what aspect of native american literature might have led europeans to over look it quizlet

Overview Questions

Overview Questions

• What is the relationship between Native American identity and American identity?
• How does Native American literature reverberate or help create a sense of what it means to be Native American in the United States?
• What does this literature assistance reveal virtually the experience of having a multicultural identity?
• How does the conception of American Indian identity depend upon the writer's identity?
• What is Native American literature?
• What makes Native American traditions from different regions distinctive?
• How has Native American literature been influenced past politics on and off the reservation?
• How are Native American oral traditions shaped by the landscapes in which they are composed?
• What role does the land play in oral tradition?
• How does the notion of time in American Indian narratives compare with notions of time in Western cultures?
• How does the chronology of item narratives reflect differing notions of time?
• How do Yellow Woman stories and the Nightway or Enemyway dirge influence Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Storyteller?
• How do Navajo chantways influence the poetry of Luci Tapahonso?
• How does the Ghost Dance influence the vision of Black Elk?
• How does the Ghost Dance challenge nineteenth-century European American notions of Manifest Destiny?
• How do Yellow Woman stories subvert the genre of captivity narratives?
• How do the poems of Simon J. Ortiz challenge the notion of what it means to exist an American hero?

Video Activities

What is an American? How does American literature create conceptions of the American feel and identity?
Video Comprehension Questions: What are some differences betwixt traditional Native American and European means of seeing the world?
Context Questions: How practice elements of a specifically Native American worldview inform the work of the writers featured in the video?
Exploratory Questions: How much practice y'all know about Native American history and civilization? To what extent is it important for non-Native Americans to know these traditions? What do you lot proceeds past learning about them? What would you lose if you lot didn't know them?

What is American literature? What are its distinctive voices and styles? How do social and political issues influence the American canon?
Video Comprehension Questions: What are some elements of the "oral tradition"? What are some of the ways in which traditional Native American and European storytellers might differ? What social issues appear in Silko'sCeremony?
Context Questions: How do the contemporary writers featured in the video draw on the oral tradition in their works?
Exploratory Questions: What topics, styles, or ideas would you expect to see in a gimmicky Native American written text? How do you lot imagine the text might differ from—and be similar to—literary works written past Americans with European, African, or Asian heritages? Would the absence of typically Native American concerns in a book by a Native American touch your judgment of that book?

How do identify and time shape literature and our understanding of it?
Video Comprehension Questions: What function of the United States are Tapahonso, Ortiz, and Silko from? What tribe is each writer from? What role does World War II play in Silko'sCeremony?
Context Questions: How do the tribe, mural, and surroundings with which each writer is familiar affect his or her piece of work?
Exploratory Questions: Why do you think it might be important for these writers to incorporate the specifics of their own time and place into their texts? What would be lost if they did not incorporate such elements?

"God Is Red": The Clashes and Contacts of Native Religion and Christianity

[2466] John Eliot, First page, Genesis from the Holy Bible: Containing the One-time Testament and the New (1663), courtesy of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

Although Vine Deloria Jr. argues in his classic and polemical bookGod Is Red: A Native View of Religion that Christianity and Native religions are polar opposites, since the very kickoff days of European-Indian contact, many Native Americans have adopted and adapted Christianity for their own purposes. As scholars have noted, native religions ever sought out new forms of power that could be incorporated into their religious practices. Thus while white New England missionaries frequently assumed that they were converting natives into "cerise Puritans," practitioners of Native Christianity most often created an emergent organized religion: one that added new spiritual practices to an existing framework.

Although in that location are probably every bit many dissimilar forms of Native Christianity every bit there are Native Christians, a few basic generalizations provide an important starting signal for agreement the forms taken by this melding of religions. For instance, Deloria argues that the key difference between Christianity and native faith is an orientation to time in the former and an orientation to infinite in the latter. That is, Christianity is a time-based faith, predicated on the ideas that the universe has a definite offset and a definite stop and that human life is a sort of "apparel rehearsal" for the last judgment and afterlife-placement. Native religion, Deloria claims, is infinite-based: information technology grows out of and accounts for the particular mural of the tribe, has no formulation of a primordial fourth dimension when humans were pure but then fell into sin, and anticipates no future of a radically different order (as Christianity posits will come up about at the Second Coming of Christ). For native faith, humans accept always been and will always exist the way they are, and the world volition always exist more or less as it is; even the afterlife is primarily a pleasant version of life in the tribe. Our job, writes Deloria, is to deal ethically and responsibly with each other and with the spider web of all creation to which we are here and at present connected—the land, the animals, the plants, the spirits of the ancestors—rather than to prepare for some future moment in which all will exist transformed. Deloria's generalizations do not hold true for all native cultures: some tribes such as the Pomo of California do speak of a time in which the world was radically different. Fifty-fifty though Deloria'south abstractions have been hotly debated by scholars, this healing vision of spiritual practice is reflected in the piece of work of many contemporary Native American writers, especially and most elaborately in Silko'due southCeremony, but also in the poetry of Ortiz and Tapahonso.

