What the outside world calls Halloween is now five short days hence. It’s not an Indigenous holiday on these lands, and yet, as modern holidays go, it’s one of the most celebrated by our peoples.
The reasons are many, and complex. Part of it, no doubt, is the very fact that it’s not one of our own. When our very existences are overlaid with colonial cultures, their ways imposed by force even as they steal our own still, it’s a chance to revel in the costumery and perhaps take a little of that power back. It’s also freeing, in a way: It’s a luxury to be able to pretend to fear monsters of the imagination when for half a millennium and more, our lands and lives and ways have been beset by more ordinary monsters, the kind that assume a far more tangible and vastly more dangerous form.
Still, our ways have become, in part, blended with those of other lands purely as a means of survival in the face of exterminationist colonial forces. Catholic traditions now filter through many traditional observances, and in this part of the continent now misnamed “North America,” at this time of year, they are heavily bound up with the imagery of Indigenous cultures from here to the southern tip of Mexico.
In this region, the season’s real observance is not of Halloween, but of All Souls’.
Indigenous cultures the world over recognize the possibility of congress between worlds, of the ability not only of medicine person to travel to other worlds in visions and dreams, but of those who have long since traveled to the world of the afterlife to return to this world occasionally. When this is most likely, most possible, varies according to culture, calendar, and tradition. Here, at least for many cultures, Indigenous and colonial alike, the beginning of the cold season marks this period. For some, it may be only those days surrounding All Souls’. For others, that may only represent the beginning of a world whose veil thins as the world counts down the days to winter . . . days ever shorter, ever darker, ever colder, ruled increasingly by the hours of night.
We are entering the season when the spirits walk.
Some of them are hungry.
It’s not, as the dominant culture depicts it, the hunger of zombies, a Halloween trope that is itself a colonial distortion of the Indigenous traditions of distant lands. It’s not even that of the ghosts of Buddhism, in which human desires and emotions become warped after death, although some of our cultures do indeed have concepts somewhat analogous, in which those who fail to walk the road in life also fail to find the path in death, and spend their revenant existence tormenting the living.
But for the most part, we envision such hunger pangs rather differently. Our cultures simply recognize that loved ones who have departed for the spirit world may sometimes wish to return, for a moment or a night: to complete unfinished business; to deliver a message; simply to see and feel the love of their families again, to sing, to dance, to eat, to feel joy, especially at times of communal celebration. And we, the living, in our turn have an obligation to them.
This is a time of phantom pangs, hungry souls, and feeding the spirits.
But however metaphorically we may understand the concept of “hunger,” we take the practice of “feeding” very seriously. I’ve written before about the Indigenous practices around the spirit bowl (sometimes, spirit plate), a means of leaving offerings for the ancestors and other spirits. At holiday meals or other special times, Wings and I put a spirit bowl out for them to enjoy a bit of everything, including the water that we drink — less, perhaps, about feeding their ephemeral forms than their need, like all humans, to know that they are not forgotten. It’s a way of remembering, of honoring their lives once lived in this world, and their new existence in the next one.
Today’s featured work embodies this practice, thing and act alike. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Spirit Bowl Coil Bracelet
The spirit bowl is a traditional means of marking special occasions, of acknowledging the lives of those who have walked on and demonstrating respect for more elemental spirits, too. Wings blends the bold tones of traditional black-on-white and micaceous pottery with an earthy mix representing water and light and the warmth of tradition, all coiled in their own round vessel. At either end are strands of translucent dark heishi, earth tones that appear black on white in the light, melding into lengths of iron pyrite with all the flash and fire of local mica. Next come round orbs of fire and ice, black and white snowflake obsidian, separated by more pyrite from round shimmering spheres of mother-of-pearl shell. Another small expanse of iron pyrite leads to the glowing warm center, large orbs of chatoyant tiger’s eye, like the light glimmers in the clay of the bowls and plates that serve the spirits. Designed jointly by Wings and Aji.
Memory wire; olivella-shell heishi; iron pyrite; snowflake obsidian; mother-of-pearl shell; tiger’s eye
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It’s a piece that fits this season in other ways, too: the softly glowing grays and whites of a nascent winter, an earth banded by shades of brown and bits of ice, trees still alive with remnant bits of amber flame. It’s the colors of the cold season, spiraled around a warming central fire — a bit like the fire that draws the spirits to the hearth of memory, and us to it as well to remember and honor them.
Today, the sun shines but the world seems bare and cold, skeletal branches hanging on to the last of their dried and curled leaves, now golden-brown like old pennies in the light. Night falls a little sooner with each turning of the earth; a week hence, and our world will be back on more “ordinary” time, and the nights will be long indeed.
This year at All Souls’, the spirits will have plenty of darkness in which to travel abroad. It is up to us to make sure that they do not go hungry as they walk, to make sure they know that we remember.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
