Academic literature on the topic 'Indians of North America – Great Plains – Music'

Among the artifacts of the Pazyryk culture (VI–III centuries BC), battle shields attract attention. As a rule, they come from rich burial mounds. Items have the shape of an elongated rectangle or square, sometimes with a rounded top. There is a belt loop in the center. Shields are ornamented with zigzags, rhombuses, braids-like ornaments, crosses, triangles. Items can be divided into two groups. The first group consists of items 35,5–44 cm long and 24,5–35 cm wide, while second group consists of 50–69 cm long and 42–54 cm wide shields. Small shields predominate. Products are made from different materials using different techniques. Some of the objects are carved from wood, the rest are made from pieces of leather and sticks. As it known, battle shields were not popular among the ancient nomads of the Asian region and are rarely found. The Pazyryk culture is an exception to the rule. However, many Pazyryk shields are not reliable enough and are poorly effective for protection against hand and throwing weapons. In addition, no damage that could occur during the battle has been observed on them. Also there are no signs of repair. Apparently, all the shields of the Pazyryk culture mainly served as amulets. Probably, wooden items were ritual models, while leather-wood ones were copies of military weapons. Both of them were made for the funeral ritual. However, one cannot categorically deny the possibility of using them during hostilities. This situation is known from ethnographic materials. For example, the magic shields of the Indians of the Great Plains of North America can be a close parallel. These products were also not homogeneous. They are different in types. One type was made up of exact copies of real defensive weapons, the other — reduced models, the third — hoops with stretched straps. The Indians constantly took them on military campaigns. The manufacture of magical shields was considered one of the most important sacred procedures, and very expensive, which was available only to wealthy people.

This article is concerned with dance as an embodied form of collective remembering in the Andean department of Ayacucho in Peru. Andean dance and fiesta are inextricably linked with notions of identity, cultural heritage and history. Rather than being simply aesthetic —steps to music or a series of movements — dance is readable as being a deeper embodiment of the broader struggles and concerns of a people. As anthropologist Zoila Mendoza writes, in post-colonial countries such as those in Africa and Latin America, dance is and was a means “through which people contested, domesticated and reworked signs of domination in their society” (39). Andean dance has long been a space of contestation and resistance (Abercrombie; Bigenho; Isbell; Mendoza; Stern). It also functions as a repository, a dynamic archive which holds and tells the collective narrative of a cultural time and space. As Jane Cowan observes “dance is much more than knowing the steps; it involves both social knowledge and social power” (xii). In cultures where the written word has not played a central role in the construction and transmission of knowledge, dance is a particularly rich resource for understanding. “Embodied practice, along with and bound up with other cultural practices, offers a way of knowing” (Taylor 3). This is certainly true in the Andes of Peru where dance, music and fiesta are central to social, cultural, economic and political life. This article combines the areas of cultural memory with aspects of dance anthropology in a bid to reveal what is often unspoken and discover new ways of accessing and understanding non-verbal forms of memory through the embodied medium of dance. In societies where dance is integral to daily life the dance becomes an important resource for a deeper understanding of social and cultural memory. However, this characteristic of the dance has been largely overlooked in the field of memory studies. Paul Connerton writes, “… that there is an aspect of social memory which has been greatly ignored but is absolutely essential: bodily social memory” (382). I am interested in the role of dance as a site memory because as a dancer I am acutely aware of embodied memory and of the importance of dance as a narrative mode, not only for the dancer but also for the spectator. This article explores the case study of rural carnival performed in the city of Huamanga, in the Andean department of Ayacucho and includes interviews I conducted with rural campesinos (this literally translates as people from the country, however, it is a complex term imbedded with notions of class and race) between June 2009 and March 2010. Through examining the transformative effect of what I call the chorography of place, I argue that rural campesinos embody the memory of place, dancing that place into being in the urban setting as a means of remembering and maintaining connection to their homeland and salvaging cultural heritage.The department of Ayacucho is located in the South-Central Andes of Peru. The majority of the population are Quechua-speaking campesinos many of whom live in extreme poverty. Nestled in a cradle of mountains at 2,700 meters above sea level is the capital city of the same name. However, residents prefer the pre-revolutionary name of Huamanga. This is largely due to the fact that the word Ayacucho is a combination of two Quechua words Aya and Kucho which translate as Corner of the Dead. Given the recent history of the department it is not surprising that residents refer to their city as Huamanga instead of Ayacucho. Since 1980 the department of Ayacucho has become known as the birthplace of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and the ensuing 20 years of political violence between Sendero and counter insurgency forces. In 2000, the interim government convened the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC – CVR Spanish). In 2003, the TRC released its report which found that over 69,000 people were killed or disappeared during the conflict and hundreds of thousands more were forced to leave their homes (CVR). Those most affected by the violence and human rights abuses were predominantly from the rural population of the central-southern Andes (CVR). Following the release of the TRC Report the department of Ayacucho has become a centre for memory studies investigations and commemorative ceremonies. Whilst there are many traditional arts and creative expressions which commemorate or depict some aspect of the violence, dance is not used it this way. Rather, I contend that the dance is being salvaged as a means of remembering and connecting to place. Migration Brings ChangeAs a direct result of the political violence, the city of Huamanga experienced a large influx of people from the surrounding rural areas, who moved to the city in search of relative safety. Rapid forced migration from the country to the city made integration very difficult due to the sheer volume of displaced populations (Coronel 2). As a result of the internal conflict approximately 450 rural communities in the southern-central Andes were either abandoned or destroyed; 300 of these were in the department of Ayacucho. As a result, Huamanga experienced an enormous influx of rural migrants. In fact, according to the United Nations International Human Rights Instruments, 30 per cent of all people displaced