Native versions of Christianity frequently present a mixture of these 2 religious outlooks. For case, a popular story for missionaries was the thought that Native Americans were one of the lost tribes of Israelites. This story fit with the notion of Christianity as a fourth dimension-based organized religion: from the missionaries' perspective, American Indians' history began with the inflow of the whites and moved forward with conversion and the eventual render of Christ. For early Native American Christian converts, nonetheless, the story was not so elementary. Many, such as Guaman Poma of Republic of peru and William Apess (Unit of measurement 4), argued that Native Americans were already Christians upon the arrival of the whites—in fact, they were much better Christians than the Europeans! This notion reflects the perspective that humans accept always been and will e'er exist the style they are and that the world will ever be more or less as it is. Similarly, movements such as the Ghost Dance combine Christian apocalyptic thought with a bones organized religion in the interconnectedness of the land, the animals, the plants, the spirits of the ancestors. By appropriating elements of Christianity, Ghost Dance dancers and singers aimed to fight the enemy with its own weapons, in this instance with religious firearms.

The history of Christianity and Native American communities has non ever been uplifting. Since the earliest days of European settlement, Native Americans accept been the object of strenuous conversion attempts that withal failed to guarantee them equal treatment either before the law or in American religious life. Indeed, Native American converts were often viewed with suspicion both past their ain communities and past European settlers: for example, Mary Rowlandson (Unit 3) has just unkind things to say about "Praying Indians" and indeed nigh praying Indians were forcibly interned and starved on an isle in Boston Harbor during Male monarch Philip's War. Samson Occom (Unit 3), a Mohegan from Connecticut who was converted to Christianity at xvi and afterwards became a popular preacher in America and England, recalls like mistreatment. In hisA Short Narrative of My Life (1768), he sums upwards the years of discrimination and abuse he suffered: "I must Say, 'I believe [my mistreatment by white Christians] is because I am a poor Indian.' I Can't help that God has made me So; I did not make my self and so.—"

Questions

1. Comprehension: According to Deloria, what is one basic divergence between Native American religions and Christianity?
2. Comprehension: In what way does the Ghost Dance religion display the influence of Christianity?
3. Comprehension: What is an emergent religion?
4. Context: Detect all the moments where the contemporary native writers in this unit of measurement mistiness the sacred and the secular. For example, is Tapahonso's "A Breeze Swept Through" a religious verse form? Why or why not? In what sense might Ortiz's "viii:50 AM Ft. Lyons VAH," despite its basically secular surface, be religious in a native sense?
5. Context: Using Ts'eh as an example, discuss the role gender plays in Pueblo religion.
6. Context: Reformer John Collier (1884-1968) created the American Indian Defense Clan in 1923 to fight the assimilationist policies of the Dawes Severalty Human activity of 1887, and he was instrumental in salvaging religious rights for Indians. Consider the annal prototype of him and two Hopi men: what does their trunk language say nigh their relationship, and by extension the relationship in the early on twentieth century between white and native cultures?
7. Exploration: You may never have seen a version of the Bible written in a nonmodern language, equally in the archive image of the Bible translated into Massachuset, a native language. The Bible was originally written mostly in ancient Hebrew and Greek, then even the contemporary versions with which you might be more familiar are translations and therefore at some distance from the original. How do you think translation of sacred texts might bear on their pregnant? Does this "Indian Bible" seem less strange than, say, Chippewa songs in English language?
8. Exploration: Compare Mary Rowlandson's vision of the Narragan-setts and "Praying Indians" to Roger Williams's vision of the Narragansetts. What is the human relationship between Puritanism and Narragansett religion in each text? What is the potential for conversion?
9. Exploration: Why exercise yous think someone similar Samson Occom would take converted to Christianity? How is it that a person tin be brought up with 1 worldview so later on change it? Occom says that he was never really treated fairly past white Christians, simply in what ways do you think he might accept nevertheless benefited from being a Christian?
10. Exploration: Challenge Deloria's claims about Native American religions. For case, to what extent is myth an example of a "primordial fourth dimension"?

[2059] N. C. Wyeth, The Supplicant (1919),
courtesy of Reed Higher Library Special Collections, Portland, Oregon.
Illustration from the N. C. Wyeth edition of Last of the Mohicans. Here Cora pleads with the Delaware sachem Tamenund for the life of her sister, Alice. The theme of white women at the mercy of "savage" natives was made popular by early American captivity narratives.

[2466] John Eliot, Starting time page, Genesis from the Holy Bible: Containing the Old Attestation and the New (1663),
courtesy of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Academy of Pennsylvania.
This translation of the first page of Genesis into Massachusett an Algonquian language, was done with the assistance of John Sassamon (Massachuset), whose murder in 1675 for being an English language informant began Male monarch Philip's State of war.

[2836] Bernard Picard, Illustration from Cérémonies et Coutumes Religieuses des Peuples Idolátres (1723),
courtesy of the Jay I. Kislak Foundation, Inc.
European depictions of Native American ceremonies, such as this one from Picard's half-dozen-volume masterpiece on world religions, often tell us more about Europeans and their anxieties than near the actual experiences they record.

[3249] Joseph-Francois Lafitau, An Iroquois Funeral every bit Observed past a French Missionary, Early on 1700s (1724),
courtesy of the Library of Congress, Rare Books and Special Collections.
Item from Moeurs des Sauvages Amériquians Comparées aux Moeurs des Premiers Temps (Community of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times [in Europe]). This drawing provides insight into Iroquois expiry rituals.

[4210] Anonymous, John Collier and Hopi Men (c. 1920),
courtesy of CSULB, National Archives.
Indian Commissioner John Collier helped fight the U.S. government's assimilationist policies and argued for the protection of American Indian cultures, religions, and languages. He is best known for the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.

[6783] Edward S. Curtis, Altar Peyote with Rattle (Osage) (1930),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [E77.C97].
The Osage Indians of Missouri were agog practitioners of the Peyote Religion. Ceremonies include a prayer meeting in a house designed for the ritual and the singing of Peyote songs. Taken from a cactus, peyote buttons have hallucinogenic backdrop. Peyote cults entered the United States from United mexican states in the nineteenth century.

