Native American Rituals Research Articles

Cowboys: Abstract Expressionism, Hollywood Westerns, and American Progress

Abstract Expressionism has been influenced heavily by the popular theory of America’s undying, progressive spirit, originally conceived by Frederick Jackson Turner and given its most potent form in Western films. Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” was embodied in stories of John Wayne and other cowboy heroes taming the supposed edges of civilization. The mythic West as constructed by Turner and these films cemented American identity as one of exploration and innovation, with the notable condition of Indigenous Americans ceding their sovereignty. While Abstract Expressionism was commonly connected to the mythic West through the origin stories of Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still, the critical understanding of this movement as the height of painterly achievement built on Native American precedents evinces a deeper connection to Turner’s popular Frontier theory. As critics like Clement Greenberg cast flatness as the last frontier of painting, and as artists like Pollock and Barnett Newman claimed Native American ritual practices as a part of their aesthetic lineage, Abstract Expressionism proved as effective as Hollywood Westerns in corroborating and perpetuating the idea of America’s frontier spirit.

Cultivating Positive Health, Learning, and Community: The Return of Mesoamerica’s Quetzalcoatl and the Venus Star

For more than 3500 years, since Olmec times (1500–400 BC), the peoples of Mesoamerica have shared with one another a profound way of living involving a deep understanding of the human body and of land and cosmology. As it stands, healing ways of knowing that depend on medicinal plants, the Earth’s elements, and knowledge of the stars are still intact. The Indigenous Xicana/o/xs who belong to many of the mobile tribes of Mesoamerica share a long genealogical history of cultivating and sustaining their Native American rituals, which was weakened in Mexico and the United States during various periods of colonization. This special edition essay sheds light on the story of Quetzalcoatl and the Venus Star as a familial place of Xicana/o/x belonging and practice. To do so, we rely on the archaeological interpretation of these two entities as one may get to know them through artifacts, monuments, and ethnographic accounts, of which some date to Mesoamerica’s Formative period (1500–400 BC). Throughout this paper, ancestral medicine ways are shown to help cultivate positive health, learning, and community. Such cosmic knowledge is poorly understood, yet it may further culturally relevant education and the treatment of the rampant health disparities in communities of Mesoamerican ancestry living in the United States. The values of and insights into Indigenous Xicana/o/x knowledge and identity conclude this essay.

Artist Statement: The Electrics

Artist StatementThe Electrics Linda Vallejo The Electrics are a fusion of my experiences in the golden days of hippiedom and psychedelic adventures, the magical, hallucinatory quality of indigenous Native American and Mexican ceremonial tradition, and decades spent at the computer manipulating digital imagery. These combined experiences are the basis for my "electrified" paintings and sculptures, where nature and people appear to glow with an almost otherworldly light. The Electrics began as "portraits" of the California Canyon and valley oak which surround my home in Topanga Canyon. For twelve years prior, I had been painting California landscapes in the tradition of fantastic realism, but as I experimented with the oaks they began "morphing" from realism into abstraction. The transition came about when I tried to capture the glow of an oak bathed in the light of a full moon. The painted field became dissected by multiple organic shapes and marks painted in contrary and contrasting colors. Today I have completed several electric oaks, landscapes, and portraits inspired by this first effort where color began to move and vibrate across the canvas. In reading the obituaries recently I have found amazing stories of individuals who have accomplished a great deal and yet are little known. These "unknown heroes" became the basis for a new series entitled Electric Heroes. In asking friends and colleagues for their "list of heroes" I found that many people remembered Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the Dalai Lama. These renowned figures became the first of my Electric Heroes. My goal now is to complete commissioned head and full body Electric Portraits. In thinking through the artistic process I believe that The Electrics are influenced by Andy Warhol's psychedelic pop icon, the splotchy "pixels" of Chuck Close's portraits, the cosmic 1960s palette and minimal line of Peter Max, and Klimt's emphatic patterning, combined with the visual repetition and coloration of Huichol yarn painting and Indigenous ceremonial bead work. In re-visiting [End Page 214] these artists and their work I am reminded of how the artistic mind "gathers" information and experiences, sometimes over a very long period of time, to reaffirm these influences in the creation of new work. Betty Ann Brown, historian and curator (https://lindavallejo.com/), states: Vallejo's beloved subjects—people and nature—come together in The Electrics, the recent paintings that are expressively energized by vivid color and vibrating form. In this series, the artist has returned to the cosmic vision search initiated in her ceremonially imbued art from the 1980s. The paintings depict the altered state of the sacred that Vallejo experienced in Native American rituals. The Electrics are unified by a brilliant, almost psychedelic palette. From lime green to hot pink, the colors Vallejo chooses recall the intensity and artificiality of early aniline dyes. The paintings are also characterized by consistent calligraphic marks. The tight curls, narrow angles, and parallel hatches all derive from one of the artist's important early experiences. When Vallejo's family lived in Spain, they traveled to the Muslim palace in Granada known as the Alhambra. The young artist was so impressed by the Arabic script used as architectural decoration that she copied it into a notebook—and then repeated the forms again and again. The calligraphy emerges in her early etchings from art school, in later drawings, and now in The Electrics. In the early years of the new millennium, Vallejo began to focus on portraits of single oak trees. I say "portraits" deliberately: these are not generic paintings of plants. Instead they are carefully detailed depictions of individual trees—the wardens and witnesses of Topanga Canyon and other celebrated sites in California, such as Joshua Tree and Boney Ridge. These are fierce and hallucinogenic portrayals of the awesome powers of nature. The growing number of Electric trees and portraits are stunningly beautiful and visionary gifts. [End Page 215] Copyright © 2020 Frontiers Editorial Collective, Inc.

