Explore Articles Filed Under: Indigenous Culture
According to several recent news reports, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is currently conducting a large-scale undercover investigation targeting people who are illegally buying, selling, or receiving bald and golden eagle feathers. On March 12, federal agents arrested four men — three from Washington and one from Oklahoma — for killing eagles and selling their feathers. One of the men, Reginald Dale Akeen, an enrolled Kiowa, is accused of traveling the powwow circuit under the name of J. J. Lonelodge and selling illegally obtained feathers to dance competitors for use in their regalia.
On March 25, 1916, a man of unknown name died of tuberculosis in California. He was known as Ishi, but that was not his real name, which no one knows; the word ishi means man in the Yahi language.
Ishi was the last surviving Yahi. His people had been destroyed by mining silt that poisoned their salmon streams, livestock that competed for grazing with deer, epidemics of alien diseases. His people had been hunted down and killed by white ranchers.
As we have discussed, the International Narcotics Control Board — a United Nations monitoring body that oversees the implementation of the UN drug control conventions — has called for the governments of Bolivia and Peru to abolish all uses of the coca leaf, including coca leaf chewing. In its 2007 annual report, the INCB asked Bolivia and Peru to make possessing and using coca leaf criminal offenses — a move that would make criminals of millions of people in the Andes and Amazon.
Peyote songs are the prayer music and ceremonial heart of the Native American Church. The songs have traditionally been sung, accompanied by the gourd rattle and water drum, in the various languages and musical styles of the indigenous peoples from which the church drew its membership. At the same time, the pan-Indian nature of the church made it a powerful vehicle for the diffusion of musical styles and content. Early studies of peyote songs, dating from the 1940s, found Navajo peyote singers using the Ute musical style, and recognizably the same peyote song among the Tarahumara, Navajo, and Cheyenne.
If you are going to be in New York this month, check out the 2009 Native American Film + Video Festival, running from March 26 to 29. Founded in 1979 and now celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, the festival is organized by the Film and Video Center of the National Museum of the American Indian. The festival aims to showcase the creative talents of Native American directors, producers, writers, actors, musicians, and cultural activists.
We have talked before about the Grob, McKenna, Callaway, et al. psychiatric study on the long-term effects of drinking ayahuasca in the ceremonies of the União do Vegetal church. I noted that the study had not clearly disentangled any bias that might have resulted from the fact that the ayahuasca drinkers — but not controls — had been preselected for their orderly churchgoing habits. Here is a study that may shed some light on that question.
When Europeans first came to South America, they were awed by the grand civilizations of the Andes. The jungle, on the other hand, was for Europeans a place of dark and savage mystery, inhabited by primitive and ferocious warriors. Two interlocking assumptions about the Amazon have persisted to this day. The first is that the Amazon is a place of virgin wilderness, untouched by human cultivation or management; the second is that the people of the Amazon have always been — as they were found to be by twentieth-century anthropologists — small bands living by gathering, hunting, fishing, and slash-and-burn agriculture.
The shaking tent is a ceremony widespread among indigenous peoples of North America, during which a shaman is tightly bound within a darkened lodge, the structure shakes violently, and the shaman — and sometimes the audience as well — converses with spirits who speak and sing, and sometimes appear in various forms, such as darting blue lights. When light is restored, the shaman is revealed to be unbound and sitting comfortably, apparently untied by the spirits.
The Natufian culture flourished in the southern Levant between 15,000 and 11,600 years ago. One of the places that Natufian dead were buried is a small cave named Hilazon Tachtit, located on a steep cliff about 500 feet above the Hilazon River, with a sweeping view of the river and the Mediterranean shoreline, in which twenty-eight burials have been excavated. These burials can be dated to between 12,400 and 12,000 years ago, during the time that Natufian culture was in transition from foraging to farming.
The first thing I was taught by Gerineldo Moises Chavez, my jungle survival instructor, was how to build a tambo, a jungle hut. It wasn’t fancy, as you can see, but it kept me dry when it rained and kept me off the ground while I slept. In fact, all ribereño houses are built on exactly the same principles — a thatched house on stilts, built entirely of jungle materials, which may range in size from a small temporary hunting shelter, just large enough to sleep one or a few people, to an elaborate structure able to house an extended family.