We have used this space this month to explore the role certain animal spirits play in indigenous arts, particularly those animals who are closely identified with our peoples in broad and general terms. Today, we look at the one that is perhaps most closely linked to our peoples on a truly pan-Native basis: Eagle.
There are reportedly four species of eagles found here upon Turtle Island. Two of them, the white-tailed eagle and the Steller’s sea-eagle, are relatively unknown to most of this land mass, confining their presence almost exclusively to the Aleutian Islands, the crescent of small islands off the west coast of Alaska.
The other two are spirits well known to Indian Country: the bald eagle and the golden eagle.
It is Bald Eagle who is widely regarded, both within and without our collective communities, as the symbol of indigeneity on this continent. His feathers are the most prized, generally speaking, and even within the dominant culture outside of our communities, he is often seen as the embodiment of our peoples. Golden Eagle, on the other hand, is less well known to the outside world, but he is also powerful. He can also grow to a slightly larger size than his white-headed brother, although they remain very close in size and roughly equivalent in wingspan. I’ve written about them both here before, and about the role they play in our cosmologies:
For many of our peoples, a sense of spiritual power is embodied, in this world that we can see and touch, by the great raptors that seem able to transcend the boundaries of the worlds, to traverse their thresholds and fly among their interstices. There is Bald Eagle, of course, now a pan-Native symbol of power, an embodiment of honor and respect, a messenger who carries our prayers to Spirit. There is Golden Eagle, or, as some of us name him, the War Eagle, the larger one who flies before the warriors and instills his heart and courage and bravery in their spirits.
When it comes to Native arts, however, it is Bald Eagle who is most often represented. Part of it, no doubt, is an appeal to popularity; after all, his image as symbol was yet one more thing ripped from our peoples by those who were busy ripping away life and land, as well, and the dominant culture has invested its own identity in this raptor to so great an extent as to have named him, officially, the “national bird.” The melding of so-called “American identity” with the mythologies of Edward S. Curtis and later, Hollywood Westerns, has produced a substantial market for Native art that adheres to specific motifs and tropes, and Bald Eagle is one of those.
But it’s not just that.
For many of our peoples, Bald Eagle is, in some ways, the ultimate symbol of power. I’ve written here before about the definitions of power, and how an inherently indigenous definitions differs fundamentally from a European one, about the elemental distinction between power (which simply is), and authority (which is merely accorded — or appropriated). Bald Eagle (which, incidentally, is usually described differently in our indigenous languages — i.e., not as “bald”) is often seen as the embodiment of power nearest to its pure form, a form that is closest to that of the spirits themselves, yet one that is perceptible (and, to a lesser degree, accessible) to us mere mortals.
I wrote about all of this, and more, last year on the day that the dominant culture uses to memorialize a genocidal killer of our ancestors. I wrote, too, about how conflicted Wings and I are about current efforts to rename it, insofar as they still constitute appeals to authority, rather than acts of power. But to confine it, for the moment, to the symbolism the raptor embodies, I had this to say:
Bald Eagle.
Our Grandfather.
It’s the symbol that unites our peoples, by which we all are known to others.
It’s the symbol that was taken by the colonizers as their own. Again.
It’s the messenger to the Mystery: Strong, powerful, able to communicate and commune alike with the spirits as it wings from the greatest heights to earth and back again.
On this day, when the world celebrates the colonizer but we celebrate the survivor, it’s a symbol of so much more.
There is no one word that captures it, and that is fitting, since at his best Eagle soars unbounded, free. And so it is with us: No reservation of land or spirit can contain our pride, our joy, our strength, our very lives and souls.
Similarly no one art form, no one genre or style or medium or representation can contain Eagle’s powerful spirit. Today, we’ll focus on only a few examples, but these barely scratch the surface.
We’ll begin with graphic representations.
As you can see from the image above, our ancestors held similar ideas about the representational power of Eagle. These petroglyphs are dated back some thousand years, but there are also older ones across Indian Country that bear similar motifs. I suspect that, in ancient times, our peoples chose Eagle as a symbol of immanent power because of its strength, and also because of its ability to fly so high that its trajectory exceeds our capacity to see it. When another being has the ability to approach the places where the spirits dwell, that adjacence naturally gives rise to thoughts of access, and so Eagle has become an intermediary, if not quite an intercessor: a messenger to the spirits. We’ll get to the ways in which that aspect of Eagle’s identity plays out in the arts in a bit.