<i>Wiwanyag wachipi</i>

Graham Harvey’s reconceptualisation of religion emphasises the relational world of indigenous peoples. His suggestion that religion revolves around negotiating with ‘our neighbours’ is particularly relevant to Native American ritual processes insofar as he extends ‘neighbours’ to other-species persons. Further, by emphasising ‘lived religion’, Harvey turns our attention to the significance of embodied religion as it expresses itself in ceremonial performances. Harvey’s approach is enriched by Ronald L. Grimes’ notion of the way in which indigenous rituals take us into the deep world of other-species communities through a gift exchange economy that promotes the wellbeing of everyone in the neighbourhood.
 The present discussion demonstrates the applicability of both Harvey’s and Grimes’ approaches to indigenous religious ritual processes by focusing on James R. Walker’s account of Oglala Sun Dancing. Walker constructs a fourstage ritual process from information he gathered while working as a physician on the Pine Ridge Reservation from 1896 to 1914. The entire process, from the declaration of the first candidates who announce their intention to make bodily sacrifices to the culmination of the ritual process in the last four days where the flesh sacrifices are made many months later, centres on re-establishing and promoting harmonious relations among the Oglala and between the Oglala and their other-species neighbours within the Sacred Hoop. The indigenous methodological approach interprets the process through Oglala cosmological and ontological categories and establishes the significance of Harvey’s approach to religion and Grimes’ approach to ritual in understanding embodied and lived religion.

