ashes, paint... bone, nuts and beads

RIP Floyd 'Red Crow' Westerman,
December 13, 2007. Wikipedia article.

I had not seen/heard mention of his death in the mainstream press, but found it online.

"Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota musician, actor and activist Floyd Red Crow Westerman passed away early Thursday in a hospital in Los Angeles after an extended illness, family members said. He was 71...
Westerman, who was born in Veblen, S.D., was an active member of the American Indian Movement. He participated in the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 and was a spokesman for the group’s International Indian Treaty Council..."

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Recent coral-stitch earrings (minus earwires):







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Download free Chapter one PDF, of the new Scott Sigler novel, Nocturnal.
Get the latest Sigler spew at Scott's main page.

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My friend, Will Lahti, has a show up in Finland, at Baari Vakiopaine, December 3-23, 2007. Check postcard for contact info.
Drop in if you get a chance. [Pics click to enlarge]

His show's postcard invite. Grandpa Turtle








My fave:




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Art and history resources/stuff:

Another online art magazine, CanadianArt.

Canadian First Nations actor/writer, Darrell Dennis (Secwepemc Nation, BC), tapped for the January Screenwriters Lab, at Sundance Institute.

"Darrell Dennis (writer) / TALES OF AN URBAN INDIAN (Canada): A dark, irreverent comedy that follows the trials and tribulations of a young Native American man from the reservation to the big city and ultimately to self respect."

Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation. An exhibit at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis; October 26, 2007 - January 13, 2008.

"Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation features a diverse array of contemporary Native American artists whose work at once acknowledges and pushes the long tradition of Native American visual art. This exhibition, the second in the Changing Hands series organized by the Museum of Arts & Design, New York, features approximately 150 works of art by more than 130 artists from areas west of the Mississippi including the Plains, Plateau, West Coast, Western Canada, Alaska, and Hawaii."

The religious sacrament, peyote, is becoming increasingly rare and endangered.
A Rare and Unusual Harvest.

The increasing scrutiny of the human genome is revealing some startling surprises. It seems that ancient viruses had long ago inserted their own genetic data into our own, shared human code -perhaps millions of years ago- and we continue to paas them down, today. Darwin's Surprise. They seem to be remnants of previous battles between our ancestors and extinct/defeated viral lineages. The shared viral inheritance between humans and apes provides an unexpected confirmation of shared lineage.

"... makes sense, though, only if humans share most of those viral fragments with relatives like chimpanzees and monkeys. And we do, in thousands of places throughout our genome. If that were a coincidence, humans and chimpanzees would have had to endure an incalculable number of identical viral infections in the course of millions of years, and then, somehow, those infections would have had to end up in exactly the same place within each genome. The rungs of the ladder of human DNA consist of three billion pairs of nucleotides spread across forty-six chromosomes. The sequences of those nucleotides determine how each person differs from another, and from all other living things. The only way that humans, in thousands of seemingly random locations, could possess the exact retroviral DNA found in another species is by inheriting it from a common ancestor."

An article about the disappearing languages of Native America. At a Loss for Words.

"But like so many indigenous languages on every populated continent, Salish–Pend d'Oreille is on the point of vanishing. Fewer than thirty fluent native speakers remain, and nearly all of them are elderly. The great majority of the roughly 6,000 Salish and Pend d'Oreille tribal members do not speak their ancestral language at all.

The fluent Salish–Pend d'Oreille speakers who work with me report that the only opportunities they have to "talk Indian" are at the tribes' Culture Committee's weekly elders’ meetings from the fall through the spring, and in their weekly language sessions with me during the summer. John Peter Paul, who died in 2001 at the age of ninety-two, was married to his wife Agnes PokerJim Paul, a Bitterroot Salish, for seventy-two years; they were the last married couple who spoke their language regularly at home. Their oldest daughter, Josephine Quequesah, is a fluent and highly skilled speaker of the language, but some of her younger siblings have a more passive level of fluency."

New "Clovis" dates.

"... analysis of dates for the best-documented Clovis sites suggests the culture arose later and was shorter-lived than once thought, a finding that some say deals a blow to the "Clovis first" theories that maintain the big-game-hunting people were the first immigrants to the New World. Michael Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans, and Thomas Stafford of Stafford Research Laboratories in Colorado, used modern radiocarbon methods to re-date more than 20 previously known Clovis sites which had been dated with older, less precise techniques. All of the sites now seem to fall between 13,050 to 12,800 years ago..."

Archaeologists studied the first known chimpanzee archaeological site.

"... a grouping of stone hammers that were used by apes 4,300 years ago to smash open nuts. By analyzing pollen grains embedded in the stones, the team was able to identify five species of nuts the tools were used to open, four of which are not eaten by humans. The discovery shows that stone tool use is not a behavior that chimpanzees learned recently by watching the farmers who live in the area..."

Prehistoric chickens in Chile associated by DNA to Polynesian, not Spanish introduction.

"Radiocarbon dating shows the El Arenal chicken lived sometime between a.d. 1321 and 1407, well after Polynesians first settled Easter Island and the other easternmost islands of the Pacific."

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From RUSirius and the MondoGloboNetwork:

A timeline of the Bush administration attack on American Bill of Rights.

The question authority proposal.

The Open Source Party proposal."... I propose a Liberal/Libertarian/Other unity party that will develop ideas and solutions to America's political problems through an Open Source process that will be engaging and fun. We will have online conferences, social networks and wikis, we will have meetups, we will have parties, we will create games that model likely real world responses to our proposed ideas, we will field candidates starting in 2010, get "crazed" anti-authoritarians on TV and radio, and maybe change a few things before the apocalypse, the Singularity, the second coming, the complete conquest of the world by Google, the election of another generation of Bushes and Clintons, or whatever other event you may be expecting..."

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Tags: Floyd Red Crow Westerman, beadwork, coral stitch, earrings, Ojibway Jewelry, Will Lahti, Finland,clovis, evolution,Native ArtBingorage, Broken Vulture Art, blog,pics