It’s the name of the piece.
Put in quotation marks, it would also be a fitting name for a mirage, or rather, mirages, plural: dream, vision, hope, salvation; appropriation and imitation, chimera and ephemera.
Buffalo itself, nearly a chimera for our peoples, driven to the literal brink of extinction by a toxic combination of colonialist greed and racism spiked with the heedlessness of power. The vast herds that roamed these lands and sustained our peoples for millennia, numbering some 25 to 30 million strong, reduced to fewer than 100 by the late 19th Century. Endless, heedless slaughter of the beautiful animal, in part because they could, in part because because it was an early form of cultural appropriation that provided tangible trophies, in part with the explicit purpose of exterminating our peoples. One white man alone was responsible for killing nearly 6,000 of the great beasts in one two-month period (destroying his hearing in one ear from the repeated shooting, a shamefully small penalty for the destruction he wrought).
For many of our peoples, Buffalo was more than a food source: He was a source of support for every aspect of life, a spirit being, a brother, family. And they were treated to the ghastly spectacle of these family members’ corpses massacred by the hundreds and thousands, tossed into piles like so much trash. Worse, perhaps, were the “buffalo hunt tours” once the railroad that helped to sow the seeds of their destruction began to snake across the plains: Those who could pay for the tour could bring their weaponry aboard the train and from the windows and roofs of the railcars, shoot the buffalo for sport. The men fired randomly, at will and whim, and as the Iron Horse sped past, the buffalo were left to die where they fell, rotting in the prairie sun, every gift they had to offer — meat, hide, sinew, medicine — laid waste, nourishing nothing more than vultures and flies.
Fewer than 100 remained.
It’s no wonder, then, that an animal spirit already so integral to some indigenous cultures’ lifeways and spiritual traditions would play a central role in their stories of salvation. It’s similarly no wonder that, in the face and teeth of a continent-wide campaign of genocide, other indigenous cultures would adopt the imagery of that savior spirit, the Sacred White Buffalo Calf. I’ve written about the old story, and about its intertribal adoption as both symbol and shield, here. It was one of the first pieces posted here — the fourth entry, to be exact. There is no need to revisit it in detail today; suffice to say that it was a story of a dream, a vision, a desperate hope for survival, of an equally desperate quest to rebuild a population (or several of them) after a series of near-extinction events.
Today, it’s a metaphor of a less pleasant kind, a vestige of a fruitless search, for most, for something that doesn’t exist in an attempt to take what is not theirs. It’s co-opted and appropriated daily by non-Indians who seek to own that which belongs only to those of the blood (and, at that, really only to the blood of those specific peoples to whom the vision and prophecy were given). And so it is perhaps also fitting that one stone that bears the name should be an example of fraudulence and fakery, chimera and ephemera.
It’s a gorgeous stone, as you can see in the photo. Taken on its own merits, it infuses pieces with its own beauty and spirit, its own identity. But that identity should not be obscured, should not be hidden beneath a blanket stolen from another.
This stone is a mineral known as magnesite. There are various forms; two of the most popular for Indian jewelry are White Buffalo and Wild Horse. What they are not is turquoise, despite being billed that way (we, like so many others, were misled by sellers’ labels, as well). Some dealers will try to justify the misnomer by saying that there is no such thing as “White Buffalo turquoise”; that it’s all magnesite.
That’s hooey. There is indeed a type of turquoise, found in the Indian Mountain area, that is called “Sacred White Buffalo” (or sometimes simply “White Buffalo” or “Sacred Buffalo”). Non-Native dealers tend to apply those names to other veins of turquoise, as well, but as far as I can tell, there really is only one. We’ll cover it in detail for the Turquoise Tuesday series here at a later date. We’ll also cover the pretenders, the fakes and frauds and charlatans of the gemstone world, in detail as well. Wings only has one piece of the Sacred White Buffalo turquoise, a very large old nugget, and it’s entirely possible that it will never be cut or cabbed. Like Buffalo itself, to us it is perhaps of far greater value in its natural state: cultural and spiritual value.
For today, though, it’s a focus on White Buffalo magnesite as it really is, and it’s beautiful on its own. It’s an opaque stone, solid and hard enough to cab well, although it is not generally susceptible to extreme polish. In other words, it can be made silky smooth, with a bit of a glassy sheen to the surface, but it will not attain the near-translucence of some other stones; its inherent opacity is too much a part of what it is. The color is white, in various shades ranging from what appears to the naked eye to be snow-white to an ivory with a hint of beige. Some of that is due to the matrices, which range from pale golden tan to dark charcoal-black; they appear mostly in patches and flecks, not in spiderweb patterns. (The Wild Horse form that I mentioned above tends toward warm brown matrices, often in bolder, blockier patters, sometimes with shades of red and gold, copper and bronze.) It makes for mysterious-looking stone, one that perhaps raises more questions that it can answer in terms of origins and constituent elements, and maybe that’s appropriate for a stone so often denied its own identity, forced by others into pretensions not its own.
That’s what this piece, named with a nod to irony and history alike, seeks to do. From its description in the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
A large oval cabochon of White Buffalo magnesite, bezel-set and trimmed in twisted silver, rests at the center of this dual-strand sterling silver cuff. Hand-stamped directional arrows lead two and from the stone; while tiny round hoops accent the band’s underside.
Sterling silver; White Buffalo magnesite
$385 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It’s a reminder of the need to seek one’s own identity, one’s self; to learn from one’s own history; to follow one’s own dreams.
It’s a reminder we can all use every day.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2014; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
