Carl Gawboy: Remembering the Fur Trade Through Art

Transcript

[Sound: Native Lights Theme Music]

Carl Gawboy: One of the things that I wanted to do in my book is to bring out the role of women in the fur trade. But there's kind of a blank there, and the historians themselves admit it. Well, that's like writing a history of American agriculture and leaving out the farmers. Indian women processed every single one of those furs that went off to Europe. They fleshed them and dried them out and then packed them up.

Leah Lemm: Boozhoo, hello, welcome to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. I'm your host Leah Lemm. Miigwech for joining me. Native Lights is more than a podcast and radio show. At its core, it's a place for Native folks to tell their stories. Every week, we have great folks on, great conversations with people from a bunch of different backgrounds. We're talking artists, community leaders, healthcare advocates, educators, so many passions and gifts, and we talk to people about those gifts and how they share them with the community. And it all centers around the big point of purpose in our lives. And it's another day, another opportunity to amplify Native Voices. And I'm really excited for our guest today, and you should be too. He's a prolific artist and very well known, so I'm really happy that he's here with me chatting. Carl Gawboy, wouldn't you know it? Carl Gawboy is a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe, and he was born in Cloquet to a Finnish mother and an Ojibwe father. He was raised in Ely, and he's lived in and out of the Duluth area for the past 20 years. And his recent book is called Fur Trade Nation: An Ojibwe’s Graphic History. Really cool, pen and ink drawings. It's like a historical graphic novel. It's really neat. I've checked it out. And his primary medium as an artist is watercolors, and I hear he's also a member of Native Skywatchers, and as a fan of looking up to the stars, I'm gonna have to make sure to ask him about that too. But I'm really excited, if you can't tell, for our guest Carl Gawboy. There you are.

Carl Gawboy: Thank you for having me.

Leah Lemm: Is that a cat platform behind you?

Carl Gawboy: Yeah, so don't be surprised if you see a mountain lion pass by.

Leah Lemm: Yes, this bed right here. That is my dog's bed.

Carl Gawboy: This is the computer room. It's also the cat room.

Leah Lemm: Well, boozhoo, Carl Gawboy, thank you so much for being here with me today. Can you introduce yourself and tell me where you're joining us from?

Carl Gawboy: I'm Carl Gawboy and I was raised in Ely. Our family was from the Vermilion reservation, near Tower. I'm an artist. I write, I give talks. Prop me up in front of a lectern and tell me to have at it, and I will have at it.

Leah Lemm: And where are you joining me from right now? Are you in Duluth or where are you?

Carl Gawboy: Yes, I live in Two Harbors.

Leah Lemm: Okay, Two Harbors. Awesome. I just drove down the North Shore the other day. It's just beautiful this time of year. And how are you doing? And how is the family?

Carl Gawboy: We're all doing really well here. Got three grandchildren living with Cindy and I and their folks, of course. It's a good thing. We have a great big house where they can all find their hideouts, and I have a studio that I can retreat to. So that certainly helps with the crowd here.

Leah Lemm: Well, Carl, what are you thinking about these days? Is there something you're concentrating on this time of year? For me, it's like a time for reflection. But is there something that you're kind of mulling over?

Carl Gawboy: I'm beginning to market a calendar that put was together, and this calendar was based on, it's color illustrations from my book The Fur Trade Nation: An Ojibwe’s Graphic History. They're beautiful Giclee prints. They're eminently frameable. So I hope people will buy them and frame up the pictures right away and put them on their wall.

Leah Lemm: Oh, that's so neat. So it's a calendar, yes, with the art from your graphic book Fur Trade Nation.

Carl Gawboy: Yes.

Leah Lemm: But they are color versions, added color.

Carl Gawboy: My graphic book was in black and white and very cartoon style. They are watercolors, full color watercolors.

Leah Lemm: That's so cool. Can you say just a little bit about what Fur Trade Nation: An Ojibwe’s Graphic History is?

