There was no rain overnight, as far as we can tell, and this day has dawned beautifully bright. But even now, the clouds are amassing again on all sides — still puffy and white, but ready in the beat of a bird’s wing to turn to something at once darker and more powerful.
“Darker” here refers strictly to color, not to any metaphorical value judgment. I have never agreed with the colonial concepts of light and dark, of black and white, of day and night, of sun and storm. They are too burdened by colonialism itself, distorted by the self-justifications of a religion from half a world away, one already stolen and twisted beyond all recognition by the point that it was adopted on those shores. It’s a worldview and way of thinking, of being, that requires binaries in everything: true/false; good/bad; real/unreal.
But that’s not the world, the cosmos or the universe, that we inhabit.
Our ways have always made space for that simple truth. We know that there are things we cannot see or otherwise perceive; things, too, that we are occasionally allowed to glimpse, to comprehend; and whole worlds beyond our own that sometimes lend us their powers, or withhold them. It’s why our cultures hold prophecy in high regard, why our communities heed the words of the prophets and the dreamers and the visionaries who foretold the things that have already come to pass, and much more than the colonial world seeks to pretend will not.
Our skies, day or night, are a visionary expanse, a way to other worlds.
This week’s Friday Feature is manifest in a tribute to these skies, and to the earth below, to our pasts, our futures, and our prophets and their visions for the whole of time. From its description in the Other Artists: Wall Art gallery here on the site:
This framed collage by Preston Bellringer (Yakama/Assiniboine) melds ancient prophecies with modern media in a piece that harks back to a ’60s ethos and feel. The iconic central photograph of Chief Joseph in the upper half of the collage is surrounded by a complex synthesis of images in multiple media: photography, paint, pen and ink, even children’s stick-on decals, all telling a layered intertribal story of warriors protecting the people in their quest for a better time, a better place, one of peace. The studded wood frame is 25.25″ high by 8.5″ wide; the visible image (no glass cover) is 22.75″ high by 6″ wide (all dimensions approximate).
Mixed media; wood
$125 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply
This is a retro-style work: not precisely vintage, but one that harks back explicitly to the spirit of psychedelic montage that was such a hallmark of the Sixties and Seventies. The images, and the materials, too, used to create it range from far newer to vastly older than that era, a spectrum of, in a sense, a half-life of colonial existence.
Much of the imagery is now considered “iconic,” their use here very obviously ironic but also wholly serious, a reminder that however much colonialism attempts to commodify us, to turn our histories and existences into products of and for its own consumption, the dreams and visions of our prophets, the fact of our futures, the truths of our cosmologies and our cosmos too cannot thus be diminished or denied. Our realities are far greater, for grander, far higher and wider and broader and deeper than anything a parasitical, invasive mode of existence can conceive, much less command. We have access to the wisdom of these ancestors, to the knowledge of their prophecies and dreams handed down, and to the same visionary expanse that afforded them glimpses of the world we inhabit today.
We have had a little rain; tonight, we shall have stars. And we shall see, across that expanse, the way to those mysteries and medicine, those other ways of knowing, too.
~ Aji
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