People today take pride in asserting that they march to the beat of a different drummer. But our peoples have always known the dangers of what the dominant culture glorifies as “rugged individualism,” a worldview neither individual nor especially rugged, but one that, as cosplayed today, leads inevitably to the oppression of marginalized populations in order to bolster one’s self and privilege.
Our own cultures most certainly support one’s development as an individual, but our ways are built around community: a recognition that we are here only thanks to the courage and sacrifice of the ancestors, that we have a responsibility to do the same for future generations, and that we are all beholden to each other for individual and collective health, safety, and well-being. But our understanding of community stretches far beyond the lodge door. In our way, our community, our collective self, is made up of the world around us, earth and sky and waters, plants and animals, air and weather and light — and, of course, the spirits who are part of a world unseen, but who retain a connection to our own more tangible plane.
It would be easy for such cultures to command conformity, but it’s less about authority and control than it is about harmony and simple existence. The hope is that each generation will stretch its wings, so to speak, but will also come to value and love the timeless ways of our individual cultures sufficiently to become participating, contributing members of the community. Still, it’s important to leave room for individuality, for the pursuit of personal goals and interests and achievements — and these benefit the community, too, even if sometimes only indirectly. It’s one of the reasons our peoples have always left room for the dreamers and visionaries to pursue what calls to them from worlds beyond the reach of the rest of us.
Sometimes, though, collective action is not possible, or merely insufficient to the task. Community requires cooperation, collaboration, compromise . . . and necessarily, coalition activities are less extreme than those that may be undertaken by a single individual. But with an earth in extremis and a polity in similar straits, sometimes we are called to act as individuals.
In times such as these, we are not called to march to the beat of a different drummer; we are called to be the drummer.
It’s a call that brings us to today’s featured work, one capable of offering up a role in a collective song, but one that depends upon the single person to give voice to its part. From its description in the Other Artists: Drums gallery here on the site:
Taos Pueblo master drum maker Lee Lujan gives voice to the earth’s own heartbeat with this small traditional Pueblo drum. Made in the old way, it’s summoned from a single unbroken length of cottonwood trunk, whole and complete with no fitted pieces. each side is covered with rawhide, tanned, stretched, and dried in the old way, the two covers laced together by hand with lengths of heavy sinew. The excess lace is used to fashion a pair of traditional handles, one at either side, top and bottom, and a small loop to hold the beater. The beater itself is made from a slender branch, stripped of bark and chosen for balance, one end padded, covered in soft white deerhide, and laced securely together. Drum stands 15.25″ high by 10″ across at its widest point.
Cottonwood; rawhide; sinew; deerhide
$210 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Note: Size and weight require special handling; extra shipping charges apply
I’ve written, at some length, about the special features of Pueblo drums before, particularly about uprights such as this. They are wrought from the unbroken trunk of a tree, a perfect circle with no fitted pieces, and bits of branch are often left in place, rather than sanded down uniformly, to provide natural handles and to highlight the trunk’s natural beauty. Hides are stretched over either end and laced together with sinew, and a sinew loop is added at one end to hold the beater when the drum is not in use. But another feature of traditional Pueblo drums is the presence of two handles: each made of spiraled sinew, one attached to one end of the drum, the other on the opposite side at the other end. It’s an image that flummoxes outsiders: Why does it need two handles? Why aren’t they on the same side?
For very good reason.
You see, at various events and ceremonies, individuals are asked to assemble to play their drums — simultaneously individually and communally. It’s not uncommon to see men lined up beside each other, each man with his own drum, all beating them in unison, the different sizes and materials producing different pitches that together form a particular kind of indigenous harmony. Such drums, though lightweight in relative terms, would be extremely heavy to hold in one hand while wielding the beater in the other, and so their traditional construction comes to the rescue: The drummer positions his drum in front of himself at the desired height and angle, with the upper handle turned toward his body. He then drives a wooden stake through the lower handle into the ground to hold it in place, so that he need only balance it with his free hand while striking it with the beater, rather than bearing its weight.
Some such drums, of course, are large enough around to serve, in effect, as powwow-style drums; a small group of men could gather in a circle around them and play as a group (we currently have only one such drum in inventory, to be featured next week). Some, however, are too tall, too narrow, or too small overall to serve as anything but an individual instrument, and such is the case with today’s featured work.
Right now, the world needs us all — collaboratively, and individually. Some of us will be called to act on our own, without the backing of a community, in pursuit of ways to save a wounded earth. For those of us so summoned, we will not have the luxury of marching to another’s drummer’s beat, different or otherwise. Land and water, air and sky, all need us now, but perhaps the most urgent at the moment are the waters. If the drum is the heartbeat of the earth, the song is the waters, carrying the message (and the lifeblood) through the body politic.
We are called now to be the drummer: to sing for the waters, to play the earth’s heartbeat.
~ Aji
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