Tulalips shape cultural revival

Out of the massive cedar log emerge figures from ancient myth.

Man and bear play a game with two bones — one marked, one unmarked — to determine who will rule the animal kingdom. The winner, man, takes shape at the top of the log, his wide eyes seeming to gaze into both the natural and the spirit worlds.

Emerging simultaneously, in this former marine-repair shop on the Tulalip Reservation, is a long-held vision of a place where Tulalip carvers and other crafts people can create and pass on their traditional arts.

In preparation for their $125 million hotel set to open in June 2008, the Tulalips over the past few months have opened an art studio and employed several master carvers as well as university-trained artists and young tribal members who want to learn traditional crafts.

When the four-star hotel is completed, it will feature $1 million in artwork, including six story poles at different entryways in the lobby, carved paddles and door pulls, woven bed throws, etched glass and native-themed prints.

"This is what I dreamed of all my life," said Bernie Gobin, 77, a Tulalip Tribes elder and master carver who visits the tribe's art studio in his wheelchair several times a week.

The revival of traditional arts among the Tulalips is part of a regional resurgence of Coast Salish art and artists that parallels the growth in tribal political and economic power in the past decade.

Near Poulsbo, the Suquamish are building a new museum. The Skokomish on Hood Canal now have native-owned galleries so they don't have to rely on nonnative art dealers. Northwest of Bellingham, the Lummi House of Tears carving studio was created 15 years ago at the request of elder carvers who feared their art would be lost.

Whether it's traditional song, dances, basket and fabric weaving, or canoes and bent-wood boxes, "all these artistic endeavors of the Salish people are being preserved and revitalized," said Michael Pavel, a Suquamish painter and carver.

"Makah, Nisqually, Puyallup, Lummi," he said, ticking off the names of tribes that have in the past decade developed and supported talented artists who are now fusing traditional forms with contemporary materials and design.

Add to the list, he said, the Tulalips.

As he wheels his chair around the 4-foot-wide cedar poles, Gobin remembers learning to carve from his father. As a young married man, he took up the tools in winter, when he wasn't working as a commercial fisherman. He cleared a space for himself and his projects in the family kitchen.

He fashioned bent-wood boxes, canoe paddles and ceremonial bowls, items to be given as gifts or passed on to family members. As he worked, he said, he was conscious of preserving tribal culture.

"I wanted to carve so my kids wouldn't have to go to a museum and see it through glass. This was a part of our lives."

Heritage on the brink

Coast Salish art was nearly wiped out by the contact with whites in the 19th century, said Barbara Brotherton, curator of Native American art for the Seattle Art Museum.

More remote tribes in British Columbia and Alaska, such as the Haida and Tlingit, were protected much longer from displacement and government suppression. It is those northern tribes, with their vivid, stylized animal spirits on masks and totems, that many people think of when they picture Northwest Indian art.

By contrast, Brotherton said, Coast Salish art was much less well-known and preserved. The Puget Sound tribes didn't have the clan structure that identified itself with totems. Their art was used in everyday activities and wasn't meant for public display.

"It didn't lend itself to being translated into tourist art," she said.

The combination of largely private art forms with the loss of ancestral homes meant that many of the Salish's traditional art forms began to die out. Children were sent to boarding schools and forbidden to speak their native language. Grandparents could no longer communicate with the young. Traditional ceremonies, for which some of the best art was created, were banned.

"A lot of culture went underground. Only the old people remembered," Gobin said.

As the Tulalips' economic fortunes grew with their commercial development along Interstate 5 near Marysville, members began looking for ways to support tribal artists.

Bernie Gobin's son Steve Gobin, the deputy general manager of Quil Ceda Village, two years ago converted a storefront in a corner of the Village into a gallery space. He solicited work from tribal artists and sent out promotional materials, but in the first month only four customers wandered in.

Gobin abandoned that effort but continued to search for a way to promote tribal artists. He got support from other tribal members after the new casino opened in 2003. Although the designers placed a leaping orca out front and suspended some canoes from the ceiling inside, they weren't authentic native artwork and they weren't made by anyone in the tribe.

