Tanis S'eiltin: Powerful Women Prevail!

Tanis S'eiltin  Luk nax adi  Kwáan
 6’ high by 36” in diameter

Industrial Marino felt, metal grommets,
metal snaps, glass beads, mother of pearl beads,
zippers, nylon braiding collection of the artist

Commentaries by Susan Platt and Mark Auslander

Susan Platt: Tanis S'eiltin's  Luk nax adi  Kwáan(Tlingit, Coho Clan, Raven Moiety) celebrates powerful women prevailing. In this COVID 19 era  her recently completed coat suggests protection, resistance, pride, and strength, all qualities that we need in our present moment.

Based on the 10,000 year perspective as a native from Alaska, Tanis creates multi media installations, prints and wearable art, while respecting and incorporating some of the media of the community based art of her heritage.   She addresses the survival of culture in the midst of great stress, as experienced in the past and present by the Tlingit. That is exactly our challenge today. 

Much more powerful than our simple face masks, Tanis presents a protective garment that contains the legacies of ancient cultures and survival in spite of everything. That is the message that she gives us in her work. 

Today, with the COVID 19 virus we all see laid bare how the obsession with profit has enabled the spread of the epidemic in our privatized health care system, decimating our communities, our cultures, and our society. We need not only protection, but hope.  

Tanis Statement 1

The coat references many cultural aspects, past and present. Most importantly it represents the desire to gather and instill cultural wealth and in doing so, pay homage to our (Tlingit) social structure which is matrilineal. Its presence  pays homage to my mother and great grandmother hence the octopus design on the back of the ruff or collar and teal strip of felt on one of the cuffs.   . . . The villages of  my ancestors, Klukwan and Dry Bay, are in mind and present throughout the creative process. Their cultural wealth is in strong contrast to our contemporary lives that are quite vacant. The coat . . .is heavy weighing approximately 18 pounds – which is another indicator of cultural wealth as is evidenced in customary regalia.

Specifically this aspect of weight is present in Chilkat Robes such as the ones my mother created prior to her passing in 1995. Her name is Maria Ackerman Miller.

This coat is in honor of her, as well as all those elders and others who have passed and are passing in our present moment of stress.  

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Tanis Statement 2  in reply to my query " Could your statement  "it represents the desire to gather and instill cultural wealth" be thought of in terms of preserving ( gathering)?"

"I have a slight aversion to the term “preserving” as it implies “objectivity” or stillness, and the act of rendering an idea or object stagnant, perhaps petrified within an anthropological manuscript or within a glass case.  In our Tlingit culture, concepts regarding  at.oow   such as my coat or masks for instance, are equated as being alive, a “living entity”  a term which is very difficult to translate into English. 

And although we know that such items are inanimate they are bearers of our histories, and vehicles that propel us into the future be that a worldly or cosmic existence. . .it instills a  . . .way of knowing and represents as well a vehicle of pride, perseverance and continuance. 

An analogy can be made with regard to metal armour in a castle, its presence marks a victory over adversaries, and for us, a victory may be one of survival beyond a pandemic (think Spanish flu of 1918), or victory on many fronts beyond political ignorance."

Some People of the Tide: Raven, Coho, Octopus 18” L X 9” W X 3” H
Industrial Marino Felt, metal grommets, glass beads, thread, leather

"This bib is also made of industrial felt and is embellished with a beaded abstract clan symbol of a wave. This embellishment references our matrilineal clan know as Luk nax adi, or Coho

Mark Auslander: In reference to the indigenous Kayapo people of Central Brazil, anthropologist Terry Turner spoke of human-created coverings (including body paint, adornment and clothing) as "the social skin":  in diverse cultural orders, the dynamic threshold between a person and the wider world is a profoundly meaningful space, which can both represent and performatively transform the relationships between self, community, and the invisible forces of the universe.  The person may be enhanced and extended across varied categories of existence through adornment, even to the point of communing or exchanging with those who are no longer physically alive, but who become co present with the living through value objects that may themselves, as the artists, be experienced as living beings.

In this instance,  Tanis S'eiltin's beautiful full body size object of bodily enclosure and adornment is both protective and connective, linking her to a line of women, past, present, and future, through principles of matrilineal descent.  At a time of social and environmental crisis, this substantial covering presumably encloses the artist and other women of the clan or community within the protective embrace of fore-mothers , binding the implied wearer to those who are not conventionally visible but yet may continue to sit and walk with her.  One senses, perhaps, that the work, now endowed with a  kind of life itself, helps enable the artist-wearer to take on the very shape or essence of the human and animal persons whose forms are embodied here.

Given the imagery of enclosing, binding, and transformation I am particularly fascinated by the octopus motifs on the ruff and a cuff extension, and on the bib that honors the peoples of the tide--Raven, Coho, and Octopus.  On the back of the ruff, a single octopus seems to be propelling itself through the water; on the bib we may behold a great school of octopi.  Speculatively, the octopus, a being who can move between different media, underwater and clinging to rocks above the surface, may for Tlingit peoples be evocative of powers to move across key cosmological thresholds. As it happens, a  beautiful shaman's head ornament held in the American Museum of Natural History is composed of the figures of a land otter and an octopus' tentacles; speculatively perhaps this imagery signals and concentrates the shaman's ability to move across, and bind together, the varied planes of existence.  In turn, a famous Tlingit shamanic mask at the Metropolitan Museum of Art depicts the shaman's mouth as that of the octopus, evocative of Octopus' ability to change shape and color in pursuit of prey.

At the current moment, as the Covid-19 pandemic poses particular urgent challenges for Native and indigenous communities on the Northwest Coast and elsewhere, it is deeply moving to see these graceful works of art, evoking the power of waves,  the life-sustaining rhythms of the tide, and the shape-shifting beings, manifesting  themselves in animal form,  who dwell along these coastal thresholds.  The novel coronavirus, after all, imposes soul-crushing separation and alienation in the communities that it threatens, just as it throws out of balance the normal integration of the body's own organs and systems.  One senses, in the powerful curves of these Tanis S'eiltin's stunning and gracefully balanced objects, a deliberative in-gathering of energy,  a bringing together of water and of breath, that might sustain the community though this and future storms.