by the violence moved to Ayacucho (par. 39). As campesinos moved to the city in search of safety they formed new neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city. Although many are now settled in Huamanga, holding professional positions, working in restaurants, running stalls, or owning shops, most maintain strong links to their community of origin. The ways in which individuals sustain connection to their homelands are many and varied. However, dance and fiesta play a central role in maintaining connection.During the years of violence, Sendero Luminoso actively prohibited the celebration of traditional ceremonies and festivals which they considered to be “archaic superstition” (Garcia 40). Reprisals for defying Sendero Luminoso directives were brutal; as a result many rural inhabitants restricted their ritual practices for fear of the tuta puriqkuna or literally, night walkers (Ritter 27). This caused a sharp decline in ritual custom during the conflict (27).As a result, many Ayacuchano campesinos feel they have been robbed of their cultural heritage and identity. There is now a conscious effort to rescatar y recorder or to salvage and remember what was been taken from them, or, in the words of Ruben Romani, a dance teacher from Huanta, “to salvage what was killed during the difficult years.”Los Carnavales Ayacuchanos Whilst carnival is celebrated in many parts of the world, the mention of carnival often evokes images of scantily clad Brazilians dancing to the samba rhythms in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, or visions of elaborate floats and extravagant costumes. None of these are to be found in Huamanga. Rather, the carnival dances celebrated by campesinos in Huamanga are not celebrations of ‘the now’ or for the benefit of tourists, but rather they are embodiments of the memory of a lost place. During carnival, that lost or left homeland is danced into being in the urban setting as a means of maintaining a connection to the homeland and of salvaging cultural heritage.In the Andes, carnival coincides with the first harvest and is associated with fertility and giving thanks. It is considered a time of joy and to be a great leveller. In Huamanga carnival is one of the most anticipated fiestas of the year. As I was told many times “carnival is for everyone” and “we all participate.” From the old to the very young, the rich and poor, men and women all participate in carnival."We all participate." Carnavales Rurales (rural carnival) is celebrated each Sunday during the three weeks leading up to the official time of carnival before Lent. Campesinos from the same rural communities, join together to form comparsas, or groups. Those who participate identify as campesinos; even though many participants have lived in the city for more than 20 years. Some of the younger participants were born in the city. Whilst some campesinos, displaced by the violence, are now returning to their communities, many more have chosen to remain in Huamanga. One such person is Rómulo Canales Bautista. Rómulo dances with the comparsa Claveles de Vinchos.Rómulo Bautista dancing the carnival of VinchosOriginally from Vinchos, Rómulo moved to Huamanga in search of safety when he was a boy after his father was killed. Like many who participate in rural carnival, Rómulo has lived in Huamanga for a many years and for the most part he lives a very urban existence. He completed his studies at the university and works as a professional with no plans to return permanently to Vinchos. However, Rómulo considers himself to be campesino, stating “I am campesino. I identify myself as I am.” Rómulo laughed as he explained “I was not born dancing.” Since moving to Huamanga, Rómulo learned the carnival dance of Vinchos as a means of feeling a connection to his place of origin. He now participates in rural carnival each year and is the captain of his comparsa. For Rómulo, carnival is his cultural inheritance and that which connects him to his homeland. Living and working in the urban setting whilst maintaining strong links to their homelands through the embodied expressions of fiesta, migrants like Rómulo negotiate and move between an urbanised mestizo identity and a rural campesino identity. However, for rural migrants living in Huamanga, it is campesino identity which holds greater importance during carnival. This is because carnival allows participants to feel a visceral connection to both land and ancestry. As Gerardo Muñoz, a sixty-seven year old migrant from Chilcas explained “We want to make our culture live again, it is our patrimony, it is what our grandfathers have left us of their wisdom and how it used to be. This is what we cultivate through our carnival.”The Plaza TransformedComparsa from Huanta enter the PlazaEach Sunday during the three weeks leading up to the official time of carnival the central Plaza is transformed by the dance, music and song of up to seventy comparsas participating in Carnavales Rurales. Rural Carnival has a transformative effect not only on participants but also on the wider urban population. At this time campesinos, who are generally marginalised, discounted or actively discriminated against, briefly hold a place of power and respect. For a few hours each Sunday they are treated as masters of an ancient art. It is no easy task to conjure the dynamic sensory world of dance in words. As Deidre Sklar questions, “how is the ineffable to be made available in words? How shall I draw out the effects of dancing? Imperfectly, and slowly, bit by bit, building fragments of sensation and association so that its pieces lock in with your sensory memories like a jigsaw puzzle” (17).Recalling the DanceAs comparsas arrive in the Plaza there is creative chaos and the atmosphere hums with excitement as more and more comparsas gather for the pasecalle or parade. At the corner of the plaza, the deafening crack of fire works, accompanied by the sounds of music and the blasting of whistles announce the impending arrival of another comparsa. They are Los Hijos de Chilcas from Chilcas in La Mar in the north-east of the department. They proudly dance and sing their way into the Plaza – bodies strong, their movements powerful yet fluid. Their heads are lifted to greet the crowd, their chests wide and open, eyes bright with pride. Led by the capitán, the dancers form two long lines in pairs the men at the front, followed by the women. All the men carry warakas, long whips of plaited leather which they crack in the air as they dance. These are ancient weapons which are later used in a ritual battle. They dance in a swinging stepping motion that swerves and snakes, winds and weaves along the road. At various intervals the two lines open out, doubling back on themselves creating two semicircles. The men wear frontales, pieces of material which hang down the front of the legs, attached with long brightly coloured ribbons. The dancers make high stepping motions, kicking the frontales up in the air as they go; as if moving through high grasses. The ribbons swish and fly around the men and they are clouded in a blur of colour and movement. The women follow carrying warakitas, which are shorter and much finer. They hold their whips in two hands, stretched wide in front of their bodies or sweeping from side to side above their heads. They wear large brightly coloured skirts known as polleras made from heavy material which swish and swoosh as they dance from side to side – step, touch together, bounce; step, touch together, bounce. The women follow the serpent pattern of the men. Behind the women are the musicians playing guitars, quenas and tinyas. The musicians are followed by five older men dressed in pants and suit coats carrying ponchos draped over the right shoulder. They represent the traditional community authorities known as Varayuq and karguyuq. The oldest of the men is carrying the symbols of leadership – the staff and the whip.The Choreography of PlaceFor the members of Los Hijos de Chilcas the dance represents the topography of their homeland. The steps and choreography are created and informed by the dancers’ relationship to the land from which they come. La Mar is a very mountainous region where, as one dancer explained, it is impossible to walk a straight line up or down the terrain. One must therefore weave a winding path so as not to slip and fall. As the dancers snake and weave, curl and wind they literally dance their “place” of origin into being. With each swaying movement of their body, with each turn and with every footfall on the earth, dancers lay the mountainous terrain of La Mar along the paved roads of the Plaza. The flying ribbons of the frontales evoke the long grasses of the hillsides. “The steps are danced in the form of a zigzag which represents the changeable and curvilinear paths that join the towns, as well as creating the figure eight which represents the eight anexos of the district” (Carnaval Tradicional). Los Hijos de ChilcasThe weaving patterns and the figure eights of the dance create a choreography of place, which reflects and evoke the land. This choreography of place is built upon with each step of the dance many of which emulate the native fauna. One of the dancers explained whilst demonstrating a hopping step “this is the step of a little bird” common to La Mar. With his body bent forward from the waist, left hand behind his back and elbow out to the side like a wing, stepping forward on the left leg and sweeping the right leg in half circle motion, he indeed resembled a little bird hopping along the ground. Other animals such as the luwichu or deer are also represented through movement and costume.Katrina Teaiwa notes that the peoples of the South Pacific dance to embody “not space but place”. This is true also for campesinos from Chilcas living in the urban setting, who invoke their place of origin and the time of the ancestors as they dance their carnival. The notion of place is not merely terrain. It includes the nature elements, the ancestors and those who also those who have passed away. The province of La Mar was one of the most severely affected areas during the years of internal armed conflict especially during 1983-1984. More than 1,400 deaths and disappearances were reported to the TRC for this period alone (CVR). Hundreds of people were forced to leave their homes and in many communities it became impossible to celebrate fiestas. Through the choreography of place dancers transform the urban streets and dance the very land of their origin into being, claiming the urban streets as their own. The importance of this act can not be overstated for campesinos who have lost family members and were forced to leave their communities during the years of violence. As Deborah Poole has noted dance is “…the active Andean voice …” (99). As comparsa members teach their children the carnival dance of their parents and grandparents they maintain ancestral connections and pass on the stories and embodied memories of their homes. Much of the literature on carnival views it as a release valve which allows a temporary freedom but which ultimately functions to reinforce established structures. This is no longer the case in Huamanga. The transformative effect of rural carnival goes beyond the moment of the dance. Through dancing the choreography of place campesinos salvage and restore that which was taken from them; the effects of which are felt by both the dancer and spectator.ConclusionThe closer examination of dance as embodied memory reveals those memory practices which may not necessarily voice the violence directly, but which are enacted, funded and embodied and thus, important to the people most affected by the years of conflict and violence. In conclusion, the dance of rural carnival functions as embodied memory which is danced into being through collective participation; through many bodies working together. Dancers who participate in rural carnival have absorbed the land sensorially and embodied it. Through dancing the land they give it form and bring embodied memory into being, imbuing the paved roads of the plaza with the mountainous terrain of their home land. For those born in the city, they come to know their ancestral land through the Andean voice of dance. The dance of carnival functions in a unique way making it possible for participants recall their homelands through a physical memory and to dance their place into being wherever they are. This corporeal memory goes beyond the normal understanding of memory as being of the mind for as Connerton notes “images of the past are remembered by way of ritual performances that are ‘stored’ in a bodily memory” (89). ReferencesAbercrombie, Thomas A. “La fiesta de carnaval postcolonial en Oruro: Clase, etnicidad y nacionalismo en la danza folklórica.” Revista Andina 10.2 (1992): 279-352.Carnaval Tradicional del Distrito de Chilcas – La Mar, Comparsas de La Asociación Social – Cultural “Los Hijos de Chilcas y Anexos”, pamphlet handed to the judges of the Atipinakuy, 2010.CVR. Informe Final. Lima: Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, 2003. 1 March 2008 < http://www.cverdad.org.pe >.Bigenho, Michelle. “Sensing Locality in Yura: Rituals of Carnival and of the Bolivian State.” American Ethnologist 26.4 (1999): 95-80.Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1989.Coronel Aguirre, José, M. Cabrera Romero, G. Machaca Calle, and R. Ochatoma Paravivino. “Análisis de acciones del carnaval ayacuchano – 1986.” Carnaval en Ayacucho, CEDIFA, Investigaciones No. 1, 1986.Cowan, Jane. Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990.Garcia, Maria Elena. Making Indigenous Citizens: Identities, Education and Multicultural Development in Peru. California: Stanford University Press, 2005.Isbelle, Billie Jean. To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village. Illinois: Waveland Press, 1985.Mendoza, Zoila S. Shaping Society through Dance: Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Peruvian Andes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.Poole, Deborah. “Andean Ritual Dance.” TDR 34.2 (Summer 1990): 98-126.Ritter, Jonathan. “Siren Songs: Ritual and Revolution in the Peruvian Andes.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 11.1 (2002): 9-42.Sklar, Deidre. “‘All the Dances Have a Meaning to That Apparition”: Felt Knowledge and the Danzantes of Tortugas, New Mexico.” Dance Research Journal 31.2 (Autumn 1999): 14-33.Stern, Steve J. Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.Teaiwa, Katerina. "Challenges to Dance! Choreographing History in Oceania." Paper for Greg Denning Memorial Lecture, Melbourne University, Melbourne, 14 Oct. 2010.United Nations International Human Rights Instruments. Core Document Forming Part of the Reports of States Parties: Peru. 27 June 1995. HRI/CORE/1/Add.43/Rev.1. 12 May 2012 < http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/3ae6ae1f8.html >.

