The Power Of Red

All of this is to remind us that for First Society people, in a tradition that begins over two hundred thousand years ago, colour was not an abstraction. Nor was it just something that one applied to a surface. More ‘real’ than human relations, it was a communication device equivalent to voice itself, a ‘voice’ that connected the living with the largely invisible world of animal‐ and ancestor‐spirits. It did not matter if the colour was in the shape of a stone, a feather, a clump of clay, an animal or a plant.

The painter George Catlin made a remarkable image in 1837 of a group of Sioux worshiping red boulders on the open prairie [Figure 5.] We have no idea what these men ‘saw’ in the boulders, but they certainly did not see just big rocks, but perhaps the great mythological Red Bear and its cubs.

As modern people it is impossible for us to recreate the ancient meaning of colour, but we should not ignore colour in how we describe First Society life, because from the perspective of the First Society, we moderns may have every shade of colour in the spectrum available to us on our computer screens, but we live in an essentially colour‐less world.