What’s that, you say? Bear’s web? Bears don’t have webs; they have dens, or lairs.
Oh, but you see, they do.
This is bear season, but is also the time when spirits begin to walk, when the wall between the worlds begins to transmogrify into something permeable. And in such a season, anything is possible.
Bear’s webs, or at least webbed bears, have long been a part of our inventory. One of Taos Pueblo’s master carvers, Mike Schildt, specializes in bears summoned from stone (although he has been known to carve other beings, too). One of his favorite media has long been alabaster, both the more common pinkish variety ubiquitous to Colorado and Utah, and the less well-known white variant called spiderweb alabaster.
I’ve written about it many times here. It is, at bottom, basic white alabaster, soft and susceptible to the carver’s tools, but with one significant difference: It comes from regions where siltstone is prevalent, and its deposits are shot through with matrices of fine beautiful brown spiderwebbing. The stone that Mike chose for the bears featured here today is exceptionally beautiful, too; the matrix in each piece runs a truly spectacular spectrum of browns, from palest gold with metallic hints to rusty bronze and warm brown to the near-black brown of coffee beans.
From the colors to the patterning to the beings it embodies here, it’s a stone perfect for this autumn season in the weeks leading up to All Souls’.
Because these webbed bears are no ordinary bears. They’re ghost bears.
All right, technically, they’re spirit bears, but all sorts of things get lost and found in translation, particularly when indigenous languages are involved, and for the dominant culture, what we understand as “spirit” long ago became “ghost.” I’ve written about the phenomenon of translation errors specifically in the cont4ext of the spirit bear here before, too — almost exactly three years ago, in fact. Rather than repeat myself, I’ll quote it here:
The ghost bear is a phenomenon found among northern peoples. More properly called a “spirit bear,” its name in English fell victim to early mistranslation that, typically, didn’t account for cultural conceptual differences, and so “spirit” became “ghost.”
It’s a real thing.
If any remain in the northernmost reaches of the United States, I haven’t heard about it, but the spirit being itself remains. Today, the conventional wisdom is that it never existed outside the northwest coast of Britich Columbia, but the ghost bear appears in stories among tribal nations on the U.S. side of the international boundary, too. In Canada, however, the ghost bear is alive, and in one area, thriving relatively well. In the wild, the spirit bear thrives naturally precisely because of its color: Its white fur makes it less visible to the fish in the rivers and streams where it hunts for food, making it easier for the spirit bear to catch them. But it’s endangered by the proposed Enbridge pipeline project, and organized efforts to save it are under way.
For the First Nations in the lands that are part of the bears’ remaining natural habitat, it has special status.There are numerous “explanations” of its meaning floating around the Internet, but none of them rings especially true in and of themselves. Too much has been derived from a children’s book by a (of course) white author presuming to “explain” the spirit bear. But the tribal nations themselves are protective of the animal and its greater meaning, and they have been relatively successful in getting the Canadian government to recognize the animal’s importance.
The province of British Columbia has named the spirit bear as the province’s official animal. It’s also illegal in Canada to hunt the spirit bear. There is exactly one in captivity: a spirit bear reportedly found abandoned as a cub, possibly because its mother was killed by another predator. It was rescued and raised to adulthood, and early attempts were made to release it into the wild, but according to officials, it subsequently appeared evident that it would be unable to survive in what would have been its natural habitat. It has since been moved into a conservancy park, where officials say they have attempted to create as natural a habitat for it as possible.
Up there, it’s known in the dominant culture as the Kermode bear: named, natch, for the white man who “discovered” it in 1905, Francis Kermode, the then-director of the Royal British Columbia Museum. No, he didn’t “discover” anything. Our peoples have been familiar with the spirit bear as long as there have been people and bears. But nothing exists until the dominant culture says it does, and so it must be appropriated wholly, down to presuming to “name” it. What he did do, in conjunction with a white zoologist, is research the bear from a dominant-culture perspective.
In terms of its identity, it’s actually a black bear. Which points up the problems with the European way of naming things, based on what the [non-]discoverer first perceives as a physical characteristic, rather than as so many of our peoples do, which is to name things based on their inherent characteristics and behavior. Think about the last time you saw a female blackbird that was black. You haven’t. Ever. So the salient characteristic of the blackbird . . . um . . .isn’t. My own people call them by a name that means “those who gather.” Watch the behavior of the group, not the preening feathers of the male of the species.
But back to the spirit bear: Yes, it’s a black bear . . . with a genetic variation that turns its fur white. It is not a polar bear; that’s an entirely different species, found in another geographic region entirely. And it is not an albino bear; eyes, nose, lips, and paws are dark brownish-black, not pink. It is simply a genetic variant — and a rare one. It makes for a beautiful animal, one with great meaning to the first peoples where it is found. It finds form here in two families of spirit bears by Mike Schildt (Taos Pueblo). [For those who want to know more about Bear as indigenous symbol, we’ve covered some of it here.]
All four of these spirit bears are found in our Other Artists: Sculpture gallery here on the site: Mother bear, eldest cub, middle cub, and baby cub, respectively. This is the second such family Mike has created for us out of this material, and this is the finest such stone I’ve ever seen. The first family consisted of three bears, Mother and two cubs of varying ages, and we were fortunate that their family unit remained intact; the same client bought all three works. My secret hope is that the same will occur for this family of four: Although each bear can stand on its own, so to speak, they have been an inseparable family unit for some time now, and it only seems right that the clan should remain together.
But whether they continue as a family or venture out on their own, they all do so in spectacular style, spiderwebbed white coats woven with metallic gold and brown threads. I suspect that they all retain a bit of the original Spirit Bear’s medicine powers, too, a bit of mystery and magic that is the province of other worlds. Whether the spirit bear’s web, or den, or lair resides in this world or another we can never be quite sure . . . just as we can never be sure, at this time of year, that the flash of white suddenly visible in the low moonlight of the indigo hours is merely an optical illusion.
It might be a ghost, or a bear . . . or a spirit bear.
~ Aji
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