I said yesterday that love is a ladder. It’s an unlikely symbol of romance, true — to most people, it probably evokes thoughts of hard labor more than love.
But here, it is a part of the iconography of place and people, a signifier of far more than the occasional chore.
Indigenous cultures are inherently communal. It’s natural among small populations, where individual survival depends as much on collective cooperation as it does on personal courage and strength. The dominant culture here has long loved deriding Hillary Rodham Clinton’s invocation, a generation ago, of the indigenous African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child,” but part of the reaction is the guilty recognition of its accuracy, something this country’s institutional framework has always openly rejected. But our peoples have always known its essential truth: that pooled talents and shared resources ensure that all survive, and thrive.
It’s a lesson older than time, one that the spirits taught.
In the old stories, it crosses lines of species and spirits: Witness how what the world now calls the United States came, millennia ago, to be known as Turtle Island. In that story, the First People emerged — one might even say they climbed a ladder, however metaphorical — into the light of this world, on the surface of the waters. But they could not stay afloat and live, and so the spirits turned to the animals for help. After much trial and error by many proud creatures, it was Grandmother Turtle who brought her unique abilities to the circle: She held the First People on the hard shell of her back, above the waters, so that they might have a land in the light to call home.
The old stories are also rife with warnings and lessons about what happens when we fail to work together, to share both labor and resources alike. Coyote is often the butt of such seemingly joking tales, as is Spider; both are considered Tricksters in a variety of tribal traditions, and both invest much time and effort in getting away with the goods without proffering the labor required, only to find that their schemes have backfired, usually in fairly spectacular fashion.
But on a more individual level, humans are naturally programmed to seek companionship — not merely of the communal variety, nor of basic kinship, but of something more. It’s not true of everyone, of course, but as a general principle, humans are programmed to seek love.
It’s not just us, however. You see it elsewhere in the animal world: species that are monogamous, whether serially or for life. Among the latter, when one of a mated pair dies, the survivor’s grief is often terrible. We have a Cooper’s hawk who stays with us intermittently throughout the year. She lost her mate to a much larger raptor when they were both barely adults; she has never, so far as we can tell, sought another. She came to us, searching for him, and we showed her as best we could that we had cared for him and sent him on his way. Since then, she returns to us every year, always alone.
But let’s return to those for whom this day in particular resonance. It’s not, historically, a part of our cultures, of course, this day; rather, it’s another colonial artifact that has found a foothold. These days, it has some (a lot of) help from pop culture, of course; Valentine’s Day is a commercial moneymaker. And like so many of the holidays of the dominant culture, its modern celebration bears little relationship to its more ancient roots.
I’ve written about those roots here before, at this time last year. Then, I was writing in the context of the heart as symbol and signifier:
[I]t’s a day now widely derided as a “Hallmark holiday,” with its contemporary emphasis on transactional romance: hearts and flowers and boxes of candy, proposals and rings as evidence of “love.” Of course, as with most such holidays, its roots go far deeper, and are frankly far less pleasant than modern understandings indicate. In the earliest years of its existence, the connection to romantic love was attenuated, perhaps best understood as a side effect; its deepest meaning had to do with martyrdom and murder of a distinctly political sort.
But what we now call Western culture is nothing if not “romantic” in the most immature senses of that word, and so the day has been sanitized, scrubbed of its original identity rooted firmly in religious persecution and political assassination, and instead the focus has been shifted, whole and entire, to a side aspect of the Roman religious martyrs who gave the day its name. The first, Valentine of Rome, was alleged to have presided over marriages between early Christians, a practice forbidden by the Roman Empire. The stories are thought to be largely apocryphal — if any were true, they are at best unprovable at this late date. The second eventual St. Valentine to whom the day’s name is attributed was Valentine of Terni, who was likewise martyred by the Roman government.[Wikipedia also makes reference to a third such St. Valentine, about whom it says virtually nothing is known beyond the fact that he lived out his religious mission in Africa; it’s not lost on me that his African work is perhaps the most likely explanation from his omission from more detailed records of the day.]