Upper Perené Arawak Narratives of History, Landscape, and Ritual by Elena Mihas

Reviewed by: Upper Perené Arawak Narratives of History, Landscape, and Ritual by Elena Mihas Joliene C. Adams KEYWORDS Elena Mihas, Joliene Adams, Perené Arawak, Indigenous American religion, Arawak ritual, South American ritual, Native American ritual, Arawak religion elena mihas. Upper Perené Arawak Narratives of History, Landscape, and Ritual. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Pp. 488. What began in 2009 as a project to fulfill Mihas's linguistic PhD dissertation requirements evolved into a much larger ethnographic documentary project in scope and product. This anthology is the end result. It comes from sixteen months of linguistic fieldwork spanning five years and with collaborative community effort at its core. Within are fifty-eight texts based on oral performances of thirty Upper Perené indigenous Ashéninka speakers authors (fifteen women and fifteen men). Of primary interest to the readership of this journal are probably the texts in Section Three, Ritual; yet these cannot really be separated out from Mihas's ethnographic project as a whole, and in fact, as will be seen, materials pertinent to ritual and witchcraft are scattered throughout the book. Mihas's hope and organizing principle was that this anthology collectively constitute a broad perspective of the Ashéninka Perené world provided by indigenous speakers. Mihas includes introductory notes treating the subjects of historical context, modern day socioeconomic realities, distinctive linguistic and cultural qualities, and detailed commentaries on each of the thirty speaker-authors, including pictures, professional/educational backgrounds, relevant kinship relations, and language fluency and linguistic knowledge of each. The text also includes illustrations, orthographical notes (lxxv), and text synopsis (lxxix). All texts are transcribed in Ashéninka Perené by contributors with Mihas providing accompanying English translations. Ashéninka Perené remains a "highly endangered Amazonian Arawak language, spoken by approximately one thousand speakers in Chanchamayo province of central-eastern Peru" with an extant population of around fifty-five hundred people (xxxiv). Mihas is a specialist in Northern Kampa language varieties and currently a postdoctoral associate in anthropological linguistics at James Cook University in Australia. The fifty-eight texts represent only a segment of the Upper Perené documentary corpus Mihas and community members produced. They were selected from a fifty hour-plus multigenre corpus (audio and video recordings) featuring over fifty speakers from twelve villages. Two hundred-plus [End Page 245] recorded oral performances are available in the Upper Perené documentary corpus (xxxi). Texts came to be included in the anthology via multiple discussions with and amongst "contributors, family members, neighbors, & cadre of tribal governance to ensure general approval of the project's ultimate product" and preserve the integrity of representing native Upper Perené worldviews and life ways as well as their autochthonous cultural identity (xxviii). Final decisions were further predicated on two influential factors: 1) speakers' recommendation and 2) availability of comparable material in Ashéninka Perené with translations in English (xxxi). Mihas's introduction further extrapolates research methods and data collection that include close observation, interviews, and documentation (recordings), transcription and translation of collected materials, and archiving data with local research organizations and international digital archives (xxviii-xxix). Mihas distinguishes four Ashéninka Perené genres for the reader: kinkitsarentsi (narrative), pantsantsi (song), vishiriantsi (chant; a repetitive song performed by more than one person), and kamenantsi (oratory; literally "advice," "instruction") but divides the anthology under tripartite thematic structure: History (Part One), Landscape (Part Two), and Ritual (Part Three). All four genres show up in each section. What is relevant here is that multiple genres are included, but are organized under themes rather than by genre. What is fundamental in specifying genre in this context is the way it departs from traditional Westernized senses of genre. The narrative genre, for example, includes history and mythology as much as history-cummythology and mythology-cum-history, the two narrative times overlapping in the Ashéninka Perené conceptual imaginary and spoken accounts that result. Each of the three parts also receives its own introduction. In her history section, Mihas clarifies the Upper Perené conception of history as well as situating the texts and reader in regional historical context. Two time frames are delineated in the Upper Perené fluid space-time continuum: pairani (ancient times, long ago, in the remote, mythic past) and...

Shamanic Vision Quest: Native American Ritual, Depth Psychology, and Renaissance Natural Magic

This paper portrays the shamanic vision quest through dreamtime cosmologies, common to the disciplines of Native American ritual, depth psychology, and Renaissance natural magic. The subject matter of Native American ritual is my practice, of depth psychology is C.G. Jung’s The Red Book, and of Renaissance natural magic is Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples’ De magia naturali. Whether through Native American medicine wheel or medieval geocentric cosmology, these disciplines are grounded in the physics of gravity: the most mundane law governing life on earth, yet perhaps also the most obscure law at play in quantum physics. Physics has recently observed what may be a graviton, a particle that incriminates the weak and lowly law of gravity as the kingpin of all the laws of physics. Gravitational waves also have been measured during the writing of this paper. Graviton: the immovable mover; the non-localized singularity or center of everywhere, but whose circumference is nowhere. Shamanic archetypes, like these medicine wheels or black hole ouroboros, may be experienced via neurologic spindle cells. Images of original nature photography and paintings embody ideas intended to draw the reader into their own shamanic vision of the dreamtime medicine wheel, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. The shaman’s solitary journey, back into the dreamtime of the dark mother, anima mundi or world soul—whether under the hypnagogic spell of an animal spirit guide, Philemon, or Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus—leads from the fiery event horizon of a black hole, to its central graviton singularity, to the dark matter that creates and consumes them. That is the paradox of human existence: only when we become conscious of the unconscious abyss can we live rooted to our singular nature, and from that individuation begin to experience divine love for our shared cosmos. This paper elicits that existential Unity.

Walking in Balance: Native American Recovery Programmes

This article reviews Native American ritual practices, frameworks and key concepts employed by several substance abuse treatments centres in the U.S. and Canada. It also examines the way Alcoholics Anonymous’ Twelve Step programme has been modified to attract and serve the needs of Native Americans and First Nations and its potential impact on the ritual practices. Native concepts of wellbeing are highlighted and linked to the idea of living in “balance”.