Wings’s own chosen medium, of course, is photography, but that’s in some ways more difficult: After all, despite their removal from the endangered list, eagles in this part of what’s now known as North America still tend to keep their distance from areas populated and inhabited by humans. It’s a wise move; despite federal legal protections that include criminal penalties for violations, there are far too many people out there who are willing to risk it to obtain eagle parts. In this area, we’re fortunate to have a number of bald eagles willing to winter in the broader region, and along the Quartzite that runs through the canyon between here and Santa Fe, we are occasionally privileged to see them atop the cottonwoods are soaring above the water. One year, Wings was able to capture their image across several photos, one of which appears at the top of this post.
Then there are those artists who draw and paint.
The acrylic painting shown just above is by one of Wings’s brothers in art and distant ancestry, Frank Rain Leaf. Frank has a broad body of work, mostly paintings, across a variety of themes. This one, which we had in inventory (and which sold some years ago) was entitled Eagle Keeper. The raptors depicted in it are golden eagles, rather than the more commonly represented bald variety. Combined with the secondary motifs in the painting, such as the young traditional man in the old style of dress, which includes the wrapped braids and the eagle feathers in his hair, they made for an exceptionally powerful image.
Eagle is also a popular model and muse for figurative works: fetish carvings, sculpture . . . and even spirit staffs.
Shown here are a few entries in our collection of staffs by Comanche carver Jack Silver Fox. These are designed for use by the outside world as walking sticks. Jack carves them from aspen, from a single piece of wood in all but the rarest of cases. The two on the left are examples of his eagle staffs, in which one end of the length of wood is carved into the shape of an eagle’s head, emerging organically from the “body” of the staff itself.
Perhaps more common, though, is the carving of eagles from stone. There was a time when we carried a broad selection of fetishes by Zuni carvers in the gallery, among them eagles made from everything from plain jet to jet with mother-of-pearl heads and tails to varieties of shell. We do not, unfortunately, have any photos of them remaining.
We do, however, have images a few sculptural works that summon Eagle’s spirit. One of my favorites is the one shown above at left, by the late Emerson Gomez. Emerson was one of Wings’s distant cousins and close friends, a master carver who had developed a signature style. Both of the works in the photos were his (and both have long since sold), but the one on the left is exceptionally powerful: a hybrid spirit being that embodies aspects of both Buffalo and Eagle, earthbound strength and soaring flight in the same body. It was wrought form local Pilar slate, with the silken feel of soapstone and a matrix than ranged from deep blood red siltstone to flecks of golden mica. The eagle’s head emerges from the back of the Buffalo’s, beneath a pair of golden alabaster horns that match the small pedestal.
While Emerson’s work was simple and spare, another carver whose work we carry, Randy Roughface (Ponca), specializes in an even barer loo
k, a form of carving known as “vintage-style.” Randy carves the old way, allowing the stone itself to speak through the voice of the being he summons from it, with clean, flowing lines and almost no feature detail.
Randy used to focus largely on small horses, but in recent years, he’s begun branching out into other animal spirits: buffalo, turtles, eagles, even an elk. We still have two of his vintage-style eagles in inventory, each with a very different look and feel. The one at left is made of alabaster, an unusual variant of the stone that includes or
ange and green mixed in with a putty-colored off-white shade. He chose to allow this raptor to emerge straight out of the stone, poised to take flight. The one at right, on the other hand, shows one perching upright, lifting its head heavenward to issue a
cry. This one is carved from Pilar slate, but an unusual specimen of the stone that looks less charcoal gray than slightly brick-red, with darker shadows on the wings and body and a lighter head and tail that call to mind bald eagle’s dichotomous color.
Then there are the larger sculptural works, such as the one at left by Ned Archuleta. This one showed three spirits combined: an elder, a bear,and a bald eagle. He entitled the piece Tiwa Messengers. It’s carved out of a variant of pink alabaster that is largely putty-colored and that looks more like marble, with flowing lines of dark red matrix and shimmering swatches of mica scattered here and there. If you look closely, you’ll see that he used the natural matrix line in the stone as the line of demarcation between the bald eagle’s head and body. It was, again, a very simple invocation of the spirits of eagle and his companions, but an also a powerfully effective one.
Of course, a work of art doesn’t need to assume the form of Eagle himself to hold some of his power.
