Native American Art News: American Indian artists part of Women’s History Month

Phillip Tuwaletstiwa, engineer and geodetic scientist, merges Western science with Native American culture, for example by developing the first comprehensive land information system for the Hopi tribe as an aid in managing cultural and natural resources. He delivers a talk titled �Dreams, Myths and a World View. 6 pm Monday, Feb. 26. $10. Hotel Santa Fe, 1500 Paseo de Peralta, 466-2775

Native Talents at Sundance

One of the chief pleasures of writer-director Sterlin Harjo's first feature, Four Sheets to the Wind, is the beautifully calibrated interplay between onscreen siblings Cufe and Miri Smallhill, played by Cody Lightning and Tamara Podemski. After their father's death, Cufe decides to leave the reservation where he makes his home and visit troubled sister Miri in the big city. The film, which is still seeking distribution, is a well-realized portrait of a modern Native American family, and Lightning believes it represents the next wave in Native filmmaking.

"It doesn't [revolve] around us being Native," he explains. "We're just regular people with regular issues like everybody else. In Native Hollywood -- there is a Native Hollywood -- there's one or two projects a year that come out that are like buckskin period pieces, and everyone just latches onto those projects. We're Indians now; let's make some films about that. That's what [Four Sheets] is about. It's not about how things used to be. It's about how things are now."

Full article

The work of six American Indian artists will be displayed March 2-15 at E. Max vonIsser Gallery of Art in the Student Resource Center of Elgin Community College, as part of Women’s History Month.

The exhibit, titled “Native Women Artists: Creating Contemporary Life Journals” features works by Lisa Bernal, Julia Brown Wolf, Frances Hagemann, Nora Moore Lloyd, Norma Robertson and Sharon Okee-Chee Skolnick. The women work in a variety of mediums – photography, drawing and beadwork. It is open 7:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. weekdays and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays. An artist reception, open to the public, will be 5 to 8 p.m. March 8 in the gallery.

American Indian Journalism Institute accepting applications for summer 2007. The Freedom Forum is accepting applications until March 31 for the seventh American Indian Journalism Institute, the premier journalism training and summer internship program for Native American college students, June 3-22, 2007.

Students attend AIJI for free and receive other financial assistance. Applications are welcome from any Native American college student hoping to become a journalist. In its first six years, 143 students completed the program. Instructions and application forms are available from Janine Harris at jharris@freedomforum.org or 605/677-5424.

Spokane artist George Flett, well kown for his depictions of ledger art, anouncing forthcoming book "The Ledger Art of George Flett"

Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, Contemporary Native American Paintings. Feb. 10-April 8. Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg.

American Indian bags as works of art

The exhibit, “Heritage of Design: American Indian and First Nation Treasures from the Maryhill Museum,” will run until June 10 and will feature hand-woven artifacts from tribes in the Plateau region of the Northwest, which includes British Columbia, Washington, Idaho, Montana and Oregon.

Museum of New Mexico/Museum of Indian Arts & Culture
Current and Online Exhibitions

Crow Indian Water-Medicine - Blackfoot

Once a Crow Indian had a son killed in war. He was in mourning: so he took his lodge into the mountains and camped there that he might have dreams in which power would be given him to revenge the death of his son. He slept in the mountains ten nights. At last as he was sleeping, he had a dream, and in this dream he heard drumming and singing. Then a man appeared and said, "Come over here: there is dancing." So he followed the man. They came to a lodge in which there were many old men and women. There were eight men with drums. He also saw weasel-skins, skins of the mink and otter, a whistle, a smudge-stick, some wild turnip for the smudge, and some berry-soup in a kettle. One old woman had an otter-skin with a weasel-skin around it like a belt. So the man staid there, learned the songs which these people sang, and when he came back to his people he started the Crow-water-medicine. Since that time he has had other dreams: and the skins of the beaver, the muskrat, all kinds of birds, etc., with many songs for each, have been added.

This medicine has great power. If any one wishes a horse, he calls in some of the Crow-water-medicine people. Then they pray, sing, and dance.

The power of this medicine is such that after a while a man may come along and say, "I have had a bad dream. You must paint me, that the dream may not come true." Then he gives a horse as a fee. The medicine has power also in treating the sick. The people who have this medicine meet at regular times, - on Sundays and at the time of the new moon. They paint their faces with a broad red stripe across the forehead, and one across the mouth and cheeks. A rectangle of red is also painted on the back of each hand. Some wear plumes.