Representing Native American Women in Early Colonial American Writings: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Juan Ortiz and John Smith

Most observers of Native Americans during the contact period between Europe and the Americas represented Native American women as monstrous beings posing potential threats to the Europeans’ physical integrity. However, the most well known portrait of Native American women is John Smith’s description of Pocahontas, the Native American princess who, the legend goes, saved Smith from being executed. Transformed into a children’s tale, further popularized by the Disney movie, as well as being the object of innumerable historical studies questioning or asserting the veracity of Smith’s claims, the fact remains that the Smith-Pocahontas story is at the very core of North American culture. Nevertheless, far from being original, John Smith’s story had a precedent in the story of Spaniard Juan Ortiz, a member of the ill-fated Narváez expedition to Florida in 1527. Ortiz, who got lost in America and spent the rest of his life there, was also rescued by a Native American princess from being sacrificed in the course of a Native American ritual, as recounted by the Gentleman of Elvas, member of the Hernando de Soto expedition. Yet another vision of Native American women is that offered by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, another participant of the Narváez expedition who, during almost a decade in the Americas fulfilled a number of roles among the Native Americans, including some that were regarded as female roles. These female roles provided him with an opportunity to avert captivity as well as a better understanding of gender roles within Native American civilization. This essay explores the description of Native American women posed by John Smith, Juan Ortiz and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca so as to illustrate different images of Native American women during the early contact period as conveyed by these works.

Feasting on Famine in Linda Hogan’s <i>Solar Storms</i>

In 1899 H. B. Cushman observed that when a Chickasaw died, tribal lamentations would last for several days and would con clude with a feast (410). Nearly one hundred years later in 1997, in the prologue to her novel Solar Storms, Chickasaw Linda Hogan recounts a feast.1 But in her presentation, Hogan changes several mourning-feast customs, the most salient of which requires that the mourned be deceased. The alteration of the tradi tional mourning feast serves not merely as a signpost for changing Native American rituals. Rather, the transformed mourning feast in Solar Storms indicts white culture for causing Native American famine, both physical and emotional. But in blurring some demar cations of culpability and in providing a role model in the form of the character offering the feast, Hogan points to ways in which the Native American community might respond to the emotional, bodily, and cultural starvation inflicted through postcolonialism.2 In this manner Hogan eschews what David L. Moore deems con struction of reductionist binaries concerning colonization.3 Hogan's Solar Storms recounts the story of Angela (Angel) Wing, a beleaguered seventeen-year-old whose disfigured face bears the scars of an unremembered trauma. Angela's deranged mother Hannah Wing necessitated Angela's placement in foster homes, from which Angela has fled for years. In a court record Angela dis covers the name of Agnes Iron, whom she contacts, believing her to be a relative. Agnes, Angela's great-grandmother, immediately sends money for Angela to join her in Adam's Rib, an economically

Cultural Appropriation and the Crafting of Racialized Selves in American Youth Organizations

This article considers three moments in the history of Camp Fire, the first American multiracial organization for girls: (1) the foundation of the organization in the 1910s through the 1930s by progressive reformers heavily influenced by ethnological scholarship on Native American rituals and symbolism; (2) the transformation of the organization into a coeducational organization in the 1970s; and (3) current efforts in the organization, now known as Camp Fire USA, to bring its activities more in line with contemporary multiculturalism while retaining its “Indian” traditions as the organization's heritage. These three historical moments are explored through a combination of archival research, interviews, and participant-observation. As a case study, the history of Camp Fire offers the opportunity to (1) deepen our knowledge of the American tradition of “playing Indian” and (2) track changes and continuities in the relationship among race, culture, gender, and sexuality in U.S. informal education.

Victorian Hallucinogens1

Nineteenth-century British, U.S., and European writings about the hallucinogenic drugs peyote and mescaline in anthropological, medical, and general interest journals appropriated the drugs from the context of Native American rituals. Appealing primarily to vision, which was commonly understood to be the most intellectual of the senses, and generating sensations of omniscience and self-reflexivity, these drugs became the occasion for their writers’ fantasies of intellectual transcendence and concomitant disembodiment. These fantasies tacitly promoted the imperial, raced, classed, and gendered power of the elite hallucinogenic subject. They also connected with similar fin-de-siècle practices of consumption, including Aesthetic delight in the refinement of visual experience and in the collection of obscure global artifacts, and the passive consumption of media entertainment such as kaleidoscopes, phantasmagoria, and cinema. Although not numerous, hallucinogenic writings should be considered part of the culture of visual modernity that helped shape subjectivities at the turn of the century.

