Surviving The Cross #7

From 1995 until the summer of 1997 I worked on a very interesting project preserving the language of the Karuk Indians of Northern California. At that time there were only a few elders of the tribe that spoke the Karuk language fluently. The goal of the project was to revive the language. The method chosen to achieve this goal was to make audio recordings of the elders and then make lesson plans for the schools so they could teach the children of the tribe the Karuk language. During the years I recorded and edited this project I heard many stories about the collision between White Men and the Indians. I had been using feathers in my printmaking for a few years and at the end of one session I had a print that I thought was not going to work. In a spontaneous gesture of rejection I rolled out a two inch wide X with my brayer and printed it. The result was Surviving The Cross #5, a juxtaposition of the images of the cross and the feather. This was the beginning of the Surviving The Cross series.