It is the heart of the ceremonial season here, perhaps the most sacred time of the year, the time of pilgrimage. In this place, the sacred is far older and deeper, deeper in very literal terms, than the new-ish structure of clay and wood that, for most of the dominant culture, marks and embodies “the sacred.” Still, what is new has likewise been here for half a millennium now, itself an embodiment of colonization.
It’s been burned to the ground and rebuilt, of course. Twice. In this incarnation, it has been here for only some 150 years, making it by far the youngest structure in the entire village. It’s fully integrated into village life now. Every year, late summer sees the crew of fiscales and other tribal members resurfacing the church: patching and plastering cracks and erosion, mudding in, refinishing with red clay adobe and, in some years, whitewashed accents, all preparatory both to the Feast of San Geronimo that marks summer’s end, an—d to the winter snows that will begin the weathering process anew.
It is not, of course, a part of Wings’s life; he is wholly traditional. He has always said that this land, given to his people by all that is in a time before time itself, is his church: a cathedral ceiling of turquoise sky and the moon and stars; an altar of peaks, of the earth itself; a baptismal font of the holy water in the lakes and the rivers and the rains that feed them; an eternal sacred that stretches in all directions.
The old so-called “mission” churches, these structures originally built to evangelize and proselytize, to convert and “civilize,” are unique in style — so much so that, over the past century, they have spawned entire cultural and architectural forms that find expression, mimicry, in everything from houses to landscaping to furniture. In this part of the country, it’s big business, and faux-Pueblo Revival homes with “mission” accents command high prices, as do “mission” doors and beds and bureaus and cabinetry.
Mimicry misses the point.
The people here have never surrendered their most ancient traditions. Oh, there is adoption, and integration, and the protective veneer of going along until something becomes habit. Native peoples are also eminently practical, and where something shows itself to have value, they will not reject its power. But underlying it all runs a common thread that stretches back more than a millennium, one that connects them to the ancient ones long since gone to Spirit, and to their grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren not yet born.
It’s a thread that runs in the sacred hoop, and one that simultaneously extends to the Four Sacred Directions and beyond.
Over the years, Wings has periodically taken photo series of the church, but I’ve noticed one consistent pattern: a focus on the “crosses.” Under ordinary circumstances, this would be unusual in the extreme; he practices no form of Christianity whatsoever, keeping instead entirely to the old ways.
These are no ordinary crosses.
True, these are representations of a Christian symbol, as one would expect from a Catholic church. After all, on the top of the church itself, they are arranged in a grouping of three, a clear evocation of the crucifixion scene at Golgotha. And yet . . . .
The Christian cross, in its most essential incarnation, is both cruciform and crucifix. That is to say, the top and side spokes are of equal length, but the bottom spoke is much longer, the better to hold a human body fastened atop it.
These crosses bear four spokes of equal length.
In traditional Native terms (for many of our peoples), that’s an image that represents the Four Sacred Directions.
And I know that’s what captures Wings’s attention, the juxtaposition of a traditional Native symbol of the sacred with one superimposed by a colonizing force —more, the merging and melding of the two. It was genius, really: a way to ensure both physical and spiritual safety, adhering to the old ways while seeming to adhere to the new.
He took this series of photos abut seven years ago, on a late summer day when the church had been newly surfaced and whitewashed. Wings used two of the photos from this series in his one-man show last year, each of which featured the same symbol rather prominently. The theme, of course, was Taos Pueblo: Ancestral Places, Sacred Spaces. There’s a reason the one shown above was not among them.
This first photo, of the entire building, including the curtilage of the courtyard, an imposing, intimidating structure. Unlike the village homes, it stands alone, unconnected to other buildings; fitting, I suppose, for a building whose purpose did not spring organically from within the village, but rather was brought in entirely from without.
In the second and third photos, below, it showed the same symbol, but from an entirely opposite perspective: facing outward, toward the Four Directions, rather than inward, toward the building that houses what was brought in from outside. I’ve written about each of those here before, both in the context of his show and subsequent to it.
The first was a close-up of the arch in the wall that serves as a door, a gateway, an entry to the courtyard that serves as curtilage to the church and allows access to its interior. It was entitled Threshold. From the interpretive text that accompanied it in his exhibition:
I entitled this Threshold because it evokes such an ominous feeling of portentousness, of momentousness: as though once one steps through the doorway, over the threshold of the church courtyard, there will be no turning back.
To a great degree, so it was, and so it remains.
After 500 years, that cross is now a part of our lives, of our contemporary culture, of our Pueblo itself. But it was not always so, and some of us retain the ancestral memories of the day before the arrival of the cross and the sword, the day of our pure red earth.
And so we choose not to cross that threshold, or to recross it in the other direction, out into the fresh air and budding trees and dusty earth and warm light of our essential selves.
I wrote further about this image here, essentially transcribing Wings’s expanded thoughts on the imagery, thoughts we have discussed many times over the years:
When we hear the word “threshold,” it tends to evoke feelings of anticipation: of momentousness, of the sense that something of great import lies just beyond. In the dominant culture in which we today are all immersed from infancy, a culture that prizes notions of “advancement” and “upward mobility” and “taking charge” and “progress” and “change for its own sake,” that sort of anticipation, while perhaps a bit scary, is generally regarded as heralding something unequivocally good. Which is to say, the change itself is inherently good; by definition, it means progress. Whatever lies inside the threshold, it must be an improvement — at least, provided that we are willing to put ourselves in the “right” frame of mind to regard it that way.
