This month, we’ve used this series to explore color symbolism in Native art. Today’s edition brings us to the last of the three primary colors: Yellow.
As colors go, yellow has not gained traction in the idioms of pop culture in the way that some others have. Blue, red, and even secondary shades like green all have come to possess deeply symbolic meaning that crosses modern cultural lines, at least in this country: having the blues, seeing red, going green, to name only three.
Yellow is less susceptible to such dominant-culture symbolism, apparently, although it does have its place in popular culture in less metaphorical fashion. In broad metaphorical terms, yellow s perhaps best known as the color of cowardice: phrases such as yellow streak and yellow belly referring to a man’s lack of fortitude when faced with danger, particularly on the battlefield. Then there are yellow dogs, a political turn of phrase that reportedly originated in Texas, where the expression referred to a member of the Democratic Party’s willingness to vote for a yellow dog who wore the party’s label before ever voting for a Republican.
There are pop culture references to it, of course. There is the yellow line of a highway, whether broken or doubled, as a metaphor for travel, particularly of an itinerant sort. There is the color as other metaphor: One famous foreign film from the late ’60s incorporated it in the title (even as it incorporated a host a violent sexual imagery and the appropriation of the image and identity of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.). Pop music, however, has seemed especially susceptible to the symbolic use of the color yellow: In the last half-century-plus, we’ve had, to name only a few of the better known hits, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon; Yellow Rose of Texas; Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini; Yellow Submarine; Mellow Yellow; Big Yellow Taxi; Tie a Yellow Ribbon; and Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road. The third and fourth have no obvious significance beyond, perhaps, considerations of rhyme and meter; the sixth was an explicit nod to an iconic image that was a part of the composer’s daily reality. The fifth, despite referring to one color, was said to refer to more psychedelic experiences. The others, however, all hint at something larger.
There is a [non-Native] tradition that ascribes particular meaning to gifts of flowers, particularly when given as a gesture (or desired or perceived to be given) as a romantic gift. Yellow roses were said to be tokens of friendship,unlike the bold reds and softs pinks explicitly associated with romantic love and passion, but of a decidedly non-romantic sort. It might be tempting to think of the second song listed, Yellow Rose of Texas, in that light.
It would be wrong.
That song is one that was made popular in the 1950s, but in fact has roots that stretch back to the Antebellum Period in the South. It’s now classified as an “American folk song,” but the original version was considered what’s now described as a “plantation melody,” a song of love separated by geography and the most vicious and violent sort of racism, a song composed and sung by slaves. The original “yellow rose” of the song, Rosa Lee, referred to the young woman’s skin color: She was what was known colloquially as “high yellow” (often pronounced and sometimes written as “high yella” or “high yeller”), a light-skinned Black woman, one whose ancestry was undoubtedly mixed with white somewhere in her recent family tree. The song’s tenor evolved into something much less benign; Confederate soldiers in Texas during the Civil War adopted it as a marching song, and with lyrics altered, that same state would adopt it as an unofficial state song. It’s symbolism that requires deconstruction in far too many layers to do it justice here, but it’s a poignant reminder of the shared historical trauma shared by this country’s Native and Black peoples.
The first, seventh, and eighth songs listed above, however, are linked in ways that implicate our own peoples, even if the direct line between them isn’t immediately clear.
There is a long tradition in European folk music and imagery, particularly that from England, of associating yellow ribbons with women, war, and faithfulness. All three components are more or less required, because the genesis of the symbolism seems to be rooted in a tangible expression of a woman’s willingness to wait for her man while he goes off to war . . . regardless of what fate may befall him there. In other words, it functioned, in part, as a test of feminine fidelity. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was originally an old folk melody, one thought to have been brought to these shores by the Puritans themselves. It gained new popularity during the Civil War (particularly in the South), with soldiers’ wives and girlfriends wearing such ribbons in their hair or tying them around the trunks of trees, an act that served both as public notice that a loved one had gone to war and as testimony to the world that she would remain faithful to him (or to his memory, should he not return alive). The U.S. Army adopted it as a cadence song, as well.
It was a practice that was adopted by white couples during the so-called “Indian Wars,” as well.
