Summer 2013

Spring classes have ended, exams & papers graded, and all final course grades submitted to the registrar...time to enjoy the sun, get the veggie garden started, mow the grass, read as many books as possible and get busy with research!
All of this actually began several weeks ago as the weather improved and other projects were moving along; I submitted a paper on using postcards as a teaching tool to a new on-line open source journal for consideration and am keeping my fingers crossed. I have also made some nice progress on a review of an unpublished Kiowa winter count (a historical account from the years 1860-1904 using pictures to recall important events) and hope to finish my assessment in a few weeks although some of the images will remain a mystery to me.

I have several articles in varying stages of completion and plan to work on those over the summer as well. One possibility will be an overview of my Kiowa & Comanche postcard collection which continues to grow very nicely (today I received 2 Comanche infant cards printed around 1910; other recent Ebay wins include 2 cards showing a Kiowa encampment at Craterville, OK from the 1920s or 1930s; and 4 from Indian City located in Anadarko,OK  taken in the 1960s).

A very exciting new project possibility draws upon a question that has developed from my calendar analysis. One scene illustrates the death of a leading tribal member, possibly identified by the painted tipi behind him.

In 1904 James Mooney asked Kiowa artists to draw many of the old painted tipis; this work was followed up by several other researchers but none have explore the Apache images. Mooney identifies this particular tipi's owner and now I want to explore all the materials archived at the Natl. Anthropological Archives, a storage facility for the Smithsonian. I hope to go for a quick visit at the end of May. It would be a great chance to collect a little information, say hello to Dr David Hunt who will help me with another Smithsonian project, see the new exhibit of Native American dolls at the Natl. Museum of the American Indian and also visit my uncle's grave at Arlington Natl. Cemetery (its been almost 10 years since I have visited).

Next week I will celebrate my Summer Fellowship with other recipients at a nice dinner sponsored by the University's Chancellor. Its always great to hear what my colleagues are working on!

for the love of books....

its no no secret that academics love to read and value their books...they are the tools of our trade and the end product of our own research! Last summer I read more books than I had in years; some provided background for my research projects and others were read because I wanted to know more about Guatemalan jade, Spanish expeditions into the new world, the lost colony of Roanoke, missing treasure in Peru....I have more books needing to be finished and started, many newly acquired: the return of a sacred object to the Omaha people, how a major fire in the west contributed to the creation of the US Forest Service, importation of European food plants into the southwest, and more.

Some books are so special that they deserve a small gift, typically a nice bookmark. Of course anything can be a bookmark: a scrap of paper, an old postcard, a bit of ribbon, even a bookmark bought in a stationary store with a tassel on top. If asked, members of my international postcard exchange group will sometimes send a bookmark from their country. I even found a few nice bookmarks celebrating the art work of the Kiowa 5 (printed by Pomegranate).  But my new fascination is silver & turquoise bookmarks made by Navajo artists.

Perhaps early Navajo bookmarks can be associated with the Fred Harvey Company; Harvey began to operate tourist businesses in the SW, bringing customers to his hotels and gift shops where visitors could see Native artists at work and purchase their creations. This influenced the type of goods being made and likely encouraged the production of small, inexpensive bookmarks.
Most of them are decorated with stamps, a process that carried over from Spanish and Mexican leather stamping. The smaller clip seems to be the older style. They are readily available new and used, on Ebay as well as in shops that sell SW native made art. Prices generally range $25-100 depending on the maker's name, about the price of a small ring or earrings, so its an affordable hobby and a nice gift for my favorite books. I hope to win another Ebay listing this week so my small collection grows which is good as I have lots of books waiting for their gift!

Summer plans

Spring semester ends early this year; finals are the 1st week of May and after all the exams and papers are graded I will turn my attention to a variety of research projects and paper drafts. My main focus will be to complete the five papers that are in various stages of development and get them out to journals for consideration.

