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Honoring Cultural Survival

10/31/2014

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PictureArtist Ray Losey
Sometime in the 1970s Ray Losey and his father Rex were driving through the Columbia River Gorge. Rex had Ray turn down the Rolling Stones blasting on the radio to report that he'd seen a rainbow. The Rainbow Warrior, that is, Greenpeace's activist vessel, visiting to expose radioactivity in the river. A master carver teaching the craft to his son, Rex decided that the two of them would carve a totem pole and donate it to Greenpeace.

This is just part of the story Ray told earlier this month when he joined another esteemed family of Northwest totem pole carvers, the Lelooskas, for a rededication ceremony I officiated at the Oregon Zoo. 

The Survival Totem Pole Ray and his father gifted to Greenpeace in 1977, it turns out, had suffered a similar fate to the animals it depicts. (The otter, bear, beaver, wolf, and eagle with salmon are all disfigured — a broken wing, a missing eye — to depict the dangers of environmental degradation.) Once the Rainbow Warrior moved on, the Loseys lost track of what had become of the carving. With some sleuthing, Ray discovered it had been donated to the Zoo where it had been run over by a maintenance vehicle, the eagle's wings lost. Eventually installed, it was obscured behind vegetation.

PictureRay Losey & the Zoo bond construction team
Fortunately, it's a new day at the Zoo. The public art program of a Zoo construction bond supported the restoration of the Survival Totem Pole and a magnificent 50 foot carving called the Centennial Pole. On October 17th we gathered to celebrate the rededication of these two cultural treasures. The Survival Totem Pole is now prominently featured at the heart of the Great Northwest exhibit, adjacent to the California Condors where the two tell complementary tales about threatened species and threatened culture.

The tremendous care and skill of the construction crew who installed the poles, noted by Ray in his remarks, offered a redemptive chapter in the carving's history and underscored the call to stewardship that is embedded in the meaning of the totem poles. 

The Centennial Totem Pole

The story of the Centennial Pole spans three centuries, two hemispheres, and at least three generations. We stand here in the second decade of the 21st Century before a towering piece of native Western Red cedar, carved in the 20th Century on the grounds of the 1959 Centennial Exposition that commemorated Oregon gaining statehood in the 19th Century. It extols the virtues of an expedition of Oregon airmen who traveled from the 45th parallel to participate in Operation Deep Freeze, which established a scientific station at the geographic South Pole in the late 1950s.

It was carved by Chief Lelooska, whose name, given to him by the Nez Perce, means “He Who Cuts Against Wood with a Knife”. Lelooska, of Cherokee descent, devoted his life to preserving the art and culture of many Native Peoples. Through his close friendship with Chief James Aul Sewid, Lelooska and his family were adopted into the Sewide lineage of the Kwakwaka'wakw which gave them rights and privileges to hereditary crests represented through the carvings, dances, songs and stories.


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Installation of the Centennial Pole
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The Centennial Pole, which stood in a few different locations around the Zoo over the last 50 years, now serves as a sentinel at the Zoo's entrance, greeting all who come to the zoo with its stories of this place we call home. To rededicate the carving, the Lelooska family gathered to offer blessings through dance, music, and the release of downy eagle feathers.

The restoration of the Centennial Pole was led by Chief Lelooska’s brother, Chief Tsungani, and niece, Lottie Stoll-Smith. Three generations of family members participated. Chief Tsungani’s daughter, Mariah Stoll-Smith Reese, director of the Lelooska Foundation, told The Columbian about the connection she felt to her uncle during the restoration: “It’s like he’s teaching you, in a way, being able to be that close to the work. That’s why I wanted to make sure my kids were part of the process.”

During the ceremony we offered the nearly 100 guests a bookmark depicting the two works of art. It is customary in Native American celebrations to offer a giveaway, a token of gratitude to all who participate that binds us together in common witness. As the baskets of bookmarks circulated, I offered these words: "The totem poles we honor today each tell a rich story. The story of the mighty totems they depict. The story of Oregonians triumphantly traveling to the South Pole, and of Northwest animals struggling to survive a changing environment. The story of the people who carved and restored them. The story of the times in which they were first commissioned, and of the changing landscapes in which they are installed. With your presence here today, you become keepers of these stories. We invite you to use this bookmark to share the stories with others."

