winter solstice celebration!
Some Wikipedia articles:
Winter Solstice
Festivus
Saturnalia
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Sculpture idea sketch; Sturgeon Hunt, by Canoe:
The stylised 'canoe' and the 'human' figures are based on the pictographic "rock art" imagery of the boreal forest, extending through the Boreal Forest and Canadian Shield of Northern Quebec, Northern Ontario, Northern Minnesota, Northern Manitoba and Northern Saskatchewan; probably further. Usually, however, the 'canoe' contains four figures, probably referencing the 'shamanic canoe' ritual. The spear is tipped with a polished deer antler harpoon, typical of the Laurel Culture toolkit found in association with the Rainy River and the prominent burial mounds on its banks.
I see the sturgeon as about 15 feet in length and realistically represented; about the largest size of fish found in these inland waters in the days before commercial fisheries, industrial pollution and wanton waste.
The boulder in the river is a glacial erratic; scooped up and delivered from hundreds of miles away by mile-high sheets of ice that scraped this land down to the bone, over the last hundred thousand years.
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Ojibway artist, George Morrrison, at Wikipedia.
An article about Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian show (2004-2005), showcasing George Morrison and Allan Houser; another important modern Native visual artist.
"The two artists came from very different backgrounds, but artistically their lives converged. While Houser grew up on the southern Plains of Oklahoma and spent much of his life in the deserts of the Southwest, Morrison's studio overlooked a lake in Grand Portage, Minnesota. But the representational realism of their early careers gradually became abstracted in later life, and both artists drew profoundly on influences derived from nature."
[Click picture for link to Minnesota Museum of American Art listing for George Morrison.]
Cube, 1988 exotic woods, Sylvia Brown, Dr. Wolfgang Zeman, and Renato and Giorgio Marmont Funds Purchase
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History Tree honors native traditions.
The 2007 Mantle of Shame Awards, at Indian Country Today.
"This year has been filled with so many acts worthy of a place on the Mantle of Shame that there simply isn't room for all the deserving. But don't think that the anti-Indian wingnut writers or Team Abramoff didn't make the cut. I just can't bear to write another word about them this year. Ditto for the Mel Gibson's uber-tacky Macacalypto and Ward Churchill's bizarre "Dances with Identities."..."
"Macacalypto". Now that's funny; I hadn't heard/read that one before.
Seven inaugural inductees in Montana Indian Athletic Hall of Fame.
"Twenty-First Century Regionalists: Art of the New West" December 22, 2007 – April 13, 2008,Booth Western Museum.
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Why are we using unnecessary "weapons-grade" nuclear material to make medicines?:
If you live in Canada, you couldn't avoid hearing the kerfuffle about the shutdown of the Chalk River Nuclear facility, upriver of Ottawa. Apparently, it is the major supplier of medical isotopes for North America, and it had been shut down for safety reasons. The Conservative government forced the plant to reopen, against the advice of the people who are supposed to regulate this "nucular" stuff.
An article, at Native Unity gave me pause...
"An important aspect of the isotope-production fiasco on Algonquin territory is being ignored. AECL Atomic Energy of Canada Limited uses 95 per cent highly enriched "weapons-grade" uranium HEU to make the main isotope (Molybdenum-99). This can be made using low-enriched uranium LEU which is NOT weapons-usable material, but is more expensive. Somebody wants to make isotopes and bombs cheaply.
He continued, "It's easier to make a very powerful bomb with weapons-grade uranium like the one dropped on Hiroshima in 1945". The only stockpile of weapons-grade uranium in Canada is at Chalk River, less than 200 kilometers up the Ottawa River from Canada’s capital. The Canadian public and Members of Parliament are told they are for "essential and life saving" medical isotope production. However, there's enough there to build two or more atom bombs and the stockpile is increasing."
WTF? They better not be driving this crap through my town. Are they driving it through yours?
Another article, at the National post:
"Edwin Lyman, senior staff scientist at the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists, said research facilities, including one at Chalk River's Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., can't properly guard this highly enriched uranium from terrorists, so they should not use it.
Mr. Kuperman noted that countries such as Argentina and Australia have already stopped using weapons-grade matter to produce medical isotopes, while the Netherlands and South Africa are now converting to less-powerful nuclear material.
But Canada's Crown-owned AECL and MDS Nordion have resisted a similar conversion at Chalk River. The two companies were one until Canada privatized the retail and processing parts of its isotope-creating business, and sold it to MDS Inc. in 1991. The new business became known as MDSNordion."
Nice.
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Merry Xmas; unless you're Lakota.
Tim Giago article about the December 29 anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890).
"... I quoted an editorial that appeared in the Aberdeen (SD) Saturday Review on January 3, 1891, just five days after the massacre. The author wrote about those terrible "Redskins," his favorite word for Indians. He wrote, "The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one or more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth."
That editorial calling for the genocide of the Lakota people was written by L. Frank Baum, the man who would later write, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz..."
December 26, anniversary of the largest mass hanging in US history (1862); Mankato, Minnesota.
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1 comment:
yew tooo!
Ainslie aka Maia
luv n kisses
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