By the time you read this, it will be wrong. Things seemed to be moving so fast in these first days after airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania earth. Each certainty is as carelessly dropped as it was once carelessly assumed. The sounds of lower Manhattan that used to serve as white noise for residents—sirens, screeches, screams—are no longer signs without a referent. Instead, they make folks stare and stop, hurry and hustle, wondering whether the noises we know so well are in fact, this time, coefficients of a new reality. At the time of writing, the events themselves are also signs without referents—there has been no direct claim of responsibility, and little proof offered by accusers since the 11th. But it has been assumed that there is a link to US foreign policy, its military and economic presence in the Arab world, and opposition to it that seeks revenge. In the intervening weeks the US media and the war planners have supplied their own narrow frameworks, making New York’s “ground zero” into the starting point for a new escalation of global violence. We want to write here about the combination of sources and sensations that came that day, and the jumble of knowledges and emotions that filled our minds. Working late the night before, Toby was awoken in the morning by one of the planes right overhead. That happens sometimes. I have long expected a crash when I’ve heard the roar of jet engines so close—but I didn’t this time. Often when that sound hits me, I get up and go for a run down by the water, just near Wall Street. Something kept me back that day. Instead, I headed for my laptop. Because I cannot rely on local media to tell me very much about the role of the US in world affairs, I was reading the British newspaper The Guardian on-line when it flashed a two-line report about the planes. I looked up at the calendar above my desk to see whether it was April 1st. Truly. Then I got off-line and turned on the TV to watch CNN. That second, the phone rang. My quasi-ex-girlfriend I’m still in love with called from the mid-West. She was due to leave that day for the Bay Area. Was I alright? We spoke for a bit. She said my cell phone was out, and indeed it was for the remainder of the day. As I hung up from her, my friend Ana rang, tearful and concerned. Her husband, Patrick, had left an hour before for work in New Jersey, and it seemed like a dangerous separation. All separations were potentially fatal that day. You wanted to know where everyone was, every minute. She told me she had been trying to contact Palestinian friends who worked and attended school near the event—their ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds made for real poignancy, as we both thought of the prejudice they would (probably) face, regardless of the eventual who/what/when/where/how of these events. We agreed to meet at Bruno’s, a bakery on La Guardia Place. For some reason I really took my time, though, before getting to Ana. I shampooed and shaved under the shower. This was a horror, and I needed to look my best, even as men and women were losing and risking their lives. I can only interpret what I did as an attempt to impose normalcy and control on the situation, on my environment. When I finally made it down there, she’d located our friends. They were safe. We stood in the street and watched the Towers. Horrified by the sight of human beings tumbling to their deaths, we turned to buy a tea/coffee—again some ludicrous normalization—but were drawn back by chilling screams from the street. Racing outside, we saw the second Tower collapse, and clutched at each other. People were streaming towards us from further downtown. We decided to be with our Palestinian friends in their apartment. When we arrived, we learnt that Mark had been four minutes away from the WTC when the first plane hit. I tried to call my daughter in London and my father in Canberra, but to no avail. I rang the mid-West, and asked my maybe-former novia to call England and Australia to report in on me. Our friend Jenine got through to relatives on the West Bank. Israeli tanks had commenced a bombardment there, right after the planes had struck New York. Family members spoke to her from under the kitchen table, where they were taking refuge from the shelling of their house. Then we gave ourselves over to television, like so many others around the world, even though these events were happening only a mile away. We wanted to hear official word, but there was just a huge absence—Bush was busy learning to read in Florida, then leading from the front in Louisiana and Nebraska. As the day wore on, we split up and regrouped, meeting folks. One guy was in the subway when smoke filled the car. Noone could breathe properly, people were screaming, and his only thought was for his dog DeNiro back in Brooklyn. From the panic of the train, he managed to call his mom on a cell to ask her to feed “DeNiro” that night, because it looked like he wouldn’t get home. A pregnant woman feared for her unborn as she fled the blasts, pushing the stroller with her baby in it as she did so. Away from these heart-rending tales from strangers, there was the fear: good grief, what horrible price would the US Government extract for this, and who would be the overt and covert agents and targets of that suffering? What blood-lust would this generate? What would be the pattern of retaliation and counter-retaliation? What would become of civil rights and cultural inclusiveness? So a jumble of emotions came forward, I assume in all of us. Anger was not there for me, just intense sorrow, shock, and fear, and the desire for intimacy. Network television appeared to offer me that, but in an ultimately unsatisfactory way. For I think I saw the end-result of reality TV that day. I have since decided to call this ‘emotionalization’—network TV’s tendency to substitute analysis of US politics and economics with a stress on feelings. Of course, powerful emotions have been engaged by this horror, and there is value in addressing that fact and letting out the pain. I certainly needed to do so. But on that day and subsequent ones, I looked to the networks, traditional sources of current-affairs knowledge, for just that—informed, multi-perspectival journalism that would allow me to make sense of my feelings, and come to a just and reasoned decision about how the US should respond. I waited in vain. No such commentary came forward. Just a lot of asinine inquiries from reporters that were identical to those they pose to basketballers after a game: Question—‘How do you feel now?’ Answer—‘God was with me today.’ For the networks were insistent on asking everyone in sight how they felt about the end of las torres gemelas. In this case, we heard the feelings of survivors, firefighters, viewers, media mavens, Republican and Democrat hacks, and vacuous Beltway state-of-the-nation pundits. But learning of the military-political economy, global inequality, and ideologies and organizations that made for our grief and loss—for that, there was no space. TV had forgotten how to do it. My principal feeling soon became one of frustration. So I headed back to where I began the day—The Guardian web site, where I was given insightful analysis of the messy factors of history, religion, economics, and politics that had created this situation. As I dealt with the tragedy of folks whose lives had been so cruelly lost, I pondered what it would take for this to stop. Or whether this was just the beginning. I knew one thing—the answers wouldn’t come from mainstream US television, no matter how full of feelings it was. And that made Toby anxious. And afraid. He still is. And so the dreams come. In one, I am suddenly furloughed from my job with an orchestra, as audience numbers tumble. I make my evening-wear way to my locker along with the other players, emptying it of bubble gum and instrument. The next night, I see a gigantic, fifty-feet high wave heading for the city beach where I’ve come to swim. Somehow I am sheltered behind a huge wall, as all the people around me die. Dripping, I turn to find myself in a media-stereotype “crack house” of the early ’90s—desperate-looking black men, endless doorways, sudden police arrival, and my earnest search for a passport that will explain away my presence. I awake in horror, to the realization that the passport was already open and stamped—racialization at work for Toby, every day and in every way, as a white man in New York City. Ana’s husband, Patrick, was at work ten miles from Manhattan when “it” happened. In the hallway, I overheard some talk about two planes crashing, but went to teach anyway in my usual morning stupor. This was just the usual chatter of disaster junkies. I didn’t hear the words, “World Trade Center” until ten thirty, at the end of the class at the college I teach at in New Jersey, across the Hudson river. A friend and colleague walked in and told me the news of the attack, to which I replied “You must be fucking joking.” He was a little offended. Students were milling haphazardly on the campus in the late summer weather, some looking panicked like me. My first thought was of some general failure of the air-traffic control system. There must be planes falling out of the sky all over the country. Then the height of the towers: how far towards our apartment in Greenwich Village would the towers fall? Neither of us worked in the financial district a mile downtown, but was Ana safe? Where on the college campus could I see what was happening? I recognized the same physical sensation I had felt the morning after Hurricane Andrew in Miami seeing at a distance the wreckage of our shattered apartment across a suburban golf course strewn with debris and flattened power lines. Now I was trapped in the suburbs again at an unbridgeable distance from my wife and friends who were witnessing the attacks first hand. Were they safe? What on earth was going on? This feeling of being cut off, my path to the familiar places of home blocked, remained for weeks my dominant experience of the disaster. In my office, phone calls to the city didn’t work. There were six voice-mail messages from my teenaged brother Alex in small-town England giving a running commentary on the attack and its aftermath that he was witnessing live on television while I dutifully taught my writing class. “Hello, Patrick, where are you? Oh my god, another plane just hit the towers. Where are you?” The web was choked: no access to newspapers online. Email worked, but no one was wasting time writing. My office window looked out over a soccer field to the still woodlands of western New Jersey: behind me to the east the disaster must be unfolding. Finally I found a website with a live stream from ABC television, which I watched flickering and stilted on the tiny screen. It had all already happened: both towers already collapsed, the Pentagon attacked, another plane shot down over Pennsylvania, unconfirmed reports said, there were other hijacked aircraft still out there unaccounted for. Manhattan was sealed off. George Washington Bridge, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, all the bridges and tunnels from New Jersey I used to mock shut down. Police actions sealed off the highways into “the city.” The city I liked to think of as the capital of the world was cut off completely from the outside, suddenly vulnerable and under siege. There was no way to get home. The phone rang abruptly and Alex, three thousand miles away, told me he had spoken to Ana earlier and she was safe. After a dozen tries, I managed to get through and spoke to her, learning that she and Toby had seen people jumping and then the second tower fall. Other friends had been even closer. Everyone was safe, we thought. I sat for another couple of hours in my office uselessly. The news was incoherent, stories contradictory, loops of the planes hitting the towers only just ready for recycling. The attacks were already being transformed into “the World Trade Center Disaster,” not yet the ahistorical singularity of the emergency “nine one one.” Stranded, I had to spend the night in New Jersey at my boss’s house, reminded again of the boundless generosity of Americans to relative strangers. In an effort to protect his young son from the as yet unfiltered images saturating cable and Internet, my friend’s TV set was turned off and we did our best to reassure. We listened surreptitiously to news bulletins on AM radio, hoping that the roads would open. Walking the dog with my friend’s wife and son we crossed a park on the ridge on which Upper Montclair sits. Ten miles away a huge column of smoke was rising from lower Manhattan, where the stunning absence of the towers was clearly visible. The summer evening was unnervingly still. We kicked a soccer ball around on the front lawn and a woman walked distracted by, shocked and pale up the tree-lined suburban street, suffering her own wordless trauma. I remembered that though most of my students were ordinary working people, Montclair is a well-off dormitory for the financial sector and high rises of Wall Street and Midtown. For the time being, this was a white-collar disaster. I slept a short night in my friend’s house, waking to hope I had dreamed it all, and took the commuter train in with shell-shocked bankers and corporate types. All men, all looking nervously across the river toward glimpses of the Manhattan skyline as the train neared Hoboken. “I can’t believe they’re making us go in,” one guy had repeated on the station platform. He had watched the attacks from his office in Midtown, “The whole thing.” Inside the train we all sat in silence. Up from the PATH train station on 9th street I came onto a carless 6th Avenue. At 14th street barricades now sealed off downtown from the rest of the world. I walked down the middle of the avenue to a newspaper stand; the Indian proprietor shrugged “No deliveries below 14th.” I had not realized that the closer to the disaster you came, the less information would be available. Except, I assumed, for the evidence of my senses. But at 8 am the Village was eerily still, few people about, nothing in