Kee Edwards: Travel through Eras

Featured
Wonder
Wednesday, 12th September
KEE EDWARDS: Travel through Eras

LEFT TO RIGHT: PHOTO BY EDWARD CURTIS, COURTESY OF KEE EDWARDS, VIA EDWARD CURTIS

Where would you go if you could experience a place during a different era?

The Americas before the Europeans came. As part Cherokee, I’m fascinated by Native American culture. There was so much tension between the races after the Trail of Tears. I even have a newspaper article of the male descendant in my family who married a Cherokee woman after she crossed the Trail of Tears. They fell in love and she decided not to be stockaded on the reservation and married the man she loved. A real Romeo and Juliet story; he was shot in the back over prejudices against the ‘Squaw’ woman he married, leaving her alone to raise their two children in Oklahoma in the late 1800s.

I, however, am rather obsessed with a romantic, imagined version of Colonialism. The mix of cultures is my idea of a dream reality. At a time when a new culture could be so vastly different, the sense of discovery must have been incredibly profound. I think there were so many during these times that loved the discovery of other cultures and ways of life like I do, now.

Just the fashion is enough to drool over. Military Jackets. Headdresses. Leather dresses. Bone and beaten metal beads. Kilts and exotic skins from traveling trappers. Amazing.

Mozambique, Kenya, and Rhodesia during colonialism through liberation and the early Eurasian and African spice routes. How inspirational they must have been. Now we see everything all at once, but the introduction of so much newness must have been mind blowing and so ripe with adventure.

Caravans of possibility.

September 2012