We have devoted much of this week to an examination of the role Eagle plays in our peoples’ arts and other cultural traditions. As I noted a couple of days ago, despite the fact that for some tribal nations, other birds play more immediate and influential roles, Eagle has been adopted as a pan-Native symbol of indigenous power and spirit throughout Indian Country. The great raptor has served as model and muse for Wings’s work for decades.
As I also said on Tuesday, while Wings has created a number of works over the years in the full figurative form of Eagle (and in related spirits such as Thunderbird and Water Bird, which are interpreted by some cultures as being spirit forms of the bird), he also launched a signature series of works that paid tribute to the power inherent in Eagle’s feathers. That series began with a small collection of cuff bracelets in the form of paired hand-cut eagle feathers, sometimes centered by a gemstone. He has since expanded the series to include necklaces; in one instance, a barrette; and several pairs of earrings.
Today’s featured work is one of the early examples of the earrings in the series.
Among those early entries, this one perhaps adhered most closely to the design launched with the cuffs. All of them shared a basic design: earring pendants hand-cut into the shape of small, slender eagle feathers, with sections of the feather “barbs” articulated by a very small jeweler’s saw. Wings cuts these freehand, so they are not perfect mirrors of each, but rather, designed to appear as two wholly separate feathers, each with its own identity and individual shape. In the case of these earrings, the feathers did not end at the narrowed base of the shaft, but from there extended upward into to terminate in a circle. This circle would form the backing of the bezel for the stones.
Wings then chose a stamp fashioned in a circle, one that he uses as an image of he sacred hoop in miniature, to create the spots the form the natural mottling effect on a real eagle feather. He scattered these semi-randomly on either side of each feather. Next, he cut two strands of fine half-round sterling silver wire, each far longer than the feather itself. From the tip of each feather, he soldered the wire as an overlay up its entire length to form the “shaft,” leaving the remaining wire hanging loose in the space between the end of the feather and the bezel for the stones. He also added more stampwork in the same tiny hoop pattern along the length of each overlay, providing texture to the shaft. Next, he wrapped the remaining half-round wire three times around the end of the shaft, just below the bezel for the stones, and soldered them securely into place. He oxidized each earring, particularly around the shaft, so that they would retain a slightly aged appearance once buffed — and to give them some of the mottled color variation visible on actual eagle feathers. Finally, he set the sones, a pair of small round onyx cabochons, glossy and deep, like pools of ink. All that remained was to hang them from sterling silver wires.
The effect was that of a pair of miniature prayer feathers: bound around the shaft by silver “yarn,” terminating in the “beadwork” of the onyx gems.
This pair was entitled Black Eagle, a reference to the the color of the onyx cabochons . . . and, I have always suspected, a veiled tribute to a man Wings has always admired, President Barack Obama. “Black Eagle” is, after all, the surname of his traditional name, one given to him when a married couple named Black Eagle, elders in the Crow Nation, adopted him in our way during his first campaign for President in 2008. The other part of the name given to him at that time is Awe Kooda Bilaxpak Kuxshish (his individual, personal name), which is said to translate roughly to “One Who Helps People Throughout the Land.” [I say “is said to translate” because I do not speak the Crow language, and would not be surprised to learn that the meaning reported throughout the country’s non-Native media differed from its actual meaning in material ways, or at least in inflection and effect that may be lost in translation.]
The best of our political leaders are, in fact, less “leaders” per se than they are intermediaries. Their job is to represent the people, not as figureheads, but as those who intercede on the people’s behalf with forces, institutional and otherwise, that are more powerful.
In our cultures, the great raptor intercedes with the spirits on our behalf, serving as a messenger and intermediary who, by way of his own feathers, carries our prayers to the heavens (and, if we are fortunate, delivers an answer).
What better symbolism to pay tribute to Eagle than that?
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