Denise Sullivan

Author, Journalist, Culture Worker

September 20, 2018 • 7:19 pm 0

Take Down The Statues

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All around the country, bronze statues are coming down, thanks to a movement started in the South in 2015 following the church shooting in Charleston. A city, a whole region, holding on to a vision of the past that was not very honorable in the first place is no way to acknowledge true history or let the generations of people who were harmed by that history heal; instead these megaton renderings glorify injustice and beget more violence. A nation in the middle of a prolonged racial crisis can no longer continue to inflict harm on its citizens and yet, these statues are a daily reminder of how twisted, inaccurate, and dated our history has become.  It’s time for a change.

The movement to unpack and teach a more accurate version of our state’s history has finally reached the far west, where we of course are supposed to understand and know better (yet by and large, I’m sad to report, there are those who still don’t get it).  Here in San Francisco last week, Native American activists and their allies achieved a victory that was 30 years in the making:  The rendering of a piece called Early Days depicting a Spanish conquistador and a Franciscan missionary lording over a Plains Indian (who by the way, was not from this region), was finally removed at the break of dawn following a contentious hearing process. I talked about statuary and other civic concerns with San Francisco’s poet laureate, Kim Shuck, a member of the Cherokee nation as well as a Polish American and a native to San Francisco.  She’s an educator with a masters in fine art and knows well the precedents for public art display; as a Native American, a person of conscience, and a mother, she was personally aggrieved by the sight of the statue as she moved in and out of the public library, her primary place of work as our city’s poet laureate.  And we talked more in-depth about the battle to topple the statue and about her San Francisco life.  I hope you’ll read on and link to this week’s edition of my San Francisco Examiner column, S.F. Lives: READ NOW

Filed under: Arts and Culture, California, Poetry, racism, Tales of the Gentrification City, , , , , , , , ,

August 21, 2017 • 5:49 am 0

Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World Is A Revelatory New Documentary

Forget everything you think you know or have been told about the birth of the blues and the histories of jazz and rock ‘n’ roll: Rumble – The Indians Who Rocked The World has a different story to tell and by the sound of it, much of what’s been handed down to us about North American music and its origins has been wrong.
The sound of the American South – the rush of its waters, the song of the bird, the crack of thunder and the rain that follows – informs the sound of Native American music, the root of all other American forms.

Take the story of the Mississippi Delta’s Charley Patton, widely acknowledged to be the father of the country blues. An existing photograph of him reveals he is likely a man of mixed race origins, though without clear proof, historians have remained inconclusive in their findings. Rumble reveals through interviews, research, and recordings, that Patton’s blood ties are to the Chocktaw nation and moreover, his connection to Native American music contributed to the rhythmic and vocal patterns of what we know as country blues. In the film, musician Pura Fé (Tuscarora) a/b’s his technique with a turntable and her voice: “That’s Indian music with a guitar,” she says. Calling on a kind of pre-blues origin of his sound, the assembled scholars and musicians, including modern day bluesmen Corey Harris and Alvin Youngblood Hart, go into deeper explanation of Patton’s relationship to Dockery Plantation, the setting where he developed a showstopping style living among Black, Choctaw, and European farmworkers. He went on to pass on what he knew to other area musicians like Son House and visiting players like the young Roebuck Staples and Chester Burnette (who of course became Howlin’ Wolf). So why is Patton’s history generally painted so sketchily in the history books? READ THE ANSWER & THE ENTIRE ARTICLE in Down With Tyranny!

Filed under: Arts and Culture, film, , , , , , , ,

August 17, 2017 • 8:08 pm 0

Mavis Staples & Buffy Sainte-Marie: Over 100 Years of Singing Strong

Two American icons of freedom singing, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Mavis Staples, are out on the road entertaining this summer, though don’t expect them to stay quiet on matters of national and international interest.  This pair were on the front line of the Civil Rights Movement and have been strong presences for peace in our time, as well in the movements for African American equality, women’s rights, Native American sovereignty,  religious freedom, and environmental healing.  Between them, they have over 100 years of speaking truth to power in a song.  Read all about them in my monthly column for Tourworthy.

Filed under: anti-war, column, Women's rights, , , ,

June 21, 2017 • 3:04 pm 0

Congratulations Kim Shuck

Kim Shuck was named the new Poet Laureate of San Francisco today. Author of several collections of poetry, editor of anthologies and contributor to countless publications and journals, Kim is part Cherokee, part Polish, and is a fifth generation San Franciscan currently living in the Castro District.

“I’m delighted and flattered and ready to get on with the job,” she told me this morning upon the announcement of her post. “It’s not about me as much as it is about poetry and supporting poetry in the City.”

