certain very important ways the elements and the meanings of what we call "art"—signs, symbols, rituals and stories—are suffused throughout every cubic inch of that remote mountain tabletop in northern New Mexico (According to the Zuni Tribal Census Office, there are approximately 10,186 Zuni residents living on the 463,278.18 acre Zuni Indian Reservation. This is approximately 723.87 miles on both the Arizona and New Mexico lands). As with all of life's great experiences, not only was I introduced to a profoundly different way of thinking—an understanding of art that was simultaneously both more mundane and revered than I am accustomed—but my interaction with these thoughts have in turn transformed my way of thinking about the place of art in general modern society. First off, there's little in Chris Edaakie's Job Description (pdf below) to indicate he is expected or paid to produce "art." Only by broadly interpreting the words might you catch the possibility ("visual teaching," "cultural sensitivity," etc.), and yet, about half of his typical weekly schedule is in fact "art" related and calls upon Edaakie's formal training in dance, storytelling and graphic design. For many professional artists, while the idea of having a regular job like this might be anathema, if you were to ask those same people how much time they actually do get to practice their art form, few would say much more than half (and many would say a lot less). Plus, Chris says, every day you get to say that your artistic expression helped prolong people's lives: "How cool is that?" he asked me.
Now, take a look at the Zuni 2004 Calendar (pdf below). The photos and sayings ("Start Your New Year..."), while they appear generic, are direct cultural references to specific Zuni traditions. When I was there, Kathleen Romancito, director of Zuni Head Start Program, told me that regularly, children, adults and seniors alike report to her that they use the images and sayings in their daily lives: "it has become very natural for people in our community to adopt these ideas as habits, particularly because they recognize their roots in our common heritage." Healthy Lifestyles Program has developed a wide array of athletically oriented accessories (sports bottles, fanny packs, posters, etc.) that infuse the ancient symbols of Zuni culture with new meaning. It is the very everydayness of the objects that make them meaningful and effective. "The fact that we, as an official tribal agency, have put our sacred symbols on these objects, means a lot. Hopefully, it leads our people to remember our sacred connections and take better care of their bodies. At the very least, it signifies this is an object people should take seriously." One other example I found particularly interesting was the Developmental Bilingual Education Program they were establishing in the primary schools while I was visiting. They called it the "Zuni Immersion Project," and its basic premise was that by organizing the public school curriculum from Kindergarten through 5th Grade around Zuni language, arts and culture, more Zuni children would grow up successful as students, workers and citizens. The program had just begun when I was there in 2004, but it was already showing impressive changes among student participants.
This is what I meant when I referred to the far-ranging scope of my perceptions of "art" while visiting Zuni Pueblo: from the most everyday to the most profound. Even those of us who have been working in community-based arts for years still suffer from fixed modern or post-modern art world assumptions. We allow our work to be defined as either "fine" or "folk," "visual" or "performing," "form" or "content," and in the process, forget about what is and is not effective. There are lots of ways to judge this, but it's often the audience of people who ultimately decides by incorporating art, or not, into their lives. If art helps to make people's life better, it's good! Please take the time to review the rest of our portfolio of media assets, including audio and video of Chris' work, and see what it makes you think about. Of course, most Americans do not grow up in communities where their ancestors have lived for more than 1,000 years, but still, as you learn more about Chris and how he has made a living out of the traditional art forms he was taught as a child, I wonder how many of you out there have had, or could have, similar experiences?
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