Some shadows are bigger than others — longer, darker, more all-encompassing.
Sometimes, they’re impossible to escape.
I’m reminded of such shadows on this day particularly: Memorial Day, what was still, in my childhood, called Decoration Day. The day itself marks an inescapably long dark shadow in our cultural consciousness, one that dims our collective light even now. Slavery — that is its root, but it, too stretches back farther yet, built on its twinned sin of ongoing genocide.
Decoration Day was first observed in 1865, a commemoration planned and executed by Black Americans whose shackles were loosed in the aftermath of the Civil War. They sought to recognize the sacrifice of Union soldiers who died in that bloody and protracted conflict, those who fought on the side that could be credited, albeit partially undeservedly, with forcing their freedom into being.
Still, the broader, dominant culture seems to have learned too little in the intervening century and a half plus one year.
The image above is, in a sense, one half of a larger image. Oh, it stands on its own well enough: a pair of fierce warrior masks hold pride of place on the rounded flue above a roaring fire. Three smaller traditional spirit beings, arrayed above Wings’s own work embodying the Four Sacred Directions, occupy the space between the masks and the fire. The whole shot in moody black and white, sending the flickering dance of white flame and black shadow upward, bringing the faces to life. It is, in fact, a companion work to that presented here on this day last week, black on white above white on black.
We learned last week just how long these shadows are: One cast itself over us, its icy touch at once coldly and collectively impersonal, and yet deeply personal on an individual level. One of our artists has walked on, and our world is a little darker without him.
His name was Wilson Appa, He was a small, lithe man, long silver hair at times tied back under a cowboy hat. He was a vet, roughly of an age with Wings, but VietNam aged him far beyond his years. Like too many who spent time in-country, the shadows of that war followed him home. I will not say that he brought them with him; it’s not as though he was given a choice in the matter.
His experience a half-century ago and half a world away, forced into the role of warrior for a society and culture that were not his, in a war that was itself a crime . . . it left scars. He came home with disabling conditions, including, I am told, exposure to Agent Orange or one of the other toxins used so freely and carelessly against a population fighting a colonial force that conscripted our own as its cannon fodder. The physical scars were not the worst of it.
Our young men — and in many of our peoples’ cultures, young women as well — have long been accustomed to the rigors of the warrior’s life. Its pursuits are dangerous, no question, and no small amount of fear underlay the acts of those our histories hold out as heroes. But our way is one that requires honor: honor in how and whom we choose as opponents, and honor in how we conduct ourselves in combat.
Fighting in the service of colonialism and white supremacy is not that sort of war.
Indeed, the irony is shattering: Wings’s own father served in World War II (as did several of my uncles), and yet when he returned home after the war, he was still denied the vote. On his people’s own land, where their “modern” village has stood for a millennium and more.
Those like Wilson who fought in VietNam were finally granted the ostensible right to vote (even if it remains too-often suppressed even today), but they were not afforded service in an honorable war. Reconciling a traditional indigenous warrior ethos with what has been asked of our Native soldiers requires a degree of cognitive dissonance and compartmentalization that scars the soul and casts a permanent shadow over the spirit.
Wilson’s health suffered in recent years. Too much of the war, too many battles, had stowed away in a corner of his soul when he returned. He once thanked us, confiding that he was not treated with respect by most in this modern world, that there was no understanding of what he had endured and accomplished, and still less appreciation for his warrior’s work. The pain in his eyes was evident, and utterly unforgettable.
On this day, when some fraction of the dominant culture celebrates its own martial history and the remainder shops and grills and drinks to excess, we choose to remember our friend Wilson. The shadows that followed him home were inky black tentacled things that refused to loose their grip. Ultimately, the shadows won, I suppose, if one looks at it as a contest between immutable power and mortal flesh. It’s no fair contest, after all; the shadows were always going to win out in the end. But despite their grasping presence, he survived a half-century or so beyond their source, and during that time, he produced beautiful and widely varied art, from beadwork jewelry to dreamcatchers to small traditional pots. Like the warrior masks above the fire, he possessed a fierce spirit and a strong heart, and while they “won” in the end, he fought the shadows with honor.
~ Aji
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