It’s September: Summer is nearly over; fall is lurking around the edges of the visible world.
In this part of Northern New Mexico, fall is already here. It has been for a month. For the last three weeks or so, it’s been getting down into the 40s at night — at least as low as 43, maybe even less. The air holds that crispness not found in summer. Some of the trees and vines began to shift color, subtly, more than two weeks ago.
Oh, Indian Summer will arrive soon, probably in the next week or two. And in fact, it got up to 88 yesterday, however briefly . . . accompanied by unusually high wind gusts and spectacularly clear autumnal air.
I’m not entirely sure why, but this time of year, to me, is the time of the Buffalo. My own people are in the Ricing Moon now, with the Leaves Turning Moon just peeking over the horizon, due to arrive in a week or so. But I’ve always associated late summer and early autumn with the ranging of the buffalo. Perhaps it’s an unconscious association with an image permanently etched in my memory: About this time several years ago, we traveled up to Picuris to buy buffalo meat from the Pueblo’s Bison Project. We were lucky enough to be there at the end of the day, and as we returned to our vehicle, the herd came thundering over the hill from the meadow, headed into the fenced area for their evening feeding. Adults and calves alike, running at top speed in the slanting late-day sunlight, their dark brown curls contrasting with the lush green grass. It touched a chord of ancestral memory so deep I felt the drumbeat of their hooves throughout my body, and I felt tears welling as I gazed at them through the eyes of our grandparents. To the buffalo, they were coming home after a day out grazing. To me, they were coming home to a place of historical memory deep in my soul, and so was I.
So for this month, I’m going to feature buffalo imagery every week. Some pieces will be by Wings, in silver; some, by other artists in various media. They won’t necessarily appear on the same day each week; I’ll post each wherever it happens to fit best. But all will have one thing in common: a relationship, whether as a faithful representation or as metaphor.
For today, it’s a piece from one of Wings’s signature series, coupled with old-style beadwork by Kewa Pueblo artisans. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
Buffalo Beads
Hand-cut and hand-stamped, Buffalo travels with you through your day, suspended from a multi-strand necklace of old-fashioned multi-colored trade-style beads. A double-terminated ajouré heartline wends its way across his strong body; hand-stamped traditional symbols accent his horns, beard, fetlocks, and tail.
Sterling silver; beads
$225 + shipping, handling, and insurance
At that price, it’s a steal; normally, the beads alone would go for that. But it’s how he priced it last year, so we haven’t raised it. If memory serves, the necklace comprises seven or eight separate strands of beads entwined together. Each strand varies slightly in composition, large blocks of white beads interspersed in a repeating pattern by short segments of beads arranged in random strings of brilliant color. The dominance of the white beads is, I think , what prompted him to choose this strand (versus the many others we had at the time) to hold his Buffalo pendant, because of the associations between color and animal: the Sacred White Buffalo.
But the pendant itself bears a little discussion, too. Wings has done a “Buffalo” series, in pendants and pins, for more than a decade, probably closer to two. They all come from a similar template, yet each is unique — one of the advantages of creating everything by hand. But beyond normal variation, he also varies the stampwork to create the detail; this one’s curly-haried hump is fashioned via hundreds of individual strikes with a tiny jeweler’s hammer. Most of them get a version of the heartline so popular in Southwestern Indian art, but these are usually double-terminated, sometimes winding gently across the surface of the animal’s body, sometimes taking on the sharper, more powerful pattern of the lightning bolts tossed by Thunderbird. Around here, the line itself is variously called a “heartline,” “a breathline,” or a “lifeline,” depending on the artist’s choice of terminology, but his are always a heartline, with all the symbolism that the word implies.
It’s a beautifully understated piece, the sort I’d wear myself. While I like bold Indian jewelry, I don’t usually wear large necklaces; they get in the way of the myriad things I need to do every day. But this one is just a bit longer than choker-length, resting comfortably at the collarbone, Buffalo lying flat beneath it to catch the light.
He’s a comforting companion in these days of seasonal change, as Summer drifts slowly beyond the horizon and the leaves turn the hues of the brightly-colored accent beads, before settling down to rest under winter’s white blanket.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