Photos by Kathy Street, used with permission of the Oregon Zoo. Please visit the Lelooska Foundation and Ray Losey's web site for more information on their work. To read about the ceremony I led earlier this year for the Zoo, to reinter remains discovered during construction, click here.

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Marcy Speaks Her Truth

10/28/2014

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In his forthcoming book Die Wise, Stephen Jenkinson writes, "They say that war's first casualty is the truth. It certainly seems to be the first casualty of the war on cancer." Jenkinson critiques our endemic resistance to "using a language for dying where the truth of the dying is in the language. We traffic in euphemism instead, as if the dying can survive the euphemizing." 

My friend Marcy Westerling has always been a truth-teller. Her blog, Livingly Dying, keeps the fact of her dying front and center, in the midst of her daily embrace of the life she loves. Thousands of readers around the world love her for it.

This month Yes Magazine published an essay by Marcy, "What I Learned About Living From Dying of Cancer." I offer this small taste of her piece with confidence that you will want to click below to read more, and in the hopes that you will share widely.

I chafe at being invisible as a person with cancer. I am a lifelong feminist and community organizer. I believe in breaking silence and sharing truth.... In 2014, I can choose to be visible. I have a tattoo on my wrist declaring me a “Cancer Warrior.” I sport buttons saying “Cancer Sucks.” I pedal everywhere, slowly, on a bike that announces “Cancer on Board.” I defy every attempt to limit me to my diagnosis as I dare the world to ignore it. When people with terminal diagnoses communicate about their experience, it may make their walking toward death more doable. I cannot think of subjects better suited for full honesty than birth and death. But sometimes I feel I am as isolated in shouting about my diagnosis as Rachel Carson [who hid her end-stage cancer in 1964 as she broke ground for the nascent environmental movement] was in secrecy. I look so good that observers may well conclude that the sign on my bike, the button on my bags, even the tattoo on my wrist represent strength and survival. 

Public or private, silent or loud, the outcomes are the same. Disease creates isolation and barriers from the world of the well. A friend with terminal cancer notes, “We cause discomfort to some because we are living, living in acute awareness of our impending death, living in pain but living as fully as we can while we are dying. Should we lock ourselves away in a figurative darkened room so as not to chance disturbing the hale and hearty with thoughts of death?”...

People often say to the terminally ill, “You are so stoic, so graceful. I could never handle this so well.” Perhaps not. The truth is you have no idea how well or badly we, the dying, handle it.... The current rules of polite conversation make the journey toward death more challenging. One woman said to me, “It is like we are standing in a different room.” We are avoided or jollied up. (“You look so good you can’t be terminally ill” is the most hated and common of compliments.) These approaches insulate people in our culture from sitting with death, sadly but comfortably.

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Click on the image to read Marcy's article
I encourage you to subscribe to Marcy's blog.
For more on my journey with Marcy, My Friend Marcy Has Cancer. I Don't (Yet). 
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Bald for a Day

10/18/2014

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A few weeks back I received an email titled, Be Bold, Be Bald! In it, a young woman living with Stage IV cancer declared her intent to join this cancer awareness campaign, slated for October 17th, by wearing a bald cap. The question she posed: "Who is in with me? It takes a lot of gumption to commit to going bald for a day. Yes, you will look a little funny wearing a bald cap. Yes, strangers might confront you. And YES, that is the point."

October 17th - my Dad's birthday. (Kenneth Albert Pruett, October 17, 1936 - October 3, 2001.) Yes, a perfect way to pay tribute to him and those living with cancer or whose days were ended by it.

I didn't know that this same week would bring news of a dear college friend being admitted to hospice (liver cancer). And that another beloved would suffer a bleak week of setbacks (ovarian cancer). Or that a 29 year-old named Brittany Maynard, who moved to Oregon to avail herself of our Death with Dignity law, would end up on the cover of People magazine (glioblastoma, same as my Dad). 

