Karen E. Goulet

The Sky That Loved Her Back Series

Some of us need more time, more tries to reach a place of peace, knowing that peace is not a constant and must be tended to on a somewhat regular basis. This series will make itself over time. It is a visual landscape of my world as I am in it, and as I remember it. It isn’t everyone’s world, and even those in it may see it differently than me. This is my healing. I create art because I must.   

How the Wind Remembers It

I have lived a very nomadic life, moving in and out of various lifestyles, but always with creative drive. Becoming an artist took some time and I kept searching for my place in the world. Eventually I would find my way to White Earth Reservation. This has been the greatest healing of my life. I have found people, land and culture that feeds my heart and feeds my soul. One dominant element of White Earth Reservation is the wind. It is ceaseless. It influences weather and horizon lines and keeps the landscape in perpetual motion. This piece is an honoring of the place I am forever tied to, no matter what else changes.

Violas Blues

It took 20 years to complete this work of art. It was started for my Uncle Arnold who committed suicide around the age of 41. When it happened, I was in Alaska deep  in a life of drug and alcohol use. I did not even think to ask my mom how he died. My mother didn’t tell me, perhaps it was too painful.  A number of years later I learned what happened. I was devastated and ashamed I had not asked my mom when she called. I have spent years wrestling with the truth of that period of my life, reconciling my emotional neglect to my family. 

Uncle Arnold was a gentle shy man, odd in his mannerisms but he was our uncle and we loved him. Many years after his death I learned about his early life. How he was put in Bemidji jail at age 11 for having shoplifted cigarettes and a candy bar. When in there he had an epileptic fit, which resulted in him be sentenced to a mental institution until he was in his 20’s. This tragedy will never be erased. I could never finish the work.  

Recently I realized the work was also for his mother Vi. She had the love and will to marry Grandpa Frank during an era when white women did not marry brown men. He was a charismatic man, and an Indian boarding school survivor. Work often kept him away from home for extended periods of time. Her life was not easy. She raised 10 children in a town that was less than kind to Native people. She lost her son, for years, to a racist system. She was the one who found him after his suicide and had to live with losing him again. She is a hero to all of her family. She loved flowers, had the prettiest blue eyes, and was strong enough to keep her family together in her own way. This piece is for her, about her, and all the things her heart had to hold in her lifetime. Wherever she is, I hope there are flowers and everyone she loved and lost.