My capstone project is a combination of my love for nature and engineering. I knew I wanted to do something, not only to help out the environment but also inspire people to do the same. I settled on creating nesting shelves for birds like robins. I researched the needs of different bird species and their various nesting needs before deciding to target robins. I purchased a plank of pine from Home Depot and, with the guidance of Mr. Kamal, cut and fashioned it into my nesting shelf. Along the way in my free time, I created an educational pamphlet to inform people on the importance of native birds and their importance in their ecosystems.

The Republic of Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale is an incredibly religious state based on a Christian theocracy. Christianity, being the largest religion that has ever existed, has had a massive influence on artistic media since its dawn. Christian themes appear in ancient both and modern literature, it has inspired great painted works such as the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, The Last Supper, or Raphael’s Transfiguration, and it is hard to escape the ever prevalent grasp of Christian music. However, possibly the most foundational form of the religion’s art is the churches themselves. In olden times and even today, such buildings were always the tallest and most impressive structures in every town. For my piece of art, I have created a stained glass window, a prominent feature in many churches across the world. Often, stained glass windows depict a message or story, which made them the most interesting things to look at in the more boring churches I attended in my childhood. And this is actually the point of these windows, they are meant to educate people on the holy scriptures, even if they can’t read. That is why symbolism is very important for this form of art. Symbolism is also prominent in The Handmaid’s Tale, the most important example being the ever watchful eye of God. This is the highlight of my window, a winged eye looking down upon the rest of the piece, shrouded in brilliant light and encircled by a halo. A common greeting in Gilead is “Under His Eye” and heaven, where God resides, is most often pictured above us. This made the placement for the eye at the top of the window very obvious. The smaller ones’ placement are more of a personal choice. They are the Eyes of God, or just the Eyes for short. The reason I placed them above the cloud layer that separates the Heaven portion and the Earth portion of the window is because the official term in the book reminded me of Seraphs, the highest order of angels and thus the closest to God. Seraphs are most easily recognized by their numerous wings and eyes, while the symbol for the Eyes is a winged eye. Their alien nature, both the Seraphs and the Eyes, is very prevalent as the closer an angel is to God, the less human they look and the Eyes are simply inhumane in the most literal sense. This is why I pictured them in Heaven. Down on Earth however, you can see two wives and a newborn child. The scene being depicted is the Birth Day, in which a Handmaid gives birth to an infant that is claimed by her commanding wife. The child is surrounded by a radiance, similar to the one pictured around God, a good time to mention how important light is in Christian culture and why these windows are so symbolic. The similar lights here show the connection between the child and God, the child a gift from God. The infant is at the center due to the importance of its birth as fertility rates have plummeted in the Gileadean Era. Because fertility is so important, below it is a circular chapel window design, but depicting a uterus. The uterus is an important symbol in The Handmaid’s Tale since that’s the reason why there’s handmaids at all: fertility. Offred talks about the organ throughout the book, imagining herself as flesh packed around it. The Aunts cannot stress how important it is while also diminishing the women they belong to, setting a single piece of them as the core of their beings. All that remains is that procreative fragment. Around the Uterus is a variety of colors. Colors are a very important piece of symbolism in cathedral windows as well as The Handmaid’s Tale. For example, red represents fertility and so I feature it extensively throughout the window. There’s God’s eye, the cloth the infant is wrapped in, and of course the Uterus. The colors around the uterus represent the different classes of Gileadean society. Black for the Commanders and Angels who wear black and represent strength, blue for their wives as it is shown they can command the classes below them, green for Guardians and Marthas who both wear green uniforms, and the handmaids at the bottom. They are red because they are the most important, and the lowest because they possess the least power. In my window too, the handmaids are at the lowest point. Hidden by a dark curtain, they stand and kneel silently. They are not the focus. The child and God are. The red child stands out among the blue wives. It is not theirs. But the one it belongs to is not important enough.

