The snow came late last night on the trail of a wailing trickster wind. This morning, in defiance of all forecasts, the snow remains huddled around peaks and slopes and lowlands alike, wind-driven flurries like small beads of ice. The temperature, though cold, is not so bad — twenties, no that unusual for November — but the wind chill hovers not far above zero.
This will be a hard winter, and a welcome one. And here at Red Willow, as in much of this Indigenous land, our world is entering a season of ceremony and strength.
By “ceremony,” I don’t refer to the federal holiday popularly known as Thanksgiving, although many (I suspect most) Native people now mark the day in some way. In the very first year of this blog’s existence, I wrote about the ways in which we navigate the lines a colonial world attempts to draw for us on that day:
People ask us whether we celebrate Thanksgiving. We have a single answer:
Every day.
Of course, I realize that what they mean is, “Do you celebrate the dominant-culture American holiday called “Thanksgiving Day?” Mostly, I refuse to be drawn into an artificial discussion within an artificial frame based on an artificial holiday. It’s not my job to pander to comforting and comfortable stereotypes and fake history. It is my job to honor our ancestors and their real history, and so if you plan to ask us questions like these, you should be prepared for brutally honest (and discomfiting) answers.
I believe it was in 1970 that Native activists observed the first National Day of Mourning and Remembrance on what the dominant culture calls Thanksgiving Day. At least, that was the title it was given among the folks I knew, with some shortening it simply to National Day of Mourning. Sources now seem to indicate that the shorter version was the original version, so perhaps the people around me simply lengthened it as a way of more fully honoring our ancestors, observing that worth celebration along with that deserving of raw grief. I use the longer version, partly from habit, but also because I insist on a more fully-articulated version of our history and a more fully-realized vision of our future.
Spirit knows there is much to grieve, and (much like that “holiday” originally designated for October 12th) this day brings that home anew every year. It is through the blessings of Spirit itself, the sacrifices of our ancestors, and the great strength and courage and hard work of our peoples that we are still here. Those sacrifices — sacrifices of blood and bone itself, of soul and spirit — were unspeakable in their pain and suffering and horror and betrayal. And so we cannot flinch from looking at them, from acknowledging the centrality of their role in shaping our history, our past, our present, our future. We owe our ancestors that much (and much more).Spirit knows there is much to grieve, and (much like that “holiday” originally designated for October 12th) this day brings that home anew every year. It is through the blessings of Spirit itself, the sacrifices of our ancestors, and the great strength and courage and hard work of our peoples that we are still here. Those sacrifices — sacrifices of blood and bone itself, of soul and spirit — were unspeakable in their pain and suffering and horror and betrayal. And so we cannot flinch from looking at them, from acknowledging the centrality of their role in shaping our history, our past, our present, our future. We owe our ancestors that much (and much more).
It’s a history with which every person, but especially every non-Indigenous person, should be familiar, and most know nothing of it. It’s much easier, much more comfortable, to buy into the absolutely false mythology of “Thanksgiving” than it is to engage with the real history and the implications of it, which reverberate yet this very day. You can find a much-abbreviated and yet, for a blog, post, still unusually long, recounting of that actual history here, where I wrote about it at this very season three years ago.
Much to grieve, indeed.
I suspect that most of the Indigenous people of this place will observe Thursday in some way, perhaps, like us, in multiple ways. But the season of ceremony to which I refer is that which accompanies winter’s arrival and extends throughout the cold season. It begins, in a way, with Quiet Season, the time at which the old village is closed entirely to vehicular traffic. It’s a drawing down of both the calendar and the natural year that allows the place to rest, free of external influences in significant degree; to recenter in the stillness of winter and prepare for the hard work, physical and spiritual, of the season ahead.
The winter holidays here are filled with celebration, and that, too, is ceremony:
But while our peoples have always made a communal space for mourning, it is, as everything else in life, a matter of balance. It cannot be all grief and unrelieved sadness; a sole focus on the evils that have been (and are still being) done to us diminishes the fully-rounded lives lived by our ancestors (and by ourselves), and disrespects the harmony required by our traditional ways.
