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Relationship and Reciprocity: A Metaphysics of Nature

Joseph Epes Brown and Emily Cousins

in Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Traditions

This chapter focuses on Native Americans' belief about nature. It shows that Native Americans do not dichotomize human and animal, natural and supernatural. Typical Western distinctions between ... More

This chapter focuses on Native Americans' belief about nature. It shows that Native Americans do not dichotomize human and animal, natural and supernatural. Typical Western distinctions between animism and animatism are not necessarily present in the Native American experience, since all forms and aspects of creation are experienced as living and animate. Even “inanimate”rocks are thought to be mysteriously possessed with life. But this experience of the sacred does not exclude a unitary, all-inclusive concept that refers to both a Supreme Being and to all gods, spirits, or powers of creation. The roots of relatedness, Lakota metaphysics, animal beings as teachers, and the cyclical relationships that Native American traditions sustain with nature are discussed.Less

Silence, the Word, and the Sacred: Evoking the Sacred through Language and Song

Joseph Epes Brown and Emily Cousins

in Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Traditions

This chapter focuses on Native American language and song. It looks at the progressive compromising of tribal languages by the Western world. It discusses the value of oral traditions, the special ... More

This chapter focuses on Native American language and song. It looks at the progressive compromising of tribal languages by the Western world. It discusses the value of oral traditions, the special role of elders in society as keepers of oral tradition, and the art of storytelling.Less

Changeless at the Heart of Change: Concepts of Time and Process

Joseph Epes Brown and Emily Cousins

in Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Traditions

This chapter focuses on Native American concepts of time and process. Western culture often perceives time as a linear progression that advances from past to present to future in a straight line. In ... More

This chapter focuses on Native American concepts of time and process. Western culture often perceives time as a linear progression that advances from past to present to future in a straight line. In contrast, many Native American cultures observe that the rhythm of the world is circular, as is the life of all beings and forms. In these cultures, time tends to be experienced as cyclical and rhythmic, rather than linear and progress oriented. Most Native American languages, for instance, do not have past and future tenses; they reflect instead a perennial reality of the present. These differing perceptions of time have contributed to the misunderstandings that characterize so many interactions between Native and non-Native Americans.Less

A Unity of Experience: Purification, Expansion, and Identity through Ritual

Joseph Epes Brown and Emily Cousins

in Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Traditions

This chapter focuses on the unity of experience in Native American religious traditions. Native American traditions stress a unity of experience. Where such traditions are still alive and spiritually ... More

This chapter focuses on the unity of experience in Native American religious traditions. Native American traditions stress a unity of experience. Where such traditions are still alive and spiritually viable, the dimension and expression of the sacred is present in all of life's necessary activities. When the elements of time, place, language, art, and the metaphysics of nature come together, however, as they do in ritual activities, the experience of the sacred is intensified. The three cumulative possibilities that must be accomplished by spiritually effective rites: purification, expansion, and identity are mentioned, as are initiation rites, and humor in Native American rites.Less

Person and Nature in Native American Worldviews

Anna L. Peterson

in Being Human: Ethics, Environment, and Our Place in the World

This chapter examines ideas about nature and human nature in two Native American cultures, the Koyukon of Alaska and the Navajo of the southwestern United States. It identifies some of the common ... More

This chapter examines ideas about nature and human nature in two Native American cultures, the Koyukon of Alaska and the Navajo of the southwestern United States. It identifies some of the common themes that surface in these two traditions and explains that native cultures also emphasize the importance of attachment to particular places in shaping and motivating efforts to protect nonhuman species. It addresses some of the important issues that native ideas about persons and nature raise for comparative approaches to environmental ethics.Less

Fixing a Center: Native American Sacred Geography

Joseph Epes Brown and Emily Cousins

in Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Traditions

This chapter focuses on Native American interactions with the land. Many tribes believe in the sustaining power of the land. According to most Native American traditions, the land is alive. Every ... More

This chapter focuses on Native American interactions with the land. Many tribes believe in the sustaining power of the land. According to most Native American traditions, the land is alive. Every particular form of the land is experienced as the locus of qualitatively different spirit beings; their presence sanctifies and gives meaning to the land in all its details and contours. These spirits also give meaning to the lives of people who cannot conceive of themselves apart from the land. Apache stores of place, Navajo relationship with the land, conflict over sacred lands, and sacred architecture are discussed.Less

“There Is No Word for Art”: The Creative Process

Joseph Epes Brown and Emily Cousins

in Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Traditions

This chapter focuses on the traditional arts of Native Americans. It looks into the spiritual perspectives and fundamental assumptions of traditional arts that are often misunderstood in Western ... More

This chapter focuses on the traditional arts of Native Americans. It looks into the spiritual perspectives and fundamental assumptions of traditional arts that are often misunderstood in Western society. The chapter also discusses Eskimo Shamanic art, Lakota animal images, and Navajo weaving.Less

Where Have the Corn Mothers Gone?: Americans Encounter the Europeans

Mary P. Ryan

in Mysteries of Sex: Tracing Women and Men through American History

This chapter describes how the coordinates of gender differentiation—asymmetry, the relations of the sexes, and hierarchy—were performed in various ways across the wide landscape of North America ... More

