Waterbird's Nest: Culture by Momaday at the Rasmuson Theater

Dale Auger

Dale Auger: On Art, Blood and Kindred Spirits
by Terri Mason

Defining Dale Auger in one sentence is akin to releasing the colours of a diamond in one cut. It can’t be done. It’s the many facets that release a diamond’s true brilliance, as it is the many facets of Auger’s life, education, ancestry, experiences and beliefs that have shaped and polished his work into the internationally acclaimed and collected artist that he is today.

Born a Sakaw Cree from the Bigstone Cree Nation in northern Alberta, Auger’s education began as a young boy when his mother would take him to be with the elders. “I used to say to myself, ‘Why is she leaving me with these old people?’ – but today I see the reason; I was being taught in the old way.”

Auger’s respect for traditional teachings led him on a journey to study art, opening the door to a doctorate in education. He is a talented playwright, speaker and visual artist whose vividly coloured acrylics have captured the attention of collectors that reads like an international ‘Who’s Who’ spanning English to Hollywood royalty. The essence of his work is communication, and now Dr. Auger has come full circle, interpreting the life of his culture – from the everyday to the sacred - through the cross-cultural medium of art.

Read the rest here:

http://www.daleauger.com/printversionbio.cfm

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Culture by Momaday at the Rasmuson Theater

By: Jerry Reynolds

WASHINGTON - Writing and language are not identical. The tradition of oral storytelling is much more ancient than writing, and author N. Scott Momaday may well be onto something when he says, ''Writing gives us a sense of false security. ... Everything in the oral tradition is just one generation away from extinction.''

By extension, everything in the written tradition could also be at risk in a generation; but cultures based on writing, which is most of them these days, don't see beyond the illusion of durability provided by material pages, not even as volumes of writing vaporize daily in cyberspace.

It's a viewpoint, apparently Momaday's own. But he would be a more convincing advocate of these and other positions if he were not a past master of both writing and public reading, as he proved again Nov. 28 at the National Museum of the American Indian's Rasmuson Theater. To hear him was to suspect that the divide between oral and written storytelling is no more vast than that between the arts and sciences - people, special people perhaps, will always bridge it; and other people, perhaps no less special, will always possess the aptitude to appreciate and embrace their achievement.

And so with Momaday, the great and greatly honored writer (Pulitzer Prize for ''House Made of Dawn,'' National Medal for the Arts, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of Italy's highest literary award, poet laureate of Oklahoma in the state's centennial year) who reads from manufactured pages in a deep-pitched, authoritative yet friendly voice that doesn't know the meaning of off-balance or unnatural or out-of-key, as if born for the improvisational stage. (Another of Momaday's views is that live theater - calling all Native-language Shakespearians: he mentioned ''Hamlet'' - is contemporary culture's nearest approximation to oral storytelling.) He closed with an oral reading of surpassing satisfaction for the audience, but it was based on a piece of his writing that is surely in the first rank of artful prose.

There's more here: http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096416426