Lilies, daisies and a ruffled pink chrysanthemum crowd the top of a beaded hoop, with violet crocus and a spike of purple bloom filling out the sides. Low inside the ring, in profile, one wolf turns its head away to the left, grey green through the mane and cream white along the muzzle. Below the hoop the season changes. Frost blue feathers hang down, snowflakes drift across them, and small pines stand dark in the ice. Summer above, winter underneath, on a mottled green ground.
The hooped web is Ojibwe. Their word for it, asabikeshiinh, means spider. Willow was bent into the ring, nettle fibre or sinew wound across it, and the whole thing hung where a child slept. The teaching belongs to Asibikaashi, Spider Woman, who looked after the little ones as the Anishinaabe spread further across the land. The shape travelled well beyond Ojibwe country in the twentieth century, which is why almost everyone recognises it and few people know whose it is.
Ma'iingan, the wolf, is one of the Anishinaabe clans, and an old teaching pairs him with Original Man as a brother who walked the world and named everything in it. Whatever befalls one, the teaching says, befalls the other. A wolf's face ringed with flowers reads differently once you have heard that.
Further designs sit in the wolf rug collection, and there is background reading in the wolf, brother of the Amerindian.
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