2 minutes of listening

Today in class we started off with a listening exercise with a partner (or two) and reported back.  I talked with Alex Sierra and we ended up both having similar feelings--why were we not taught this in school?  Why was this part of our history swept under the rug and not explained to us as youths?  Why is the oppression of the American Indians continuing even until this day?

This class utilizes one of the few things that gets me angry and involved--documentaries.  Documentaries move me more than any other display of new information or controversy or history.  There is something so much more real about personal accounts/experiences than reading some facts in a book or some story that I have to analyze later.  I learn more from these intimate encounters, watching someone's expressions while they tell their story.  The most recent documentary we watched was this Link.  This video talks about the Native American Holocaust, and it blew my mind.  Learning about this sent my mind into a frenzy--why had I not heard of this before?  Why did it seem as though Wounded Knee and the Trail of Tears were the only horrific things that happened to the Native Americans?  I thought back to my World History textbook in 9th grade and grasped for a memory of any of this and only could recall a page and a half regarding Chief Crazy Horse and Wounded Knee.  I still do not know much about the battle at Wounded Knee other than what I've seen in movies.  The Trail of Tears?  Described to me in school as just a big migration from ancestral lands to reservations.  I can't remember if anyone ever taught me about the hardships American Indians experienced on this "migration".

When I was a child, there were a few books I had called "If You Lived With The Sioux" and "If You Lived With The Cherokee".  The first was written by Ann Mcgovern and the second by Peter Roop.  The books gave me a basic overview of how these specific Indian nations lived and operated.  I've posted a picture of the front cover up above this section.  Anyone can buy these Scholastic books on Amazon for $6.99.  There is a three page Table of Contents section, telling the young reader that they are about to know about the Sioux's clothing, their lifestyle habits, their war habits, and finally what happened when "the white people came" and "a note from the author about the Sioux Indians today."  I don't have these books anymore, but I wonder if the author was honest.  I wonder if they are telling the truth in these books and not deceiving the youth of today and yesterday.

I found a blog on wordpress, here's a Link.  The particular article was written in 2008 and asks the question of where the Lakota Sioux are today.  The Sioux, as of 2008, are some of the poorest people in the United States, only 14% speak their original language, there is almost no work for adults, and the average Sioux man is twice as likely to end up in prison comparatively to a white man.  I can't remember what Ann Mcgovern's educational book on the Sioux said when I was a child, but I'm sure it did not tell half the truth about the actual conditions this particular nation of American Indians has been forced to live in.

Introducing Iktomi

I've only made it a few stories into the Iktomi section--the smart-ass spider man.  I'm not really sure what to think of him.  I feel like he solves a lot of his problems by killing dissenters, like Flint Boy and the Buffalo Chief whose wife he stole.  I'm not sure I like his way of handling things better than Coyote's.  Coyote didn't seem to be particularly violent--just tricky and deceiving.  Iktomi seems to be deceiving and with no scruples when it comes to killing people.  For instance, Flint Boy was a longtime friend of his, and he drowned him in the river.

Does anyone else feel a little weird about Iktomi?

Glen Cove

I typed in one of the tribe names into the Tumblr search engine, and this came up.  I thought this was interesting:

"Activists continue to defend the ancient indigenous burial ground at Glen Cove, south of Vallejo, California, against plans by the Greater Vallejo Recreation District (a local parks and recreation administration) to build a parking lot, restrooms, paved trail etc on the burial site. June 11th, 2011, marked the 59th day of protest at the site with over 250 people participating. Food for the protesters was brought in by a local Indian restaurant and by theSanta Barbara chapter of the American Indian Movement and the South Central Farmers. Indigenous groups with historical ties to the site include the Ohlone, Patwin (Wintun), Bay Miwok, Coast Miwok, Wappo, and Tule River Yokuts."

(Photo via Protect Glen Cove)

Reading While Sick

This week I was sick with the stomach flu--I will spare you the details.

Instead of wallowing around in pained self-pity, I sat down and read quite a few of these Trickster Tales.  Coyote and his antics kept me company while I felt incredibly under the weather.


I re-read several of the earliest Trickster Tales.  The one that I continued to like the best/find the most interesting was the Origin of the Sun and the Moon.  THe story seems to proceed with the same feel that the other tales do, with Coyote playing a trick and either getting away with it or suffering the consequences for it.  However, at the very end of the tale it takes a turn.  Two frogs wish to take two human men as their husbands.  They blind one man in one eye and the other has the frog stuck to his face.  Out of shame, both men decide they would prefer to be the sun and the moon.  The blinded man became the sun because "The sun, as we know, has only one eye (Erodes 11)."  To the right is a picture I found of the "Eye of the Sun" located in Monument Valley.  Here is a Link.  In relation to the frog sisters who wanted the two men for their husbands, here is a photo, and a link to that photo.

Since we had been talking a lot of about the etiological properties of myths for the past few classes, I thought that this particular story was appropriate.  The American Indians clarified that the eye of the sun is there because the man who is the sun is blind in his other eye, and the moon has dark spots because it is the frog sister on the other man.

We have always heard the phrase the "man in the moon" but I don't think I knew that there was a theoretical man in the sun until reading this story.  Also, the frogs seemed out of place in the story to me.  The transition was very poor and made it seem as though that bit of the story was just tacked on, perhaps as a later addition into the oral tradition.  When I read these stories I always wonder which parts were truly originally there and which ones were added as time passed by, as new people told the story, as new questions were asked of the storytellers.

Day Two

We finished all but 15 minutes of the documentary--class had let out and it's available to stream on Netflix. There were very compelling parts of the end.  The one that spoke most to me was about Chief Crazy Horse, Chief Thasunke Witko.  His name means that his horse is spirited, not crazy.  The Chief was an expert horseman whose horses all had spirit.  The narrator mentioned several times that most Native Americans do not even know how to ride a horse--something that cinema has made the Indians famous for.  There was a bit about a stuntman who specialized in horseback riding because he was sick and tired of seeing men dressed up like American Indians riding the horses in the movies.  He trains other young members of his tribe to ride so that in the future they can take his place.

We also read aloud as a class the Navajo Night Chant which takes the reader on a journey through the surroundings of the Navajo and helps him recognize the beauty there is to be had and shared in the world.  The sort of chorus begins with "With beauty before me, may I walk" and that sentiment echoes throughout the piece while the words flow with their natural rhythm.

First Day of Class

This Blog was created specifically to track my ideas through my American Indian Literature class at UNC-Asheville this Spring Semester of 2012.

The first day of class we watched part of a documentary about the American Indian portrayed in Hollywood Cinema.  I feel like the most effective part of the documentary, the portion that I saw, was how the interviewees were Native American themselves.  It was refreshing to hear their point of view on the subject of films starring Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson.  I specifically remember the reaction to how the plains indians were portrayed--with headdresses and headbands, war paint.  Plains indians didn't even wear headbands.  The interviewee at the time said something along the lines of "It's like Hollywood took the identity of several tribes and just made them into one thing: Indian."