Sky Dances Light is an installation of fifteen jingle clouds comprised of the series Threshold, Forest, Revolution, Solo, and Kin; and incorporating the 2022 series Vivid Dream: Awakening.
Historically, jingles were created from the rolled tops of tobacco cans and other tin lids. They are grounded in Indigenous histories of making and storytelling, adornment and ritual. Here, they hover between the sky and the earth. Simultaneously heavy and weightless, the jingles nudge and tap each other, creating murmurs of sound when animated by a breeze. They amplify each other’s stories, reverberating with each passing movement.
The tin jingles in this piece acknowledge the Jingle Dress Dance which began as a healing ritual in the Ojibwe tribe in the 1900s, during the influenza pandemic. The idea for the dance came to a tribal elder in a dream. When it was performed, according to the vision, the young girl who was sick in time became well. The Jingle Dress Dance was also a radical act. In 1883, the United States banned Indigenous ceremonial gatherings. Though the ban was repealed in 1978 with the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, during its centurylong prohibition the Jingle Dress Dance was shared with other tribal communities. Today it is a pow-wow dance and continues to be associated with healing. The relevance of this dance extends beyond pandemics.
The jingle cloud-like forms recall a story, “Lifting the Sky,” that I heard as a child, told by Vi Hilbert from the Upper Skagit of the greater Coast Salish tribe. As the story goes, the sky was starting to press down on the people. Overwhelming the world with darkness, it became incumbent on the people—who spoke different languages and didn’t necessarily understand one another—to find a common vocabulary, even just one phrase, that would allow them to work together. The word they found is yəhaw̓ which means to proceed, to go forward, to do. Working together using sticks and saying that one word, yəhaw̓, with group effort they push up the sky. These clouds are lifted together, hoisted by many hands just as they were created by many hands. They are first steps in a rhythm of healing and gathering, of being and hearing together.
