MYTH, MEMORY, AND LANDSCAPE IN THE PYRAMID LAKE PAIUTE RESERVATION

摘要

In the Great Basin region of Nevada, Pyramid Lake and Lake Winemucca are landscape features that ground the cosmology and mythology of the Native American Paiute peoples. Since the early 20th century, water diversion from the river that feeds these lakes for municipal and agricultural purposes has been devastating. To acknowledge this generational theft and formulate a new mythology to contextualize the story of these landscapes' dissolution, students worked with community members and tribal historians. They designed an intensely narrative and didactic landscape installation for Lake Winemucca's desolate lake bed. It adopts tribal symbolism and mythology and uses subtle topography as a storytelling vehicle. Divided into five parts, its first stage reveals layers of geologic strata in the lake bed, with a descent into the landscape. Dense dusters of rule reeds are a reminder of the ecological riches the area once had. Eventually, the trail becomes a narrow pass, hemmed in by symbolic representations of the heedless use of water and subsequent ecological collapse. Finally, the path widens and releases, rejoining the ground plane and the exposed lake bed strata layers. "I think it's absolutely stunning, poetic, emotional, and formally compelling," said one juror.