In 1949, director John Ford made this connection explicit, if perhaps unremarked in any deeper way, in his [faux-“Indian”] Western of identical name: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. In the movie, the link of the yellow ribbon of the title to the accepted symbolism of the day is superficial at best, a plot device. The film’s real story centers around the presumed heroism of a Cavalry officer in subduing an Indian uprising in the aftermath of Custer’s thoroughly-kept date with karma at Little Big Horn. It’s also a perfect early example of why casually tossing around the phrase “off the reservation” is racist.
Some note that yellow appeared in Cavalry officer uniforms by way of the neckerchief (something that was not, in point of fact, required as part of the uniform, and a color combination echoed in boy scout uniforms even today). The phrase “The Cavalry’s coming!” is one still widely in use today by a dominant culture that refuses to recognize that it was, to our peoples, a terroristic turn of phrase, one that portended slaughter and genocide.
Which brings us to Elton John and the last song on the list above: Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road. The song was about a young man from a simple farming background who had abandoned his home for the bright lights of the big city, only to find that its inhabitants led a shallow and lifeless existence, and who decides that he is “going back to [his] plough.” The “yellow brick road” of title and lyrics is a direct reference to the road of the same description in The Wizard of Oz, a bright shiny path that beckoned its protagonists onward through all sorts of risks to a gleaming city made of emeralds that turned out to be a fraud.
In other words, a metaphor from the popular children’s book written by L. Frank Baum — one of the most vicious, most dangerous anti-Native racists this country ever produced and instilled with the power to act on his prejudices in an official capacity. I read The Wizard Oz at the age of six or seven (on my own, outside of school, when I was in second grade), with absolutely no knowledge of the author behind the story. As an adult, it’s impossible for me to hear about references to a yellow brick road without visualizing it as the track of Manifest Destiny, dirt roads and railroads alike laid out upon the bodies and bones and spirits of our ancestors.
Which brings me to more direct Native symbolism associated with the color yellow.
For us, at least in broad general terms, yellow is the color of Father Sun, of sunflowers and squash blossoms, of the bees that pollinate them and of the bright yellow honey that is their gift to us.
Locally, it is the color of Father’s Sun’s own singer:
Meadowlark is known for his brilliant yellow dress as much as for his unmistakeable song.
And yellow is the color of the most numerous of the First Sisters: Corn. Sweet corn, Indian corn, red corn, even blue corn manifests in shades of yellow even as it grows into tiny jeweled kernels of green and blue and purple.
Among the peoples of this land, it manifests as a katsina, its own spirit being: It’s the Yellow Corn Kachina (in this case, one with a dual spirit, appearing as the spirit of Blue Corn on the reverse).
And it’s not merely the First Sister, either. The Second Sister who appears most often in this place is the pinto bean, but we have planted beans indigenous to many other parts of this land, and some of them appear in shades of yellow, in whole or in part.
Then there is the Third Sister. There is yellow squash itself, of course, something we plant and eat every year. But even the squash that manifests in other colors, greens and browns and shades of orange, flower early into squash blossoms, often in a color that can only be described as pure yellow. Such is the case with the squash blossom pictured at the top of this post, a bright yellow star like a radiant sun, that nevertheless arises from a plant that produces squash with dark green skin and pale green flesh.
The soil in which the corn is birthed sometimes evokes its own shades of yellow. The earth in this part of the Southwest is rife with sandstone of various shades. Much of it is brilliant red, some of it is an ordinary brown . . . and occasionally, it’s possible to find it in glowing golden hues:
It’s the yellow of an early-summer sky at sunset, dust and smoke bronzing it with traceries of fine horizontal lines.
Yellow appears in the very form and shape of the Pueblo itself, too:
In the late-day autumn light, the walls of the old village, its surfaces and edges and wooden poles and arbors, appear to made of gold. It’s a combination of the color of the clay itself, a golden red touched with hints of bronze fire, thanks to the presence of mica, of the clarity of the air, and of the angle of the light. It’s what led Spanish invaders, having sighted the village in the distance for the very first time, to believe they had found the fabled Cities of Gold.
The local clay shines in another form, too, one specific to the people of this bit of land: in its pottery.
We tend to think of the Pueblo’s indigenous micaceous clay as red, and so it is, but it also contains much more than a mere hint of yellow. Fired in just the right way, displayed in just the right amount of sunlight, and traditional Taos Pueblo pottery looks like “ceramic” ware crafted of solid gold.
In this place, the same earth that displays such flash and fire also sustains other beings who appear to us robed in shades of yellow, too: the magnificent trees that blanket the landscape here.
