A Digital Painting Series by Tatakwan (aka Jude Norris)
In Plains Cree, Ekwa (pronounced eh-gwah) means ‘now is the time’ or ‘right now’. The Ekwa Buffalo series is a series of digital paintings of individual buffalo in movement. Like all my work, the pieces in this series have layers of meaning. They can be understood or experienced in a variety of ways.
Buffalo Painted in a Unique Style
The Buffalo is a strong emblem of the North American land. The Ekwa Buffalo images can be enjoyed purely visually, as images of this imposing animal. They are colourful, dramatic, and have a distinct look that weaves in elements of different painting genres. I’ve incorporated elements of realism, impressionism, colour-field and abstract painting into my own unique style. I’m also influenced by the use of colour in Native turn of century painted hide clothing and bead work. The Ekwa Buffalo are organic and animal, yet they still show the digital domain they were created in.
Every Artwork has a Story
These paintings are also the result of a long personal, creative and technical journey. Every artwork or art object carries the process that went into creating it. That’s important to me. I think the story of how the artwork came into being, or the story of the artists themselves, are as important as the artwork. In fact, they’re inseparable. An artist, their story, or their work might be really interesting on their own. But to know one is to appreciate the other even more.
An Inspiring Symbol of Culture & History
The buffalo is a recurring presence in my work. It speaks of both a directly experienced and symbolic relationship that is deep and lasting. It magnifies both our extremely ancient precolonial history, and the history of the last few hundred years. As both an animal and an image, the buffalo invokes layers of cultural experience and symbolism. But it can also be a strong metaphor for a wider community, history and future than just the Native one.
Previous Buffalo Artwork
Some of my other work involving the Buffalo Nation includes the multimedia installations Buffalo Basket (now owned by the UBC Museum of Anthropology), as well as Puskwa Moostoos Waskigun (Home of the Buffalo). I created that while I was in residency at the Western Front in Vancouver in 2007. In Puskwa Moostoos Waskigun, you can walk inside a ‘soft architecture’ or ante-chamber created by three large perpendicular screens. Once inside you are immersed in a landscape of buffalo. A medley of individual animals and herds travels across the three screens, surrounding the viewer with images and sounds of Bison.
Buffalo Basket came earlier. It’s made of a small shopping cart with its basket woven with red willow. The basket is covered in a hide dome that looks like a tiny sweat lodge. The interior is lined with moss, and nests a small video screen playing images of buffalo. The loud bellows of the Buffalo bulls emanate from inside the basket and fill the room it’s in.
Some earlier Buffalo artworks include the Mixed Blood Buffalo Ballgown, a hand-painted taffeta gown. It’s half red/half white and has ledger-drawing-style buffalo bounding across the white half. Recently I reworked these ballgown buffalo into the ledger style red buffalo mural digital painting. Around the time I made the ballgown, I also started a series of buffalo collages that continues today. In these early buffalo artworks, I cut the bodies of buffalo out of the white pages of phone books, where the name ‘Buffalo’ would be. Then I painted them and mixed them with other imagery.
Images of a Personal Journey
The story of the Ekwa Buffalo began in the late 90’s, before I had even physically reconnected with my own people, territory, or culture. These images are very personal artifacts of my own search for and passage back into my culture. There was a wonderful synchronism to the meetings, people and experiences of that healing journey. That energy is also infused in the paintings.
Eagle Mounds and an Intertribal Gift
While visiting a friend in Minnesota, I was introduced to the British artist Adrian Frost, who at that time was living in Muskoday, Wisconsin. Adrian’s late wife, Cherokee artist Jan Beaver, had had a vision of what she called Ghost Eagles. Later, Jan and Adrian found the physical manifestation of these eagles. They were ancient earthworks in the Hochunk territory in Wisconsin. Afterward, Jan was instrumental in reconnecting the Hochunk with these giant eagle mounds and the land they are on. Eventually the land was purchased and passed back into the hands of the Hochunk Nation. This chain of events also resulted in the Hochunk becoming involved in the cross-country Indigenous buffalo restoration efforts. Since the 1800′s, many Native people have been working to save and regenerate the buffalo herds. These efforts include tribes helping one another by sharing their buffalo. This time the Lakota gave the Hochunk two young bison to start their own herd.
When we met, Adrian and I had an immediate connection and friendship. He happened to be looking after the daily feeding of these two buffalo, and I went with him to both the eagle mounds and on one of his daily trips to the buffalo. I shot video footage of the young bison, capturing their unique bounding gallops around their corral.