Above, I alluded to the fact that eagle feathers (and plumes) are particularly prized by our peoples. They are used as an 
integral part of ceremonial and traditional dress, whether attached to the hair (as in the line drawing at left), to a headdress, or to some other part of a person’s regalia. Some dancers carry fans made of eagle feathers, as in the painting of the dancer at right, or just a single feather. I’ve written both here and elsewhere about the fact that eagle feathers represent an earned and sacred trust for our peoples, the awarding of 
which signifies bravery and/or service (such as those given to warriors for courage in battle) and marks rites of passage that herald both hard work and significant accomplishment (an example is the widespread practice among Native families of awarding an eagle feather to a graduating to student to hang from her mortarboard, enabling her to wear it when she receives her diploma or degree). [Such uses as the latter one also give rise, on a lamentably annual basis, to incidents of racism and institutional discrimination aimed directly at Native students, forcing, seemingly, each successive class to fight anew for this one small right.]
And I’ve also written about the role that eagle feathers play in the sacred: in ceremony and in prayer.
Generally speaking, of course, ceremony is not for outsiders. Oh, I know that it’s popular among members of the dominant culture to convince themselves that it’s for them, but in most instances, it’s not; it’s an issue of blood and culture and tradition, and you can’t separate any of the three. But the facts of indigenous prayer and smudging are acts that long ago were allowed into the light of day for the outside world to know, and there’s no putting the horse back in the barn, or the eagle back in the aerie, as it were.
I’ve written about the role that feathers play in Native art relatively recently, as a part of this very series. Within some media, such as leatherwork and items like dream catchers, medicine wheels, and medicine shields, the feathers are incorporated directly into the work. Because Native people who are enrolled in federally-recognized tribes are permitted to possess eagle feathers, they are able to use real ones for such items that are intended for their own use (or the use of fellow tribal members). It is not, however, legal for non-Natives to possess such items, and so indigenous artists make “replica” version for sale to the outside world.
An example of what I mean appears in the photo directly above, of small ornamental medicine wheels. The artist, Elk Good Water, has engaged in the time-honored traditional practice of painting the feathers, in this case, simply by adding dots to the shaft at specific intervals. It produces the ancillary effect of making the feathers themselves look a bit more like actual eagle feathers, but these are perfectly legal for sale to and purchase by those in the world outside the village walls: These are feathers shed naturally by Eurasian collared doves, an invasive (and unprotected) species that are now-ubiquitous in this area (indeed, there are two on the feeder outside the window as I write).
Some Native artists take ordinary feathers dropped by non-migratory birds, the kind that are legal to own, and repaint them entirely to look like eagle feathers (or sometimes hawk feathers). Such feathers are sometimes sold individually, as prayer feathers, sometimes with the bare part of the lower shaft bound by yarn of twine, which may or may not be beaded, and may or may not have fringed tassels (with or without beads or other talismanic items attached). We used to have some of these sorts of feathers for sale in the gallery, but it’s been about eight years. Since that time, we have had medicine wheels and dreamcatchers with legal feathers attached, as well as rattles and powwow hairpieces.
Eagle feathers serve as model and muse for other forms of Native art, as well. In recent years, it has become increasingly popular to incorporate the eagle-feather motif into Native jewelry (a style that is now frequently appropriated by non-Native jewelers and smiths). It’s common to find inexpensive dreamcatcher earrings and pendants that have tiny silvery feathers attached, or to find earrings made in the general shape of feathers. These are often mass-produced, and if you come across them, you should look closely: They’re often made by non-Native artisans who have no idea what eagle feath
ers actually look like. Instead, they’re stylized feathers with no spotting or barring, but with curving shapes like a willow leaf blowing in the wind. Native artisans tend to make eagle-feather jewelry much bigger, bolder, and blockier, with articulation of the barbs and with th
e requisite spotted patterning, where the medium permits it.
One example comes from one of younger artisans, Jeremy Gomez. He is the nephew of Emerson Gomez, whose Eagle/Buffalo spirit is pictured above. Jeremy specializes in carving, particularly fetish carving, and some years ago, he carved a few eagle-feather “fetishes” for us — not genuine fetishes, as they did not personify a particular spirit being, but of similar size and form. About the same time, he also created some carved eagle-feather jewelry out of alabaster and slate: the two orange alabaster necklaces at left, the slate earrings shown at right, and another pair of similar feather earrings out of orange alabaster. All are made of stone lightweight enough to wear comfortably, but all embody the look and feel of their real-life counterparts. This is particularly true of the necklaces; Jeremy cut the stone so that the matrices flowed horizontally, evoking the blocky coloration evident on real eagle feathers.