Edmund Wilson: a life in literature

From the Jazz Age through the Kennedy administration, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) stood at the center of the American cultural scene. A champion of the young Ernest Hemingway, a loyal friend and mentor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and an ally of John Dos Passos during the Depression, Wilson wrote classics of literary and intellectual history (including Axel's Castle, To the Finaland Station, and Patriotic Gore), searching reportage, and insightful criticism. Though he documented his private life in openly erotic fiction and journals, he left the personal dramas at its center in shadow. Lewis M. Dabney, the first writer to integrate Wilson's life and work, vividly encompasses his formative love affair with Edna St. Vincent Millay, his tempestuous marriage to Mary McCarthy, and his lasting accord with Elena Mumm Thornton, as well as his volatile friendship with Vladimir Nabokov and enduring ties with W. H. Auden and Isaiah Berlin. Steeped in knowledge of the era, this compelling narrative follows the critic's intellectual development, from son of small-town New Jersey gentry to America's last great renaissance man, a lucid commentator on everything from the Russian classics to Native American rituals to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Dabney shows why Wilson was and has remained - in his cosmopolitanism and trenchant nonconformity - a model for young writers and intellectuals, as well as the favorite critic of the general reader. Edmund Wilson has been widely recognized as the authoritative biography of a brilliant man whose life reflected the grand sweep of twentieth-century cultural, social, and human experience.

From "Knockout Punch" to "Home Run:" Masculinity's "Dirty Dozen" Sports Metaphors in American Combat Films

From “Knockout Punch” to “Home Run:”Masculinity’s “Dirty Dozen” Sports Metaphors in American Combat Films Ralph R. Donald (bio) Lucy Komisar says that "Little boys learn the connection between violence and manhood very early in life ... Boys play cowboys and Indians with guns and bows and arrows ... They are gangsters or soldiers interchangeably ... They are encouraged to '... fight back,' and bloodied noses and black eyes become trophies of their pint-sized virility" (202). This may help to explain why war films, especially combat films, and westerns are so popular among American boys: they are bred for it. After all, as Molly Merryman writes, the process of proving oneself a man is "... a culturally-prescribed construction in which men are willing to risk danger, dismemberment and death to prove their masculinity" (Creedon 1). And if, at the time, there is no war handy for American males to prove themselves, sports such as football, baseball, hockey or boxing provide another social venue, complete with the opportunity for selfless team effort, the thrill of conquest and the chance for glory as well as physical injury—everything needed to transform a boy into a full-fledged warrior-man in our culture. Pam Creedon argues that anxiety over having no war to provide an opportunity to achieve this manly status causes American boys and men to turn to football, for example, an excellent substitute for armed conquest (13-14). Sally Jenkins describes football in terms a general would understand: " ... bullying the opposition into retreat with mob action" (Creedon 8). There is even a pecking order for comparing sports to war. George Carlin put it this way, in contrasting football with baseball: Baseball and football are the two most popular spectator sports in this country. And as such, it seems they ought to be able to tell us something about ourselves and our values ... The objectives of the two games are completely different: In football, the object is for the quarterback, also known as the 'field general,' to be on target with an aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy, in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short, bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing his aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line. In baseball, the object is to go home! And be safe! (Carlin 52-53) So an American boy can prove his readiness for manhood in two principal ways: If there is a war handy, he can become a soldier and fight bravely for his team. In the absence of a war, he can become an athlete and fight bravely for his team. For young men who have witnessed hegemonic masculinity and the subjugation and trivialization of women throughout childhood and adolescence, the continuation of their male-favored status in life is at risk unless they can find a way to "step up to the plate," "take their cuts" and "win one for the Gipper." The alternative, say the mainstream voices of American socialization, is too dreadful to consider: life as, at best, an un-manly male, or at worst, a suspected homosexual. The social construction by which boys become men, then, seems pretty simple, no more sophisticated than Native American rituals involving being hung by their pectorals to prove the endurance of a brave, or counting coup in combat against an enemy of the tribe. In modern America, the war film, especially the combat film genre, often blurs the distinction between war-making and sports participation, effectively melding these two contemporary constructions of masculinity. One hand washes the other in the sports-war continuum: Sports metaphors inserted into the vocabulary used by soldiers in war prime the combatants to recall the conventional behavior expected of them in their boyhood socialization on the playing fields. They are cued to recall that above all, doing their duty for the team is required, and that they must [End Page 20] complete all other requirements necessary to "get the job done." And, after all, man is what he does: his work. So as we heard...