[7588] George Catlin, Dog Banquet, from The Manners, Customs, and Condition of the N American Indians (1842),
courtesy of Tilt and Bogue, London.
In Letter no. 28, Catlin remarks, "The dog-feast is given, I believe, by all tribes in Due north America; and by them all, I recall, this faithful brute, as well as the horse, is sacrificed in several different means, to gratify offended Spirits or Deities" (Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians).

Healing Arts: The Navajo Dark Dirge (Nightway)

Bearding, [RATTLE Daze RITE (MNA: MS 63-34-ten) (PLATE ii)] (1980-2002) courtesy of Museum of Northern Arizona Photograph Archives.

Healing songs and chants are an of import genre in Native American oral traditions. As a general dominion, songs and chants seek to re-create a state rather than an event. Songs and chants are too rarely told in a vacuum: the Night Chant, for case, is composed of a whole series of practices—including dances, the construction of sandpaintings, and the use of prayer sticks—that constitute a nine-day healing ceremony traditionally performed by the Navajo. Although the Night Chant is specific to the Navajo, information technology provides an important example of the interrelatedness of language, healing, and spirituality in native traditions. It is one of the great masterpieces of the oral tradition.

The Night Chant is a "way" insofar as it attempts not just to break into the natural grade of an illness, but in facts sets the "patient" on the path or style toward reestablishing the natural harmony and balance that allow for health. For the Navajo, who migrated to the Southwest from the northern lands old between seven hundred and one m years ago, the Dark Chant is one of many ceremonial chants meant to affect the world in some concrete mode. The Night Chant is a healing ceremony, a treatment for illness, especially paralysis, incomprehension, and deafness. In the words of anthropologist and ethnographer James C. Faris, Night Chant practices are those that "order, harmonize and re-constitute and situate social relations." Hence the ceremony emphasizes humans' ability to control their globe and their responsibility to utilize that control in the service of balance, respect, and healing. If the Holy People—the ancestors or the spirits—inflict suffering, it is considering people have broken the rules; the Night Chant attempts to put the rules back together, to restore the weather condition conducive to order, balance, and wellness.

The anniversary begins at dusk when the chanter, the medicine man who conducts the anniversary and the just one with the knowledge of proper Night Chant practice, enters the home of the patient, the one who is to exist cured. After a ritual call for participation ("Come up on the trail of song")—which emphasizes the role of non merely the patient simply all guests present to form a community of healing—the patient sits to the west of a burn down. There follow elaborate chants, songs, and dances. The first four days are devoted to purification, after which the Holy People are chosen upon. On the sunrise of the 9th day, the patient is invited to look eastward and greet the dawn, representative of renewal. The chant is fundamentally narrative, although non necessarily continuous, and its specific details and enactments vary greatly amongst different medicine men and the particular needs of the patient. Faris emphasizes the flexibility and fluidity of the elements of the story. There is no key episode that must be retold in all cases for the ceremony to be effective; rather, specific episodes ascend from local situations, and no single medicine man possesses the cognition of every possible episode. But there is mostly a bones storyline, which tells of a long-ago cultural hero of particular visionary power who gathers the details of how to properly conduct the ceremony from the Holy People. The Dark Chant is therefore in part a perpetual retelling of itself; it is neither entertainment nor abstract teaching, simply the ritual reenactment of its own origin. In this origin is the fashion toward order, which is the way toward healing. Through this retelling the vocaliser aims to bring almost hózhó, or holiness, harmony, beauty.

The sandpaintings reflect this goal of balance and harmony seeking. Created for the anniversary and immediately wiped away, the sandpaintings elaborately echo some of the master patterns and images of the dirge. Equally sacred artifacts, they are not intended to be recorded through picture or painting. Considering they are designed specifically to attract the attending of (and eventually embody) the Holy People, it would exist a dangerous violation to allow them to exist later on the proper time for spiritual contact had passed. Those included in theAmerican Passages archive were painted by a priest based on sketches taken from the work of a medicine human who authorized them to be shown to the public. Reproductions such as these have usually been contradistinct to diffuse their power. Surviving notes suggest that at that place are several inaccuracies in the Rattle Shock Rite paradigm; for example, the owl feathers on the central figure should be spotted and decorations should be added to the belt of the central effigy. Similar the multiple levels of manual that Black Elk's narrative went through (see higher up), the various mediations these images have undergone proceed to define a communal center of identity and knowledge in opposition to the outsider—however sympathetic he or she may exist.

Questions

1. Comprehension: Which tribe is the Night Chant associated with?
2. Comprehension: What is the Night Dirge used for?
3. Comprehension: What acts does the Night Dirge involve?
4. Context: In Silko'sAnniversary, Betonie is a mixed-blood Navajo healer. In what sense can y'all see the Dark Dirge or something like it being used in this novel? How is what Tayo goes through similar the ritual described to a higher place? To what extent does his ceremony take into consideration contemporary sources of illness? How does information technology seek to deal with these sources of hurting?
5. Context: Examine ane of the sandpaintings in the annal. How does information technology seek to achieve harmony and balance? How does it exemplify hózhó? Compare the strategies it uses for achieving harmony and remainder to those in Tapahonso'southward poetry.
6. Context: Examine the Rattle Daze Rite image in the archive. Note that it is centered effectually four figures that represent gods of the N, South, East, and West. Why might these figures exist important in Ceremony? Why do yous call up four might exist such an essential number for many Native American beliefs (every bit opposed, say, to the three and seven of Christianity)?
7. Context: Compare the text of the Dark Dirge to that of the Ghost Dance songs. What strategies does each utilise to achieve harmony and balance? How are these strategies related to the goal of each text?
8. Exploration: Why might a Navajo not want a non-Native American to know the details of the Night Dirge? Does this seem reasonable to you? Are in that location things about your life yous wouldn't desire others to know, even though their knowledge would non bear upon your life? Navajos believe that knowing things about people tin affect people. If knowledge could give people power over you, would you be less probable to requite people access to personal information?
9. Exploration: Practise you call back the sandpainting images in the archive are aesthetically pleasing? How do yous know "good" art when yous encounter it? For example, to what extent is information technology reasonable to assume that realistic figures constitute good fine art?

