It’s the first day of March, that magic marker called “Spring” mere weeks away, but we’re going to use the day to close out our February weekend series on animal spirits anyway. Today’s archetype is Horse, and like those we’ve introduced to you over the previous three Sundays, this one has been given tangible form by our friend Randy Roughface.
Our world here is blanketed in white — nearly two feet of the stuff, in fact. It’s warming today, and if it hits the projected high, the snow may turn to rain, or at least to sleet. Meanwhile, the aggregated crystals, compressed and compiled into twenty-inch high stacks, have already begun to erode from the warmer surfaces, diminishing rapidly in size and stature.
It’s a day when much of the world welcomes the new warmth, however slight, casting about for tangible manifestations of heat to bolster the sensation. Fire, flame, smoke; colors in deep shades of red and gold; hot-blooded spirits that race through our daydreams, kicking up tongues of flame in their wake.
This little red mustang embodies that fiery spirit.
At first glance, he appears to be sorrel, but if you look closely, you can see he’s actually a red paint, much like my own horse, Miskwaki. Of course, he doesn’t have anywhere near the amount of white that Miskwaki does; only a light pinkish blaze, piebald-style, down his forehead and over his muzzle, with a similar light patch on his left foreleg and an Appy-style spot or two on his right side.
And a red paint is the classic Indian pony.
His description isn’t even posted in our Other Artists: Sculpture gallery yet (I’ll get to that later), but he’s a beautiful incarnation of the wild horse, rendered in an equally archetypal Native material: pipestone. In this incarnation, his flame-like hue contrasts with the surface across which he races: a small slab of local Pilar slate, rough-hewn into a tiny little mesa of brown-black earth, balanced carefully to allow the sculpture to stand tall and straight. In his case, he stands roughly 5.75″ high, including the thin slate base. The base itself is about 5.25 inches long; from tip of nose to tip of tail, the horse is approximately 8″ in length. And for a sculptural piece of his size out of this material, he’s modestly priced: $255 + shipping, handling, and insurance.
But about that stone . . . . We’ve looked at pipestone in depth before. As I noted then:
Pipestone is what we all call this stone; the dominant culture calls it catlinite, which is frankly a new name for it by any historical measure, and is less than courteous to the peoples for whom it has been a sacred element of their culture for centuries at a minimum, and probably for millennia. The name “catlinite” dates only to 1835, when a white man, a painter, named George Catlin visited (perhaps “trespassed upon” would be a more accurate turn of phrase) the sacred quarries in Minnesota used by many area tribal nations. He claimed to be the first white man to do so, but numerous other colonial settlers and explorers disputed his claim, and it is now widely considered to be false. For the remainder of this post, I’ll be using the English translation of our people’s words for the stone, i.e., pipestone, for the sake of accuracy.
Pipestone is what is known as claystone (or sometimes “mudstone”), a finely grained soft stone susceptible to carving, brick-red in color. It appears as a form of argilite in host rock of what is now called Sioux quartzite. The most famous pipestone source is the one mentioned above, in Minnesota (and referenced in Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha), and it is reportedly the softest and easiest to use. It is also restricted to enrolled tribal members from various nations, a significant modern victory for tribal nations, Native sovereignty, and the protection and preservation of sacred land.
Most of the pipestone our carvers use, of course, isn’t from that region; it generally comes from the much nearer deposits in Utah. It’s a somewhat harder form of the stone, but still the same deep brick-red color, is still useful for traditional carving, and still embodies an indigenous spirit. It has the added advantage of not transgressing that which is sacred to our Northern cousins. This particular block of stone also puts on bold display the variations that are found throughout the material, patches and lines and whorls, and the texture of the stone’s surface, cool and smooth, yet easily warmed and seemingly malleable despite its solidity.
And, indeed, this little horse’s own clansmen adorn traditional-style pipes: We have two, also created by Randy out of beautiful red pipestone. As with the stone itself, these pipes are not, however, ceremonial versions, but art replicas. Sacred pipes are not something that should ever be separated from their actual Native carriers and their people, much less be sold.
Both the horse effigies on the pipes and their larger brother featured here today have one thing in common besides the stone from which they take form and shape: All hint at heat and fire, warmth and flame, whether found in the bowl of the pipe and the tendrils of smoke that arise from it, or within the fiery spirit of the wild horses they all embody, running for the sheer joy of it.
It’s a feeling of incipient Spring, through the eyes and soul of a horse.
~ Aji
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