Academic literature on the topic 'Indians of North America – Arts and crafts'

This article explores the hemispheric and transatlantic uses of race and empire as tropes of settler-colonial otherness in the novelThe Canadian Brothers(1840) by Canadian author John Richardson. In this pre-Confederation historical novel, Richardson contrasts the imperial British discourse of racial tolerance, and the British military alliances with the Natives in the War of 1812, with the brutality of American Indian policies south of the border, in an effort to craft a narrative of Canadian difference from, and incompatibility with, American culture. At the same time, the author's critical attitude towards all European military and commercial interventions in the New World illuminates the rootedness of both American and Canadian settler colonialisms in British imperialism, and exposes the arbitrariness and constructedness of the political boundaries dividing the continent.

Although current theories of diaspora argue for a break between an older irrevocable migration from one nation to another and a new transnational movement between host country and birthplace, research on nineteenth- as well as twentieth-century North America demonstrates that earlier migration also had a transnational dimension. The cultural consequences of this two-way traffic include syncretic performance forms, institutions, and audiences, whose legitimacy depended on engagement with but not total assimilation in local conventions and on the mobilization of touristic nostalgia in, say, Cantonese opera in California or Bavarian-American musicals in New York, to appeal to nativist and immigrant consumers. Today, syncretic theatre of diaspora is complicated on the one hand by a theatre of diasporic residence, in which immigrants dramatize inherited conflicts in the host country, such as Québécois separatism in Canada, along with problems of migrants, among them South Asians, and on the other by a theatre of non-residence, touring companies bringing theatre from the home country, say India, to ‘non-resident Indians’ and local audiences in the United States.

The centering processes of geographic information system (GIS) development at the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was an extension of past cartographic encounters with American Indians through the central control of geospatial technologies, uneven development of geographic information resources, and extension of technically dependent clientele. Cartographic encounters included the historical exchanges of geographic information between indigenous people and non-Indians in North America. Scientists and technicians accumulated geographic information at the center of calculation where scientific maps, models, and simulations emerged. A study of GIS development at the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs will demonstrate some centering processes.

Three palynological cores from the coastal plain of Georgia and Alabama were analyzed for paleobotanical remains. Results show that the Indians of southeastern North America increased forest fires used in hunting as a response to the demand for deer hides during the early eighteenth century. Palynological data are consistent with known anthropogenic changes in the region. Charcoal abundance increased significantly between A.D. 1715 and 1770, which is the period of the most intensive hunting by the Indians. This study shows that forest fires from hunting had a significant and measurable effect on the evolution of the biophysical environment.

Advanced maritime technology associated with long-distance exchange and intensified resource acquisition has been linked to the development of stratification and greater sociopolitical complexity in the Pacific Rim region. One such example is the emergence of hereditary chiefs among the Chumash Indians of southern California. Plank boats owned by an elite group of wealthy individuals and chiefs were an integral part of an elaborate economic system that was based on maritime exchange. An artifact assemblage associated with the construction, maintenance, and use of this watercraft was identified and analyzed. It included wooden planks, asphaltum plugs, asphaltum caulking, and chipped stone drills. Radiocarbon dates and other relative-dating techniques provide strong evidence that the plank canoe originated at least 1,300 years ago in southern California. This represents the earliest use of this type of watercraft in North America and probably in the New World. The timing of this innovation provides evidence that sociopolitical complexity developed in the region at least 500 years earlier than previously proposed.

Indigenous negotiations of European colonialism in North America are more complex than models of domination and resistance reveal. Indigenous people—acting according to their own historically and culturally specific ways of knowing and being in the world—developed strategies for remaking their identities, material choices, and social configurations to survive one or multiple phases of colonization. Archaeologists are making strides in documenting the contingencies and consequences of these strategies, yet their focus is often skewed toward sites of contact and colonialism (e.g., missions and forts). This article examines places of refuge for native people navigating colonial programs in the San Francisco Bay area of California. I use a resistance-memory-refuge framework to reevaluate resistance to Spanish missions, including the possible reoccupation of landscapes by fugitive orfurloughed Indians. Commemorative trips to shellmounds and other refuges support the concept of an indigenous hinterland, or landscapes that, in time, provided contexts for continuity and adjustment among Indian communities making social, material, and economic choices in the wake ofmissionization. By viewing colonialism from the outside in, this reoriented approach can potentially enhance connections between archaeological and Native American communities.