Carl Gawboy: I taught the history of the fur trade when I taught in Indian Studies departments before I retired. And I taught at the College of Saint Scholastica and at the University of Minnesota - Duluth, and I was teaching in the Indian Studies Department. And basically I taught whatever was required of me. Taught many different subjects, but my specialty was art, and that was my master's degree was in, and that's what they hired me for, to teach survey of American Indian Arts. Well, then what happened, because Indian Studies departments shift around. A lot of people come and a lot of people go. And so I was asked to cover for a lot of courses, and then I was able to come up with my own course. One of the courses I wanted to do was the history of the fur trade. Now, the reason why I wanted to do that was because most Minnesotans have no idea that for 250 years there was action going on here, economic action, cultural action, quite a remarkable period. Most Minnesotans aren't aware of that. I must say most Native people aren't aware of it. It's sort of a blank, and I can very comfortably say that every single Ojibwe person worked in the fur trade industry, as trappers, as guides, as interpreters, as cooks, canoe makers. And how do you just drop 250 years out of your history? And this is what I found out right talking to students. They knew absolutely nothing about it, even though about half of my students had French names. I can't think of any other place in the world where 250 years would just be dropped, just like that. And most of the Indian Studies approach Indian history from the kind of the pure, untouched culture, you know, dressed in buckskins, live in bark houses, to all of a sudden, to the 20th century, where they talk about the reservation period. And I kind of know where that comes from. Historians had the same type of approach when historians were big proponents of the frontier thesis, where the frontier existed, and then all of a sudden, boom, you know, the modern era. But historians don't teach that way anymore. There's a new paradigm that has replaced it, called a middle ground paradigm, where they recognize the fur trade. The middle ground was where two cultures really tried to understand each other, and for the most part, they succeeded. Not always. There were little events like the French and Indian War and Pontiac’s War, American Revolution, little dust up like that. But between 1650 and 1850, French, Scots, English, Ojibwe, Crees did business together. They married each other. Daniel Harmon, who left us a great fur trade journal from the mid 19th century, spoke Cree to his children. This is what's meant by the middle ground. Well, to me, that's kind of exciting. It's kind of interesting. And Ojibwe history isn't like other tribal histories. Other tribes didn't do that. If you're a Pueblo up until the 1960s, if you married outside of the Pueblo, you lost all your privileges, you lost your land, lost your ceremonial rights. Boom, you were gone. And it didn't matter if you married an Anglo or a Navajo, you were gone. Ojibwe weren’t like that. They welcomed outside marriages because these outside marriages brought new ideas and new ways of doing things into the village. I guess that was another reason why I wanted to teach this course was because many of my students thought that the Ojibwe were just like all the other Indians all over North America. I traveled around quite a bit when I was in graduate school in the 1970s and I went to the northwest coast and I met Tlingits. Went to the southwest, and I met Navajos, plus many of the students from many of these tribes came to the University of Minnesota, and I got there, and I tell you, they're really different. They're not like us, and they think we are really strange. So it kind of goes both ways. And so to my mind, the fur trade answered a lot of questions history. The fur trade filled in a lot of the gaps.

Leah Lemm: You're listening to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. Native Lights is produced by Minnesota Native News and AMPERS, with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Today I'm. Speaking with Carl Gawboy. Carl is a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe, and he was born to a Finnish mother and Ojibwe father and raised in Ely. And he's an artist, and his latest book is Fur Trade Nation: An Ojibwe’s Graphic History. A colleague of mine got me a t shirt with Fur Trade Nation: An Ojibwe’s Graphic History, and there's two women on it, one with a knife and one with an ax.

Carl Gawboy: And look at the expression on their faces. You don't mess around with them.

Leah Lemm: Heck no. I think those are supposed to be us. Can you say who those women are?

Carl Gawboy: One of the things that I wanted to do in my book is to bring out the role of women in the fur trade. Now I'm not the first one to do this. It was a great book that came out in the 1980s just when fur trade history was just trying to change. It was called Many Tender Ties by a Canadian scholar. She did all of her research talking about women in the fur trade. But there's kind of a blank there, and the historians themselves admit it. Well, that's like writing a history of American agriculture and leaving out the farmers. That's the gap that I wanted to fill, and it comes from my own background. My father was a trapper, and I grew up with traps boiling on the wood stove, sterilizing them before we go out. Because, you know, if a mink smells human scent on a trap, they won't go near it, so they have to be sterilized, one little step in modern trapping that I was a part of. And so I guess that consciousness always stuck with me, and I want us to do something about that, about my own history.

Leah Lemm: And so women in the fur trade, what was the Ojibwe women's role?

Carl Gawboy: Well, let's talk about furs themselves. Women processed every single one of those furs that went off to Europe. They fleshed them and dried them out and then packed them up.

Leah Lemm: So is that why they had the blades in the drawing?

Carl Gawboy: Yes, in my drawing, that's why that woman is holding up that knife and holding up a dead mink.

Leah Lemm: Do you have any favorite stories from the fur trade era? Any favorite characters?

