A SYMBOL // A QUESTION
originally published on March 6, 2019 on now-defunct tedpackard.com
As I age, precious tender at thirty-three years, I come into greater and more terrible knowledge of time and its illusory, relative, and relentless nature. One day, one week, I am amazed at the effortless, driven flow of creation from my fingers, from mind’s eye to solid sound or dancing form. Time is slippery in that current, and is measured in the surfacing breathes, looking up from my burned wood, from the page, from the fretboard, remembering to drink water, to eat, to move my creaking body, to sleep. These habits of body maintenance become trifles and annoyances in the face of the creativity spilling out - creativity to be harvested or to be lost as heat or vapor, felt for a moment, and never seen again.
Then, like a creek once full of snow melt, the season of thaw passes, the water is gone and the soil cracks, thirsty and waiting in silent prayer for the next precious drops. Time slows. Time stops. Brittle and solid, waiting becomes confused with other tasks that make a life run, and for a time, some temporal infinity, even the possibility of creation is forgotten.
This is not the simple, “block,” that writers, musicians, artists, humans who spin worlds inside our own, know. Lately, for me, it is something much more insidious, unpredictable, and yet increasingly, utterly dependable: Planning. Waiting. Delay. The intentional, unavoidable pause when something is not yet ready, the season not yet right for planting.
I grow such respect for projects of others that I see come to fruit, knowing the seasons and years of working and waiting, and the long moments where everything seemed in doubt.
All this is to say that I have been waiting, with great intention, to begin my next large wood-burning project. The tale of this waiting is not yet complete, but it still bears telling, and holds some worth, I think, in the story thus far:
I have been commissioned to make a table. Rather, to burn the top of a round table that has already been built and delivered to me. The specifications for the design were enthusiastically indistinct, encouraging me to express myself along the border, but with one all-important exception: the center. In the center of the piece, radiating outward, there was to be a Zia sun symbol.
You’ll know this symbol if you see it. Beyond the Four Corners area, the symbol is most likely seen when a license plate from New Mexico passes, but in New Mexico and the southwest, the symbol is ubiquitous. Businesses’ signs, state buildings, flags, hats, shirts, and tattoos show this sign: A hollow circle with four sets of four lines radiating at the four directions, like a compass, like a medicine wheel, like an archetypal symbol of the sun.
I was surprised to find myself hesitant at the use of this symbol in my work. The symbol, I was aware, was well-loved by my client, and symbolized their own early life in Albuquerque. I also knew that the symbol was well-loved, well-used, and generally given over into the canon of southwest imagery. I have learned and grown a great awareness in these last seven years, for my own feelings, intuitions, and hunches. And I had an uncomfortable hunch about this request, about this symbol: I wasn’t allowed to use it.
I set this feeling where I put nascent projects that are not yet begun - on the back burner, where ideas simmer low, untended, with other ingredients slowly added over days, until the aroma of a recipe forming brings my attention back. This is perhaps one of the most important parts of my creative process, this pre-beginning time, where dreams and wonderings, daily happenings and curiosities combine and play without judgement or even much attention, waiting to be pulled into the forefront and whipped together with intention and no small amount of surprise on my part in what I find there.
After finishing a few other projects, it was time to shift to the table, and I was pleased to clearly see that the next step was research. I knew too little about this symbol that looked so striking, that held so much significance for so many.
I was dismayed by what I discovered.
In the course of a few days, I uncovered some fifty pages of academic writing or legal briefs on the topic, and discovered some small part of my own ignorance that is likely obvious to many of you reading. The Zia sun symbol did not magically appear onto a thousand signs and garments, nor is it some static relic of the past, a petroglyph found in the desert, unattached and mysterious.
The Zia is not a symbol, they are a people. And they are very much alive.
Any following mistakes are my own, and the result of my own incomplete research and sources at odds with one another.
Zia Pueblo, ancestral home of the Zia people, is less than an hour north-northwest of Albuquerque. Archaeologists say that the Zia Pueblo has been inhabited continuously since the 1200s. The Zia people survived the genocidal, colonial conquest of the Spanish, Mexican, and American governments, but barely. Through warfare and disease, their population was reduced to under 100 in 1890. Members of the Pueblo today number ~850.
This symbol is not a disembodied artifact, but a vital piece of the living Zia culture. It is considered a central symbol in their religious practice, representing not only the sun, but the connections of all beings, the multifaceted cycles of life that stem from the sun and its play with creation. Official documents currently describe the symbol as showing the four directions, the four seasons, the four times of day, and the four stages of human life, though there is evidence that this is not the original meaning or design. There is a depth and meaning well beyond these words that is implied when the symbol is referenced by Zia legal documents.
