It’s Halloween, time for things that go bump in the night.
We don’t have much in the way of parallels to what America’s dominant culture calls Halloween, although we do certainly have all sorts of indigenous traditions, ceremonies, festivals, and stories that have been warped beyond all recognition in that outside culture by appropriation, much like what happened when the organized Church got hold of European Pagan ways centuries ago. It’s a complex conglomeration of appropriation, co-optation, assimilation, and extermination: all enforced by the invading culture as a means of eradicating those they seek to conquer, with not a little seeming capitulation by the the allegedly conquered as an adaptation, a simple survival mechanism.
It distorts and destroys, yes, but it can seen through another lens, too: Imagine if those invaded and colonized had refused entirely to appear to submit to some of the efforts to colonize their spirits. Survival is an endless series of trade-offs, and in some cases, our ancestors calculated that it was better for the children and grandchildren, to appear to submit simply so that they might survive.
And so now, you get “Indian” feast days and dances and other temporal markers with the names of Catholic saints. You get twin ceremonials for many of life’s rites of passage: one traditional and private; the other public and tied to the Church. And you get thousands of Native children, for generations now, waiting eagerly for Santa, chasing Easter eggs, and dressing up in vivid costumes representing the scary archetypes of another culture.
The last is key; it’s pure fun for our kids, and the costumes are neither appropriative (as are too many of those worn by children and adults alike of the dominant culture) nor culturally transgressive. Which is to say, you won’t find our children dressing up as scary spirit beings from our own cultures.
Not that the analogues really track to begin with; our spirit beings manifest differently. There are often lessons attached to their very being, and they often play very specific and necessary roles. Those whose role is wholly negative nonetheless have much to teach us about how to be, how to walk our road. I’ve written about one of those, if obliquely, in an earlier Halloween season.
All this is simply to say that there isn’t a lot in Native arts and culture that is directly analogous to the broader markers of this day. If you’re looking for an indigenous version of witches and goblins, you’ll be disappointed. But we do have some items that bear some relationship to some of the motifs of the day, so in that spirit, we offer you ghost bears and spiderwebs.
THE GHOST BEAR
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.]
SPIDERWEBS
Most often, when you see references to spiderwebs here, it’s in the context of the form of matrix found in some types of turquoise. We’ve discussed it at length here in various editions of Turquoise Tuesday.
But spiderwebs appear in Native art in other ways. The most obvious is in the dreamcatcher, a symbol we’ve covered here. In the old story, Grandmother Spider gave the gift of her web to the people to create the dreamcatcher, to be placed over the head during sleep to prevent bad dreams from harming them. And, of course, Spider appears in the stories and traditions of numerous peoples, whether as Grandmother, as Spider Woman, or as Iktomi, the male trickster of the Northern Plains.
And sometimes, they appear in wholly unexpected places, such as a stone typically envisioned as solid white. In this context, they’re nothing at all scary or creepy, but rather, extraordinarily beautiful.
It’s a stone called spiderweb alabaster, and it’s one that’s especially popular with one of our carvers. Mike Schildt. He sculpts animals of all sorts, but bears are a favorite — perhaps unsurprising, given their dual importance as symbols of both protection and healing. They’re also especially well-suited to this particular stone, especially in these sizes, which allow the webbed matrix enough free range over the animal’s body to show it to full effect.
We’ve covered alabaster several times already, so there’s no need to paraphrase everything that’s already been written here. A short excerpt will do. As I said earlier this month:
It’s a form of gypsum, and it comes in a variety of shades, from nearly pure white to ivory and beige; from a soft pastel pink to a deep rose to a putty color shot with brick red; from palest peach to the fiery shade you see here. There are other colors, too, depending on the region where it’s found and the other minerals present, but these are the ones I see most commonly used by Native artists in this part of the country. Both Colorado and Utah are reliable sources of alabaster, but I’m told that this shade and quality of the orange form is best found in Utah.
It’s a soft stone, and an absorbent one, making it easy to work with but also delicate. It’s one reason why it’s useful to do as Mark does and limit the actual carving as much as possible, letting the stone itself speak. It’s sturdy and stable enough to survive in sculptural form, but of course, it needs a safe and stable place to reside. Like most sculpture (and pottery), its fragility is an inherent part of a piece’s value, hence the need for special shipping arrangements.
