Yesterday went by pretty quickly, without a whole lot of things of note happening.  I worked out another Lesson Plan and printed it off (this time about teaching the main tree types of our coast), met up with some of the staff for a meeting about tomorrow’s big day (the auction thing), and helped figure out more things dealing with the cedar room I hope to help design.

Did go to a lunchtime meeting with the curators though, and went over the lesson plans I’ve created as well as the Cedar Lab Proposal I drafted up in case it was needed.  And one thing that really reflected my own personal understanding of the issue came up in conversation, and that was the fact that I really need my work to be looked over by someone with more roots in the indigenous communities.  The thing that came up was the language I was using in some of the work I made (and I worried that this might be a problem, hence my desire to have it looked over) could sometimes be construed as somewhat racist or simply offensive to indigenous people.  Obviously not my intent, but a lot of the language we use today has taken decades to entrench itself in modern vocabulary so that even without intending to put people into boxes we do simply by the words we choose to explain.  For instance, I re-read my intro paragraphs to the proposal and found that the way I was using both vocabulary and tenses made it seem as though indigenous people were no longer existing, and were simply a culture that had remained static forever before disappearing/assimilating into our own.  Now it wasn’t THAT horrible or explicit in its message, but I found it could likely be construed as offensive to certain people.

This is something I’ve known about for a long time, the idea that language shapes perspective in a lot of ways, and simply using the same language to portray and describe a group of people will slowly make everyone believe those words are only associated with those groups of people.  A great contemporary example is how the media chooses to depict racially charged issues (white people rioting at a Pumpkin Fest in Maine were simply “rowdy” and “fueled by testosterone” whereas blacks rioting over police brutality were “thugs” and “overly aggressive brutes”).  This sort of language over time can start to shift perspectives of everyday people toward seeing a group of people as they are depicted in the news.  So with this in mind I really aim to avoid that sort of “language-labeling” with my lessons and work I do at the gallery.