SUBSTANCE OF STARS

from Defining Desert Living - Fall 2022

OUR UNIQUE VISUAL WEALTH

BY ALEX JARSON

HEARD MUSEUM EXHIBITION - 2022 / 2023

The first great civilizations were born in the shadows of a great sunset. As the sun fell, the sky began to glow. And as the sky darkened, people began to dance and create. They told stories, sang songs, and read poetry about the old legends that walked the earth. No matter how long the darkness prevailed, the stories would not die.

People found happiness. They shared it together.

As the phases of the moon passed, the darkness spread throughout the different lands. People began to fear it, taking shelter from monsters at night. The stories they once told around the fire were now written with ink. The sun rose and people rejoiced. But without the open mouth of darkness near our ears, there was no story to tell. The dream of life, this idea of mystery and unknown depth, seemed to fold in on itself, and people forgot it was even a dream at all…

A new exhibit at the Heard Museum, Substance of Stars, invites us to step into the dark to see what the past is hiding from the future in the present day. Substance of Stars combines historic and contemporary works with immersive digital technologies to showcase the cosmological and spiritual practices of each community.

This three-year collaborative project with four Indigenous Nations examines the collection of the Heard Museum from Indigenous perspectives of their own cultural production, across a variety of media.

The exhibition’s centerpiece is the Sky Dome, a 360 degree room, surrounding the viewer with seasonal landscape imagery created by four Indigenous videographers. A ceiling-mounted fiber optic map of the cosmos rotates four times around the North Star as it demonstrates seasonal changes from the viewpoint of someone living in the Four Corners.

I learned that Náhookos Biko’ is the central fire in Navajo cosmology. It is the North Star Polaris. Náhookos translates to the revolving motion of the stars in the night sky. Náhookos tells how the stars are falling. As we look into the night sky, we may not notice the rotation of our planet right away. But over time, the stars move east to west.

Náhookos Biko’ never leaves its place in the sky. When we need guidance, we turn to it, receiving direction from somewhere we perceive as the present. But of course, that’s not the entire story. Stars are episodes that happened years ago. The light is transmitted through the cosmos, until we receive it, years later.

We find that we are actually looking into the past from the present. But how did we get there? And where are we going in the future?

The dawn of America came when people could no longer imagine a world with darkness. We created our own myths, held firm in the torch of the American spirit, and we built a palace of ideals. We made a history of our own. The world became a place of light.

An electric sea of energy reflected the world around us. The land and sky became two sides of a silver coin to explore. We were free, or so we thought, but true ideas were distilled in the afterglow of our past inventions, and our creations were no longer reflections of our hopes and dreams.

In this post-historical world, we created gods in the image of ourselves. We built the tallest structures, the biggest monuments, and the greatest works of art. We created them to be symbols of our accomplishments, icons of power, and we celebrated our lives within the context of the era at large.

But the tribes remember the genesis. Their ancestors held onto the pain, the horror, and the darkness of the past. There is no shying away from the truth. It lives on in the shared experience of DNA. It also lives on in the story of the stars.

The exhibition reminds you that the world’s history moves like the seasons. Humans built it all with hope and change in mind. We lit the torch because our value was in the future. We needed to see the path forward. And we needed to keep moving.

BY ALEX JARSON

This page: Sky Woman, 1936, Ernest Smith (Tonawanda Seneca),oil on canvas Sky Woman, Joe Greene (Mohawk), Soapstone Shooting Star, 2007, Fidel Estudillo (Diné), silver

Today, worth is measured a little differently. We have the economy, the stock market, the dollar, and a thousand different variations that go together. They are all reflections of each other, but at the end of the day, they represent one thing: modern value. But they are hollow shells of what we want to believe. We are still looking for a new world.

In many indigenous tribes in America, value was measured in the honor and respect you brought to the group. In other words, how your story reflected onto your tribe was important. For the Haudenosaunee and Iroquois people, wampum belts were crafted from Northern Quahog shells, a beautiful clam found in the Northeast. These shells were often crafted into jewelry and belts, and used as a certificate of authority or credentials.

