Saturday, April 19, 2008

Gathering Of Nations, Red Drum Women Society Singers, Nominations for 2008 Eagle Awards Open, Kokopelli-The trickster

Andres Quandelacy, Bisbee Cobolt Azurite Buffalo

Native American arts daily news, presented by
amerindianarts.us

Headlines, exhibits, powwows listed below: (access past headline archives for 2004-2006 here)

Northeastern State University Symposium on the American Indian

Gathering Of Nations

Hippies, Indians: Picking through the rubble

UM to break ground on Native center

Indian spiritual walkers passing through Newton, Kansas

American Indian sorority recruits downtown for first time

Native American Flutist R. Carlos Nakai to Perform with Fellow Canyon Records Artists

Gerard Tsonakwa featured presenter at Biosphere 2 in Oracle

Kalyn Free speaks at democratic meeting

Red Drum Women Society Singers heal through the drum

Nominations for 2008 Eagle Awards Open

Pow wow: 'Honor the Youth'

Touring exhibition "People of the Plateau and the Plains: Native American Photography by Edward S. Curtis"

Legislature announces Folk Heritage and honors Native American artist

SPIRIT Parade celebrates culture, protests historical treatment

Native American Activists Walk 3,000 Miles

Powwow passes on Native culture

California Indian country

Native American, Indigenous Scholars Form New Interdisciplinary Association

Native Green Energy working with the Passamaquoddy tribe

Gathering of Nations in Albuquerque, April 24-26, 2008

(SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.) - Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts will present An Evening with R. Carlos Nakai, William Eaton and William Clipman with special guest Cliff Sarde on May 10, 2008, at 8 p.m. The performance is presented with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Single tickets are available for $38 from the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts Web site at www.scottsdaleperformingarts.org or the box office at (480) 994-ARTS (2787).

Works of art from the Eugene B. Adkins Collection -- a private collections featuring the Taos artists as well as Native American art -- will open to the public March 7 at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art on the University of Oklahoma campus.

More on the Adkins Collection

The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in New York, the George Gustav Heye Center opens "Remix: New Modernities in a Post Indian World," a spirited multimedia survey of 15 emerging Native artists June 7. A joint presentation from the museum and the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the exhibition closes Sunday, Sept. 21.

Jamestown, North Dakota Culture Festival is slated for Aug. 1-3.

One special guest will be Hidatsa storyteller Mary Louise Defender Wilson. She is a winner of the NEA National Heritage Fellowship and the only fellow living in North Dakota. Marvin Bald Eagle Youngman will be teaching different Ojibwa games. Storyteller Keith Bear has also been invited to participate.

“The Native American component of the festival will include artists, music, dancing, storytelling, games and food,” said Taylor Barnes, Arts Center director. “This festival is primarily about how traditions are shared through games and food.”

Recent Books of Interest

American Indian Mafia

An FBI Agent's True Story about Wounded Knee, Leonard Peltier, and the American Indian Movement (AIM)

''Canyon Gardens: The Ancient Pueblo Landscapes of the American Southwest (University of New Mexico Press: 2006). Editors V.B. Price and Baker H. Morrow have assembled 15 essays on the millennium-old Puebloan landscape.

"Being Lakota", Book by Larissa Petrillo

"American Indian Nations: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow", Book by George Horse Capture

Kokopelli - Trickster - Hopi

Kokopelli is a fertility deity, usually depicted as a humpbacked flute player (often with a huge phallus and antenna-like protrusions on his head), who is worshipped by many Native American tribes in the Southwestern United States.

Like most fertility deities, Kokopelli presides over both childbirth and agriculture. He is also a trickster god.

Because of his influence over human sexuality, Kokopelli is often depicted with an inhumanly large phallus. Among the Ho-Chunk, this penis is detachable, and he sometimes leaves it in a river in order to have sex with girls who bathe there.

Among the Hopi, Kokopelli carries unborn children on his back and distributes them to women (for this reason, young girls are often deathly afraid of him). He often takes part in rituals relating to marriage, and Kokopelli himself is sometimes depicted with a consort, a woman called Kokopelli-mana by the Hohokam and Hopi.

Kokopelli also presides over the reproduction of game animals, and for this reason, he is often depicted with animal companions such as rams and deer. Other common creatures associated with him include sun-bathing animals such as snakes, or water-loving animals like lizards and insects. Because of this, some scholars believe that Kokopelli's flute is actually a blowgun (or started out as one), but this is a minority opinion.

In his domain over agriculture, Kokopelli's fluteplaying chases away the Winter and brings about Spring. Many tribes, such as the Zuni, also associate Kokopelli with the rains. He frequently appears with Paiyatamu, another flautist, in depictions of maize-grinding ceremonies. Some tribes say he carries seeds and babies on his back.

Origins and Development

Kokopelli has been worshipped since at least the time of the Ancient Pueblo Peoples. The first known images of him appear on Hohokam pottery dated to sometime between AD 750 and AD 850.

Kokopelli may have originally been a representation of ancient Aztec traders, known as pochtechas, who traveled to the Southwest from Mexico. Such traders brought their goods in sacks slung across their backs, and this sack may have evolved into Kokopelli's familiar hump (in fact, many tribes make Kokopelli a trader in this way). These men also used flutes to announce themselves as friendly as they approached a settlement. This origin is still in doubt, however, since the first known images of Kokopelli predate the major era of Aztek-Anasazi trade by several hundred years.

Another theory is that Kokopelli is actually an anthropomorphic insect. Many of the earliest depictions of Kokopelli make him very insect-like in appearance. The name "Kokopelli" may be a combination of "Koko", another Hopi and Zuni deity, and "pelli", the Hopi and Zuni word for the desert robber fly, an insect with a prominent proboscis and a rounded back, which is also noted for its zealous sexual proclivities. A more recent etymology is that Kokopelli means literally "kachina hump".

Because the Hopi were the tribe from whom the Spanish explorers first learned of the god, their name is the one most commonly used.

Kokopelli is one of the most easily recognized figures found in the petroglyphs and pictographs of the Southwest. The earliest known petroglyph of the figure dates to about A.D. 1000. Kokopelli was one of several kachina dolls sold to tourists. The Spanish missionaries in the area convinced the Hopi craftsmen to omit the phallus from their representations of the figure. As with most kachina dolls, the Hopi Kokopelli was often represented by a human dancer. These dancers apparently had great fun with missionaries and tourists by making obscene and sexual gestures that the foreigners did not understand.

In recent years, the emasculated version of Kokopelli has been adopted as a broader symbol of the Southwestern United States as a whole. His image adorns countless tourist items such as T-shirts, ball caps, and keychains. A bicycle trail between Grand Junction, Colorado and Moab, Utah is now known as the Kokopelli Trail.

Kokopelli bears a passing resemblance to Bradshaw Paintings of North-est Australia (examples), which could be mere coincidence or sign of a common origin; some have suggested that ancient astronaut theories in the model of Erich von D䮩ken have attributed both to a common celestial source.

Blue Panther Keeper of Stories

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

Po'pay, Leader of the First American Revolution, Clear Light Publishing, 2006, new book by Herman Agoyo (Ohkay Owingeh)

Zuni fetish updates from Amerindian Arts

posted by Amerindian Arts at 12:24 AM

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