We’re traveling in a tiny green bug of a car–my nine-year-old granddaughter Krya, my best friend Pam from Pittsburgh and me. Hoping to avoid damage and a fine from the car rental company, we creep slowly over an uneven, sandy, rocky trail of a road in the Morongo Valley desert of California. We’re headed to the studio and home of Native American artist, Sharon Davis to view her art installations and memorials. “Just keep heading towards the mountain. I’m the last house on the road,” Sharon had said, so we keep on, slowly swerving around rocks and cautiously traversing dips and elevations in the path before us. “I heard people sometimes approach a sacred site on their knees, Pam says. “Well, this is our version of that practice,” I say.
It’s not hard to recognize when we’ve made it to the right place. Amidst the desert’s many shades of beige and brown, colorful visual stimulation abounds. The cottage and transformed former garage are coated with navy blue paint and colorful graphics. Sharon emerges to greet us, dressed in black tights and a warrior woman shirt, her straight bright red hair sparkling in the sunlight. We see her sense of humor immediately as she begins to walk us around her property. Serving as our guide she points to a collection of objects; bicycle wheels, a paint can, wood, and metal tubing, arranged by her artist’s eye and tied together to create a purple sculpture. “These are items I found on my property when I moved here.” Next, we pause at an arrangement of glass objects she calls, “Crystal Cactus” which are mixed in with the real kind, one showing off beautifully, currently in full bloom.
We pause next at a sign that contains a drawing of a pair of small moccasins and the numbers, “215,” beside the words, “We were children.” Two hundred and fifteen pieces of hair twisted and tied with orange ribbons hang together, positioned over a pair of adult size white boots. They represent the children that did not live long enough to wear them. They are part of the more than 1000 missing and murdered native women and children in North America that Sharon’s art installations seek to gain public recognition for. As Sharon speaks of these atrocities, I look over at my 9-year-old Native American granddaughter and wonder to myself, “Is it ok that I brought her here?”
Leading grief expert, Francis Weller says, “Part of the medicine we need right now is to come out of the fiction that grief is individual. If the sequestered grief that surrounds us made a sound, the whole world would be weeping.”
We move our focus to the red dresses hanging on clothes lines, each dress blowing at a different rhythm by the wind that surrounds it. We experience a presence through the marking of the absence of bodies to fill the dresses. It is social commentary. It is protest. It is quiet yet powerfully loud. Sharon describes the ceremonies the women do when they change the dresses out and they are thrown down, crumbled to disintegrate on the ground. The desert sun takes the color out of them quickly, and they need to be replaced often. We pledge to join women from near and far who watch for red dresses in resale shops and send them to Sharon.
The final art installation/memorial is titled, “Broken Promises.” In the shape of the medicine wheel, the center contains a stick for each of the over 500 treaties that the US government has made and broken with native tribes. Individual ribbons the colors of the wheel have been tied to poles representing the thousands of women, children, and elders killed in massacres across the country and throughout generations. I think of how incensed US citizens are presently at Russia’s engagement in similar behaviors.
My granddaughter walks the memorial site with us, and I become more comfortable with the rightness of our telling the stories to ourselves and to the young. We must tell the stories in order to heal, and be able to say, “no more,” and it matters how we tell the stories. Even as the small community that we are, this art/memorial is providing us an opportunity to communal grieve, to go into the darkness, and not be consumed by it.
