When hearts gather, magic happens.
And it’s not only magic: It’s medicine and music, song and dance. It’s love.
That is, after all, what our gatherings are: love of clan, community, culture; love of history and language; love of the ancestors and of generations yet unborn. In the face of the direst of odds, our cultures not merely survive, but live — fully formed and informed, fully articulated and actualized. A half-millennium of genocide has not been sufficient to wipe us out, nor has a century of Hollywood fictionalizing managed to erase us, despite white supremacy’s best efforts on both counts.
And the reason we have managed what seems, on the surface, impossible?
Because we do not go it alone.
“American” culture worships at the altar of “rugged individualism,” a cult made all the more toxic by fictional tales of the exploits of the frontier, imagery become sacred iconography, larger than life, by way of stars of the big screen such as Gary Cooper and John Wayne (the latter a virulently anti-Native bigot).
Of course, “America” has never been individual, nor rugged, at least for the dominant culture. It was built upon genocide and chattel slavery and a five-hundred-year-long betrayal of indigenous hands extended in aid. More, it was built specifically and explicitly to bolster and sustain the fortunes of white Europeans at the intentionally direct expense of peoples of color, beginning with the Native nations.
The cult of rugged individualism, like all cults, is mere toxic myth.
Still, our peoples refused to succumb to the foxfire allure of its mythos, refused to abandon community, culture, and clan in favor of a false narrative of bootstraps and self-sufficiency. We had no need of bootstraps when our moccasins were made of the Buffalo’s gift.
Our traditions’ insistence on communal effort has hindered us by the dominant culture’s yardsticks, true; individuals among our peoples tend not to be wealthy in financial terms, nor powerful in the political sphere of the outside world. Those who become so, on either count, are the exception. But for cultures’ whose wealth is measured in ties to the land, in ties to past and present and future, in ties to family and community, to culture and language and ceremony and art? Whose most powerful moments occur when we gather, in numbers great or small, to sing and dance and feast and celebrate, to make medicine and participate in ceremony, to heal and to pray?
Our wealth is beyond measure, because our wealth is of the heart.
It a heart dance, a gathering of love, that sustains our peoples, and it is a concept to which Wings has paid tribute in ways large and small, overt and symbolic, throughout the course of his life as an artist, and as a Native man. And today’s featured work gives life to it, lends its name to it, embodies it. From its description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
Heart Dance Earrings
In our way, every dance is a dance of the heart. With these earrings, Wings summons a pair of dancers to the circle, shimmering silver beings holding fast to a bit of icy-pale rose quartz, a stone that some say represents matters of the heart. He repeats the motif on the drops themselves, each adorned with a single hand-stamped heart at top and bottom: moving up one side and down the other, creating their own round dance and sacred hoop. Earrings hang 1-15/16″ long (excluding wires) by 3/8″ across at the widest point; cabochons are 3/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; rose quartz
$195 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The gathering season, known to the outside world simply as “summer,” is winding down now; it will be another month before the people of this place gather for a communal event. There will be small gatherings throughout the fall, but the next such events of note remain a few months off, a part of the winter holidays.
But these are the times that sustain our communities, our cultures; the times that give us life. For when hearts gather, love follows; and where love follows, life is not far behind.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2017; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