the sky, including the twin towers. I walked to Houston Street, which was full of trucks and police vehicles. Tractor trailers sat carrying concrete barriers. Below Houston, each street into Soho was barricaded and manned by huddles of cops. I had walked effortlessly up into the “lockdown,” but this was the “frozen zone.” There was no going further south towards the towers. I walked the few blocks home, found my wife sleeping, and climbed into bed, still in my clothes from the day before. “Your heart is racing,” she said. I realized that I hadn’t known if I would get back, and now I never wanted to leave again; it was still only eight thirty am. Lying there, I felt the terrible wonder of a distant bystander for the first-hand witness. Ana’s face couldn’t tell me what she had seen. I felt I needed to know more, to see and understand. Even though I knew the effort was useless: I could never bridge that gap that had trapped me ten miles away, my back turned to the unfolding disaster. The television was useless: we don’t have cable, and the mast on top of the North Tower, which Ana had watched fall, had relayed all the network channels. I knew I had to go down and see the wreckage. Later I would realize how lucky I had been not to suffer from “disaster envy.” Unbelievably, in retrospect, I commuted into work the second day after the attack, dogged by the same unnerving sensation that I would not get back—to the wounded, humbled former center of the world. My students were uneasy, all talked out. I was a novelty, a New Yorker living in the Village a mile from the towers, but I was forty-eight hours late. Out of place in both places. I felt torn up, but not angry. Back in the city at night, people were eating and drinking with a vengeance, the air filled with acrid sicklysweet smoke from the burning wreckage. Eyes stang and nose ran with a bitter acrid taste. Who knows what we’re breathing in, we joked nervously. A friend’s wife had fallen out with him for refusing to wear a protective mask in the house. He shrugged a wordlessly reassuring smile. What could any of us do? I walked with Ana down to the top of West Broadway from where the towers had commanded the skyline over SoHo; downtown dense smoke blocked the view to the disaster. A crowd of onlookers pushed up against the barricades all day, some weeping, others gawping. A tall guy was filming the grieving faces with a video camera, which was somehow the worst thing of all, the first sign of the disaster tourism that was already mushrooming downtown. Across the street an Asian artist sat painting the street scene in streaky black and white; he had scrubbed out two white columns where the towers would have been. “That’s the first thing I’ve seen that’s made me feel any better,” Ana said. We thanked him, but he shrugged blankly, still in shock I supposed. On the Friday, the clampdown. I watched the Mayor and Police Chief hold a press conference in which they angrily told the stream of volunteers to “ground zero” that they weren’t needed. “We can handle this ourselves. We thank you. But we don’t need your help,” Commissioner Kerik said. After the free-for-all of the first couple of days, with its amazing spontaneities and common gestures of goodwill, the clampdown was going into effect. I decided to go down to Canal Street and see if it was true that no one was welcome anymore. So many paths through the city were blocked now. “Lock down, frozen zone, war zone, the site, combat zone, ground zero, state troopers, secured perimeter, national guard, humvees, family center”: a disturbing new vocabulary that seemed to stamp the logic of Giuliani’s sanitized and over-policed Manhattan onto the wounded hulk of the city. The Mayor had been magnificent in the heat of the crisis; Churchillian, many were saying—and indeed, Giuliani quickly appeared on the cover of Cigar Afficionado, complete with wing collar and the misquotation from Kipling, “Captain Courageous.” Churchill had not believed in peacetime politics either, and he never got over losing his empire. Now the regime of command and control over New York’s citizens and its economy was being stabilized and reimposed. The sealed-off, disfigured, and newly militarized spaces of the New York through which I have always loved to wander at all hours seemed to have been put beyond reach for the duration. And, in the new post-“9/11” post-history, the duration could last forever. The violence of the attacks seemed to have elicited a heavy-handed official reaction that sought to contain and constrict the best qualities of New York. I felt more anger at the clampdown than I did at the demolition of the towers. I knew this was unreasonable, but I feared the reaction, the spread of the racial harassment and racial profiling that I had already heard of from my students in New Jersey. This militarizing of the urban landscape seemed to negate the sprawling, freewheeling, boundless largesse and tolerance on which New York had complacently claimed a monopoly. For many the towers stood for that as well, not just as the monumental outposts of global finance that had been attacked. Could the American flag mean something different? For a few days, perhaps—on the helmets of firemen and construction workers. But not for long. On the Saturday, I found an unmanned barricade way east along Canal Street and rode my bike past throngs of Chinatown residents, by the Federal jail block where prisoners from the first World Trade Center bombing were still being held. I headed south and west towards Tribeca; below the barricades in the frozen zone, you could roam freely, the cops and soldiers assuming you belonged there. I felt uneasy, doubting my own motives for being there, feeling the blood drain from my head in the same numbing shock I’d felt every time I headed downtown towards the site. I looped towards Greenwich Avenue, passing an abandoned bank full of emergency supplies and boxes of protective masks. Crushed cars still smeared with pulverized concrete and encrusted with paperwork strewn by the blast sat on the street near the disabled telephone exchange. On one side of the avenue stood a horde of onlookers, on the other television crews, all looking two blocks south towards a colossal pile of twisted and smoking steel, seven stories high. We were told to stay off the street by long-suffering national guardsmen and women with southern accents, kids. Nothing happening, just the aftermath. The TV crews were interviewing worn-out, dust-covered volunteers and firemen who sat quietly leaning against the railings of a park filled with scraps of paper. Out on the West Side highway, a high-tech truck was offering free cellular phone calls. The six lanes by the river were full of construction machinery and military vehicles. Ambulances rolled slowly uptown, bodies inside? I locked my bike redundantly to a lamppost and crossed under the hostile gaze of plainclothes police to another media encampment. On the path by the river, two camera crews were complaining bitterly in the heat. “After five days of this I’ve had enough.” They