My first paper will likely be the discussion of how I use postcards in the classroom. A well known journal offers a section for teaching strategies & their assessment; these articles are usually short at 10-15 pages and my draft is almost complete, just waiting for final thoughts on this semester's student projects which seem to be going very well. Another paper will be a broad overview of my biography book manuscript; I can develop this by sampling some of the writing already completed. I want to introduce the work to a possible audience and demonstrate to a press that this would be a worthy manuscript for consideration. I will also finally write up my KCA postcard analysis; the collection has grown quite a bit over the years and offers several interesting possibilities, but I think an overview will be the best place to start. The preferred journal has noted they are hungry for paper submissions, but their publication tends to run a year or two behind schedule which concerns me a bit. Another possible paper is my recent conference presentation of Native American Women in Coloring Books which may be of interest to a woman's journal. A final paper which examines the life of a Kiowa man needs much more data collected in both Oklahoma and Maine but a summer trip to Old Town, ME sounds very nice!

My book manuscript still needs work on 3 chapters to be nearly complete. This will take some time and will likely be placed on the back burner. Manuscript completion and the time needed for submission & review by a press will place the project outside of my tenure vote deadline. However the project will be completed and used for later promotion. It has already spun off several other research topic possibilities including the new Smithsonian project which has been funded by my University with a Summer Fellowship and travel money. I'm excited to see how this will develop and know it can produce lots of materials for conference papers and journal articles.

It will be a super busy summer but I am looking forward to the work as well as hot weather and plenty of sunshine. I accomplished so much last summer and am eager to get started again!!

Introducing the world via postcards

I have collected postcards for many years; loved to get them as a kid and I still mail them to friends whenever I travel. But its an old fashion method of communication in this age of Facebook, Instagram, and email. Happily lots of us still enjoy sending & receiving them!! I belong to an international exchange group called Postcrossing and trade cards all over the world, plus get surprises sent to my unsuspecting friends (all these Year of the Dragon cards were sent to a friend who had a baby, both mom & daughter were born in dragon years). I decided to introduce this idea to my students and have offered extra credit to anyone who buys & mails a card overseas (and receives one in return). So far 16 students have signed on to the project and some of the cards are already in the post. Later they will read some academic articles about how cultures are represented on postcards and write an essay paper (plus I will give them a card of their choice from the hundreds I have acquired in trade...just something to help them remember our class and maybe to dream about future global travel). I am slowly writing a possible journal article on how to use postcards as an educational tool; plan to finish soon.

National Science Foundation

I will be attending a NSF grant writing workshop next week at IUPUI in Indianapolis and am excited. Its always nice to have some professional development and I'm hoping to find more funding for my upcoming Smithsonian research project!

Because the seminar begins at 7:30am Monday morning I have decided to drive down on Sunday and stay overnight. On Sunday afternoon I will visit the well known Eiteljorg Museum for the 1st time; they have an excellent Native American collection and I recently met Katrina Mitten, a Miami bead artist who has some items on display in the galleries. Plus I always poke around museum gift shops for books, postcards, bookmarks etc. and look forward to finding something to add to my postcard collection. After reading so many books last summer I have also become fond of special bookmarks and recently bought 2 from Pomegranate including one by Jack Hokeah, a Kiowa 5 artist (along with a nice set of note cards illustrating Native American saddles & horse trappings). I think my books will enjoy having some special attention!!

Coloring inside of the lines...

Am working on my upcoming conference paper that examines how Native American women & girls are presented in children's coloring books. I have collected 55 books published from the 1930s into the 2000s offering 1055 pages of human activity to consider; a few statistics have been gathered...images of men & boys make up 60% of the scenes, women & girls are 21% and mixed gender scenes appear 19% of the time. These numbers are generally consistent over time, but books published in the 1990s & 2000s indicate some shifts, with female inclusion increasing (up to 26%) and male only images decreasing (down to 53%).

