Native American Benefit Powwow brings history full circle

Native American arts daily news, presented by
amerindianarts.us

Stone Child College students gear up for graduation with arts night

Indian groups plan protests during Sturgis biker week

A Site to Be Seen: Ancient Earthworks Electronically Rebuilt

Native American Benefit Powwow brings history full circle

NCAA denies Illini use of Indian mascot

Groups honors leaders in American Indian education

NCAA Declines 3 Appeals on Indian Mascots

Local education director honored

Professor proposes American Indian center

Sale of aboriginal art a travesty, native group says

American Indian denied his civil rights

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Museum of Indian Arts and Culture: "Elements of Earth and Fire: New Directions in Native American Ceramic Art: Color," second of three four-month installations, each focusing on one element of pottery-making. "Color" runs through June 18; series continues through Oct. 8. "Wondrous Works: Contemporary Art by Native American Women, through Jan. 14, 2007. 708 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe. Admission and hours: (505) 476-1250.

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MOTHER'S DAY BRUNCH, 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., Gathering, Mashantucket Pequot Museum, 110 Pequot Trail, MASHANTUCKET. Brunch includes spring asparagus, carved hickory roast buffalo brisket, desserts and more. Emma Joe Mills Brennan and her jazz trio will perform. Presentation by Native American quilters Salli Benedict, Sheree Bonaparte and Barbara Helen Hill. $30. Moms get half-price admission to museum exhibits. Reservations: 1-800-411-9671 by May 10. www.pequotmuseum.org

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Taos Art Museum: "The Stark Legacy," paintings by members of the Taos Society of Artists. Through July 23. 227 Paseo del Pueblo Norte, Taos. Admission and hours: (505) 758-2690.

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Park volunteers needed
Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum staff needs volunteers to assist with the Four Corners Indian Art Market May 6 and 7 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Volunteers will work four-hour shifts.
The art market is a celebration of the contemporary and traditional Native American arts and culture. Activities include Hopi and Navajo dancers and performances by singer James Bilagody and flute player Aldean Ketchum. Food, pottery, arts, crafts and jewelry are available for purchase. For more information, please call 435-678-2238.

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Prayer at sunrise

Now this day, (Lukka yattone)
My sun father, (Hom yatoka tatcu)
Now that you have come out standing to your sacred place, (yam telashina kwi to' ye lhana kwai ikapa)
That from which we draw the water of life, (yam kia kwi ya na te'ona)
Life sacred meal, (hala wo tinane)
Here I give to you. (lilha tom ho te'a upa)
Your long life, (yam onaya naka)
Your old age, (yam lha shiaka)
Your waters, (yam kashima)
Your seeds, (yam towashonane)
Your riches, (yam u/tenane)
Your power, (yam sawanikia)
Your strong spirit, (yam tsemakwin tsume)
All these to me may you grant, (temlha hom to anikchiana).

To be chanted with an offering of cornmeal
Zuñi

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Fire had come to the Six Nations - Haudenosaunee

Often, around the fire in the long house of the Haudenosaunee , during the Moon of the Long Nights, this tale is told.

Three Arrows was a boy of the Mohawk tribe. Although he had not yet seen fourteen winters he was already known among the Iroquois for his skill and daring. His arrows sped true to their mark. His name was given him when with three bone-tipped arrows he brought down three flying wild geese from the same flock. He could travel in the forest as softly as the south wind and he was a skillful hunter, but he never killed a bird or animal unless his clan needed food. He was well-versed in woodcraft, fleet of foot, and a clever wrestler. His people said, 'Soon he will be a chief like his father.'

The sun shone strong in the heart of Three Arrows, because soon he would have to meet the test of strength and endurance through which the boys of his clan attained manhood. He had no fear of the outcome of the dream fast which was so soon to take. (to fast means to go without food or water)

Three Arrow's father was a great chief and a good man, and the boy's life had been patterned after that of his father.

When the grass was knee-high, Three Arrows left his village with his father. They climbed to a sacred place in the mountains. They found a narrow cave at the back of a little plateau. Here Three Arrows decided to live for his few days of prayer and vigil. He was not permitted to eat anything during the days and nights of his dream fast. He had no weapons, and his only clothing was a breechcloth and moccasins. His father left the boy with the promise that he would visit him each day that the ceremony lasted, at dawn.

Three Arrows prayed to the Great Spirit. He begged that his clan spirit would soon appear in a dream and tell him what his guardian animal or bird was to be. When he knew this, he would adopt that bird or animal as his special guardian for the rest of his life. When the dream came he would be free to return to his people, his dream fast successfully achieved.

For five suns Three Arrows spent his days and nights on the rocky plateau, only climbing down to the little spring for water after each sunset. His heart was filled with a dark cloud because that morning his father had sadly warned him that the next day, the sixth sun, he must return to his village even if no dream had come to him in the night. This meant returning to his people in disgrace without the chance of taking another dream fast.