“The word colonization, it has the same root as the word colon; it means to digest. Colonization is the process of digestion of one culture by another.” -Winona LaDuke

When it comes to the world of religion, Christianity stands out as a problem child, and a child with a loaded gun at that. It is a religion that holds more power and influence than any other religion by a great deal, and with exceptionalistic views and controversial ideologies, it has had an undeniable impact on the course of history. However, there is not a history it roots itself more deeply in than the history of America. America has danced upon the line between a free democracy and a theocracy since its birth. And while the Founding Fathers implied through the constitution that a distinct separation between the church and state was necessary for their envisioned nation to function properly, America has always been a very Christian nation, through the people and the government. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is a testament to the effects of the mixture between Church and State, and what better inspiration to base such a book on than America herself. Of the countless literary elements Atwood has perfected and seamlessly woven together into this story, what often stands out the most is the level of worldbuilding. It is so cruel and despicable that Atwood was forced to remind her audience that “I wasn’t putting anything into it that humans had not already done somewhere at some time.” And while there are a great number of historical instances that serve as her muses, none are more prominent than the ties between early American history and Christianity. As the French and British colonized the land that would one day be taken and transformed into America, they encountered the peoples indigenous to the region. And instead of possessing no religion at all, the natives had many religions that were integral to their very way of life. Now this posed a problem to the missionary colonists whose belief was that their purpose was to show the native peoples the way of Christianity in order to “save their souls” and surely, having seen the path to God, they would convert. Once they saw the light, their meaningless lives would be filled with purpose, they thought. This was not the case. The European colonists and their western traditions wreaked havoc on the relationship between Native Americans and Christian missionaries. Between the genocide, mistreatment of the land, and general usurping, indigenous people developed a reasonably severe distrust towards Europeans. The missionaries saw only one option, and that was taking advantage of the single group of targets most mentally and physically vulnerable: the children. The boarding schools were established, commissioned by a government that was, against the Founding Fathers wishes, completely composed of Christians and run through Christian ideologies at the time. Here, the connections between history and Atwood’s writing begin to make themselves obvious. The first step the boarding school project took was the forceful separation of families. Indoctrination does not work if your subject has a voice to tell them anything else. Both Gilead and America utilized government agents to abduct children and split families, seen in Handmaid’s Tale as the separation between Offred and her daughter. Both of them become victims to indoctrination and while Offred is only mildly affected and resists it to some degree, the same cannot be confirmed for her young daughter who she is shown pictures of holding hands with another woman, presumably her new mother. In real life however, the parents of the children were not given the reassurance that they were safe. Even if the early American government told them such a thing, it would have been a terrible lie for that certainly was not the case. Once the individual is isolated, the next step is to erase their culture and identity. “My name isn’t Offred,” the Offred notes, “I have another name which nobody uses now because it is forbidden.” Like the non-Gileadean civilians during the upheaval of America, the Native American children were given English names, often religious names, and were forbidden from using their old ones, as well as any other words from their native languages. Gilead is not too dissimilar to the Native American Boarding Schools; they’re both based on negative reinforcement training. The Aunts carry cattle prods in the book but not to defend against intruders. Aunt Lydia confidently states they are free from such threats, there’s no reason to fear them, especially not in the presence of the Angels and Guardians. It is clear that they are the Handmaids. The children of the boarding schools were hit, abused, isolated, starved, and even sexually assaulted. They were given such punishments whenever they even showed a fraction of their original cultural identity. Some converted to Christianity, many simply hid their true selves, none believed. “I thought you were a true believer,” Ofglen says to Offred, surprised, “I thought you were.” Both women still cling to their past lives but bury them deep, not out of newfound faith, but fear. The life they lived was proof enough to them that the God Gilead worshiped was not real, not for them. Religion is different for each person. A lantern for dark times, a deep scar from a bitter lie, a fundamental set of truths to live by, or a path to salvation and promise for tomorrow. What you believe is and should be up to you. But Atwood warns us that religion is a dangerous thing and that such beliefs should not be a source of leadership, lest others be smothered by your ignorance for their own beliefs. The word colonization means for one culture to consume another. But the days of conquering are over. It’s time to start building instead.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zBuvE24oXHx0_oJAi7BqqUINnLlsrzXZ5psyffnGbd0/edit?usp=sharing