We awakened this morning to an orange sky, the faintest glow of a newborn sun radiant and growing behind the peaks. This is dawn as it is in the heart of the fall season here at Red Willow, the amber of autumn skies arrived two months early.
Now that the sun is fully risen and making its slow ascent, the skies have turned to a hazy gold, and even autumn’s sharp edge on the wind is not enough to clear the air of the pall of smoke from western wildfires that hangs heavy over us now.
The law refers, mockingly, to “a parade of horribles”: a phrase meant to diminish the notion that a given act or circumstance will, or even likely could, lead to a cascading domino-effect of outcomes so bad that they must be enjoined on that basis alone. It is, of course, like the rest of “the law”: built around the amorphous “reasonable person” who is a stand-in for reifying [Christianist] colonial white [and usually male] supremacy. But this year has been nothing if not a genuine parade of horribles and if experience has told us anything at all, it is that based on current circumstances, it will get very much worse in the weeks and months to come before it even begins to get the smallest bit better.
It would be easy to be discouraged now: a deadly pandemic, worse in this country than any other through deliberate and deadly mismanagement; actual Nazis in control and showing every sign of refusing to give it up when the established mechanisms formally relieve them of it in November; a world figuratively and also quite literally on fire, the smoke of the latter having drifted far enough afield to shut down our own airways now. Masks are necessary for more than just viral vectors.
But if the protection of masks is needed, so, too, is the motivation that comes from memory: not from the recollection of some alleged “good old days” that never were, but from the individual aspects of daily life that were themselves small gifts, of the ancestors and of the spirits, that made ordinary life beautiful. As I said in this space yesterday, memory and hope reside at opposite ends of the spectrum that is the lived reality of our existence, and they work both in opposition and very much in collaboration to help us build a better world.
That better world seems very far away now. But that, too, was foretold in the times of memory, and our peoples know that the promise of prophecy requires our own hard work to bring it into being. And so, climate change and. wildfire and deadly drought or no, killing pandemic and even more killing policies from an illegitimate “leadership” or no, we have faith in the fruits of an Indigenous future.
Today’s photos all come from a summer’s day more than a decade ago, perhaps 2008 or 2009. In those years, the land was fertile and our gardens lush, filled with corn and beans and squash, the Three Sisters; filled too with other vegetables and fruits and medicinal herbs. Wild strawberries grew in their small sweet abundance, tiny tart hearts filled with flavor as intense as their scarlet color. And the rains came, daily, to coax them from the soil, keep their leaves alive and green.
We have squash blossoms this year, just like the one shown above, but little more. Ears have begun to sprout on the corn, but it’s well below its usual height, and may not make it to fruition. The beans did not survive the drought at all, nor did too much else we planted, fruits and vegetables and herbs and flowers alike.
And yet, there is a small ongoing harvest. A few yellow squash have survived to grow; we are waiting to see whether the zucchini and acorn and pumpkin make it, too. We have a bit of green-leaf lettuce, although heat and drought were too much for the spinach; the garlic is thriving, and we still have hope for some of the onion, a few tomatoes, and the dill. Little else has made it, but still we speak to the plants, sing to them, pray for them, as our ancestors and our ways teach us to do. Above all else, we are grateful for what their gifts and our work have yielded. Gratitude, after all, is a traditional teaching, too.
Today’s featured works of wearable art embody those gifts and the spirits who give them, as well as the responsibilities they assign to us, from the sacred to the very ordinary but all essential to our ways. Both of these works come from The Coiled Power Collections in the Bracelets Gallery here on the site. the first is a favorite of long standing, one in the reds and golds of summer petals and autumn leaves alike, one wrought in the spiraling embodiment of all that is sacred about the hoop. From its description:
Ceremony Coil Bracelet
We seek truth through prayer, through petitioning the spirits in the sacred fire of ceremony. Wings honors the fire, its purpose and effects, in this spiraling coil of flame. Manifest in the colors of the fire itself, it begins, small and red, with tiny freeform nuggets of angelskin branch coral that extend into larger freeform nuggets of highly polished carnelian. As the flames coalesce in color and intensity, they become spheres of chatoyant red tiger’s eye growing into the diffuse maroon and gold shades of mookaite. The fire concentrates into golden shades, freeform amber nuggets followed by luminous yellow tiger’s eye spheres, finally crystallizing into the pure gold fire of citrine. Memory wire expands and contracts to fit nearly any wrist. Designed jointly by Wings and Aji.