Archive

[5741] Bearding, Two Navaho Shaman Dry Painting to Cure and Illness (due north.d.),
courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History.
Navajo sand paintings, or "dry" paintings, are meant to summon and embody the spirits of the holy people and therefore are wiped away immediately later the Nighttime Dirge ceremony.

[5742] Anonymous, Navajo Shaman Drypainting a Remedy (due north.d.),
courtesy of the American Musuem of Natural History.
The Navajo Night Chant is a ix-twenty-four hour period healing ceremony that includes dances, sandpaintings, and prayer sticks. Sandpaintings reflect the Navajo value of hózhó, or holiness, harmony, beauty.

[5743] Bearding, Navajo Shaman Puts Finishing Touches on Remedy Painting (n.d.),
courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History.

The Navajo employ sandpaintings in an elaborate, nine-solar day anniversary designed to cure disease by restoring order, balance, and har-mony. The paintings are wiped abroad as presently as the ritual is complete.

[5951] Anonymous, Rattle Shock Rite (1980-2002),
courtesy of the Museum of Northern Arizona Photo Archives.
Sandpaintings are used in Navajo ceremonies and are designed to attract the attention of the Holy People. This reproduction has been altered to diffuse its ability.

[5953] Anonymous, Whirling Logs (due north.d.), from J. C. Faris, The Nightway: A History and a History of Documentation of a Navajo Formalism (1990),
courtesy of the Museum of Northern Arizona Photo Archives.
This reproduction of a Navajo sandpainting differs from the original in subtle but pregnant ways. The story told in Nightway Dirge changes with every shaman and patient. Sandpaintings like this oft reflect primary themes or images from the narrative thread of the ritual.

Singing Mothers and Storytelling Grandfathers: The Art and Meaning of Pueblo Pottery

[5890] Henry Peabody, Pottery in the Interior of an Acoma Habitation, New Mexico (c. 1900), courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

Pottery is an important Native American art grade that dates back thousands of years. Equally Simon J. Ortiz notes, "[Pottery making] has more to do with a sense of touching than with seeing because fingers have to know the texture of clay and how the pottery is formed from lines of shale, strata and earth movements." Pueblo pottery is considered some of the nearly cute, and it has deep ties to storytelling traditions. Pueblo cultures, along with those of the Navajo and Apache, constitute the dominant native traditions in the American Southwest. Pottery dates back over fifteen hundred years to the Anasazi catamenia, just in the by few decades at that place has been a tremendous revival in pottery-making among the Pueblo people, led in office by the Cochiti Pueblo potter Helen Cordero and her Storyteller dolls. Cordero'southward pottery challenged the appropriation of Native American fine art by white fine art collectors.

Native works of fine art and craft take a troubled history in mainstream American culture. Like so much of native culture, objects such as bowls and dolls were at least potentially sacred: if used in certain ritual contexts, they acted as embodied prayers to ancestors or gods. The kachinas in the archive are adept examples of this: they are dolls, but they embody a ritual significance too [8110, 8209]. As such, they were not to exist handled and scrutinized past curious Europeans, fifty-fifty investigative anthropologists. Nevertheless, soon after the introduction of railroads into the Southwest, Indians (many of whom establish themselves desperately poor after having their traditional ways of life disrupted) began producing pottery and other artifacts for European commercial consumption. This trade, which began in the 1880s, allowed a pocket-size income for many Pueblo and other native peoples. In most cases, the objects differed in subtle merely profoundly significant means from the ones intended for tribal use, and so did not direct endanger the tribe's traditions: this practice continues to be a business concern for some native writers who incorporate traditional material in their work. Commercial production had the effect of making native-made objects into either mysterious oddities or "artworks" whose consumers had no sense of their sacred origin. Hence, for much of the twentieth century, many Indians felt invaded and exploited by the broadcasting of their artifacts into white America.

As anthropologist Barbara Babcock and photographers Guy Monthan and Doris Monthan particular in their volumeThe Pueblo Storyteller, in the late 1950s Helen Cordero began producing pottery that recaptured and transformed the traditional Pueblo means of fine art. Cordero turned to the traditional construction of objects that possessed deep cultural significance: these are called fetishes (if used in anniversary), figurines, or effigies. Traditionally, clay for the Pueblo was a living substance with its own spirit, and then that anything constructed from clay acquires, as Babcock writes, "a kind of personal and witting existence as it [is] being made." All Pueblo ceremonies used clay objects, which are closely associated with the original creation of life in every known Pueblo cosmos story. Some of these objects were vessels and some were human figures—for case, those known as "kachina dolls." The dolls stand for kachinas, masked supernatural spirits who are said to enter into the bodies of Pueblo dancers during ceremonies and deed equally conduits between the world of humans and the world of spirits or gods.

