Native American Folktales (Background)

Just to brush up on our geography, I thought that I'd post a map of the Pacific Northwest, the part of our country where the Coyote Tales we read came from.  (The map is from Sheppard/Wood Distributors, a commercial warehouse and distribution company from Boise.)

Below is a map of Idaho itself from the Eastern Idaho Interagency Fire Center.


"Coyote and Bull" and "Coyote and the Mallard Ducks" came from the Nez Perce, so I thought I would begin with a little information about this people, but while we are posting maps, I will post a map of the territory held by the Nez Perce in the 19th century.  This map is from the Chief Washakie Foundation's web site.


Adam Kittleson's article from Minnesota State University at Mankato's E-museum is a good place to begin. 

http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/northamerica/nez_perce.html

This history is from the Nez Perce tribal government's official website:

http://www.nezperce.org/content/history/nimiipu.htm

http://www.nezperce.org/Official/historyfaq.htm

For more detailed information, see this article by Deward E. Walker, Jr. and Peter N. Jones:

http://content.lib.washington.edu/aipnw/walker.html

The Nez Perce were also among the many peoples that the Lewis and Clark Expedition met on their way to the Pacific Ocean.

http://www.pbs.org/lewisandclark/native/nez.html

The Nez Perce were also known for their Appaloosa horses:

http://www.nezperce.com/npedu13a.html

If you don't know what an Appaloosa horse looks like, here is a picture below. The picture is a public domain photograph from Wikimedia Commons.

Chief Joseph (1840-1904) was also one of the most famous Nez Perce.  For his story, see this link:  http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/a_c/chiefjoseph.htm

This biography is also interesting:

http://www.windriverhistory.org/exhibits/chiefjoseph/chiefjoseph01.htm

The picture of Chief Joseph below is from Wikimedia Commons.  It was taken in 1900, towards the end of his life and long after he had surrendered to the United States.



Here Jeff Head writes about his travels along the Nez Perce trail.  The pictures are beautiful!

http://www.jeffhead.com/magruder/index.htm

On to the Wishram, the people who gave us "Coyote and Eagle in the Land of the Dead."  They once lived along the Columbia River, the border between Oregon and Washington.  At one point, they were relocated to the Yakama Reservation, about 100 miles north of this area.

As you may see from this free map from the Map Company, quite a few groups lived in this area.  The map below shows where the Wishram live now as part of the Yakama Confederation.



Here is a little more information about the Wishram:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lewisandclark/record_tribes_064_13_33.html

http://www.pbs.org/lewisandclark/native/wis.html

For more information about the Yakama Nation, see this site.  Scroll down past the ads for an interesting article.

http://www.ohwy.com/wa/y/yakamana.htm

Below is a Wikimedia Commons picture of Wishram petroglyphs at a site called Wishram Village.  It is now part of a national park near The Dalles, Oregon.


Scroll down for more information about Wishram Village or Nixluidix:

http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMYPK

The picture below is from www.waymarking.com. 



The story of She Who Watches is also from the Wishram:

http://www.lensjoy.com/gallery/20.htm

The photo below is by Chris Carvalho.


With the Shoshone and "Wolf Tricks the Coyote Trickster," we return to Idaho.  Finding a map for the Shoshone is particularly difficult since their one-time territory was so large.  The map below is from Boise State University's magazine Idaho Issues Online.  Here are a few pieces to put together, but I will provide only an overview and focus on the Shoshone within Idaho since the story about Wolf and Coyote is from the Lemhi-Shoshone.





For more information about the Shoshone, see these sites:

http://www.shoshoneindian.com/

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lewisandclark/record_tribes_017_11_8.html

This site also includes audiofiles as well:

http://www.wisdomoftheelders.org/program301.html

Lewis and Clark's guide Sacajawea was a member of the Shoshone although she had been kidnapped away from her tribe and sold into slavery.  The illustration below is from the Chief Washakie Foundation's website.

http://www.shoshoneindian.com/sacajawea_001.htm


Here is a web article on Chief Washakie, an Eastern Shoshone chief who lived into the 20th century.

http://www.windriverhistory.org/exhibits/washakie_2/index.htm

Below is a picture of Idaho's Snake River, along which the Shoshone lived.  This picture came from the University of Montana-Missoula's Regional Learning Project.

Leslie Marmon Silko (whose poems I read on Monday) is descended from the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico.  As we learned from reading "Franz Boas' Visit," she also has white ancestry.  The map below is from Prof. S.J. Crouthamel's site for his course, Introduction to American Indian Studies at Palomar College.



The Pueblo is a much larger group, but I thought I'd begin with an overview.

  http://www.cabq.gov/aes/s3pueblo.html

Writing in 1932, James Paytiamo explains how the Laguna Pueblo came to be and were named.

http://southwestcrossroads.org/record.php?num=508

This history is more formal and less anecdotal:

http://southwestcrossroads.org/record.php?num=665

Here is a picture of the Laguna Pueblo from teacher Nancy Lopez's site at Jefferson Middle School in Albuquerque, NM.