Carl Gawboy: There's a series that runs through the book called fur trade jokes. These are actual jokes that historians have put together, and sometimes they come from Native peoples themselves. Some of the jokes that I've heard, like, for instance, this is a true story. The Governor General of Canada was taking a tour of the Canadian provinces. Stopped by at Grand Portage, near the town of Kenora, Ontario. He comes up and goes up to the nearest Hudson's Bay Company factor, and says, I would like to meet a real Indian. And so the factor said, Scottish accent: “Would you come here for a minute, McDonald?” An Indian named McDonald. Now, I showed that cartoon to white people at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College. They didn't get it. I showed it to Indians, and they laughed and laughed.

Leah Lemm: How about we talk a little bit about your becoming an artist?

Carl Gawboy: Well, my mother said that I could draw before I could walk. And I started drawing because my older brothers and sisters were all real smart. They went into fields like engineering. That wasn't me. When I first started conceiving of putting together Fur Trade Nation: An Ojibwe’s Graphic History, it was because I kind of combined two interests. One is my background in the fur business, and my interest in Ojibwe history and their connection to the fur trade. And then my interest in comics, and then the Noah Harari Sapiens series came out, and that's what inspired me. He's talking about the history of mankind, all in graphic narratives. And I thought, I can do this. So I sat down and started to do this. So I did each drawing on a single sheet of paper, computer paper. Did each one separately, and that's because I was working on three by five cards from my lecture notes. See, I never threw away my lecture notes. So I opened up my file and started doing one at a time so they weren't done in any order.

Leah Lemm: Excellent. Well, I want to pivot a little bit, because I saw that you are a member of Native Skywatchers, which is infinitely intriguing to me.

Carl Gawboy: The interesting thing about my being involved in that is that when I first was teaching in Indian Studies, if you put the words Native Americans in science in the same sentence, they wouldn’t believe you. And if you certainly put Native Americans and astronomy in the same sense, that just would not compute. But in 19 seven days, that all changed, and that was when Anna Sofaer, an artist, was hiking up on top of a butte in Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, and saw a group of slabs on a ledge with a pictograph behind it, and when the sun shone through those slabs, it showed a beam of light that pierced down through this pictograph that has been called the sun dagger. And Anna Sofaer rediscovered it, and she took photographs of it. She just happened to be up there on June 21, the solstice, and she took photographs of it. And then started going around talking about the Ancient Puebloans who lived at Chaco Canyon who did this amazing thing, this amazing piece of science that marked the two equinoxes and two solstices and marked it with a dramatic light effect, using slabs that made a couple tons each maneuvered into position to make this beam of light shine through it. Well, no one believed her, and especially anthropologists. And they said, they said that the Pueblo Indians were too ignorant of science and astronomy to have made something like that. So they made up all kinds of reasons why that occurred, that these slabs just happened to fall off the ledge above and landed on that ledge to create this beam of light going through a pictograph. Right? They don't even believe that humans did that petroglyph.

Leah Lemm: Okay, jeez.

Carl Gawboy: Well, then it finally happened that they found out that in a lot of the ancient public sites, there were alignments to the rising and setting of certain stars, especially solstitial risings that came just before the equinox and the solstice. People brought in the subject of the medicine wheel in Wyoming, great big stone circle that had astronomical alignments, like Stonehenge, it was all happening at the same time. And then the scientific world had to believe it, and they had to go along with it. And suddenly Anna Sofaer became a big star, and all of a sudden, the scientific community in the southwest just climbed on the bandwagon, and now they're talking about like they invented ancient Indian astronomy. So anyway, when all that happened I thought, I wonder if anything like that happens around here? I said, What's around here that's ancient? So marking on the rock that's permanent. And I said, the rock paintings, Laurentian shield pictographs, of which my growing up around Ely. They're all over the place. And of course, there's about 200 of them all the way up to the Arctic. So I thought, I wonder if that has anything to do with astronomy. I wonder if they're—wait for it—constellations. And so one of the most famous examples is a pictographic site right near Ely, the Hegman Lake pictographs. And I woke up in the middle of the night and I said, of course, they're constellations. And not only are they figures, the big figures, the constellations, but they also mark the three important constellations, marking the three seasons of the year, winter, fall and autumn. And I thought, well, gee, you know, if that's going to be like an almanac, and if those are the three big constellations that mark the seasons, where's the summer one? Well, some friends of mine went up to the Hegman Lake pictographs and they found the summer one. Everybody had just ignored it all these years because it was too abstract. But there it was. So I started putting together a little bit with astronomy, and just took off from there.

Leah Lemm: You're listening to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. Native Lights is produced by Minnesota Native News and AMPERS, with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Today, I'm speaking with Carl Gawboy. Carl is a member of the Bois Forte of Ojibwe. And he was born to a Finnish mother and an Ojibwe father and raised in Ely. And he's an artist, and his latest book is Fur Trade Nation: An Ojibwe’s Graphic History. Sorry, before you keep going, can you say what they look like?

