Over the past year, we’ve become increasingly aware of an impressive community of Indigenous scholars and cultural critics producing blogs and podcasts that provide intelligent insight and critique of contemporary issues and popular culture. Here are five that we think you should follow:

American Indians in Children’s Literature
Debbie Reese takes a critical approach to evaluating representations of American Indians in children’s literature, literary works, and popular culture. In addition to shedding light on stereotypes and misrepresentations, Reese also recommends books by and about Native Americans for young readers. Reese says this about the motivation to maintain the site and educate her readers: “The content of the website is designed to help people develop a critical stance when evaluating American Indians in children’s books. This means recognizing negative and positive stereotypes, both of which stand in the way of seeing and accepting American Indians as people of the present day.”

Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond
J. Kehualani Kauanui’s weekly podcast addresses some of the most pertinent issues facing Indigenous peoples today. Her guests include many well-respected academics, community representatives, activists, and officials from around the world. Kauanui’s incisive questions and keen ability to tease out the nuances of global Indigenous issues, make complex issues accessible to listeners from diverse backgrounds.

Media Indigena
The seven contributors to the Media Indigena blog clearly have their fingers on the pulse of Indigenous news, politics, and popular culture. The contributors come from backgrounds in journalism, academia, policy, and beyond. They report on and analyze news, politics, arts and culture, business and economics through writing and other media, including frequent guest spots on The Word (another daily Native talk show we recommend checking out). They strive to create online community and dialogue, as they explain on their website: “We are more than mere aggregators: along with adding value and vigour to mainstream debates and discussions about Indigenous issues, we spark and spur conversations of our own. In other words, we are both curators and creators.”

Native America Calling
This show has been on air for over a decade and we think it’s worth a mention here because of the host’s impressive ability to inspire conversation and critical thinking on a wide variety of issues. From a book of the month feature to shows ranging in theme from the future of American Identity to policing authenticity of Native Arts crafts, the shows are both edgy and relevant. They’re presented in an open format that welcomes callers from around the country to join in the conversation. The show airs every weekday online and on various FM and AM stations. Archives of previous shows can be found here.

Native Appropriations
We can’t get enough of this blog and the author, Adrienne K.’s, witty critiques of representations of American Indians in popular culture. Though some of the images she shares may seem absurd (everything from the hipster headdress craze to caricatures of Indians on home products), this blogger articulately sheds light on the deeper messages being conveyed by these images and the deleterious effects they can have on Native peoples and how they are perceived.

Know of other blogs or podcasts we should tune into? Please share them with us!

Anetso, a centuries-old Cherokee ball game still played today, is a vigorous, sometimes violent activity that rewards speed, strength, and agility. At the same time, it is the focus of several linked ritual activities. Is it a sport? Is it a religious ritual? Could it be both? Today on our blog Michael J. Zogry, author of Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game: At the Center of Ceremony and Identity (University of North Carolina Press), describes the junctures between ritual, sport, and identity:

How the Cherokee Ball Game Confounds the Sport vs. Ritual Dichotomy

By Michael J. Zogry

In daily life people often speak of sports as being “like” religion, and certain people avow that a particular sport is their religion. Other opinions of sport recognize ceremonial, perhaps even religious behaviors on the part of individuals participating in or attending sporting events, but stop short of labeling them as religions. As a scholar in the academic study of religions, I have long been interested in this phenomenon. For many years, the prevailing scholarly standpoint seemed to be that games, including the subset of sport, were not religious activities, no matter how closely they seemed to resemble them. I began to investigate why it is that standard European-American conceptions of religion did not include athletic activities, and searched for the answer to this question: Can a game be a ritual? The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss had argued no in the 1960s, and I was surprised that many contemporary scholars relied upon his work to conclude the same. But I was not convinced by his argument, so I set out to determine an answer for myself; this was the genesis of my book about anetso, the Cherokee ball game.

A few weeks ago this blog hosted several links to stories about the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team. This single-racket and ball activity is deeply rooted in the cultures of the member Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee confederacy, as it is in the cultures of neighbor nations such as the Huron and Passamaquody. These racket games generally are regarded to be precursors to the sport of field lacrosse, the rules of which were codified in 1867. By then the indigenous games in this geographical region were well-established; the Jesuit father Jéan de Brebeuf, stationed in what was then New France, had written about the Huron game in 1636.

