American Indian graduates may don feathers
Native
American arts daily news, presented by
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Former Peoria chief remembered fondly on passing
Indian radio stations have new partner
American Indian graduates may don feathers
Hands-on project assists tribes
Rankokus festival delights the senses
Four to be inducted in tribe’s Hall of Fame
August 25-27—PowWow Native American Festival: Intertribal gathering of Native American dancers, drummers, artists, and craftspeople, Friday noon-8 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m.-9 p.m. and Sunday 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Patterson Park at Linwood and Eastern avenues, 410-675-3535, baic.org.
NATIVE AMERICAN HONORING CEREMONY at Montezuma Hall, Aztec Center, SDSU, 619-281-5964. From 7-10 p.m. Friday, May 26, join a traditional Native American ceremony geared towards helping Mother Earth. Featured guests include actress Irene Bedard, singer/storyteller Yona Welch, the Toltecas En Aztlan dance group and more. $10.
July 21-22, 2007
American Indian Intertribal Cultural Festival, July 21-22, 2007, Hampton, Va. -- Festival highlighting the contributions and cultures of Virginia Indians, with native foods, dances, traditional stories, arts and crafts and music
OCT. 5-6
Virginia Indian Symposium -- Williamsburg Hosted by Virginia's Indian tribes, the "400 Years of Survival" symposium will feature nationally known Native American speakers on topics such as sovereignty, federal recognition, health care, repatriation and education.
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.
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. 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.
A Raccoon Story - Seneca
AN uncle and nephew lived together. One day when the nephew was in the woods, hunting, a handsome young woman came to the cabin. She had a basketful of bread on her shoulders.
Unstrapping the basket and putting it down in front of the old man, she said, "Here is marriage bread, my father and mother have sent me here to marry your nephew."
"Very well," said the uncle.
When the young man came home, his uncle said, "You are married now."
"I am glad," said the nephew.
After this the young woman cooked and the men hunted. Each day the nephew returned with a heavy load of game. One day while hunting he came to a tree in which there was a large hole and in the hole was a litter of coons. He climbed the tree and threw one coon after another on to the ground.
All at once he heard a woman say, "Come down. Come down, you are tired," then she ran off through the forest.
When the young man went home, he told what had happened. His wife laughed, but said nothing. Not long after, when packing up his game ready to start for home, a woman came up behind him, took him by the arm and led him to a log. They sat down, she pulled his head on to her lap and began to look in his hair.
The man was soon asleep. The woman put him in a basket, put the basket on her back and went to an island in the middle of a lake. Then she took the man out of the basket and asked, "Do you know this place?"
"I know it. This is where my uncle and I used to fish," and giving a spring into the water the man became a bass and escaped.
When he went home, he told his wife what had happened. She laughed, but said nothing.
The man was so frightened that he stayed at home for several days. Then the feeling wore away and he started off to hunt.
As he was packing up his game to go home a woman said, right there at his side, "Stop, wait a while, you must be tired."
They sat down on a log. She drew his head to her lap and began looking in his hair. He was soon asleep. Putting him into a basket the woman carried him to a great ledge of rocks where there was only a foothold, then, taking him out of the basket, she asked, "Do you know this place?"
"I will tell you soon," said the man, looking around.
That minute the woman disappeared.
Soon he heard someone say, "I will fish a while."
A line dropped into the water below and a man began singing and pulling up fish.
At last he said, "I have enough, I'll rest and have something to eat. This is what we people eat when we are among the rocks," and he took a baked squash out of his basket.
The young man said to the rocks, "Stand back a little so that I can string my bow."
The rocks stood back; he strung his bow, and, saying, "Now boast again!" he shot the fisherman.
He heard a loud noise and looking in the direction it came from saw an enormous bat coming toward him. The bat passed a little to one side. The young man took a hemlock leaf from his pocket and dropping it over the rocks, sang, "A tree must grow from this hemlock leaf. A tree must grow from this hemlock leaf."
Soon a tree came in sight. Then the man talked to the tree, said, "Come near, and have many limbs."
As the tree came to a level with the place on the rocks where the young man was sitting, it stopped growing. He had seen that along the narrow shelf of rocks there were many men. He called to the nearest one to tell all to come and they could escape.
The men crept up, one after another, then went down
on the tree. When all had reached the ground, the young man took a strawberry leaf from his pocket and dropping it said, "Grow and give berries." Then he sang, "Ripen berries. Ripen berries." The vines grew, were covered with blossoms. The blossoms became berries and the berries ripened.
When the men had eaten as many berries as they wanted, the young man picked a leaf from the vines, put it in his pocket and the vines and berries disappeared. Then he said to the men, "Let us go to our wife"--meaning the woman who had captured them.
When they had traveled some distance, the young man killed an elk. Taking the hide he cut it into strings and made a baby board, but one large enough for a grown person. After a while they saw a house and in front of it a woman pounding something. When she saw them, she began to scold and, holding up the pounder was going to strike them.
The young man said, "Let the pounder stop right there!"
The pounder stopped in the air, half raised.
They seized the woman, strapped her to the board, and, saying, "You must be cold," they set the board up in front of the fire. Just then the young man's wife came and, finding that they were about to roast the woman, she was angry.
She freed her, and said, "You are free now, and I will go home."
She went to the lake and called on Bloodsuckers to stretch across the water. They came and she walked over on them.
Each man went his own way. When the young man got home his wife was there.
The nephew and uncle were raccoons.
Seneca Indian Myths by Jeremiah Curtin 1922 and is now in the public domain.
http://groups.msn.com/KeeperofStories/
Reprinted from this site by permission
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.
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.
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.
posted by Amerindian Arts at 1:19 AM
