An Appreciation of L. Frank

In the reading I’ve done towards my final project on Two Spirit identity, I came to realize that there was a Two Spirit person that we had seen in class and whose work we had discussed without acknowledging that they are Two-Spirit. Artist and language recovery activist L. Frank (also known as L. Frank Manriquez) appeared in the short documentary on Indigenous languages we watched in class at the beginning of the semester.

https://vimeo.com/41890958

 

L. Frank has spent many years piecing together languages, works of art and cultural objects, in order to take back the history which has been lost and give it to the people. Throughout her work, she has put a focus on the ways in which we can return our research to the community under research (or at least our communities outside academe. In an article about language recovery published in News From Native California, Spring 2013, for example, she writes about the creation of Breath of Life, Silent No More, a project which helps linguists and Indigenous communities in California come together in order to reconstruct languages which no longer have fluent speakers. “Having no speakers, we were trying to read and understand diacritical marks, working alone day in and night out. We were looking for language understanding, knowing that in the language we would find our people.”

In the introduction to a collection of her drawings, Acorn Soup, L. Frank writes about the way in which for her the past and the present intersect and are permanently linked. This link grows stronger with the work of recovery.

“Trying to make string to hold the rattle together, I gathered Indian hemp from a field in Sonoma County, and I learned how to make string, and then we went to court to try to keep a developer from cutting down the hemp. Then I got into astronomy, and then I made some stone bowls—the first stone bowls of the Tongva people in over two hundred years—with soapstone mined from Catalina Island.

Sometimes when I’m working with soapstone, I can hear the. Voices of the ancestors. Once I made a bowl that was so perfect, so flawless, I knew it was the ancestors who had made it. And once I was weaving a basket, in my brother’s back yard in Orange County, and over the fence I could hear a lot of women talking, joking about a man they knew. Then I realized they were not speaking English; I was hearing the voices of the people who used to live there.” (11)

In Acorn Soup, L. Frank presents a vision of myths and stories from creation to contemporary California. The images are often simple, and the captions appear in a reversed handwriting. These comics occupy multiple spaces, spaces of satire and theory, commentary and recovery. They retell old stories and invent new ones. My personal favorite is a series of images featuring Coyote as an artist at the end of the 20th century. Another series of images, features the recurring caption “No greater love hath any Coyote for his father,” shows pictures within the picture, drawn by Coyote, of Coyote chasing after and consuming a bird. Another image shows Coyote dressed as a magician, with “Culture Revival Act” on his placard, advertising his mission. In the Appendix, L. Frank describes the meaning of the drawing as follows:

In order for many natives to revive their cultures they must navigate the quagmire of teh many disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, astronomy, and ethno-this and ethno-that. And find dollars to support the rivival. Native people are proficient magicians. (63)

I’m currently reading another text by L. Frank, First Families: Portraits of Indigenous Californians, written in collaboration with Kim Hogeland. This large book presents a history of Californians from an Indigenous perspective, using family memories and photographs for historical record. Piecing the images together, we see one by one different modes of life, shifting relations with Americans, differing traditions. California, it seems, was always the real melting pot of this land. These photographs could be the photographs of our great grandparents or grandparents, showing the many-fold experiences of Indigenous people on Turtle Island. These snapshots are so overwhelming to me as a viewer and reader because for so many Indigenous peoples in this country, they exist only in a distant past. To see a past that still lingers on in our grandparents’ faces, and to know that it is only by accident of birth that we are not the lanky teenager or small babe in this photograph is to bring a commonality to these images, wherein differences seem not so large after all.

Interview about Two Spirit

“The L. Frank Project”

“L. Frank Manriquez #nosainthood4serra (2015)”

“From The California Museum’s 2011 exhibit, ‘California Indians: Making a Difference'”