Native artists aim to raise relief funds
By Anne Constable
Darryl Dean Begay, Lyndon Tsosie and Raymond Yazzie, all well-known jewelers, will be launching a website next week for their new organization, Native American Artists for Japan. The concept is to get Native artists to donate work that will be auctioned off on eBay, with proceeds to go to the Japanese Red Cross Society.
Begay said that he was planning to make a new piece—a figure of a samurai warrior—for the auction.
Yazzie, he said, is making a ring with a Japanese flag. And contemporary painter Tony Abeyta is donating a painting and a limited edition book about prominent Native American potters, which is signed by a number of them.
7 comments:
Awesome! It reminds me of Tonga fundraising for the first Christchurch earthquake and Oklahoma Choctaw raising funds for survivors of the Irish famine after their trail of tears.
Such kindness is truly humbling.
In my generation, it's understood very well that what happens halfway around the world affects you.
Many artists are doing what they can; the works tend to be Japoniste (inspired by Japanese style).
Oh, I found this:
Prairie Island Tribe Worried About Safety at Nuclear Plant
The worries are, of course, caused by Fukushima Dai'ichi.
I completely understand their fears. There are pro-nulcear people here (in NZ) who have long been telling us how safe nuclear power is and how behind the times we are for not having it. It's a tragedy for it to come to this for people to realise there is no safe guarding against mother nature.
I don't think anybody on Earth will be building more nuclear plants for a while after this.
By the way, if you are interested, the fourth (daishi) reactor at Fukushima Dai'ichi is producing the greatest radiation. Daishi also means "great death". (Oddly, Fukushima Daini, which has exactly four reactors, had no problems shutting down.)
Anon: The first part of the name doesn't sound too good in English either!
I also recall the Midland-Dow nuclear plant in Michigan. Never a danger because it never started, the company that ran it made constant big mistakes trying to build it, and they always passed off their blunders as pay hikes to the customers, who had no choice in anything as they were beholden to a monopoly. Nuclear energy is extremely expensive.
Yeah, in China, Japan, and Korea, there's a tradition of four being unlucky because in Mandarin, sì means "four" and "death". This carries over to Korean (sa), Cantonese (sei), and Japanese (shi). Fourteen is worse; yao-si means "death wish".
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