It’s snowing again.
Heavily just moments ago; lightly but steadily now.
We got something like four inches yesterday; it stopped overnight, and this morning brought us a little sun to backlight the trailing iridescent bands of clouds that wrapped themselves around the peaks. It was beautiful, a serene respite before the blue-black wall to the west made its way overhead once now.
Now, our small world here is mostly white: snow blanketing the ground, pale gold stems of dormant plants in the fields poking through it; a gray-white sky overhead, a single uniform color unbroken by an absence of cloud or hint of sun filtering through it.
It’s beautiful, and exactly what this land has needed for so long now.
Tonight, the mercury will plunge; the snow is supposed to return tomorrow, and then tomorrow night will see the temperature drop into the teens. As deep freezes go here, it will be a relatively mild one, but no less a shock to the system for that, given how unseasonably warm it’s been for so long.
Still, we are fortunate — blessed, even — to have a fire blazing in the woodstove now, and despite the cold, we have no fear that we will not be warm tonight.
Too much of our community is not so lucky.
And it’s not just unhoused folks, although that number is growing by the day. It’s also folks who can no longer afford to heat their homes, whether it’s firewood for an old stove or fireplace, gas for a propane tank, or electricity for a draughty frame-build apartment. This is not a place for the latter sort of structure, but a invading population committed to quick high profits on the cheap is offering nothing better, and LIHEAP doesn’t begin to cover the need here.
Which means that it is our obligation to step up and help out when we can. It also reminds us, as I have been reminded many times this day already, that we have an obligation to acknowledge and be grateful for our own blessings. Whatever else we might have to worry about (and after this week’s developments, and in our again, pain-wracked bodies, those worries are legion), we at least will be warm and safe tonight.
It’s not even winter here yet, not even loosely defined; there is much of fall that remains, including future warming trends before the real cold settles in for the season, dark and deep. These are days for the fire at autumn’s heart, and they remind us that we need to stoke the flames in our own hearts, too: of courage, of strength, of generosity, of love.
This week’s #ThrowbackThursday featured work is such a reminder, too. It’s a work that dates back some fourteen years, to the fall of 2010, if memory serves. It was one of what I seem to recall were three small dress buckles that Wings created more or less contemporaneously, two set with small center stones and one that I believe was plain hammered silver. Of the more ornate pair, this one was set with coral, and the other with onyx.
But it is the coral the evokes the feeling of fall’s flame, and in fact, I believe that it was also named accordingly: Autumn’s Heart, or something very close to it. It was also proof that Wings’s habit of honoring seeming irregularities in his work is nothing new, whether it’s a fracture in an extraordinary stone or a deliberate decision to cultivate asymmetry in his stampwork.
These buckles were small, tailored varieties, probably no more than three inches wide and just over two inches high. He’s created these for decades, small, streamlined buckles designed for everyday wear, whether with tailored trousers for the office or with jeans anywhere and everywhere — born of a recognition that however much clients might love the big old traditional concha buckles, not everyone works in an environment where they would be welcome, nor cultivates a style that would make them comfortable wearing them. These buckles are a way for folks to add a little bit of Indigenous flair to their everyday wear, each of them over the decades entirely unique.
The buckles begin, always, with the silver still flat. He designs the stampwork, sometimes altering it as he goes [or, as he is more likely to put it, finding that Spirit has other ideas for it]. But this series always begins with the border.
It’s a narrow thing, generally an eighth of an inch, perhaps three-sixteenths, from the edge all the way around. He achieves it in the same way that he does virtually all his scorework: with a single short chisel-end stamp, a narrow plain line that is chased repeatedly around the entire edge until a deep, even border is formed. I use the term “chased” deliberately, because it has a specific meaning in metalwork: It’s when a stamp is struck repeatedly in the same spot to deepen the design, and, as here, linked by overlapping its ends repeatedly, all the way around all four sides of the rectangle, until the border is complete. It’s laborious work, and meticulous work, too, requiring a steady hand and eye so as not to blue the line, and plenty of strength for the hammer strikes.
Once the border was complete, he would have turned his attention to the stampwork inside it, between the scored line and the buckle’s edge. He kept that simple, too, slender sweeping arcs, a little like a crescent moon, linked all the way around it, placed end to end, and at the point where each pair of ends meet, topped with a tiny round hoop. It can be seen as an invocation of sun and moon in the design, of course, but here, it feels more like an embrace: life’s sacred hoop repeated all around the edge, the arc opening to either side, as though holding the buckle’s interior within it. He added one more stamp to the border, a single petaled motif repeated once in each corner, life in full flower as a part of that embrace.