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I also didn't realize how many names would find their way onto my tribute cap. I planned one side In Memory of those who had died; one side In Honor and Support of those living with cancer. Their names brought up other names: those whose deaths came in other forms, those whose suffering is undiagnosed. 

When it came to wearing the cap, no strangers confronted me. As I met with a client, worked out at the gym, shopped for groceries, picked up a latte, and hit another shop or two, what I got more than anything were averted eyes. It reminded me of when I held up a large protest sign about my friend Marcy being waitlisted for chemo. The words referring to Marcy were small and my sense was that most passersby thought it was I who was being denied treatment. For every sympathetic smile there were perhaps five who quickly looked away.

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When I discussed my experience at a potluck that night (still "bald"), one person wondered whether the lack of comment coming my way was the blase response of Portlanders used to many daily doses of weirdness. Perhaps. But for many, I suspect, their silence was a way of saying, 'I don't know what to say."

I've had many, many moments of muteness myself. Sometimes months of muteness - connecting, for example, when my college friend was diagnosed and then again when she entered hospice, but nothing in between. It can be hard to carve out space in a busy life for communication that requires real presence. It can be hard to find words in a language oriented entirely towards fixing things.

We are divided, for the most part, into those who live in Cancer World (or the world of another serious illness) and those who don't. Those of us on the outside may visit occasionally - going "bald" for a day, waiting for our own diagnostic results only to return to the land of the Worried Well. I knew that my bald cap was nowhere near an approximation of what I would experience if chemo had actually taken my hair, my eyelashes, my eyebrows; if I couldn't reverse it all with a simple costume change. 

Whether I raised awareness about cancer among those I encountered or not, here's what being bald for a day did. It opened a door in my heart between the worlds of the living and the dead, the worlds of the ill and the well. As I took the time to call up the names, inscribe them on my cap, see the names, touch the names, I honored them and honored my growing capacity for remembrance and connection. 

And a I had a few great conversations. The Trader Joe's checkout clerk told me her story, and her son's. Here's to the boldness that might invite such a connection, even without such a bald provocation.


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A Ministry of Presence

10/12/2014

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This week I listened to an interview with journalist Michel Martin, host of the wonderfully-named but now defunct NPR program Tell Me More. She spoke to an aspect of my work as a Celebrant that I value the most, something she called "a ministry of presence."

Speaking to Krista Tippet as part of a Chautauqua series on The American Consciousness, Michel described having gone to Turkey in the wake of a series of disastrous earthquakes. She wished she could do something useful as a doctor would have, for example, or an engineer. And yet as a reporter, she received endless appreciation from the people she met. She shared her feeling of inadequacy with her husband. Why were people thanking her for doing, seemingly, nothing? Because, he said,"You are showing them that they exist."

She learned that lesson as a cub reporter covering an accidental death in a housing project. Fearful of intruding on the bereaved mother, she was greeted with open arms. "If someone from the media didn't come," she was shown, "it was invisible and had no meaning." As she put it in the interview: "If you are a person in dire circumstances, being noticed, that's the most important thing we can do for people....What we are simply saying is, 'I see you.'"

These words address the role of a journalist, but to my ears they describe why I get up in the morning. Organizing Death Cafes where strangers give each other the gift of presence as they share whatever is on their minds about death, receiving in return the message: "I see you." Inviting clients to articulate what their wedding, their new baby, their mid-life passages, the death of their loved one means to them; letting them know they are seen in all their joys and sorrows. Creating ceremony that calls upon the seen and the unseen to affirm that life matters, that memories have power, that we can embrace those who are missing.

"Sometimes the best thing we can do for people is let them know that we see them," says Michel Martin. Her charge to us - be we journalists, Celebrants, or just plain people: "Look around and see who's missing. And try to invite that person."

It's the highest calling, the greatest challenge, and the deepest privilege of my work.

PictureMichel Martin (Amy Ta/NPR photo)
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With great appreciation to my Orphan Wisdom School classmate Carrie Stearns for sharing this broadcast. Click here to listen to the full hour.

Michel Martin is a journalist with NPR. She previously reported for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and ABC’s “Nightline.” She was the creator and host of the NPR program Tell Me More, which ran from 2007-2014.

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