The Rock Art of Eastern North America: Capturing Images and Insight

The Rock-Art of Eastern North America: Capturing Images and Insight. CAROL DIAS-GRANADOS and JAMES R. DUNCAN (eds.). University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 2004. 426 pp., 175 illus., 7 tables, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, biblio., contributors' biographies, index. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8173-1394-X; $34.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8173-5096-9. Reviewed by David H. Dye The Rock-Art of Eastern North America is a welcomed addition to the growing literature on prehistoric and historic rock-art. Long overlooked by professional archaeologists, the study of petroglyphs and pictographs is rapidly becoming an important and integral part of current archaeological discussions. Due to the persistence of researchers such as Carol Diaz-Granados, James R. Duncan, and their colleagues, the study of rock-art clearly is a mainstream focus for eastern North American archaeology. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this genre of rock-art investigation is its association with Native American ritual, art, and iconography. These topics, until recently, were often avoided by archaeologists because of difficulties in establishing chronological controls; understanding rockart from the perspective of its environmental, social, and ideological contexts; and incorporating rock-art interpretations/discussions within traditional or current archaeological paradigms. The Rock-Art of Eastern North America impresses upon us that these interpretive problems are not insurmountable and that the study of rock-art can be integrated as one facet of our understanding of eastern North American prehistory. The Rock-Art of Eastern North America comprises 20 chapters divided into seven major topics: dendroglyphs; ethnography; patterning of sites and motifs; gender; survey, recording, conservation, and management; historic; and dating methods. The well-written and thoughtful chapters are authored by active rock-art researchers and well-known scholars and avocationals. Illustrated with 175 photographs, line drawings, and maps, the 426-page volume covers a large geographic area, ranging over 12 states and four Canadian provinces in the eastern North American woodlands. Of course, this area generally is in the interior of the continent which contains rocky terrain suitable for rock art. In the opening section which covers dendroglyphs, Fred E. Coy Jr. discusses Native American carvings and paintings on trees that are found throughout much of the Eastern Woodlands. He argues that the relative lack of pictographs on rock surfaces is a result of the more frequent use of tree boles as communicative devices, especially in the upper Eastern Woodlands. The three articles in the second section cover rock art and ethnography. Lori A. Stanley offers the account of the Ratcliffe Sacred Rock in the upper Iowa River Valley and the oral history of the modern Winnebago tribe of Nebraska, while Mark J. Wagner, Mary R. McCorvie, and Charles A. Swedlund outline the ritual landscape and associated rock-art at the Mississippian Millstone Bluff Site in southern Illinois. Kevin L. Callahan follows with a discussion of pica and geoghagy as an explanation of cup-marked boulders in the Eastern Woodlands. In the second section, six chapters deal with the patterning of archaeological sites with rock-art motifs. Charles H. Faulkner, Jan F. Simek, and Alan Cressler describe their long-term research on prehistoric rock-art in Tennessee, with emphasis on open-air sites. Richard Edging and Steven R. Ahler examine rock-art sites and Late Woodland settlement locations in the northern Ozarks of south-central Missouri and Robert Alan Clouse documents the patterning of human activity and possible functioning of the Jeffers Petrogylphs, located at the eastern edge of the Great Plains in southwestern Minnesota. Jack Steinbert identifies elemental forms of rock-art at the Lake-of-the-Woods petroglyph sites in Ontario, Canada, and offers interpretations about the peopling of the Americas based on randomly pecked cup marks on boulders. …

Interpretations of Native North American Life: Material Contributions to Ethnohistory. Michael S. Nassaney and Eric S. Johnson, editors. 2000. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. 464 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8130-1783-1.

