Today, we’re going to use this space to explore a traditionally Native symbol that belonged only to a few nations, but that today has been adopted as an intertribal symbol of indigeneity and cultural and artistic meaning: the medicine wheel.
I wrote here about the medicine wheel a year and a half or so ago. As I said then:
The medicine wheel is something that today is regarded by outsiders as inherently Indian, like the dreamcatcher — as something that belongs to all tribes and is universally “Native American” (much like non-Native conceptualizations of so-called “Native American religion”). It’s not, of course; its origin as a so-called “medicine wheel” was actually fairly limited in geographic scope. In point of contemporary fact, however, it has become something of a pan-Indian symbol, adopted by tribal nations all over Indian Country to represent their own cultural interpretations of various traditions.
There is another problem with the popular understanding of the medicine wheel, and we’ll dispense with it at the outset: What is no popularly called a “medicine wheel” is in fact often simply a symbol representing the Four Sacred Directions, one that incorporates the “sacred hoop” imagery of the circle. There are many, many more Native cultures that have used this form of imagery, and/or that have historically held it sacred (or at least symbolically powerful) than those who actually used literal medicine wheels. Some variations are not wheels at all, but rather, shields. As with every other aspect of life perforce lived within this dominant culture, language becomes careless, and what a thing is called today does not necessarily bear a relationship to what it is — or to what it isn’t. We’ll talk about some of the differences later in today’s post.
Image Credit: National Parks Service
First, it’s useful to define exactly what a genuine medicine wheel is. As I wrote earlier:
The original medicine wheels, of course, were laid out in ancient times on the grounds of the Northern Plains, using large white rocks to create spokes radiating from a central stone hub. And despite the wheel’s modern incarnation as a hoop intersected by four spokes, the original versions had many spokes, apparently not always of the same length nor spaced the same distance apart. Archaeologists, anthropologists, self-styled New Age “shamans,” and self-appointed “experts” of all kinds will gladly tell you, in authoritative tones, exactly what their purpose was and how they were used, but the fact of the matter is that it’s guesswork at best. Among the latter two categories, it’s ill-informed, counterfactual, exploitative guesswork at that. And the less said about fraudulent exploitation like so-called “medicine wheel astrology,” the better.
The one interpretation of the original medicine wheels that has gained some well-grounded traction is the notion that they may have been used as astronomical observatories, and/or for calendrical purposes. Certain spokes on some of the great wheels have been found to align with certain celestial bodies, particularly with regard to specific days of the year (e.g., equinoxes, solstices, etc.) Still, absent a clear historical record explicating the wheels’ use(s) and function(s), it remains guesswork: Were such alignments intentional or coincidental? Were they the purpose of the wheels’ construction (or one of them, anyway), or simply an unintended consequence? It’s too simplistic to say that “no one knows,” because it might very well be the case that there are elders of the tribal nations descended from the builders of these great stone structures who are tasked with carrying such knowledge. But if so, that knowledge is for their peoples, and they would likely hold it close. This is a concept that the dominant culture refuses to understand, but it is right.
Before we get into pop-culture renditions of “medicine wheels,” or into variations and meanings, it might be useful to look at some of the ways in which “wheels” and similar circular patterns manifested in the lives of the ancients.
One of the notions we hear regularly today, used to justify the subjugation and theft and genocide that were the building blocks of the U.S. and its official policy of “Manifest Destiny” (and, indeed, of every colonial effort on this land since the arrival of the first Europeans), is a twinned concept comprising a supposed lack of so-called “technological progress” and what is seen as its natural and logical result, a culture that is “primitive.” And those who justify such characterizations and conduct have a stock set of go-to conclusions that bootstrap these premises. One of their favorites? They love to point to the apparent absence of the wheel in Native technologies as proof of this “primitive” nature.
First, let’s dispense with the notion that it’s any kind of given that absolutely no Native anywhere on this continent ever created a wheel. The most that can be said is that, thousands of years later and in the aftermath of untold destruction of what would have been the historical record, evidence of it has not been found. We know for a fact that they fashioned hoops of all sorts of materials (willow being perhaps the best-known), and a wheel is simply a sturdy and uniform hoop. Clearly, our peoples understood the significance of the wheel’s shape, and comprehended its deeper uses far better than most other cultures: Witness the Ancient Ones’ conceptualization of life as hoop; of the spherical and orbital nature of sun and moon and the world itself; of the cyclical nature of existence; of long-held traditional practices in which gatherings are held and ceremony and business conducted in egalitarian circle formations. Do all of these things hold true for all of our peoples? Of course not. But they are histories and practices sufficiently widespread to be fundamental to the nature of this land and its indigenous inhabitants overall.