Another such figure was the "Singing Mother" found amidst the Cochiti. These figures, which may not have been ceremonial only certainly partook of the Pueblo assumptions that made ceremonies possible, are the ones that Cordero's Storyteller dolls repeat and revise. The figures of a mother singing to her child evoke fertility; as Babcock writes, they brand "the connection between man reproduction and other, life-giving forms of generation." As such, childbirth and kid raising are linked to the passing down of stories and songs across the generations, emphasizing the interlinking of all cosmos, including the inextricability of human civilisation and the natural world. Betwixt 1900 and 1960, Pueblo artifacts made for trade were weak in quality and few in number. But Cordero start created a figure that evoked the Singing Mother on commission for a white folk fine art collector, and in the process managed to transform the one-time tradition into a living art form for the present. As always in native traditions, she emphasized the local and the specific: she changed the mother figure to a male, modeled on her gramps whom she remembers as a powerful storyteller, and she added multiple children to the figures (there are every bit many every bit thirty on some pieces). None of her hundreds of figures are identical, nor are the many figures created by Pueblo potters inspired by her work. They are images of the passing down of tradition that are themselves the evolution of tradition. For potters similar Cordero, the importance of the clay and its relationship to the stories of the oral tradition help keep the art traditions alive.

Questions

1. Comprehension: What does the Singing Mother represent?
2. Comprehension: What is a kachina?
3. Comprehension: When and why did Helen Cordero begin producing her pottery?
4. Context: How can y'all see Native American artistic traditions being kept alive but transformed in the contemporary writers discussed in this unit? For example, how isCeremony not merely a reiteration of healing rituals only also a specific annotate on the effects of World War Ii on Native Americans? What is Betonie'south relationship to the Navajo community? How does this inform the way he uses ceremonies?
5. Exploration: Information technology is a curious fact that there is very little bear witness of Pueblo figurative ceramics from almost 1500 to most 1875. This happens to represent to the flow of intense Spanish colonialism in the American Southwest. Why do you think we accept this gap in the historical record?
6. Exploration: How is passing down traditions analogous to childbirth? In what means are these acts like, and in what ways different?
7. Exploration: Could those Pueblo who fabricated pottery for white tourists be considered to be "selling out"? Would you take washed the same affair? Does our gimmicky culture bear witness examples of one time-sacred objects or ideas existence used for turn a profit?

Archive

[5890] Henry Peabody, Pottery in the Interior of an Acoma Habitation, New Mexico (c. 1900),
courtesy of the National Athenaeum and Records Administration (NARA).
Pottery is an important part of Pueblo civilisation. Even dirt is believed to exist endowed with a "spirit" of its own. Here nosotros see the within of a traditional Pueblo home in which 1 family unit's roof was some other's flooring.

[6756] Anonymous, Frontispiece from The Country of the Pueblos (1891),
courtesy of J. B. Alden, New York.
Although Pueblo pottery has long been considered sacred and used in rituals, many pots today are made for the tourist merchandise and for not-Pueblo collectors. Potter Helen Cordero, however, rejects the Western sense of "art" every bit ornamental or just entertaining.

[7312] Anonymous, Video of corn dancers (c. 1940),
courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.
The people of Acoma accept been making pottery for centuries, both for everyday use and for rituals such as the Corn Trip the light fantastic toe. The Corn Trip the light fantastic is held annually at a tribal site near Albuquerque, New Mexico. The dance was given by the supernatural Female parent, who wanted her people to have a public dance which all could bask. Prayer sticks are used in the trip the light fantastic toe to bring legendary hero Koshari. Sacred clowns painted in blackness and white join the dance.

[8113] Huron Tribe, Pair of dolls (1830-50),
courtesy of the Portland Fine art Museum, souvenir of Elizabeth Cole Butler [88.43.6-vii].
Dolls similar these, fabricated by the Huron Tribe in the mid-nineteenth century, played a number of roles in traditional Native American culture, including being used to teach children their people'southward history. The dolls were fabricated from wood, wool, and cotton fiber material and were adorned with metal and drinking glass beads, leather, and real hair.

[8116] Acoma and Santo Domingo, Jars (c. 1900, 1920),
courtesy of the Portland Art Museum, Elizabeth Cole Butler Collection.
Soon subsequently the introduction of railroads into the Southwest, Indians (many of whom became desperately poor after having their traditional ways of life disrupted) began producing pottery and other artifacts for sale.

[8122] Santo Domingo Tribe, Jar (n.d.),
courtesy of the Portland Art Museum, gift of Elizabeth Cole Butler [1481].
Native American pottery, traditionally sacred or utilitarian, began to exist produced in its gimmicky "decorative" form in the belatedly nineteenth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, dealers, archaeologists, and tribal members formed the Indian Arts Fund to collect traditional Pueblo pottery and encourage its product.

Native Weavers and the Art of Basketry

[6303] Anonymous, Pomo feather gift handbasket (north.d.), courtesy of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Fine art Gallery, Reed Higher.

