This is the time when the spirits walk.
In our cultures, we know this truth; it’s not a matter of opinion, nor one of what the dominant culture calls superstition. If we were unaware, the dogs show us otherwise every year. It is always this way from October to year’s end, as we move into the depths of the cold season; we have seen things that resort to “superstition” cannot explain, but more, we trust the evidence of our animal relatives, whose senses are more finely honed than our own.
It’s not merely trickster spirits, or even benign ones, now. The ghosts of winter are here today, the first snow of the season having driven in hard and fast this morning on a bitter north wind. It’s not a lot of snow — perhaps three inches, where we are, just enough to cover most surfaces — but the winds gave us a ground blizzard as it fell. Some areas are high with drifts, others entirely bare; most are a mix, black rock and hard brown earth showing through beneath a slightly threadbare blanket of white.
On this #ThrowbackThursday, it put me in mind of ghosts of other sorts: spirits of stone and sacred beings, both present in today’s featured work from a little over eight years ago, created in the first days of summer in 2011. It’s a hook bracelet, an old traditional style reconceived for a new millennium, built around a focal stone named for a powerful spirit of the Indigenous peoples far north of here.
This piece had a name, of that I’m sure, but I no longer recall what it was. In this instance, I suspect the design began with both stone and silver simultaneously; typically, when Wings creates a hook bracelet, it’s the stone that sparks the style it will take. But the creation would have begun with the band.
Those bands manifest in one of two styles: either a perfectly straight strip of sterling silver; or one that is flared slightly at either end. This one was flared only the tiniest bit, a difference of a millimeter or two. He stamped it before cutting it freehand and filing the edges smooth. Typically, such bands are stamped in repeating patterns that are the same all down its length (although he has made the occasional exception), and such was the case here. He would have begun, most likely, with the center pattern, one in with thunderhead symbols are conjoined at their open wider bases, forming a tiny closed world of spokes and corners radiating to cardinal and ordinal directions. This he chased down the entire center of what would become the band.
Next, he chose a highly stylized symbol consisting of three conjoined arc, the middle one slightly higher than the two flanking it. This is a motif that he uses for multiple purposes: conjoined, as clouds; arc side down, as rainclouds; arc side up, as flowering symbols, representations of mountains, or the rays of a sunrise. Here, he chased this pattern down either edge of the band to create borders in a slightly freeform, abstract design. Then he cut the entire piece out freehand.
I noted above that the band flares slightly at either end, but the fact of the matter is that the widest point was not in fact the actual end of the band, on either side. When Wings cut it free of the surrounding silver, he left two longish slender tabs of silver, one extending organically from the center of either end. These would form, on one end, the hook to close the bracelet, and on the other, the hinge to keep the stone and its setting attached.
Then he set the band aside and turned his attention to the stone. It was a sizeable roundish cabochon of White Buffalo magnesite, not especially highly domed, but slightly freeform, both around the edges and on its gently wavy surface. It was a beautiful stone, a rich, creamy white one shade off pure white, and its rolling surface only added to its snow-like appearance. Its matrix was also classic White Buffalo magnesite, inky black lines and dots and patchy bits of bronze-y brown — just like the rocky surface of the earth showing through the first snowfall of the season.
It’s a beautiful, beautiful stone.
It’s not turquoise.’there is such a thing as Sacred White Buffalo turquoise (a/k/a “White Buffalo” or “Sacred Buffalo”). This is not it. The turquoise version is simply one rare variant of a form of turquoise that goes under another name. Turquoise is named for the mine where it was found (e.g., Arizona’s famed Bisbee Mine; Nevada’s Royston or Blue Gem; Colorado’s King’s Manassa; the old Cerrillos/Tiffany mine here in New Mexico). The area where the palest actual turquoise (that is turquoise, not variscite) comes from the Dry Creek Mine area of Nevada. Most of the stone is a spiderwebbed pale blue, but some of the blues are so pale as to appear nearly white to the naked eye. This is what some in the market began calling “Sacred White Buffalo turquoise” several generations ago.
