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“Whitman’s Song Sung the Navajo Way”
Get PDF“Whitman’s Song Sung the Navajo Way”Kenneth RoemerUniversity of Texas at Arlington One of the most important contributions of Native American and Indigenous studies had been the movement away from heavy or even total dependence upon non-Native theoretical and critical interpretive lenses and a move toward using indigenous aesthetics and worldviews to interpret Native texts. There has been less interest in using Native interpretive perspectives to interpret non-Native texts. That’s unfortunate. This reorientation of the critical lens can, not only offer “new” and insightful readings of Euro-American texts, it also highlights the importance of American Indian interpretive strategies. In this paper I will offer a case study: what happens when we read Whitman’s “Song of Myself” though the lens of the aesthetics, functions, and worldview of an English translation of the Navajo Nightway? One result is obvious: many of the poetic devices in “Song” that are typically labeled innovative, liberating, and even revolutionary -- for instance, his uses of repetition with variation and parallelism and his creation of a persona whose identity transcends its individual corporality and selfhood – were performed by the Diné hundreds of years before the publication of Whitman’s poem. Fundamental concepts of function and audiences are also transformed. The Navajo medicine’s person use of linguistic forms that have parallels in Whitman’s poetry are aimed at creating hózhó (order, balance, and harmony) in a chaotic world for specific patient(s) and for the community of humans, non-human animals, and the physical environment. This expansiveness can make Whitman’s enlarged persona seem limited to those relatively select individuals seeking to break out of what they perceive as static lives. Finally the concepts of word power intrinsic to the Nightway –the literal believe that the words, if done correctly, can create hózhó, or can create imbalance, even live-threatening illness, if performed incorrectly – these concepts, by comparison, can make Whitman’s powerful words appear more limited to the spheres of transformed perceptions of self and the act of reading.
Frederick Weygold: Artist and Ethnographer of North American Indians (eds Christian F. Feest and Charles Ronald Corum)
No full textFrederick Weygold: Artist and Ethnographer of North American Indians is a biography edited by Christian F. Feest and Charles Ronald Corum. The book follows Weygold’s life chronologically, from his birth in 1870 in St. Charles, Missouri, USA, through his various travels and career paths, until his death in 1941 in Louisville, Kentucky. It is full of detailed biographical anecdotes and high-quality pictures and photographs. Despite questionable oversights concerning the socio-historical contexts of Native American history and policy, it is also likely to please early ethnography enthusiasts, and admirers of Plain Indians’ visual arts
Doing Research in the Real World
Get PDFDavid E. Gray has produced a 4th edition of his successful textbook Doing Research in the Real World. This useful handbook for social science researchers includes the addition of entirely new chapters on Visual Research Methods, Digital Research Methods and Getting Started Using NVIVO, along with other chapters updated to reflect developments in digital research tools. This has been done whilst also retaining a comprehensive overview of research methods in the social sciences. The purpose of this book remains to assist researchers and their supervisors in navigating the complex decisions involved in the design and execution of research projects and does this in a clear and approachable way
Policing Resource Extraction and Human Rights in The Land of the Dead
Get PDFA Red Reading of George Romero's 2005 zombie film, Land of the Dead
WHAT MA LACH’S BONES TELL US: Performances of Relational Materiality In Response to Genocide
Get PDFDrawing from Freya Mathews and Mario Blaser’s critiques of genocide, modernity, and coloniality, in addition to the unpublished writings of Raphaël Lemkin on colonialism, this study interrogates three ontological tenets associated with genocidal coloniality: that some persons are things, that matter is inert, and that some humans are autonomous of an ecological matrix. The author examines these tenets through the lens of Guatemala’s recent counter-insurgency war (1960—1996), focusing on the genocide against Ixil Maya communities during the height of the war (approximately 1979-1985). The author draws from work on collective art-based projects in Nab’aa’, Guatemala to examine how embodied performances of the inextricable relational ties between human and other-than-human persons and entities in an agentive and person-filled material world posed insistent challenges to genocidal coloniality’s three tenets. Three moments of performance, ranging from the quotidian to the ceremonial to the experimental, are highlighted: performing name exchange with a wild edible plant important to survival during wartime famine; performing chaj (ceremony) to address collective trauma from the 1982 mass killing at Xoloche’; and, finally, performing experimental theater in collaboration with Mexican artist, Violeta Luna, and Ixil performance ensemble, Teatro Tichiil. The author reflects on two terms prevalent in Mayan languages—kamawil, or living object, and kab’awil, “double gaze” (Adrián Inés Chávez in Chacón)—to explore the potential of Mayan ontologies of materiality and personhood to counter the colonial project’s construal of (some) persons as bodies only, to be used and disposed of as objects, in a world of inert matter. The author concludes by noting that this centering of persons (human and other) as relational beings underscores the ontological workings of what Gerald Vizenor termed “survivance,” understanding it to be an active resistance to the three tenets of coloniality through the embodied and storied insistence on complex relational personhood and the continued enactment of “transmotion” as inextricable relationality within a living and agentive material world
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