The period that much of the outside world knows as Lent has arrived in this place on unseasonably warm winds. It feels not like winter’s downward slope, but rather, the ascent of spring’s own hill. The wild creatures are unsure what to make of it all, and struggling to find their footing in this new world whose patterns are continually upended by climate change.
In our household, we no longer mark Easter in the accepted sense, much less the strictures of the Lenten period. Still, this week in particular, with its themes of celebration and feasting in advance of repentance and fasting, echoes traditions and practices of indigenous cultures the world over. So, too, the fertility imagery that accompanies the end of the Lenten period: Native cultures in what we now call the Americas have, since time immemorial, celebrated markers of life, both new and renewed, in culturally specific ways. In the centuries since contact, they have also merged with other cultural traditions in certain specific ways, both invading ones and those that, like our own, the invaders sought to suppress.
The racism that formed the very foundation upon which this dominant culture was constructed, stone by stone and brick by brick, remains viral half a millennium later. It infects everything . . . and everyone. No one is immune, individually or as part of a larger culturally-identified group, and it shades the ways in which we view the world around us, even when we don’t recognize it. Where we have opportunities to seek and build on solidarity, we too often build walls instead. This week has provided too many examples.
Mardi Gras revelers celebrated Fat Tuesday two short days ago, preparatory to the asceticism of Ash Wednesday and the period of voluntary abstinence that fills the weeks between it and Easter. In the Caribbean and in Central and South America (as well as parts of Mexico, and, indeed, much of the rest of the world, including parts of Africa), what New Orleans calls Mardi Gras is there known as Carnivál. There are differences, of course, in how various cultures celebrate it, but the underlying themes are the same. In Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America, many revelers dress in elaborate regalia that includes beads and feathers and greatly resembles the dress regalia of many North American indigenous nations.
This is not appropriation.
Wings has been outspoken on the subject of the appropriation of our peoples’ cultures and imagery and identities (as have I). Neither us has the slightest tolerance for redface. But lately, we’re seeing inaccurate charges of redface and racism leveled at Carnivál participants — people who are indigenous to the very cultures, plural, their celebratory regalia represents.
Here in North America, it’s easy to forget that on this side of the globe there are worlds beyond our own that have held their own indigenous populations as long as ours. Indigenous populations, I might add, who are ethnically related to us — who are family. Carnivál represents, as do many of our own dances and feast days here in the north (many of which are, ironically, overtly named for Christian saints), a celebration of existential triumph, of the ability to assimilate just enough to use as cover the motifs of the invader, while maintaining the integrity of the old ways beneath and within.
This is not appropriation.
New Orleans presents a harder case in the form of the Mardi Gras Indians, a group of krewes that call themselves “tribes” and whose members dress in elaborate regalia evocative mostly of northern Native nations. They are exclusively African American in membership, although a good percentage can directly trace Afroindigenous ancestry, and the blood and cultures and traditions of the original nations of the region beat strong in their veins. Part of the controversy lies in the roots of their existence.
The go-to excuse for appropriators, whether the fraudulent “shaman” types or the minstrels who serve as sports mascots, is invariably: “But I’m honoring you!” I’m not even going to begin to dissect all that’s wrong with that statement here; I’ve done it many times over the course of my life, and all I will say here is that the layers of racism that go into it are truly extraordinary (and mostly ignored by those who witness it). Suffice to say that stealing someone’s imagery and identity is never an “honor.” But one of the avowed purposes of the Mardi Gras Indians’ very existence is to “honor” the region’s ancestral Native population. And in this instance, there is truth to it.
The very existence of the Mardi Gras Indians springs from disparate roots: It derives, in part, from some of the old so-called “Wild West Shows” of the late 19th Century. New Orleans’s celebratory and exhibitionist character was fertile ground for such shows, and its longstanding mix of ethnicities and cultures perhaps made the general populace as a whole more receptive to notions (however often misguided) of indigeneity. A the time, regiments of Buffalo Soldiers were returning home and in need of employment. And while those soldiers had been used explicitly by the American government as a tool of genocide against the indigenous populations, a deep and abiding respect had arisen among many on both sides of that line: Native warriors and Black soldiers alike recognized the strength and courage and heart of the other, and honored that even as they were pitted against each other for the benefit of the invading and enslaving culture. Some of these returnees found employment in such shows, and some chose to take on assigned roles as “Black Indians.”
Of course, many of them were already Black Indians. By blood.
And the reasons they took on such roles were varied. Some chose to honor parents and grandparents who were of the southern Native nations. Some chose to honor the Native nations who had given shelter and safety to Black relatives who had escaped slavery (and who often intermarried with members of area tribes). And, of course, there were those who perhaps had no Native blood that they could identify, but who saw it as a way of showing their respect for their former fierce opponents on the battlefield.
