BEST OF SHOW: DALLIN MAYBEE

For some time now I’ve been saying that because content of books is so easy to come by -- download it, morph it any way you want, read it as eprint behind glass or paper print with ink, hear it on iPod, buy it second-hand, whatever -- that books-as-objects will grow in importance. Custom-bindings, artist’s books, illustrated books. Recently some authentic monks created a new Bible in the ancient manner, carefully hand-lettering the script on parchment and illuminating the margins and headings. It is VERY expensive and precious. But what I’ve been pitching -- and cannot do myself -- is a Native American sort of book with a beaded buckskin binding.

In the November “Southwest Art” magazine there is a photo of the “Best of Show” at the 86th Annual Santa Fe Indian Market where all the creme-de-la-creme in Indian arts and crafts is presented. It is exactly the sort of book I envisioned! The artist is Dallin Maybee, a 33-year-old first year law school at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University who already has had a twenty year career as an Indian dancer. I mean, is this a “Renaissance Man” or what?

But the term is a Euro-reference to a period in Europe when people were cultivated in science, law and art -- not labeled and sorted and assigned as “we” like to do. Maybee comes from the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation in Western New York. His mother is Northern Arapaho, his father is Seneca, and his family includes many people who bead and make dolls. They love and respect children, so Maybee took a “philosophy of childhood” class and out of that grew two stories: a father and son story and a mother and daughter story. Each became a book.

There is a Blackfeet artist who makes individual paintings in the 19th century style of “ledger books” which were traditional accounts of warriors and hunters, like the ones that were originally painted onto story robes. (See “Blackfoot War Art: Pictographs of the Reservation Period, 1880-2000” by L. James Dempsey, May 2007, Univ of Oklahoma Press.) The choice of ledger books was forced by the lack of availability of any other paper so the artists simply ignored the blue lines and painted over them, like school children drawing in their tablets I expect a person could make something philosophical about those faint equidistant lines for European style writing, specifically records of money, with superimposed on top the far more exciting doings of horses and men, arrows in flight and hoofprints on the ground. The contemporary Blackfeet ones are done on ledger pages from the Blackfeet Tribal Council. When I look at them, I recognize the names -- knew the people, both the ones whose names are written there and the ones who wrote them. It’s a little shocking. I know some of the history, still recent enough to reek of reality -- if you can stand that much alliteration.

But Maybee Dallin is writing children’s books onto antique ledgers from 1863. The covers are rawhide, which is stiff, translucent and rather like parchment. He has painted the main images, a running buffalo with the mother and child; two pale horse heads with the father and son. The beads are used to make a border around each book. The photos online (http://www.law.asu.edu/ under “Headlines”) are too small to tell much about construction details. It appears that the hinge of the cover is buckskin with thong ties. The beading must have been done on something besides rawhide and then glued on. Rawhide is too stiff for beadwork, at least as i know it. Maybe he found some other way to work the surface. They are several feet wide and only a foot or so tall, in a panorama sort of proportion.

These books are displayed under glass at the law school with the idea that one is able to ask a librarian to take them out long enough to read them. Naturally, the world being what it is, publishers are courting him for some kind of commercial publishing plan -- defeating the whole artwork one-of-a-kind approach. But any book produced commercially won’t be the same anyway.

Maybee has traveled many places in the world with his dancing and visited many disciplines with his education. Beginning as a tribal police officer, he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and began work on an MFA from the University of California in Los Angeles. It was his work as an officer that brought up the idea of law school. He says, “I did some Indian law coursework at UCLA during my master’s, including coursework on Federal Indian Law and practical applications in the legal development program there, where I was able to do some really exciting things like helping a tribe draft civil procedural code.” Right. Exciting. Like beadwork: little bits that add up to something grand.

If I were worrying on behalf of Dallin Maybee (and why wouldn’t I?) I’d be afraid of him becoming overloaded, not having enough space and time to develop. When an Indian with this much stability and creativity is located -- and it’s not that there aren’t many of them, it’s that people don’t look for them and support them -- there is a tendency to put them on every committee, to sign them up as representatives, to drain their blood with minutia. Or since he’s such a multi-gifted person, he may be pushed and pulled from one point of view to another without being able to form a core for himself.

And yet, of all the NA pursuits, beading and quilling require centering, deliberation, planning, even meditation. That helps. What may save him is his ability to do California civil law while at the same time creating children’s books. I hope they aren’t so precious that real children never get to see and handle them, this mix of Indian and white concepts: “book” with bead, reading with rawhide.


This wonderful addition comes from David in England, who also provided photos of Maybee's work. I'm very grateful and rather awed that this should happen!




Hi Mary
You asked in your latest item about native art books if someone could try to C&P the native artwork in the photo. Attached are 2 jpegs, blown up by 50% and sharpened, but as detail is lacking in original, if you blow them up too much, the pixellation appears. If you don't have suitable software, I used IrfanView, a downloadable freeware programme which also offers a 'gallery' function useful for browsing image collections.

Though these examples were done using printed ledgers, I wonder if native peoples didn't have an earlier, now obscured, tradition of creating books by sewing together hides. Celtic peoples did this, and as I've mentioned before, I do a blog built around the topic (codexceltica.blogspot.com). Codices represent the intermediate phase between the scroll and the modern printed book - handwritten or drawn, on pages of either parchment or vellum, sewn or stitched together, often with a cover. The Beowulf Codex I've just blogged about for instance was done on sheep hides. Often the hides were scraped and reused, creating a palimpsest.

Though orthodox scholarship follows the Roman claim the Celtic peoples were illiterate, there are stories of the early missionaries like Columba destroying hundreds of "books" on arrival. And of course he only wound up a missionary at Iona after a dispute in Ireland, which led to a battle, over a manuscript book (a psalter) he copied without permission. (He lost the case - as the judge put it, "To every cow its calf; to every book its copy".) He's now patron saint of bookbinders.

David
South Central MediaScene
www.south-central-media.co.uk