We spent all of Native Heritage Month, otherwise known as November (or, to my own, the Freezing Moon), exploring the art of resistance, from a perspective that spans centuries, tribal nations, and artistic media. Now that we have moved into December, what the dominant culture regards as the holiday season and what to me is the Little Spirit Moon, I want to continue the same theme, but with a slightly different focus.
On Sunday, Wings released a brand new collection: a series within a series, the first in what ultimately will be a complete set of forty-nine pieces. As I noted then, his inspiration grew out of a series of conversations between us, discussions focused around our peoples’ histories, our traditions, what it means to go well through life — and what it means, in a broader culture that was built explicitly and deliberately upon our genocide, that such a life must necessarily be one of resistance. We talked about the gifts of the spirits, everything from the land that was given to our ancestors to hold in trust and care to the spiritual and cultural traditions that speak specifically to our origins and the way of life that Spirit has assigned to each of us to the more obvious gifts, beauty and harmony and prosperity and joy and medicine and love and life itself, to what the dominant culture might call virtues, those teachings and requirements for living that help us to ensure all the rest. And out of this discussion of virtues, and the qualities and aspects in which they each consist, grew his inspiration for his new collection.
Of course, resistance has always played a role in Wings’s work; indeed, it’s the very name of the coil shown immediately above, one in the form of protective stones and the berries of the medicine tree, in the colors of deeply rooted life. But it’s not inaccurate to say that resistance is a part of all Native art, simply by definition; after all, our very existence is itself the ultimate act of resistance. Our peoples’ art, so much a part of us at an essential, elemental level, cannot be otherwise. But some indigenous art makes that characteristic express, whether or not it is the focus of a given work. In the same way, other works don’t even affirmatively nod in its direction; it’s simply immanent in the work by virtue of being created by a Native artist.
Today’s post will explore both sorts of art, and forms that fall somewhere in between, as well. After all, some defining characteristics (of anything) are defining only because of how they perforce exist in opposition to something else — in this case, one or more features of the dominant culture. It will also explore the ways in which specific art forms can used, in literal or inspirational terms or in both, to give us the bravery, the courage, to lives lives of resistance.
As I said above, Wings’s most recent collection-within-a-collection focuses on specific gifts, virtues, as my own people define them. When I introduced the first in this new series on Sunday, I noted that he was addressing these gifts out of the order in which some choose to list them. That’s fine; the order implies no greater weight to any one of them because it appears first in a list. Each is required, in full measure, for us to go well through life in the sort of the harmony for which the spirits gave them to us in the first place. And as I noted on Sunday, he chose to begin with the virtue, the gift, of bravery for a very specific reason: The developments of recent weeks now mean that we are all called to resistance, to lives of bravery and the spiritual trait that makes bravery possible: Courage.
His new collection explores seven different aspects of a life of bravery from an indigenous perspective: the spirits upon whom we call, the tools and weapons with which we aid and arm ourselves, the essential strength of character and heart that is required for us to stand up, step forward, and practice an active resistance on behalf of the people. The first of these is the one that inspired the first work in the collection, the one shown at the beginning of this post, entitled Courage. And so for today, I want to use this space to explore representations of courage, both literal and symbolic, in indigenous arts.
We begin with the most obvious of courage-inducing tools: traditional weapons.
I realize that there is a certain school of thought out there that says that nonviolent resistance is the only appropriate course of action. That vast majority of such people who insist on it are wholly of the dominant culture, with all of the privileges that that entails, and I invite readers to think on that for a moment. or an hour. Or a day. Or a year. Because it is one thing to commit to a course of passive nonviolence when the most vulnerable in one’s own community are relatively safe; it’s quite another to do so when they are at clear risk of existential erasure in cultures of violent and genocidal 
colonialism.
We live in the real world, which means that we live in the latter.
Our ways require living with honor, and part of that is ensuring the safety of the most vulnerable. Part of it is also ensuring the survival of the people, and of our traditions, our languages, our histories, our lifeways. And in the real world, courage does not always exist in attempting merely to sit down in the face of violence; sometimes it requires a willingness to stand up, step forward, and take action . . . all the while knowing that such action may require what some too easily dismiss as “violence.”
Sometimes, uprisings are necessary. They are right.
This knowledge is, perhaps, one of the reasons why so many of our Native artists continue the old ways of crafting traditional weapons by hand. They are pieces of history, yes, and of art, but they are also a tribute to the old ways, and a way of honoring the sacrifices the ancestors made, often in battle, that provided for our own very existence.