Much of what has grown up around the phenomenon of the Mardi Gras Indians smacks of appropriative behaviors. But one thing that is too often missed is the fact that the genesis of it is birthed in blood: not merely blood shed under the artificial terms of Manifest Destiny, but the blood of childbirth, and the blood that runs through the veins of those whose bodies are descended from Red and Black alike. Afroindigineity is real, and over the centuries, it has given rise to thriving, vibrant expansions of culture in this country. Anyone familiar with the cultural markers and expressions of Black life, much less Southern conjuring and hoodoo (and New Orleans is in many ways the womb of both), knows the essential truth of this.
This is not appropriation.
Perhaps ironically (or perhaps not), all of these thoughts have put me in mind of one of Wings’s pieces from a decade ago, one that is wholly, entirely Pueblo in nature and identity: the Ko’ko’pe’li pin pictured above. (Yes, we spell it in the more accurate way, stripping the word of its Anglicization and including the glottal stops that mark its oral expression.)
Ko’ko’pe’li was — is — an exclusively indigenous spirit; more, one exclusive to the peoples of this specific region. He is also a spirit who has been violently appropriated by the invading culture in contemporary terms. You can’t throw a rock in the desert Southwest without hitting something utterly non-Native and commercial that bears his image: T-shirts, coffee mugs, trashcans on the street; you name it, someone has slapped his likeness on it, and just as often, has ordered mass-produced versions of whatever it is from a sweatshop in China or the Philippines or Pakistan. [And to be abundantly clear: This is not a criticism of the people of China or the Philippines or Pakistan, but of the exploitive colonial nature of the dominant culture here that sees fit to exploit cultures not its own on two sides of the world.] The result is that he is seen by the white world as a friendly, welcoming, light-hearted spirit.
He’s not.
Oh, he can embody all of those things: He is, after all, known to some peoples by the name Flute Player. He’s also known as the Water Sprinkler. What he is, perhaps most of all, is a fertility spirit: one to be invoked to ensure an abundant harvest, and one to be appealed to for a successful pregnancy and delivery of a healthy child.
But as with all of the spirit beings, it’s dangerous to impute to him a nature that is too benign.
As a spirit being, he has his own, much broader worldview, his own ordering of priorities, and the extent to which either of those aligns with what humans desire is safest regarded as happy coincidence, not as his existential purpose. He is much more powerful than his tie-dyed appearance on Santa Fe trashcans would suggest, and as always, it is dangerous for mere mortals to play too much with the fire that is spiritual power. He commands respect in the ways of the peoples to whose universe he belongs.
Wings has not made one of these in at least a decade. I suspect that is, in part, because the spirit’s image has become so appropriated, so commercialized and commodified, that he did not want to seem to feed such dynamics. Still, it’s the sort of work, a tribute to one of the Ancient Ones, that he would create as a commission for someone of like mind as his own (and if you are interested in a unique version, simply inquire via the Contact form at left).
In this instance, the summoning of the spirit was simple in the extreme: the ancient Flute Player cut freehand from sterling silver, all in once piece, from feathered headdress to sash to moccasins. He was, as is his wont, hump-backed in appearance, although it’s not a Quasimodo-like appearance — rather, his shoulders are bent forward as he plays the traditional Native flute and dances to its tune. It is the flute, by the way, that serves as the mechanism for fertility, with all the phallic imagery that that implies: The notes that issue from its lower end represent, variously, the water that nurtures the land or the seeds that take root in it (whether “land” is defined as soil or as a human womb).
Wings kept adornment spare, allowing the spirit to speak mostly for himself. Traditional stampwork in patterns representing running water and raindrops formed the pattern on his sash and wrap; the remainder of his traditional dress, leggings and old-style moccasins, are left to the silver itself to define. An inverted thunderhead symbol accents his flute at the end from which music, water, and seeds issue. His headdress bears a series of tiny circles on each feather, and the headdress is especially interesting to me, because the feathers’ sharp, narrow, blade-like shapes remind me of the sorts of feathers traditionally used in Carnivál headdresses, from birds indigenous to those regions. Nonetheless, the circles do multiple duty, serving here as representations of the spots found on eagle feathers, and symbolizing simultaneously drops of water and life’s sacred hoop. In this land, the latter two are inextricably intertwined.
Finally, he chose a single small round gift of the earth to form the dancing spirit’s head: a garnet cabochon, deep, dark glossy red. It’s the color most associated with our peoples, one still used to this day as a part of a vile and violent slur, and one reclaimed as an expression of identity and intertribal solidarity.
In this week when feast and fasting, celebration and sacrifice, all loom large and side by side in the collective consciousness, this spirit being who embodies the fertility and abundance of the season to come seems especially apt. He is also, as we and the wild creatures with whom we share this land work to navigate our new too-warm and muddy world, a reminder of the blessings to come in this still-new year.
~ Aji
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