And so remembrance requires more of us than tears: It requires respect, honor, commemoration, celebration. Yes, celebration. Our peoples have always known that there must also be space for joy, for drumming and singing and dancing and feasting. We honor those same ancestors when we sing honor songs, when we dance in their memory, when we prepare the foods that sustained them for thousands of years with care and love for our own families.
And so, for us, today is a day for feasting.
Feasting, of course, involves its own work. Preparation is laborious, many dishes done the old way, and it should be approached in the right heart and spirit. Eating, too, requires a particular mindset, one given to generosity and remembrance. On such days, whether a formal holiday or otherwise, even when we simply sit down to participate in an unusually lovely meal, we remember our elders and ancestors. Spirit plates and spirit bowls are much in use in our cultures; no past practice, this, although it is an ancient one. And on holidays and feast days, in celebration and in ceremony, by filling such dishes with a portion of our own meals and setting them aside for consumption by the spirits, we acknowledge the gifts they gave us by virtue of their existences, and reassure them that they are not only not forgotten, but still honored and welcomed in our own lives.
The first of today’s two featured works, wrought in the earthy, snowy colors of day and season, embodies this tradition in very literal terms. 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
This piece evokes the spirit of people and place, traditional Pueblo heishi spiraled with shell and shimmer and stones like sun and snow-dappled ground. It’s the illuminating light of the ancestors’ wisdom braided into a hoop of this land’s rich earth, bound together as completely as soil and spirit, place and time.
And it reminds us that we are not alone.
It has become common, particularly over the last half-century or so, to regard the bald eagle as a a sort of pan-Indigenous symbol of Nativeness. It was fitting, in its early years, not merely for the fact that many of our peoples do revere them for a variety of reasons, but also for their endangered status, having been, like our ancestors, purposely hunted to near-extinction.
For the eagle, conservation efforts were undertaken at the highest of levels, and now, their numbers have rebounded. In some places, they not only live and thrive, but are the primary inhabitants of certain spaces simply by virtue of their sheer number now.
That is not the case here.
In this place, the eagles remain wary, and rightly so. Their numbers here are too few for any sort of critical mass, and so those who come here tend to stay mostly out of sight. Once in a great while, one will perch upon the lone old cottonwood warrior still standing in the field off the highway into town; just as rarely, we will catch sight off one flying over our own land here. Over the past few years, his golden cousin has visited on a few occasions, most recently, a month or so ago. But Bald Eagle is more likely to be seen down the Gorge, where the water runs and sustenance is readily available and the trees remain mostly out of reach of human perfidy. Even so, it’s rare to see more than one at once. Symbols tend to require a certain sense of scarcity to retain their potency, and in this area, Eagle obliges.
The images shown here today are from some thirteen or fourteen years ago. Wings shot them all within minutes, perhaps only moments, of each other, all on his old Nikon film camera. And those moments were the purest of gifts, a perfect blessing.
It began with the one shown at the top, a solitary eagle atop the wintry skeleton of an old ghost cottonwood. Colonial descriptors are likely to include terms such as “regal,” or “noble,” or “proud,” but what strikes me, instead, is simply an essential strength of spirit. His dark body matches perfectly the trunk of the tree; his head and tail are nearly lost to human vision in the snow-spotted landscape. He possesses the wisdom to know where to go, to be: to hunt, to eat, to survive. And he owns the strength of spirit to do it alone, in the cold still light of winter.
But, as it turned out, he was not alone.
He would be joined, in moving to a second perch, by another of his kind, presumably his mate. [If indeed the two are a mated pair, the one on the right is the male; the one on the left is larger, which would identify her as the female.] And while Wings captured these shots at a significant distance, he was most certainly within their line of sight, and they were just as certainly aware of his presence and movements. And still, the elected to remain still long enough to bless him with this gift.
Here at Red Willow and environs, the eagles are spirits almost entirely of winter. One day before the end of the calendar year three years ago, I was granted the gift of capturing on film a solitary one in this same general area — and, as with these, he was well aware of my presence willing to bestow the gift anyway.
Such is winter in this place. It is, in some ways, the hardest of seasons — today, in fact, is dangerously cold — and the longest, too. Winter here straddles the latter half of autumn and much more than the first half of spring; we have been known to get snow into June, and this year’s summer rains instead brought snow to the peaks in July and August, too. It is a harsh land, here at 7,500 feet and more, where actual temperatures can on occasion plunge to forty degrees below zero and snowstorms are regularly measured not in inches but in feet. It takes work to survive the season, even now. It also takes faith, and no small amount of prayer, and strength of body, mind, heart, and spirit.
