Creative Instincts

Lillian Pitt’s life has all the trappings of an ordinary existence. She lives with her partner in a cluttered ranch house in southeast Portland, practices Iyengar yoga and spends her workdays shuttling between meetings, Kinko’s and her studio. But Pitt’s story is far from mundane. A one-time hairdresser, Pitt’s life dramatically changed the day she accompanied a friend to a ceramics class and plunged her hands into raw clay. A member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Pitt’s facility for creating tribal masks led her to learn more about her deep-rooted heritage, connecting with Wasco and Yakama elders in a new, meaningful way. Now an acclaimed sculptor, Pitt has received commissions from the City of Portland, the Oregon Convention Center, Portland State University and others.

Q: How did you get your start as an artist?
A: I’m a late bloomer. I was going to Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham for its mental health-human services program, and a fellow student said I should join her ceramics class. So I did. And it was love at first touch. My instructor told me to take some clay home, and I didn’t have a clue as to what to build because I’d never considered myself artistic. I looked up on the wall and we had Northwest coast masks. So I said, I’ll make a mask.

Q: As simple as that?
A: It was a very homely mask, it’s just awful! But that summer there was an opening where R.C. Gorman, the famous Navajo artist, was showing, and I showed him pictures of my masks. He bought my first two masks, and I figured I’d give it a year before I went back to school.

Q: To focus on your art?
A: Yes. But that was 25 years ago. R.C. had written to all these galleries across the U.S. and they put in orders, and I just had to do them. Eventually I figured I should start doing my own images, and that’s when I found out I have a 10,000-year history of ancestry in the Columbia River Gorge.

Q: Did you grow up on the Warm Springs reservation?
A: Yes, until the sixth grade, and then we moved to Madras.

Q: What was the transition like, going from Warm Springs to high school in Madras?
A: In the early ‘60s, my high school experience wasn’t that great; there was a lot of prejudice. So moving to Portland (after graduation) was a blessing. I went to beauty school; I was a hairdresser for many years and I enjoyed doing that. I’ve really become quite the city girl.

Q: Were you taught the history and traditions of your ancestors growing up?
A: Well, yeah, somewhat. There’d always been Celilo Falls, where my dad went fishing in the spring and fall. We used to play while dad fished and we figured it would be there forever. But then in 1956, they drowned it with the Dalles Dam. But the history and the legends have always been there for me. There is the legend of the Stick Indian. The story behind that is if you’re lost in the woods, a Stick Indian will guide you to safety with their whistle—if you’re a good person. And if you’re bad, they’ll lead you deeper into the forest with their whistle. A lot of my masks have the pursed mouth of the whistling Ste-ye-hah’.

Q: The Stick Indian is depicted in the Lewis and Clark pin you designed. Why did you choose that> character?
A: Because it’s specific to the Oregon, Washington and Western Idaho people.

Q: But how does the Stick Indian relate to the Lewis and Clark expedition? Q: The Lewis and Clark expedition paved the way for European settlement of the West, disrupting the way of life for many tribes. Do you have conflicting feelings about commemorating the bicentennial?
A: Well, there were a lot of people who came before Lewis and Clark who had traveled across the Pacific and up the Gorge. Eventually we probably knew that changes were going to come, legends were told about changes coming. So, no, Lewis and Clark doesn’t mean too much to me except an opportunity to tell my story and my people’s story. It’s a way of educating people.