We had to drive south this morning for an appointment. It’s always a beautiful journey down the Gorge, never he same twice, but this time, truth be told? It hurt our hearts.
The Great River is at what seems to us to be an all-time low . . . at least for the last 1,200 years or more. We have never seen so much visible weathered rock, such giant sandbars, so much riverbed silt visible from above, so much algae greening the water away from its usual teal blue shades.
And we’ve never seen so many invading colonizers actively harming it as we have this year. Just as on our last trip down, some twenty rafts full of invaders, not a mask visible among them and probably not a vaccination, either, churning the silt and chasing all the wild creatures from their watershed homes while running their giant inflatable beasts aground on rocks rising from a mid-river flow that’s all shallows now.
There is no medicine there now. The best we can hope for is a measure of healing when winter comes.
We returned home just in time for the gathering storm to break all around us: lightning and thunder, wind and rain, all driven at gale force beneath a low and blackened sky. Now that is medicine, and a great gift too, the one thing land and water alike here need most.
Well, that and to be left alone.
There’s precious little chance of that in this colonial culture.
At Red Willow, the land has always had its stewardship from those who belong to it, but colonialism is battering down the doors anew here even as a climate-change-battered earth threatens to break apart beneath the blows. The spirit of this place has always been one of sharp edges that serve to protect the sacred, but the outer world would sand them all off in hopes of plundering and profiteering from what is not its to know, much less to own. But the land, to a degree, still protects itself, and most of the outside world is ill-prepared, in the end, to engage it.
This is a place where the medicine grows, medicine older than time.
And the many kinds of medicine that grow here make us blessed indeed. Some of it is rarer now, particularly the First Medicine: water, scarce on the ground or from the sky. Some of it is metaphorical, found in the stark beauty of the landscape and the magic of the light. But some of it is literal indeed, the gift of the plant spirits, and of the creator spirits and the elemental nurturing forces, and these manifest in a kaleidoscopic diversity of form and shape and shade.
On the way down this morning, we noticed the first few wild sunflowers dotting the roadside here and there. There are wild golds and whites all over the fields, accented here and there with patches of thistle and clover in shades that range from white to pink to magenta to lilac to violet to cornflower. And of course, this is also the season when a medicine common to so many of our peoples on this land mass is in full final flower, the one that, after a fashion, bears our collective name: Indian paintbrush.
It’s a plant of extraordinarily simple beauty and even more extraordinary power, manifest in colors that range from white to yellow to coral and blood red and beyond: one used as pigment, for art, and for the art of war; one used as adornment, invoking all the healing powers of beauty; and one used as medicine in the literal sense, in teas and poultices and every conceivable form. The most common color found here is the coral variety, petals like brilliant flames rising from summer meadows to dance, and perhaps it’s fitting, given that when the land of this broader region was born of the waters, its scape formed in some places atop shell mounds rife with banks of now-fossilized coral.
It’s a motif that repeats throughout today’s post, in the four photographic images as well as the three representations of the one work of wearable art featured here today. The photo above dates back, if memory serves, to 2010 or earlier, one Wings captured in June of that year, I believe. During the early weeks of that summer, he shot several images of various plant spirits, from local wildflowers to the scarlet blossoms of the prickly pear to the cactus that is a sacred medicine, one whose use outside is not permitted.
And then there was the Indian paintbrush.
He knows that I love it, with its fiery fragility, and that it’s a medicine important to my own people, as well. I was away then, caring for an ill relative in a place where there was none to be found, and he sent me the photo via e-mail and some of the blossoms via snail mail. [In those days, mail took only a day or two; now, it’s unlikely that the plant would have made the journey safely.]
At that time, forcibly isolated as I was, it seemed the greatest of gifts, one to reconnect me with both of my homes — this home, and the lands of birth. It’s a gift embodied in today’s featured work, an extraordinary traditional cuff in sterling silver and coral: actual coral, the cabochons in the exact same soft orange-red shade as the medicine plant’s petals.