Further, there were eminently practical reasons for the wheel’s lack of development in ancestral cultures here. Modern pack animals were not indigenous to this land. The vast majority of the native horse population vanished millennia ago; the modern horse, as we know it today, arrived with the waves of European invaders, beginning with the Spanish. Tell me, have you ever tried to harness a deer? Or an elk or a moose? Perhaps a bear? How about a buffalo? No? Wise decision. Our ancestors were equally wise. But in the absence of a ready supply of pack animals that could easily be trained to harness, haulage and portage required human labor, hence the invention of toboggan and travois. And they worked admirably. More, prior to invasion and colonization, this land was vast enough to support large numbers of individual societies and nations and cultures, mostly with sufficient resources to negate the need to migrate constantly, or even to travel far and wide on a scale that would make foot travel prohibitive. Without a need to cover such distance, the wheel as conceived for travel would have been mostly superfluous. [Yes, I know that the modern tendency of the dominant culture is to insist that such travel ad exploration are an inherent “good” simply for their own sake, but that’s a very modern and privileged worldview, one that begs all sorts of questions (and I mean that phrase in the philosophical sense).]
Regardless of the hows and whys, it’s abundantly clear that our peoples understood the wheel as a concept, including the cyclical and rotational aspects that its form and shape imply. It appears in petroglyphs and pictographs all over the continent, in early art and symbolism, and, of course, in the great stone structures built directly upon the land in the north.
Regardless of whether given imagery serves as an intentional representation of an actual medicine wheel or is created more in the symbolic vein of the hoop and the directions, it’s become one of those motifs that is now “pan-Native,” for lack of a better descriptor. It is used for multiple purposes, from tribal seals and flags and logos to personal ornaments and talismans and good luck charms, and it now finds expression in a variety of formats. As I wrote earlier:
All that said, the “medicine wheel” has become an indigenous motif much like the bald eagle and the white buffalo: a symbol of solidarity and the sacred, something that translates easily into the cultural argot of many tribal nations and traditions. In its modern incarnation, it tends to take on a specific stylized form: a single hoop with four spokes set at the cardinal directions, intersecting at the center. In some versions, nothing exists between the spokes, which may themselves be painted in specific colors; in others, the wheel is rendered more in the image of a shield, with solid colors filling the gaps between each spoke. It’s a symbolic representation of the number four, significant and even sacred in many tribal traditions, often for multiple reasons. And there are commonalities in the colors chosen, too: In my experience, they are most often rendered in combinations of white/yellow/red/black or white/yellow/red/blue, although the order in which they appear on the wheel varies considerably by tribe and tradition.
So, too, does the symbolism vary, and depending on the tradition, it may represent multiple concepts, depending on context and use. For some, it’s a representation of the Four Sacred Directions — North, East, South, and West — with all the specific associations and powers that that may imply. For others, it serves as a marker of the seasons — Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter — and with that association, for some, comes the notion of “human seasons,” the stages of life (infancy, youth, adulthood, elder status). For some, it’s the elements, Nature’s inherent forces of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. I’ve even heard of associations with sacred substances — cedar, sage, sweetgrass, tobacco — although I suspect that’s a more recent development.
What unifies them all, though, is the simple imagery: four become one in the sacred hoop.
Examples of the most basic variety, four equal spokes intersecting at the center, appear in the medicine wheel ornaments immediately below, and at the top of this post.
It’s common today to assign meaning to the quadrants and/or to the spokes separating them, and to assign colors to them, as well. Meanings and colors both vary widely among our various peoples (and sometimes vary within the larger group, as well). For example, I was taught that the colors are assigned as follows: North is white; East is yellow; South is red; and West is black. Another branch of our people, from an area not many miles away, differs in one crucial aspect: In their way, West is assigned the color blue. Other peoples assign other colors, or sometimes use the same collection of colors but identify them with different directions. Still others interpret the directions as not referring to the cardinal points of the compass, or at least not solely to them; some assign meaning to the ordinal points instead, or to the spaces between the cardinal points that encompass either or both (and the ordinal points the lie within that range).