Scholars have been debating what constitutes “the Southwest” for decades. Thirty years ago, geographer D. W. Meinig began his landmark study Southwest: Three Peoples in Geographical Change, 1600–1970 by stating: “The Southwest is a distinct place to the American mind but a somewhat blurred place on American maps.” For Meinig, the crucial determining factor in constituting the geographical parameters of his own study was the coincidence of Native American and Mexican American settlement patterns in Arizona, New Mexico and around El Paso, Texas. The watersheds of the Gila River in Arizona and the Rio Grande in New Mexico provide the focus of his study of the historical interaction of Indians, Mexican Americans and Anglos through the successive periods of Spanish colonialism, Mexican independence and American rule. The historical geographer Richard Francaviglia has challenged the relatively narrow focus of Meinig's study by calling for a more expansive consideration of the Greater Southwest, which, in addition to the core of Arizona and New Mexico, also includes parts of Colorado, Utah, Texas and the northern states of Mexico. He rationalizes, “The southwestern quadrant of North America is, above all, characterized by phenomenal physical and cultural diversity that regionalization tends to abstract or simplify. The more one tries to reduce this complexity, the smaller the Southwest becomes on one's mental map.”2

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Bachelors
Arts and Sciences
English

Text in English with abstracts in English, Afrikaans and isiZulu. Translated titles in Afrikaans and isiZulu.
This study examines the symbiotic relationships between Hopi traditional arts, the use of art and narrative as mnemonic device, and embedded references to the Fourth World narrative that describes how the Hopi people climbed from a troubled Third World into the current spatio-temporal era, the Fourth World. (The original oral narrative was published by anthropologist Harold Courlander and anonymous consultants in 1971 as The Fourth World of the Hopis: The Epic Story of the Hopi Indians as Preserved in Their Legends and Traditions.) This study posits that the traditional arts of the Hopi and their forebears serve as visual and oral reiterations of the Fourth World narrative, including their emergence from an opening in the earth known as the sipaapuni. After promising to live a harsh but reverent life, the land’s guardian, Maasaw, made the arid southwestern North American land theirs. The Hopi people call these lands Hopi Tutskwa, the original home of the migrating “Ancestral Puebloan” predecessors. The Hopi consider objects, habitation sites, structures, and other sacred features to be these ancestors’ embodied “footprints.” This study describes how diverse Hopi arts are both Ancestral Puebloan “footprints,” and what archaeologists define as “exographic” objects or mnemonic forms of “symbolic storage.” The use of mnemonic objects within the Puebloan culture has been documented as early as 1630 by Fray Alonso de Benavides who noted the use of “knotted strings” as a form of recording “sins” (Morrow, 1996:42). As they relate to mnemonic technology, Hopi arts and lifeways expand the boundaries of Western art history studies to include elements of archaeology and anthropology. Within these interdisciplinary contexts, objects and imagery are not simply “art” in the Western sense, but embodiments of cultural belief and visual reiterations of oral narratives which preserve intrinsic