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Activist, art collector, and writer living in Gozo
The first thing that strikes you about the American art collector Barbara Bode is her approachable open demeanor and friendly cheerful voice. My first impression was immediately that she’s a lively and spirited woman of substance. Here we find out more about her life, passions, and interests.
The first time we met, you were selling some remarkable artifacts from your Southwestern American Indian collection. Could you tell us more about the artists in question, the unusual pottery pieces and what some of the other works represent?
Most of the pieces in my collection are the work of Navajo sculptor Pablita Abeyta who is also an old friend. Pablita comes from a family of Navajo artists who all grew up on the Navajo Reservation that spreads across northern New Mexico and Arizona in the southwestern United States.
In my collection there is a Christmas grouping of a mudhead Madonna and child and Joseph, which are indicative of the effect of Christian missionaries on some native people.
I don’t know personally the other artists whose pots are in my collection but I love the work of the artisans of three New Mexico pueblos in particular. Several of my pots are made by artists of the Acoma Pueblo. These potters are widely known for their elegant white pottery. Some of the finest white kaolin clay available is found at the pueblo, as well as brown/black and red/rust earth paints, which are used to decorate the pottery.
Two other pueblos are famous for their highly polished black pottery. They are San Ildefonso and Santa Clara, two neighboring villages on the Rio Grande River just north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. In addition, I have a small collection of five ‘fetishes’. One was made by Pablita and one is Zuni, a tribe on the border of New Mexico and Arizona. The others are of unknown origins.
What spiritual tradition would you say Native Americans follow in New Mexico and Arizona and how does it influence their Arts and Crafts?
Contemporary southwestern Indians, like most other native people in the States and Canada, in their culture, values and traditions deify the sun and the moon and the forces of nature. They also emphasize their respect for the wisdom of their elders, their concept of family responsibilities extending beyond the immediate family to embrace their whole village, their respect for the environment and their willingness to share. Despite government and majority culture pressure to abandon them, all of these values have persisted up to modern times.
What we see in their arts and crafts generally is the way in which they meld these traditional values with a contemporary aesthetic. For example, about a decade ago, Pablita began to color her traditional clay sculptures or to splash some gold leaf across her pots. But still the traditional deities remain represented in her work.
Does the Native American community still thrive nowadays in a few cities such as Albuquerque or is it a dying culture?
Native Americans haven’t truly thrived since the Europeans came over in the 17th century. Over the years, they stole their lands, killed their warriors, infected their people with diseases and forced them onto reservations and into boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their native languages or practice their native arts or traditional religious ceremonies. And as the European immigrants acclimated, they also stole their oil. These Europeans now considered themselves red-blooded Americans and denigrate Native Americans as “redskins.”
The culture is not dying but the majority culture either ignores it or tries to rob it of its resources and its traditional culture.
Today a large number of Indians still live on reservations where the government and white folks continue to try to grab their last acres of valuable land. Each major city in the States does have a percentage of Native Americans living there but a number of tribes have been wiped out entirely. Americans for Indian Opportunity, the Native American Rights Fund and other NGOs today struggle to change discriminatory and confiscatory government policies and popular attitudes.
What is The Children’s Foundation in D.C.’s mission exactly, and how were you involved in it?
For 15 years, I was President of The Children’s Foundation.
After 35 years, in June of this year, The Children’s Foundation closed its doors. It had been one of the two major national anti-hunger organizations in the United States. Our mission was to improve laws, policies and practices in order to reduce hunger among low-income American children and their families, including, of course, American Indians.
We did this through research and activism. We studied various aspects of childhood hunger in America; reported to the US Congress on our findings of what was needed or what government programs weren’t working; and worked with members of Congress and the various presidential administrations to get laws passed or laws and policies changed so that we could eradicate the problem of hunger in the United States. Once we won positive policy changes, we then worked through our field representatives across the country to monitor the implementation of the laws. By organizing groups of low-income parents and leaders to understand their children’s rights under the laws and to make sure they were obeyed, we developed monitoring forces in communities across the country.
Up until the current Bush administration, we were making solid progress. As the whole world saw in New Orleans after the hurricane, that’s no longer true.
Tell us about your experience and work as an activist for social change.
I was studying in the Washington DC area when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called for a March on Washington. Participating in it was an amazing experience. As a result, after graduate school I went as a college instructor on a special fellowship program to teach on a historically Black college campus in the South. As the only white person living and teaching on campus, I learned an enormous amount. The experience opened me up to issues of discrimination and bigotry in my country.
From then on, no matter what sort of work I was doing, I was also involved in various civil rights movements on behalf of people who were marginalized. Happily, most of my professional life was committed to doing the same thing.
What brought you to Malta – more specifically Xaghra, Gozo?
I wanted to learn and see more. But I also wanted to be able to drive safely and get around on my own. The roundabouts of Malta seemed to me to be life threatening! Gozo sounded far safer.
Enter Antonia Camilleri of Ghajnsielem, driving instructor extraordinaire. I spent a week or so on Gozo in January. Every morning she would pick me up and teach me to drive on the other side of the road and shift gears with the other hand. For an hour we would combine driving lessons with sightseeing, including clambering down Calypso’s cave and marveling at the walls of Ta Pinu. Then at 9 am she’d drop me off somewhere interesting and leave me to wander around and get back to my hotel at the harbor on my own.
Besides, there were so few tourists in mid-January that I got special attention and tours from the museum curators and from Gozitans generally. To stand in the temples of Ggantija was a vitalizing experience. Antonia‘s introduction to Gozo convinced me that I wanted to return and I wanted to live here. When I came back in December 2003, I stayed with them, while I looked for a place to live. A number of months later, I had the chance to move into a gorgeous 200 year old farmhouse, where I’ve really settled down.
Barbara Bode was talking to Erika Brincat.
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