[soothing music]
- I see glass as a transformational medium.
It's transforming from a liquid to a solid.
There's this feeling about the material
that is unlike any other material,
and the effect that you can get with it is pretty remarkable.
I'm a Tlingit tribal member,
which is from the southeast of Alaska,
and I see myself as a bit of an ambassador of glass
to the Indigenous community.
Because it is my cultural background,
I wanted to have a very distinctive Tlingit style.
That way, I'm sort of continuing the tradition.
You know, there are people that came before me
and pioneered this whole system of design and object,
and there will be people that are after me too, you know.
I'm just the guy that's doing it today.
A lot of the materials that we use for the traditional arts
are becoming increasingly rare, like, you know,
the big cedar trees for a totem pole or a canoe.
So in my own way, I'm trying to introduce
this new material to the Native culture.
The transformation theme is prominent
in the Northwest Coast art.
I mean, the Raven often transforms
into different characters,
and so I like playing with those themes.
The Raven story that I'm working on
is "Raven and the Box of Daylight,"
and I'm thinking of using glass as elements
to tell the story, and I'm thinking of having it
sort of like a theatrical installation
is the way I'm describing it.
I mean, to experience it as in its purity
as much as we can without inundating them
with lots of information along the way.
- My name is Miranda Belarde-Lewis.
I am Zuni and Tlingit, and I'm an independent curator
in the Seattle area.
Raven and the Box of Daylight is an exhibition coming up
at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma.
We are telling the iconic Tlingit story
of Raven freeing the daylight for us all.
Preston is illustrating this story in glass,
and I'm curating it.
- Each object will help to shape the story,
and it will also be enhanced by video projecting onto glass
and creating sort of a backdrop.
I wanted to create this atmosphere
of the Northwest Coast
where there's mist rising out of the trees.
It would transform the viewer into another place.
The story of Raven.
It was the beginning of time.
The world was in darkness,
and Raven encountered the fishermen of the night
at the head of the Nass River,
and he asked, "Where is the daylight?"
and the fishermen tell him of this old man
that is keeping these objects, the daylight,
the Sun and the Moon and the stars, in his clan house.
- So Raven found out that the daughter of the man
drank from a stream every morning,
and he changed himself into a piece of dirt
because Raven is a trickster and he's a shapeshifter.
And he fell into the water that she was drinking from.
Her servant saw the dirt and they threw him out.
- So Raven has to reformulate his plan, and the next day,
he transforms himself into a hemlock needle
and floats down the river.
And this time, when he gets scooped up, she doesn't notice,
and so she swallows this hemlock needle.
- Just as in many other stories around the world,
there was an immaculate conception
because the result of her drinking Raven
was she became pregnant.
[blowtorches hissing]
- So the salmon is gonna play a part sort of like stagecraft.
I'll have like a glass on the ground
that sort of looks like the river,
and then the salmon are gonna be kind of floating above the top.
- The salmon's a little more difficult
just because it's an off-center thing that's, you know,
there's a lot of weight on one side,
a little bit asymmetrical.
It looks much easier than it really is, you know.
You can't put it down, with glass.
Once we start, we have to finish it.
- Miranda: Native people are the best storytellers in the world
because our stories carry knowledge,
and that knowledge was needed to survive
in a particular environment.
There was a Apache philosopher by the name of Viola Cordova.
One of her main points is this idea of bounded space.
Bounded space is the natural territory
that is defined by rivers, mountains, deserts, forests,
or oceans, and everything within that bounded space,
you have a relationship with.
The animals, the plants, the people,
your relationship with that space determines your language.
It determines your spirituality,
it determines your concept of self,
and it determines your aesthetics.
You're going to make what you surround yourself with.
- So this child was born,
and the old medicine woman notices
that this child is very precocious
and the eyes are always darting around,
and she says, "He has Raven's eyes."
[Sean whistles] - Okay.
- Preston: He asks to see this box
that is up on this little area.