Anthropological Papers American Museum of Natural History, Vol. II, 1908.

http://groups.msn.com/KeeperofStories/
Reprinted by permission

Creation The Origin of Death by Dying – Zuni

The impetuous fathers of the Bear and Crane did not deliberate for long. No! Straightway they strode into the stream and feeling with their feet that it even might be forded—for so red were its waters that no footing could be seen through them—they led the way across; yet their fear was great, for, very soon, as they watched the water moving under their very eyes, strange chills overcame them, as though they were themselves changing in being to creatures moving and having being in the waters; even as still may be felt in the giddiness which besets those who, in the midst of troubled or passing waters, gaze long into them. Nonetheless, they won their way steadfastly to the farther shore. But the poor women who, following closely with the little children on their backs, were more áyauwe (tender, susceptible), became witlessly crazed with these dread fear-feelings of the waters, wherefore, the little ones to whom they clung but the more closely, being k'yaíyuna and all unripe, were instantly changed by the terror. They turned cold, then colder; they grew scaly, webbed and sharp clawed of hands and feet, longer of tail too, as if for swimming and guidance in unquiet waters. See! They suddenly felt to the mothers that bore them as the feel of dead things; and, wriggling, scratched their bare shoulders until, shrieking wildly, these mothers let go all hold on them and were even wanted to shake them off—fleeing from them in terror. Thus, multitudes of them fell into the swift waters, wailing shrilly and plaintively, as even still it may be said they are heard to cry at night time in those lonely waters. For no sooner did they fall below the surges than they floated and swam away, still crying—changed now even in bodily form; for, according to their several totems, some became like to the lizard (mík'yaiya'hli), chameleon (sémaiyak'ya), and newt (téwashi); others like to the frog (ták'aiyuna), toad (ták'ya), and turtle (étâwa). But their souls (top'hâ'ina: "other-being" or "in-being"), what with the sense of falling, still falling, sank down through the waters, as water itself, being started, sinks down through the sands into the depths below. There, under the lagoon of the hollow mountain where it was earlier cleft in two by the angry maiden-sister Síwiluhsitsa as before told, lived, in their seasons, the soul-beings of ancient men of war and violent death. There were the towns for the 'finished' or dead, Hápanawan or the Abode of Ghosts; there also, the great pueblo (city) of the Kâ'kâ, Kâ'hluëlawan, the town of many towns wherein stood forever the great assembly house of ghosts, Áhapaáwa Kíwitsinan'hlana, the kiva which contains the six great chambers in the middle of which sit, at times of gathering in council, the god-priests of all the Kâ'kâ exercising the newly dead in the Kâ'kokshi or dance of good, and receiving from them the offerings and messages of mortal men to the immortal ones.

Now, when the little ones sank, still sank, seeing nothing, the lights of the spirit dancers began to break upon them, and they became, as be the ancients, 'hlímna , and were numbered with them. And so, being received into the midst of the undying ancients, see! these little ones thus made the way of dying and the path of the dead; for where they led, in that ancient time, others, wanting to seek them (insomuch that they died), followed; and yet others followed these; and so it has continued to be even unto this day.

But the mothers, still crying, did not know this—did not know that their children had returned unharmed into the world from where even themselves had come and to where they must eventually go, constrained there by the yearnings of their own hearts which were ill with mourning. Loudly, still, they wailed, on the farther shore of the river.

www.aniwaya.org/html/stories

http://groups.msn.com/KeeperofStories/
Reprinted by permission

Articles by Amerindian Arts

Note on Zuni substance

Concept of the Sublime

Dorothy Dunn On Primitive Art
(Excerpt)Quoting Alice Corbin Henderson, Dunn states that in an Indian society, art is "possessed in common" and "totally lacking in individualistic concept." Thus, objectivity is enjoined with intentionality as personal accomplishment without a reference to the individual. This would satisfy a pedagogic sense of rationality in that in an Indian society "the surest way to make a prayer effective is to symbolize the matter prayed for" (Bandelier). If the prayer (the art of rhetoric) was effective, then it was handed down from generation to generation and its success justified its rationality.

Essay on the Zuni World View

Bibliography of the Zuni Language

Indian Ledger Art-Resources and Information

Books of Interest

Navajo Spaceships

Classic Hopi And Zuni Kachina Figures

MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK: THE FIRST 100 YEARS

Fine Indian Jewelry: The Millicent Rogers Museum Collection

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

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."
To Order this book

Literature on Native America

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

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.

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.

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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