There is another classic traditional pattern in Southwestern Native jewelry in which the eagle-feather motif plays a significant role — and chances are, you’ve already seen it and haven’t even known it. The concha belt buckles shown immediately above, all by Taos Pueblo silversmith Rodney Concha, all feature this imagery. [Yes, his last name is Concha, which is the Spanish word for shell. And yes, he is a silversmith, but like Wings, he occasionally works in other metals, and these happened to be wrought in copper.] Now, look closely at each buckle — specifically, at the edges on either side. You see those rows of tab-like shapes that edge each one? Look again. Those shapes represent eagle feathers. Now, look in the center oval of each buckle, at the pointed ray-like pattern emanating from each center diamond. Again, those represent eagle feathers. Tis is a very old traditional motif, a design that’s been in use in concha belt buckles (and earrings and other silverwork) for a very, very long time.
Wings has used the eagle-feather motif in his silverwork for many, many years, although his assume a different form:
He began by making cuffs in which the bracelet band as wrought in the form of a pair of eagle feathers. One of his earlier versions is shown above: It’s his signature design, with an overlay shaft and articulated barbs, stampwork creating individual bar
bs near the ends and the
spotted pattern near the center. Most often, he centers them with a beautiful stone, usually turquoise, but he did do a smaller series of them a few years ago without the enter stone, featuring a wrapped overlay “shaft” at the center, like the one at right. He has also created a few with narrower bands and smaller center stones, like the one shown at left, the sort that fit narrower wrists more comfortably.
More recently, he has expanded his body of work in this series to include a big, bold cuff like the one shown at left, in which he crafted the feathers as a separate band and soldered it onto the larger cuff as an overlay. This piece was a special commission f
or a special person, a dear friend whose work seeks justice. He is a warrior, in his way, and he needed what he calls his “armor” — a piece that would balance his other cuff by Wings, one that would provide him with spiritual protection. Wings chose for him the warrior’s armor: the eagle feather.
Then, earlier this year, he decided to design a cuff in the form of a medicine wheel. The focal point atop the band took the form of the wheel itself, but the band was truly inspired: a pair of eagle feathers, like the actual eagle feathers that would hang suspended from the hoop of a Native person’s own traditional wheel. It’s an unusual design, but one that holds the power of the feathers, the four directions, and the wheel itself.
A few years ago, Wings expanded his signature eagle-feather series beyond cuffs into other forms of wearable art.
The barrette you see just above was another commission, for another dear friend who wanted a barrette to coordinate with her other amethyst jewelry, a piece that would include protective symbolism. Instead of an ordinary rectangular barrette, he hand-cut it 
into the eagle-feather shape, then added a large amethyst to anchor it and a second smaller one at the tip. The feather was made long and wide enough to accommodate a French clip on the back.
Wings also has, for some years now, created both necklaces and earrings as part of his eagle-feather series. Originally, most of the necklaces were anchored by a round or oval turquoise cabochon, like the one shown at left. Each varied in the stampwork and overall shape, but they were all clearly part of the same series. The one shown here was entitled A Prayer for Rain.
Then, in
the summer of 2009, if memory serves, he departed from his usual pattern slightly: He chose a cabochon of opalescent serpentine, mossy green with flecks of blue and pink and white shimmering light, as the anchor stone. This one, shown at right, was called The Summer Eagle, and it sold just as fast as the earlier turquoise ones.
Then, a year or two after that, he created another version, this time with a fiery orange amber cabochon. This one, shown at left, turned out to be my favorite: The stone (which is not, technically, a stone at all, of course), looked like the sun in miniature, all bright flames and warm light. Its name was Greets the Sun, an homage to the role the eagle feather plays in sending our prayers to spirit, including those we make at dawn every day as we greet a rising Father Sun.
Wings also added earrings to this particular series, simply by scaling the general pattern down to smaller size and a lighter weight. Over the ye
ars, they have assumed a couple of basic forms. One is the smooth, tapered variety at left, with an overlay shaft an articulated barbs, s
uspended from a tiny bead at the top and tipped with an equally tiny cabochon at the end. These were called From Earth to Sky, a reference both to the feather’s linking of the earthy onyx bead with the Skystone at the tip, and to the eagle feather’s linking of us to spirit through our prayers.
The second appears at right, and at lower left, in two different iterations. At right, he created similar feather
design with an overlay shaft, but extended the upper end of it to wrap the overlay around it, just as he does with the larger works. In this instance, he topped each earring with a small round repoussé concha stamped in a starburst pattern, then tipped each one with a diminutive amethyst cabochon in the color of the desert sunset. These he called Desert Eagle, and like the others, they sold rapidly.