This chapter describes how the coordinates of gender differentiation—asymmetry, the relations of the sexes, and hierarchy—were performed in various ways across the wide landscape of North America five hundred years ago. Focusing on pre-Columbian Indian tribes that developed complex societies, it analyzes the differentiation of male and female and the ease of lateral transfer between their roles within Native American cultures. In pursuit of the question “Where Have the Corn Mothers Gone,” the chapter puts the history of gender into play to explain the outcome of the collision between Amerindian cultures and European colonizers.Less

Castle on the Plains

Douglas C. Comer

in Ritual Ground: Bent's Old Fort, World Formation, and the Annexation of the Southwest

This chapter examines the events associated with the establishment of Bent's Old Fort. It explains that the fort was established by the trading company of the Bent brothers and operated within a ... More

This chapter examines the events associated with the establishment of Bent's Old Fort. It explains that the fort was established by the trading company of the Bent brothers and operated within a previously existing trading network with roots in a prehistoric trade between villagers and nomads of at least six hundred years ago. The chapter also looks at the initial entry of Europeans into similar trading systems in the East, which had profound effects in the Native American cultures even before permanent European settlements were established.Less

Introduction:: British Forts and Indian Neighbors

Daniel Ingram

in Indians and British Outposts in Eighteenth-Century America

British forts in the colonial American backcountry have long been subjects of American heroic myth. Forts were romanticized as harbingers of European civilization, and the Indians who visited them ... More

British forts in the colonial American backcountry have long been subjects of American heroic myth. Forts were romanticized as harbingers of European civilization, and the Indians who visited them were envisioned as awestruck, childlike, or scheming. In the last few decades, historians have attacked the persistent notion that Indians were mere supporting participants and have sought to reposition them as full agents in the early American story. However, historians have given little attention to British forts as exceptional contact points in their own rights. This book studies Indian-British interactions near British military and provincial forts, revealing the extent to which Indians defined the fort experience for both natives and newcomers. Indians visited forts as friends, enemies, and neutrals, and, in many cases requested forts from their British allies for their own purposes. They used British forts as trading outposts, news centers, community hubs, diplomatic meeting places, and suppliers of gifts. But even with these advantages, many Indians still resented the outposts. Forts could attract settlers, and often failed to regulate trade and traders sufficiently to please native consumers. Indians did not hesitate to press fort personnel for favors and advantages. In cases where British officers and soldiers failed to impress Indians, or angered them, the results were sometimes violent and extreme. These forts evoke an early American frontier affected as much by Native American culture as by British imperial priorities.Less

Salvaging the Savage

in Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks: Rewriting the Tropics in the novela de la selva

This chapter shows that authors of the novela de la selva are interested not only in overturning imperial topoi of the ‘Indian’ but also in establishing new descriptive paradigms for Native American ... More

This chapter shows that authors of the novela de la selva are interested not only in overturning imperial topoi of the ‘Indian’ but also in establishing new descriptive paradigms for Native American culture. They try to achieve this by including Amerindian myths and words in their novels and by shifting the narrative perspective from the urban travellers to the Amerindians themselves. Nevertheless, the representation of Amerindian culture in the novela de la selva is not attempting to be — and should not be idealized as — an instance of self-description on the part of indigenous people. Although the proliferation of costumbrista literature in post-independence Latin America might be seen as an ‘autochthonous’ genre, the urban Creole elite's portrayal of jungle tribes is quite the opposite and is often no more successful than European descriptions of Amerindians.Less

The Countercultural “Indian”: Visualizing Retribalization at the Human Be-in

Mark Watson

in West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977

This chapter discusses how the 1960s counterculture appropriated fragments of Native American cultural tradition, through citations of “Indian-ness,” to fashion what they called a “community of the ... More

This chapter discusses how the 1960s counterculture appropriated fragments of Native American cultural tradition, through citations of “Indian-ness,” to fashion what they called a “community of the tribe.” The 1960s conception of the tribe was an emergent political alternative that was historically specific, drawing from a number of idiosyncratic 1960s sources, most important the then-fashionable media theory of Marshall McLuhan. This 1960s tribe tied small-scale collectivity together with high technology and aesthetic experimentation in order to reinvent the relationship among art, technology, and politics. As the United States became increasingly dominated by high technology and the information economy—a “technocracy,” in Theodore Roszak’s 1969 coinage—this “techno-primitivist” political aesthetics grew in urgency and became a long-lasting part of late twentieth-century underground aesthetic politics.Less

Lizards and Humans

Eric R. Pianka and Laurie J. Vitt

in Lizards: Windows to the Evolution of Diversity

This chapter discusses the importance of lizards and their role in human culture, art, and folklore. Lizards have been woven into human culture throughout our evolutionary history. Lizards, most ... More

This chapter discusses the importance of lizards and their role in human culture, art, and folklore. Lizards have been woven into human culture throughout our evolutionary history. Lizards, most likely iguanas and spiny-tailed iguanas, were sacrificed in some Mayan rituals and thus held special significance. The Anasazi, Hohokam, Mimbres, and Mogollon Native American cultures used horned lizard images on pottery, petroglyphs, effigy bowls, figures, and shells. The chapter also discusses the collection, exportation, or sale of lizards and the impact of large-scale harvesting in the long term. Finally, the chapter discusses efforts to protect and conserve endangered lizards.Less