This is one of those difficult days, simply by definition.
To the colonial world, it’s Black Friday, the single biggest shopping day of the entire year, one dedicated to advertising and commercial excess in all its forms.
Also to the colonial world, since it’s that world’s label, it’s Indigenous Heritage Day. [Yes, I know they call it “Native American Heritage Day,” but if we must be forced into a reactive position on it, then Wings’s and my reaction has become one of rejecting the proprietary “American” label, since our peoples predate anything “American” since, oh, roughly time immemorial.]
It seems somehow brutally apt that that world should insist on combining the two days into one.
For us, this may be a sales day, been so is every other day of the year. More to the point for us, this has always been a day to retreat, to do our best to avoid the crowds even in pre-pandemic years. It’s a day for the work, both of Wings’s art and everything else required of us.
The “everything else required of us” grows by the year.
This shows all the signs of being a very bad winter for our communities. The best winters are those with plenty of snow, which necessarily entails plenty of cold; the snow is what provides the vast majority of our surface water throughout the year, allowing us to plant and irrigate and harvest. In a good year, the hay feeds are horses with some left over for sale; in a good year, the produce feeds us, with plenty to give away to those who need it.
We have not had a good year for half a decade and more.
Two years of raging, uncontrolled pandemic, brought to our doors by the colonial world that insists on keeping it there, have worsened everyone’s circumstances now. Income is down and prices are up, and families will go without food, shelter, and warmth as a result. The colonial world even now exists explicitly to tear our world asunder, the better to seize and exploit all aspects of it. On this day, our efforts are far better focused on creating space for community now.
It will require us to relearn old lessons and learn new ones, too. It will also mean relearning our languages in deeper ways even as we familiarize ourselves with others, that we may move through the world in greater safety: not so much for the words themselves, but for knowing the complexities of meaning that allow us to communicate our message. Because in the colonial world of the 21st Century, it’s all about controlling the narrative, and if we are to make our communities safe, we need to take charge of what we let out every bit as much as what we let in.
This week’s Friday Feature, ironically, is just such a tool — meant for a very different context, true, and yet we can learn from it. From its description in the Other Artists: Leatherwork, Antler, and Bone gallery here on the site:
Sharpen your traditional hunting skills or simply learn to communicate with the herd with this hand-made elk whistle. Carved of deer antler entirely by hand by Joseph “Joe T” Trujillo (Taos Pueblo), this vintage-style whistle is fully functional for use in the back country. The deer antler is treated with a clear stain to seal it against the elements; a hole hand-drilled through the top holds a long thong made of bright, highly-visible red leather. The whistle stands 2-1/8″ high at the highest point by 3/4″ across at the widest point; thong is 26″ long, excluding knot (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sealed deer antler; leather thong
$75 + shipping, handling, and insurance
An elk whistle is a wonderful thing: Carved the old way, out of antler, it produces pitches that match those of the sounds that elk make in their own language. People expect to hear the trumpeting bellow of the bull elk, but don’t realize that they have an entire language of sounds and pitches, from deep-throated long calls to high-pitched whistles, some out of the range of human hearing. It enables them to communicate over long distances while foraging, or to issue effective alerts in the face of a sudden threat.
Our ancestors knew that elk whistles would benefit them in the hunt. Now, though, at least as important as hunting is the need to protect the well-being of the herd as a whole. The cumulative effects of five or six years of deadly winters have threatened their survival as thoroughly as any predator — indeed, given that catastrophic climate is a direct result of colonial human activity, it’s accurate to identify it as a predator now.
Here, we have no need to call the elk to us; they know this place is designated sanctuary for them. Across the continent, though, their kind, and all of their cousins and other relatives, will need many more such places to ensure their survival in the face of what is to come. And I think — no, strike that; I know — perhaps it’s less about controlling their movements or corralling and curtailing their migratory spaces than it is about learning to communicate with them in a way that fosters genuine (and justified) trust. We need to reconceive the ways in which we understand relatives, family, community.
And we need to be creating space for community for them, as well.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
