Vanishing//Vanquishing: Whose West?

During the Great Western Migration, as the Native American population gradually gave way to disease, conflict and broken treaties, they were replaced by pioneers hoping to start a new life on their land.

— Oregon photographer Rich Bergeman from his statement for his exhibit The Vanishing West in Eugene, Oregon, May-June 2021.

Gave way. Replaced. Pioneers. New life. Their land (whose?) And: Great. Sadly, it's too easy to criticize this disturbing statement. Its transparent framing echoes the nostalgic-logic of the photographs in the exhibit as Bergeman “explores the backroads east of the Cascades in search of vanishing relics of the Northwest frontier” photographing “a “landscape dotted with melancholic relics…” A statement as dated as the “traces left of settlement efforts” which comprise the objects of his photographs. 

During my own travels "east of the Cascades" I have come to see The West as an ever-present vanquishing.  The Vanquishing West, my series of photographs, by sheer necessity. Yes, often melancholic, and layered, urgent, molten — a contemporaneous here-now scape for/in an implicate future, dissolving as I gaze… Yet …

… vanquishing and vanishing signal parallels; simultaneous inflections. In this sense time (past-present-future) collapses into a space of erosion, sedimentation, eruption and emergence. If something is disappearing or conquering there is ever present a profound ground of being and becoming: creation. In ways and manners human cognition can only glimpse or guess. 

A photograph is true only outside the edges/boundaries of the frame: The ghost outside the machine — to reverse mirror a concept popularized by Arthur Koestler. Perhaps it is with this spirit that Bergeman concludes his exhibit statement: “…ghost towns gradually giving up their ghosts…“  

CODA

Close and thoughtful viewing always rewards the memory and the heart and will make you a better conversationalist at dinner!

— Sandy Brown Jensen, review, KLCC - NPR for Oregonians, May 6, 2021

The Vanishing West exhibit continues through June 12: https://www.wlotus.com/current-exhibition/  or  https://www.wlotus.com/

Meanwhile, peruse selected “conversationalist” images from The Vanquishing West, an ongoing project from this RockArtOregon author. 

Mural (detail), Chiloquin, Klamath County

Facebook, Crook County

Columbia River, In-Lieu Fishing Site

Southern Oregon, Klamath/Lake Counties

"Indian Land" Abert Rim, Lake County

Reverse of historical geology sign (since "vanished")

Grass Valley, Sherman County

On May 17 Sherman was one of five Oregon counties voting in favor of leaving Oregon for a "Greater Idaho." Measure 28-46 in Sherman County, “requires Sherman County promote the interests of the county in relocating the Oregon-Idaho border.” The measure passed with 62 percent approval.

Positively Crook County

Corridor, Deschutes County

Alkali Lake Airport, Lake County

Ruby Pipeline, buried ("natural" gas Wyoming to Klamath County),

parallels "Pacific Connector" powerline (Dalles Dam, Columbia River, to Los Angeles)

Petroglyph & Power-Tower; Totem in John Day Country; Tribal fishing platform, Columbia River at The Dalles Dam; Contrails, Lake County.

Water: Earth Ver. 2.021

And like everyone, I took, I was taken
I dreamed

I was betrayed:

Earth was given to me in a dream
In a dream I possessed it
-- Louise Glück from The Seven Ages (2001)

The stillness was complete, as if the lake absorbed not only noise, but time itself.
-- Kapfa Kassabova from To The Lake 2020

Weather. Climate. Seasons. Ossifying classifications, jostling divinities: conjuring and swooning, dripping and melting, drying and yearning. Defiant!

Last week of April, days in Basin and Range country. Basin. Range. Each word streams images, intentions, unknowns through the dreaming mind. Through the eyes wide open. Each picture coalesces, glistening in the wind.  Each stone listening, what are we about.

Recalls photographs transmitted from “our” 2021 Mars landing — Perseverance! transmuted. MarsScapes — rocky dusty pocked — making clear once more: Earth remains the blue planet, a greening globe.

“Water is Life” poster perfect, too true to be comprehensible.

Earth 2.021: Version Here Now. Recommended for all users. Of water.

Seasons: lakeshore shelter, circular petroglyphs on basalt

Photos: Lake Abert, Chewaucan Basin, Lake County, Oregon. April 2021 Douglas Beauchamp

...

CODA

Will we soon remember from where we’ve come? The water.

And once remembered, will we return to that first water, and in doing so return to ourselves, to each other, better and cleaner? 

Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do? 

—Natalie Diaz [1]

...

NOTES

Lake County, Oregon: over 8000 sq mi. One human per square mile, thousands of cattle, lizards, hundreds of pronghorn, tens of thousands of birds: water-seekers all, on the move.  

Lake County drought map, Lake Abert center, in the Red zone: Dense maroon=Exceptional drought. Stark Red=Extreme drought. Ochre=Severe drought. https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/

[1] Natalie Diaz, concluding lines of the poem The First Water Is the Body. Published in New Poets of Native Nations, Edited by Heid E. Erdrich, Graywolf Press (2018), and in Postcolonial Love Poem (2020).