Flag and Green Cross Lanyard

Description

Flag and Green Cross Lanyard is a striking and deeply meaningful expression of Indigenous artistry and the layered, complex cultural symbolism carried by two of the most significant symbols in the Native American experience. Measuring 16 × .75 inches with a 1-inch swivel clasp for secure ID carry, tiny seed beads are meticulously woven with Nymo thread on a wire frame and secured with e-glue in a bold, purposeful palette of red, white, blue, green, black, and silver. The flag and cross design moves across the beadwork with confident visual presence and quiet, considered depth — the bold reds, whites, and blues of the flag pattern carrying the full, complex weight of a symbol that has meant many different things to many different people across the long and difficult history of Indigenous and American life, and the deep, living green of the sacred cross blazing with the vitality and healing power of a symbol whose Indigenous roots reach back far deeper than any colonial association and whose sacred meaning has never belonged to any single tradition or people.

The US flag carries a particularly complex and deeply layered significance for Native Americans — a symbol whose meaning cannot be reduced to a single, simple interpretation and whose presence in Indigenous life reflects the full, unresolved complexity of the relationship between the First Nations peoples and the nation that grew up on their ancestral lands. For many Native Americans, the flag is simultaneously a symbol of the colonization, forced removal, and broken treaties that have defined so much of the Indigenous historical experience, and a symbol of the extraordinary resilience, sovereignty, and patriotism of a people who have never stopped being fully and completely present on this land — who have served in the US military at higher rates per capita than any other demographic, who have fought and died under this flag in every American war, and who have always understood their relationship to this nation as that of the original stewards of the land it now occupies. To wear the flag as a Native American is to hold that full, unresolved complexity with honesty and with the deep, patient resilience of a people who have learned to carry contradiction as one of the most essential and most sacred of all human capacities.

The cross holds its own ancient and profoundly sacred significance in Native American tradition — a significance that predates and exists entirely independently of its later associations with Christianity and the colonial period. In Indigenous spiritual tradition, the cross is one of the most ancient and universally honored of all sacred geometric forms — a symbol of the four cardinal directions, North, South, East, and West, and the sacred center point where all four directions meet and from which all orientation, all meaning, and all sacred order flows. The cross represents the intersection of the spiritual and earthly realms — the vertical axis connecting the world above to the world below, and the horizontal axis spanning the full breadth of the human world from one edge to the other, the two together forming the most complete and perfectly poised of all possible maps of the sacred universe.

The cross is central to the medicine wheel — that fundamental symbol of Indigenous spiritual tradition that organizes the entirety of human experience and natural reality into a unified, interconnected whole. In this context the cross carries the meanings of healing, wholeness, and the sacred, life-sustaining connection between the physical world and the Creator — a symbol not of any single religion or cultural tradition but of the universal human recognition that the world is ordered, that it has a center, and that the person who knows where that center is and how to orient themselves in relation to it has found the most essential of all forms of sacred knowledge. The green of this particular cross adds the living, regenerative energy of the natural world to those meanings — the color of growth, of healing, of the fertile, patient vitality of a living earth that has always sustained those who have known how to live in right relationship with it.

Flag and Green Cross Lanyard brings these layered meanings together in a beautifully functional and deeply personal form — a handcrafted tribute to resilience, sovereignty, spiritual wholeness, and the enduring presence of Indigenous peoples as the First Nation Americans who have always been, and will always remain, at the sacred center of this land and its story.

Details

• Colors: Red, white, blue, green, black, silver
• Materials: Seed beads, Nymo thread, wire, e-glue, ID swivel clasp
• Size: 16 × .75 inches with 1-inch swivel clasp for IDs

Care Instructions: Wipe with damp cloth and keep dry. Please remember that even though the Nymo thread has a nylon base and is very strong, pulling hard and yanking on the Landyard can tear the thread so please be kind to it when you use it. Please use with things the weight of ID’s.