When women are featured they are busy with food activities; there are only 12 scenes of gardening, but 20 gathering plants, and 40 preparing meals. Oddly there were only 2 scenes showing women participating in hunting (these from a modern book on life in the arctic).

Curiously there were only 6 images of hide processing....clearly under represented for people who used hides for clothing, bedding, containers, and housing! However women & girls were seen busy making non-leather crafts; there are 16 scenes of weaving textiles, 14 making pottery and 17 creating baskets. As a bead worker I was sad to find only one image of a women beading. Interestingly there were just 4 images of sewing clothes.....I suppose all those leather moccasins were left by helpful fairies late at night.

Women set up their homes 7 times, yet traveled in 23 scenes. So who disassembled and reconstructed all those tipis, bark sheet and reed mat wickiups? Perhaps the child artist who consumed these books didn't ask such awkward questions. Young native girls were usually featured playing; exploring the woods with their brother; and feeding small animals alone. Strangely girls were never depicted playing with other girls or spending time with grandparents.


There were 87 portraits that included women & girls; essentially these are non-action scenes with natives facing the audience almost as if they were waiting for a photograph to be made. Presumably these images showed child artists what native people looked like: clothing, jewelry, hairstyle etc. Some were portraits of individual women, but most offered a man & woman pair (and oddly there were just 13 family portraits). Like historic photographs, these illustrations included props; women were shown holding a basket 9 times, pottery in 3, and a baby (usually in a cradle) in 15 examples.

There were also 57 village or household scenes featuring several people doing different activities. Men were usually in the foreground while women occupied the back, smaller in scale and with activities shown in considerably less detail. Erving Goffman knew what he was talking about! So we can generally conclude that native people lived in the past; women are less visible & important to the story than men; women spend the majority of their day performing domestic labor; native people are often on the move; and indigenous women make decorative crafts that are of the type sold to tourists.

The one real surprise involves ceremonial activities such as dancing. I found 30 scenes of ceremonial life that included images of women; in 4 examples women were background figures, observing the action, while a surprising 26 examples offered women as participants! The inclusion of women in this vital aspect of native life was quite remarkable.

more analysis and conclusions are in process....

Anth 495

Occasionally a student at my university will ask for additional time or attention to work on an independent project that isn't covered by their coursework. I don't do these often as few of our students are self-directed, but one student who plans to go to graduate school is working on other complex projects. She is currently working as an intern at the Field Museum in Chicago reassembling Native American skeletons for return to the tribes under NAGPRA, federal legislation that repatriates human remains and objects of religious & cultural importance. Like most large facilities, the Field has many such remains in their collection and sadly they are poorly documented, making reconstruction tasks quite difficult. Fortunately the Field has a good working relationship with Native communities and it is slowly returning many loved ones.

Currently my student works in a lab and doesn't benefit from learning other NAGPRA activities, but she is interested in seeing the other side of the coin: the process by which tribal groups reacquire these materials. So I will help her develop a research project to learn more about the culture and politics of this very important task. Its essential for students to see the complexities of culture as practiced; Native politics can be difficult and decision making in any community is rarely ever simple and orderly. Additionally, she hopes to compare smaller native communities with larger, more politically organized ones to see some of the variations in the return process.

This will be a good project and could lead to a publication or conference presentation if she chooses to follow it through. The literature doesn't seem to reflect the Native perspective on this matter and this could be a nice examination of an important issue!

More social networking!

A friend who is in grad school recommended a new site to me: Academia.edu so I created an account. She has never used Facebook and this site is geared towards professional connections rather than social ones. I loaded up some published papers and conference presentation power points....I added a few friend's accounts to follow so I can keep up with them professionally. Not sure if the site gets much traffic or if anyone will look over my profile but I may connect with other scholars and that's always nice!!

I need to work on my next conference paper and get all my reservations made quickly. I have other projects waiting to begin so it will be a fulfilling spring & summer.

