by Quentin Lewis

Yearnotes 2022

yearnotes

This is my year as sentences on which I could put a period, and a few that require more complicated or delicate punctuation.

I read 53 books this year:

 

Besides books, my most regular medium of choice is podcasts. My staples for this year have continued to be WTF w/ Marc Maron, Why is this Happening?, Double Threat, Explorers Wanted, Pseudopod, Our Opinions are Correct, Weird Studies, Know Your Enemy, the Memory Palace, and Deconstructed. New additions include:

  • Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about post Cold War movies of the 1990s, which is informative and thoughtful, though focusing on movies that are mostly neither.
  • 5-4, a very funny and incisive podcast “about how much the Supreme Court Sucks”
  • “The Land You’re On”, a wonderful exploration of contemporary and historical Haudenosaunee life and culture put together by the great Neal Powless.

 

I saw some good (and some bad!) movies and TV this year, including

 

I mostly buy music on Bandcamp, and this year I bought albums by:

 

Professionally I got a bit done.

  • Teaching-wise, I again taught Collections Management, and this year, taught it Ungraded, with grades developed in consultation with students based on their and my mutual assessment. It was a great experience that I’m doing again. I also taught North American Material culture up to 1700, with far-too-brief surveys of the rich and diverse object-worlds of Indigenous people on Turtle Island. Finally, I was a guest speaker in SUNY Oneonta’s capstone course “Issues in Anthropology”. I spoke about the archaeology of race, a subject to which I used to devote substantial intellectual and practical effort.
  • We finished a speaker’s series on Land Acknowledgements with amazing talks by Bonney Hartley (Stockbridge-Munsee Community) and Darren Bonaparte (Mohawk of Akwsesasne).
  • We finished and installed two exhibit panels documenting our repatriation of brooches used by John Wannaucon Quinney to the Stockbridge-Munsee. These panels were developed by Hartwick students and staff and members of the Stockbridge-Munsee community, and copies are on display here and at the Arvid E Miller Cultural Center and Library on the reservation in Wisconson.
  • I applied for and successfully received a NYSCA/MANY Partnership Grant for Capacity Building. This grant is currently funding our consultation by Indigenous Concepts Consulting, a Haudenosaunee-owned consulting firm, who is helping us re-think and re-imagine how we exhibit and talk about Native people at the Yager Museum. We held a day-long workshop with Michelle and Neal in November, and now we are in the process of coming up with a new exhibit plan to install next year.
  • With some money from the Richard and Gerri Haan fund for Native American studies, the museum hosted a weeklong residency and exhibit by Jason Medicine Eagle Martinez, an artist and teacher based in Rensselaer, New York. Jason’s work and process were enthusiastically received by students, faculty, and staff, and I’m honored to continue to be able to use the Yager Museum as a space to exhibit exciting contemporary Indigenous art.
  • Speaking of that, earlier this year we de-installed dadibaajimo: Two Mississauga Artists Share stories, and after months of wrangling, I finally managed to return Cathie Jamieson’s paintings back to her on the Misssissauga Reservation, with the help of Luke and August Swinson. Luke has agreed to donate his artwork to the Museum’s collection, and we have purchased two of Cathie’s paintings as well. I am excited to help the museum grow and blossom as a repository of interesting and gorgeous contemporary Indigenous art.
  • I completed the Museum’s five-year collections inventory, with the help of Hartwick students Moussa Niang, Gabriel Valenzuela, and Josephine Becker. My son even helped too! We also repaired and re-installed St. John of Nepomuk in the Museum’s Van Ess Gallery.
  • Along with Josephine, I installed “Front Row Center: Icons of Rock, Blues, and Soul”, a travelling exhibit of photographs by Larry Hulst. I also directed the installation of “Juxtapositions: Warhol and the Baroque” and did some design work for the display panels. Finally, I installed some Mexican Masks from the Museum’s collection for display at Thornwood, the home of Hartwick’s new President, Darren Reisberg and his husband John Hilliard.
  • After two years of locked summers in the Museum, we re-started the Museum’s Crafternoons programs, with weekly activities for kids. I love this event and am happy that the Museum can be a space for children’s creativity again.We also showed a bunch of movies, had a live concert, and hosted another successful “Horror in the Museum”.
  • I joined Hartwick’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion subcommittee on Native American issues. We are working largely on aesthetic and built-environment changes to the College, including street signs, the college alma mater, a land acknowledgement and the placques on Yager hall. We are also building a case for greater engagement with New York Indigenous communities through recruitment and retention of Indigenous students and faculty.
  • Oh yeah, and I got promoted to Museum Curator, too!

