“I didn’t know when I was young that Bill was a scholar of Native art,” she recalls. “I started with Indian design because I was thrilled by it.”īunn-Marcuse grew up in Honolulu but came to the mainland many summers to attend a camp in the San Juan Islands, where she met Holm and his family. “I’m at my heart a hobbyist,” he once told UW Magazine. He made beadwork, textiles, cedar canoes and totem poles. Holm had learned techniques from reading anthropological texts, talking with older Indigenous artists or trying the skills with his bare hands. His personal collection of 30,000 images of Northwest art was the stuff of legend: Young artists and scholars reached out by letters, then emails, asking him for copies of images or for advice about technical instruction or cultural history.Īn original Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw mask, on the left, shown next to a teaching replica made by Bill Holm. In 1965, he published the book “Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form,” which became a Rosetta Stone for generations of Native artists looking to converse with their ancestors. Holm became an encyclopedia of archival history and a bridge between cultures, mastering the contents of museum collections and traveling the world to give what he had learned to the next generation. “His strength was that he was incredibly humble and generous.” “They were really interested in talking to him, because he was really interested in talking to them,” says Bunn-Marcuse. As an outsider to Native arts and culture, he had immersed himself in the Burke Museum beginning as a teenager in the 1940s, learning from director Erna Gunther before traveling the region to meet Native artists and learn about their craft. People crowded in and sat in the aisles in Kane Hall. The auditors included Indigenous artists like Haa’yuups Ron Hamilton and Joe David. Holm taught a three-quarter sequence of Native art to UW students in the 1970s, inviting anyone in the community to sit in on the class. Even though Holm is no longer with us, students at the UW continue to learn through the people who learned from him, teaching the classes he helped shape. Holm, a leading scholar of Native art and art history, mentored Bunn-Marcuse, ’98, ’07, and was like a grandfather to her children. ![]() The class has a particular weight this quarter because of the passing of the legendary Bill Holm in December 2020. This exercise lets the students think about how the class is inhabiting or occupying a wide swath of Indigenous land because they’re not at UW. Today’s students are in land that first belonged to the following tribes: Seattle, Snohomish, Snoqualmie, Puyallup, Tulalip, Yakima, Spokane, Nooksack, Stillaguamish, Butte, Okanagan, Massachusett, and Cherokee. On a virtual map from native-land.ca, Bunn-Marcuse asks students to plot where they currently are, and the map converts it to Native terms-most of which are still recognizable to us. ![]() The fact that the class is being taught remotely, with students from across the state and the nation, actually contributes in a way. Listen to the pronunciation of “Siʔaɫ” by Salish tribal elder Vi Hilbert, who taught the Lushootseed language at UW for many years. ![]() “That is the name of our city,” Bunn-Marcuse says, telling the students that throughout the quarter, they will take turns sharing a longer land acknowledgment each time the group convenes. The vocal lesson has another purpose: It’s a collective land acknowledgment at the start of the quarter. “And since we’re not in class, you won’t be spitting on anyone.” The apostrophe in the middle of the word is a glottal stop, she adds, like when you briefly pause in the middle of the phrase “uh-oh.” A cacophony of voices ping-pongs around the Zoom room as the students try it out:īunn-Marcuse smiles in acknowledgment of the chaos, and promptly asks everyone to mute themselves. “To say this barred ‘L’ at the end, you put the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth, behind your teeth, and you blow air out the side,” she says.
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