Even the Faceless Kachina Has Something to Say

I woke up this morning thinking about kachina dolls. These are small wooden figurines of Hopi spirits that are carved from wood, sometimes adorned with feathers and always bright paint, signed on the bottom, accompanied by a slip of paper with a brief history of the god and what he or she stands for, and they are generally sold to tourists who like to collect that sort of thing and kids who hope that they might be real.

Having this sort of thing in my head when I wake up is somewhat normal for me. I very rarely remember my dreams, so it's possible that the strange things that are sometimes swimming around my head when I wake up are the vestigial appendages of whatever I was dreaming about. Maybe a fin, or a tail, or a toe. Maybe the kachina doll is the toe of some sort of Indian Voltron that will one day assemble itself from the millions of crappy little tchotchkes that have been made since white people decided they were worth collecting, and maybe this giant accretion of tribal culture will sweep everything into the sea, leaving only reservations untouched.

It could happen. But as usual, I digress. I think I liked kachina dolls because of the detail. They were made by Hopi to represent the spirits that inhabited the bodies of men during certain ceremonies, and that's the sort of thing that lends itself to detail. There might be rainclouds on the cape, or a long slash of a mouth with jagged teeth, or it might carry a rattle or a bough from a certain kind of tree. Without these details, the kachina loses meaning, and is just another piece of brightly colored wood.

I've always had a tendency to lose myself in detail. I loved kachinas as a kid because they told a story. They had meaning beyond the typical soulless transaction that Americans have with their own culture. Stories are everything, but detail is just a vehicle to get to meaning, and I sometimes forget that.