cultural knowledge and belief. This study suggests that what has previously been categorised as Hopi “art” within Western academic contexts is instead an extension of the West’s tradition of ekphrasis, or simply “writing about art.” Therefore, Western academia inappropriately emphasises chronological form, style, and development within Hopi arts rather than the significant cognitive role art plays within the culture of the people. As traditional metaphors for or reiterations of the Fourth World narrative, this study shows how content embedded within Hopi arts is most appropriately studied through iconological and mytholinguistic analysis as they best serve the Hopi people’s non-Western oracy-based tradition.
Hierdie studie ondersoek die simbiotiese verhoudings tussen die Hopi se tradisionele kunsvorme; hulle gebruik van kuns en narratief as mnemoniese middele; en ingebedde verwysings na die Vierdewêreld-narratief wat vertel hoe die Hopi-nasie bo ’n veelbewoë Derde Wêreld kon uitstyg en die huidige tydruimtelike era, die Vierde Wêreld, kon betree. (Die oorspronklike orale narratief, The Fourth World of the Hopis: The Epic Story of the Hopi Indians as Preserved in Their Legends and Traditions, is in 1971 deur die antropoloog Harold Courlander en anonieme konsultante gepubliseer.) Hierdie studie voer aan dat die tradisionele kunste van die Hopi’s en hul voorvaders dien as visuele en orale reïterasies van die Vierdewêreld-narratief, insluitende hulle verskyning deur ’n opening in die aarde wat as die sipaapuni bekend staan.Nadat hulle beloof het om 'n moeilike dog eerbiedige lewe te leef, het die bewaker van die land, Maasaw, die woestynagtige suidweste van Noord-Amerika aan hulle gegee. Die Hopi-nasie het hierdie streek Hopi Tutskwa, die oorspronklike tuiste van die swerwende “Voorvaderlike Puebloaanse” voorgangers, genoem. Die Hopi beskou objekte, woonterreine, strukture en ander heilige elemente as vergestaltings van die voorvaders se “voetspore”.Volgens die studie is uiteenlopende Hopi-kunsvorme nie net Voorvaderlike Puebloaanse “voetspore” nie, maar ook die “eksografiese” objekte of mnemoniese vorme van “simboliese bewaring” wat deur argeoloë omskryf word. Die aanwending van mnemoniese objekte in die Puebloaanse kultuur is reeds in 1630 opgeteken deur Fray Alonso de Benavides. Hy het vermeld dat knope in toue gemaak is om van “sondes” boek te hou (Morrow, 1996:42). Die verband wat Hopi-kunsvorme en -lewenswyses met mnemonise tegnologie hou, verbreed die grense van Westerse kunsgeskiedenisstudie om ook elemente van argeologie en antropologie in te sluit. In hierdie interdissiplinêre kontekste is objekte en beelde nie net eenvoudig “kuns” in die Westerse sin van die woord nie; dit is ook ’n vergestalting van kulturele oortuigings en visuele reiterasies van orale narratiewe wat intrinsieke kulturele kennis en oortuigings bewaar. Hierdie studie voer aan dat dit wat voorheen in Westerse akademiese kontekste as Hopi-“kuns” gekategoriseer is, in werklikheid ’n verlenging is van die Westerse ekphrasis-tradisie, wat eenvoudig beteken “om oor kuns te skryf”. Westerse akademici plaas dus ’n onvanpaste klem op die chronologiese vorm, styl en ontwikkeling van Hopi-kuns in plaas daarvan om die kognitiewe rol wat kuns in die kultuur speel, te beklemtoon. Hierdie studie toon hoe die ingebedde inhoud van Hopi-kunsvorme, as tradisionele metafore vir en reiterasies van die Vierdewêreld-narratief, op die mees gepaste wyse bestudeer kan word deur ikonologiese en mitolinguistieke ontleding van die Hopi-nasie se nie-Westerse tradisie wat op geletterdheid van die gesproke woord (oracy) gebaseer is.
