I have said on many occasions that our lifeways are bound inextricably with the land. It is a question of both geography and geology, but also one of the biology and botany of place: of that which the land sustains, that which gives it its essential nature (and Nature). Depending on the people and place, the spirits of specific lakes, rivers, and rock formations may all form a fundamental part of a given cosmology. So, too, do spirits that are more widely understood to be “living” beings, those nominally known as animals and plants. Among the latter category are the tree spirits, who for some indigenous peoples play significant roles in both spiritual and cultural traditions and in daily life.
And, of course, in indigenous art.
Wings’s own people provide an example of the way in which the plant life of a given place informs identity: They call themselves the People of the Red Willow, named for the once-lush cover of red willow stands indigenous to this place. [In many places, the willows thrive, including in the specific area where we live, but in the broader region, colonizing forces brought colonizing species that have in too many places supplanted the healthy and hardy indigenous flora. Some, like the Russian olive, are ruthless invaders and thieves of resources. Wings ripped out every one that had managed to take root on his land, replacing them with indigenous plant species.]
Red willow, of course, is not much like a “tree” as that word is commonly understood. Unlike weeping and globe willows, it does not grow upward from a single large trunk, branching out into long boughs studded with hanging leaves. Its growth pattern is more that of a shrub: large groupings of individual tall stalks that grow in stands out of a broad, flattish common base. But the stalks can grow very tall, well over human height, and at maturity, their bodies become solid and large enough in diameter to qualify as very slim trunks. And much like their more traditionally tree-shaped counterparts, the tips remain flexible, studded in summer with long, slender leaves like green feathers.
Red willow has healing properties, particularly in its bark, and is used as medicine in the form of teas and poultices. Its flexibility also makes it useful for art. Cultures all across Indian Country use red willow in forming the hoops used to make dream catchers and medicine wheels. Here, it’s the material of choice for traditional bows and for the shafts of arrows.
More typical trees play other roles in the people’s lifeways, however. And, of course, specific types of trees are integral to the traditions of other peoples across the continent. Perhaps the most famous is the white pine of the Haudenosaunee (now sometimes known as Six Nations), which is the national symbol of their collective peoples. Its significance dates back to a more ancient time when the nations were at war with each other. In the midst of the terrible tragedy that accompanies such conflict, a vision was given to a seer of one of the warring nations: a giant white pine with roots extending to the Four Directions. In his dream, the people were told to bury their weapons of war beneath the tree, sending them outward in the directions of the roots, whereupon they would enjoy a future filled with peace. As word of his dream spread, war-weary peoples on all sides heeded its call. Finding such a tree, the clans met beneath it, buried their weapons, and negotiated a lasting peace. The white pine has thus come to be called the “Tree of Peace” — a motif that is found in Native cultures far beyond that of the Haudenosaunee, often characterized as the “Tree of Life.”
The story itself appears, with some variation, in other cultures, as well. The People of the Three Fires, The Anishinaabeg peoples known colloquially as Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi, share a similar symbolism. In this version, it was not one dreamer who was granted the vision, but three: one from each nation, elders who had lost all of their sons in war with each other. Each left his village to die, only to find himself led to an enormous tree with roots reaching to the Four Sacred Directions, a place of such purity of peace and beauty and harmony that he lost all desire for death, and instead was inspired to make peace with his counterparts. In this instance, these were elders, but ordinary men, not political leaders nor heads of their respective Medicine Societies. Nonetheless, they heeded the vision, fashioning pipes to be smoked in the service of peace, and returned to their people to persuade them to follow suit. This was how, so this version of the story goes, these related peoples came to be known as the People of the Three Fires, each group given its own task for maintaining the alliance.
Here, the pine trees are known by their Spanish name, piñon, and they play multiple roles. Their trunks are used as vigas, the beams of the old traditional homes, and for latillas, the tall slender poles used to form palisade-style fences and arbors, and are also used to make the traditional ladders used in the old village homes. Their nuts are a popular traditional food source, roasted in the shell to produce a flavorful and nutrient-rich snack (and today, a much more costly one). Their wood fires the hornos and fireplaces in the old village homes, and is used in celebratory bonfires and for other traditional purposes. Piñon smoke bears a sweet and spicy scent that in winter serves as one of the sensory markers of this place. Piñon bark is used for healing, mashed into gum to treat toothaches. And, of course, the trees themselves are shelter and safety for the birds, their thick close network of inner boughs prime nesting space.
