Today is the day the dominant culture celebrates as Thanksgiving, and what some indigenous nations will mark as the National Day of Mourning and Remembrance (too many forget that final word, which was part of its original name; our cultures know that mourning without remembrance is hollow, of no use).
Wings and I will mark it as all, and none.
As with virtually all holidays, we don’t “do” Thanksgiving in the usual way. That is to say, we will enjoy a good meal, one a bit more elaborate than usual, and we will keep the spirit of gratitude in our hearts as we do so. But our cultures are cultures of thanksgiving, small “t” and utterly ordinary; gratitude is both a mandate and a way of daily life for us.
On this day, we also mourn, and we remember — but again, that differs from no other day except perhaps in the slight additional formality of the observance. In our way, every day is both mourning and celebration, memorial and honor, for our histories and cultures and identities and relations. To carve this day, and tomorrow’s, out as something unique merely plays into the genocidal institutional framework of white supremacy: The former becomes assimilationist, the latter, reactionary, and we refuse to allow such a framework to be imposed as the superstructure of our lives.
Today, as much as anything, and as much as any other, we celebrate.
For those seeking the history of which I speak, you can find an extensive summary here, one that includes the fairy tale our children are repeatedly told of “The First Thanksgiving.” It was nothing like the story you’ve heard your whole life, nor was the rest of our peoples’ history post the advent of colonization. As I wrote then:
In the larger society we are all told from the cradle onward, Native children included, that what the dominant culture calls “The First Thanksgiving” was a model of interracial and intercultural cooperation, one in which the colonial settlers magnanimously invited the Natives who had saved their hides to share in the bounty that their Christian God had provided for them.
It’s a masterpiece of whitewashing, in more ways than one.
Yes, it’s true that there were strategic alliances between some of the indigenous peoples and the colonial invaders. It’s also true that the invaders’ communal public meal, the one now labeled “The First Thanksgiving,” was in fact overtly a celebration of colonial triumph over other Natives in what would come to be known as the Pequot Massacre.
The entire post is well worth reading for everyone. It is long, and hard, and brutal — much, in fact, like the history of our peoples these last 500+ years. The rest of the world needs to learn these truths.
But we already know them. And we refuse to become sidetracked or bogged down in their tragedy.
Because we are warriors of the spirit, our peoples, and we have been given the gifts of survival and the medicine of being. We know where life is born, where it resides, and that all things return to it, and are returned, again and again and again.
Ours are the stories of descent and ascent, of emergence, from below and above and the center of all things.
And on this day, such thoughts led me to one of Wings’s works from seven years ago almost to the day. It seems fitting, given that in my way, seven is a number of spirit; fitting, too, that the work’s name should have been Emergence. It was a tribute to regeneration and renewal, to transformation and transcendence, a pair of earrings built around what would have been called, by the market, teardrop-shaped stones but that looked much more like that as which all [human] life begins: a pair of eggs.
Those focal stones were gaspeite, a bright green gem found all over the world, but only in very specific deposits. The formal name of the stone comes from its most famed (and only official) deposit here on Turtle Island, on Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula, although it has been found in my own homelands and would have been well-known to our peoples, who populated this land mass from points north and east through Quebec and Ontario and the Upper Midwest of this country. I wrote about the stone in detail here, and it’s one that, thanks to its color and pattern, I have always associated with new, and renewed, life.
These earrings, part of a two-item collection that Wings created in the late fall or early winter of 2010, looked like green eggs of a distinctly non-Seussian sort: full and still solid, webbed with cracks and veins in rich charcoal and bronze shades. They reminded me of Earth as egg, lush, fertile, and green, cracked open here and there and the soil spilling out to admit the emergence of new life.
In this instance, Wings built the settings to the stones, creating large single bezels backed by solid sterling silver, cut freehand to accommodate the four ingot drops that would bead the bottom of each. Most often, such patterns evoke the image of rain, of drops descending from the larger mass of the focal stone. In this case, thanks to the stones’ distinctive egg shape, they seemed to emerge upward from the ingot work. When Wings adds ingot beads in a pattern of four, he usually intends them to represent the Four Sacred Directions, and this was no exception: It seemed like Mother Earth herself, reborn, emerging into the universe from all four directions and winds.
Once he had created the backing and soldered the saw-toothed bezels into place, it was time to add the beads. Ingot work is both meticulous and somewhat an exercise in flying by the seat of one’s pants: The molten silver can be controlled, but only so much; between pouring and cooling, there is a phase in which it will do what it decides to do. It makes for beads that are entirely unique, each one slightly different from the others. Once cooled, here stamped each with a simple cactus blossom pattern, another symbol of life renewed, and soldered them securely in groups of four to the base of each earring. After adding the wires and buffing the settings to a sheen just a shade off Florentine, it was time to set the stones.
The result was nothing short of spectacular . . . and at the same time, supremely soft and gentle, just what one would want, and expect, the universe to provide for the birth of a new life, or a new world.
On this day when the rest of this land’s inhabitants are intent on marking its passing in diametrically opposing manners, when it seems that the only options presented are gluttony and grief, this work reminds us that there is balance to be found.
Because the world we inhabit births itself anew daily. We can feast, and we can weep, but we can also work to midwife a better world into being every day.
These earrings reside now with a dear friend; they are perfectly suited to her, and that, too, is a reminder of the existence of balance, of new worlds, of good worlds. To our family, friends, and clients, Wings and I wish you all a happy and harmonious day today, an equally happy and harmonious holiday season to follow, and the chance to help birth better worlds daily.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2017; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