He breathed on her and gave her something that she could non see or hear or olfactory property or touch on, and it was preserved in a little basket, and by all of the arts of design and skilled handwork.
—Kotai'aqan, Columbia River Basketry

Basketry, similar pottery, is an art that is found in numerous Native American cultures simply differs profoundly from tribe to tribe. Every bit Mary Dodge Schlick, the author ofColumbia River Basketry: Souvenir of the Ancestors, Souvenir of the Earth, points out, for centuries baskets have been office of vast trade networks in which friends and acquaintances meet, gamble, and trade food stuffs and goods: baskets are one way of conveying these valuables. Baskets also play of import roles in spiritual and medicinal rituals, as attested to in Greg Sarris's piece of work on Pomo handbasket weaver and healer Mabel McKay. McKay wove her baskets for collectors and for general consumption, and all were made under the guidance of a spirit who taught her healing songs and imbued her baskets with a spiritual ability. Baskets similar the Pomo feather baskets featured in the archive [6303, 8118, 8119] should be thought of every bit spiritual, too as textile, objects.

Equally archaeologist A. L. Kroeber and many others accept noted, Pomo baskets are among the finest in the world. He writes, "To the Pomo, these served as gifts and treasures, and higher up all, they were destroyed in honor of the expressionless." The Pomo live in Northern California and are known for the intricacy of their baskets, particularly their beaded baskets, feather baskets, and miniature baskets [6303]. Sometimes the baskets held medicines, but other times nothing at all; equally Susan Billy, a Pomo basket weaver, explains, "People often ask me what these ceremonial baskets hold. They did non have to hold anything, because the basket itself was all that was needed. The basket contained the prayers and the wonderful, good energy that fabricated it a formalism basket." Gift baskets were given to people of stature or people with whom i wanted to cement a human relationship [8081, 8119]. Pocket-size gift baskets were sometimes worn.

Other Native American communities, including the Nez Perce of Oregon and Washington, likewise wore baskets. Baskets hats, such as the ane in the archive [8118], play a part in the oral tradition of the Columbia River peoples. For example, in 1 Wishxam myth, Grandmother uses a basket hat to teach Little Raccoon near the consequences of misbehavior. In many Native American communities, baskets play an important part in women'southward civilization. Knowledge of how to make a basket hat, amongst other skills, was a sign that a young adult female had reached machismo in Columbia River culture. Women still wear these hats at powwows and other ceremonies.

Questions

1. Comprehension: How is basketry like pottery in its significance for native cultures?
2. Comprehension: How are Pomo baskets potentially spiritual every bit well as material objects?
3. Context: In his bookThe Souvenir, Marcel Mauss argues that gifts must be reciprocated in honor and prestige, if not in kind. How might the Pomo gift baskets create a reciprocal relationship with the giver? How does this compare to other instances of giving, in, say, Leslie Marmon Silko'southCeremony?
4. Context: Look carefully at ane of the baskets in the archive and take annotation of the strategies it uses to create order and harmony. Compare it to i of the coyote or trickster tales inThe Norton Album of American Literature. How does Coyote disengage society's society? Is residue reinstated by the end of the tale?
5. Exploration: If baskets such equally the Pomo gift baskets have a "wonderful, skilful energy," do we have any correct to keep them in museums? What do you recall happens to this free energy in museums? How should items with spiritual significance exist displayed? (You lot may want to read the essay by Greg Sarris, "A Civilization Under Drinking glass: The Pomo Basket," inKeeping Slug Woman Alive.)
6. Exploration: What women's traditions exist in your family unit? How are they passed forth from one generation to the next?

Archive

[6303] Anonymous, Pomo feather gift basket (n.d.),
courtesy of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College.
The series of quill stitches in this coiled Pomo basket indicates the weaver's desire to continue her piece of work during a menstrual period, which would be bad luck if she did not substitute bird quills for plant materials.

[6307] Anonymous, Water jar, pitched with horsehair lug handles (n.d.),
courtesy of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College.
Basketry objects found on the North American continent have been dated to as far back as 9000 b.c.

[6310] Anonymous, Coiled basket tray, rattlesnake design (n.d.),
courtesy of Reed College, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Fine art Gallery.
Like pottery, basketry is important for storing and transferring food and other supplies.

[7416] Bearding, Tray, Apache, San Carlos, Arizona (north.d.),
courtesy of the New York Country Historical Association, Thaw Drove.
Get-go in the tardily 1800s, many Native Americans used the American flag as a decorative motif in their craft. Notice the crossed flags in the design of this Apache basket.

[8081] Pomo tribe, Gift basket (c.1930),
courtesy of the Portland Art Museum, Elizabeth Cole Butler Collection.
The Pomo are a coastal native grouping in Sonoma Canton, California. The handbasket is made of willow, sedge root, clam shell beads, abalone beat out, meadowlark feathers, quail feathers, mallard duck feathers, flicker feathers, and dogbane. Pomo baskets are known for their spiritual, formalism, and healing properties.

[8118] Plateau Indians, Basketry hat (c. 1900),
courtesy of the Portland Fine art Museum, Elizabeth Cole Butler Drove.
Nimíipuu (Nez Perce) women wore fez-shaped basket hats as part of their everyday wearable. This hat is made from vegetal fiber, wool yarn, and a leather fringe. The Nez Perce were one of the tribes encountered past Lewis and Clark during their search for the Northwest Passage.

[8202] Yokut, Handbasket (c. 1900),
courtesy of the Portland Art Museum, souvenir of Elizabeth Cole Butler.
Yokut Indian women (Central California) learned to weave at an early age. Baskets were indispensable to Yokut daily life. Yokut baskets are known for their ornate designs, including human figures and animals. This basket is made of sedge root, red bud, bracken fern root, grass, and quail feathers.

Sacred Play: Gambling in Native Cultures

[6693] Anonymous, Bone Game, Makah (c. 1900), courtesy of Larry Johnson and the Washington State Historical Society.

