When I planned this week’s posts and chose the work to feature today, I had forgotten the date. In our small world here, the dominant culture’s legal holidays are, for the most part, just another day; the pace and rhythm of our lives is dictated far more by the land itself than by red letters on a paper calendar on the wall.
I chose today’s featured work in keeping with the week’s color theme, as we have done in this space throughout this month. Last Tuesday’s post in our Indigenous Arts series explored the motifs and meanings assigned to the color white in the work of our artists and cultures, and for some of those cultures, white is a color of peace. For the Sunday before Memorial Day, a day the rest of the country has set aside to honor the memory of those fallen in battle, today’s featured work is perhaps the most appropriate expression I could have found, had I been looking with the date in mind. Instead, Spirit has moved with its customary serendipity and synchronicity to place it front and center.
Tomorrow, we’ll explore these motifs a bit more deeply, including some of the history has been, all too predictably, elided and erased by modern discourse. We have particular reason to do so, having recently lost one of our artists who was a Native vet. The fact that tomorrow’s post will lead into the last in our current series on the symbolism of color, one that, in many cultures, is the color of morning, is all too pointedly, poignantly apt. But for today, we’ll close out the last week’s focus with a work, expressed in contemporary terms, that addresses the need for peace. From its description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
A Precious Peace Earrings
For peoples whose last half-millennium has been marked by invasion and colonization from without, by the colonizers’ breaking of every single treaty entered, by the need to be willing to stand as warriors just to ensure survival, peace is a precious thing indeed. Here, Wings has summoned its spirit by way of the contemporary symbol, instantly recognizeable the world over, from a medium precious in its own right. The spokes have been formed, freehand, via delicate ajouré cutwork using a tiny jeweler’s saw. Each medallion, a disc of solid sterling silver, has been buffed nearly to a mirror sheen. Earrings measure 1.5 inches across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver
$225 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I’ve written before, at some length, about the origins of the peace symbol and the ways in which it fits (and fails to fit) into our own cultural frameworks. In terms of Native symbolism, the outside world tends to think reductively in terms of “peace pipes,” despite the fact that for the most part, there was no such thing in itself. There were ceremonial pipes passed among the participants at a council for any matter of gravity, a way of showing respect to one’s comrades and opponents and demonstrating a commitment to bargain in good faith. Reducing the imagery to “peace pipe” is no doubt comforting to others, but it erases the true history and the complex dynamics at work . . . and the breadth and depth of the betrayal that ultimately resulted across the board.
That history, and the modern practice of whitewashing symbolism, renders Wings’s turning of the modern peace symbol into a work of Native art a subversive act. What began as a symbolic notation for the words “nuclear disarmament” looks for all the world like the shaft of an arrow, its point broken off to permit the safe embrace of life’s sacred hoop. In Wings’s hands, the motif is not a bludgeon to wield over the heads of others, not a tool to scold and hector others into complying with the dominant culture’s demands for a veil to be drawn over the past, for marginalized populations to be the first to stand down in the face of war.
It is, instead, a remind to each and every individual, regardless of culture or race, of history or place: Work on one’s own self first. Peace comes in defending those who need it, but not in forcing those same populations to surrender self-defense, however comforting and comfortable such an approach might feel to those who style themselves saviors.
If the world is to live in the white light of peace, it requires power, and those who own it, first to demand better of themselves and their own.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2016; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