A weapon, after all, is fundamentally a tool, a mechanical means to achieving a particular end. With regard t
o modern dominant-culture weaponry, it’s true that such items are tools purely of battle. But our traditional weapons have always been a bit different: bows and arrows, spears, knives, tomahawks, hammers, and axes all can be used in war . . . and can be used in the hunt, in clearing ground, in setting up shelter, in myriad other ways that involve nothing more unusual than ordinary subsistence. A staff may look like a weapon, and its way, it is, but of a spiritual sort. Coup sticks are most definitely weapons, and yet they inflict injury upon nothing but pride.
And yet, it takes real courage to wield these instruments in the proper way. It takes courage to step up and learn to use them properly, effectively, with honor, and then to carry that knowledge into battle and adhere to it. It takes courage to be willing to defend those more vulnerable, or at least less able to defend themselves, in the face of violence. It takes courage to be willing to challenge an opponent by wounding his pride, with nothing more deadly in hand than a stick, when he may be fully armed.
It takes courage to resist, to survive, to exist, to be in the face and heart of colonialism day after day after day.
But just as not all wars are fought on the field of battle, not all weapons are instruments of war, and not all forms of courage exist in be willing to stand up in physical confrontation. Our peoples know, better than most, just how much war can be waged, how much death and destruction wrought, with the stroke of a pen. But it all begins much deeper, if less visibly: It begins with men’s (and women’s) hearts and spirits, and the ambitions that drive them and the level of greed and resentment that grows there.
And because our peoples recognize this, we also recognize the importance of maintaining a strong heart and an honorable spirit. We will look at these through an artistic lens later this month, but for now, it’s enough to note, by way of the appearance in Native art, the degree to which both hearts and spirits are reservoirs of courage, and what they enable us to achieve if we maintain them always in the proper balance.
We begin with hearts.
Sometimes, the hearts are literal, as with Carl Winters’s heart hand drums. Sometimes, they are figurative, as with Elk Good Water’s 
medicine wheels, which stretch outward from and reach inward to the heart of the sacred hoop.
A lot of people don’t realize it, but Native peoples tend to be fond of heart symbolism, express or otherwise. You see it frequently in its express form in traditional beadwork, hearts combined with flowers and/or geometric patterns and 
symbols. You see it in the heartlines of traditional fetishes and some jewelry pieces, too. Our peoples have always understood the connection between the hear
t and what we refer to as spirit: that which animates body, mind, heart, and soul, that which gives us breath and transports the lifeblood throughout our beings.
In other words, the heart is, in its way, the center of life, of the human spirit (and the spirits of the animals and other beings).
Sometimes, this understanding of the heart as a mechanism pumping life throughout the body, whether ours or that of Mother Earth herself, leads to representations of hearts that are implied, as with works that feature the color of blood (such as the coral in the heartline bear pendant at left) and the movement of water, another arterial mechanism. In this way, the Rio Pueblo that bisects the old village is sometimes said to be the heart of the Pueblo.
And sometimes, the notion of a strong heart is made express, in shape or in spirit.
A Strong Heart is the name of the coil above, one of the works in Wings’s new collection. As is clear from the photo, there is no heart shape to it; rather, the entire spiral is built around a single large round center bead, bright red apple coral. No, it’s not the traditional image of a heart, but then again, neither is a real heart. The coral summons the symbolism of the lifeblood, buttres
sed on all sides by its strong flow through the body and the grou
nding presence of rich black earth and the spirits of water and fire.
In Wings’s wider body of work, hearts appear frequently — by themselves, or as per my earlier allusion, as an elemental part of spirit (and spirits). At left and right are the former: a traditional heart pendant, appended to a double-barred cross that invokes Dragonfly; and a double-heart cuff, one that exists in cab and bezel, but also exists in the elongated and highly stylized shape of the cuff, what appears to be a dual-strand band but is in reality a single on curved into a heart’s rounded top at one end, and its pointed base at the other.
And then there are the spirits: being possessed of their own strong hearts, and in some cases, their own warrior spirits, as well.