Memory wire; angelskin coral; carnelian; mookaite; amber; tiger’s eye; citrine
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
If the gold of these jewels resembles both squash blossom and ambered aspen leaf, the reds are the shades of summer bean blossom and autumn maple.
We used to plant rows and rows of beans, whole plots of pintos and scarlet runner beans and purples and heirloom Native beans. They’re mostly hardy, especially the pintos and our Indigenous heirloom varieties, but this drought has been too much even for them to handle. With no water, very little grows.
And yet, we have hope for next year. it will be an El Niño year, after all, which over the last quarter-century has typically meant more than usual precipitation, heavier rains and snows and thus better growing conditions overall, for our region. Yet even that has not been enough to save the land in recent years, and so we are engaged in a daily fight to perceive such new patterns as may exist and adjust both our efforts and our expectations accordingly.
And while fall may already be here, there is still a winter to get through, a spring to survive, and neither will be easy. now.
The second of today’s featured works speaks to me more of light in those dark days of winter, on into the harsh pale shades and spirits of spring in this place. It, too, pays homage to the reds of the current seasons, their more fragile existence supported by the stronger, older, grayer, darker shades of history and experience. It’s a hoop that connects that which is so ancient as to be timeless, and that which is so young as to be yet unborn, even unconceived, with the entire spectrum of our ways and teachings filling the space between. From its description:
The Ancestors, the Clans, and the Gifts of the Spirits Coil Bracelet
The ancestors, the clans, and the gifts of the spirits are all sources of the truth of our existence. With this coil, Wings pays homage to these building blocks of not only our cultures and lifeways but our very selves, wrought in a continuous circle of ancient materials woven with the reds of identity and blood. At either end are small polished nuggets of rhodochrosite, warm pale rose and pearlescent with matrix. They extend into lengths of fiery chatoyant red tiger’s eye, round orbs seemingly lit with the light of the stars, infused with the deep reds of ancestry and history. The clans are represented by earthy doughnut-shaped rondels of fossilized dinosaur bone, impossibly old and ethereally beautiful. At the center lie fourteen spheres, large mookaite beads in the reds of our blood and the golds of earth and light of the indescribable translucent shades of the spirits and the blessings they bestow daily. Memory wire expands and contracts to fit nearly any wrist. Designed jointly by Wings and Aji.
Memory wire; rhodochrosite; red tiger’s eye; fossilized dinosaur bone; mookaite
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
In our way, both the ancestors and the clans are gifts of the spirits: family and societal histories and structures and futures that give order and form and shape to our world. They are integral, constituent parts of our cosmologies that tell us who we are as people, show us place in the universe, and give us the experiential perspective needed to survive whatever hardships may come.
In no small part, that perspective is one of history, and one of prophecy, too: This is not the first time our peoples have encountered such dangers, and the prophets of our ancestors foretold the coming of these days. But they foretold, too, of better summers to come, provided we do our parts: summers lush and green, filled with sun and the sweet red juice of ripe wild strawberries, days of abundance and lives lived well.
This one image, as much and perhaps more than any other from this series and the year it was taken, seems to me to be both prophecy and promise: a glimpse into the past, our recent past when this season blessed us, and a glimpse into the future, too, and what can be again.
It involves the work, of course, and there will be hard days yet to come, hard months and seasons and years, too. but our work, and our ways, are never for us alone. They are always a remembering, an honoring of the ancestors, of their hopes and dreams and stark realities, gifts that give us the means, and the justification, for faith in the fruits of an Indigenous future.
And that is an abundant cosmology indeed.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