In autumn, the peaks are striated with aspen lines, bright yellow rivers flowing down the mountainside, intense and fiery gold standing out in sharp relief against the remainder of the evergreen-covered slopes. Here on our land, earth and sky are dotted with smaller amounts of gold:
The leaves of October into early November, having made another half-turn in their dance toward winter, moving from flame-orange to a shade that seems to hold the very light of the sun.
It’s not just leaves, either. Yellow is the color of our willows here in winter and early spring, gleaming gold in the icy sunlight. Piñon and cedar are also both common here, and both produce woods in gentle yellow tones.
Piñon wood is hard, and is most often used here in more mundane pursuits: vigas and latillas for construction and repair of houses and arbors and fences; firewood for heating homes the old way in winter. Cedar, on the other hand, is a softer wood, more susceptible to carving. Occasionally, it finds its way into carved pieces, as with the figurative work above of a traditional elder. In Pueblo artwork, woods like cedar are also conducive to the creation of sculptural works, since the natural arc and flow of the branches evokes the traditional curved forms of various spirit beings.
Yellow is a color that appears in indigenous arts through all sorts of media. Photography and painting are obvio
us examples, with color playing roles purely aesthetic and wholly symbolic and everything in between. Sometimes, such graphic arts are combined with other media to produce multi-layered art forms. An example is the Native drum. The example at left, a small dual-sided hand drum, is both functional and aesthetic: It can played for its intended purpose, but it has also been accented with imagery intended to b
e pleasing to the eye, to add value in terms of the work’s collectibility, and to invoke spiritual or ceremonial power. In this case, the power in question takes the form of a Sun Spirit, a being we’ve discussed previously in this series. The being’s forehead is bisected into two colors, red on its left and a golden-yellow shade on its right. It thus encompasses the colors of the Four Sacred Directions, colors often found in the medicine wheel.
But it’s not merely the artwork on the drum’s hide cover that evokes this particular color. The drums themselves are often similarly golden in color, a product of the various local woods used and the old traditional style of Pueblo drum-making, in which tree trunks are cut into lengths of appropriate size, then stripped of their bark and hollowed out so that the body of the drum remains a single unbroken whole, with no fitted pieces. It makes for a deeply resonant sound, and allows the natural golden beauty of the wood itself to take center stage visually.
Other art forms and media are susceptible to color symbolism, as well. Weaving and basketry are two examples in which color addition, placement, proportion, and pattern can be very significant to a given work, telling a specific story or imbuing it with specific power(s).
The same is true of beadwork, whether in terms of beadwork jewelry or in the form of leatherwork, such as moccasins and other traditional regalia.
Above, I referred to the image of the Sun Spirit on the hand drum as embodying the colors of the Four Sacred Directions. The same is true of these infant moccasins, manifest in a combination of leather and beadwork: white hide, and yellow, red, and black beads arrayed in a traditional pattern that is at once beautifully simple and incredibly complex.
Now, as I’ve noted in previous entries in this series and elsewhere, the colors of the Four Sacred Directions are not identical for every indigenous people. Indeed, not only can we not agree on the colors themselves or which color is assigned to which direction, we can’t even agree on how many sacred directions there are. Some peoples recognize four; others six; still others seven; and at least a few, eight or more.
All of that said, there are some combinations that are more common than others, and many different peoples agree on the cardinal points as holding sacred status and special powers, and assign the colors white, yellow, red, and black (or occasionally blue in lieu of black) to them in some particular order. This order becomes apparent in the manifestation of the Medicine Wheel or Medicine Shield, where each of the four spokes or four quadrants, respectively, is assigned a different color. The most common variation with which I’m personally familiar attributes white to North; yellow to East; red to South; and black (or blue (to west); secondarily, it’s the same order in a quarter-turn of the compass, so that white is assigned to East, yellow to South, red to West, and black (or blue) to north.
Wings has incorporated this imagery into his work, most often by allusion and inference: He uses a particular color stone, or combination of stone colors, to represent directional symbolism. In recent weeks, though, he made the motif explicit, creating a cuff in the form of a medicine wheel, entitled A Medicine Prayer, with the colors represented by gemstones and arrayed accordingly.