That night Tree Arrows, weak from hunger and weary from ceaseless watch, cried out to the Great Mystery. 'O Great Spirit, have pity on him who stands humbly before Thee. Let his clan spirit or a sign from beyond the thunderbird come to him before tomorrow's sunrise, if it be Thy will.'

As he prayed, the wind suddenly veered from east too north. This cheered Three Arrows because the wind was now the wind of the great bear, and the bear was the totem of his clan. When he entered the cavern he smelled for the first time the unmistakable odor of a bear. This was strong medicine.

He crouched at the opening of the cave, too excited to lie down although his tire body craved rest. As he gazed out into the night he heard the rumble of thunder, saw the lightning flash, and felt the fierce breath of the wind from the north. Suddenly a vision came to him, and a gigantic bear stood beside him in the cave. Then Three Arrows heard it say, 'Listen well, Mohawk. Your clan spirit has heard your prayer. Tonight you will learn a great mystery which will bring help and gladness to all your people.'

A terrible clash of thunder brought the dazed boy to his feet as the bear disappeared. He looked from the cave just as a streak of lightning flashed across the sky in the form of a blazing arrow. Was this the sign from the thunderbird ?

Suddenly the air was filled with a fearful sound. A shrill shrieking came from the ledge just above the cave. It sounded as though mountain lions fought in the storm; yet Three Arrows felt no fear as he climbed toward the ledge. As his keen eyes grew accustomed to the dim light he saw that the force of the wind was causing two young balsam trees to rub violently against each other. The strange noise was caused by friction, and as he listened and watched fear filled his heart, for, from where the two trees rubbed together a flash of lightning show smoke. Fascinated, he watched until flickers of flames followed the smoke.

Three Arrows had never seen fire of any kind at close range nor had any of his people. He scrambled down to the cave and covered his eyes in dread of this strange magic. Then he smelt bear again and he thought of his vision, his clan spirit, the bear, and its message. This was the mystery which he was to reveal to his people. The blazing arrow in the sky was to be his totem, and his new name - Blazing Arrow.

At daybreak, Blazing Arrow climbed onto the ledge and broke two dried sticks from what remained of one of the balsams. He rubbed them violently together, but nothing happened. 'The magic is too powerful for me,' he thought.

Then a picture of his clan and village formed in his mind, and he patiently rubbed the hot sticks together again. His will power took the place of his tired muscles. Soon a little wisp of smoke greeted his renewed efforts, then came a bright spark on one of the stick. Blazing Arrow waved it as he had seen the fiery arrow wave in the night sky. A resinous blister on the stick glowed, then flamed.

Fire had come to the Six Nations!

From the Archives of Blue Panther Keeper of Stories
http://groups.msn.com/KeeperofStories/
Reprinted by permission

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Books and Articles

Dorothy Dunn On Primitive Art
Excerpt
Anthropologists use the term "primitive" as a general category to describe cultures which had not achieved a certain standard (define modernity). For Dunn, a primitive was not a certain type of culture, but described individuals and objects indigenous to any, every, culture. The primitive subject was that gifted individual, or "seer" whom was able to discern the primitive objects relevant to their culture. These objects were also primitives, and represented the signs, icons, or symbols of a culture. Thus, for Dunn, primitive art was the one to one relationship between the seer and the perceived set of primitive objects of their culture. Primitive was not a certain type of culture, but a certain set of variables occurring in every culture, and primitive art was an event that portrayed the values, or what was of importance in that culture. Thus, Dunn encouraged her students to carry on the tradition into the Modernist era.

Essay on the Zuni World View
Excerpt(Complete article is available in PDF)
In Signs from the Ancestors, a study of Zuni cultural symbolism and perceptions in rock art, M. Jane Young cites the "dialectics of the beautiful and the dangerous" noted by Barbara Tedlock and states that "Tedlock posits an underlying aesthetic framework that informs cosmology, whereas I posit an underlying cosmological principle that informs aesthetics". From the perspective of this paper and its conclusions it would appear that Young is perhaps partially correct in her ascertainment although the confluence of the two principles makes it difficult to discern logical priority in either the beautiful (tso’ya) or the dangerous (attanni), for the multireferential finds manifestation of beauty in the "aesthetic of accumulation, an elaborate redundancy of symbolism in Zuni sacred and secular environments" and informs cosmological principles of the preconditions of the rational, while aesthetic license premises pragmatics where proper interpretation of context ensures that rational thought of the "perspective-taker" attains objectivity as a "personal accomplishment" in the success of "reciprocal public intentions". This is because the principle of the “base metaphor” cited by Young is inclusive of a body of conceptual presuppositions which include the notion of an interrelatedness of all things, which is seen here as a cosmological precept akin to notions of identity and individuation, and the notion of a predetermined harmony as indicative of the aesthetic. Young notes that the “very generality of the metaphor lends its ambiguity--an ambiguity quite characteristic of the Zuni view of the world. Zuni ritual symbols, whether expressed verbally or visually, are frequently multivalent or multireferential, standing for both themselves and something else at the same time; yet all of the meanings are bound together, so that the Zunis say, as do the Mescalero Apache: "They’re all the same thing".