Carl Gawboy: Yeah, there's a great big moose figure done quite realistically. Then there's a great big human figure with arms outstretched, and then there's a panther with a curved tail. Now the great big figure with the arms outstretched looks like a very primitive figure, but the moose and the panther are very realistic. Same artist, right? Why did they draw the human figure so abstract, and why the moose figure so realistic? And that's because the big human figure is a constellation. It's Orion, and the big, long outstretched arms, two big, bright stars on the either side of Orion.

Leah Lemm: Where do you see these? Are they on like a rock?

Carl Gawboy: Yes. From Ely, you can get there in a couple of hours. Drive up the Echo Trail, see a big sign that says, Hegman Lake. Take a port bridge down to the lake. Paddle about five miles, and there they are. They're on a big vertical cliff caused by glacial plucking as the glacier went through, leaving a big sheath of cliff going down to the water. And that's where the pictographs are painted. Now the pictographs were done all over the place in this part of the country, but then in 1850 they roughly stopped. So the oldest pictographs here, and believe me, they've been studied and studied and studied. Canadians, especially. Most of the Laurentian shield pictographs are in Canada. We've just got a few up in the north here. Most of them, they've been studied a lot. A lot of them have to do with the Laurentian shield itself and the glaciers that came through and made these beautiful flat rocks to paint on. But then no one has ever been able to really define why they were painting. Many of the Canadian Ojibwe will explain it to you. The US Ojibwe, just across the border, won't say a word. The reason why the Canadian Ojibwe is because they want to make it clear that what they painted was something that's culturally important, and they want people to appreciate them and know about them. They're not going to hold back any secrets. But the Minnesota Ojibwe still feel, oh, well, this little thing called the American Indian Religious Crimes that made Indian religion and all the art that went with it illegal, and that wasn't ended until the Carter administration that passed the American Indian Religious Freedoms Act. So now we can practice our religion. Wow, thanks. Thanks, guys.

Leah Lemm: So it's less a secret. It doesn't need to be so much a secret.

Carl Gawboy: Yeah, yeah.

Leah Lemm: And so Native Skywatchers, it says you're a member. So I take it, there are other members.

Carl Gawboy: Yes, yes.

Leah Lemm: What's the group like?

Carl Gawboy: Annette Lee, who is Dakota, has a PhD in astronomy and physics. Now get that wow. Can you believe it? She was hired at St Cloud State to run their planetarium and to teach astronomy there, and she is the one that got us all together. I have to say that Dakota have worked longer and harder on this than the Ojibwe have. As far as their astronomy is concerned. They started putting things together in the 1950s and Annette Lee got in touch with many of the informants that were involved in putting all of this Dakota astronomy into written form, and diagrams, star charts and things like that, connecting them with legends and stories. Then she pulls up into my yard one day and says that “I hear you're have been doing some work on Ojibwe astronomy.” For some reason, for some reason, I gave her all my stuff. I said, “Sure, here, here's all my notes.” I was a part of her organization. That point on, we put on workshops, workshops for teachers the Minnesota Legislature passed the law that in curriculum like science, American Indian contributions to it have to be acknowledged. But nobody knew any Ojibwe science, and it just so happened that an Annette Lee’s organization just came out right at the same time, and they put together curriculum. Beautiful, beautiful. That any school teacher can get and use. You learn about constellations and their movement through the year. Brightest constellations that are in different seasons of the year. You have star charts that you follow along. So you can learn a lot about astronomy by studying Dakota and Ojibwe astronomy, just like a you can studying the ancient Greek names for these constellations.

Leah Lemm: Fascinating. Well, maybe kind of for a final question, any advice for up and coming artists?

Carl Gawboy: Don't throw anything away. And you know, you save everything. Do something every day and keep at it.

[Sound: Native Lights Theme Music]

Leah Lemm: Carl Gawboy. Just a really fascinating artist, person. So don't throw that art away. I like to make art, whether it's songs or canvas. Just, you know, drawings and stuff like that. And sometimes I just throw it away because I get, like, kind of frustrated, and I'm like, you know, who needs this anymore? But you never know. You know, maybe, maybe my kid might like it someday, or maybe I'll want to look back and look at what I've done. So chi-miigwech, Carl Gawboy. I'm Leah Lemm. Miigwech for listening. Giga-waabamin. You're listening to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. Native Lights is produced by Minnesota Native News and AMPERS, with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.