In this instance, the colors are assigned in the order I outlined first, but with blue rather than black representing West. Yellow is the color of the East, the color of dawn and the rising sun. Interestingly, he chose to center it with a larger cabochon, representing a joining of the forces and powers of the directions and elements, and of the place of emergence whence the people come. The stone he used was rutilated quartz, one that in my own mind I have always given the name “bumblebee quartz” . . . because it appears in shades of white, black, and yellow, striated like a bumblebee’s body, and has always reminded me of our relatives the bees who are so crucial to our ecosystem’s survival, like the one shown in the second photo in the post.
But perhaps the most common symbolism attached to the color yellow, in the way of our peoples, is that of Father Sun, and his attendant spirits, warmth and light. It is in this sense that the color assumes its greatest power and significance by way of Wings’s own work.
It’s certainly true of his photography, in which the unique and ethereal light of this place plays a leading role. The photo above, the same image that served as the focal point of yesterday’s photo meditation, is a case in point: The most obvious color in the photo appears in shades of golden yellow behind a silhouetted image so dark as to look nearly black. But more, the color captures the spirit of the light here in a way that demonstrates both its power and its connection to the people and our ways.
This is true, and obviously so, of sunrise and sunset, but here we are blessed with another phenomenon that makes photography a gift in itself, one that occurs mostly attendant to our monsoon season (which has already begun this year, more than two months early). Perhaps it’s no coincidence that yellow forms what is more or less the center line of the rainbow. It is, after all the color we most associate with the light of the sun.
It forms our own yellow ribbon, our own yellow center line, too, entirely apart from any highway scarring the land — a gift presented to us jointly by the sun and the rain, one that touches nothing and cannot be held, occupying that space between earth and sky.
It is this form which finds expression in Wings’s silverwork, the light of the sun in the form of precious met
als and precious stones alike, joined togethe
r to create their own spirits in touchable, wearable form.
Some embody the sun’s light in the metal itself, brass that holds the orb’s own yellow glow.
Some stand a step further removed, sterling silver in a form that alludes to it in form only, earrings entitled Sun Serpents, assuming the shape of the sun with a serpent coiled endlessly around it.
Still others incorporate the sun’s image and color by reference, using shape and stone to tell the story: Sun’s Eye, sterling silver orbs embossed with the rays of the rising sun, that fatherly spirit’s eyes gazing out through jewels in brown and bronze and golden yellow, stones named for one of the great cats of faraway lands.
Some of the works capture the sun’s color and shape, like the amber ring at left. This “stone” was a lighter shade, although no less intense — truly golden-orange, the color of both sunrise and sunset on nea
rly any day in this place.
The one at right, however, was something spectacular: an amber cabochon of pure fire, hints of scarlet and crimson at play within its mysterious depths. Wings set it into an eagle feather, symbol of that which we hold most sacred, of ceremony and medicine and prayer. Its name was Greets the Sun, a reference to our practice of greeting the dawn and its creator with prayers of thanksgiving for the gift of another day.
Sometimes, the yellow glow is softer, a gentle honey-colored shimmer, with the mystical quality of the Taos Pueblo light itself. Wings captured that, too, in a two-piece collection in miniature with the name Taos Light, comprising a necklace and a cuff bracelet centered around magnificent ovals of rutilated quartz.
The cuff appears here, angled so that you can see the way in which it seemed to hold the very sunlight of this place. Both pieces were warm and welcoming and wholly otherworldly, as though beckoning one to travel into the light itself.
And then there are his recent works, pieces that are the light.
They are the first two works in his latest series, The Light Collection.
The first is the cuff shown directly above, Light In the Storm, an anticlastic cuff forged to catch the light and direct it toward the gigantic labradorite cabochon in the center: a stone of dark gray thunderclouds and slanting steel rain shot through with the light of Father Sun, a reminder that he is always with us, even when we cannot see him clearly.
Wings followed it up a few weeks later with the masterwork below, a companion piece in the form of a necklace:
It is The Light Spirit, a being of extraordinary power whose presence is yet so subtle that we notice it mostly in its absence. This one was summoned from sterling silver and two similarly outsized labradorite cabochons, one for the head and one for the body. The head is the blue-green of sky and water and rich verdant plant spirits; the body is earthy and fiery and yellow-gold light.
They are not yellow ribbons or yellow lines or yellow bricks, as popularly conceived or otherwise. But they most certainly contain the golden light of a yellow sun.
~ 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.