In fact, racket and ball games have a long history among First Nations who once or still hold lands along the eastern seaboard of North America, throughout the interior of the what is now the southeastern United States,  in the Great Lakes region and immediately westward, not to mention in certain areas of present-day California, Mexico, and the Pacific Northwest.  In the land area that is now the southeastern United States the double-racket and ball game has been most prevalent, among nations such as the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Yuchi, Seminole and member nations of the Muskogee (Creek) Confederacy.

Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, certain members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Nation have continued a centuries-long practice by engaging in a:ne:tso (anetso), what has, in English parlance, come to be called the “Cherokee ball game.”  Noted as early as 1714 in non-Cherokee written accounts, missionaries, ethnographers and other itinerant travelers have described and discussed anetso regularly for almost three centuries.

Furthermore, Cherokee cultural narratives (“myths”; I choose not to use this term because it implies the story is false) record games that were played by “other-than-human persons” even before humans inhabited the earth. In the foundational cultural narrative of Kanati and Selu, the first Cherokee man and woman, the phrase “to play ball against” is used as a figure of speech. This narrative is analogous to the Hebrew Bible story of Adam and Eve, and other narratives in which individuals play anetso are of the same significance as those contained in other texts considered to be key components of particular religious systems.

Ostensibly an athletic contest that at one time pitted teams from the local community against one another in a regular seasonal schedule of games, it is a vigorous, sometimes violent activity that rewards speed, strength, and agility. However, interpreted as “game” within a broader framing of “religion,” anetso simultaneously resists and problematizes such classifications. Anetso, as an event, is itself the focus and hub of a “ceremonial complex” (or cycle), an extended series of activities that historically has featured virtually every activity that Cherokee people and non-Cherokee observers have identified as elemental of Cherokee “religion” or “ritual.”

Considered as a unit, the anetso ceremonial complex incorporates a variety of activities that complicate standard scholarly distinctions such as ritual vs. game, public display vs. private performance and tradition vs. innovation. Over centuries the ceremonial complex has undergone alteration, yet a ritual history of anetso reveals that the activity itself as well as several of the constituent activities of the complex have shown remarkable persistence, disputing the trajectory of decline and degeneration plotted even in the recent past by many scholars of First Nations’ cultures. For centuries anetso also has been a staple of public performances for the benefit of visitors.

At the present time, typically two or three games of anetso are played once a year during the Cherokee Fall Fair, attended by Cherokee people from the local area and a number of tourists. As such it can be interpreted as a marker of cultural identity that Cherokee people perform or self-present to a diverse crowd of spectators, both community members as well as other onlookers. For certain participants and observers alike anetso has remained vital as a series of practices as well as a symbolic link to a shared history, a distinctly emic vehicle of cultural identity and sometimes even a packaged response to the objectifications of tourists, academic and otherwise.

—

Michael J. Zogry is an associate professor of religious studies at University of Kansas. His new book Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game: At the Center of Ceremony and Identity, is now available from University of North Carolina Press. This year, the Cherokee Fall Fair will be October 5-9 at the Cherokee Indian Fair Grounds in Cherokee, North Carolina.

In the introduction to her book, Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita, Jennifer Nez Denetdale speaks of traveling to the Southwest Museum in Pasadena, California to view photographs of her great-great-great grandmother, Juanita, as well as her woven dress or biil, in Navajo. The dress, which had been a treasured possession of Juanita’s, had been appropriated by George Wharton James in 1902. Now, the dress has been returned to the Navajo tribe and will be on display in the Navajo Nation Museum through an exhibit curated by Denetdale. Below Denetdale describes the emotions and significance of bringing the dress back to its rightful home.

Bringing Juanita’s Dress Home
By Jennifer Nez Denetdale

Yesterday morning I drove over to Window Rock with my family who live in Tohatchi, New Mexico, our home community. The Diné cultural advisor Robert Johnson had driven all the way to Pasadena, California, in a tribal vehicle that meets specifications for bringing my great-great-great-grandmother’s dress and textile–a saddle blanket–from the Autry National Center. With him is conservator Angie McGrew who is at the Southwest Museum, now a part of the Autry. Angie traveled with the dress and textile to assist with proper display.  My son, mom, sister and I arrived at the Navajo Nation Museum where we found the  museum curator Clarenda Begay and Angie already at work in the gallery. For a couple of weeks, Robby, who has worked for the Museum for ten years, has been busy painting the walls red, a nice contrast with a certain hue of blue, sort of between blue and turquoise.