Bibliography of the Zuni Language
Excerpt
The Zuni, or Shiwi language, is now generally considered a language isolate. The Encyclopedia Britannica categorizes it as a Penutian language, and Bertha Dutton once posed the hypothetical that according to the Swadesh list, "If the Zuni language is a member of the Penutian language family, then it is a distant relative of the Tanoan languages (Tewi)." The Penutian hypothesis was advanced by Alfred Kroeber and Roland B. Dixon, and later refined by Edward Sapir, and was an attempt to reduce the number of unrelated language families in a culturally diverse area that was centered in California's central coast. While this theory was plausible for some of the languages, the problem of verification of this theory was that to find any evidence of any cognates between the California languages and Zuni, one would possibly have to trace the languages' lineage by as much as 3000-5000 years or more.

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Indian Ledger Art-Resources and Information
Excerpt
Ledger art is traditionally a male American Indian pictographic art form, and historically has been characterized as such by researchers. Chronologically its stylistic development belongs to the Proto-Modern era of the Native American Fine Arts Movement and was a major influence, through trade routes and the patronage of white art collectors, on Modern Indian Art as its elements diffused to the schools of New Mexico, Oklahoma, and the Northwest Coast. Its more explicit expression, however, yielded to the styles that developed in these schools and culminated in the early 1960's during a period of the Movement referred to as the First Generation Modernists. Only recently have the researchers of Ledger art recognized Virginia Stroud as the Native American Woman artist who, as a Second Generation Modernist and a member of the so-called "New Indian Art Movement", revitalized a traditionally male form of art expression with her pictographic images in the late 1960's to the early 1980's. Influence on Stroud's stylistic achievements can be attributed to her Kiowa upbringing centered in Oklahoma, which is the major geographic center of the Southern Plains school, and her attendance at Bacone under the direction and influence of Dr. Richard West.

AEQ Book Review of Making Dictionaries: Preserving Indigenous Languages of the Americas .
Frawley, William, Kenneth C. Hill, and Pamela Munro, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 450 pp. ISBN 0520229967, $34.95.
© 2004 American Anthropological Association Book Review of Making Dictionaries: Preserving Indigenous Languages of the Americas .
Reviewed for the Anthropology & Education Quarterly by Catherine S. Fowler
University of Nevada
csfowler@unr.nevada.edu
To Order this book

THE FOURTH WORLD
W. Tussinger has written his first novel which was released in December, 2004.
W. Tussinger is a member of the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma and has lived on several reservations including the Yuroks of Northern California and the Yakamas of Washington State where he attended college.
To Order this book

An Overview of Pacific Northwest Native Indian Art
Free downloadable e-book

American Indian Women's Activism in the 1960s and 1970s
by Donna Hightower Langston
Complete article

THE WOMEN/Edward S. Curtis
"THE WOMEN/Edward S. Curtis," by Christopher Cardozo; foreword by Louise Erdrich (Bulfinch Press, $35) — Cardozo, who lives in Minneapolis, is the world's foremost expert on, and collector of, photos of American Indians taken by turn-of-the-century photographer Edward S. Curtis. Cardozo went through 1,000 photos to find the 100 sepia-toned images in this book, which show the daily lives of American Indian women at a time when most were already on reservations. Minneapolis novelist and poet Erdrich discusses women's work in her foreword: " … although Edward Curtis believed that he was documenting a vanishing culture, it is in these humble arts that the strength of Native culture lives on."

Linguists Find the Words, and Pocahontas Speaks Again
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand, The Book
Early tribal artifacts put in spotlight at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

"Communing with Bears"
By Sara Wright
Communing with Bears is the story of a joyful encounter between one woman and a black bear.

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Web Sites:
Native American Links Page
Indigenous Peoples Literature
Native Voice
Wisdom of the Old People
By David Whitney

National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation
Inuit film to tell story of last great shaman
My Two Beads Worth: Indigenous News Online
Northern California Indian Development Council
Native Village
Smudge Ceremony

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Literacy in Indigenous Communities by L. David van Broekhuizen, Ph.D. (2000)
HTML Format (70K)
PDF Format(117K)
Literacy in first languages in indigenous communities is a complex topic that generates lively discussion. This research synthesis explores the notions of national, mother-tongue, multiple, and biliteracies. It presents important information pertaining to threatened languages, language shift, and language loss. Examples of culturally relevant uses of literacy in indigenous communities and issues related to first-language literacy instruction are also provided.