They say there is water on the moon.
Oh, it’s not much, as such things go here on Earth: Most of her surface is a desert that makes our climate here seem positively tropical by comparison; such accumulated water as exists is mostly concentrated at her poles. But water has always seemed to me to be a mostly feminine element, and so, too, is our source of light in the dark hours.
Much of what is out there, free-floating, and labeled as “Native wisdom” is in fact wholly fabricated, invented, mostly over the course of the last century, by colonial personalities with no connection to our hundreds of indigenous identities, cultures, languages, and ways. And it’s a one-hundred-percent safe bet, a literal certainty, that anything — anything at all — given a blanket label of “Native” or “Indian” simply wrong. Why? Because there is no such thing as “Native American” anything; there are only the hundreds (historically, thousands) of variable indigenous cultures and identities.
So when someone says to you, “The Native Americans . . .,” you know immediately that you can safely discard all that follows.
I’m reminded anew of this right now, with tonight’s full moon and with other symbols of the current season — water, the rains, the wild creatures emerging anew into the warmer air. For example, snakes.
Snake appeared in Wings’s latest work, released only two days ago. In that incarnation, he assumed the powerful identity of the Water Serpent, a spirit being that some of the peoples in this broader region call Avanyu. He has other names, too, and other incarnations. In some cultures in this area, Snake in all his forms is to be abjured — not for any reason to do with the Christianity’s colonizing connections and contexts, but because snakes are taboo in their culture (and, of course, for very sound reasons; among others, have you ever met a rattler in search of food?). In my own culture, snakes play variable roles and assume varied forms, from the rattlers whose rattlers lend their names and works to Medicine to our own version of the Water Serpent, which can be beneficial but should not be dismissed as benign.
Here in the place of the Red Willow, the Water Serpent is associated with rain, and snakes generally with prosperity . . . but no one should mistake such symbolism for the notion that the people are unaware of the dangers posed by the prairie rattlers that often surface in the fields here in the spring.
Still, the serpent’s sinuous shape is unmistakable in the Native art of this area, both ancient and modern. Wings has long used it to great and powerful effect in his signature series, the Warrior Woman: a female, and distinctly feminine, warrior of great heart and strong spirit who holds the moon in its curving crescent phase in her left hand even as she carries the gently undulating form of Snake over her right shoulder. It’s an invocation of power, of feminine abundance and prosperity held close.
Taken together, they are loosely representative of the rain, of the waters, of life itself.
Individually, much of the same might be said of our Grandmother herself, the Moon.
The dominant culture tends to confuse concepts of power for prosperity, just as they mistake authority for power and prosperity with monetary wealth. By the same frame of reference, they misunderstand the ways in our peoples comprehend the Feminine, both the identities and the powers ascribed to it and the ways and means, the faces and places, in which it manifests.
It’s not at all unusual to find, in cultures the world over, the association of the moon with womanhood. The cynical part of me knows full well that a major factor in this conceptualization is one that defines (and demands) power as the province of manhood, of concepts of maleness and constructs of masculinity — and so the Sun must be the Father, the parent, the patriarch, the source of authority, the default. By the same token, it becomes acceptable to ascribe female powers to the Moon, she of the lesser, merely reflected light — lesser power safely neutered, of course, by placing her past what society regards as her prime, menopausal and therefore no threat to male primacy, however much of her face she chooses to show at any given moment.
It is this same cosmological disjunct that led the dominant culture, some years ago, to fire missiles, weapons of mass destruction, at her face, upon her body, into her spirit, to see what would happen. “For science.” And it was our understanding of our cosmos, of her place in it and ours too, that then led our women to pray for her safety and well-being, for her healing and our forgiveness.
And it is true that many (perhaps most?) of our cultures regard her as feminine, too, and even as a grandmother. But in our way, grandmothers are no mere reflected and subordinate lights. Even in the most patriarchal of indigenous societies, attaining grandmother status confers authority, respect, honor, and great (and sometimes even fearsome) power. Just as the moon shines her light on the darkest corners of our world, so, too, Native grandmothers are able to speak truths to and about that which some would always prefer to keep well hidden. In some of our peoples’ traditional ways, the word for ‘beauty” is measured by the lined faces of aging women, and their wrinkles are its standard — because it is an understanding of “beauty” that reveres great and long experience and the wisdom that comes with it.
Perhaps such understandings find commonality with the moon’s face, too: It is, after all, pitted, cratered, lined and spotted and truly ancient in character.
Grandmother sees that which we will never perceive, and does so over and over and over again. The old adage says that there is nothing new under the sun, but the same could just as easily and accurately be said of the moon — and more, she sees both that which thrives in light of day and that which prospers in the dark.
We tend to think of her in slivers and slices, her identity cut into bits and pieces for consumption as we perceive her (and small wonder, then, that women identify with her): waxing or waning; crescent, horned, half-moon, three-quarter; the flat two-dimensionality of our view of her as full; the utter invisibility, the erasure, we ascribe to her as new.
But in fact, it matters not what our weak senses are able to perceive. We may see only a sliver of her face, or most of it in the barest of profiles, but what remains hidden to us looks down upon our world nonetheless. And what we arrogantly presume to call full, what we regard as her whole self? Well, that’s only one side of her, too.
It is that side she will show to us tonight, the one we call full but remains really only a glimpse of her as she really is, whole and entire and utterly three-dimensional, possessed of breadth and depth and distance and the gifts that come with age beyond our reckoning.
On this night in this place, we may not see her rise at all: A thin veil of gray clouds covers the sky now, likely low enough and late enough to conceal her face until she sits high in the heavens, but we know that she will be with us all the same. In lands some small distance hence, they will feel her call the tides; in others, her glow will be stern and icy cold. Here at Red Willow, even veiled, she will lend shimmer to the still-damp earth and light to a land still overgrown by winter. She is here, with truth and life and the gifts that are uniquely hers to give, whether we see her clearly or not.
She is the Eternal Grandmother, the one who keeps the watch in the darkest hours, the one who shines her light on the darkest corners of that which some would hide. She is the one with the power to speak truth to day and night.
~ Aji
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