Of Preparations, Prayers, Gifts, and Gratitude

 Usually, long before I leave for the dance, I have begun working on my prayer ties.  That's because usually I need to make well over a hundred, and I make several dozen or so at a sitting.  It's time to start making prayer ties, and I'll explain them in a different post, soon.  But my preparations for this dance have been different (though I think, just as prayer-filled.

Two of my sisters will be dancing this year, and I wanted to give them ribbon shirts.  I made one for myself two.  I didn't make the shirts, but I decorated them.

Each of the shirts has a different ribbon pattern on the front and a tree with the different animals of the medicine wheel on the back.  On the front they have a row of five buffalos and on the sleeves they have eagles.  That's because one of my sisters had a dream or vision of 5 buffalos which turned to eagles.  With all of my sisters, we are five girls raised in Buffalo, NY.  And I take eagles as a type of prophecy.

I made a ribbon skirt for someone else once, and one of my sisters said "You should make one for yourself.  So this year, I did.  

It has sets of ribbons in the medicine wheel colors (yellow, white, black, and red) and between the ribbons there are the animals associated with the wheel.

I made stamped aprons to give away, and I also decorated shirts for my son John, who will be supporting me in the dance.

The symbols here are that the tree (which in the dance represents the source of all life, God) is surrounded by the animals that represent the directions in the medicine wheel.  In the east, we have the eagle.  The eagle is in the place of vision.  The color for the east is yellow, which is why this eagle is stamped in yellow.  The south is the place of coyote. The color should be white, but it did not make sense to me to stamp a white coyote, so I settled for coloring the moon in.   Coyote is the trickster animal who never does exactly what you expect.  Coyote will trip you up when you think you are doing just fine.  Coyote teaches us to laugh at ourselves, and to get up and begin again.  In the west is bear, and the color is black. The west is the place of the adult, and adults are the ones who do what needs to be done (whether they feel like it or not).  People who observe bears in the wild learn some things about what plants are good for physical healing, so the bear is also the place of physical healing.  In the north there is the buffalo, and some would say particularly white buffalo.  In the dance at Tucson, we use a medicine wheel that gives red the color for the north.  North is the place of provision (the buffalo gave the Plains tribal people almost everything that they needed).  It is a place for gratitude, it is the place of the ancestors and of teachers.  It is the place where you reap what you have gotten by taking a vision received in the east around the circle, to be tested in the south, put into action in the west.  You receive the fruit in the north and begin the circle again.