The Demo Site

Larry Littlebird's approach to his "Hunting Sacred" workshop last Saturday was much like the late great Thomas R. Barrett's take on teaching art history to school kids: Start at the end. Barrett's reasoning was, "You have to understand where you are before you can comprehend where you've come from." So we began the year with the Post-Impressionists and ended in May with Monet.

Completely aware of the naïveté of his pupils, Littlebird's motivation was similar. Most of his students that day had never hunted, and if they had, their experience had not grown out of the premise that “the role of the hunter is to learn to be blessed.” After some initial outdoor awareness-exercises (more on this later), we walked into Littlebird’s one-room “Sheppard’s House.” There, in the middle of the rounded adobe room in front of the woodstove, was a huge, beautiful elk hide centered on a brightly colored blanket surrounded by offering dishes of food and water, many fabulous necklaces, various talismans, and two bows, two groups of arrows, and a quiver. Hours later, when we came back from the day’s last outdoor exercise, what greeted us on the dirt floor were one bow, some arrows and the quiver on a stark-grey blanket. The sun was setting, and it was time for us to go, metaphorically armed for life.

“Artists are the antennae of the race,” Ezra Pound said (around the dawn of cubism and industrial farming). But how does one LEARN TO BE an antenna? From these two incredible wise men (split by a mere 25 years), I gather that becoming a true artist must be much like becoming a sacred hunter. You have to REALLY listen, or more precisely, you must be fully AWARE of your environment—using each of your six or seven senses most of your waking life.