Bringing together the perspectives of archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and art historians, these tightly integrated case studies highlight the significance of material objects to the study and interpretation of Native North American culture, history, and identity. authors contend that archaeological remains and ethnographic specimens can, and indeed should, be analyzed in tandem with other souces of historical data (e.g., written texts, oral accounts) to expand our understanding of Native culture change and continuity from the pre-Columbian era through the present.The essays in this collection begin with concrete, tangible expressions of Native American culture which, in most cases, were made and used to meet basic human needs or to participate in social and religious life. Material objects invite interdis-ciplinary study because they are a rich source of information about how human societies and social identities were created, reproduced, and transformed. While this volume serves to complement and enhance our historical and cultural understanding of native peoples throughout North America, the theoretical approaches and research methodologies showcased here have implications for studies anywhere people left material traces of their activities, identities, and lives.ContentsPart I. Ethnogenesis: Creation, Maintenance, and Transformation of Ethnic Identity1. Ritual and Material Culture as Keys to Cultural Continuity: Native American Interaction with Europeans in Eastern Arkansas, 1541-1682, by Kathleen H. Cande2. Identity of Stadacona and Hochelaga: Comprehension and Conflict, by James F. Pendergast3. Echoing the Past: Reconciling Ethnohistorical and Archaeological Views of Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) Ethnogenesis, by John P. Staeck4. Politics of Pottery: Material Culture and Political Process among Algonquians of 17th-Century Southern New England, by Eric S. Johnson5. Emblems of Ethnicity: Ribbonwork Garments from the Great Lakes Region, by Susan M. Neill Part II. Change and Continuity in Daily Life6. FranCois' House, a Significant Pedlars' Post on the Saskatchewan, by Alice Beck Kehoe7. Improving Our Understanding of Native American Acculturation through the Archaeological Record: An Example from the Mono Basin of Eastern California, by Brooke S. Arkush8. Cache Pits: Ethnohistory, Archaeology, and the Continuity of Tradition, by Sean B. Dunham9. Maple Sugaring in Prehistory: Tapping the Sources, by Carol I. Mason and Margaret B. Holman10. Archaeology of a Contact-Period Plateau Salishan Village at Thompson's River Post, Kamloops, British Columbia, by Catherine C. Carlson 11. Obtaining Information via Defective Documents: A Search for the Mandan in George Catlin's Paintings, by Mark S. Parker MillerPart III. Ritual, Iconography, and Ideology12. Images of Women in Native American Iconography, by Larissa A. Thomas 13. Tlingit Human Masks as Documents of Culture Change and Continuity, by Barbara Brotherton 14. One Island, Two Places: Archaeology, Memory, and Meaning in a Rhode Island Town, by Paul A. Robinson 15. Archaeology and Oral Tradition in Tandem: Interpreting Native American Ritual, Ideology, and Gender Relations in Contact-Period Southeastern New England, by Michael S. Nassaney This title is published in conjunction with the Society for Historical ArchaeologyMichael S. Nassaney, associate professor of anthropology at Western Michigan University, is the editor or coeditor of four books, including The Archaeological Northeast.Eric S. Johnson, a preservation planner at the Massachusetts Historical Commission, has written numerous articles and monographs on New England archaeology and ethnohistory.

THE CIRCLE IS SACRED : A MEDICINE BOOK FOR WOMEN

Review by Katharine English Freelance Writer and Regular Environmental Contributor to Point Communications, Inc. and COLORS Magazine, 1363 McAllister Street, San Francisco, CA 94115, USA. TEL: 415-922-1144, Fax: 415-922-9553. Lee, Scout Cloud, Ed.D, THE CIRCLE IS SACRED : A MEDICINE BOOK FOR WOMEN, Tulsa, OK: Council Oak Books, 1995. 272 pp. US$17.95 paper ISBN: 0-933031-97-1. Scout Cloud Lee is a woman of many talents. Trained as a recreational therapist (and author of several books on the subject), she now works primarily as a motivational speaker, focusing her work on personal development and dream-stalking, the Native American concept for what more conventional Westerners might call listening to your inner voice. But that's not all. Lee is also a spiritual healer -- or Medicine Woman -- and a singer. And with the publication of this book, she joins a growing list of authors who are providing members of a troubled age with new tools for living, grounded in age-old wisdom. The time of the gun and the rifle are over, says Lee in the book's preface. The time of the Medicine Power is here (8). Lee's Medicine Power is an interesting marriage of traditional Native American ritual, Christian referencing and New Age folk lore. While the mix may baffle some readers, or seem an odd contradiction to others, in its own strange way, it works. Starting with a broad overview of the need for ritual in daily life, Lee offers a series of practical steps toward spiritual awakening and healing: honoring the Earth and the Creator with ritualized, individual prayer, creating alters and sacred space, ceremonial dancing, sweat lodges, healing circles, and an important primer on Earth etiquette. It's easy to see how Western ideas of Christianity complement Lee's approach. Ritual prayer has always played a part in Christian ceremony; Rome uses incense, while Native American tradition calls for sagebrush. And Lee's altars allow the introduction of personal, individualized offerings, so that the inclusion of an effigy of Jesus of Nazareth in no way precludes a rock from Mother Earth, a feather from an eagle, or a handwritten poem expressing a personal sentiment. Lee's point seems to be empowerment through inclusivity, demolition of social and ritualistic barriers and a basic celebration of life. These concepts can seem foreign to a cynical Western audience crippled by the media and a largely out-of-touch traditional Church body politic. Unconditional love of life and ritual without walls, are uncommon practices within the hallowed confines of most religious institutions, despite biblical teachings to the contrary. But perhaps the most fundamental and moving aspect of Lee's spiritual guide is her unflinching certainty about the Earth's inseparable bond with all that we worship and revere as sacred. In fact, it is the very root of what we call holy, and the entity that will ultimately set us free from our (ironically enough) Earth- bound troubles.

