Bill and Modoc the Shaman (click to embiggen)
Another piece to celebrate the anniversary of the release of the Blacklight Journal 3 Special Edition! This time, Modoc the Shaman! I was excited to see a drawing in the blacklight Journal 3 of Modoc, and had been wanting to do something with him ever since.
The reasoning and research behind the way he is dressed, along with illustrations, is probably best put under a cut...
“Modoc the Wise. A Gravity Falls shaman who met a gruesome end when he ran afoul of Bill. He is thought to be the one who inscribed the incantation on the cave that brought Bill into my life. I am the latest in a long line of these foolish men, and it is my burden to avenge them all or lose my life trying.”
(Once again, indebted to @fordarkisthesuede for the pic of the blacklight Journal, and the transcription!)
I really appreciated that the design for Modoc was clearly based on NW Coast elements, rather than his being a "generic shaman" design. The only problem, though, was that the headdress and robe he is wearing is pretty clearly identifiable -- the headdress is a Haida chief's design, featuring a carved frontlet and ermine surround, while the robe looks a little like a Haida robe and a little like a Tlingit chilkat robe (it's hard to tell at that angle and in just linework; but the Tlingit did trade with the Haida).
(Above, Haida Chief Son-I-Hat John McAllister, 2016)
So on the one hand, it's great that the design is from roughly the right part of North America! (Rather than being a Plains design, for example.) However, the Haida and Tlingit are coastal tribes, from quite far north (along the coast in what is now British Columbia in Canada, and southeastern Alaska). And, Gravity Falls, as shown on maps in the show itself, is not coastal, and is located in at least central to south Oregon. The tribes in that area aren't the same, and they don't have the same artistic and design expression.
(I'm not counting the presence of the totem pole in the show. So-called totem poles are also more of a NW Coast thing, but, in modern times, they've become a lot more widespread throughout the region. And the show is a case of a white guy using the totem pole as decoration for a tourist trap, in which case, it not being exactly geographically authentic is completely to be expected.)
So I decided to see if I could figure out how Modoc the Shaman might have looked, with a bit more of a nod to customs local to the Gravity Falls area.
The first issue, of course, is that while we have a general idea of where Gravity Falls is supposed to be, we don't have an exact location. It's *probably* in the Cascades in central-ish Oregon, but we don't know how far to the north or south. It's probably not as far south as Crater Lake, and it isn't as far north as Mt. Hood. Otherwise...? *Handwave*. This makes a difference because the tribe whose lands comprise the north-central Cascades are the Molala, while the southern Cascades (into northern CA) are the Klamath (including the area around Crater Lake).
In the end, I wound up going with a Klamath shaman design for Modoc, for a few reasons:
Edward Curtis took a bunch of photos of Klamath men and women, including one shaman, in the early 20th century. So it's easier to find references for Klamath ceremonial dress.
I wasn't having much luck finding good references for the Molalla.
the show named the shaman “Modoc”.
The Modoc tribe is from the same region as the Klamath, and is affiliated with the Klamath Tribes today.
I based this design of Modoc the Shaman specifically on photos of Lee Snipes, otherwise known as "Captain Sky", one of the last practicing shamans of the Klamath (according to their own tribal website). He was photographed in several outfits, and I blended elements from them. To figure out the coloring, I was able to hunt down a website with pictures from what seems to be some Smithsonian holdings of historical Klamath clothes and decorations, in color. (The problem with trying to reconstruct historical costumes from black and white photos, obviously, is that you can fall into the trap of making everything too monochrome. In this case, I felt a little more certain by the end that the outfit probably WAS fairly monochrome in earth tones, with some stand-out red and blue design elements, based on the historic clothing samples.)
(Above, my two main references. Both Lee Snipes / Captain Sky, taken by Curtis ca. 1923. Snipes was photographed in a variety of outfits. There are a few more photos of him, in which accessories vary but some basic design elements remain the same. It seems likely -- though I don’t know for sure -- that Snipes himself was selecting the outfits for the photos. I’m making an assumption, however, that these reflect what he would have worn for ceremonial purposes as a shaman.)
The other issue with figuring this out is that Modoc the Shaman is supposed to be from far in the past - 1000 CE. It's not ideal to be attributing what is essentially a modern design to a far-past historical figure -- that is, it's not great to suggest that a Native American tribe's ceremonial dress was static in design across centuries, when we know that almost all traditional designs evolve even if the culture is trying to keep to a tradition. So I just want to acknowledge that as problematic. Just because we know what a Klamath shaman was wearing in the early 20th century, we can't necessarily say that a shaman from the same region was wearing the same things 500 or 1000 years earlier. So, this is a good-faith effort to be more authentic to the region, but, with an acknowledgement of its limitations.
(At least we do know that the Klamath, or a form of that tribe, were living in the area for a very long time. When I visited Crater Lake, a ranger gave a presentation that included the fact that it's now been acknowledged by historians that Klamath oral tradition includes what are basically mythologized eyewitness accounts of the eruption that formed Crater Lake... 10,000 years ago.) So there you go! This was an interesting exercise, and I like the results.
Finally, I should note: elements of this piece should be recognizable as a combination of screenshot-redraw modifications, most notably from The Last Mabelcorn. The background is also based on some screenshots.