Though wampum was used in trade, it was not money. To the Iroquois, wampum was a way to tell their story through archetype, color, and shape. It was a path to achieve cooperation through tribes, and a highly important item in the giving of names. One could not outright own value. The value of the wampum was not just in the monetary value of the shells, but in the spiritual and cultural value of the entire item.

The Yup’ik tribes of Siberia and Alaska have a concept known as Ella, a shared consciousness that is part of the One Mind. They believed there is a unity to all things, that all things have godliness of everything. All realities—physical or metaphysical—are aspects of the one.

Therefore, they structured their society as such. But there is a polarity to it all, in which all ideas spin.

Every idea has a reflection. The ocean reflects the sky, and in turn mirrors the spirit of the world. Every idea, good and bad, has a mirror image of itself. A light and a dark. And so now we seem to have reached an impasse, or turning point between the two.

In so many ways, we’re stepping into darkness again. This is a terrifying concept to us because time is never supposed to move backward. But the truth about time, is that it’s moving in every direction, all at once. Our minds interpret those movements. When all points connect, a bright period of light will come. But until then, we have a lot of work to do.

For instance, our mistakes are catching up to us in the form of pollution, slowly dimming the radiance of the stars throughout my lifetime. It’s only until we find ourselves in one of Arizona’s six “Dark Skies” sites, that we realize how bright they really are.

In modern America, culture has been distilled and reduced into caricatures of what used to be. Our entities are cartoons telling us what to buy, eat, wear, and think. We have become beasts with a collective goal to stay happy through valueless contractions that complicate our everyday relationships as the natural world bites our ass with a vengeance.

The stars in the sky burn bright, but upon closer inspection, they glow like dollar signs on a Pac-Man screen.

The tribes knew of the possibilities of man. The trajectory was obvious. We are symbiotic to the process, not above it. But we behave like the gods we made at the early 20th century. All we had to do was follow the path and heed the warnings. Of course, our ancestors may not have known the intricacies of skyscrapers. But they knew the intricacies of the spiritual realm, and they told its story on the darkest nights. They knew it needed to stay within the circle of the Earth, and they vowed to keep it there forever.

It will never die. Instead, it will rest inside a dream, until awakened again.

The nature of dreams is an ancient phenomenon. It is something we are born with, and something we strive to learn and understand. Dreams are the fire of the soul, the engine of our minds, and the way in which we connect to the universe from within.

We must keep dreaming.

Dreams are born in darkness. They serve as a window out of our world, which provides a new perspective. In turn, dreams are a vast library of knowledge, a shared memory, and a wish for what’s to come. Just as the mind is a complex network of neurons, our consciousness is linked through the generations. In the modern world, stars are a measure of time. Many grandfather clocks bear illustrations of celestial events and entities.

The Navajo have a story of the beginning of time. The story goes that when the world began, it was a First World of darkness called the Nihodilhil, encapsulated by a heavenly sky. People arrived as insects and various animals first, evolving with each new world.

Leaving the darkness of the First World, they found themselves in the blue of the Second World, and then the Yellow of the Third. The Fourth World was glittering and white, and this was when humans evolved into what they are today.

But everything changed in the Fourth World. Man was not satisfied. The land was dry and barren. So he kept searching. He’s still searching to this day.

There are two worlds after the Fifth World. The first is a heavenly realm referred to as the World of the Spirits of Living Things, and the second is the Place of Melting into One.

We will never see the world in the way of our ancestors, but that doesn’t mean we should give up the ghost. We are still here. We are still alive. We are still connected.

If we fail to act on our mistakes, the earth will be fine without us. That’s the unfortunate reality. If Earth is a conscious entity, then climate change is our problem. Earth has the power to heal itself. As a culture, it is imperative to listen to the past if you want to continue adding to this great civilization.

The future is abundantly clear. We can see it in the substance of the stars.

Left: Nepcetaq (“Sticks to the face” mask), 1850, Central Yup’ik, Alaska Carved wood, pigment, seal blood, feathers, fox teeth, seal skin; Above: Ni’hodithit, (The First World), 2004-2005, Peggy Black (Diné)