Symbolic recognition: Ceremony in a treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder

This brief report describes the utilization of a „welcome home”︁ ceremony in the treatment of Vietnam War and other war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Designed primarily to address the issues of sanctuary trauma and social isolation and alienation, the ceremony drew upon knowledge gained from the study of Native American ritual. Carefully avoiding mimicking such ritual, the principles of affirmation of the worth of the warrior, societal participation and reintegration, and spiritual and existential support were translated into a mainstream cultural format. The significance of a woman leading the ceremony and veteran reactions are discussed.

Symbolic recognition: Ceremony in a treatment of post‐traumatic stress disorder

AbstractThis brief report describes the utilization of a „welcome home”︁ ceremony in the treatment of Vietnam War and other war veterans suffering from post‐traumatic stress disorder. Designed primarily to address the issues of sanctuary trauma and social isolation and alienation, the ceremony drew upon knowledge gained from the study of Native American ritual. Carefully avoiding mimicking such ritual, the principles of affirmation of the worth of the warrior, societal participation and reintegration, and spiritual and existential support were translated into a mainstream cultural format. The significance of a woman leading the ceremony and veteran reactions are discussed.

From Tantrums to Prayer: Goat Island's "Can't Take Johnny to the Funeral"

Although it is not billed as such, Goat Island's most recent collaborative work,1 appears to be the completion of a trilogy that began with Soldier, Child, Tortured Man (1987). It deals not only with the humiliations, fears, longings-the dark side of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood-but with the extreme vulnerability of infancy. This earliest condition, over which we have no control, profoundly shapes the individual psyche. A squared circle forces the audience into a more intimate, more intense confrontation with the action than the basketball court arrangement of the earlier work. The synchronized movements are back, presenting us once again with an initially mystifying and indecipherable code. There is the same commitment to gesture, action, the same hyperactivity of movement. However, the tension and strenuousness are augmented by a microphone used sparingly to capture the heavy breathing and the pounding of blood in the performers' heads. Because they are willing to work themselves to exhaustion to alleviate the anxious urgency that appears to motivate the work, we become committed to their excessive action. Once again we are willing to suspend analysis of its symbolic meaning while we give ourselves over to its unravelling. This time the inspiration for the movement was derived in part from sports photos-rugby, lacrosse, water polo-frozen motion reactivated, translated into dance/gymnastics. At times the emphasis is directional, reminiscent of the kata, the patterned movement of karate, or various Native American rituals that honor the north, south, east, and west-an obeisance to direction as if it, as a concept, were a player in this drama. Here, as in other Goat Island works, we cannot resist wondering what has set these performers in motion and what hidden necessity motivates their action. When the performers do slow down enough for us to study them, they appear as lost souls wandering inside their own intent, a bit like the inhabitants of Dante's hell, caught in a circle or malebolge of pain, a bit like the figures of Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. They appear as part of some social interaction, yet inevitably apart. At times they become ontologically regressed, adults reduced to infancy writhing in convulsions. They also appear phylogenically regressed, wild dogs gnawing on each others' legs, humans reduced to a lesser species. Or they simply appear helpless, deranged inmates of a sanatorium, caught in the privacy and isolation of their illness. They reenact obsessive patterns and appear to obey silent directives whose meaning they alone can understand. Karen rotates her finger in the air and swivels her body while looking sidelong off into space. Matthew spins and collapses as if shot; with a circular movement of his hand he appears to torque down his mouth. There are times when they do interact. Karen crawls into a fetal position on top of Greg's prone body. Tim rubs his head against Matthew's leg like a cat. They cover their mouths with their hands, politely, almost with a slight gasp, as if they are remembering some unspeakable event, as if they must restrain the words they might otherwise utter. All motion is laboriously synchronized, separate scenarios woven into one complex, perfectly choreographed nightmare. At intervals someone separates from the group to make a statement, not unlike the shattering of silence in We Got A Date. Language once again is a way out of the abstraction of (continued)

'Sweat Lodge': A Northern Native American Ritual for Communal Shamanic Trance

No abstract available