These days, colonial methods of reckoning time notwithstanding, I am up again with the dawn. It’s a relief to feel body and mind find their rhythms again, in harmony with a spirit that seeks every day to see the sun rise. And despite those artificial ways of counting the hours that the world calls “Daylight Savings Time,” Father Sun and Mother Earth follow their own path, one that these days is already edged with the markers of autumn more than of summer.
Outside the window, the world glows: more gold than green now, a product of particulate haze in the rays of a sharply angled sun, but also of drought and a drastically altered climate that brings us yellowing leaves with the summer solstice now. It is a beautiful day, but very different from what this small corner of the world has traditionally known at this time of year.
Here at Red Willow, much else is different this year, too. In an ordinary year, this time would be a frenzy of activity, working to beat the calendar: refacing of the old homes and the church in the village, working on traditional projects preparatory to the annual feast at September’s end; and before then, ceremony, an annual observance that brings the word “path” into real, tangible form.
The pandemic has changed that. Internal observances proceed as judged safe, but so far, at least, the outside world will remain outside this year. Conditions now evoke ancestral memories of early resistance, when song and drum and dance were turned to purposes of protection and healing, times that both fulfilled the prophets’ predictions and foretold those we live today.
This is an ancient land, one in which the mountains were born of and witnessed creation itself. Our ways of reckoning time are barely a moment in their cosmologies. They know well the cycles and circles of life, loops in which we find ourselves caught up, tangled and ensnared, preoccupied with the momentary while failing to see how we are held safely in the embrace both of history and of the generations yet unborn.
Too much focus on stitches and steps robs us of the gift of seeing the beauty of the whole. But what belonged to old bones are now become the headdress, the drum, the art, the tools of song and the regalia of ceremony, of the horn and the shell and the dance around the hoop.
Today’s imagery speaks of such matters, and reminds us that time and weather and age may alter the appearance, but they do not destroy the animating spirit. And given the imagery, there could only be one piece of silverwork to accompany it today.
The photo above was taken, if memory serves, on an afternoon in 2008. For much of the time we had the gallery, the buffalo skull welcomed people at the door. It’s been a part of Wings private collection for decades now, hand-painted in a radiant pattern of concentric hoops. As such items go, it was a flawless piece then, not a crack or a break anywhere on its fragile surface.
And it was, perhaps, the model for the focal element of what would ultimately become today’s featured work, an extraordinary silver masterwork of traditional motifs and meaning, one similarly manifest as horn and shell and hoop and prophecy fulfilled of an earth rising and renewed. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Earth Rising Cuff Bracelet
It is a time of elemental change, Earth rising to link past and present and future in a sacred hoop of protection and survival. Wings links them in more tangible ways with this spectacularly complex cuff, one that fuses one of his very early pieces into a whole new work that honors elemental powers, sacred numbers, and ancient spirits. It begins with a solid sterling silver cuff, scored freehand into eight separate lines, the number of the cardinal and ordinal directions. At either end, a sterling silver overlay in the shape of Grandmother Turtle, she who holds the world on her back, climbs steadily upward. Each turtle is cut, freehand, with a tiny jeweler’s saw, articulated head, legs, and tail each stamped with traditional patterns to form scales and provide texture and dimensionality. Each turtle’s shell is gently scalloped with stampwork around the edge, a Morning Star stretched across the shell’s center. Wings brought old to new and melded them together at the top of the cuff with the addition of one of his very early pieces from his personal collection: a hat pin in the form of a medicine shield that doubles as a medicine wheel, cut freehand and centered by Buffalo’s skull, our Elder Brother of the Earth. The horizontal spokes of the medicine shield are sculpted and stamped in the shape of a ceremonial pipe, eagle feathers suspended at either end. The entire wheel is overlaid onto a backing of hand-hammered sterling silver. Cuff band is 7″ long by roughly 1-1/8″ across; turtle overlays are 1-1/4″ long by 15/16″ across at the widest point; buffalo medicine wheel overlay is 1-7/16″ high by 1-3/8″ across at the widest point (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver
$1,900 + shipping, handling, and insurance
At various points over the years, the skull was retrieved from the gallery and hung on a section of fence here at home. This was taken on a summer’s morning, capturing its spirit overlooking our garden — watchful, protective, encouraging too.
At this point, the skull was still whole, of perhaps a bit more weathered by the forces of day and night and weather. In its place overlooking the corn and beans and squash, it evoked the nurturing spirits of summer, of those associated with the rains and the waters. Here, that means dragonflies and thunderbirds and the occasional turtle, too — turtles whose shells, like dried gourds harvested from the gardens, can be used for rattles in the dance.
And they put in an appearance on today’s featured work: turtles, cut freehand, heads and tails and limbs texturized, shell hand-stamped in a radiant Morning Star motif, overlaid atop the band on either side to embrace the buffalo shield at its center, itself a masterwork of saw-work and stampwork and overlay techniques that create a layered and beautifully complex work of traditional symbolism and extraordinary power.
But time and weather perform their work, and little save the spirits themselves can resist it. Over time, the painted hoops on the skull faded; so, too, did the rich color of the horns. Someone knocked it off its hook outside the gallery, and the nasal bones, always fragile and only delicately attached, broke off.
Wings glued them back together, but of course, it was never quite the same. The adhesive, transparent and invisible when applied, discolors over time, making the break all the more visible. In that way, it’s much like us: weathered by time and age, laugh lines turned to wrinkles that furrow face and brow.
What we forget is that it doesn’t change who we are.
Yes, in this image, the buffalo skull has aged significantly. So, too, have the day and the year in which it was taken: Wings captured that shot at day’s end, in autumn some half-dozen or so years ago. The golden light is intense, its angle deep and long and sharp, casting a shadow far larger than the object itself.
And so it is with age and time and life itself, with the traditions held in memory and the ceremonies unheld today. The shadows they cast now seem large, and the are, but it’s all the better to hold the powerful spirits that animate them.
The horn and the shell are the trappings, the tools. It is the dance around the hoop that matters, and it is still ongoing.
~ 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.
