It’s that day again.
Some call it Thankstaking. Some call it a national Day of Mourning. Some add “and Remembrance” after “Mourning.”
To us, it’s all of those things, and none of them. We don’t celebrate “Thanksgiving”; for us, every day is a day of thanksgiving, a day of gratitude for and acknowledgment of all that we are given. We understand and support those who choose to observe it as a day of mourning, but at our age? By now, every day is also a day of mourning, a day of grief, and after a lifetime of such days, it’s hard to want to make this day special in that regard purely in reaction to the colonial culture that is the cause of it all.
As with everything else in our lives, we have had to come to some kind of uneasy accommodation with all the many faces of this day, and carve out our own meaning from the formless mass of performance and the all too fully formed mass of pain.
As it happens, today is an absolutely beautiful day, clear and cold, with yesterday’s white dusting of snow on the peaks. Wings has work to do in the studio, and I use this day to create a nice evening meal to mark our own form of remembrance — of our ancestors, of the spirits, of those walked on before their time. In that last category, there are far too many over the last couple of years. We always put out a spirit bowl with food for them, so that they will know that we remember them and honor their existence on both sides of this divide.
And so, over the years, this day has come to represent something perhaps unexpected: a little shelter for our spirits.
Such thoughts inevitably take me back to the early years of our time together, and those early markers of days like this. This week’s #ThrowbackThursday work goes back to 2006, and if memory serves, to just about this time of year . . . and to Wings’s first work in a new form.
I was on the road a lot for work in those days, and so every chance to come home was a return to shelter, too. Sometimes it was only for a day or two; sometimes much longer. But on one occasion, I had gotten in late in the day, and we had gone to Orlando’s, one of the local institutions, for dinner. It’s good home-made Norteño-style food, with good portions served at low prices in an always-crowded space that was small and colorful. And over dinner, Wings told me that he had ordered a new mandrel, one that would permit him to do what’s known as anticlastic forging: the process by which a cuff is created with sides that slope upward on either edge of the band.
I was fascinated by the description, because although I’d occasionally seen such designs from commercial sellers of mass-produced jewelry, I had no idea how they were made. And he was looking forward to getting into the studio and putting the new mandrel to work.
It didn’t take him long.
He began with a plain sheet of silver, cut to size in a classic traditional wide-band style. He kept the stampwork simple for this first effort, perhaps because he did not yet have a feel for the rhythms of the hammerwork involved and did not want to risk defacing a complicated stampwork pattern along the edges. Knowing him, though, I think it was more likely that he began the design and simply knew when to stop, because it created a beautifully simple, spare, elegant look.
He has a chisel-end stamp, probably not quite a centimeter in width, that has the blade end of it scored in tiny vertical lines. I’s useful for creating textured lines and edges, or borders when they need to have a little “pop.” But as I said, it’s not very wide, and so creating long lines with it, particularly twinned parallel lines that run the full length of a cuff, is laborious work.
But he did it. He spaced the center line just marginally off center, so that the placement of the second, outer line would wind up being the same distance from that edge as the base of the third, stamped row would be from the opposite edge. It wound up being flawless placement, keeping the design as a whole perfectly centered. Once he had both rows scored evenly down the band’s entire length, he chose a single stamp, a triangular shape with two angles designed in a radiant line pattern and open base. It’s one nominally used to represent an arrowhead, or directional signs, but he also uses it as a lodge symbol.
It seems to me that it functions, in a sense, as all three here: guidance and direction, armor and protection, and of course all of the lodge’s shelter and ceremony.
Once the freehand stamp- and scorework were complete, he turned to the shaping. A regular mandrel is long and round, with a gentle taper to the end; an anticlastic mandrel is similar up the end, at which point it curves in an up-and-down pattern of angles resembling an S. He placed the band in these angles to hammer it into the proper shape, which allowed each edge to rise gracefully upward in a gentle arc, rendering the center of the band’s surface concave and allowing the flared upward slope to extend the full length of the band on either side.
It was a simple piece, and a powerful one. My own people’s tradition includes similar lodges, tipi-style. Wings’s father and uncle were Road Men in the Tipi Way, and he grew up immersed in its traditions in addition to his older kiva ways. And to me, this particular piece, with its bold lines and essential simplicity, has always seemed to be one, fundamentally, of protection and safety, of a little shelter for our spirits.
On this day, and in this week, this month, this year? We can all use a little of that now.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
