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.
Read more >
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.
Read more >
This Day in North American Indian History
February 9,
1869
According to General Philip Sheridan's official report, from March 2, 1868, to February 9, 1869, in the Department of the Missouri (from Texas and New Mexico to Dakota and Minnesota), 353 officers, soldiers, and citizens were killed, wounded, or captured by Indians. Of the Indians, 319 were killed, 289 wounded, and fifty-three captured. Approximately 1,200 surrendered.
Indians of Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, making pottery (NA)
February 9,
1872
Three soldiers from Troop B, Fourth Cavalry, were attacked by Indians on the North Concho River in Texas. No casualties were suffered on either side.