For just over two weeks now, each day has brought new horrors, with new exercises in oppression rooted in insecurity and resentment accompanied by too much authority. We all knew these days were coming, certainly for the last three months, but the rapidity and glee with which marginalized peoples are being further tormented still nearly beggars belief.
Nearly.
For our peoples, though, this is sadly neither inconceivable nor unbelievable; we have had far too much experience of it over the last half-millennium. Indeed, there’s a good argument to be made that, given the power structure of the dominant culture, this is merely business as usual, if noticed a bit more by others beyond ourselves.
As I have been saying for months (even years, in other venues), it’s a time for resistance.
It’s a time to teach our children resistance.
That, too, is something our peoples have always known all too well.
In a broader society like this one, teaching the younger generations the skills they will need to resist is also teaching them to survive. In this society, such teaching is an act of love, and profoundly so.
Some will interpret this as a reference to the warrior arts. But those are only the most obvious (and thereby, perhaps, most basic) aspect of survival. Many will never engage in a single martial act in their lives, but they will learn to be warriors no less than those who fight literal battles.
Because in this broader culture, our greatest armor, and our most powerful resistance, lies in our ability to call upon the old ways.
And so cultural teaching, the sort that is passed down from generation to generation, arms our children for the battles ahead even as it shows them the power and strength of our love. Our indigenous languages and lifeways, our spiritual traditions and cultural benchmarks, our arts and medicine, our prayers and ceremony: All of these combine to instill in our children blood-deep connections to the ancestors, to our shared histories, to the spirits who gave this land to us in the time before time . . . and to arm them against that which would seek their destruction, whether by force or favor, assimilation or erasure.
Some of these lessons involve fundamental life skills, the sort that our parents and grandparents practiced as a matter of course.
Skills like the hunt.
Not of all our cultures are warrior cultures, and there are likely some that, similarly, do not center hunting in their lifeways. Still, it’s most likely a given of history that most of our peoples at one time or another perforce practiced both. Here, the rabbit hunt still common practice, and for the younger generations, both lesson and rite. It’s also an expression of parental and familial love, the love of kinship and clan and community, a method by which some of the old ways of survival are passed to the children.
Today’s featured work is a small one, but one big on symbolism. It’s a painting by Frank Rain Leaf that memorializes the rabbit hunt, an event by which young boys learn basic cultural skills, and adult men keep their own skills sharp. From its description in the Other Artists: Wall Art gallery here on the site:
Traditionally-dressed tribal members on horseback participate in a rabbit hunt in the shadow of the mountain. Summer thunderheads tower above in the turquoise sky, the warm red earth beneath the horses’ hooves dotted with stones and silvery sage. Unframed; 8-5/8″ wide by 6″ high (dimensions approximate).
Acrylic on canvas stretched over wood
$225 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It’s an image that doesn’t look much like our current environment, given that it depicts a scene from the warmer months — mountains clad in green blankets, puffy white thunderheads rising into a turquoise sky, sage in full bloom. Still, climate change has ensured that, for now, it’s not far off, either: The mountains remain mostly green, if the darker shade of the stands of piñon and fir, the skies have been more blue than not of late, and the rich brown earth shows through everywhere, although at this moment, it’s mostly mud.
More to the point, we are entering the late-winter season of ceremonial closure, when certain of the young boys will begin their instruction. They will participate in the hunt soon enough.
In these uncertain times, when existential threats loom large and real for our peoples, there is collective strength to be found in passing on the old ways.
There is strength to be found in the love such teaching represents, too.
~ Aji
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