Today has dawned mostly clear, both bright and bitterly cold. By eight o’clock, sun already well above the ridgeline, the mercury had only reached six degrees. These are the days when winter, still not officially here by colonial reckonings, hovers close and holds our whole small world in an icy grip. Last night delivered dangerous cold, and tonight will be little better.
This is an important week here, and a difficult one, too — made all the more difficult now not merely by winter’s arrival but especially by the pandemic and the limitations it necessarily imposes. For us, it’s difficult on a deeply personal level, with tomorrow serving as yet another marker of grief and loss. With Christmas just around the corner now, we find ourselves lapsing into moments of nostalgia, always tinged with more than a little melancholy: a reminder that the world we thought we had as children was nothing like the reality of it, and that there’s no recapturing what never really was.
In hard times, we look to that which always sustains us: the world around us, the old ways, the ancestors and the spirits. Today’s featured work embodies all four, however counterintuitive that might seem: Those who know Wings know that he is a traditional who entirely eschews colonial religion, and yet the last five hundred years of colonial history have infused our various cultures with a partial iconography of other traditions that are now deeply embedded and recognized as traditionally Indigenous, too. So it is with today’s featured work, one that revives one of his older shapes and styles, echoing a series of related designs he created some twenty years ago and more. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
The Stars and the Sacred Directions Necklace
Wisdom rests within the embrace of the stars and the sacred directions. Wings summons them both to the center of the sky in this revival of one of his older styles, a traditional Southwest-style cross cut freehand and wrought in heavy fourteen-gauge sterling silver. In echoes of older works, he extends the upper spoke of the cross into a secondary bail, creating an image that is less cruciform, more evocative of the Four Sacred Directions. The spokes are scored and stamped entirely freehand in a design that evokes a Northern-style star. A second star is nested at the center around a single square cabochon of natural blue-green spiderwebbed turquoise beautifully marbled with an inky matrix, an eight-pointed star whose points each form one-half of an Eye of Spirit, itself a sign of wisdom, illumination, and guidance. One the reverse, he echoes the motif of stars pointing to the Sacred Directions with mariner’s stars stamped freehand around his hallmark at the cardinal points. The pendant hangs from a hand-made bail, through which is threaded sterling silver snake chain. Pendant including bail hangs 3″ long, without bail, 2-5/8″ long; bail is 9/16″ long; cross is 1-3/4″ across at the widest point; turquoise cabochon is just over 3/8″ square; chain is 18″ long, excluding findings (all dimensions approximate). Close-up views shown below.
Sterling silver; blue-green spiderweb turquoise
$1,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Our peoples now participate in widely disparate forms of spiritual practice in addition to our own traditional Indigenous ways. My mother’s family was Catholic; my father’s, fundamentalist Protestant. Wings’s people tend toward Catholic practice in the mission church, but his mother was Mormon and his father, like his uncle, one of the leading warriors of the battle to reclaim Blue Lake, were Road Men in the Tipi Way. We have an old, old photo of both of them as young men, Wings a toddler standing between them in front of the tipi they used for meetings. It’s an image that never fails to bring a catch to my throat.
And so while Wings’s preference now in the imagery of sacred geometries is to create older-style, wholly Indigenous “crosses” who equidistant spokes symbolize the Four Sacred Directions, his personal history includes the cruciform iconography more usually associated with Christianity. There’s no denying that they are popular motifs; when we had a brick-and-mortar gallery, the one category of jewelry item tourists requested more than any other was that of the cross. Back then, I mostly had to disappoint them, because they wanted cruciform imagery, not older Indigenous symbols. He’s only created three or four in all the years I’ve known him, so this marks both a departure from and a return to his broader body of work.
As always, of course, he insists his own interpretation of such imagery, and here he revived, with a few subtle changes, the stampwork from a piece that dated back to around 2005 or so. Like it, this one is wrought in vintage style, an homage to the older style of silverwork practiced by his father and especially his grandfather, all three men self-taught and the last, without benefit of the more modern tools of the trade. This one lives up to its name, and to the significance of this day, a single pool of intensely blue waters at the center of the light, the spokes both embodying and stretching to the stars and the sacred directions.
There will be precious little water here now in the more usual sense; it’s all crystallized into snow and ice. But the stars will be abundant each night, in a dark so deep and clear that the Bridge is clearly visible, that shimmering silver road the colonial world calls the Milky Way. Its presence reminds us to look upward, to appreciate and honor the blessings of the stars and the gifts of the sacred directions even as we pray for the rain.
These are days that demand much of us; they require from us the strength and bravery of warriors coupled with the wisdom of the ancestors. But our ancestors knew that our survival depends upon knowing who we are, n matter the incursions and influences from the outside world, and upon knowing where we are, our connection to earth and sky, to our cosmologies and our cosmos too.
That cosmos, and our cosmologies that interpret it, have placed us in the embrace of a world of power — between beautiful waters, a bridge of stars, and all the sacred directions.
Yes, our world looks very different from that of our ancestors, or even our parents. But like them, we have all that we need to create a thriving future for the generations to come.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