The clearly white opaque stuff, like this? Is not turquoise. It’s often sold as turquoise, even by sellers the market deems “reputable,” and yes, we got taken, too, years ago. The real stuff is valuable, and very expensive; this, not so much, in relative terms. And yes, I’m well aware there are folks out there marketing this very kind of thing as turquoise even now. There are reasons we don’t do business with them.
It’s unfortunate for another reason, because, of course, the name itself comes from the powerful spirit of the origin stories of the Oceti Sakowin, the Indigenous nations of the northern plains that the colonial culture call the “Sioux.” It feels somehow doubly sacrilegious to see the colonial world market one stone as another under a name sacred to people who are, in Indigenous terms, our cousins.
Wings has always loved the genuine turquoise version, but he has also always loved the magnesite for very different reasons. This stone is certainly more classically “white” than its expensive turquoise counterpart. It ranges from specimens that are nearly all white, with only a few subtle hints of bronze-colored or gray inclusions beneath the surface, to stone shot through with large patches of black, gray, brown, or bronze. Most falls somewhere between the two extremes, like the cabochon in this piece . . . and as White Buffalo magnesite specimens go, this is an exceptionally beautiful one — in stone color, matrix colors, and matrix pattern. Of all the pieces he’s created over the years using this stone, this particular cabochon has always been my favorite, and none since has matched it.
As I said, this cab was slightly freeform — not a perfect circle, and not a uniform, high-domed surface, either. Because of the rolling wave-like effect of the top of the stone, it required extra attention to detail to create a suitable bezel: too low, and it risked falling out; too high, and the bezel would rise visibly above the stone’s edges. He settled on creating a low-profile scalloped bezel, one that would sit low enough not to show bare silver above the stone’s lowest edges, yet would rise high enough to grip the cabochon firmly and keep it securely in place. He cut a piece of sheet silver a few millimeters beyond the edges of the stone, adhering to its freeform shape except on either side, where he extended a wide tab outward from its more-or-less-circular shape. He then soldered the bezel into place a few millimeters inward, tight enough to grip the stone and to leave just enough room outside it to add a slender strip of twisted silver all the way around the edge.
Wings now had the two pieces that would eventually form the full bracelet, but it was not yet time to join them. First, he pierced the two tabs extending from the bezel, then cut out the interior of each, meticulously even, with a tiny jeweler’s saw. These would form the loops for the two “hook” tabs extending from the band. Next, he oxidized the joins between setting and bezel and twisted silver, and all of the stampwork on the band, then buffed both pieces to a medium-high polish. Lastly, for this phase, he set the stone, ensuring that the bezel’s scalloped edges gripped tightly.
But there was one more necessary process. Wings set the band on his workbench, and taking the bezel in one hand, threaded the tab on one end of the band through the corresponding loop on the bezel, and gently bent the tab over its outer end to meet up with the band itself. This created a hinge, by which the bezel would always stay attached to one end of the bracelet; the other would be used to open and close it. Accordingly, he then threaded the other end through its loop, but bent the tab only enough to hook over the edge, not to clamp it down tightly. It held via tension, and the wearer could open and close it by squeezing the sides of the band inward enough either to pop the tab loose or to thread it back for closure. This one was a relatively narrow band, but made of sufficiently lightweight silver to allow the wearer to conform it to the wrist fairly closely.
I don’t recall the exact date this one sold, nor the identity of the purchaser. If memory serves, it sold either later that same year or the following year (winter comes to mind, for some reason). Our (literal) brick-and-mortar gallery was still open then, and customers very often paid cash for such pieces.
I do know that, of the substantial number of pieces Wings has created over the years using White Buffalo magnesite, this one held the stone that captured my own spirit. It was, in its way, like the snow on the ground outside the window, a thing of ghosts: of winter, of stone, of a powerful and sacred Indigenous spirit.
And that is where its true value lies.
~ 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.
