Each person, each family, each tribe has its history.We can create our contemporary calendars of records, our own version of winter counts that might illustrate the key events that impacted us over the past year.My own 2009 calendar would include the arrival of new books from favorite authors. Joy Harjo published her second children’s book, For a Girl Becoming. I was fortunate to attend deeply meaningful events the sixth International Indigenous Librarians Forum in Aotearoa (New Zealand), the Hawaii Book and Music Festival, and the Sequoyah Research Center Symposium in Little Rock, Arkansas. At the National Conference on Tribal Museums, Libraries and Archives in Portland, Oregon in October, I was fortunate to receive the National Leadership Award. The Tribal College Librarians Professional Development Institute took place in June in Bozeman, Montana and will continue, thanks to the awarding of a U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services grant. I was also able to teach a full graduate course on indigenous librarianship at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I worked with great students, met and spoke with tribal librarians, and had some time to think and write.
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Cultural conflict and the degradation of sovereignty sprang from the fact that Christian institutions are not focused on specific places and specific people. Religious leaders felt a need to spread the belief system to all peoples everywhere. They interpreted the absence of Christianity among Native Americans as an absence of all religion. However, Native peoples did have developed religious belief systems and rituals well before the time of contact with Europeans.
Although traditional Native American religions shared many attributes that set them apart from Christianity, there were also religious distinctions among the tribes. Native nations that relied on hunting and gathering for their sustenance used animal ceremonialism; agricultural nations featured rain and fertility rituals in their religions. Hunting groups focused on a male supreme being, while the agricultural societies worshipped both gods and goddesses. The agricultural nations saw creation coming out of the ground, and spirits returned to the earth after death and burial. For this reason burial places are of central importance. Hunting societies looked toward the sky as the source of both creation and heavenly afterlife.
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This Day in North American Indian History
February 8,
1887
The Dawes Severally Act (24 Stat. 388–389) regarding land allotments took effect. Its official title was “An Act to Provide for the Allotment of Lands in Severally to Indians on the Various Reservations, and to Extend the Protection of the Laws of the United States and the Territories over the Indians, and for Other Purposes.”
February 8,
1936
An election was held to approve a constitution and bylaws for the Manchester Band of Pomo Indians of the Manchester Rancheria. It passed by a vote of 33–4.