2013

My blogs have been quietly ignored for several months...had a good fall semester with 2 sections of Introduction and a Native American survey class. The Intros went well, I had fun teaching them and most students seemed interested in the materials. The Native class passed too quickly as it always does and I have received permission from my Department Chair to split it into 2 courses next time (Native people east of the Mississippi River in one class and west of the river in a follow up course), giving us time to explore more topics in greater detail.

The fall enrollments were quite large so I was busy grading so many papers, placing my own work on hold temporarily. I did however apply for a summer faculty fellowship and a research grant to continue working on my book manuscript, articles and to start a new project at the Smithsonian Museum. I'm very excited about this work; will be the first scholar to work with an interesting (and large) collection of objects made in the early 1900s, displayed briefly and then placed into storage. The collection manager was very open to my project idea; it will be quite interesting but will be a long term task which I hadn't really anticipated. I will attend a National Science Foundation grant writing introductory session in Feb; I feel that this project would be a good topic for one of their grants and we also hope to tap into some internal Smithsonian funds along the way (perhaps from the Repatriation Office).

Over the holiday break I worked on home renovations, including stripping many layers of wallpaper from my dining room and assembling bookshelves. Happily my Native American books are now out of boxes and available for reference! There is more work to be done on the other walls in the room but at least the bookshelves went up before the break ended!

Spring semester begins tomorrow; I have the exact same class schedule so it will be comfortable. Will make some adjustments to the readings and assignments; with lower enrollments I won't be so overwhelmed with grading!! Need to work on a new research paper "Sacajawea, Pocahontas and Precious Moments (with crayons)" for a Feb conference...the work explores how native women and girls have been presented in children's coloring books over time. I bought a few more books on Ebay over the break to add to my collection. Hopefully I can get some work done on other projects during the spring and be ready for full time research & writing as soon as the summer begins!

Roanoke

just finished a good book exploring the early English colony that was landed at Roanoke Island along the Carolina coast in 1587, 20 years before Jamestown & Pocahontas. The colony was "lost" when its leader returned from England after 5 years to find no one around (including his grand daughter, the first person of English blood to be born in "America") and some odd marks carved in the trees.Like most Americans this was really all I knew about the story. I didn't even know the leader was the famous artist John White, who painted the images (seen on the book cover) that I use in my class power points!

This book, written by an anthropologist who worked on the 500 Nations documentary series, offers a broader understanding. She spends alot of time (too much maybe) discussing the political situation in England (the colonists may have been unwanted religious separatists; they were supported by Sir Walter Raleigh who fell out of royal favor and his enemies wanted the colony to fail to embarrass him; the English wanted to launch raids on Spanish ships from coastal hiding places so kept their location a state secret etc). But the author does provide some very interesting information on coastal and piedmont native groups and how they may have been part of the story. I knew the area had been densely populated before European arrival and that most were small tribal groups who allied with others for trade & defense. They regularly fought one another to control resources, trade and slaves. After contact, massive epidemics completely disrupted all of this: some tribes disappeared, others became vulnerable and merged, while others survived and became powerful (until they were crushed by the English & later Americans). The author suggests the colonists were unable to survive on the island and moved into the interior, but their native hosts were later over powered by other tribes, and the remaining colonists became slaves working in copper mines. Subsequent English expeditions heard bits & pieces of the story but were unable to penetrate inland and eventually gave up the search. Because so very little was learned from these interior groups before they too disappeared (I had never heard any of their tribal names before) the story eventually fades away.

But I am intrigued by the Great Trading Path that ran through the mountains connecting copper from the interior with salt & pearls from the coast. All of these were seen in post-Missippian era communities, as recorded by DeSoto's men who marched thru the area in 1540 (bringing the first wave of epidemics that decimated southeastern native populations).This was a good book, easy to read (put together like a detective murder mystery rather than an ethnohistorical approach that I would have preferred), and I learned some intriguing new things. I spent a big part of the summer reading on my deck in the sunshine and have really improved my own understandings of the native experience!!