Gambling has long been a function of Native American cultures. Hand games, similar gift exchange, are an important way to redistribute goods among community members. Gambling is not all fun and games, notwithstanding. In the oral traditions of native peoples, gambler figures, like tricksters, tend to be threshold figures who can movement between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Gambler myths, even so, tend to have a more than gothic edge than trickster tales. Gamblers oft preside over the world of the dead, rather than merely visit information technology, and they are often associated with the end of the world. In contrast, the transgressive nature of the trickster is often a creative or generative forcefulness. Thus, gambler stories oft are about an individual or community facing fearfulness of anything. In Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, for example, the tribes' Cultural Hero challenges the Gambler. The stakes are high: the Hero works on behalf of the community, simply wages his life. These crucial encounters dramatize the people's belief most how the original world was altered to its current form.

As Kathryn Gabriel points out inGambler Way, gambling can be seen every bit a mode of tapping into catholic forces. At times an endeavor to gain insight into or even control the otherwise unpredictable time to come, the outcomes of games can propose what the cosmic forces have in store. Dice and other gaming equipment are even sacrificed on Hopi and Zuni altars. As Gabriel says about gambling in these communities, "It is likely that the rites were performed to discover the probable result of human effort, representing a desire to secure the guidance of the natural powers that dominated humanity." Diverse native games, such every bit dice or hoop and pole, invoke and elaborate basic assumptions about the universe, from the nature of causality to the constant tension between opposing forces. Moreover, the communal nature of the games fosters identity inside the group. Even so, the games are competitive: winning was often seen every bit a blessing and an assurance of connected order and balance—hence the high stakes and profound meaning of native gambling (medicine men sometimes perform ceremonies to invoke the aid of spirits in winning). Many native myths involve gambling, where divine power helps the protagonist win games of chance over antagonistic opponents. Considering these are sacred rites, tribal members are reluctant to discuss their details. The Navajo, for instance, fear speaking about gambling away from sacred times and places, lest doing so bring down the wrath of the cosmic forces (much as they would be loath to casually discuss the Nightway). In cultures where there is no need for a direct-edge stardom betwixt the sacred and the secular, practices like gambling both reveal and maintain profound cultural values and behavior. Never trivial or merely parasitic to "real" or "productive" activity, gambling always conveys deep pregnant in native civilisation.

These traditional associations of gambling are present in contemporary debates over bingo palaces and Indian casinos. Because Indian Nations are sovereign states, gambling is legal on tribal ground. For many native communities, such as the Pequot of Connecticut, casino revenues have led to an economic and hence cultural renaissance. Libraries and museums besides as educational and language programs are now available where none existed before. Critics, however, debate that legalized gambling in any grade is merely a style of taxing the poor and disenfranchised.

Indeed, Indian gambling has long had its detractors. Europeans settlers professed shock when confronted with the intensity of Native American gambling. In 1775, Captain Bernard Romans said of a Choctaw hoop and pole game that it was "plain proof of the evil consequences of a vehement passion for gaming upon all kinds, classes, and orders of men." And indeed, from a Western bespeak of view, the stakes of native gaming seemed high; traditionally, players would sometimes go on betting until losing everything they endemic (fifty-fifty including the clothes on their backs), and Captain Romans notes that several Choctaw committed suicide after such losses. Gambling in most native cultures is not an idle pastime and certainly is not understood as vice or bad habit. Get-go, it is a very pragmatic manner of redistributing appurtenances and food without the bloodshed of fighting or even state of war. Only more profoundly, gambling is a course of what has been called "sacred play"; like many aspects of native life, information technology is inseparable from spirituality.

Pedagogy Tips

• Although Longfellow based his Song of Hiawatha on Iroquois history and mythology, affiliate xvi on the gambler Pau-Puk-Keewis is based on the Chippewa oral tradition (equally collected by Henry Schoolcraft in the first half of the nineteenth century). Kathryn Gabriel considers Pau-Puk-Keewis "the nearly perfect classic of the destructive Native gambler"; she notes that he is "derived from Paup-pu-ke-nay, the Ojibwa/Chippewa trickster grasshopper who has the ability to shape-shift." Ask your students to read the excerpt from Hiawatha in the annal and apply it every bit a backdrop for discussing Native American Gambler figures and for agreement the label of Fleur in Erdrich's story.
• Lawrence Johnson'south 1999 documentaryHand Game is an splendid introduction to traditional Native American gambling practices.Manus Game looks at eight Indian communities including the Crow, Spokane, Flathead, and Blackfeet. Information technology investigates the world of bone, grass, or stick game—the most widely played gambling game in Due north America. This video includes interesting interviews with gaming participants and could be usefully paired with stories about gambler figures.

Questions

1. Comprehension: Why was gambling of import to many Native American cultures?
2. Comprehension: What are the primary attributes of a gambler figure? How does Silko'southward gambler fit within this image?
3. Comprehension: Compare gambler and trickster figures.
4. Comprehension: What is the human relationship between the gambler and the cultural hero?
5. Context: Why exercise the men in "Fleur" react so strongly to Fleur Pillager'due south uncanny winning of the game? How do gender politics and religion operate in the story to provoke the men'south rancor?
6. Context: Read the Winnebago trickster tale. How does the Winnebago trickster compare to the gambler? What is the role of each in creating culture?
7. Context: Compare the depiction of gambling in Leslie Marmon Silko'sAnniversary and Louise Erdrich'southThe Bingo Palace. What role does the oral tradition of the Pueblo and Chippewa, respectively, play in each?
8. Exploration: Imagine that yous are an advertising executive who has been asked to design a entrada to gain credence for a new Indian gambling facility near your customs. What rhetoric will you employ? What claims will you abnegate?
9. Exploration: Compare the role of gambling in Leslie Marmon Silko'southwardCeremony to the role of gambling in the high society novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James (Unit 9). To what extent is gambling in these novels likewise about characters' attempts to control the otherwise unpredictable future? How do their experiences differ?

