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Popular fashion trends come and go in cycles, and once again we are seeing a trend of the “Native American look” in clothing, home furnishings, jewelry, and bedding. Some companies are running into legal trouble over their merchandise, as there are laws and trademark restrictions against products attributed to Native Americans. Even when the letter of the law is followed, the trend is causing bad feelings about the appropriation of a culture.
“The problem,” says Jessica R. Metcalfe, a Turtle Mountain Chippewa and doctor of Native American studies who teaches at Arizona State University and blogs about Native American fashion designers at Beyond Buckskin, “is that they’re putting it out there as ‘This is the native,’ or ‘This is native-inspired’. So now you have non-native people representing us in mainstream culture. That, of course, gets tiring, because this has been happening since the good old days of the Hollywood Western in the 1930s and ’40s, where they hired non-native actors and dressed them up essentially in redface.
“The issue now is not only who gets to represent Native Americans,” Metcalfe says, “but also who gets to profit.”
Collector’s Weekly has an extensive article about the history of the trade in Native American style, and how the controversy is playing out today. Link -Thanks, Lisa!
A genetic study of Icelandic natives found a genetic variation in 80 people similar to a variation found mostly in Native Americans. The genetic code was traced back to four women who lived around 1700. But the history of Iceland leads experts to believe the gene must’ve entered the population hundreds of years earlier. The simplest answer so far that fits the facts is that some Viking brought back a Native American wife from North America, who then bore the first Viking-American child in Iceland.
“We know that Vikings sailed to the Americas,” said Agnar Helgason of deCODE Genetics and the University of Iceland, who co-wrote the study with his student Sigrídur Ebenesersdóttir and colleagues. “So all you have to do is assume … that they met some people and ended up taking at least one female back with them.
“Although it’s maybe interesting and surprising, it’s not all that incredible,” Helgason added. “The alternative explanations to me are less likely”—for example the idea that the genetic trait might exist independently, undiscovered, in a few Europeans.
Link -Thanks, Marilyn!
(Image credit: Robert Harding Picture Library, Alamy)
Have you ever visited a casino on a Native American reservation? David Israel hasn’t yet, but he likes to go prepared, so he found out as much as he could about the history and laws of Native American casinos. Here’s a sampling:
7. Revenues from gaming are required to be used for tribal governmental and charitable ventures only. The revenues are exempt from federal, state, and local taxes, however there are exceptions. In the cases where the revenues are divided evenly and then distributed directly to tribal members, the federal government gets a nice cut. State taxes are often part of the agreements for large scale casinos.
8. There are 562 recognized tribes in the United States, only about 200 operate full scale casinos. There are approximately 150 additional tribes seeking recognition. Many complain that these tribes have no real membership and are only seeking to cash in on the casino business. Supporters of Native American rights point to centuries old treaties put in place to protect these unrecognized tribes. The Pequot tribe, which operates Foxwoods, received recognition in the early 1980s, after the last surviving member living on the reservation died and her grandchildren came together to recreate the tribe.
Read the rest in this post at mental_floss. Link
Americans know about Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, but you probably aren’t familiar with all the Native Americans from the history of the early United States profiled in this slide show. Red Cloud is ranked at #8.
Without a doubt, one of the best Native American war leaders the United States Army ever faced, Red Cloud organized 2,000 Arapaho, Sioux and Cheyenne in a successful bitch-slapping of U.S. forces out of the Lakota territory that is now Wyoming and southern Montana. Known as Red Cloud’s War, the two-year skirmish ended with the U.S. agreeing to completely withdraw from their area.
Link -via Gorilla Mask
The Denver Post recently uncovered a collection of photographs taken by Durango, Colorado photographers William Pennington and Lisle Updike between 1915 and 1920. They were featured in the newspaper in 1974. From that article:
These pictures, bearing the stamp of their studio, were recently discovered in a long forgotten file of the Denver Post library.
The two young photographers supported themselves with their portrait business, but satisfied their artistic urges by traveling around the Four Corners area in a wagon taking pictures such as the ones appearing on this page.
“There was no money in taking pictures of Indians,” Updike, 84, said from his winter home in Phoenix, Arizona. His sons and grandsons now operate a chain of Updike studios in Utah and Arizona.
Updike died a couple of years after the original article appeared. The linked post features 16 of those prints. Link -via Cynical-C
(image credit: The Pennington Studio)
Native Names, the Interactive Map. Graphic: Oliver Uberti, National Geographic
A lot of places in the United States have their names derived from Native American words (I’m looking at you, Punxsutawney!). But do you know what they actually mean?
Our friends over at National Geographic have put together this really spiffy interactive map of the United States, with the translated meaning of the towns, lakes, and other localities.
Here are my personal favorites:
- Malibu, CA: It makes a loud noise all the time over there
- Topeka, KS: Good place to dig potatoes
- Chicago, IL: At the skunk place
- Yosemite, CA: They are killers
But the strangest one has got to be Loleta, a small town in Northern California. It means "let’s have intercourse."
Of course, the town founders claimed that the name means "pleasant place at the end of the tide water" but not according to William Bright, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Anthropology at UCLA, who wrote in his book Native American Placenames of the United States:
LOLETA (Calif., Humboldt Co.). In 1893, a resident, Mrs. Rufus F. Herrick, chose the present name, supposed to be from the local Wiyot Indian language. The Indian name was in fact katawóio’t, but an elderly Indian played a joke on Mrs. Herrick by telling her that the name was hós wiwítak ‘let’s have intercourse!’ – the latter part of which she interpreted in baby-talk fashion as Loleta (Teeter 1958).
Ouch! Link: Blog post | Interactive Map – Thanks Marilyn!
What are your favorites?
