Joe Feddersen: Petroglyphs and Power

Joe Feddersen Echo 14, monoprint 

Joe Feddersen (Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation): Echo 14 (monoprint) and Omak Lake 2 (monoprint)/

Overview: The Art Beyond Quarantine team has been deeply interested in Native and indigenous artists whose work speaks to the profound vulnerability of their communities to Covid-19. Although Feddersen's Echo 14 and Omak Lake 2 were created prior to the pandemic, they characterize a set of conditions that constitute sources of resilience as well as danger experienced on the Colville Reservation during the pandemic. Both works employ the ancient symbolism of petroglphs, for millennia inscribed on the rock formations of the Okanogan, while alluding to newer intrusions on the landscape including power lines and environmental degradation. 

Artist's Statement:  Echo speaks to the land and a personal awareness of our surroundings.
The array of icons and symbols creates a history, which incorporates past images, such as petroglyphs, with newer symbols like the bio-hazard signs or high voltage towers reflective of the world around us.

When returning home to the Okanogan, I noticed the increase of parking lots at the big box stores, high voltage towers standing on the bare ridges, and the prevalence of bio-hazard signs.  The frequently seen bio-hazard signage being a direct result of the increases in type II diabetes found in our tribal communities.  This overlay of icons and symbols mimics a petroglyph wall of various layers obscuring previous ones in an ongoing dialogue between the past and the present.

Joe Feddersen Omak Lake 2 monoprint 

Susan Platt:  Joe Feddersen lives in the center of Washington State on the Colville Reservation, in an area known as the Okanogan. Driving through there, I experienced it as a dry and desolate place. It is, in fact, historically a land rich with resources for hunting and fishing,and a long history of indigenous life. Because of its remoteness it was occupied by white settlers very late. White occupation was further encouraged by the irrigation provided by the Grand Coulee Dam which was originally intended to provide irrigation for small farms. Today, that land is owned by corporate giants.

Feddersen (who is a retired Professor of Art of The Evergreen State College), addresses the complexity of the relationships of native people and the environment. While Indigenous artists and activists are taking a lead in protesting environmental destruction and climate change, others are working for those companies or encouraging and inviting power companies onto their land for desperately needed jobs, jobs that often sicken them.

Feddersen is acutely aware of these conflicts. He worked for power companies earlier in his life, and you see in both these works the geometric abstract form referring to the giant electrical transmitting towers that dominate the landscape in North Central Washington State.  Those towers carry energy from the Grand Coulee Dam which destroyed many fishing grounds of the traditional Colville Indian Reservation during its construction and the subsequent flooding that followed.

The construction of the dam is narrated from the perspective of Feddersen's tribe in Lawney Reyes’ book B Street.How the building of Grand Coulee Dam Changed Forever the Lives of One Indian Family and Devastated an Entire Tribe. (University of Washington Press, 2008).

In both monoprints Echo 14 and Omak Lake 2 we see the overlap of contemporary electrical towers with disconnected images of people and horses based on ancient petroglyphs. There is a feeling of disintegration of the relationships of the past and present, of the chaos of contemporary life, but interspersed in Echo 14 are images of circles and connections with arrows, as perhaps representing a connection to the past and to community. In Omak Lake ( based on the area that Feddersen lives, Omak is a saline inland lake) the figure seems to reach out toward the ancient animal imagery. The looming  tower both enables and destroys life.
A sense of scattering and isolation in Echo Lake contrasts to the desire and will to overcome it,  in Omak Lake in the subtle spatial relationships and colors.

The background of Echo 14 is drawn from Feddersen's tour-de-force glass installation Charmed. 2013 that includs the same references to contemporary hybrid native culture. The installation hung across one long wall like a blanket.  Its fragility, as well as its intricate scale, confronted us with an overwhelming assertion of the state of the planet, of life and of native understanding of our current condition. 

 Charmed 2013 glass wall

Increasingly I am thinking about the intimate relationship between COVID-19 and environmental and biological degradation.  Capitalism's obsession with profit leads to shaping and destroying the natural world and our own bodies. Feddersen's work points to this connection. He mentions diabetes among the Indigenous people in his tribe.

It has been demonstrated that those suffering from poor health such as diabetes are more prone to die from the virus. Likewise air pollution and the degradation of lungs leads to death from the virus.

 Charmed, detail of glass wall

Mark Auslander;  The petroglyphs and pictographs that Feddersen incorporates and honors in his work speak to a profound understanding of the ancient circulation of life-giving energies and flows binding together ancestors and descendants, landscape sites, and persons and non-human beings, including those who manifest themselves in animal form. These symbolic forms do not simply represent other beings but directly access and channel sites of generative energy on the land which for untold generations have nurtured webs of life across the region,  binding persons and natural beings to one another in highly permeable, interdependent ways.

This imagery,  evoking permeable fields of energy and responsibility that move across persons, space, flora and fauna speak a deep ethos of inter-relatedness, which is both a source of strength and vulnerability, especially in the context of epidemics, introduced from far away, that have long afflicted Native communities in the region. A deep ethic of generosity, hospitality and mutual care is a beautiful and enriching aspects of life in Native worlds, yet this has meant that maintaining quarantine and social distance is difficult or even impossible at times; one simply cannot refuse care and shelter to any member of the community is distress, and caregivers are highly vulnerable to infection, and may become, in turn, sources of infection to others. As Susan notes, pre-existing condiions, including Type II Diabetes, hypertension and asthma may contribute to significant co-morbidities in the age of the virus.

The electrical towards in these works allude different forms of energy that now crisscross the landscape, bringing new risks in their wake.  Frontline electrical work is an important source of employment on the reservation, yet maintaining the power grid  during the Covid-19 pandemic means  that electrical workers often have to bunk together in extremely close quarters, in shared trailers, tent clusters, or motel rooms, and must at times travel long distances together confined in the cabs of electrical repair vehicles.

In Echo 14, appropriately, the central pylon at the image's central base looms in semi-anthropomorphic fashion over endangered persons and animals In turn, in  Omak Lake 2, Elk, Wild Horse, and a being that may be both human and turtle are interconnected not only through ancient webs of life and spiritual energy, but now through a giant electrical power pylon that dominates the entire image.  We do not know for certain the long term health impacts of high voltage transmission lines on human and animal life, but there is no doubt that massive hydroelectric projects on the Columbia and related rivers have profoundly altered regional ecosystems.  Dams interrupt life giving fish migration routes, flooding has submerged ancient hunting grounds and settlement sites, and inundated ancient petroglyph and pictograph that served as semi-permeable boundaries between invisible and visible worlds.  The power tower that dominates the image might even be regarded as the site of a latter day crucifixion, upon which the  Okanogan's ancient residents are subjected to continuing regimes of suffering. A deep openness to the forces of the universe, so brilliantly evoked in the petroglyph tradition, now signals vulnerability to potentially devastating infection, dangerously compounded by the forms of structural violence that have long stalked this stunning landscape.