This leads us naturally to a variant symbol I mentioned in the quite above, one that is not really best characterized as a medicine wheel, but as a medicine shield. In this variation, the colors are applied not to the spokes, but to the spaces between them, creating a circle that is entirely opaque. It may be divided into four quadrants set along the axes of the cardinal directions, or off-set at angles from the center, oriented toward the ordinal points. In this version, the spokes are outlines (usually black), and the spaces between are filled in with the relevant colors, creating an image much like a traditional shield.
As noted above, all sorts of meanings are now assigned to the quadrants, or to the spokes, or to various sundry points along the wheel. Most of this is an outgrowth of so-called New Age-like practices that appropriated the wheel for their own entirely non-Native purposes, and imposed equally non-Native ideas upon it from without. Some of this stems from an unfortunate tome written years ago by a Native man for the express consumption of non-Natives, presuming to couple the imagery and superficial meanings attributed to the medicine wheel with what he termed “astrology,” and it became a quick and longstanding hit among the appropriative “self-actualization” set. Let’s be very clear: There is no such thing as “medicine wheel astrology”; it is a pop-culture invention that happened to be invented by a Native man and thus was afforded some sort of faux-official “Native” authenticity by outsiders. Wings and I have both read the book, and we both recognize bits and pieces taken from various traditions and stirred into a mishmash of meaninglessness. We both know plenty of Natives who half-humorously adopt some of its symbolism on an individual level. Please do not confuse that, nor the kudzu-like outgrowth of fake “medicine wheel” practices and “ceremonies” that have been its legacy, as having anything to do with actual medicine wheels.
This is probably a good moment for a note about the terminology: It’s a common misconception held by the outside world that medicine wheels are tools of healing. The fact of the matter is that most of us have no real idea of the true purpose(s) of the original ones build upon the earth in the lands to the north, although we can make some educated guesses. But to say precisely how each was used in terms of how the people of the time might have moved around and among and through their circles and spokes and centers . . . that is nothing more than guesswork at best. What the peoples indigenous to those areas have made public about their own traditions, however, makes it seem unlikely that such giant structures were used for healing, or at least solely for such a purpose.
The disconnect arises in the way we define and use the word “medicine” compared with the rest of the world. To the dominant culture, “medicine” has a very specific meaning, one best characterized and defined by associations with correcting illness or injury, with physicians and hospitals and pharmaceutical substances and what we generally term “medical practice.”
To us, “Medicine” is something very different: It is power, plain and simple. It may be power held by the spirits; it may be power granted to or channeled through one or more individuals. It may be the sort of power one sees in forces of Nature; it may the sort of power that resides in the human head and heart that permits an individual to practice a certain skill with prowess, or to express and create by way of a particular talent. It may reside in one’s reputation as a great orator or politician, or in the humble practices the allow one to heal the sick in the literal terms. What it is not, however, is something confined to notions of doctors and drugs; it is something so great and small, so all-encompassing, as to be universal, although it finds expression in myriad ways, some of them minute, and through the offices and acts and hands and hearts of a wide array of individuals.
And so, when you hear us talk about “Medicine,” or even “medicine,” it may refer to any number of specific things, but its one fundamental, essential aspect is its identity as power. [I should also note here that we define “power” differently, too, and it should not be conflated with what is more accurately labeled “authority,” but that’s a discussion for a different day.]
This notion of medicine wheels and sacred hoops finds regular expression in Wings’s silverwork, as well. Indeed, it’s one of his more common themes, despite the fact that medicine wheels are not an integral part of his people’s traditions. What are a part of their traditions are the symbolic motifs of the circle and of the sacred directions, and it is in these concepts that the medicine wheel motif links up with his own ancestral ways. We’ll close today’s exploration with a few recent examples.
The ring pictured immediately above was one he made as part of a collection in miniature, a series of four rings that all took the form of simple sterling silver bands, but all composed of fused lengths of heavy raised silver wire, giving each a uniquely three-dimensional look and feel. This one was one of the smaller, more subtle ones, but it was the only one with stampwork added to the edges . . . in the form, fittingly enough, of tiny sacred hoops. The name of this ring was Hoop Dancing, and its name is taken from a style of traditional dance whose express purpose is storytelling and symbolic expression. I wrote about the actual practice of hoop dancing more than a year ago; you can read about it here.
Speaking of sacred hoops, one of the works Wings created for his one-man show a couple of years ago expressly invoked such imagery:
This cuff was titled, aptly enough, All the Sacred Hoops, and it served as a physical embodiment of its name. I wrote about its imagery in some detail nearly two years ago, here; it was fitting, and comforting, on a day when the markers of death and grief and loss loomed large in my mind.
