Kim Shuck – Art as a Way of Life 2

Doug Salin Photographer

What caused you to turn to writing as a way of expression and connection?

 I am a serious nerd and always have been. I would like to say that it was my reading habit that inspired me to write but I think that there were a number of contributing factors. I spent a great deal of my childhood around people who told stories well in various media so I think that I may have learned how to do that while wrapped in my first blanket. However, I also go through long anti-social moods, so having my stories written down lets them be out there without my having to be out there with them.

As a poet you express your culture on paper in a way that is more Eurocentric than native. Yet as a bead maker, weaver, and writer of fables the work seems more intrinsically native.  How do you choose which medium to use for any specific creative undertaking?  Does culture effect those choices?

Cherokees are very chatty for Native people. Since Sequoyah’s writing system was accepted we’ve been in there scribbling. At the same time the Polish side of my family has long roots in decorative textiles. My Cherokee grandfather did the New York Times Crossword in pen every day and my Polish grandfather remembered falling asleep to the sound of a floor loom. I wish I knew why certain stories were in beads and others were in words, it’s going to sound crazy but my work in any form often wakes me up at night and insists on beginning then… generally between 1 and 3 am, when my conscious mind has little control over the medium. Years back I think that I was translating between cultures, as if my grandparents were talking to one another through me, but now I think that my work is far more for my own amusement… and to fix a now recognized but misunderstood identity of functional multiculturalism in my own mind.

As a consciously multi-ethnic woman do certain art forms make you feel more in tune with one genealogical ancestral strand than another?

The line of demarcation for me is getting so blurred. If I am making lace, weaving on a floor loom or making specific foods I can say that I am doing a more Polish thing. If I’m finger-weaving, or making regalia for someone I could say that that was more Cherokee. When I am directly following a specific narrative from one or the other cultural soup I could say that it was leaning me in one direction or the other. At this point I’m just as likely to drag Baba Yaga and her flying butter churn into a story that also has Rabbit running around. I’ve spent some years trying to tear down the walls between the interior ethnic monologues that it’s hard to know now. It’s important, maybe, that the Polish I am is not some general American identity any more than my Cherokee is and I spent years working three sets of cultural awareness to get through my day… and not very well at that. Most of my creative endeavor is a solitary occupation so identifying the ancestral voice, for me, happens when I take my work out of my studio and expose it to other people.

Doug Salin Photograph

I was once on a panel of women writers with the poet Chrystos. She said that metaphors were not a part of traditional Native writing because the art of native was not in describing one thing through defining another, but in reflecting the truth of the subject.  Thus, a horse is not as fast as the wind, rather the speed of the horse creates a wind that bends branches and flattens grass.  What do you think the role of metaphor is in the Native poetry tradition?

I may be a scholar of Native writing but I’m not a patch on Chrystos. I can really only speak to Cherokee, as distinct from Native, and I’m not even in the top ten of Cherokee scholars in terms of tradition. We have a distinct form of literary expression in Cherokee of short prayers or formulae, which I in my arrogance call poems. In these poems there will be sections where the person creating it will say something like “I am the red panther”. I’m going to call that a metaphor, because there are clues that the author is trying to evoke characteristics of this being rather than trying to suggest that she is actually the being itself. I’m trying to remember if the early, unblended stories I know contain metaphors as well. I think that they actually do. Culturally Native America is so vast it’s difficult to characterize. I would say that metaphor happens in Cherokee traditional word play where someone wants to write about how a thing could be better, how they want a thing to be. They are a way to visit an adjusted reality.

The indigenous peoples of North America have many nations and languages and a myriad of traditions.  Despite this do you think there is a unified Native voice that has emerged in poetry?  If so why and how?

Yes and no. The connections manifest in nowhere near the same ways that they do in European traditions, a thing that was mostly a facet of religions that leaned heavily on the written word. Our culturally unifying experience has been, not to put too fine a point on it, occupation. I think that there is a 20^th century voice that many Native writers operate within, a voice of resistance, of announcing identity. I feel as if the same thing happened in Africa as colonial regimes broke up, a process that is still taking place. I feel as if something similar happened in marginalized parts of Europe. The unifying voice was the voice of insistent identity. My experience of the finest younger Native poets is that they are locating themselves in a more specifically cultural context, so now we get Dine writers, Cherokee writers and Ohlone writers. I have to say at this point that there always have been some people writing this way, but it’s becoming more common and I think it’s a part of a more confident expression of culture.

Do you use any ritual as way to open yourself to the poem or story you need to write?

I have unconsciously adopted a ritual, yes. There is a Cherokee tradition of going to water in the morning, of going there to set your intention for the day. I do actually write that way every day. That and smoked tea, little black notebooks with no lines, my favorite pen. I am a creature of comfort and habit. If I’m having trouble settling I take a walk. But mostly it’s the morning ritual of writing. Ugh, that sounds so terribly ‘self-help’.

What do you feel is the responsibility of the artist in these difficult times of poverty, war, and increasingly open racism?

Wow, so specifically artist’s responsibilities… because we all have, not to get to woo woo about it, sacred responsibilities to other people and not just human people. I think that artists need to forage consistently in the direction of their very own specific understanding of things. It’s a discipline not to settle for things already understood. It’s so easy to focus down on micro issues but there are larger ones. So it’s important not to contemplate the navel so much that you don’t see that there are issues in the Congo. It’s important not to be obsessed by exotic problems and forget that, for example, ice storms consistently cut off reservations from supplies here, in this country, every year and make donations necessary for life to continue there. It’s important not to get so wrapped in problems not your own that you go numb. So the responsibility is to exercise empathy but also empathy for self. In the words of any emergency flight card, put your own mask on first.

Kim Shuck is a writer and fine artist living in San Francisco. Her first book Smuggling Cherokee was the winner of the 2005 Diane Decorah Award. Her newest book Rabbit Stories came out in March 2013. Her work has been featured in periodicals and anthologies in Europe and North America.

Want to read some of Kim’s wonderful work start here

“Tragedy

May or may not

Have something to do with goats…”  Kim writes in the first of a melange of poems you will enjoy

To learn more about Kim, see some more of her intriguing beadwork and textiles, read more poems please check out Kim’s website