A lifelong reader, educator, lover of San Francisco’s libraries, its poetry, and writing history, I know Kim best as the curator of the Gears Turning Poetry Series which started at Modern Times Bookstore Collective in early 2015 and ran until the store’s closing at the end of 2016 (Gears Turning continues at Adobe Bookshop). Thanks to her efforts, her monthly reading series hosted a truly diverse, intellectually gifted, and emotionally-deep line-up of Native American readers and San Francisco poets, from the Mission to North Beach: She introduced voices that are not always featured at the usual bookstore readings and helped to restore a sense of normalcy to a bookstore that was having trouble surviving the new San Francisco.  She will be publishing a book of collected works by the poets in the series soon.

Kim’s own poems explore life’s often ineffable and sometimes more tangible mysteries, the light and the dark of them. The work is at once lyrical, traditional, and new. There is joy and grief and hope to be found in the collections of her poems, Clouds Running In, Rabbit Stories, Smuggling Cherokee, and the chapbook, Sidewalk Ndn. She is also an awarding-winning bead work artist.

Kim steps into the poet laureate position where Alejandro Muguía leaves it:  Both Alejando and Kim identify as poets of the People and of the Mission District, though they certainly have their respective histories and ties to San Francisco’s other poetry district, North Beach.  But what I really wish to acknowledge here is their tireless (a cliché, but true) efforts to raise the Mission’s profile as a literary destination in itself and for never saying no when called upon to read, present, or otherwise boost poetry in the neighborhood and beyond it.

A side note: Yesterday’s NPR program Fresh Air featured an interview with Native American writer, Sherman Alexie who noted there were fewer Indian voices at work than when he started publishing. He joked he and Louise Erdich hoped for a Native American writing renaissance and I immediately thought wait: What about the recent poetry prize awarded to Joy Harjo? What about Kim Shuck? Today’s news confirms that Native voices, and all the poets of San Francisco, past, present, and future, will be well-tended to in the hands of our seventh poet laureate. Congratulations to her.

 

 

Filed under: Book news, Books, California, Poetry, Women's issues, , ,

October 12, 2015 • 11:18 am 0

Indigenous Musicial Sheroes: Buffy Sainte-Marie and Debora Iyall

Buffy Sainte-Marie is one of the central figures in Keep on Pushing: As unique musically as she is direct lyrically, Sainte-Marie was born on the Piapot Cree Indian reservation in Saskatchewan and adopted by a family in Maine. She says that as a child she was artistic innately, as well by necessity. Befriended by a Narragansett couple who lived near her family in Maine, it was from them she learned about cultural handcrafts and kindness. “They didn’t sit around and give me Indian lessons,” she said, “But on the other hand, they didn’t chase me away.”  As a young student, Sainte-Marie was drawn to philosophy and religion, while she simultaneously developed her musical side, as a folk performer. Her unique vibrato and innovative song style are what first drew me to finding out more about her story; what I found, moved me to the core, from the volume of hardship and turmoil she described, to her refusal to study war, which landed her among Nixon’s enemies.  “I don’t think many people, even today, understand how much blacklisting has gone on of artists in the record business,” she says.  In the face of the hassles, Sainte-Marie continued to innovate, as an electronic musician as well as a computer-based visual artist. Committed to teaching, to passing on what was given freely to her as well as what she fought to achieve, Sainte-Marie’s work still offers a pointed critique of war, greed, injustice and the anti-people policies that impact indigenous people all over this land.

Debora Iyall is one of the artists  directly descended from Sainte-Marie’s example of native creativity:  A singer, a songwriter, a poet, and a visual artist, Iyall’s story also unfolds throughout Keep on Pushing, beginning with her time as a teenager during the Indians of All Tribes’ Occupation of Alcatraz.  Her punk-rooted style bears little resemblance to Sainte-Marie’s folk roots (Iyall was most influenced by Patti Smith), but a close connection to arts education and her roots in the Cowlitz tribe made her a unique presence in San Francisco art-punk band, Romeo Void. Iyall had the guidance of elders—her mother and the Natives she met at pow-wows and on Alcatraz—who supported her creative discoveries. “I felt like I had these little nuggets of information or culture to hang on to,” she said.  Today, Iyall exudes confidence in her work as a performer and visual artist and is also a teacher and advocate, for artists of all colors and dimensions.

I was honored and humbled to have been allowed access to the lives of both Debora Iyall and Buffy Sainte-Marie—two women whose works have uplifted and inspired, not only their brothers and sisters native to the Americas, but their fellow artists and anyone who’s ever been broke or hungry, tired, or cast aside, and helped them to keep on keeping on: Their complete stories are told in Keep on Pushing.

Filed under: anti-war, Arts and Culture, Folk, Punk, Women's rights, , , , ,

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