Staging the Indian: The Politics of Representation

Staging the Indian: The Politics of Representation. The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. February 2, 2002–June 2, 2002.     

Twelve Thousand Years: American Indians in Maine

Twelve Thousand Years: American Indians in Maine. Bruce J. Bourque. with Steven L. Cox and Ruth H. Whitehead. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.368 pp.     

Hollywood Icons, Local Demons

Hollywood Icons, Local Demons: Ghanaian Popular Paintings by Mark Anthony. Widener Art Gallery, Trinity College, Hartford, CT: January 31-March 31, 2000 (review venue); Kansas City Gallery of Art, University of Missouri, Kansas City, September 8-October 27, 2000; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, July 14-September 25, 2001; Lowe Art Center, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY: December 10-January 25, 2002 (pending funding).
Hollywood Icons, Local Demons: Ghanaian Popular Paintings by Mark Anthony. Michelle Gilbert. Hartford, CT. Trinity College, 2000.72 pp.     

Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900

Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900. Ruth B. Phillips. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998. 334 pp.     

North American Indian Jewelry and Adornment: From Prehistory to the Present

North American Indian Jewelry and Adornment: From Prehistory to the Present. Lois Sherr Dubin. New York: Harry N. Abrams. 1999 608 pp.     

A Green Pigment from North Dakota Burial Mounds

Abstract

A clayey, green pigment was found in association with human interments in 3 mounds at the Boundary Mound site (32S11) on the Missouri River 16 miles downstream from Fort Yates, North Dakota.

Samples submitted to the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. were identified by microscopic and chemical analysis as Greensand, a sedimentary deposit containing greenish grains of glauconite. The nearest present day exposure appears to be just south of Wessington Springs, in Jerauld County, South Dakota. This report is the first identifi - cation of greensand as a pigment mineral.     

Pomo Indian Basket Weavers. Their Baskets and the Art Market

Pomo Indian Basket Weavers. Their Baskets and the Art Market Grace Hudson Museum and Sun House, Ukiah, California, May through September 1998; National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., October 1998 through January 1999; National Museum of the American Indian, George Gustav Heye Center, New York, May 9through August 15, 1999 (review venue); University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, PA, October 1999 through September 2000.
Pomo Indian Basket Weavers. Their Baskets and the Art Market. Special issue of Expedition, The Magazine of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology 40(1), 1998.     

Coming to Light: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indians. 2000.; Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated.

Coming to Light: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indians. 2000. video by Anne Makepeace. 85 minutes (56-minute version also available). Co-produced by Anne Makepeace Productions, Inc. and ThirteenAVNET. For further information, contact Bullfrog Films, P.O. Box 149, Oley, PA 19547; 1-800-543-FROG (3764); info@bullfrogfilms.com.
Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated. Mick Gidley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 319 pp.     

Continuity and Change in Modern India

A Caste in a Changing World: The Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmans, 1700–1935 . Frank F. Conlon. Sponsored by the Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. xv + 255 pp. $15.00 (cloth).
Shanti Nagar: The Effects of Urbanization in a Village in North India. Vol. 1: Social Organization . Stanley A. Freed and Ruth S. Freed. Anthropological Papers, 53, Part 1. New York: The American Museum of Natural History, 1976. 254 pp. $13.85 (paper).
Family and Social Change in Modern India . Giri Raj Gupta , ed. Main Currents in Indian Sociology, 2. Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1976. xxxiv + 263 pp. n.p. (cloth).
Caste, Class and Democracy: Changes in a Stratification System . Vijai P. Singh. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1976. viii + 158 pp. $12.50 (cloth), $5.95 (paper).
Dimensions of Social Change in India . M. N. Srinivas, S. Seshaiah , and V. S. Parthasarathy , eds. New Delhi: Allied Publishers Private, 1977. xiii + 518 pp. Rs 60.00 (cloth).     

First Peoples, First Contacts: Tangible Records

First Peoples, First Contacts: Tangible Records. Chase Manhattan Gallery of North America and First Peoples, First Contacts, British Museum, London, permanent installation.
First Peoples, First Contacts: Native Peoples of North America. J. C. H. King. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.288 pp.     

The Walls Came Tumbling Up: The Production of Culture,Class and Native American Societies

In this paper, two historical moments in the continual formation of Native American societies are examined: the creation of distinct and bounded ‘Indian’ societies in the south‐eastern colonial United States, and the recent internal differentiation of the Lumbee Indian peoples in North Carolina. Four issues are at stake: the production of difference and inequality within and between Native American societies; the formation and transformation of ‘culture’ in this context; a re‐examination of the concept of class; and the simultaneous production of culture and class among indigenous peoples and perhaps more generally. This leads to a suggestion concerning the problem of hegemony in struggles over inequality.     

A comparison of energy flow among the grazing animals of different societies

Domestic cattle serve a variety of purposes in human society. In most cultures they are used primarily as a source of food: either meat, milk, or both. However, in some societies products such as blood and manure are important and elsewhere cattle are important draft animals or symbols of status and prosperity. Comparisons of energy flow in Indian, Ugandan, and North American cattle reveal how these different human strategies shape the energetics of cattle herds. Despite allegations to the contrary, Indian cattle appear to be rather productive when all consumable and nonconsumable products are considered. North American range cattle are considerably more productive than Ugandan cattle; however, the latter are efficient at maintaining high biomass. Other aspects of cattle energetics demonstrate the divergence in grazing strategies used by different peoples and the ecological efficiencies of these diverse strategies.     