Wikipedia also credits the first real popular-culture link between the day of St. Valentine the Martyr and notions of romantic love to Chaucer. Again, the genesis of the connection should be unsurprising, given the cultural emphasis that medieval European societies placed upon romantic notions of all sorts. It was the time of Arthurian legend, when the word “court” took on multiple layers of meaning, when chivalry was regarded as necessary to combine with bravery to create “honor,” men’s highest virtue, and when the feminine virtue of maidenliness required women to manifest damsel-in-distress helplessness. After all, how could a “courtly” man enact his sense of chivalry without a maiden to rescue?
Whatever the day’s bloody and persecutorial root, it is now firmly entrenched in Western society’s collective mind as a day of romance, of love, of flowers, . . . and of hearts. Hearts paired and shared, particularly.
But medieval Europe was not the only ethnic and cultural group to place such symbolic primacy on the notion of the heart as the human embodiment of love. Some aspects of humanity seem to be largely universal: not merely the mind’s seeking of patterns to explain the world in symbolic terms, but often, too, the very patterns it identifies. The centrality of the heart to humanity’s existence seems to be one such motif.
While the various Saints Valentine were busy being martyred for their beliefs and behaviors (or, at the very least, for the political inconveniences they presented to the rulers of the day), on this continent, half a world away, the indigenous populations were busy going about their own lives in very different ways. This would be, of course, the half of the world that medieval Europe’s “wise men” insisted did not exist, and therefore, peoples who they would not have believed existed, either. Nonetheless, our ancestors managed both to exist and to build complex cultures and histories and lines of descent in the face of such affirmed nonexistence.
And for many of them, the importance of the heart was both recognized in eminently practical terms and expressed in symbolic ways.
It is true that, in most historical Native art, the heart motif as we have come to understand its shape and expression does not appear frequently. It doesn’t mean, however, that it’s not there.
Whatever the levels of distress inflicted upon our women from without, we are far from helpless.
It’s why Wings gives primacy to the heart motif in his most deeply personal signature series, the Warrior Woman. The one shown here is my own, in which the heart is a repeating motif, one who carries a jewel of deepest red, a tribute to the color of our people.
Of course, the heart symbol has long been one of Wings’s personal favorites. He uses it in necklaces, earrings, bracelets, belts. Sometimes it makes its way into an entry in another of his signature series, as with the necklace shown above: part of his longstanding collection entitled The Mona Lisa On the Rio Grande.
Sometimes it’s a freestanding, one-of-a-kind work, like the one from last week’s #ThrowbackThursday post (and one that resides in my personal collection):
And sometimes, it’s a more subtle evocation of both symbol and substance, like one of his most recent pairs of earrings:
Of course, jewelry is far from the only Native art form to utilize the imagery of love, or even of hearts.
Music has long been a part of our peoples’ rituals of romance, from courting flutes to wedding songs. One of the early gifts I gave to Wings was a crane courting flute, designed by a Comanche artist of superb talent and heritage, to fill a conspicuous absence in his rather extensive collection of Native flutes. And at public events, one way for a suitor to announce his (or, increasingly today, her) love for another is with a hand drum song. I’ve written about such songs here before:
With regard to public events, one example is a practice known as hand-drum singing, a popular (and contested) event at many powwows. Unlike the typical traditional use of hand drums here, hand-drum singing of this sort usually involves one person at a time (although occasionally some tribal nations field hand-drum groups). Each person rises in succession to sing in a combination of vocables and words in verses of their own composition, while playing the hand drum as his or her own accompaniment. There was a time when such events were effectively restricted to men, but in recent decades, women of some nations have begun participating, and are often some of the most skilled such singers in attendance. Hand-drum songs are a favorite venue for the singing of love songs; young people will often compose them to send a public message of sorts to a romantic interest.
