A compendium of Tlingit oratory recorded in performance, featuring Tlingit texts with facing English translations and detailed annotations; photographs of the orators and the settings in which the speeches were delivered; and biographies of the elders. Most speeches were recorded on Canada's Northwest Coast, primarily in British Columbia, between 1968 and 1988, but two date from 1899. Includes references and glossary.
This anthology provides a single-volume overview of the essential theoretical debates in the anthropology of art. Drawing together significant work in the field from the second half of the twentieth century, it enables readers to appreciate the art of different cultures at different times. Advances a cross-cultural concept of art that moves beyond traditional distinctions between Western and non-Western art. Provides the basis for the appreciation of art of different cultures and times. Enhances readers’ appreciation of the aesthetics of art and of the important role it plays in human society.
Indigenous oral narratives are an important source for, and component of, Coast Salish knowledge systems. Stories are not only to be recounted and passed down; they are also intended as tools for teaching. Jo-ann Archibald worked closely with Elders and storytellers, who shared both traditional and personal life-experience stories, in order to develop ways of bringing storytelling into educational contexts. Indigenous Storywork is the result of this research and it demonstrates how stories have the power to educate and heal the heart, mind, body, and spirit. It builds on the seven principles of respect, responsibility, reciprocity, reverence, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy that form a framework for understanding the characteristics of stories, appreciating the process of storytelling, establishing a receptive learning context, and engaging in holistic meaning-making.
In People of the Raven, award-winning archaeologists and New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear spin a vivid and captivating tale around one of the most controversial archaeological discoveries in the world, the Kennewick Man---a Caucasoid male mummy dating back more than 9,000 years---found in the Pacific Northwest on the banks of the Columbia River. A white man in North America more than 9,000 years ago? What was he doing there? With the terrifying grandeur of melting glaciers as a backdrop, People of the Raven shows animals and humans struggling for survival amidst massive environmental change. Mammoths, mastodons, and giant lions have become extinct, and Rain Bear, the chief of Sandy Point Village, knows his struggling Raven People may be next. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
The Tsimshians are a Northwest Coast Native people known for their dazzling works of art and rich array of social, religious, and oral traditions that have captured the attention of scholars for over a century. Jay Miller brings together for the first time a wealth of material about the Tsimshians, presenting an unforgettable picture of their cultural universe. That universe is built around the metaphor of light, which was brought into the world by Raven; its refraction forms the chief social, religious, and symbolic institutions of Tsimshian culture. Family heraldic crests express light in one way, masks in another. Miller argues convincingly that the genius of Tsimshian culture, and one of the main reasons for its continuing vitality, is that its people are sensitive to different, and often creative, ways of capturing and embodying light.
William Beynon was born in 1888 in Victoria to a Welsh father and a Tsimshian mother. He was an accomplished ethnographer and had a long career documenting the traditions of the Tsimshian, Nisga'a, and Gitksan. In 1945 he attended and actively participated in five days of potlatches and totem pole raisings at Gitksan village of Gitsegukla. There he compiled four notebooks containing detailed and often verbatim information about the events he witnessed. For over 50 years these notebooks have seen limited circulation among specialists, who have long recognized them as the most perceptive and complete account of potlatching ever recorded.
The word "elegy" comes from the Ancient Greek elogos, meaning a mournful poem or song, in particular, a song of grief in response to loss. Because mourning and memorialization are so deeply embedded in the human condition, all human societies have developed means for lamenting the dead, and, in "That the People Might Live" Arnold Krupat surveys the traditions of Native American elegiac expression over several centuries. Krupat covers a variety of oral performances of loss and renewal, including the Condolence Rites of the Iroquois and the memorial ceremony of the Tlingit people known as koo'eex, examining as well a number of Ghost Dance songs, which have been reinterpreted in culturally specific ways by many different tribal nations. Krupat treats elegiac "farewell" speeches of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in considerable detail, and comments on retrospective autobiographies by Black Hawk and Black Elk. Among contemporary Native writers, he looks at elegiac work by Linda Hogan, N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie, Maurice Kenny, and Ralph Salisbury, among others. Despite differences of language and culture, he finds that death and loss are consistently felt by Native peoples both personally and socially: someone who had contributed to the People's well-being was now gone. Native American elegiac expression offered mourners consolation so that they might overcome their grief and renew their will to sustain communal life.
