Ethan Brown, Pamunkey Artist: Gourds, Film and Rediscovering a Culture

Ethan Brown is a citizen of the Pamunkey Indian Tribe, a federally recognised tribe whose reservation — on the border of King William, Virginia — is one of the two oldest in the United States. He had lived there for about thirteen years when he spoke with the National Park Service's Chesapeake programme in 2020. He works in many media: gourd art, wood sculpture, oil painting, pottery and film, and he lets each piece grow naturally rather than starting from a fixed plan. What follows paraphrases the interview.

Learning from his grandmother

Brown started making gourd art about twelve years earlier, at eighteen or nineteen, just after moving onto the reservation. His grandmother made gourd art — he learned by watching her — and an uncle was an accomplished artist. The tribe's museum has a gift shop, so he began making pieces to sell there, and the work grew from that.

Gourds have always been part of the culture, he says, but not decorated the way he does it; his techniques are contemporary. He grows his own gourds — a canvas he doesn't have to buy — draws the design in pencil, wood-burns the outlines, then fills in colours and stains by feel. The part he enjoys most is imagining the scene and designing it; once the drawing is on the gourd, the rest is almost automatic.

No fixed message

Brown doesn't set out to make viewers take away a particular lesson. He follows what inspires him in the moment and leaves the meaning to whoever looks at or buys the piece. His work mixes what he has read about art, history and culture, what he has absorbed living on the reservation and hearing its stories, and whatever he likes in the look, design and storytelling of Native and non-Native art alike. Any theme, he says, could yield a hundred different gourds; the hard part is choosing a direction and letting each piece become what it wants to be.

Into film

For a few years he had been writing screenplays for practice and making short films. What pulled him toward film was the Pocahontas Reframed Film Festival in Richmond, which his father began directing, and the Native filmmakers he met through it. He was finishing an abstract short film drawing on traditional symbols and creation-story elements, partly sponsored by the University of Virginia's Religion, Race, and Democracy Lab and made with professor Federico Cuatlacuatl, graduate student Caleb Hendrickson and Richmond sound artist Joshua Rodenberg. Titled Tsenacommacah, it was filmed entirely on the Pamunkey Reservation.

He planned to keep making visual art — pieces he would want on his own shelf, which then go to the gift shop and leave the shelf empty for the next one — while doing more film, which he sees as a deeper medium for complex storytelling.

The Great Hare, and what was lost

For Chesapeake national parks Brown painted a gourd of a Powhatan creation story. A creator spirit in the form of a Great Hare comes from the rising sun carrying a magic bag that holds man and woman. He makes the mountains, forests and rivers and sets a Great Deer on the land. The four winds, jealous, come by night and kill the deer. The Great Hare gathers its hairs and scatters them across the land, each becoming a smaller deer so that people will have food; then he lets man and woman out of the bag to live in harmony.

But Brown did not inherit that story; he read it in a book. The destruction of the tribes, he says, cut off much traditional knowledge — people were forbidden their language and ceremonies. Culture keeps evolving, though, and he feels closer to what the reservation community has lived through over three centuries: not the old traditional culture, but still theirs. For him, art is a way to weigh the written historical record, his community's stories, his experience of other Native communities and his own intuition — and through them to make new connections and rediscover things.

The forest

Asked which lands he hopes to protect, Brown says he simply hopes people don't make the planet uninhabitable. He celebrates the forested East Coast: the Pamunkey, he says, are traditionally a forest people.

His work, and that of other Pamunkey artists, can be seen and bought at the Pamunkey Indian Museum gift shop.

Sources

• National Park Service, Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, "Indigenous Artistry: Ethan Brown," first published July 29, 2020, on FindYourChesapeake.com. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/ethan-brown.htm
• Related: Gourd Art, in which Brown explains three of his gourds.
• The article's photographs are Ethan Brown's own, of himself and his painted gourds; they are left out.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.