Iroquois Museum, part 2 (paintings)

I wanted to share some of the paintings/artwork that my kids found particularly interesting. Above, J looks at a wall of work, each tile representing a part of the Thanksgiving Address, which we listened to/read/recited every morning during the reading of our epic.

This is one of many paintings of the Sky Woman's fall (her shadow can be seen coming through the hole from the sky world above), I chose to show this one because it was J's favorite. This next photo is an entire series of her fall:

J and Zoo Boy told their friends the story of how Atsytsyakayon fell through the hole under the Great Tree and into the water world below (her shadow can be seen coming through the hole in this painting), and how the birds caught her and carried her down to turtle's back, and how muskrat brought mud up from the bottom of the great ocean to give her a place to stand on turtle's back, which became the earth.

This painting is titled "Creation's Struggle", and shows the Sky Woman's daughter's twins struggling for control of the earth. In our story they were named Tharon:hyakawon and Shawiskara, here at the museum they were identified by other names, but the painting certainly depicts the story the way we know it. This was my personal favorite painting in the museum, and the boys loved it too. They easily identified which twin was which.

A sculpture of the evil sorcerer that we knew from our stories as Atotahrho. He's identified here by another name, but the boys easily recognized him due to his snakey hair.

"Hiawatha's Grief" is the name of this painting, and the boys were not only excited to find a painting of their beloved Aionwahta, but also to see that the strand of wampum he is holding looks just like the strands they made themselves at home after reading the story about his wanderings in grief. (I have to admit, I patted myself on the back for that one!)

A replica of the wampum belt that Aionwahta (Hiawatha) created while traveling from tribe to tribe to form the Great League of Peace (the Iroquois Confederacy). It depicts 4 longhouses (representing the Mohawk, Oneida, Seneca, and Cayuga) and a tree (the Great Tree of Peace, representing the Onondaga), all joined on a common strand. This was Zoo Boy's favorite moment, and when I told him we would be creating our own version of this wampum belt, he was VERY excited.

I'll write more about the connections we made between the exhibits at the museum and our crafts and projects in my next post.

Iroquois Museum, part 1

This past weekend we took a little trip out to the Iroquois Museum in Howes Cave, NY. The museum itself (above) is shaped like a Longhouse, which is pretty cool. Inside, there are lots of paintings, sculptures, and artifacts of Haudenosaunee life.

The kids (ours and Laurels) really loved seeing all the artwork and artifacts. The adults really loved talking with the folks who were working at the museum, who are members of the Mohawk tribe. In particular it was fun pairing up the artwork with the stories we read (I will post separately about that), and the projects and crafts we're working on (also deserving of it's own post).

The boys check out some lacrosse artifacts. They wondered when the sticks were modified to enclose the entire basket (like their sticks at home), and wondered whether it would be easier or harder to use this original type of stick.

Zoo Boy works on completing an artifact identification quiz. J chose to fill out a clan attributes quiz. Laurel's girls each worked on the scavenger hunts.

Rosebud sat in Daddy's lap and smiled at everyone. Tough job.

The whole gang checks out some creation paintings, which I will post next! As soon as we're done stripping branches off of saplings we cut for our own Longhouse. (Which of course also deserve their own posts....) I can't believe how far behind in blogging I am again...it's been a very action-packed week!

finally all caught up!

What a relief! Now to just stay caught up....

quill work, day 1

Sharp! And smelly! They're porcupine quills, and the Haudenosaunee used them extensively in decorating clothing and other articles. So, of course, we had to give it a try!

First we sorted them (above), to get rid of the porcupine hair (seriously, yuck), and then we washed them (below) -- several times -- to get rid of the porcupine stench (ha ha).

Then we dyed them (we left some natural, too). The whole process took about 2 1/2 hours, which left us with no time to actually DO anything with the quills, so that will have to wait until next time. But at least now we've got some pretty, colorful, less-stinky quills to start with when we're ready to pick them up again!

three sisters garden, week 2 (days 7, 8 & 9)

Most of this week was spent out of the garden (because we're just waiting for the corn and sunflowers to germinate at this point), much to Zoo Boy's disappointment (he's decided he just LOVES gardening), so we spent it exploring some gardening poems and doing some copy work with them, as well as writing our own garden-related poetry.