One form of alabaster that I didn’t mention above, however — because I was saving it for this discussion — is the one featured here today. It’s often mistaken for horsehair pottery, which also a thing, but of a very different sort: It’s fired bisque clay, off-white in color, in which actual horsehair is embedded in randomly swirled patterns before final firing. It’s a Native pottery form, one popular in Navajoland, but it is pottery. These bears are all stone.
So what is it, and how does it get that look?
First, the primary stone itself is ordinary white alabaster — as noted above, gypsum. Plain [white] alabaster ranges from slightly translucent icy white to an opaque white more or less the color of snow to various shades of off-white to a putty-gray shade. In this form, it’s usually fairly close to actual white, like snow, with just a hint of ivory undertones. The white portions of it also tend to be relatively opaque across the board, with little visible variation. That sort of wild display is left to the stone’s matrix.
And what a display it is — against the demure white stone, it’s positively flamboyant. I can find no definitive sources as to what, precisely, “it” is. My best guess, considering the regions where the stone is sourced, and the sorts of matrices common to other rocks and minerals in those areas, is that it’s a form of siltstone (sometimes called mudstone). We’ve encountered siltstone on a couple of occasions already: as the “smoky” red-brown matrix in some Bisbee turquoise, as the likely source of the “chocolate” matrix in Royston turquoise, and as the precious deep-red pipestone used to make the pipes and calumets sacred to so many of our peoples. It occurs as matrix in other forms of host rock: sedimentary inclusion that leach into gaps and cracks and crevices and harden over eons, creating a rich brown tracery of lines that we call “spiderweb matrix.”
There’s nothing frightening or ghoulish about these spiderwebs; they’re neither home nor host to any danger. They are merely Nature’s own costumes, a gift to a plain white stone to wear as a beautiful adornment.
BONUS: GHOST FISH
We have a bonus for you today, thanks to the photo at the top of this post. When Wings took that shot, he placed the family of bears on the drum with the fish in the background. [Yes, you have met that fish before: We encountered him up close and personal here.] At the time, I wondered whether he’d simply forgotten to remove the fish, but I didn’t say anything.
After a while, he asked me: “So do you know why I left the fish in the photo?”
Of course, I said, “No.”
He grinned. “Because bears like fish.”
And, being made of pink alabaster, he looks more than a little like the salmon that are a staple of the ghost bears’ natural diet. In this case, of course, everyone’s safe and accounted for; the only feeding these guys need, bears and fish alike, is of the spiritual sort.
But looking at it today, in the context of the Halloween theme, its near-translucence reminded me of something else from long ago. It’s something that will resonate with some women of my generation, but also, oddly enough, for scientist types who specialize in fish. It makes me think of the ghost fish.
I first encountered the ghost fish as words on a page. By way of one of our cousins, my sister had come into possession of the latest Trixie Belden mystery, The Mystery at Bob-White Cave, published in 1963. She apparently had no interest in the book, so it passed to me, and I devoured it. Set in a place I’d never been, called the Ozarks, it involved subterranean caves! Spelunking! Bats! And ghostly water-bound apparitions: translucent white fish and reptiles, creatures who’d lived in the deep cave waters for so many eons that they had no eyes — they had no need for them. I’d never heard of such a thing; we certainly didn’t learn about any “ghost fish” in school. And so, I was introduced to a young person’s mystery series that, also unknown to me, was actually launched in 1948.
Before long, of course, the plots became outlandish and silly, but it was still a change from the hardy Boys/Nancy Drew mystery series, or from Cherry Ames, or from a couple of other old series whose names escape me now, one set in the fashion world and one in that of airlines, back when transcontinental flight was new and exotic, and when flight attendants were still called “stewardesses.” As always, they involved heroines (or, in the case of the Hardy Boys, heroes) who looked nothing like me, and had lives vastly different from anything I could even imagine. But they all had two things in common: 1) They cemented my love of mysteries at an early age; and 2) they introduced me to worlds that, at the time, I could never have hoped to see otherwise, worlds I had no way of knowing existed.
From that perspective, they allowed me to try on a variety of costumes myself.
Happy Halloween!
~ Aji
An editing note: All of the bears (and the fish!) pictured here today remain available for sale, but not all are yet posted in the Sculpture Gallery here on the site. I’m scrambling today, but once I get a chance to complete the category entries, I’ll update this post with the relevant links.
