31”x72” acrylic on canvas form 74”x18”x20”. Intergenerational collaboration with Bill Hudson and Clarissa Rizal

I’ve been metaphorically deconstructing Tlingit cultural practices through my art lately, identifying pieces of traditional patriarchy and misogynistic residue left from the colonial project (that we now brand as “Tlingit” tradition, art, and culture), and reconstructing them with all the femininity I can muster.

I’ve been ruminating on the totem pole. One reason for choosing the phallic form — customarily used for commemoration, recording histories and/or asserting physical domain — is because there’s been an “extra” one up in my attic. My mom had left me all of her blank canvases and unfinished art when she died, including a blank totem form similar to the pair her and my dad painted in 2004, “Totemic Theory” (photo below).

I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to paint on it, but as I was meditating on an idea, my mentors prompted me to first try working more loosely… to shake some of the rigid formline training out of me. I went up into the attic to see if I could find some discarded canvas to mess around with and happened to find a roll labeled “Totemic Theory”.

The bones of my parents’ pole design had been projected onto it and penciled out.

Having just spent the last month dreaming about the unused totem pole that was laying on my work table at that very moment, I knew that this canvas was made for me. If a voice arose that said, “You can’t do that! That’s your parents’ design! That’s cheating! That’s ugly!” then I didn’t listen. I just painted.

Nothing seemed more natural than filling in my parents’ lines. And then I remembered, I used to do this as a kid (photo below)! I learned to hold a brush and fill the bristles with paint within the shapes that my parents had drawn out on scraps of canvas for me!

And I was still getting to do it (photo below)!!

At what point are we told not to copy? Not to follow in our parents’ footsteps? Not to listen closely for the voices of our ancestors? We are literally the extended limbs of those that came before. We are NEVER creating alone, so why try to pretend that we can take sole ownership of any of our art?