Here's the image that she's talking about, which appeared in the original post:
Children are taught from a young age to hold crayons and
pencils and recreate symbols that we tell them mean different things. In a way,
these iconic North American children's drawings are like our notation
system- they are cultural. If you showed another child
from a completely different place/time/culture these tulips they may not have
even been able to identify what they are 'supposed' to represent.
Imagine a Blackfoot child from the 1500’s who would have
perhaps known the same riverbanks as this mysterious artist. Would they have
known what those shapes on sticks represented? If they saw the typical
arrangement of a triangle-on-square that since childhood I have associated with
the idea of home, what would they have seen?
We can only speculate. Perhaps both children, despite
their different lives, watched the sun paint the sky as it sank into the
melting North Saskatchewan River with the same expression of wondered delight
on their faces.
by Maren Elliott
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