 

I tried, in halting ways to take better care of myself this year. Inspired in part by weight-lifter and fitness-culture critic Casey Johnston, I started doing strength-training again at the gym. I feel strong in my body and better overall. I also started talking to a therapist regularly, which has made my brain and my heart feel better too.

On the other hand, this is the year my whole family got COVID. Thankfully, none of us seems to have developed any long-term or debilitating symptoms. We also managed to get the usual kind of sick that was held at bay by quarantining at home for two years.

We spent an atrocious amount of money on car repair. If you’re up there God, please send me a future that looks more like Wakanda than NYC. Or at least send me a Tern GSD electric bicycle.

When vehicles were working, we did take the opportunity of a slightly epidemiologically safer world to travel a bit.

  • We visited Toronto (and Bancroft, ON) for the first time in two years, and I ultimately ended up going back twice more–once to pick up my renewed PR card, and once to celebrate my Mother-in-Law’s 80th birthday!
  • We also took a trip out to the North Shore of Massachusetts, which is a gorgeous, fun and personally resonant place to which I am always happy to return.
  • We spent some time in Iowa with my parents and my brother. And they spent some time in Oneonta with us.
  • We also did some shorter outings to Oswego, and Chenango Valley State Park.
  • We sent our son off to summer camp at the amazing and inspiring Camp Stomping Ground. It was a bit rocky for him (and for us!), but he made it through his first time and is excited to go back next year.

I mourned the passing of influential people in my life, including Tony Barrand, Mike Davis, Mimi Parker, and Wilco Johnson.

I voted and gave some money to good people, and like most of us, I mourned the many dark turns that America and the World took. I did spend some time working on the Black Trowel Collective’s Microgrants Committee, helping provide microgrant funding for financially distressed archaeology students. I wanted to do more.

I played second guitar for John O’Connor at a wonderful summer evening concert at Meadowlinks Golf Course in Cooperstown.

Late in the waning hours of 2021, I wrote a Christmas ghost story that I’m still fiddling with. I also finished a draft of a short story that I’d been working on for a year, but when I shared it with some writer friends, they suggested I open it up into something bigger. In a fit of blind hubris, I’m now slowly turning it into a novel about the Catskills, the violence and weakness of men, faith, and conspiracy. Stay tuned–maybe by next year I’ll actually have something substantive written.

…

As I was writing this, I kept thinking of things I didn’t do; didn’t make, didn’t arrive at, didn’t finish this or that thing I started, didn’t even start this or that thing I thought a lot about, didn’t call when I should have, didn’t help out when I could have, didn’t get around to something or other. I’m not sure why I feel so weighed down by the alternative 2022 I construct in my head; there are a lot of words and deeds in the previous paragraphs! Somehow it just feels tentative and uneven when I try to take it all in.

What I do feel good about are my people, who are the ultimate measure of any of us. I love Alanna (who was amazing this year in too many ways to count), and Dominic and Hazel who I get to watch grow anew every day. I love my folks, and my brother (who made quite a year for himself in a new city). I love my friends with whom I communicated in a variety of lengthy and brief ways this year: the Minister of Intrigue, Randall (who had a baby–here’s to you Julian), and Bill (who bought a house), and Pat (who made a hit Christmas movie), and Matt (who moved) and Matt and Paul and Ian and Thor and Juan and Liz and Dan (who also had a baby whose name unfortunately escapes me as I write this) and Anthony and Bob and John and Jon and Nate (who still hasn’t told me the name of his new baby!). Thanks everyone for the various subtle but essential acts of listening and talking to me that you did this year.

May we all hope to give as much nourishment, joy, and care to the people around us as we draw from them, in this new year, which will be better than the last.