Lolu cwaningo luhlolisisa ubuhlobo bobudlelwane obukhona phakathi kobuciko bamasiko endabuko amaHopi, ukusetshenziswa kobuciko nokulandisa njengamadivaysi aphathelene nokukhumbuza kanye nezinkomba ezifakwe emlandweni Wesine Womhlaba ochaza ukuthi abantu bamaHopi bakhuphuka kanjani ezweni elabe liyinkinga ukufinyeleleni kulesikhathi sanamuhla soMhlaba Wesine. (Indaba yokuqala elandisayo exoxwayo yashicilelwa umuntu oyisazi seanthropholoji esaziwa ngokuthi nguHarold Courlander kanye nabaxhumanisi abangaziwa ngonyaka ka1971 njengengoMhlaba Wesine wamaHopi: Indaba Yokubonga Amaqhawe abantu abangaMandiya angamaHopi njengoba Kugcinwe kuyiZinganekwane Namasiko abo). Lolu cwaningo lubonisa ukuthi ubuciko bamasiko bamaHopi kanye nabokhokho babo babedlulisa imilayezo ngezinto eziphindaphindiwe ezibukwayo nezidluliswa ngomlomo ekulandiseni ngoMhlaba Wesine, kufaka phakathi ukuvela kwawo ekuvuleni emhlabeni owaziwa ngokuthi yisipaapuni. Ngemuva kokuthembisa ukuthi uzophila impilo enzima kodwa ehloniphekile, umgcini wezwe uMasaaw wenza umhlaba omelele eningizimu nasentshonalanga neNyakatho neMelika ukuthi ube ngowabo. AmaHopi abiza lemihlaba ngokuthi yiHopi Tutskwa, okuyikhaya langempela olwafuduka “koKhokho wePuebloan” owayekhona esikhundleni ngaphambilini. AmaHopi abheka izinto, izindawo zokuhlala, izakhiwo kanye nezinye izici ezingcwele ukuba zibe yilezo zinto ezifakwe "ezinyathelweni" zokhokho. Lolu cwaningo luchaza ubuciko obuhlukahlukene bamaHopi obusho “izinyathelo” Zokhokho bePuebloan kanye nalokho okuchazwa ngabantu abaphenya ngezinto zasendulo okuthiwa ama-akhiyoloji njengezinto "eziyi ekzografi " noma izinto iziphathelene nokukhumbula okuthile "okuwuphawu olugciniwe". Ukusetshenziswa kwezinto eziphathelene nokukhujulwayo osikweni lwamaPuebloan laqoshwa phansi kusukela eminyakeni ye-1630 nguFray Alonso de Benavides oye waqaphela ukusetshenziswa “kwezintambo eziboshiwe” njengento yokuqopha noma ukurekhoda “izono” (Morrow, 1996:42) Njengoba zihlobene nobuchwepheshe bezinto ezikhunjulwayo, ubuciko bamaHopi nokuphila kwabo kwandisa imingcele yezifundo zomlando yaseNtshonalanga okufaka phakathi izinto zama-akhiyoloji nama anthropholoji. Ngaphakathi komongo wezizinda ezahlukene, izinto nemifanekiso akuzona nje izinto ezilula “eziwubuciko” ngokomqondo waseNtshonalanga, kodwa ukukhombisa izinkolelo zamasiko kanye imilayezo ngezinto eziphindaphindiwe ezibukwayo nezidluliswa ngomlomo ezigcina ulwazi lwangaphakathi olujwayelekile lwamasiko nenkolelo. Lolu cwaningo lubonisa ukuthi yini eyabekwa yahlelwa nje "ngobuciko" bamaHopi ngaphakathi kwezimo zezemfundo zaseNtshonalanga kunalokho kwandiswa isiko laseNtshonalanga okuwu buciko bokukhuluma, noma “ukubhala ngosiko”. Ngakho-ke, izazi ngezemfundo zaseNtshonalanga zagcizelela okungalungile ngendlela yokulandelana, isitayela nentuthuko ngaphakathi kobuciko bamaHopi esikhundleni sendima ebalulekile yokuqonda edlalwa ubuciko osikweni lwabantu. Njengamazwibela wendabuko wokungathekisa noma ekulandiseni ngoMhlaba Wesine ngokuphindaphindiwe, lolu cwaningo lubonisa ukuthi okuqukethwe kufakwe kanjani ebucikweni bamaHopi okuyindlela efanelekile okufundwa ngayo kusetshenziswa ukuhlaziya ayikhonoloji kanye nesayensi ephathelene nolimi lwezinganekwane njengoba babechaza abantu abangamaHopi olwakhelwe osikweni lokuxoxwa ngomlomo okungelona lwaseNtshonalanga.
Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology
D. Litt. et Phil. (Art History)