The dress woven and worn by Juanita will be displayed at the Navajo Nation Museum.

Early in 2010, director of the Navajo Nation Museum, Manuelito Wheeler, invited me to be guest curator for a show on Manuelito and other Diné leaders. He had read my book and, along with other museum staff, was supportive of my research. This show marks my first experience as a curator, although I had served as a consultant for several museums over the years. Yesterday we gave interviews to local radio stations, in both Navajo and English. My cousin, who is president of Tohatchi Chapter, has always been enthusiastic about my work and he readily agreed to be a speaker at the exhibit opening and also to provide interviews for broadcasting. He is very proud to be a descendant of Manuelito and Juanita. Back in the museum, I showed him the two boxes which held the two precious items. Like the rest of us were, he was tearful. We thought of our grandmother and my mom said, “She is here and smiling at us.”  Finally, in the gallery, with the displays ready for the two items, we watched as Clarenda and Angie open the boxes.

Juanita in 1902. Photo by George Wharton James.

In 1997 I had traveled to Pasadena to visit the dress and the textile. I had spent several hours sitting near them, gently touching them, looking at the dress and its careful mending. More than ten years later, I was given the opportunity to see treasures that my great-great-great-grandmother had valued. The Indian artifacts collector George Wharton James who met my grandmother says that she prized the dress and kept it carefully stored away and only after some coaxing, she had allowed him to carry it away. The dress is a rare one, dated between 1868 and 1874, it shows much wear, with patching on the backside. We marveled at the dress and our eyes teared as we imagined our grandmother’s life. Where and when had she worn the dress? Our grandmother had lived through one of the most traumatic times in our history and the dress had seen the hardship. It had traveled so far and now it returned home, after more than one hundred years.

By yesterday afternoon, we had all contacted many Diné, including the descendants of Manuelito and Juanita, to invite them to the exhibition opening. One of the assistants watches as we hover over the dress and remarks, “It’s going to get pretty emotional in here tomorrow evening.” The Diné get emotional whenever we think of what our ancestors have endured in the nineteenth century. We marvel at their endurance and their determination to live in the Diné way. Friday evening we will once again take some time to remember our ancestors who had a vision for the future, for they thought of us.

The exhibit on Manuelito & Diné leaders opens Friday, August 27th at the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, Arizona with a reception from 5 to 7 PM. The exhibit will run through February 2011. Jennifer Nez Denetdale is a professor of history at the University of New Mexico.

Navajo Nation Museum and Library

Luisa Cadena and some of her grandchildren with Janis B. Nuckolls and her children in Ecuador.

Anthropological linguist Janis B. Nuckolls has many years of field experience, primarily in Amazonian Ecuador. In her new book Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman: Ideaphony, Dialogue, and Perspective, Nuckolls shows through the words of a Quechua-speaking woman named Luisa Cadena a complex language system where language is the core of cultural and grammatical communications. Her new book will be available soon from the University of Arizona Press and is a proud part of the First Peoples publishing initiative. She answers our question about her research:

How did you first meet Luisa Cadena?
I was waiting for a plane ride out of the remote military base, Montalvo, which is the nearest to my field site of Puka Yaku. It was very hot and dusty, and and the wait was quite long. It was looking like it was going to be an all-day experience, in fact. Luisa was waiting as well, and she was enjoying herself immensely, conversing with the other passengers. I noticed right away that she had a very charismatic presence that people responded to and I thought I would be so lucky to be able to get to know someone like her who obviously loved language, and loved to recount her experiences. Once we landed in Shell, I made a point of noticing where she was going, and we talked about meeting again. The next day I went to visit her in her rented house in Puyo, just off the main road. I told her I was still struggling with many questions about the Quichua language, and asked if she would be able to help me. She was quite happy to be asked, and we worked almost every day during the next 5 months, going over all of my field notes and queries, after which time, I left Ecuador to write my dissertation.

What is the significance of the title “Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman?” Why the word “strongwoman”?

The word ‘sindzhi’ in Quichua means strong, and is used a lot both to compliment others for their strength, as well as to make claims about one’s own strength. For Luisa, strength is a kind of attitude that she assumes for herself, almost all of the time. She is always dealing with some problem or other. I have spent hundreds of hours in conversation with her, and have heard countless stories and anecdotes from her experiences. I could probably count on one hand, the number of times she has seemed overwhelmed by her problems. Most of the time, she presents herself as undaunted, in charge of, and fully engaged in, any difficulty that life sends her way.