Archive

[1092] William J. Carpenter, Life on the Plains (1915),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-99804].
Navajo and cowboy playing cards. These cards evidence the blazon of interethnic male person-male bonding seen in James Fenimore Cooper's novels. Interaction like this largely died out when white males started to bring their families to settle in the West.

[6651] Anonymous, Men Playing a Game in Subterranean Lodge at Chino Village (n.d.),
courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.
In what looks not unlike a ritual or formalism germination, these men are engaged in game-playing in an underground lodge. In Native American cultures, gaming is a sacred action that in some cases allows the players to tap into cosmic forces.

[6693] Bearding, Bone Game, Makah (c. 1900),
courtesy of Larry Johnson and the Washington State Historical Society.
This game, called the "bone game" by the Makah Tribe of the Pacific Northwest, is often referred to equally the "paw game" or the "stick game." The activity is guessing which manus is holding a piece of bone, but the game is complex and involves drumming, singing, and trickery.

[8225] Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Pau-Puk-Keewis," from The Song of Hiawatha (1855),
courtesy of Ticknor and Fields, Boston.
The sixteenth chapter of Longfellow's famous Song of Hiawatha tells the story of the gambler Pau-Puk-Keewis. Although Longfellow based this work on Iroquois history and mythology, Pau-Puk-Keewis comes from the Chippewa oral tradition.

Creative Response

Creative response

1. Periodical: First, freewrite in your journal on whatever you know about Native American literature and cultures. So, write a narrative from the point of view of a person of your ain age who has simply encountered Native American civilisation for the beginning time. What do you imagine that person would be thinking? What would he or she discover most memorable? What emotions would he or she exist feeling? What would he or she say to or ask the Native Americans (assuming communication could occur)?
2. Poet'due south Corner: Use i of the poems past Tapahonso or Ortiz as a model for a verse form about an experience of your own. What near this model is helpful to y'all in expressing yourself? What seems to interfere or be bothersome? If y'all have written poems in the by, "translate" one of them into this form so that it echoes elements of the oral tradition. How does irresolute the form of your poem touch on what yous understand to exist its significant?
3. Doing History: Phase a fictional dialogue between Wovoka, the Paiute prophet of the Ghost Trip the light fantastic toe organized religion, and a thoughtful, middle-class white person in the Midwest Us, in which they effort to explain themselves to each other. Imagine this exchange takes place in early 1890, after the Ghost Dance has begun to spread but before the ending of Wounded Knee. Wovoka is preaching a peaceful yet clearly anti-white spirituality (read the Wovoka choice inThe Norton Anthology of American Literature before y'all do this assignment). The white person, sympathetic to human suffering and not prejudiced against Native Americans, is both anxious nigh the destructive potential of the Ghost Trip the light fantastic and unavoidably implicated in the society that has nearly decimated native culture. What can these ii people say to each other that might build a bridge between them?
4. Multimedia: Equally Paula Gunn Allen says in the video, virtually all objects and practices in traditional American Indian life are "messages": "content-laden information that you can read." Using theAmerican Passages paradigm database, construct a multimedia presentation in which you lot analyze the images of such items as pottery, baskets, sandpaintings, masks, and dances. What "argument" near their culture do they seem to be making? In what sense can these objects or practices be seen as letters, indicating the values or beliefs of the civilization that produced them?

Problem-Based Learning Projects

Trouble-Based Learning Projects

""How can I get my students to call back?" is a question asked past many kinesthesia, regardless of their disciplines. Problem-based learning (PBL) is an instructional method that challenges students to "learn to learn," working cooperatively in groups to seek solutions to real world problems. These problems are used to engage students' marvel and initiate learning the bailiwick matter. PBL prepares students to retrieve critically and analytically, and to find and use advisable learning resources."— Barbara Duch, University of Delaware

1. Yous are a United States congressperson in 1924, speaking in favor of the human activity to grant citizenship to American Indians. Using texts and cultural artifacts from at least three dissimilar communities, prepare a presentation for Congress using images as well equally testimony on why American Indians deserve to be full citizens.
2. You are a spokesperson for a museum that has been asked to return to a local tribe the five-hundred-twelvemonth-old human basic and burial objects in its drove. What will the museum do with these objects if they aren't returned? How should the museum present information about Native American cultures if it doesn't employ the burial objects? Assistance design a new exhibit for the museum.
3. Yous are part of a team charged with composing a new American history textbook for high school students. Yous accept been asked to provide a brief sketch of the furnishings of European colonialism on Native American civilization. How would you write such a sketch? Where would you want your reader to feel sympathy, anger, frustration, satisfaction? What is our current responsibility toward evaluating the actions of people in the past? Are the Europeans the bad guys? Are the Indians the proficient guys? Should our judgments be more complicated? Is in that location reason to believe whatsoever of us would have acted more than ethically had we been alive 4 hundred years ago? Consider, as you write, that your audience will consist of readers from European as well as Indian backgrounds.

marquezsentort.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.learner.org/series/american-passages-a-literary-survey/native-voices-video/activities/

Bagikan Artikel ini