For my own people, red cedar, maple, and birch trees all play significant cultural roles, as do species of pine and red and other willows. Red cedar, more formally known as juniper, is prized for its wood, for its berries, and for its healing properties. Where I come from, the red cedar is, to use colonial terms, both icon and archetype: It is both a sacred being and a sacred substance. We, like many other peoples, Wings’s own included, burn cedar in the process known as smudging, for cleansing, for purification, for ceremony and healing. There is, I am told, an ancient red cedar overlooking the waters of the Great Lake at Grand Portage, a tree that is a sacred spirit to my cousins, one which they try to keep safe. But colonial types labeled it “The Witch Tree,” and the state actually capitalizes on this sacrilegious label, making money off showing it to non-Native tourists who treat it and the entire area and its people with colossal disrespect.
Pine trees (and a host of other evergreen species) were once plentiful in our lands, and it is still possible to find small lakes ringed with them; old soldier pines and other sentinels tower over protected lands in the central part of the state. The maple was a gift of the spirits, one whose syrup, so the old stories go, our ancestors were able to drink straight from the tree itself. Birch bark has been used since the dawn of time to make canoes, containers, and paper (yes, for writing, if not with an ordinary pen), and also has some medicinal properties. And the willows heal the body and the spirit: Their bark contains the active ingredient found in aspirin, and is used to treat pain and inflammation; it is also used to heal sleep itself, since it is red willow that is used to fashion the hoop from which real dreamcatchers are made.
Here, other trees hold pride of place, although many are indigenous to the lands of indigenous peoples all over the continent (including my own). These include Douglas fir, which forms the pole erected for the Feast of San Geronimo, known as the Tree of Life. It is cut in early May, the bark peeled and stripped, and he trunk left to dry over the course of the summer. Before the appointed day, it is set upright in the plaza for the feast, then cut down thereafter:
The plum trees provide a traditional source of food, sweet sources of nutrition in summer; dried and turned into prune
pies year-round. So, too, are the chokecherry trees: food for the people for a variety of purposes, and food for the birds. The bright yellow and orange birds known to the rest of the world as grosbeaks (and to my own as those who break the nuts, a reference to their powerful beaks) are here named “chokecherry birds,” for their penchant for gravitating to the trees to relieve them of the burden of their fruit.
Another tree that plays an outsized role in the daily life of this place is the aspen. Their utility in Native art is relatively 
limited, except for carving and, perhaps, for some small drums, particularly hand drums. The two shown at right are possible examples.
More often, aspen is used for carving. It’s a relatively soft word, susceptible to the pressure of tools and hands, and while it is extraordinarily lightweight, it’s also sturdy. Jack Silver
Fox (Comanche), one of Wings’s old friends and fellow artists, creates staffs out of aspen. Jack uses a single length of wood, strips it, shapes it following its own natural lines, and sands it smooth in some areas, leaving others rough and textured for the purpose of forming feathers and other motifs that will stand out in relief against the rest of the staff. With his eagle staffs, he carves the eagle’s head out of one end, then whittles away the rest of it to create the narrower shaft. With those that are toppe
d by other animals, he usually carves the animal separately and secures it to the top of the staff. These are designed to be replicas of spirits staffs, but are in reality most often used by customers as walking sticks; true spirit staffs are sacred, and are handled accordingly.
Aspen is also, as we’ll see later, a source of photographic inspiration for Wings, and it’s an exceptionally clean-burning form of firewood. But it is perhaps most “useful” simply as itself: a living being that’s good for the local ecosystem, and spectacularly beautiful year-round, but never more so than in autumn, when its leaves set the mountainside ablaze. In that sense, aspen is Nature’s own art, splashing the landscape with bright gold and burnt orange and warm reddish-brown as the leaves dance their final whirlwind dance before the long sleep of winter.
But one of the most common, environmentally friendly trees indigenous to this place is the cottonwood, so named for its cotton-like pollen. The pollen is my current nemesis; I have always been allergic to it, but the shedding process is usually done by the end of June. Our spring was so cold, and buried beneath so much snow this year, that the trees all bloomed late, and so pollination is tardy as well.
Cottonwood is a institution here, not merely for the people, but for the land and the animals, as well. It’s an exceptionally hardy and long-lived tree, albeit one that, one it reaches elder status, becomes vulnerable to the vagaries of lightning and wind. The old warriors in the photo immediately above are now mostly gone, felled by spring winds driving at gale force. The remnants that remained are now undergoing a rebirth, with new green emerging from within and around the ancient trunks.
In this place, cottonwood has two very specific, very important artistic uses, uses that transcend art and enter in the realm of the ceremonial and spiritual: Their trunks are used to create traditional Pueblo drums; and their roots are used to carve traditional katsinam (kachinas). We’ll begin with the drums.
I’ve written here before about the traditional Pueblo drum. These are designed for one individual to use: The presence of a rawhide handle on opposite ends and opposing sides is not purely to allow for right- or left-handedness. These drums vary in size from the relatively small one at right, fairly lightweight, to the mid- to large-sized one at left (and even larger), which tend to be relatively heavy — to heavy for a person to hold in one hand longer than a few minutes. Pueblo men who play the drum solve this dilemma by inserting a short rough length of wood, the equivalent of a small branch or post, or a large stick, through the lower handle all the way to the ground. This permits them to balance the drum while holding the upper handle in one hand and wielding the beater with the other. It’s an ingenious solution, one that works very well for those who must play at ceremonial or other formal events.
