Laramie River Rainbow, UW Honors Class, March 2017, 12'x52"
Owen Bensel, Morgan Brennerman, Tayln Costello, Sara Ellingrod, Daniel Good, Hanah Larson, Alexa Milbradt, Katelyn Olson, Zachary Parsons, Chelsea Taylor, Corrinne Vaughan, Ally Watson and Gabrielle Wollert
Laramie River Rainbow Story
Inspired by Australian Aboriginal painting traditions this story painting by Paul Taylor's University of Wyoming Honors class of March 2017, teaches to the traditional Law of "Care for Country" and sharing our water. The students included Owen Bensel, Morgan Brennerman, Tayln Costello, Sara Ellingrod, Daniel Good, Hanah Larson, Alexa Milbradt, Katelyn Olson, Zachary Parsons, Chelsea Taylor, Corrinne Vaughan, Ally Watson and Gabrielle Wollert.
Students explored Aboriginal relationship systems, were broken into 4 clan groups Kangaroo, Emu, Crocodile and Kookaburra, assigned specific clan group and individual estates to care for in their Albany County watershed. See the Medicine Bow Mountains in the west from which the Laramie River and Little Laramie River flow and meet up near Laramie township and flow north. To the east you will see the Laramie Range which feeds the Spring Creek drainage and in turn the Casper Aquifer which feeds the people of Laramie. You can see the students individual clan estate symbols or brands.
Laramie town is represented by the symbol for Prexy's Pasture at the heart of their UW campus. The dots represent the rain, the snow, the water and in turn all of the plants, birds, animals, insects and people that are born from this rain on this land. The night sky and stars represent the campfires of the Ancestral grandparents looking down each night to see how we are carrying out the traditional Law of "Caring for Country". The student hand prints represent their school certificates as graduates of what is called the "Bush University" in Aboriginal education.
The dark spaces in their hand stencils and the Milky Way represent the shadows of the major Ancestors, Sky Father, Earth Mother and the Rainbow Serpent, keeping watch on us each night.
