The weather began its inexorable shift yesterday.
The mercury remains, for the moment, at unseasonably high levels, but last night’s winds blew in a heavy bank of stormclouds to the east, the kind that unquestionably hold snow in their embrace. And despite the warm air, yesterday’s forecast predicted a 100% chance of rain turning to snow for tomorrow — and thence, three days of the white stuff. This is a place where carrying water is carrying power.
We cannot afford to object, just as we cannot really complain about the current muddy quagmire just outside the door. After a near-waterless year last year, we have all been reminded not to take its gifts for granted.
Here in this place, the people have always known water’s value. This land is blessed, ordinarily, with more of it than the much broader region: enough, managed wisely, for a world of health and harmony and prosperity; not enough that any amount of waste is permissible. Our peoples were conservationists, of water and other resources, millennia before the concept had such a name, and indeed, the label only tells the smallest part of the story; English terms are, as always, inadequate to the task. Even the word “resources” is vaguely insulting to that to which it refers, as though water and wildlife, plants and minerals, exist purely for human exploitation. In our way, such a worldview desecrates us all.
None of which is to say that we do not use the water and wildlife, plants and minerals. But our relationship to them is not one of authoritarian control, not one of dominion, as the colonizers’ holy writ would have it. Rather, it’s a relationship of trust, of mutual care and service, one in which we assume the obligation of stewardship for our larger world, and the burden of honor and respect for that which we must take.
The people of this place long ago devised their own methods for working with the water. Some of it is agricultural, involving complex systems of ditching and earthwork. Some of it is more ordinary haulage, usually accomplished by way of the beautiful pottery for which the people now are known, the women carrying outsized water jars now called ollas to bring home water for drinking, cooking, bathing, cleaning, ceremony. And, in the more recent centuries of the colonial period, flasks found their place in the process of carrying water on a more personal level.
Today’s featured work is one such piece. This one is special; it was crafted by Wings’s late sister, many years ago, of indigenous micaceous clay. From its description in the Other Artists: Pottery gallery here on the site:
This classic water flask was hand-made many years ago by Wings’s sister, Cynthia Bernal Pemberton (Taos Pueblo). Made of Taos Pueblo’s iconic micaceous clay, the flask is pristine but for the turtle carved in relief on the front. It hangs from a white deerhide thong. Stands 7.5″ high by 6.5″ across at widest point (dimensions approximate).
Micaceous clay
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply
It’s wrought in a very old traditional style, complete with deerhide handle, and embossed with a depiction of Grandmother Turtle, herself a spirit of earth and waters simultaneously, rising organically from its surface in the front. Like the waters, Turtle herself is a representation of power — the power of life and breath and existence.
A century and more ago, a flask would have been used for water, yes . . . but in colonial hands, it would also have been used for less medicinal purposes (albeit such indulgence was often justified as ‘medicine”). Smaller versions, made not of clay but of metal, were also used for tobacco — again, in colonial hands, for purposes of pleasure; in our way, for offerings and ceremony.
In other words, they are the clouds writ small, water and sky given material form through earth and fire: holding medicine, carrying power.
~ Aji
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