Our upright drums are made by Lee Lujan, one of Taos Pueblo’s masters. Lee creates them in the old way, by hollowing out a segment of a cottonwood’s trunk. [Hand drums, on the other hand, such as those shown earlier in this post, are made by fastening pieces of wood together and stretching the hide over only one side of the frame. Lee’s hand drums are made in the same manner as his uprights: from a single length of hollowed-out tree trunk.] The result is that the body of the drum is one unbroken circle, no fitted pieces, and the resonance can be astonishing. He then covers either end with large pieces of tanned hide, cut to shape and stretched to fit tightly, and laces them by hand with sinew, then adds the twisted rawhide handles and a loop to hold the beater.
The other popular use for cottonwood in traditional Native art is in a form that is specific to the peoples of this region: the carving of figurative pieces known as katsinam, or kachinas. I’ve written about the katsinam before, in some depth, and I won’t replicate it all here. I will note, as a matter of course, that Wings and I find it inappropriate to refer to katsina carvings as “dolls.” It’s a loaded word that, in the broader dominant culture, carries a very specific connotation, one that in no way applies to these works of art and spirit. These are the personification, the embodiment, of the spirit beings they are intended to represent, and we find that the term katsina (or kachina) is fully and entirely descriptive and needs no diminutive to “explicate” it further.
The katsinam that we carry are by Josh Aragon, who at his relatively young age has already shown himself to be a master carver. Josh lives here — he is married to a woman from Taos Pueblo — but his own ancestry is Hopi on one side, Laguna on the other. He learned the art of carving from his relatives at Hopi, who imbued him with the knowledge of the old ways. Today, katsinam are carved from a v
ariety of materials and in a diversity of forms, but the old, traditional, truly “authentic” way is from a single piece of cottonwood root. This is why, when you see photos of old carvings, they often curve or appear to sway: because they are summoned not from the trunk or branches of the tree, but from the flowing root system itself. Cottonwood root is exceptionally lightweight, and soft enough to sculpt rather finely, making it especially well-suited to this purpose. Josh adds extraordinary detail, preferring to use plant-based and other natural paints, and one of his most popular styles is that of a dual-spirited katsina, such as the one above: It embodies the Yellow Corn Spirit on the front; the Blue Corn Spirit on the back. [I should note here that “dual-spirited” is not synonymous with “two-spirit”: The former refers to different aspects of the same being, which may or may not involve two separate spirit beings conjoined as one; the latter is a term that comes from my own languages, and is now used on an intertribal basis to refer to Native people who identify as members of the LGBTQI communities (and it applies only to indigenous people).]
Some artists choose other words for their carving work. One artist who specializes mostly in pottery made some holiday ornaments for us one year, tiny drums formed from narrow ends of aged piñon, long since weathered gray. Another old acquaintance, Hopi flute maker Bobby Seumptewa, sold Wings one of his early flutes, a beautiful piece made of ash with a spectacular eagle effigy. Last year we discovered that Bobby had walked on a few years ago. A few months later, we were contacted by his daughter, who had Googled her late father’s name in search of his work. She visited us three months ago, and we reunited her with her father’s flute. Most Native flutes, of course, are made of red cedar, a wood that is especially inclined toward such musicality, and similarly well-suited aesthetically. Over the years, Wings has amassed a sizeable collection of traditional red cedar flutes, including one that I gave him as a gift many years ago — a crane flute, which is an old-style courting flute made of red cedar, with the body painted in the bird’s colors and the lower end fashioned in the shape of the crane’s bill.
Then, we come back full-circle to red willow. I mentioned above that we use red willow for medicinal purposes, and that Pueblo warriors 
and hunters have traditionally used it to make both bows and arrows. It’s a material well-suited to warfare of both material and spiritual sorts. At left are replica tomahawks made by Elk Good Water; at right is a stone hammer by an unknown artist who I suspect is Elk himself (having forgotten to sign it).
But there are spiritual battles to be fought, as well, and red willow serves us well in that context, too. I noted above that it is red willow that forms the hoop for genuine dreamcatchers and medicine wheels. Fo
r the former, it was the material prescribed by Grandmother Spider herself when she gave The People the gift of protected dreams and healing sleep. It works well, flexible enough to bend into a hoop, sturdy en
ough to permit the stringing of a web and the hanging of feathers and thongs (and sometimes fetishes and beads, as well).