I structured the book as a series of ‘lessons’ because each chapter presents important theoretically interesting points about ideophony, dialogue and/or perspective in Quichua linguistic culture.

What is an ideophone?

An ideophone is a word, and in Quechua it is usually an adverb, that communicates imitatively about vivid perceptions. The sound qualities of ideophones often get embellished with intonational and/or gestural emphasis by speakers. Onomatopoeic words in English are a type of ideophone — words like ‘bling bling’, ‘woof woof’, or ‘ka-ching’. In English, ideophones tend to be used in written form, such as in comic books, where action words like ‘thwack’ may take up an entire visual frame, and the reader just knows that some kind of forceful impact has taken place. You can easily find ideophones in picture books for children as well, especially in the ones for preliterate children. In Quechua, though, ideophones are used by adult speakers in everyday spoken language as well as in their narratives. They are considered an artful form of language for adults, and are not usually heard when adults talk to little children.

You have observed that Runa conceptions of nature are voiced with habits of speaking that are endangered because they are steeped in a worldview that is increasingly marginalized. What do you mean?
I mean that traditional Runa habits of speaking often involve close observations of nature, which become irrelevant or at least, much less important, when people become involved with formalized knowledge systems that are conveyed within institutional settings. I have observed many Runa with varying experiences and in a wide range of ages. Many are becoming less interested in subsistence ways of life and want to be engaged in the market economy. These people find Spanish to be more useful and relevant to their activities than Quichua.

Indigenous political movements, particularly in Ecuador and Brazil, have gained momentum in the last two decades, and you write that it is critical to bring voices that are always at the front lines of that public discourse together with those voices that never have the opportunity to be heard. What do you mean?
Thanks for asking. This is a very important point that needs to be appreciated by readers. In Ecuador, the kind of people who have official roles involving advocacy on behalf of indigenous people, often create the impression that they are authorized to speak on everyone’s behalf. This perception masks a very complex reality. Many indigenous leaders have acquired university educations and have travelled to Europe, the US, and elsewhere. They represent, what I would consider to be a kind of privileged sector of indigenous-ness, because they are learning how to gain access to resources, whether economic, political, or educational, that not everyone has been able to gain access to. These are the people who are ‘at the front lines’.

Luisa, by contrast, has not tried to create a political base of power for herself. She has enormous power and influence, however, in her own personal sphere. She is a kind of artist of everyday life insofar as she is able to accomplish what she most needs to do – whether it is finding food for her family, surviving a difficult ordeal, or learning a valuable lesson about the complex physical environment she lives in. What has always amazed me about her, though, is that when she needs to, she can be successful outside of this personal sphere of influence. The book presents a couple of instances where she is able to use language to persuade people in official political power to help her. This happens with the book’s opening saga, and it happens as well in the very last story in the book.

It is precisely because Luisa doesn’t consciously seek political power for her people or for herself, that she becomes a valuable spokesperson, in my opinion. She is closer to the kinds of concerns that ordinary people have, and her voice seems less ‘filtered’ somehow.

In Ecuador, what is the status of current bilingual and Indigenous unification efforts?
I haven’t been in Ecuador for over a year now, so I’d better not try to answer that one directly. However, last summer I was privileged to teach an ethnolinguistic seminar organized by Dra. Marleen Haboud, at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica in Quito. I heard from indigenous people from all over Ecuador, and many expressed a lot of frustration over the relevance of their educational experiences.

I should also say that I am not optimistic about any attempts to unify Quichua dialects into some kind of standard. Indigenous leaders who attended my seminar were amazed to learn that there was no Academy for the English Language. One man from Saraguro wondered why Quechua speaking people should bother about unifying or standardizing their language if speakers of English did not worry about such things.

What does that mean for Luisa Cadena?
I think it means that, even though it still has a fair number of speakers, (for Amazonian dialects anyway, several tens of thousands of speakers), the Quichua language is rather endangered. It seems to me that people are not able to fathom that their language might someday be completely lost. I supervised a sociolinguistic survey, which was adapted from one used by Marleen Haboud, and had one of my students administer it. He asked people about the possibility that Quichua might someday not be spoken. Most people denied that this was even possible. Without intending to sound overly critical, since peoples’ needs are very complex and difficult to juggle, it does seem to be the case that many Runa are not aware of how vulnerable Quichua could become. What this means for Luisa Cadena is that her great grandchildren could grow up in a family where Quichua is no longer spoken.

