It’s another bright clear day, far too warm for the season and utterly dry. What we thought was a cloudbank on the northwestern horizon at dawn has since revealed itself to be a smoke plume, no doubt the direct result of both federal and stats lifts of red-flag warnings and burn bans.
This, despite an obvious lack of precipitation, and new news reports yesterday that the drought will only deepen throughout the winter to come.
And this is colonial governance at its finest: all about authority and control, exploitation and profit; nothing to do with stewardship or proper management, nor indeed with saving lives.
We have seen this writ large and blood-drenched in the responses to this pandemic, at federal and state levels alike. Our own communities are left to try to defend against the latest iteration of the smallpox blankets with resources, already at the lowest of ebbs, continually being diverted into colonial endeavors and the pockets that profit from them. We watch our Mother Earth suffering with us, as those same actors do the same to her, just as they have done for lo, these five hundred years and more.
As our own collective health diminishes, so, too, does hers, and now, under siege from all sides, her heartbeat grows fainter by the day.
It is up to us to work for her healing.
Here in this place, we have watched her very lifeblood dry up, evaporating in the arid heat without the summer rains that are the host to its own rebirth. We have watched the world confirm what we have always known: that in those early days of the world’ first lockdown, traffic halted and skies silent once again, our mother began to breathe — her heartbeat grew stronger, her respiration steadier, in the most literal of terms.
And then, as always occurs, colonialism’s interests trumped all, detouring from the path of saving lives to kill hundreds of thousands, millions more for profit and control.
We are far past the tipping point. Too much damage has been done to reverse it; we can only arrest and try to build a better world from the ashes of our ongoing destruction now. But colonialism gives no quarter, and it will not in the days and weeks and months and years to come. And as its agents blockade the only roads to change, we shall have to find ways to go around them instead.
It will hardly be a first for our peoples; our ancestors, after all, faced down far more immediate threats to their own extermination and extinction and survived to leave to us our own existences. They left us, too, the gifts of prophecy, of their own foreknowledge of what would come to pass and how we must meet it to survive. They did it with words, yes, but also with dreams and visions, with song and dance and drum. From Buffalo Dance to Sundance to Ghost Dance and beyond, we have the medicine of the drum, a space of mystical power contained in a song of breath and a beating heart.
Today’s featured work embodies space, power, medicine, and song at once. From its description in the Other Artists: Drums gallery here on the site:
A Pueblo drum gives voice to the heartbeat of the land. Master drum maker Lee Lujan (Taos Pueblo) created this large traditional upright drum from a length of cottonwood trunk, a whole and unbroken circle of old wood. He stretched tanned rawhide over top and bottom to create a dual-sided instrument with spectacular resonance, then hand-laced both covers together across the drum’s circumference using sturdy sinew. Once the drum was bound together, he used the remaining lace to create one handle on each side, top and bottom, by spiraling the sinew tightly together in an arc and then tying it off at either end. Another small length of sinew forms a loop at one handle to hold the beater, a rough-hewn length of wood chosen for balance, pads one end, and wraps it in buttery soft white deerhide. Drum stands 21.5″ high by 18.25″ across at its widest point. Another view shown below.
Cottonwood; rawhide; sinew; deerhide
$495 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Note: Size and weight require special handling; extra shipping charges apply
This is the last of the large traditional drums remaining in our inventory, and it is a stunningly beautiful example of the drum-maker’s art. I’ve written at some length before about how they are created, and how they are used, and it’s different than you might think. This is a larger drum, an upright that resembles the giant drums used at powwows or in certain types of ceremony, but it is in fact a personal-sized drum, although more than one person could beat it simultaneously. It’s designed to lend its voices to a chorus of other such voices, each pitched slightly differently with size, shape, materials, placement, warming, and individual resonance, to create a harmony uniquely their own. It’s much like the body, our own and that of Mother Earth: all the individual autonomic actions working together in concert to produce that beautiful breath of life that keeps us all alive and well.
The depredations of colonialism, though, have deprived us of that harmony now: There will be no powwows, no group gatherings or ceremony while the pandemic rages. We are forced into a collective isolation mostly unknown to us, all of us acting in concert for the protection of all, but separately now. Some enterprising young Natives have periodically introduced Zoom-platform versions of quarantine powwows and dance, allowing people to film themselves dancing to the drum for posting in a collective space. it’s not the same, but it’s a partial answer now, when we are forced apart yet need the drum’s united and uniting voice.
The year 1973 saw the return of the Ghost Dance to Wounded Knee: both a fulfillment of prophecy and prophecy born anew for a new seven generations and beyond. Perhaps the like is needed of us now, in isolation by circumstance, united in spirit — a return to the song, the dance, and especially the drum, to invoke the mystical power of that space and the medicine of its rhythm, to create anew a song of breath and a beating heart to heal Mother Earth, and ourselves.
~ 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.