The medicine wheels shown at right are purely replicas, small and modestly-priced works of art designed to evoke the spirit of the wheel; they are not fashioned out of authentic materials. The dreamcatcher at left, however, is made the old way: a red willow hoop, hand-formed and bound with sinew; a delicate sinew web strung across it, with tiny trade beads interspersed within its framework; and an eagle plume (not visible) attached to the bottom of the hoop.
And at last, we come to Wings’s own work. The trees of this place have long been a source of inspiration for him, particularly with regard to his photography. The cottonwoods, their long skeletal arms extended outward, aging trunks
brushed smooth by the elements, can be sources of great unease, and equally great harmony. The one at left appears in a clearing along the Quartzite River along the canyon south of town; forbidding and foreboding, it summons to mind every children’s story in which the trees were inhabited by angry spirits, ready to stretch their bony arms out and grab the unwary traveler. The one on the right has a wholly different feel: it’s actually a pair of trees, near twins, thst sit across the road and serve as a perch for great raptors and tiny wingéd spirits alike.
Then there are the ones on our own land, the willows and the aspens, strong and sturdy spirits that he planted himself and nurtured to adulthood. One of his favorite methods of photographing such trees has long been from beneath, giving the observer a view from the ground up . . . seeing, perhaps, what the tree itself sees from deep within its own spirit.
We featured one such image here yesterday, the weeping willows at left. I can recall a time when these were very nearly baby trees, small and fragile. Now, they are tall and powerful warriors in their own right. The view from b
eneath their branches is one to make you feel protected, as though it is possible to reach for the heavens, and yet remain safely rooted in the process.
Then, of course, there are the aspens. They are fragile-looking beings, but in truth, they are as strong as any other. Their trunks and branches are positively skeletal in winter, true, but they possess a beauty and grace in all seasons, an ethereal spirit that seems to touch the very place where Spirit dwells. Beneath these beings the color of bone, their trunks dotted with giant eyes, it’s possible to believe that reaching out is all that is required for us to touch the world beyond this one.
In a way, it’s the same symbolism that animates the Haudenosaunee story of the Tree of Peace, and the Anishinaabeg story of the Tree of Life. It’s the lesson of openness, of refusal to be bound by selfishness and isolationism, of the obligation to reach out to the world around us.
It’s a lesson Wings has translated into his silverwork, as well.
The first such work he ever created was entitled, simply, Tree of Life, and it was infused with the color and spirit of the aspens just above — not deliberately, you understand, but merely as serendipity, or, if you believe in it, synchronicity.
It was this one, a necklace whose pendant was formed of silver burnished near-white, set with a truly spectacular teardrop-shaped lapis lazuli cabochon the color of cobalt. Above it, on the hand-made bail, he set a tiny round lapis cabochon in a blue deeper still, very nearly violet.
The front of the pendant was beautiful enough, but it was the back that made it.
Taking a tiny jeweler’s saw, he hand-cut — essentially freehand, mind you — a delicate Tree of Life into the back of the bezel, a method known in smithing as ajouré. It was a painstaking, deliberate process, one that required perhaps as much patience as skill. It was the first time I can ever recall him suing the motif, but it was not the last.
A few years ago, he made a pair of earrings for me out of fossilized picture jasper, large teardrop-shaped cabochons whorled in a pattern that resembled the Crane whose name I bear. On the reverse of each earring, he created an ajouré Tree of Life. I loved the design so much that he adapted for simple silver slab earrings, like those shown here:
He has created these using both garnet and tiger’s eye. More recently, he added a new style:
This pair, entitled The Dreams of Trees, was a direct homage to the trees that keep our world alive. They have already proven to be a popular style, and variations are in the works.
About the same time, he created another pair of dangling earrings that did not invoke the image of the trees overtly, but nonetheless summoned their spirit:
These he called Spring Dreams, and featured lime jade to evoke the color of new leaves.
But not all of his tree-related silverwork has embodied the spirits of the warmer seasons. Nearly every year, prior to the winter holidays, he adds a few new works to one of his signature series: a collection of evergreens in the style of Christmas trees.
He has created perhaps dozens of tree pins over the years, some loosely shaped like firs, others like spruce, still others like more ordinary piñon. Some are jaunty, their boughs uplifted; others appear to bear the weight of winter snows like heavy garlands. All are hand-cut, all features “garlands” of hand-stamped symbols, and all bear “ornaments” made of tiny gems. At left, the three trees shown include such jewels as turquoise, lapis, jade, gaspeite, coral, moonstone, and onyx. The tree at right, however, was a little larger, significantly more valuable, and by far my favorite for its stones: brilliant blue opal. It resides with a dear friend on the East Coast.
Like those works infused with the imagery of the Tree of Life, the holiday trees share one thing in common: “arms” reaching out, in fact and in spirit. As I said yesterday, one lesson we need to learn is one that the trees know: adaptability. But another is openness, for as they also know, it is by reaching out that we touch the sun, the winds, the rain . . . and the spirits.
~ 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.