And so it is perhaps fitting that this should be a time off ceremony in so many different ways, moments along the journey to spring that give us the opportunity to reflect, to give thanks, to seek courage and strength, and to renew ourselves for the hard work ahead.
For there is much to navigate on that road. Ahead of us lie the Christmas holidays, here a form of Christian observance blended with far more ancient Indigenous traditions. There will be vespers and bonfires on Christmas Eve, followed by dancing on Christmas Day. All across this region, there will be more dancing to mark the birth of the new year as measured by the Gregorian calendar, events wholly Indigenous even as they occur according to a method of measurement created on the other side of the planet. And all of this, the dancing and drumming and singing and feasting, lead our worlds inexorably into a more formal ceremonial season, one accompanied by an entire closure of Indigenous lands to the outside world as those appointed enter into a sacred period of prayer and teaching and tradition for however many weeks or months may be required: twenty-eight days, two months, once in recent memory, near three. It is a time of hard work to match the harshness of weather and climate now. Ceremony sees us through the winter, opens it up and closes it out and leads us into spring.
The second of today’s featured works symbolizes the tools and the objects of ceremony, prayer and honoring of the spirits, supplication made and answers received. Like the previous piece, it’s an entry in The Coiled Power Collections, Wings’s spiraling series of gemstone coil bracelets. And this one, both symbolically and stylistically, happens to be a personal favorite. From its description in the same section of the same gallery:
Eagle Feather Coil Bracelet
The eagle feather carries our prayers to spirit; as a gift, it is an honor conferred, a sign of respect for the person who has earned it. Wings calls its power into the spiraling hoop of this coil bracelet, one strung with gifts of the earth in the mottled earthy tones of Eagle’s own robes. At either end are the feather’s downy fringe, made of Hawai’ian puka shell in hue a shade off snow-white. Just above, the raptor’s characteristic mottling begins, expressed in the form of a length of doughnut-shaped rondels of variegated fossilized dinosaur bone. The bone flows into shades of black with round matte onyx, thence to more round beads of mottled black and white snowflake obsidian, fire and ice that flows into lengths of ovaled barrel beads of basaltic lava rock. At the center rest seven large faceted diamond-shaped barrel beads in smoky quartz, the color of a young eagle’s feathers and the shape of the Eye of Spirit itself. Note: Puka shell fringe beads are fragile; best worn for special occasions, not everyday wear. Designed jointly by Wings and Aji.
Memory wire; Hawai’ian puka shell; fossilized dinosaur bone; onyx; snowflake obsidian; basaltic lava rock; smoky quartz
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The eagle feather is a sign of honor, a tool of prayer, a means of communicating with the spirits. It is a gift of one of our most powerful relatives, those whose realm is the higher reaches of the sky. Its use reminds us to look to the spirits, and to our ancestors, for guidance, for illumination, for wisdom.
It reminds us to give thanks:
And through it all — the mourning, the remembrance, the celebration — runs a red ribbon of thanksgiving: for our histories, painful though they may be in places, and for the ancestors who brought us to this place in time today; for our contemporary existence despite half a millennium of organized campaigns of genocide, and for our ability not merely to survive but to thrive, with tongue and song and dance and food and medicine and art and so many lifeways still intact for so many of us; and for our future, our children and their children and their children’s children, and the possibility of leaving them a better earth, even unto the seventh generation and beyond.
We have much to mourn. We have much to remember. We have much to celebrate. We have much for which to give thanks.
We close with another view of the lone eagle, at the moment when, with utter confidence in both his world and his abilities to navigate it, he leapt into the winds.
It speaks to an essential strength of spirit as well as body that he does so instinctively: He know his limits, but he also knows his power, and he uses it.
It’s a lesson for us as we enter the hard season, a reminder that hardship is not its primary quality or characteristic. It is a time that puts us to the test, but a test we know well how to meet and transcend, if only we put in the work. This is a season of ceremony and strength, for our world, and for us, and we give thanks for that, as well.
~ 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.
