The sky is a square of turquoise, blue to the four corners and perfectly clear except for the haze of smoke rising from a presumably-prescribed burn on the lower slopes of the peaks. This day is clear and cold, temperature at last seasonal for this time of year. The forecast predicts some clouds as the afternoon progresses, but no real chance of precipitation for the whole of the extended forecast, which takes us into mid-December.
We are looking at a hard, hard winter now.
Outsiders misunderstand what I mean when I say that it will be a hard winter: To colonial minds, that means bitter cold and snowfalls measured in feet. By contrast, the latter is what makes for a good winter here, because the snowpack forms the vast majority of our available water throughout the year — and available that, in recent years, has been reduced by fully two-thirds of our usual amounts. We have not had a year to make up for it since, either; if memory serves, our last good winter was the one that began this time eight years ago.
We have been mourning the losses forced by climate change for the whole of that time. This year, there is so much more to mourn besides . . . and so much to remember.
I think most folks now know that Wings and I do not celebrate “Thanksgiving.” Even the word itself is a lie, and a particularly insidious, dangerous one at that. I’m not going to recount the true history of either word or holiday here today (and atypically, I’m not even including the word, as I usually do, in the hashtagged component of the title of this year’s post; there is too much grief this year for that). Those who read here regularly have already seen my recounting of it; those who haven’t can find it here. It’s an abbreviated history of colonialism on our lands, and it begins far earlier than that fateful day of the Pequot Massacre which was in fact the subject and object of the colonizers’ thanks on the first day that supposedly bears this day’s name: the burnout and wanton slaughter of Indigenous people. As you’ll see from the rest of the post, fire was a common theme and tool, and there wasn’t time or space to get to more recent such incidents, such as a Twentieth-Century atrocity targeting my own people’s relatives. Wings’s ancestors put in an appearance, though, and it is this history that has shaped his own process, practice, and praxis, artistic and otherwise.
Which brings us to today’s featured throwback work. It’s a cuff in the same vein as yesterday’s all-new masterwork; together, they form near-bookends of one of his most popular, and most meaningful, signature series. As I noted yesterday, it’s a series that he’s been creating for the better part of two decades now, perhaps more, but also one in which the entries tend to be intermittent. The entire body of work now includes necklaces, pendants, earrings, even a barrette, but by far the largest number of them are cuff bracelets (including one memorable iteration he created as a gift for a warrior now walked on who was elder, brother, and friend to us). Today’s throwback work is one of the earlier versions, one that dates back at the very least to 2007, but I believe it was actually created in 2006 or perhaps even 2005.
Like yesterday’s new work, it’s a cuff bracelet form of twinned eagle feathers, wrought in sterling silver. This was a fairly substantial gauge of silver, and on this one, Wings chose to use the same ajouré (saw-work) technique to create the band itself spaces between collections of barbs cut freehand. He did not elect to score the individual barbs on the upper reaches of this one, saving it for the lower half of each side of the band (which still amounted to dozens, scores, even, of freehand score marks):
He mottled the upper portions of each feather with tiny hand-stamped hoops in a randomized pattern, then set about creating the overlay of the shaft.
If you look at the top, beneath the stone, you’ll see that the “shaft” appears to bend slightly in opposing directions. There’s actually a reason for that, albeit not an aesthetic one. On some of the twinned-feather cuffs, he chooses to wrap the narrower center with the same slender sterling silver “wire” with he creates the shaft itself. It is, actually, a more difficult technique, because in doing it, he uses only a single piece of wire, wrapping it securely around the center, then stretching equal lengths of the same strand down the very center of each feather, and soldering the whole securely into place. It’s even more challenging on a cuff such as this one shown today, where he has chosen a wider, heavier gauge of half-round wire, instead of one of filament size. But the wrapped shaft symbolizes unity, and in this instance, the heavier “wire” gave him a broader canvas on which to inscribe the shafts patterning: short, sharp chisel marks, arrayed like the rays of the sun, each grouping at an alternate angle from the next. It’s a challening pattern to create even on a flat surface; here, he did it on an impossible narrow length of silver that was convex in a half-circle shape.
Once the silverwork portions of the feathers were complete he turned his attention to the bezel. For this one, he had chosen a cabochon form his old private collection of stones, some of which had been given to him many year previously by his father, who walked on nearly twelve years ago, and who had also been a self-taught silversmith. This cabochon, a perfect square (a shape not often found anymore in larger, custom-cut turquoise cabochons), was, we believe, old Kingman turquoise. By then, the stone’s surface patina had already aged from what was probably once a robin’s-egg blue to a shade blended with a bit of seafoam green (old natural blue turquoise tends to turn slightly greenish with wear and use, absorbing materials in the air and the oils present in human skin, all of which work to darken and subtly mute the color). The color it would have been originally, however, is classic Kingman from the old days, and so is the earthy charcoal-colored chert matrix around the edges and dusted throughout the center of the stone. The stone had a decent, middling amount of doming to its surface, and so he elected to set it into a plain, low-profile bezel edged with delicate twisted silver, the better to let this beautiful old Skystone speak for itself.
Bezel finished, he oxidized the entire cuff, paying special attention to the score- and stampwork on the band, and to the bezel and twisted silver that limned it. Oxidizing these to a significant degree would, once buffed away, create a rich, aged, eminently traditional look. He left the polish only a few degrees of Florentine to preserve that vintage effect.
Once complete, the cuff assumed a spirit all its own: a perfect honoring of ancestors and spirits and the oldest of traditional Indigenous ways, the very embodiment of prayer and ceremony and the tools we have been granted to that purpose.
It’s a spirit, a process and practice and praxis, that our whole world needs now. This day is a day of grief for us, a chance to mourn who and what have been lost to the evils that underlie this sanitized “holiday,” to remember them and to honor their existence. But there is so much more to grieve this year, so much deadly, wholly unnecessary loss, sacrificed upon the altars of genocidal white supremacy and colonial white comfort and convenience — so much wholly preventable pain, illness, suffering, death among our peoples now.
But Eagle’s feather is a tool of more than prayer; it is the very means of a collective healing. As Eagle’s own recent visitation here reminds us, there is to be found, amid mourning and remembrance, medicine: of the old ways, of the spirits, of the ancestors and the teachings for which we, in our way, give thanks every day.
For ours is naturally a life of gratitude, of medicine and ceremony, and it needs no artifice of a legal holiday for us to remember and to act upon it.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
