After days with highs in the mid-sixties, winter is suddenly here. Not coming; not on the way: Here.
I spent the first half of the week working outdoors in T-shirts and shorts beneath a sun that shone bright and hot. It was far too warm for November in this place, more evidence of climate change, however anecdotal. were it not for darkfall once again by five-thirty, you’d hardly know it was fall, much less approaching winter.
Not now. It rained all day Wednesday, turning to snow that night — the smallest of flurries, gentle, few, and very far between. Only the lightest dusting appeared on some surfaces at sunrise yesterday; the earth was still warm enough to melt the flakes on contact.
By late morning, the snow was a wall of white, if only briefly.
Here at this elevation, we got about two inches, although you wouldn’t know it to look at the ground now; most of it was gone by the end of the day. Still, we got the predictable drop in temperature that follows a storm here: twenty-one at dawn; a low reportedly around sixteen. The grass is white again, hard and crunchy with frost, hard surfaces slick with ice, and it’s supposed to get even colder by tonight.
It’s a time to huddle inside, warm and safe against the cold and the dark. Where only last week we were still working outside after 6 PM, we now find ourselves making an effort to be indoors more than an hour earlier. Now, of course, we have many diversions to occupy our time: books, television, Internet. Not so very long ago, within our own lifetimes, in fact, traditional families spent their winter nights more simply, without the technological flourishes that turn tales into seemingly living things, but still in pursuit of the same pastime . . . telling stories.
In our cultures, we carry our stories with us.
Sometimes, it’s even possible to wear them.
This month, we’ll be using our Friday Feature series to highlight the work of the other Native jewelry artisans whose work we carry in our inventory. In some instances, such as today, they are artists who work in other media or genres as well. We’ll also devote one Friday to a group of such pieces that are from Wings’s private collection, works where the artists’ identities have been lost to the mists of time.
But today, we begin the month with storytellers.
Today’s featured work of wearable art is by Wings’s cousin, Aaron Mirabal, whose preferred medium is Taos Pueblo’s own micaceous clay. He specializes in traditional storytellers, those iconic Pueblo figures that embody the relationship between elders and children: teaching, learning, the transmission of history and culture and identity all wrapped up in moments of childhood fun.
Mostly, Aaron produces small versions of the classic figurative pieces, petite grandmothers in traditional dress with children on her lap. But a few years ago, he created something wholly unique: old-fashioned clay beads of the kind the ancestors would have made and worn, strung together into necklaces, interspersed with a few larger “beads” in the form of tiny yet fully articulated storyteller figures, one of which remains in inventory. From its description in the Other Artists: Miscellaneous Jewelry gallery here on the site:
This one-of-a-kind necklace by Aaron Mirabal (Taos Pueblo) features three grandmother storytellers crafted of the Pueblo’s own micaceous clay. The center figure holds two children; each of the others holds one apiece. All figures are dressed traditionally, and are interspersed with round hand-made beads of the same micaceous clay. An older piece from Wings’s private collection.
Micaceous clay; paint
$125 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I’ve written at length about the Pueblo storyteller tradition here before. As I said then:
One of the hallmarks of indigenous culture is storytelling. It’s a way to pass the time where few other forms of entertainment may be readily available, true, but in our cultures, it’s much more than mere leisure-time amusement. It’s more than what today we might call “family bonding” time, and more than a way to build relationships among the older and younger generations. It’s also much more than a way to teach lessons, although it’s that, too.
It’s a way to keep culture itself alive.
Our stories are as varied as the peoples (plural) who tell them, and as the people (singular), as well. A survey of tribal nations within the same geographic region, the same ethnic subgrouping, or the same language family will turn up variations of very similar traditional stories. And yet, within those same groups, the same stories vary within other subgroups, as well. And thus you get dozens, perhaps hundreds of nations with their own origin stories that have basic similarities and yet vast differences; nations from all over the country that tell stories of how their own ancestors were given/invented the drum, the dreamcatcher, the jingle dress; variations within the same nation as to details of those stories, or even their fundamentals.
Stories tell our children where they came from. They tell us who we are. They tell us how to live, how to walk the red road, how to go well through life according to the old ways that Spirit has given us. They tell us how to be wise, and how to be wary. They teach us the meaning of courage and honor and respect and the sacred. And sometimes, they do all these things while making us laugh, such as when Coyote decided to lie in wait for the maidens picking strawberries.
In Pueblo cultures, this tradition has been given figurative expression and tangible form in a medium called, aptly enough, the storyteller.
That post reviews the conventional “wisdom” of the dominant culture with regard to the history of this particular genre of Pueblo figurative art, noting the all-too-predictable discrepancies between what outside “experts” now consider that history and the real and lived historical experience of actual Pueblo people. It also highlights Aaron’s more classic work, small freestanding figurative pieces in varying sizes featuring a grandmother and two or three children. I’m reproducing the entry for one of them here:
This little storyteller is fashioned from the local micaceous clay by Wings’s cousin, Aaron Mirabal (Taos Pueblo). Here, it’s a grandmother with three grandchildren on her lap, all dressed traditionally and colorfully. Grandmother’s hair is coiled into two Hopi-style butterfly rolls, in Aaron’s trademark style. She stands 3.5″ high (dimensions approximate).
Micaceous clay; paint
$155 + shipping, handling, and insurance
You can find the descriptions for Aaron’s additional three pieces on Page 2 of the Other Artists: Sculpture gallery, here and here and here.
To return for a moment to the beads that lead today’s feature, as I said in an earlier post here:
With Native beadwork, storytelling tends to fall into two major categories: individual beads in specific designs that represent concepts, character, or an entire chronicle; and groups of beads arranged or woven into a detailed pattern that can “read” by those with the ability to translate it. An example of the latter is wampum, beads made from whelk shell that were strung onto strands of leather, often into large belts, in specific patterns and used as currency for trade. Other tribal nations have created belts and strands of other types of beads in specific sizes, patterns, colors, and number and arrangement of beads for use in Medicine Society work, including the training of apprentices, the historical preservation of knowledge, and the need to keep that knowledge secret from prying eyes.
Today, most beadwork here in the Southwest is of the intertribal variety: That is to say, most practitioners are those who bead moccasins and leatherwork (another form of beading often used to tell stories, sometimes elaborately so), or jewelers who create wearable art of stone, bone, and antler beads.
Clay beads, however, were a very early jewelry form, and Taos Pueblo’s own micaceous clay made for an especially beautiful result. Most ancient clay beads depended on color for aesthetics, with opaque, duller surfaces (at least until firing processes became widely used and increasingly sophisticated). Micaceous clay, of course, has always been different: No matter how rudimentary the form, the clay itself captured and held glints of the very sun.
. . .
And in one masterstroke, Aaron has managed to interweave his people’s old traditional practice of storytelling and the figures that embody it with the ancient and much broader concept of beads as the mechanism for the act of storytelling itself. That he does so in micaceous clay, a medium uniquely the Pueblo’s own, in a form that predates the very walls of the old village, is a testament to the timelessness of the complex motif and the traditions they embody.
It’s a way to wear the very stories and symbols that form the basis of culture, in a form sure to give the wearer an opportunity to pass on the story of its creation. And for the holiday season, it’s the sort of piece that can be used decoratively, a small storytelling garland ornamenting the upper boughs of a tree, bringing a little Pueblo storytelling to the celebrations of other cultures.
Wings’s cousin has created, in this piece, a perfect gift for the holidays: an embodiment of some of the Pueblo’s oldest traditions, ones that find new life in this winter season, given a new and particularly accessible form. It’s a way to hold close both the stories and their tellers, a means to wear them next to the heart.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