The timing was interesting. Not long before I met Adrian, I began an intense period of what I can only describe as a very inward, psychic re-connection with the Buffalo Nation. Puskwa Moostoos had become a strong presence in my mind, heart, and artwork. It was during that time the buffalo came into my creative work.
The Red Buffalo Skydive Animation
The footage of the Hochunk buffalo later evolved into both the animation, Red Buffalo Skydive (1999), and now the Ekwa Buffalo series. Red Buffalo Skydive is a 3 min experimental animation. It was created by rotoscoping (drawing over) individual frames of the buffalo video footage. The audio is narration of me telling a story a paraplegic man told me about his (post-accident) skydiving adventures.
As an animation it’s unusual in that I made each of the frames a distinct, ‘stand-alone’ drawing, often with its own unique style. Even the story of how Red Buffalo Skydive was created is a synchronistic and amazing one! Since its release it has enjoyed a wide audience, having screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the Sydney Opera House, the 24hrs Festival in Barcelona, and various other festivals and locations. It is now available for free download as part of 2007 Images Festival Ifpod project/website.
The Buffalo Call Me Home
Just after all this buffalo re-connection, contact, and creation happened, I also re-connected with my own Plains Cree Nation and Territory. We are, of course, intrinsically and anciently connected with the buffalo. I see this period and these events in part as the Buffalo Nation calling me home. Before this, I had once gone to see an Elder in Toronto, to ask about why I felt such intense emotion towards these animals. Everything that had happened to them felt very real to me. He explained to me that all things that happen exist always, outside of time as we know it. He said this is why I could feel these things in the present, even though they happened in the past.
The Buffalo & The People Are Still One
We, the plains and also the woodland people, do have an long standing and deep relationship with the buffalo. So much so that we may be seen as inseparable. This is and always has been very much truth in our own spiritually-oriented understanding.
It was also understood in terms of the colonial process. The buffalo were systematically slaughtered as a means of subduing us. And it worked. When they suffered, we suffered, and vise versa. I do not want to dwell on a negative past, but it is an undeniable part of all of our history. And it cannot be healed until it is truly addressed.
This part of our history is also a reflection of the depth of our relationship with the buffalo. And now, as we strengthen, they strengthen. The way some Native people see it, one can’t happen without the other.
Culturally, the buffalo is associated with fortitude, community, and respect for the abundance provided for us by the natural world and Gitchi Manitou – the Great Spirit. The buffalo is the only animal that turns to face into a storm. The young are cared for and protected communally.
Puskwa Moostoos at one time provided us with virtually everything we needed to live bounteously. We in turn used every part of that gift prudently. Now our close relative the buffalo continues to nurture our spirits. And like so much in Indigenous culture, the buffalo’s teachings are relevant today and can benefit all.
Painting PuskwaMoostoos on My Own Terms
Lately, despite my concern about making ‘stereotypical Native Art’, I find myself again wanting to make imagery of these and other animals, just as I have since childhood. I do this in honor of my inherent love for and connection to them. And I do this while pondering the dual nature of those stereotypes. I have a very heartfelt desire to express my own relationship to an animal that is very special to me. Yet I’ve had to do this on my own terms, as a very contemporary, yet very traditional artist.
And so, years after those individual, meticulously drawn frames of the Red Buffalo Skydive animation were made, they evolve further into the Ekwa Buffalo Series. I’ve had a long stretch of focusing on multimedia sculpture, video installation, and single channel video. Now I find myself making a circle and returning to my original practice of painting. Only now it’s as a continuation of my work in the digital realm, a thing that did not even exist when I began painting.
More Than One Way to Be An Ekwa Buffalo
Ekwa Buffalo Series have a pluralistic nature. They are lovely paintings in a unique style. They are also images which can bring up numerous and even contradictory layers of meaning, history, and emotion. The Ekwa Buffalo are a celebration of creativity, survival, and the teachings of the buffalo. The images can evoke the spirit of Puskwa Moostoos, both supporting and drawing from the special energy of this animal. They are a welcoming, as the Buffalo Nation, like us, return to strength, and we enter a time when we all must all learn to live together in respect.
click here to return to Ekwa Buffalo painting series description page
click here to go to a scroll-down page showing all the paintings in the series
Click the button below to see the Ekwa Paintings in the shopping cart.
