My daughter-in-law and I are working on a mural for the new Native American room at the Lake County Historical Society in Painesville, Ohio. We started it last spring and it's about half finished. We've had several interruptions, but started working on it again this week. The finished mural will be about 11 feet high by 14 feet long. It represents a Whittlesey Focus village site about 1500 A.D. as one might have looked if it were situated on our present site, overlooking the Grand River and not far from Lake Erie. In fact, Dr. Redmond and his crew from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History conducted a field survey with some test digs on our site in May of 2008. We only found one piece of worked flint from the holes, but right at the end of the survey, one of our staff members found a beautiful little adze in the field where we were working. A few weeks later, we found a rough, much larger celt. Dr. Redmond said that our site fits perfectly the description of known Whittlesey sites along the southern shore of Lake Erie. Anyway, it's apparent that the Whittlesey at least passed through our site. Dr. Redmond advised us on the details of the mural. He spent a couple of hours at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History going over our layout, letting us photograph Whittlesey pottery and showing us the real Ringlar dugout canoe that is stored in the basement under carefully controlled conditions. (The dugout canoe on display is a replica of the real one downstairs.) Our mural depicts village life, with a combination of round wigwam style buildings and long house type buildings. The village is surrounded on three sides by a stockade. A large field of corn and squash and beans is being harvested just outside the stockade. People are cooking, making pottery, building wigwams, playing games, etc. I'll try to add some photos of the mural to the blog soon.

Childhoods of the Past

Writing is one path I have chosen in my creative journey. I hope to take children back in time to the worlds of other children. I have unpublished accounts of childhood in pre-1850 Ohio, especially Northeastern Ohio. It seems that the only resource teachers draw on for accounts of children in pioneering times is Wilder's Little House on the Prairie books. As wonderful as they are, they cover only the Midwest and prairie life at a much later time than pioneering in the Eastern Woodlands a half century earlier. Bringing these real life Northeastern Ohio pioneer children to life, surrounded by virgin forest and wild animals, is a major goal. Childhood in other eras is also fascinating to me. I have accounts and photos of my grandmother's childhood in Missouri in the early 1900's. What pops out of her album dispels some misconceptions about what was normal for girls of her day. For example, in about 1910, she was captain of a girl's basketball team, decked out in black bloomers and holding her basketball. She and her sisters donned overalls to reenact the local preacher baptizing people in the river. All the neighborhood kids, boys and girls, swam in the swimming hole in the river. She rode horseback bareback. She sat on her brother's Harley Davidson motorcycle dressed to the nines in a big black hat and long dress. Her cousin, in a modest, two piece bathing suit poses on a beach with a box of graham crackers that doesn't look much different than a box of graham crackers today. All this is seen through my grandmother's eyes, since she owned her own camera and took pictures or had her friends take her picture doing every day things. Then she made her own photo album. The more expected scenes of playing drop the handkerchief at school are also part of her photo album. In one photo she sits in a one room school house at a desk among other children, a big bow on her head. Enlargement of the photo revealed a math problem written on the blackboard behind her, with her signature underneath it. If there ever was a real "American Girl" of the early 1900's, my grandmother, Jo, was it. Entering her world through her album is stepping right into the past and joining the children at their game of drop the handkerchief or girls' basketball.

The Last Journey with Viktor Schreckengost

I conceptualized, chose the artwork and worked on a committee to create the current Viktor Schreckengost exhibit at Historic Sites in Kirtland, Ohio, running from January 12, 2007 to April 19, 2008. The exhibit is entitled All Creatures Great and Small: Animal Artwork of Viktor Schreckengost. He attended the opening of the event, with his wife, Gene, and several family members. He was animated and happy throughout the evening, especially enjoying the children at the exhibit. As it turned out, this was his last public appearance. He died less than three weeks later, on January 26, 2008. To have walked the last mile of his journey with him was an important part of my own life's journey. I attended his funeral the following week and left with a determination to explore and expand my own gifts, to try to leave the world a happier place because I was here.

Walking in Their Moccasins

I am currently the project director for “Walking in Their Moccasins”, a program for 4th through 6th graders on prehistoric Native Americans of Northeast Ohio. I designed and implemented the program, including the curriculum, exhibit room, craft, hands-on activities and booklet. The project was made possible through a grant from the Martha Holden Jennings Foundation, collaboration with Kathy Purmal, staff and volunteers at Lake County Historical Society, community volunteers, family, friends and The Geauga County Park District. Four hundred children from local schools attended the first sessions in 2007, held at Lake County Historical Society. The "Moccasins" program will be offered again this spring, probably at our old site in Kirtland Hills, but by the fall of 2008, should be located at our new museum site in Painesville, Ohio. A half-day of hands-on activities include spear throwing with an atlatl, a mini-archaeological dig with "Professor Whittlesey", prehistoric timeline activities and reenacting village life in a prehistoric Whittlesy Culture setting.