Above is "The Sunflower" by James Montgomery, below is an excerpt from a Navajo corn-planting ritual. (This is J's work, Zoo Boy wrote shorter portions of these poems.)

At the end of the week, we started writing our own poetry about gardening. Both boys are familiar with Acrostic poetry, and we worked on one poem together as an example (we did it on a dry-erase board and I didn't think to take a photo to save it, d'oh!). The boys then selected their own garden-related word and wrote their own Acrostics:

Above, J's poem "Garden". He's played around with Acrostics before, so he dove whole-hearted into the exercise. Zoo Boy mumbled repeatedly about how hard it was, and ran each line by me asking if it was OK or not (my answer was always "anything you want to say is OK, this is your poem"). I need to be careful with him and assignments like this, he's so easily convinced that he "can't" or that what he does is not "good enough". In the end, he was very excited about what he came up with and proud of himself, saying that even though it was really hard, he thought it was also really fun to write his own poem. Here is his poem, "Corn" :

We will be continuing to work with poetry throughout the rest of our planting unit (and will probably wrap our housing/building unit in with it as well since it's going to overlap).

I had planned a painting for our last day of the week, but we wound up taking an impromptu day off because of hatching ducklings:

If that's not a good reason to skip school, I don't know what is!

three sisters garden, day 6

We started this week by planting our sunflowers. According to Native American Gardening by Michale J. Caduto and Joseph Bruchac, sunflowers are a traditional part of any three sisters garden, although I couldn't find any stories to back that up. I was looking for SOME sort of sunflower story to read to the boys, but then J made up his own while we were preparing to plant our seeds, so I decided to just let it be. J said that the sunflowers are the "sentinels" that stand tall to watch over and protect the three sisters as they grow. (See, that's better than anything I could have come up with!)

We planted our striped seeds along the northern edge of the garden, so that they won't shade the other plants, and again along the fence inside our front gate (also to the north, which leads to our garden). Plenty of sentinels to keep that corn safe!

Rosebud, below, wants to know when all the cold, rainy weather will finally be over. The rain's been great for the garden, not so good for spending time outside in it! But she's been a pretty good sport about bundling up and getting soggy.

three sisters garden, painting (day 5)

We wrapped up our first week in our planting block with a painting, and a story ("The Corn Spirit" from the book Keepers of Life by Michael J. Caduto and Joseph Bruchac). Here's how we did the paintings in case anyone is looking for inspiration with this:


We started out doing a wash of the entire page in yellow, while I said "It was a perfect week to begin work on our Three Sisters garden. The sun was shining a bright, warm yellow, and it filled the sky with it's glow." Then we washed over the yellow with cobalt blue, while I said "The sky was so blue, the green, green grass grew up to meet it. (Of course, this resulted in a completely green page -- the color in the photos are slightly off.) "The first thing we needed to do to start our garden was to till up the soil." We loaded our brushed with Prussian blue, and painted in straight lines across the center of the page, leaving a margin of green all around, while I said "We hired a very nice man to come with his rototiller, and he turned over the sod for us and made us a place to plant a garden. We were thankful to have this man and his machine, because digging up all that grass by hand like the Haudenosaunee did would have been very hard work."


Then we dipped our brushes in the orange, and mixed it into the Prussian blue already on the page to make brown, while I said "We went to the pasture and dug up some nice, dark, organic soil to mix into our newly turned over earth." Then we picked up the Prussian blue again, and in a circular motion, made 12 circles in the garden square (that's how many mounds we have in our garden) while I said "We raked the soil into mounds, so that we would have little hills in which to plant our corn." Then with a small dry brush, we took away four spots of paint in each of the mounds, while I said "With a planting stick, we made four holes in each mound, one to the North, one to the South, one to the East, and one to the West, so that there would be space to plant our corn." Then we picked up some thick gold paint with the tip of the small brush, and "planted" a kernel of corn in each hole, while I said "When all was ready, we dropped our corn kernels into our holes, and our garden was ready for the rain and the sun to take over."

The top painting is mine, the middle is J's, and the bottom is Zoo Boy's. And yes, I'm very impressed with myself that I came up with this idea, it's hard to imagine that I used to be afraid of painting....