As plans for the new hotel began to take shape, Gobin said many tribal members insisted that their own artists have a place in the project.

For Steve Gobin, who grew up watching his father carve, the art studio is both a tribute and a culmination of a decadelong effort by the Tulalips at reclamation. Tribal historians began to interview surviving elders and to research traditional tools and the plants used to make Salish paints.

Elders help arts survive

They talked to the handful of remaining women weavers and studied some of the carved artifacts elders had wrapped in paper and stuck in the back of drawers, beautiful objects for everyday use that included combs, needles to mend fishing nets and spindle wheels.

The art studio, he said, "wasn't just about learning to carve, it was about re-educating ourselves about who we were as a people. We're reviving a portion of our culture that was slowly being lost."

Steve Gobin is a little apologetic about all the people named Gobin employed in the art studio. There's his brother, Joe, who had previously created poles with some of the region's celebrated carvers. There's his son, Steve Gobin Jr., who is one of the studio apprentices.

His cousin, Mike Gobin, administers the studio, keeping the artists on task and on schedule. All of the art must be completed by January for installation in the hotel. According to the tight timeline, the artists have two months each to carve three pairs of poles.

Joe Gobin, 51, like his father, Bernie, was a commercial fisherman who carved in the off-season. He started as a "little, tiny guy," with some soap and a butter knife. His grandmother offered pointers. As a boy, he joined other tribal children who spent summer days learning about traditional culture from Harriet Shelton Dover, daughter of Snohomish Chief William Shelton.

"Once a week, we'd learn songs and dances."

The group of young people was the first to dance when the traditional longhouse on Tulalip Bay was rebuilt in the 1970s. When tribal elders urged recreating the canoe journey their ancestors used to make each year along Puget Sound, Joe Gobin was drafted in 1988, along with noted carver Jerry Jones, to carve the tribe's first canoe of modern times.

The spirit of revival extended to basket weaving, to the paddles used in traditional dances and to making their own ceremonial regalia, Joe Gobin said. In the art studio, he teaches the younger artists how to make adz handles from maple branches and cowhide. The finished tools are themselves works of art, without knots or glue or bolts of any kind.

Joe Gobin also designed the carpeting for the hotel banquet-room entryway. He has created several prints for the hotel guest rooms. While other artists in the studio talk about the legends of transformations between the spirit and human worlds, Gobin talks about his experiences fishing and living near the water.

"The eagle is always around when we're on the water. Whenever we have any tribal ceremonies, the eagle is always sitting in a tree. It has a lot of meaning to our people."

The second pole currently being carved in the Tulalip studio is the work of James Madison, 33, Joe's nephew, who earned an art degree from the University of Washington in 2000. On his story pole, Madison combines traditional animal figures with contemporary techniques such as bronze casting and fused glass.

He recalls how Picasso's painting was influenced by African art and said he's always looking for ways to combine European techniques with traditional native forms. But he said his goal is to teach young tribal members and nonnatives "who we are and the importance to us of both today's world and the spirit world.

Madison, who also designed carpeting and native prints for the hotel, said, "Joe and I could have done all the artwork ourselves, but that's not the point. We want to help train young artists, to help them see that they can be the creators and guardians of our culture."

Madison's pole is topped by a fierce, wise eagle in profile. At its base is a bear with his powerful arms embracing a human woman, his wife.

"It isn't literal, 'Hey, I married a bear,' " Madison said. "We have a human form and a spirit form. In the beginning, both the animals and people could talk the same language."

Across the room, Joe Gobin leans over his roughed-in story pole, one of his homemade adzes in his hand. He notes the contrast between the new art studio, large enough for the massive poles, with its heat and good lighting, and his experience carving the ceremonial canoe in 1988.

He completed that project under a tin roof in a structure with tarp sides, on a lot next to the Tulalip Arby's, where the men shivered through the winter.

He waves to the high roofs protecting him now.

"To have a job like this, to practice what I've wanted to do all my life, what I was trained to do, it's a dream," he said.

Lynn Thompson: 425-745-7807 or lthompson@seattletimes.com