A few weeks ago, Stephanie, our district’s principal of Indigenous Education invited another principal and I (we all work in the same building) to build our own drums. She shared a lot of knowledge about building them as we made them. One tidbit of information was that now that I have the drum, it’s expected that if I’m asked to play it, then I would accept the invitation.

Another point was that to be respectful, I shouldn’t paint it in an indigenous style. If I want this, then I should ask or pay someone with heritage and background in the style to do it for me. I wanted to paint it myself and today I decided what I wanted.

I’m working with my uncle, Joe Truss, on a series of videos on the foundations of geometry and the structure of the universe, and this morning we talked about the significance of the cube octahedron.

One of the unique properties of a cube octahedron is that the edge length is also the radial length. If you zoom in on the image of my drum and you’ll see the yellow lines which are the radial lines coming from the center and going to each of the 12 vertices.



I decided on a Yin and Yang sign in the center, and drew the connective balls on the vertices different sizes to indicate depth. I used colour to do this as well with lighter colours at the back. If I did this again, rather than colouring the triangular faces each a different colour, I might have coloured the intercepting hexagons a different colour:

That said, I’m happy with the final result, and since I was working with Sharpie pens, I’m thrilled to have completed this without mis-colouring a line or slipping off of my ruler.

And besides the drawing, the drum sounds pretty good too!

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