Wesaw’s Song of Life: Indigenous Resistance through Land, Water, and Air

Sophia Zhang

Journalism, Psychology, and English Literature

Jason Wesaw is a lifelong “maker.”^[1] His artistic career began at 14 when he fashioned a hollow log he found in the woods into a drum. He is open to all disciplines: drum-making, ceramics, photography, textiles, painting, music, work on paper, or multimedia installations. Wesaw is a member of the Pokagon Potawatomi Nation, in southwestern Michigan (Turtle Clan), where he makes art, sustaining and promoting cultural practices across the Great Lakes.^[2] Wesaw roots his projects in an acknowledgment of land and spirit.

Cycles are a fundamental part of traditional Potawatomi life, grounded in the ubiquitous movements of the seasons. Wesaw says these “age-old patterns” are the basis for most of his work, where he urges viewers to consider their relationship with place and a spirit of the land that translates into art. His “works play off of each other, creating a language that stretches the mediums into a complimentary visual aesthetic.” ^[3] Wesaw’s artistic approach is typically minimalist and abstract, requiring a more active role in interpretation from viewers while providing for a multiplicity of meanings. He does not limit himself to the constraints of fixed materiality or temporality, cutting through paper as if it were clay or drawing in sand as if it were paper. The particles making up paper will or have already found their way into the sand at some point in time. “Our society needs to move from this idea of one endless linear timeline,” Wesaw says to Bodwé, a tribally-owned group of companies seeking to grow the economy and legacy of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi. “Our life cycle is a circle where we live in the present with knowledge of the past and an eye to the future.”^[4]

Breath of Life: The First Song was first created as part of Wesaw’s solo exhibition for the South Bend Museum of Art called “On the Banks, Above.” The show celebrated his ancestral relationship with the Senawajewa Zibé, or the St. Joseph River, a body of water that winds through the center of present-day Michigan and Indiana. In the Potawatomi creation story, the original people of the St. Joseph River Valley emerged on its banks. They celebrated the power and abundance of the river, flowing through the waterways of their villages and lives.^[5] In the exhibit, Wesaw’s work shared with the other art a sense of flowing, like water. Situated in its new temporary home at the Block Museum, “Breath of Life: The First Song” gains yet another context. It weaves through time, space, people, ideas.

Wesaw’s work consists of 58 shakers, suspended handles up from the ceiling with translucent string as if floating in mid-air. Some are made from vintage cans, others from turtle shells and elk hide. They are spaced out various distances apart in a wide, horizontal orientation. The shadows of the shakers form a landscape of their own, the white wall opposite the exhibit entrance as the canvas. If the average person were to walk underneath the installation, the shakers would dangle just over a meter above their head.

Made from Calumet baking powder cans in varying degrees of wear, the can shakers are a vivid red with a stereotypical Indigenous chief plastered on the front. The Calumet Baking Powder Company, under Kraft Inc., made its profit on the mythicization and appropriation of Indigenous culture; a calumet itself is a ceremonial pipe often used to make peace.^[6] Yet the exploitation of the Indigenous community was not merely a privatized matter. Many treaties the U.S. government signed with Native nations after displacement, involved providing sustenance or access to agricultural lands. In the 1832 treaty with the Sauk and Fox Tribes, the government promised “articles of subsistence,” which they honored only nominally. ^[7] The rations distributed to tribes since the 1800s were often unhealthy and rotten, primarily consisting of flour, lard, wheat, and baking powder—a sure departure from the diet of protein and fresh produce off the land. The commodity distribution gave rise to a wave of diabetes and obesity; the government distribution created a legacy of poverty and food insecurity that has persisted in Native communities today. ^[8] To obtain the cans and handles, Wesaw scours flea markets, auctions, and antique shops. There is the repetition of the cans’ mass production in the 20th century, and also in Wesaw’s repurpose and reuse in current times.

Wooden dowels emerge from the bottom of the Calumet cans, some painted blue, some red, and some twisted natural wood. Together, the cans and dowels become shishigwen, the rattles or shakers used in Indigenous musical tradition for dancing, singing, or ceremonies.^[9] In the Potawatomi Creation Story, the shishigwen filled the void with a rhythm of life, a sound reminiscent of water.^[10] Typically, the heads of shakers are made from deer, cow, or elk hide, dried gourds, turtle shells, or wood. Wesaw features some of these animal skin shakers in his work alongside his vintage-can ones. In the context of a late capitalist society, he complicates the unfair imposition of traditionality onto Indigenous art and imagery. “I’m considering how imagery and language is co-opted to relegate our sacred items into cheap knock-offs, furthering a mentality that all things are ‘For Sale!’” Wesaw says. “Feathers, pipes, and many other icons of our cultures are often used in cheap, stereotypical fashion, not just by others, but increasingly by our own people. What does sovereignty and autonomy really mean and what do we consider traditional in the modern day?”^[11]

Materials such as turtle shell and animal hide may be deemed as “traditional” or “authentic” in their relation to the past. The assumption that objects like shakers are traditional often insinuates that they are not used in the modern day, a misconception that Wesaw resists. There are many layers of time woven into his piece: the shakers made from turtle shells and other animal parts, the two varieties of Calumet cans, one from the 1920s-30s, and the other from the 1950s-60s, the present-day process of creating both types of shakers, and the future meanings Breath of Life: The First Song engenders from its various stays at different exhibits.