Hand drums are most frequently round, but in recent years especially, it’s become popular to design them in other shapes: hexagonal, octagonal, or, like the one shown above, heart-shaped. The heart-shaped hand drums seem especially well suited to love songs, for obvious reasons, although some simply like the shape and appearance and use them for any sort of hand drum song. [There is also another context in which music relates to love at such events: social dances like the Forty-Nine, which have become known for the opportunity they provide to seek romance before the powwow’s end.]
Lovers are also popular as model and muse for Native artists in other genres. Taos Pueblo is perhaps most famed for its pottery, a spare and elegant form of traditional ware made of micaceous clay. Most of the Pueblo’s potters rarely add much in the way of adornment — etching and incising are relatively rare, and painting is even moreso — but sculpting figurative works from the clay is sometimes popular. Occasionally, figurative works will arise straight from the walls of a pot itself:
The small spirit cup above is by Jessie Marcus; the spirit mugs and bowls are her trademark, although she creates other works, too. She crafts them in a mostly traditional shape, with one significant difference: On one side of the lip, she summons human or other figures who are one with the pot, yet with fully articulated identities. Examples include everything from elders (male or female) to singers to Buffalo Dancers to horses. Occasionally, she’ll coax two separate figures from the rim, such as a mother and child . . . or the lovers shown above, the man with long hair accented with an eagle feather, the woman with bangs and her locks bound up in the traditional bun.
Of course, once in a while, an clay artist will choose to create a work that is entirely figurative, with no pot of any sort a part of the piece:
Such was the case with the wedding pair shown above, a masterwork by Wings’s aunt, Juanita Suazo DuBray. Her specialty has always been her trademark corn pots, with one or more ears of corn sculpted in relief on the pots’ surfaces. But she has long created figurative works such as storytellers too, virtually always with the ear of corn present in some way, even if only subtly.
And then there was this one.
It looks at first glance a bit like a vase, but it’s not. It was simply a wedding pair, bride and groom in the finest clothing. and wrapped in the traditional wedding blanket . . . adorned with four ears of corn. The blanket (even without the corn as accent) symbolizes the couple’s union, and the starting of their new joint life together. For a young couple just embarking on their married life together, particularly a couple planning a family, it would have made a perfect gift, with the corn’s symbolism of fertility and abundance.
Speaking of weddings and clay, Pueblo peoples are known for a specific type of pottery related to matrimony: the wedding vase.
Weddings vases are traditional among here at Red Willow, but also among the other Pueblo peoples, and among other indigenous peoples across Turtle Island, as well. It’s easy to see why: The concept of a single vessel with two spouts, from which bride and groom both drink, is perhaps as perfect a manifestation of the symbolism of marriage as it’s possible to find. While some cultures (including, traditionally, the dominant culture) have long focused on the religious aspects of two becoming one, such conceptions often function effectively as vehicles for erasure, loss of personal autonomy and sovereignty and identity, and even abuse. The wedding vase, on the other hand, embodies both conceptualizations of married identity: of two united as and even becoming one, yet each also whole and independent.
It functions in another way, too.
One of the most salient aspects of marriage, from an indigenous perspective, is its potential for magnifying that which is good, both in act and in effect. And the wedding vase is a perfect example of the way in which we are often stronger, better, and more effective together. A single vase quenches the thirst of both bride and groom, allowing them to share efficiently and, yes, very effectively. As the title of today’s post suggests, marriage is love paired, love squared: Love is power’s exponent, truly greater than the sum of its parts.
Wedding vases are, perhaps surprisingly, not restricted to pottery, however. In recent years, Wings has begun fabricating miniature versions from sterling silver. The one shown above was entitled Love Grows, and became a gift to honor the wedding anniversary of some much-loved friends.
But I want to return, just for a moment, to the notion of the ladder.
Sometimes, love is emergence: out of the dark and the shadows, into the light.
Sometimes, it’s taking a chance, and a further step.
Sometimes, love is coming together to follow the light.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2017; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
