Dawn.
The air is something more than cold: a thief of breath, quick and thorough; a scalpel’s blade slicing to the bone. The trees are skeletal, sky and earth the same shade of white. The snow is measured in inches for now, but it’s early yet.
This is a day of, and for, thanksgiving.
I should point out here that the use of the word in the title is a bit deceptive, but the capitalization conventions of a lifetime of writing and editing are impossible to overcome now. It’s “thanksgiving,” with a small “t,” not a mythological colonial marker but a way of everyday life.
And on this day, we are very thankful.
The storms that are snarling holiday traffic elsewhere are most welcome here. In this place, snow means survival — for the earth, for the trees and plants and our animal relatives, for ourselves. Drought during the rainy season is bad enough, and of that we have had plenty in recent years. But drought in winter? That is deadly, and it has marked the last two or three cold seasons deeply here.
So to be granted the gift of the First Medicine, water, in such volume? This is reason enough for gratitude, reason enough to celebrate.
For us, there are so many, many other reasons, too.
I have said here, year after year, that we do not celebrate “Thanksgiving.” And in the traditions of the dominant culture, we don’t, despite the fact that we will sit down to a beautiful evening meal together. But we both know well the mythos of “Thanksgiving,” that everything you know and everything you were taught is wrong — and not merely wrong, but dangerously, genocidally wrong. the story of “Thanksgiving,” that tallest of tales, was designed and has been curated over the centuries specifically to further the ends of genocide: to erase Indigenous peoples, but more, to erase white supremacy’s violent colonial history, to whitewash it into something it never was, while obscuring the murderous evils committed in its name.
If you want to know the truth, you will go here and read this. And you should want to know the truth. Just as the primary colonial religion of this place cautions against building a house upon sand, so, too, can a society built upon theft, rape, maiming, chattel slavery, lynching, murder, massacre, extermination, and genocide not stand. You wonder how we got here today, with the illegitimate abomination that sits in the Oval Office like a spray-tanned gremlin, busily seeking what it might destroy next?
“American history” is how. “America” is how. “Thanksgiving” is how.
You cannot change the course of history until you face up to what it was, and is, for how will you avoid repeating it?
I subtitled that post The Fire Within. For all the water is our first medicine, fire perhaps the closest second. Fire warms. Fire purifies. Fire provides a sacred center for ceremony. Fire keeps our hearts brave and our spirits strong. And in this world, we need all such medicine that we can get.
And you will see from the post that I explicitly tie the cleansing and strengthening power of fire to our roots, both ancestral and spiritual. These are the things that sustain us, that have kept us alive in the face of a half-millennium of overt, deliberate campaigns of genocide. And they are the things that sustain our Mother Earth, too, a place now where the world’s Indigenous peoples occupy less than 20% of its land mass even as they steward the preservation and thriving of more than 80% of its indigenous species of animal and plant life.
At the time today’s featured throwback work was created, some seven years or so ago, those statistics were not available. But these earrings evoked perfectly the notion of Indigenous roots, branching out, standing strong even in winter, fed by the fire within. They were called FireRoot, and they and a similar pair found their way onto the ears of two women who needed their own strong branches and stronger roots — women who, while not Indigenous, worked to fight some of the worst harms that can be inflicted on a child, in hopes of giving young people in such precarious situations strong roots of their own.
These earrings were simple in the extreme: long substantial rectangles of sterling silver, cut freehand and filed smooth along the edges, a pair of tiny silver jump rings attached at one end to hold the earring wires. But before getting to that point, there was the design.
Earrings wrought in this style are known as “slab” earrings, for their slab-like shape. You find the same name among solid stone earrings, as well — generally rectangular or freeform slabs of turquoise or other stone, cut thin and left to hang unadorned save for polishing. In silverwork, the style is a bit more metaphorical, because it requires silver off a relatively thin and lightweight gauge to be wearable, and also because the silver “slabs” are usually accented with stampwork or stones. In this instance, the adornment consisted of a combination of stones and saw-work, with freehand ajouré cutwork producing the primary design.
Once cut free of the surrounding silver, Wings set each on his workbench and set about creating, on each, a representation of the Tree of Life. These were, of course, trees of autumn and winter, branches bare and reaching skyward toward the light. He accomplishes it by piercing the slab once near the base, then inserting the blade of a tiny jeweler’s saw and cutting trunk, branches, and rolling ground freehand, without ever needing to remove the saw until the pattern is complete. This also has the virtue of making not merely every pair, but every single earring, unique.
Once the cutwork was finished, Wings chose a pair of small round cabochons to serve as the root of each tree and fashioned a tiny round sawtoothed bezel in place on each drop. The cabochons he chose happened to be tiger’s eye, rich and earthy in color yet banded with shimmering chatoyant light. It produced an effect not unlike dancing flames.
Flames might seem an unusual motif to pair with trees, but as our peoples have always known, fire is necessary to a healthy land. A fire that burns off dead wood and overgrowth gives new life to the trees struggling for space and oxygen . . . just as the cleansing smoke of fire in ceremony gives new life to our spirits, and its warmth keeps our hearts strong and steady.
And so the earrings became FireRoot, and they likewise became a metaphor for our peoples’ ancestral histories and path, for our survival and existence. For even on these cold and difficult days, when the lie that colonialism by definition must be attempts once again to erase us, our spirits remain strong — and at the root, a warming sacred fire sustains us.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