In other words, the movement goes in one direction: forward, into whatever lies beyond. There’s no thought of stepping back, of turning around, of returning whence you came. Contemporary society reflexively frowns upon phrases like “go back,” as something inherently regressive and outdated, preferring to forget, to ignore the fact that are things to go back to, things that have value in and of themselves that perhaps cannot be replaced or improved by “progress.”
But that’s a cultural framework.
. . .
The photo above is a good example of this cultural disconnect, and it’s one that extends beyond the dichotomy of dominant (i.e., white American) culture and traditional Indian culture to a fissure in the foundations of Indian cultures themselves. And it’s perfectly natural: After half a millennium of contact that included overt genocide and forced assimilation, it would be shocking if there were not dominant-culture influences now deeply embedded in our own contemporary cultures.
That doesn’t mean there are not lines of demarcation, however faint. Sometimes the line manifests as a fiissure, a crack in the foundation, and sometimes it requires structural repair that can only be achieved through a patch, an acceptance of some outside influences in order to preserve the whole.
Sometimes, it manifests as a threshold, and occasionally, we’re afforded the option, the choice, the autonomy and agency and personal and cultural sovereignty that accompanies the ability to make a conscious decision whether to cross it.
Such was the genesis of the photo above.
Wings’s threshold leads outward, back to the old ways, to tradition, to his people, to the ancestors, to the Four Sacred Directions. To the real sacred space.
Yes, I chose that last sentence deliberately. It’s the name of the third image, the one shown immediately above. From its interpretive text in Wings’s show:
I originally titled this Hope Lives Beyond.
My focus then was on the colonizing of our lands, our soil, our spirits, the taking of our sacred red earth and using it to build a temple to a god that was not ours. Under the guise of an entryway, forcing us behind a wall that trapped us with a vengeful spirit from a distant continent and kept our own spirits outside, outcast. And all of it, whitewashed, literally and metaphorically, covering the red of our earth, like the red of our skins, with the white of a colonizing force.
Then, I was focused on the prospect that hope for our future lay beyond that whitewashed wall.
Today, that still holds true, but now, my focus lies further beyond: beyond the dusty tracks of the plaza where our people gather; beyond the red-earth walls and roofs of Hlaukwima, our South House; beyond to one of the real sacred spaces of our people. To the mountain: to the wild game and plant medicine it nourishes; to the forest that provides wood for our homes, our safety, our traditional needs; and to the sky that holds the thunderheads of summer, bringing the rain that sustains us.
Again, I wrote about his expanded thoughts on this image last year, in the context of its relationship to the previous photo, Threshold:
But that photo was not taken from the perspective of someone about to cross the threshold in the direction that society assumes is the “right” or “normal” one. He took it from the perspective of someone not merely facing the other way, toward the outside of the church’s courtyard curtilage, but from someone standing outside that curtilage entirely.
Its a very different point of view.
And it’s one that affords the viewer a very different landscape, no matter the range of the lens. The close-up version, visible immediately above, allows one to see beyond the wall to the rest of the old village, to much older ways of life still lived daily. It’s a snapshot of life lived in more or less the same manner for a millennium, before the incursion of those who brought the courtyard, and the wall, and the cross atop it, and the threshold to another way of life and a religion from an ocean and more away.
Back a step, and the broader perspective, that in the photo at the top of the post, comes into focus. The view rises beyond the ancient homes, hundreds of years in existence, beyond the limbs of the trees shining silver in the afternoon sun, to the mountain itself, blanketed in forest green against a turquoise sky, thunderheads boiling over the ridgeline, merging to generate the blessed rain that will refill the Rio Pueblo and settle the dusty earth of the plaza.
It’s a view that contains, unseen to the naked eye, but no less visible in the hearts and histories of the people, a multitude of sacred spaces, all connected, all one continuous sacred space that has sustained the people, in this place, for more than a thousand years.
. . .
In that greater, more real sacred space, there are lines, yes. Some that are not to be crossed under certain circumstances; many that are never to be crossed by outsiders, certainly.
But they are not thresholds in the sense of the one within the courtyard wall. They are merely points on a spectrum seen and seeable only within the context of the people’s own ways, an existential continuum of history and tradition and practice and identity that is as much a part of the topography of the people’s lives as it is a part of the physical landscape.
Viewed from this perspective, the threshold of a wall seems suddenly artificial, insufficient to contain and constrain the identity and existence of a people whose continued presence in this space predates European recognition of life beyond their own bounds and waters by 500 years.
It’s why Wings’s own gaze is fixed firmly on the perspective that reveals the mountains and sky, the earth and trees and clouds beyond.
It is his sacred space.
It is his home.
It is him.
It’s impossible for me to do greater justice to it than his own words. But its more than words — it’s a way of living, of existing, of simply being, one that informs his whole life. It’s why the Four Sacred Directions find expression so regularly in his work. His art, whether rendered in photography or in silver, is a tangible tribute and a spiritual embodiment of what is, for him, the real sacred space.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