At that point, Wings would have turned to the focal stampwork inside the border. he had, as I recall, already planned to build it around the small center cabochon, in this case, a tiny round domed specimen of bright red coral. The motif that he chose to create is mostly, and nominally, a Morning Star design, or perhaps better phrased as a “Guiding Star,” which can be the first star of evening, the last one at the dawn, or any in between that the spirits choose to send us as a sign. This is not an ordinary star, though; it’s a motif in which the star’s spokes are formed of diamond shapes — apt for such a purpose, but also possessed independently of symbolism signifying the Eye of Spirit, itself a guiding force.
These are also not created through the usual stampwork, which involves placing a stamp design-end down on the silver and striking a hammer upon the stamp’s other end to transfer the design. These were done through a technique known in the industry as repoussé: It’s a French term that somehow, to American ears, seems to make it sound fancier, but in truth, it simply means “from the reverse.” Such stampwork is accomplished by turning the top surface of the silver face-down against a specially designed mini-anvil [very mini, in cases such as this, consisting of a hollowed-out small diamond shape], then striking a matching stamp against it to create the design you see here, in which the textured parts are flush on the surface, while the center of each stamped design rises in domed relief. Here, Wings chose to repeat the image eight times: four with points nearly meeting at the center, their opposite tips extending to the ordinal points of the compass; then four more, placed between those original four and seeming to emerge from them, extending to the cardinal. directions. It’s a classic design that crosses multiple cultural lines, here and elsewhere, and its often used in star motifs like those found on traditional quilts, but here, Wings kept the spoke loose, apart from each other, arrayed almost casually, without worrying overmuch about symmetry. In so doing, it created a sense of motion, one that makes me think of wind through the changing leaves in autumn, shaking them slightly apart here, loosening one there, not yet stripping them from the limbs but a reminder to us all the same that winter is not far off now.
Once that was complete, he did something that he rarely, if ever, does: He added a design that amounted to repoussé in reverse. He chose a classic heart stamp, again, one designed with a corresponding mini-anvil in that form and shape, and flipped the buckle right side up once more. Then he placed each corner in turn against the heart-shaped mini-anvil, and struck it — beginning with what would nominally be, to the observer, northwest, moving to northeast, then southeast . . . and then, he stopped.
There are two things about this that are significant, one stylistic and the other symbolic. With regard to the former, the repoussé effect of each heart was inverted; the rounded, convex surface appeared on the underside of the buckle, while the concavity appeared on the outer surface of the piece. It as, perhaps, a way of distinguishing the heart motif from that of the diamonds — of not placing the signifiers of human love on the same plane as those of Spirit’s wisdom and guidance. Symbolically, the decision not to place a heart at the southwest corner was also a deliberate design choice, and I suspect that it was two-fold: one, to tell the story that Wings wanted to tell with this piece, which seems to be a reminder that life is lived in motion, amid the passage of time and not separate from it, and we would do well not to dwell overmuch on the outside world’s pronouncements about age-related norms, nor to devalue the contributions either of elders of or our aging selves; and two, as Native artists as so often wont to do, a way of building into the design a deliberate but seeming “imperfection,” as a reminder that only Spirit can create that which is truly perfect.
Once the stampwork was complete, he would have turned it back over and domed it slightly. Flat buckles won’t lie properly when worn, and so a very faint doming of the center corrects it. It also must be done before the loop and peg are soldered to the reverse, to ensure that they fit properly. After adding his hallmark, creating those and soldering them into place would have been his next task.
Finally, he would have turned it face up once again, in order to fashion the bezel and set the stone. For this one, he chose a simple saw-toothed bezel set at the very center of the stampwork, then oxidized it all and buffed it to a medium polish. The last task would have been to set the tiny coral cabochon, then bless it and place it into inventory. As I recall, it sold in relatively short order, although I no longer recall to whom.
It always seemed to me like a work for the season in which it was made: one for the fire at autumn’s heart; one to remind us to stoke the one in our own hearts and spirits.
It’s how courage grows, and strength, and wisdom, too; how generosity fills us, and how love infuses our work, our every act.
And Spirit knows the world needs us to cultivate those practices now.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