As an anthropologist, what do you feel your obligation is to your research community and what have you done to meet that obligation?
As a linguistic anthropologist, my obligation to my intellectual community is to discover something new and interesting that may help other researchers better understand Quechua language and culture. I also feel an obligation to share my data with others. In order to do this in the best possible way, I am going to be making my original data available to anyone with an interest, by getting my narratives into the Archives of Indigenous Languages of Latin America, based at UT-Austin. I will be traveling there the first week of October to get everything labeled and ready, so that it can be made available to this book’s readership.

My obligation to my Quechua research community is to try to give back something to them since they have given me so much. One way to do this will be to get the book translated into Spanish so that it might be publishable by a small press in Ecuador, where some of the country’s most powerful people might benefit from learning more about the great human resources right in their own back yard.

How has Luisa’s life changed in the time that you two have been working together?
When I first met her in 1988, she was moving between Montalvo and the rented house she had in Puyo which she used when her kids were going to school there. She was kind of transitioning out of her life in Montalvo, but hadn’t yet made the definitive move. She was earning money for her children’s education by washing other peoples’ clothes. Now she has her own space and house outside of Puyo, which she acquired without my help. Her husband has now become her dependent. Because of strokes he can no longer walk. She lives in an extended family household with her sisters, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren surrounding her. She did seem wistful, though, about life in Montalvo, the last time I asked her, and she expressed interest in building a small house there on her land. Because her health is no longer robust, though, I wonder if she’ll be able to do that. One thing that has not changed, though, is that she continues to be involved in horticulture. The last chapter explains how she’s managed to do this.

How has your life changed due to the work you’ve undertaken?
My life has changed tremendously. When I first met Luisa, I was in the most liminal stage of life possible—an ABD (all but the dissertation) graduate student. I was married but hadn’t yet had any kids, which, for my Quichua friends, made me even more marginal. I knew when interviewing her that I was getting important data, but I had no idea at the time, of how her narratives were going to allow me to figure out what role ideophones had in Quichua grammar. Now I’m a working, professional anthropological linguist. My three kids are about the same ages as some of her grandkids. I probably would have written a rather different dissertation if I had never met her, and would have assumed a different kind of academic voice.
—
In Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman, Janis B. Nuckolls, a professor at Brigham Young University, shows how ideophones are the core of Quechua speaker’s discourse and that they allow agency and reaction to substances and entities as well as beings. Nuckolls also shows that Luisa Cadena’s talk gives every individual, major or minor, a voice in her narrative, revealing a language system that allows for the possibility of shared affects, intentions, moral values, and meaningful communicative interactions between humans and nonhumans.

We’re already gearing up to hit the road for our very busy fall conference season. If you have plans to attend any of the  conferences listed below, please be sure to seek us out to say hello. There are many other exciting conferences and symposia happening this fall so check out our calendar for a more complete listing of Indigenous studies conferences.

Look for the First Peoples booth at these conferences:

Latin American Studies Association
October 6-9, 2010 – Toronto, Ontario
Partner Press Exhibitors: University of Arizona Press, University of North Carolina Press

Western History Association
October 13-16, 2010 – Incline Village, NV
Partner Press Exhibitors: University of Arizona Press, University of North Carolina Press

American Society of Ethnohistory
October 13-17, 2010 – Ottawa, Ontario
Partner Press Exhibitors: University of North Carolina Press

American Anthropological Association
November 17-21, 2010 – New Orleans, LA
Partner Press Exhibitors: University of Arizona Press, University of Minnesota Press, University of North Carolina Press

National Congress of American Indians
November 14-19, 2010 – Albuquerque, NM

We won’t have an exhibit at the National Women’s Studies Association annual meeting (November 11-14, 2010 – Denver, CO) , but we’re excited to attend and listen in on keynotes by Andrea Smith and Renya Ramirez as well as many other sessions on Indigenous feminisms.

There are so many great conferences this fall! Here are a few that look particularly strong that we wish we could squeeze into our schedule:

Inuit Studies Conference
October 28-30, 2010 – Val-d’Or, Quebec

Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law
October 29-30, 2010 – Cornell University

Exploring the Red Atlantic Conference
November 12-13, 2010 – University of Georgia

Do you know of a conference you think we should add to our calendar? Please let us know about it, either by leaving a comment here or emailing nvarner@uapress.arizona.edu.