3/18/2023 0 Comments Qarc uc berkeley![]() It was a middle-class fortress from which to beat back the ever encroaching wilderness. In mine, it was the single-family zoned suburbs and the notion of order, domestication, and control within prescribed borders. The rules of the reservation, where sale of alcohol was prohibited yet still accessible just outside of its boundaries, influenced the setting of Skeets’ childhood. US land use and zoning policies, for instance, dictate who can live where, do what, and how. It is, Skeets offered, where decolonization starts.īut where, exactly, do we begin? I might suggest that treating the Memory Field as not just a figurative concept, but a literal place, can call our attention to our geographical location and the policies and systems presiding over us. Postmemory is a means to re-envision and reclaim that which was stolen without material record. Skeets also emphasized the importance of postmemory, which Marianne Hirsch defines as “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before-to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up.” This concept is familiar to indigenous peoples and others who have been marginalized, whose documentation of their histories rests not on paper but in corporate remembrance-one of “imaginative investment, projection, and creation” (Hirsch). Somewhere along this border, I became a poet.īut it’s not only personal memory we draw from. The line between lawn and woods shaped the psyche of an impressionable young Chinese girl who learned the manners of White society but yearned to journey into the intrepid, unpredictable realm of her inner self. Just last week, when my mother showed me the view from her iPad, the bare, finger-like branches of the bur oaks revived in me whimsical sensations of plucking daddy longlegs from ferns, dodging trees on sleds, and getting lost with the tops of houses still in sight. Growing up, I was fascinated by the woods at the edge of my family’s backyard, captivated by this exuberant, organic chaos that lay on the other side of our neatly mowed patch of grass. ![]() Sitting in my own memory field is my childhood home in Rochester, Minnesota. Indeed, the Memory Field is about how place is folded, and folds us, into the creative process. When we create, we automatically tap into our bodies’ ways of knowing, a consciousness that overflows into art, essays, poems. In Skeets’ words, entering the Memory Field involves “a spiraling of knowledge within ourselves.” Drawing from Brenda Miller’s The Body of Memory, Skeets explains how personal memory is woven from textures of observation and experience that are held in the body. Using a framework by Navajo elder Philmer Bluehouse, Skeets described how memory consists of layers of knowledge, from the basic (riding a bike) to the esoteric (prayers and songs). “Land and memory,” said Skeets, “are one and the same.” The land, in helping us remember, becomes a part of ourselves. It’s how when walking through the streets of our younger years, we feel our histories peel from the ground, the buildings, the trees, reanimating themselves as if they had been asleep and our steps had awakened them. It describes how the land is an active participant in how we recount the past, perceive the world, and create art. The Memory Field is both place and form, map and meadow. They would also guide his exploration of the Memory Field, which he coined as “radical remembering as resistance and reconciliation.” These notions would later find expression in Skeets’ acclaimed poetry collection, Eyes Bottle Dark and a Mouthful of Flowers. In Gallup-center of Old Hollywood, alcohol, and a bustling Native American art trade-glamor and progress situated themselves amidst a patchwork of indigenous communities. ![]() Skeets’ first encounters with the idea of place were influenced by Gallup, New Mexico, a town near his childhood home. “It is the way we perceive the world, how we define a kind of personal truth.” So began The Memory Field, a lecture in which Skeets discussed how land informs how we express-and define-ourselves through memory. “The landscape is associated with memory,” said Jake Skeets in his October craft talk sponsored by the Arts Research Center. The Land Remembers: The Memory Field by Jake Skeets
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