So
me, like the pendant at left, assume the classic heart shape as a part of their very selves. It’s one of the entries in Wings’s signature series of necklaces, The Mona Lisa on the Rio Grande, a series built around pendants in the form of a spirit being’s head, face, and traditional tablita headdress — in this case, a Maiden. In this instance, the focal point of the pendant is a heart-shaped turquoise cabochon, set into a hand-made heart-shaped bezel
that follows its outlines, the pair of which form the Maiden’s face and head. On the reverse, Wings repeated the heart motif with stampwork on the underside of the bezel in the form of tiny randomly-arrayed hearts.
Then there are the spirits who are simultaneously closer to ourselves and also more explicitly possessed of their own warrior spirits: Wings’s signature Warrior Woman series. The heart motif appears in two ways on these small but powerful beings. First, most of them are given an expressly defined heart on the front, whether stamped, overlaid, or created by means of a heart-shaped cabochon. Second, as is clear on one of the pins in the image above at right (which can be enlarged by clicking on it), he sometimes adds heart-shaped stampwork to the moon she carries in her left hand, a distinct form of symbolism, and, perhaps, medicine, that infuses the entire work.
Such a spirit, of course, makes an appearance explicitly in Wings’s new collection: the coil shown above, entitled A Warrior Spirit. It called expressly upon the elemental forces for its power, grounding blacks and fiery reds and purples accented in four specific places with the color of leadership: blue. More, it’s not just any blue, but turquoise, the color of protection — the very reason why here we paint our window- and doorsills turquoise, why warriors sometimes attach bits of turquoise to their bows, or braid it into their horses’ manes and tails.
Spirit beings abound in our way, and most have nothing particularly to do wi
th notions of war, nor even of resistance. Here, many ancestral and other spirit beings are known as katsinam, or kachinas, and they play a variety of roles: to sing the dawn; to bring the rains; to serve as disciplinarian.
The katsinam assume the form of carved beings, like the Longhair shown at left by Josh Aragon; they may also be carved as large sculptures in other media, or as small fetishes. Dancers personify them at specific ceremonial dances and events, and, of course, they exist on their own as dwellers of the spirit world. Josh also occasional creates wall art with katsina figures carved in and painted on wood, as with the painting of Morning Singer shown just above at right. Neither has anything to with war, per se, but in a society where existence itself is resistance, their continued thriving as an integral part of cultural and spiritual traditions bespeaks a certain warrior spirit of their own — and of their peoples’, as well.
But there is one being that, in some traditions, expressly evokes the powers and heart of the warrior. It appears in two places in the painting above, Eagle Keeper, by Frank Rain Leaf.
It also appears in one of the coils in Wings’s new collection:
It’s the Golden Eagle, known to some of our peoples, as the coil’s name suggests, as The War Eagle. It’s part tribute to its fierce power, part invoking of those powers as guide and instiller of courage and a fighting spirit when we must fight.
And sometimes courage is found in outside help of another sorts, itself in many ways its own art form:
In some cultures, warriors wear masks. Some may wear them in battle, although that is probably less likely than the alternative; they may be heavy, unwieldy, uncomfortable, vision-impairing. However, some traditions engage in the wearing of masks while dancing before and/or after a battle, to instill a fierce heart and fearsome sense of courage and power in their warriors and to celebrate their victories.
And in some cultures, the warriors wear “masks” made of paint.
War Paint is the name of the coil shown above, another entry in Wings’s new collection. It comprises some of the colors most commonly worn, whether on the face itself or painted on a mask, and it, too, is composed of materials that invoke the powers of the elements.
But living in a way that honors the gift of bravery requires something more than periodic supplication to specific spirits. War paint is usefully psychologically, both offensively and defensively, but it’s not enough.
To honor the gift of bravery, we must engage in an active resistance, the Resistance of the name of the coil shown above, one of daily lived existence. It’s a resistance of body, mind, heart, and spirit, one that exists in a thousand daily acts, in visions and dreams, in the beginning of our lives and practiced as we travel around life’s sacred hoop to meet up again at its invisible end.
To honor the gift of bravery means that we must live lives of essential courage: courage as a way of life. We can draw inspiration and strength from our arts, our words, our ceremonies, our medicines; from earth, air, fire, and water; from the mountains and the storm and the trees that stand longer than time; from the ancestors and the animals and all the other spirits who give us life and sustain our existence.
But when it comes down to it, we must find courage within ourselves, courage to lead, to stand up, to step forward. We must call upon our cultures and spiritual traditions, our histories and our identities, because it is in these that we will find the courage of our (cultural) convictions . . . and the courage for our resistance.
~ 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.
