We have spoken much recently of resistance. The week’s developments in the dominant culture have made it necessary, this knowledge that we must once again be ready to do what is necessary to ensure our people’s survival.
Less than an hour ago, the War Eagle paid us a visit — the first in more than a year. In such times as these, it feels like a sign.
Most resistance, of course, consists in a thousand smaller acts, in the minutiae of daily life, in the interstices of the two and more worlds in which our peoples must walk simultaneously every day. And the fruits of resistance are apparent in ways far less visible, and yet at the same time far deeper, than in acts of protest and war.
They appear in the earth, the land cultivated, nurtured, planted in the old way. They appear in the water, in the scarce scant rainfall of autumn and in the effluent of the mountain watersheds, honored and treated with respect. They appear in the literal fruits of these, combined with the forces of clear air and fiery sun, to midwife that which sustains our bodies as well as our spirits.
They appear every time a Native child is born and learns her language, in every indigenous word uttered in the face of colonialist tongues. They appear in our people’s stubborn insistence on survival, in the subversion of snatching the colonizer’s most revered symbols and inverted them, imbuing them with sovereign indigeneity and turning their power back on the oppressor.
They appear in our words and symbols and song and dance and art and culture and spiritual tradition and history, in our faith and in our prayers.
They appear in us.
And this . . . this is what today’s work means. At the end of of this extraordinarily difficult work, as we enter a time newly dangerous to us all, and to us as much as any, this is where art itself becomes resistance. This was the week in which Wings’s art became overtly political. Oh, it’s always been political, by its very definition, its very identity, wrought by the hands of this man who is nothing but Native to this land, but now — now it’s become something more.
In his hands, his art is tool and weapon, blessing and gift, and today’s featured work is the very embodiment of this complex and layered identity. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
From the Heart of the Earth Necklace
From the heart of the earth our whole world grows. Wings pays tribute to this evolutionary process with this necklace, a cross that is not a cross, but the embodiment of elemental forces and nurturing spirits. The pendant’s form is a very old design, one that circumvented colonial insistence on Christianity by appearing to adopt its four-spoked shape — and then adding an extra bar and a curving end to produce the form of a much older spirit: that of Dragonfly, a pollinator, a messenger, a symbol of romantic love and life’s abundance. Here, Wings has honored another old adaptation of the style, turning the curved tail at the base of the lowest spoke into a stylized heart. Above the heart, the pendant extends upward and outward to the Four Sacred Directions, each of the remaining five spokes stamped with a single thunderhead symbol pointing inward toward the center, a sign of the rain that keeps our Earth herself alive. Above the top spoke, the hand-made bail flowers into a lush green peridot; at the base in the center of the heart, the place of emergence, two tiny hand-stamped flowers are wedded into the form of a butterfly, a small spirit rising from its own place of emergence to continue the processes of pollination and prosperity. The cross is made of solid fourteen-gauge silver, and hangs 2-5/8″, the bail 3/4″ (the pendant is 3-3/8″ in total length; 1-1/8″ across at the widest point); the stone is 3/8″ long; the pendant hangs from an 18″ sterling silver snake chain (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; peridot
$1,150 + shipping, handling, and insurance
At the end of a week in which our existence became, once again, something called into question, our survival something not guaranteed by governments nor the mass of those they govern, Wings’s work finds its roots in the same place that we find ours, the same place whence so many of our people’s bodies and spirits emerged so long ago: from the heart of the earth.
We are grounded, we are rooted. We are life, and we are the fruits of resistance.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2016; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