Legal documents are where my research brought me, and the hours spent reading were fascinating, sad, disappointing, and confusing.
To start, the symbol was not given to anyone by the Zia. It was considered a secret ceremonial symbol, given its religious nature, and was not shown to outsiders. A piece of ceremonial pottery depicting the sun symbol was reported missing from their Fire Society’s kiva in 1890, sometime after members of the Smithsonian descended on the pueblo to collect artifacts before the Zia became extinct. The symbol came to the public eye in 1923, when a competition for the design of New Mexico’s state flag was won by a non-native physician who had seen the missing pottery, then modified the original design and stylized it to the form of the current state flag.
Since the symbol was placed on the flag, it spread far beyond the Zia’s ceremonies, and into perceived public ownership, a shared symbol that all New Mexicans seemed free to identify with, and indeed, to use at their discretion.
This perception was incorrect, however. The Zia had not consented to the public use and proliferation, commercialization, modification, and commodification of their religious symbol. While it needs no comparison, it is helpful for me to consider my own heritage - and wonder at my own feelings if the Packard family crest were owned and used by a conquering, repressive state that had overseen my own family’s decimation, then shared my family’s symbol with everything from a coffee shop to a plumber, while paying lip service to a pale imitation of the deeper meanings that the sigil holds for my family.
The Zia have spent decades using various legal avenues to address the situation, and to regain some control over their symbol. The main impediment to this process has been the fact that their symbol is effectively owned by the state, and laws protect state symbols so that they cannot be owned by anyone else, and likewise cannot be regulated or withheld from businesses or individuals who wish to use it for their own purposes.
The very short and inaccurate version of this legal battle is that the Zia attempted to regain control of their symbol through Trademark laws, but though there have been multiple cases, there has been no decision that returned any legal control. The Zia have not attempted to bar the state from using the symbol, and they do not wish to have it removed from public spaces. Some Zia say that the time for that is passed, and that it is now a part of a heritage larger than theirs. They request that businesses seek permission, and that donations are made to their educational foundation. They request that the symbol is used in specific proportions, displayed accurately, and not modified. They want control, acknowledgment, and compensation. But there is no law requiring any of this, and many still ignore these wishes.
After reading much and more than I will retell here, I was left with a complex combination of feelings. I felt sad at the treatment of the Zia, of their hard history of survival. I felt angry that they should have to fight for their own identity, that, in so many ways, was already out of their control and lost to the uneducated public’s casual and unknowing debasement. I felt anxious at wanting to satisfy the desires of my client, and uncomfortable at the prospect of educating them about their request.
And I felt resigned. There was nowhere left but forward, and if it got uncomfortable, well, that’s what life is for sometimes, isn’t it? I considered saying, “no,” to my client. I considered simply leaving the design out and telling them a white lie (bound in my white fragility), that the symbol, “didn’t fit,” with my design of the table. But that was not the way forward. I decided to be honest with the only people that this actually had anything to do with: the Zia.
I wrote a letter, explaining the situation, my client’s request, my own desire to both respect the Zia’s property and identity, and my desire to participate in this conversation on the pueblo’s terms. I asked them if the symbol could be used, and under what conditions.
I can imagine annoyance or anger from others upon hearing that I made this request, that I reached out to the Zia, essentially asking permission for appropriation. All I can say, is that, in my reading, I heard something more nuanced and complex in the Zia’s legal battles and declared wishes, and in some ways, it felt like an invitation to participation rather than a desire for simple omission.
Cultural interaction has always been potentially messy, and nowhere messier than between lineages of oppression. I am stumbling forward, attempting to bring my best self along, asking more questions than offering conclusions.
I have not received a reply from the pueblo, and I accept that as a refusal until I hear otherwise.
In the mean time, I have begun work on the table top. The themes I am bringing out are intimately tied to those that I have been enmeshed with these last seven years, working in nature connection: cycles of seasons, cycles of life, cycles of the day, the four directions. These themes are universal, and complete themselves on their own. My own understanding of them does not require an esoteric symbol from a culture to which I do not belong.
The center of this table remains blank. Perhaps it will stay that way, holding space for that unifying force that ties all beings together, reminding us to look up, to look out, and to see each other.
A Very Limited Resource List on the legal history of the Zia Sun Symbol:
https://www.newmexico.org/
Below is the beginning of the table, still in draft. Pictured are four times of day, clockwise from upper right: Dawn, Midday, Dusk, and Night.
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