Anterior femoral curvature: Its probable basis and utility as a criterion of racial assessment

Stewart ('62) and Walensky ('65) indicated that while the metrical expression of anterior femoral curvature alone will not always differentiate between Whites, American Negroes, and North American Indians, it was very useful as a racial criterion in combination with observed traits such as torsion, pilastry, and cross-sectional shape. Seven additional North American Indian groups reported here, representing both pre-Columbian and post-contact times, upheld the observation that anterior femoral curvature is a useful feature of racial assessment for Negroes, Whites and North American Indians. However, two South American groups studied (Ecuador and Peru) were only slightly more curved than American Negroes, and were less curved than Whites and North American Indians. The metrical expression of anterior femoral curvature therefore is not a useful feature of racial assessment for separating these two South American Indian groups from Whites and American Negroes. Femora of American Negro and White individuals with low ponderal indices were found to be less bowed than the norms for their race; individuals with high ponderal indices were more bowed than the norm for their race. The assumed genetic basis for expression of anterior femoral curvature suggested by Stewart ('62) and Walensky ('65) seems to be a feature of human plastic response to body weight rather than to temporal, clinal, postural or equestrian influences.     

Social Identity and Culture Change on the Southern Northwest Coast

Driven by the participation of Native American people in the contemporary political, cultural, and academic landscape of North America, public and academic discussions have considered the nature of contemporary American Indian identity and the persistence, survival, and (to some) reinvention of Native American cultures and traditions. I use a case study—the historical anthropology of the Native American people of the Oregon coast—to examine the persistence of many American Indian people through the colonial period and the subsequent revitalization of "traditional" cultural practices. Drawing on archaeological data, ethnohistorical accounts, and oral traditions, I offer a reading of how, set against and through an ancestral landscape, traditional social identities and relationships of gender and authority were constructed and contested. I then consider how American Indian people negotiated the new sets of social relationships dictated by the dominant society.     

Native American Tattoos: Identity and Spirituality in Contemporary America

Influences from counterculture movements and tattooing traditions from around the world have transformed the North American tattoo experience. Consultants' narratives reveal a desire to align with a primal human essence, seen as somehow lost through the process of civilization. Images are intentionally chosen to seek connection with people considered to embody a simpler, truer form of human life; what scholars routinely refer to as the “primitive,” or the Other. In the cases under consideration, an effort is made to connect to a particular so-called primitive, that is, the American Indian. Thus, the current renaissance of tattoo as fine art provides an occasion to reconsider American fascination with “playing Indian” and all things Indian.     

Peopling of the Americas: paleobiological evidence.

A subjective and bivariate analysis of 8500-10,000-year-old human fossil remains from North America substantiates that the fossils' closest affinities are with Asian populations. Within North American prehistoric Indian populations, increasing brachycephalization and the possible development of a larger, broader face are two structural trends that can be identified. In those respects where Paleo-Indian specimens differ from modern northern Asians and North American Indians, they tend to resemble southern Asian and European populations. These assessments generally support the inference that populations entered the New World relatively recently but before the modern northern Asian and North American features were fully developed. Based on the data examined, no date can be specified for time of entrance of the first populations, nor can the number of founding populations be discerned.     

Ethnic differences in mortality from acute rheumatic fever and chronic rheumatic heart disease in New Mexico, 1958-1982.

To examine time trends and differences in mortality rates from acute rheumatic fever and chronic rheumatic heart disease in New Mexico''s Hispanic, American Indian, and non-Hispanic white populations, we analyzed vital records data for 1958 through 1982. Age-adjusted mortality rates for acute rheumatic fever were low and showed no consistent temporal trends among the three ethnic groups over the study period. Age-adjusted and age-specific mortality rates for chronic rheumatic heart disease in Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites decreased over the 25-year period, although rates were higher among Hispanics than among non-Hispanics during most of the time period. In American Indians, age-adjusted mortality rates for chronic rheumatic heart disease increased between 1968 and 1977 to twice the non-Indian mortality rates during the same period. Despite this increase in mortality from chronic rheumatic heart disease among New Mexico''s American Indians from 1968 to 1977, the New Mexico data generally reflect national trends of decreasing mortality from chronic rheumatic heart disease.     

Nutrient intake and meal patterns of Micmac indian and Caucasian women in Shubenacadie,NS.

North American Indians have a higher morbidity from gallbladder disease, diabetes mellitus and obesity than other North Americans; this may result from their food intake. Nutrient intake and meal patterns were compared in 120 Micmac Indian and 115 Caucasian women in Shubenacadie, NS. Findings were compared with the Canadian Dietary Standard (CDS) and the Nutrition Canada national and Indian survey reports. The diet of Indian women had higher carbohydrate, lower protein and lower fibre content than that of Caucasian women, who derived a higher percentage of energy from protein and had a higher intake of vitamin A, niacin and ascorbic acid. Overnight fast was longer among Indian women. A high percentage of all women studied reported diets that did not reach the CDS for total energy intake in kilocalories or for calcium, iron, vitamin A, thiamin or riboflavin.     

Maxillary first premolar angular differences between North American Indians and non-North American Indians

A quantitative technique for obtaining angular data on human maxillary first premolar teeth is presented. Measurement indicates that North American Indian buccal cusps are either buccolingually compressed mesially, or expanded distally, or both, when compared with non-Indian teeth. Surprisingly, data on Chinese and Eskimo samples are similar to non-Indian teeth rather than Indian teeth. Similar techniques may be applied to the more complex multicusped molar teeth in order to extract quantitative data from them.