weren’t talking about the trauma, bodies, or the wreckage, but censorship. “Any blue light special gets to roll right down there, but they see your press pass and it’s get outta here. I’ve had enough.” I fronted out the surly cops and ducked under the tape onto the path, walking onto a Pier on which we’d spent many lazy afternoons watching the river at sunset. Dust everywhere, police boats docked and waiting, a crane ominously dredging mud into a barge. I walked back past the camera operators onto the highway and walked up to an interview in process. Perfectly composed, a fire chief and his crew from some small town in upstate New York were politely declining to give details about what they’d seen at “ground zero.” The men’s faces were dust streaked, their eyes slightly dazed with the shock of a horror previously unimaginable to most Americans. They were here to help the best they could, now they’d done as much as anyone could. “It’s time for us to go home.” The chief was eloquent, almost rehearsed in his precision. It was like a Magnum press photo. But he was refusing to cooperate with the media’s obsessive emotionalism. I walked down the highway, joining construction workers, volunteers, police, and firemen in their hundreds at Chambers Street. No one paid me any attention; it was absurd. I joined several other watchers on the stairs by Stuyvesant High School, which was now the headquarters for the recovery crews. Just two or three blocks away, the huge jagged teeth of the towers’ beautiful tracery lurched out onto the highway above huge mounds of debris. The TV images of the shattered scene made sense as I placed them into what was left of a familiar Sunday afternoon geography of bike rides and walks by the river, picnics in the park lying on the grass and gazing up at the infinite solidity of the towers. Demolished. It was breathtaking. If “they” could do that, they could do anything. Across the street at tables military policeman were checking credentials of the milling volunteers and issuing the pink and orange tags that gave access to ground zero. Without warning, there was a sudden stampede running full pelt up from the disaster site, men and women in fatigues, burly construction workers, firemen in bunker gear. I ran a few yards then stopped. Other people milled around idly, ignoring the panic, smoking and talking in low voices. It was a mainly white, blue-collar scene. All these men wearing flags and carrying crowbars and flashlights. In their company, the intolerance and rage I associated with flags and construction sites was nowhere to be seen. They were dealing with a torn and twisted otherness that dwarfed machismo or bigotry. I talked to a moustachioed, pony-tailed construction worker who’d hitched a ride from the mid-west to “come and help out.” He was staying at the Y, he said, it was kind of rough. “Have you been down there?” he asked, pointing towards the wreckage. “You’re British, you weren’t in World War Two were you?” I replied in the negative. “It’s worse ’n that. I went down last night and you can’t imagine it. You don’t want to see it if you don’t have to.” Did I know any welcoming ladies? he asked. The Y was kind of tough. When I saw TV images of President Bush speaking to the recovery crews and steelworkers at “ground zero” a couple of days later, shouting through a bullhorn to chants of “USA, USA” I knew nothing had changed. New York’s suffering was subject to a second hijacking by the brokers of national unity. New York had never been America, and now its terrible human loss and its great humanity were redesignated in the name of the nation, of the coming war. The signs without a referent were being forcibly appropriated, locked into an impoverished patriotic framework, interpreted for “us” by a compliant media and an opportunistic regime eager to reign in civil liberties, to unloose its war machine and tighten its grip on the Muslim world. That day, drawn to the river again, I had watched F18 fighter jets flying patterns over Manhattan as Bush’s helicopters came in across the river. Otherwise empty of air traffic, “our” skies were being torn up by the military jets: it was somehow the worst sight yet, worse than the wreckage or the bands of disaster tourists on Canal Street, a sign of further violence yet to come. There was a carrier out there beyond New York harbor, there to protect us: the bruising, blustering city once open to all comers. That felt worst of all. In the intervening weeks, we have seen other, more unstable ways of interpreting the signs of September 11 and its aftermath. Many have circulated on the Internet, past the blockages and blockades placed on urban spaces and intellectual life. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s work was banished (at least temporarily) from the canon of avant-garde electronic music when he described the attack on las torres gemelas as akin to a work of art. If Jacques Derrida had described it as an act of deconstruction (turning technological modernity literally in on itself), or Jean Baudrillard had announced that the event was so thick with mediation it had not truly taken place, something similar would have happened to them (and still may). This is because, as Don DeLillo so eloquently put it in implicit reaction to the plaintive cry “Why do they hate us?”: “it is the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind”—whether via military action or cultural iconography. All these positions are correct, however grisly and annoying they may be. What GK Chesterton called the “flints and tiles” of nineteenth-century European urban existence were rent asunder like so many victims of high-altitude US bombing raids. As a First-World disaster, it became knowable as the first-ever US “ground zero” such precisely through the high premium immediately set on the lives of Manhattan residents and the rarefied discussion of how to commemorate the high-altitude towers. When, a few weeks later, an American Airlines plane crashed on take-off from Queens, that borough was left open to all comers. Manhattan was locked down, flown over by “friendly” bombers. In stark contrast to the open if desperate faces on the street of 11 September, people went about their business with heads bowed even lower than is customary. Contradictory deconstructions and valuations of Manhattan lives mean that September 11 will live in infamy and hyper-knowability. The vengeful United States government and population continue on their way. Local residents must ponder insurance claims, real-estate values, children’s terrors, and their own roles in something beyond their ken. New York had been forced beyond being the center of the financial world. It had become a military target, a place that was receiving as well as dispatching the slings and arrows of global fortune. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php>. Chicago Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby, "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. (2002) A Day That Will Live In … ?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]).

