Some days, the fire is hard come by.
That’s been true here much of this week, as highs in the sixties plunged suddenly below zero, with subsequent daytime temperatures chilled to the bone by a bitter wind. After a day yesterday filled with an icy sun, the clouds returned in the early hours of this morning, granting us a warmer dawn, the radiance of the rising sun muted into a warm peach glow by veils of gray. Now, a whole storm system’s worth of clouds hovers overhead, dark and lowering, yet too insubstantial to deliver anything but the rising wind that has brought the chill back to our bones.
In the cold depths of winter, the fire in our bodies, hearts, and spirits fast burns down to embers.
For our peoples, of course, there has been a concentrated effort from without to extinguish that flame. It’s an effort that continues apace this very day: We see it in its most icy brutality in the Canadian government’s violent removal by force, ongoing as I write this, of the Wet’suwet’en people from their own lands, in order to violate and desecrate that sovereign land with a dangerous pipeline the people do not want and to which they have never consented. On this side of that artificial line known as the “U.S. border,” there are more than enough daily atrocities to fill whole libraries with accounts of them, not least of which is the ongoing genocidal crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, one that knows no borders or boundaries.
At such moments, hope seems ever farther out of reach, its denial reinforced like a cruel cosmic joke perpetrated by colonial forces and systems for the purpose of keeping us passive while we are stripped of every resource, every identity and self, every opportunity to fight back.
But hope, like the flame, does not die so easily.
Our ancestors knew this, and knew it well. They also understood, in a way that colonial structures and systems do not, that keeping hope alive is our task and obligation, in their memory, for ourselves, and for the benefit of our future generations — who will only have a future if we commit to and do the work required of us now. And that work requires us to be warriors and dreamers both: visionaries who can conceive, articulate, and build a future better than the one we were given; defenders of dream and destiny and the young spirits who will inhabit and fulfill them. It requires of us, sometimes, the creating and constructing of our own hope, stoking the embers of spirits and dreams until they ares strong enough to sustain their own fire.
Today’s featured work is a multi-layered manifestation of exactly this dynamic: a hearing and honoring of the ancestors’ visions, an expressing of it in contemporary terms that provide a foundation on which to build. From its description in the Other Artists: Wall Art gallery here on the site:
Chief Jo’s Vision Framed Mixed-Media Collage
This framed collage by Preston Bellringer (Yakama/Assiniboine) melds ancient prophecies with modern media in a piece that harks back to a ’60s ethos and feel. The iconic central photograph of Chief Joseph in the upper half of the collage is surrounded by a complex synthesis of images in multiple media: photography, paint, pen and ink, even children’s stick-on decals, all telling a layered intertribal story of warriors protecting the people in their quest for a better time, a better place, one of peace. The studded wood frame is 25.25″ high by 8.5″ wide; the visible image (no glass cover) is 22.75″ high by 6″ wide (all dimensions approximate).
Mixed media; wood
$125 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply
I’ve written here before, at some length, about the man colonial history calls “Chief Joseph”:
Born Hinmuuttu-yalatlat in 1840 to one of Khapkhaponimi, one of the “chiefs” of the Wallowa band of the Nimíipuu (Nez Perce), both he and his father had the English name “Joseph” hung on them by white “missionaries” invading the area. At this time, Manifest Destiny was playing out in its usual fashion, and the Nimíipuu were under great pressure by the colonialist federal government to enter into treaties to permit settlement of their lands. The “treaties,” of course, were not worth the paper they were written on, and the “settlement” amounted to “we’ll steal your land and pen you up over there.”
Desperate to save their sacred lands in the Wallowa Valley, lands essential to their spiritual traditions, several of the chiefs agreed to such “treaties.” Then came the “discovery” of gold by trespassers in those very same sacred lands that the treaties allegedly protected. Under intense pressure to surrender the mineralogically valuable land, the chiefs eventually decided to resist — and, if necessary, to fight to save their lands, their people, their ancestral way of life.
In 1871, Khapkhaponimi walked on. That his people fight to save their sacred lands (and their freedom to be) is recorded as his dying wish. His son, Hinmuuttu-yalatlat, who the dominant culture remembers only as “Chief Joseph,” took up that dying wish as his mantle and his mission. After three years of desperate and ultimately futile negotiations with the U.S. government, Hinmuuttu-yalatlat ordered his people to head northward to safety, taking the women, elders, and children. Battle erupted, and for several months, his warriors engaged the U.S. Army while the people retreated to the hoped-for safety of the Canadian border. Once there, they were ambushed and surrounded, and the bitter cold and lack of food in the northern winter made effective countermaneuvers impossible.
Hinmuuttu-yalatlat worked desperately to negotiate a peace that could be had with honor. It was during this period that his most famous utterances were reportedly made:
“We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man. Free to travel. Free to stop. Free to work. Free to choose my own teachers. Free to follow the religion of my Fathers. Free to think and talk and act for myself.”
“You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases.”
He hoped that he was being treated as a peer, as an equal — as a man. And, of course, the invading army’s negotiators were only woo willing to foster that false hope. He was made promises of specific lands — not their most sacred, most important lands, but lands nonetheless — for the people, if only they would lay down their weapons, board the unheated cattle cars of the Iron Horse, and be transported peacefully.
They laid down their weapons. They boarded the freezing metal rail cars.
They were transported to a concentration camp.
Sent first to eastern Kansas, then to Oklahoma, Hinmuuttu-yalatlat and the Nimíipuu spent more than a decade in the wilderness of U.S. Army death camps (and death camps they were, decimating the people’s numbers with epidemics of disease, starvation, and other privation). Eventually, they were promised a safe return to their sacred valley, only to find, once transported, that they were not home but were once again interned, this time on the “reservation” of the people now known as the Coleville.
Hinmuuttu-yalatlat survived another quarter-century. Recognizing the futility of challenging the U.S. Army’s massive numbers and firepower, he nevertheless continued to fight in his own way, challenging their words. He spoke, plainly and proudly, to anyone and everyone who would listen. He insisted on the Native right to self-determination, to autonomy, to sovereignty, to existence — as men, as women, as human beings.
He did not, in his lifetime, create the world that he so devoutly wished to see. But his words have outlived his body, unto the seventh generation and beyond, and they are sound guides for our peoples today in the same ongoing fight for the same existential rights.
Warrior, leader, elder, teacher, he remains, well over a century later, a hero to our peoples and a role model for our own work. It is why Wings has his image tattooed on his upper arm: a reminder of the need for courage and conviction, of the need to adapt but continue the fight, of the need to stand on our principles and keep our traditions alive.
For our people.
In these coldest days of winter, in this season the outside world so carelessly declares one of “love,” in this time of a subtler, more legalistic genocide, Preston Bellringer’s work reminds us that dreams are granted to us for a reason, and that the old visions still hold essential truths. It also reminds us to appreciate the beauty of the world and lives granted to us even as we must contend with our own duties to dream, and defend, a better world into being for our children. We do not do that by giving in to the cold, or by allowing hope to die; we do it by stoking the embers of spirits and dreams.
Of this work, and its creator, too, I think “Chief Joseph” would have been proud. It’s up to us to honor the legacy, and the vision.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