Wings has, however, invoked the imagery of the Four Sacred Directions, of shields and wheels, more explicitly, too. A recent major work, one that is highly metaphorical in its execution, summons the images of the cardinal directions and melds them with the motif of a shield, with all of the protective symbolism that that word implies. It remains available in our Necklaces Gallery, and its name evokes the four winds who are, in some traditions, the guardians and gatekeepers of the cardinal directions. From its description:
Dance of the Whirlwind Spirits Necklace
When the winds come from the Four Directions to meet at the center of all that is, they summon the spirit of the whirlwind to dance in the vortex of the storm. Wings summons all of the spirits in this work, a large, heavy talismanic medallion of solid sterling silver, hammered by hand and lightly domed in repoussé fashion. A symbol of the Four Sacred Direction in a flaring stylized cross shape rests atop the medallion as an overlay. Each spoke is marked with a single cabochon of cobalt-blue lapis lazuli, the color of the rain; they spin inward toward the vortex at the center, embodied in a large round onyx cabochon of mysteriously glossy depths. The hand-made bail is accented with tiny hand-stamped hoops, the shape of the spiraling wind itself. The pendant hangs from an alternating strand of round sterling silver and lapis lazuli beads, with small square lapis and round onyx beads stretching toward either end of the strand, each end terminating in two tiny Florentine-finish silver beads. Pendant is 2-1/8 inches long (including bail) by 2-1/4 inches across; beads are 19 inches long (dimensions approximate). Other views shown at the link.
Sterling silver; onyx; lapis lazuli
$1,500 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Then there is the explicit motif of the wheel. In our world, such imagery calls to mind celestial bodies and their orbits: the sun, the moon, our earth itself. Another of the works that Wings created for his 2014 exhibition called on this symbolism in both style and substance.
The name of the work was Wheels In the Sky, and it was a dual-sided piece: a hand-stamped Morning Star on the front that evoked the Four Sacred Directions; a pinwheel-like shape on the reverse that hinted at heavenly spirits in a whirl of motion:
The pattern on the reverse would eventually give rise to a new work, one similarly wrought from ingot:
He titled the ring Whirlwind Moon, and it, along with the ingot necklace, reside with a dear friend for whom all of the imagery in the two pieces holds particular resonance.
Finally, we come to a work that makes the medicine wheel motif a bit more explicit, even if that link is not immediately obvious from the piece’s name. This was another in the series of raised-wire rings that included the one at the beginning of this segment of today’s post. Unlike the other three in the series, this one still remains in our current inventory, and of the four, it was always far and away my favorite, both for its greater physical substance and for its symbolic imagery. From its description in our Rings Gallery:
Four Ring
The cardinal directions. The elements. The seasons of the year. The stages of life. Over and over, the number four appears in indigenous cultures as a marker of the significant and the sacred. Keep its symbolism close to hand with this simple, elegant band hand-wrought in sterling silver. The ring itself is made of four individual pieces, two pairs: one pair of slender strands of triangle wire, peaks ever so slightly elevated, fused in the center; flanked by another pair of strands of half-round wire, one strand melded at either edge. The four pieces are soldered together, fused so completely that they appear to have been milled from a single heavy piece of silver. Unisex; sizeable.
Sterling silver
$195 + shipping, handling, and insurance
When I wrote about this ring here back in late 2014, I referred to it as “a little wearable medicine wheel.” As I said then:
It’s solid, substantial, and seamlessly one. It’s impossible to tell that it was once four separate strands of silver, now melded together.
It’s a perfect representation of the wheel, and of the sacred hoop.
For today, I’ll leave you with one final image. It’s one of my own photographs, one I took more than a decade ago at a very old site south and west of here, one that, to me, has always seemed the embodiment of a medicine wheel:
It is a petroglyph, millennia old, left for us by the Ancient Ones. It shows a perfect rendition of what we today conceive as the modern medicine wheel in the center, four equidistant spokes at the cardinal points converging in the center of an equally perfect hoop. The hoop itself is ringed by small graven circles: fifty-two in number. I have always thought to myself that it serves as an expression of life’s cycle and circle as viewed through the lens of a single year, four seasons spread across fifty-two weeks. Whether the original artist intended such meaning, I can only speculate, but I do know that when I view it, it gives me a feeling of balance, of harmony with our world and with the hoop that links us both to the Ancient Ones and to those who will not be born for many millennia more.
As “medicine” goes, it’s hard to find any sort of wheel more powerfully effective than that.
~ 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.
