Artist, Kay WalkingStick: My name is Kay WalkingStick, and in Cherokee that’s Adolanvsdi. The sculpture is called Tears.
It’s a model of a funerary scaffold. Native people who migrated during different seasons or to different hunting grounds had funerary scaffolds, where their remains were burned. They were returning to nature, but they were also rising up in smoke, so that they were presented to the universe.
I made the piece in the period that Columbus was being celebrated in the United States. And I can’t possibly celebrate Columbus, remembering what that invasion, you’d have to call it, really brought about. There was an absolute decimation of the native people in this country. In 1492, we were 20 million. Now, we are 2 million.
The bundle is meant to look like a figure, a human. Within the bundle is a corn husk, and some turquoise, and some lithic stones. The black is cow hide. The brown is deer hide. And the leather was from a shirt that I made my first husband. He died young, and I think part of Tears was also my own grief. This is about native people and native grief, but also my own personal grief.