This study constructs a historical-geographical narrative of Poplar, Montana and explores residents' place-identity in the context of economic restructuring. Located on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northeastern Montana, Poplar offers an ideal setting to better understand how economic restructuring affects the lives of residents in northern Plains reservation communities. Loss of businesses, consolidation of services, and general economic restructuring continue to challenge communities on the Great Plains. For Great Plains Indian reservations, however, these problems are compounded by additional variables such as persistently high poverty rates, a dynamic relationship with the federal government, and increasing populations. Archival research, landscape analysis, and interview data are all used to better understand the influence of economic restructuring in shaping Poplar. This study demonstrates the value of historical and cultural geographic approaches in understanding the past evolution as well as the contemporary challenges of reservation communities in the American West.

Thesis (M.A.)--Kent State University, 2009.
Title from PDF t.p. (viewed March 3, 2010). Advisor: Kevin Adams. Keywords: Great Plains; Native Americans; Indians; smallpox; disease ecology; Northern Plains; epidemic; environment; climate; warfare; Sioux; Shoshone; Mandan; Arikara; Hidatsa; Crow; Cree; Assiniboine; Blackfoot; horse; firearm; Hudson's Bay Company; traders; fur. Includes bibliographical references (p. 196-203).

The Fincastle site (DlOx-5) is located in Southern Alberta, Canada. Excavations from 2004-2007 unearthed a significant number of lithic artefacts, fire-broken rock and a dense bone bed. Radiocarbon dates (ca. 2500 BP) place the single occupancy kill site in the Late Middle Prehistoric Period. This thesis investigates the butchering activities that took place in the East Block of the site, where 60,000 bone fragments were collected. Of these faunal remains, 5,540 records were processed and examined using Brumley’s (1991) Bone Unit (BU) analysis scheme. They were then assigned to a Bone Unit Butchering Category, a classification system created to identify specific butchering activities. Detailed analyses of the articulations, location and quantity of impact and/or cut marks, and specific fracture types and lengths were also carried out. The evidence shows that both primary and secondary butchering operations occurred at Fincastle, including joint dismemberment, meat removal, marrow extraction and grease rendering processes.
xviii, 298 leaves : col. ill. ; 29 cm. --

An assemblage of distinctive projectile points from the Fincastle site (DlOx-5), Alberta at c. 2500 B.P. instigated an analysis of archaeological cultures on the Northern Plains during the late Middle Prehistoric Period. Archaeological sites included in this study are from the Pelican Lake Phase, the Besant Phase, the Sandy Creek Complex, a previously Unnamed Complex, and the Plains Woodland at approximately 2500 – 1250 B.P. A projectile point analysis was conducted on assemblages from Fincastle, EbPi-63, EgPn-111, Kenney (DjPk-1), Leavitt (24LT22), Muhlbach (FbPf-1), and Smith-Swainson (FeOw-1) sites. As part of this study, nearly 40 metric and non-metric attributes were examined in approximately 500 projectile points from these seven sites. Research findings indicate that two coeval groups existed in Alberta, identified as the Kenney and Sonota subphases of the Besant Phase. Two additional subphases are hypothesized for the Besant Phase in Wyoming and Montana.
xix, 379 leaves ; 29 cm.

The Fincastle Bison Kill Site (DlOx-5), located approximately 100 km east of Lethbridge, Alberta, has been radiocarbon dated to 2 500 BP. Excavations at the site yielded an extensive assemblage of lithics and faunal remains, and several unique features. The elongated point forms, along with the bone upright features, appeared similar to those found at Sonota sites within the Dakota region that dated between 1 950 BP and 1 350 BP. The relatively early date of the Fincastle Site prompted a re-investigation into the origins of the Besant Culture. The features, faunal and lithic assemblages from twenty-three Late Middle Prehistoric sites in Southern Alberta, Saskatchewan, Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas were analyzed and compared. The findings show that Fincastle represents an early component of the Besant Culture referred to as the Outlook Complex. This analysis also suggests a possible Middle Missouri origin of the Fincastle hunters, as well as the entire Besant Culture.
xii, 183 leaves : ill. (chiefly col.) ; 29 cm

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2001.
eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 297-332).

This chapter re-examines the powerful nomadic-equestrian societies in the North and South American grasslands and makes the case for a distinctive imperial formation, the kinetic empire. Kinetic empires were shape-shifting, action-based regimes that turned mobility into an imperial strategy and revolved around mobile activities: long-distance raiding, seasonal expansions, transnational diplomatic missions, semi-permanent trade fairs, recurring political assemblies, and control over shifting nodes. Their governing systems were light and flexible, and they rose and stayed in power by capitalizing on their superior capacity to access and connect political and economic centers around them. The Comanche and Lakota Indians created the Western Hemisphere’s most prominent examples of kinetic empires in the North American Great Plains. In South America the Araucanians frustrated European colonizing efforts, commanded a large and expanding territory, and pulled other Native groups on their orbit, but lacked the Comanches’ and Lakotas’ strong collective identities and political unity.