Finally, he created the design shown at left in a similar vein. These were named Black Eagle, a reference to the slightly larger onyx cabochons at their top (and perhaps to the traditional name bestowed on our President, when Crow Nation elders adopted him). These were more elaborate, and more like the larger works, featuring extended shafts with the overlay wrapping below the stones, and the classic spotted patterning hand-stamped on the front of each earring.
And then he created these:
These were a recent work: a commission for a very dear friend who routinely wears long, dangly earrings. She had seen the necklace shown above, Greets the Sun, featured here in an earlier post, fell in love with the design, and asked whether Wings could make a pair of earrings in similar design and length. The ones shown above were the result, the most spectacular of his entire series of feather earrings. They were called RainFeathers, a tribute to the Skystones that anchor them at top and tip.
Recently, Wings expanded the feather motif into more highly stylized, more abstract design:
This necklace is called The Night Eagle, so named for the shape of the black and white Botswana agate stone that forms the pendant. With the small round moonstone cabochon suspended from its tip like a tiny moon, it made the pendant look like nothing so much as an eagle feather, one whose barring assumes a slightly different pattern, but one that is perhaps attributable to the shadows of the night that is its natural element.
Once in a while, though, Wings chooses to design a piece that pays tribute to Eagle himself, in his full form.
This spoon was, I believe, from 2009 or so, and featured a very simple design on the bowl and most of the handle . . . but at the handle’s tip, Wings hand cut it into a wider pattern, one that took the form of Eagle himself, spread wings, hooked beak, and all. Wings cuts these works freehand, as one solid piece. In this instance, he used a variety of traditional stampwork designs to create the raptor’s facial features and feathers, and the net effect was of a being that very much resembled Thunderbird.
Sometimes, of course, the link between Eagle and Thunderbird is more explicit. Such was the case with this work:
This pendant was hand-cut in the shape of an eagle, including the hooked beak, but with wings rampant and the head turned in the classic style of the Thunderbird. In this instance, Wings formed the raptor entirely from silver and stampwork: doming the entire piece slightly, repoussé-fashion, then creating the facial features, body plumes, wing feathers, and tailfeathers by means of stampwork. In true Thunderbird fashion, this eagle is armed with arrows, which in the storm manifest as lightning. This was one of Wings’s older pieces, long since sold, but also one of my favorites for its stark, spare simplicity and for the sense of power that infused it.
Eagle is not, of course, the only bird with spiritual significance for our peoples. Virtually all of the raptors are popular, including the small hawks and falcons. But certain birds have other spiritual significance, much of which varies by tribal nation and tradition. Among some of the peoples of the Pacific Northwest, for example, Raven is the Bringer of the Sun. Those peoples who subscribe to the ways of the Native American Church find special meaning in the Water Bird (sometimes called the Peyote Bird), which I have seen identified by people of diverse nations and traditions variously as everything from the anhinga to the swallow to various raptors and a wide array of smaller birds. Some privilege the powers of woodpeckers generally, and of the Northern flicker specifically; others assign special powers and meaning to certain smaller birds, from bluebirds to goldfinches to hummingbirds. And, of course, stories abound about a wildly diverse array of bird species, including Owl (which is not universally a death symbol, despite the perceptions of the dominant culture since a particular children’s book by a non-Native author was published in the ’70s).
Still, there is a special role for Eagle in our ways, and particularly for Bald Eagle. He has come to embody much of what we prize about ourselves, and in which we take pride. It is the embodiment of the spirit who serves as messenger, as our intermediary with the rest of the spirit world, the one who carries our prayers. It is also, among other things, the power inherent in survival, in refusing to lie down kin the face of death and destruction, of insisting that we will rise, we will fly, we will survive and thrive and be free.
It’s the feeling that accompanies the image we featured here as the subject of yesterday’s photo meditation, a photo that is a part of Wings’s series Wingéd Ones, and found in the Photography Gallery here on the site. It’s fitting, I think, to close with the narrative text that accompanies this photo, precisely because it makes clear this sense of power:
BEING
Leave the relative safety of the branch, now gray and bare, of the slowly-petrifying tree.
Spring up, into the currents of the winter air, reach out, embrace the clear thin sky.
Leap, with soft, strong wings spread wide, smoky feathers touching the face of the winds.
Glide above this earth that is ours, up toward the place where Spirit dwells, to listen closely for the words to bring back to firmer ground.
Like Eagle, we put our faith in the winds to carry us where we are to go, and always, always, to bring us back home.
Like Eagle, we are, and we shall be.
Eagle is power, and what greater power is there than, quite simply, to be ourselves . . . to be?
~ 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.