Author and renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes in As We Have Always Done of Indigenous aesthetics in art, media, and practice as a form of coded disruption of colonial noise. One such principle is repetition, a literal, metaphorical, conceptual rhythm that cycles. As Simpson says, “if we are not continually and collectively engaged in creating and re-creating our way of life, our reality, our distinct cultural reality doesn’t exist.” ^[12] In the same way, Wesaw’s can shakers are rhythmically repeated throughout the work, like music. The sound of a shishigwen ranges from the sprinkling of rain on tree bark to a clamoring thunderstorm. In the South Bend exhibit, Wesaw’s installation was an ode to the St. Joseph River. At the Block Museum, the closest body of water is Lake Michigan, with which Wesaw also has a relationship. Of course, there is also rain, snow, water vapor in the clouds, condensation on the glass, and more. These phases of water embody the repetition that sustains and perpetuates the cyclicity of nature. As in Wesaw’s work, water is the breath of life.

Yet the rattle does not sound in the exhibit. The shakers dangle in the air at varying heights, oriented so that the top of the cans and the other heads are facing straight down. Quite literally, the caricatures and stereotyped Indigenous figures are turned on its head. If one were to go underneath and look directly up, one would see a constellation of two-dimensional shapes. A similar flatness is the unfulfilled expectation of music, dance, and rhythm to shakers. The physical silence may implore the viewer to ponder the metaphorical silencing that Indigenous people have endured throughout time. History is a form of repetition itself, the effects of colonialism birthing new violences each day. The work's self-containment is simultaneously resistant to commodification and full of the contexts and implications of its regular use. Though Calumet cans are symbolic of the history they hold in relation to Indigenous communities and the notion of land tenure, Wesaw’s interpretation is contemporary, a new type of shaker he started making around 2020.

Wesaw’s installation features shakers made by his grandfather, an Elder in their community. Though these practices are repeated across generations, there is a new meaning in each iteration, as the individual artists imbue the practice with their own flair, such as Wesaw with the vintage cans. He takes the mass production of commodified goods like Calumet baking powder and repurposes it into something hand-made, intentional, and creative. Repetition is another one of Simpson’s Indigenous aesthetics, and Wesaw uses it as a form of transformation. When presented in the installation, the cans are given a level of individuality despite their repetition—the little imperfections, peeling color, rusty metal, nicks, and scratches that vary with each one. The work redirects the colonial occupation of land and time through change and repurposing, like the flowing and weaving of water.

Wesaw’s work meets the viewer at an intersection of timelines and locations, demonstrating another one of Simpson’s aesthetics—multidimensionality, or “an organization of time and space that’s different from the colonial world’s—different plans of reality. ”^[13] Some of his non-can shaker heads are colored with natural dyes and some of his handles are with synthetic paint—materials sourced from a multitude of places. The sassafrass wood will make its way back to the earth, but what about the metal cans? The acrylic paint? Wesaw holds both nature and artifice in his work without judgment or shame, his materials of the work blurring temporality and place. Regardless of the start and ending points of the physical components of his work, there is a resonant current experience that should be prioritized.

The shadows provide a two-dimensional aspect of the piece, the overlapping flat, translucent shapes of the shakers superimposed onto each other across the blank white wall. Some are more opaque and true to size, resulting from the shakers closer to the wall, and some are big and translucent, closer to the front door of the exhibit. They appear like fat raindrops dripping to the floor, or perhaps hanging fruit, dancing across a blank expanse. Here, it is difficult to differentiate a turtle shell shaker from a Calumet can one—the shadows take away the passage of time. But it is oxymoronic to imply that shadows are two-dimensional because they are born from a three-dimensional spatial organization, the product of light hitting solid, rounded objects. The dimensions meet here once more.

And then there’s air. In the Potawatomi Creation Story, the origins of life began with the breath of the creator. “The installation suspends the shakers just out of reach, almost as if they are being handed down to us from the spirits above,” Wesaw says. “To me, the first song represents the gift of life, how special and amazing it is.” ^[14] Breath of Life: The First Song holds space for contemplation and celebration of the land, water, and air. It transforms the colonial contexts of its materials into a song of Indigenous resistance across dimensions—flowing, weaving, and creating new life.