They bring it down and he starts to play with it.
He opens it up and it becomes the box
that contains the stars, and so he takes the stars
and he tosses them up through the smoke hole,
and that's how the stars get into the sky.
- Miranda: So he was given the box with the Moon in it
to help comfort him, to show forgiveness,
and he opened it and the Moon went out
through the smoke hole into the sky.
- Today I started the piece,
which was the stuffing of the cup,
applying all the powder, and then I hand it to Preston.
As it gets larger, it gets hotter.
It's just more to handle.
You put that weight on the end of a five-foot pipe
and then get it hot, and so the more you gather,
the more it takes to actually control it.
Preston's work, one piece of his work
is merely like one line in a story.
It's the whole thing that he does.
It's his culture, it's what he's communicating,
what he's trying to say, the piece itself.
- Preston: Every object that was created
in the Tlingit community was made from a natural element.
The ladles were created from mountain goat horn.
The cedar bark was harvested to create basketry.
You know, the natural pigments that are used
on the wooden boxes.
One thing that is really fascinating is the whole science
of creating these objects.
- There's a term called
traditional ecological knowledge.
And it usually has to do with gathering practices
of Native people, either for medicine or for food.
In the Northwest Coast, we have the example of cedar bark.
When you gather cedar bark from a tree,
if the tree is gonna remain standing,
you can only take a section
about a third of the circumference of the tree.
That way, the tree can heal itself and keep on growing.
Now, that is generations of knowledge right there
that relates to this idea
of traditional ecological knowledge,
which goes back to the idea of bounded space
and having this relationship,
a long-standing relationship with the plants in your space.
The ecological knowledge
is embodied in many different pieces of Native art.
That relationship with the landscape
is what is inspiration for the art.
- Preston: Of course, a few days later is the final box.
So the boy fusses and cries and screams to get his way,
and the daughter goes to the old man and says,
"Father, is there anything more important than your grandson?"
And he says, "Yeah, okay, you're right."
So he puts the box down in front of him
and instructs him not to open up the box.
Of course, he opens up the box, he takes the Sun,
and he flies through the smoke hole in the house
and he places it in the sky and breaks daylight on the world.
And the people that were startled,
some of them ran off into the forest
and became the animals of the forest,
some of them dove into to the water and became the sea life,
some of them took off into the sky and became the birds.
Then the people that remained where they are
became the Tlingit.
- The green is a rubber tape and you can draw on it,
and then I'll cut it out and then it'll be sandblasted.
Everything that I cut and I remove,
the color will come off of that,
and wherever the tape is, the color will stay.
Whatever I cut is how Preston's designs
are gonna come out in the end,
so I wannna stay true to his design
and his line and keep it looking like his hand.
- The sandblasting process, as far as Preston's work goes,
it's the last step of a kind of interdependent process,
and each step can only be as good as the last step.
So Brit's cutting can only be as clear
as Preston's lines were for her,
and my sandblasting is only gonna as good as the cutting.
On the Raven, the black comes off
to reveal red underneath.
- At that point, Raven decided that he was done being a human,
and he changed back into the Raven form.
And back in those times, Raven was a white being
to mark his supernatural status.
The man was so angry at being tricked by Raven
that he held him by his feet over the fire.
And the smoke from the fire turned Raven black,
and that's how we know him today.
So we have Raven to thank
for releasing the daylight into the world,
but he suffered and is forever marked for doing so.
- Maybe some elements of this story
being spoken in Tlingit,
you know, throughout the soundscape, you know,
so that that actually subliminally,
you'd be getting this story, but you don't realize it.
The way that I think about working with the cultural arts,
it becomes a bit of a responsibility
to kind of shepherd this ability and this knowledge
and share it with a broader audience.
All of the symbolism that I work with
has some kind of connection to nature,
so it's something that I'm constantly reflecting on
in terms of the mythology and the symbolism
and how to bring those into a new way of looking at them.
[gentle flute music]