I wanted to show you the image of the cuff’s upper surface first, to display the full effect of the three large coral cabochons dancing across the stamped silver band. But I’ll reserve the description for one of the images of it featured below, because here I wanted to juxtapose the colors and textures with those of the plant in the wild.
The photo of the plant at the top of this post is one he shot at the roadside. We get a scattering of cactus blossoms and wildflowers and medicine plants along the highway here amid the chamisa and sage, plants hardy, or perhaps just lucky, enough to withstand the onslaught of pollution and exhaust. It’s rare to see one of that size by the roadside, though; the pollution tends to stunt their growth, so this one was spectacular indeed.
A couple of years later, though, on a different road into the Pueblo, he captured this shot:
This one shows what Indian paintbrush truly looks like in the wild, far enough removed from much human habitation to interfere with its flowering and growth. Where the one above was low, close to the ground, incapable of growing much taller, these are plants that flower with abandon, reaching heights to rival the chamisa and dancing like flames in the wind and light.
And they, along with the view immediately below of today’s featured work of wearable art, show how this silverwork piece came so naturally by its name. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Indian Paintbrush Cuff Bracelet
The first soft weeks of summer are when the red medicine flowers: Indian paintbrush, the crimson petals of desert and prairie. In a week when they are in full flower, Wings honors their color and medicine, the water and light that calls them from the earth, with this heavy silver cuff set with fiery coral. The band is nine-gauge sterling silver, slender yet solid and substantial, its entire surface chased with deep, heavy, graceful freehand stampwork. Down the center, two rows of curving lines arc in and out like the path of the Great River, the silver between as clear and luminous as the Río’s surface. From either edge up to each flowing line, the band is texturized with deep single stamps, scores of strikes of the jeweler’s hammer rippling its surface. Between each break in the water’s path, paired flowers rise from either edge, stems curving and petals dancing in the light. Across the top three round, highly-domed, bezel-set, richly textured cabochons of natural sponge coral evoke all the shades of the flowers that serve as one of our most ancient Indigenous medicines. At either end of the band, paired wildflowers dance in the embrace of deeply textured earth. The band is 6″ long by 3/8″ across; the coral cabochons are each 1/4″ across (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; sponge coral
$1,500 + shipping, handing, and insurance
The coral cabochons, of course, are the coral petals; the stalks swaying in the summer breeze are scattered along the band, stamped and texturized entirely freehand, with graceful, highly polished negative space to embody earth and light.
Much like the second photo from that same day in 2012, when he captured a single high set of stalks in the foreground, leaving a small new equine spirit the focus of the shot. The foal’s own coat, in certain lights, took on a similarly reddish tinge.
This is a horse culture, and their presence, too, is a kind of medicine. They make some aspects of the sacred possible in a landscape so often inhospitable to human travel, and of course, as is the case all over this land mass, they have ancestors indigenous to these lands, too. Our peoples and these elegant beings traveled together millennia before the first product of European equine bloodlines set an invading foot upon these shores, and their descendants know us now.
This foal’s appaloosa back end, though, reminds me of the back ends of today’s featured work: narrow, graceful, shaped with flowing lines and speckled with texturizing color.
This is an old traditional-style work — heavy nine-gauge silver cut to size and gently shaped, the simplest of patterns given a high polish and evoking the medicines of water, light, and plant life, and the bold cabochons of a natural material, pitted and textured and alive with inner fire, glowing like the petals that are the piece’s namesake.
Petals found dancing in the last photo, just beyond the tiny new horse.
Indian paintbrush is a medicine of many names, depending on where it grows and how it’s used and who it is who’s using it. Our languages are beautifully varied, mostly built around what things do rather than how they are superficially perceived, and that makes them more powerfully accurate than colonial languages will ever be.
We are fortunate indeed to have this be a place where it thrives, and where the small equine spirits do, too.
This is a place where the medicine grows, and it is our job to protect it, now more than ever.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