This profile essay on Leslie Marmon Silko also gives you a little background on the Laguna Pueblo.

https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~rnelson/woman.html

Here is an extended interview with Ms. Marmon Silko:

http://www.altx.com/interviews/silko.html

The Laguna Pueblo are also known for their pottery:

http://www.clayhound.us/sites/laguna.htm

The picture below is also from www.clayhound.us .


I will finish up with information about the Anishinaabe, Gerald Vizenor's background.  This people lives in the upper Midwest, in Minnesota.  Specifically, Vizenor is a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation (see the map from Native Wiki further below).

For more information about the Minnesota Chippewa, see the site below:

http://www.mnchippewatribe.org/a_brief_history.htm

This site has quite a bit of information about the White Earth Reservation:

http://www.kstrom.net/isk/maps/mn/whitearth.htm
With our current interest in biodiversity and local food, the wild rice has become more and more important:

http://www.savewildrice.org/history

A branch of the Anishinaabe are based in Canada.  Anishinaabe-Canadian Norval Morisseau's work is depicted below.  I found this image at virtualmuseum.ca , an online collection of images from Canada's museums.

 

The Story of the Stone (part one)

In EN 202, we've read a few scenes from The Story of the Stone, a classic Chinese novel from the 1700s, but I would like to give you a fuller picture of this novel.  After all, the English translation is in five volumes, and the Longman Anthology's excerpts are mainly from the first and the second volumes.

The Story of the Stone follows Bao-yu, a wealthy, spoiled, but idealized young man from before his birth (there is a frame story) through his childhood and adolescence to his decision to become a Daoist monk.  In his early years, his family flourishes, and admittedly, it is easy to lose track of the members of his extended family and their servants who people the novel.  However, Bao-yu will fall on hard times as we will see in the later volumes.  Translator David Hawkes mentions that Bao-yu's story may be a fictionalized version of his author, Cao Xuequin,'s life.  Like Bao-yu, Cao Xuequin came from a wealthy family that lost favor with the Emperor.

That was the short version of The Story of the Stone.   The pictures and text make up the long version of my summary of Volume 1.

Below is a picture of a jade pendant to evoke the pendant that Bao-yu wore around his neck.  (As we learn in the frame story, he had been a jade cornerstone in a previous life.  Curiously, he was the stone that a goddess rejected and a Daoist monk rescued.)


Rescued by the monk, the future Bao-yu meets a flower that will become Dai-yu, his childhood companion and first love.  Below is a picture of the couple.  This appears to be a scene from the end of Volume 1 or perhaps Volume 2.



In 1987, CCTV, China's major television network, broadcast a miniseries version of The Story of the Stone.  (The miniseries, though, is titled The Dream of the Red Chamber, an alternate title for the novel.)  Here is a scene from that series.  In this version, Bao-yu is played by a man, but this role has been performed by a woman in the Shaw Brothers' version  from 1977.
(The Shaw Brothers were based in Hong Kong, which was a British colony and *not* part of China in those days.)

For a little more information, here is a link to a page on the TV series:

http://www.china-guide.com/entertainment/dream.html

I will also post a link to the trailer of the recent TV series:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHUGdUH-3fI



Or you may prefer Bukit Panjang Hokkien Konguay Opera Troupe's rendition of this scene:


If you would like to hear what an operatic version is like, see this video of Dai-yu burying the flowers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwBGFUiK0Bo


I also want to include some pictures that show you how opulent Bao-yu's lifestyle was as well as how beautiful his family's gardens were.  Below is a scene from the recent remake of The Story of the Stone!  In the first volume, Bao-yu's grandmother (Grandmother Jia) is often depicted holding court over her family's meals, so I imagine that this scene might be one of those occasions.


Bao-yu's life, though, is not all pleasure even though he is his grandmother's favorite.  His father, on the other hand, feels contempt for him because he prefers the company of women and dislikes studying.  (Jia Zheng, the father, is a Confucian scholar and civil servant, so he represents a more conventional adult masculinity.)  In one of the scenes that we may read for EN 202, Jia Zheng forces Bao-yu to come up with names and brief poems for the various highlights of the garden he has built for his daughter's visit.  The father appears to despise his son's contributions, but in the end he accepts them.  In another scene that we will not read, Baochai's brother Xue Pan tricks Bao-yu by claiming that his father is looking for him.  Bao-yu's fear of his father is that well-known. 


Below is another scene from this recent remake.  This depicts Dai-yu as a young girl who has just come to live with her relatives (Bao-yu's extended family).  We see Dai-yu's precociousness and pensiveness in this picture.  (She studies in secret and is an accomplished poet as well as a skilled needleworker who destroys her work out of spite.)  However, we do not see her prickliness, but this, too, is a strong element in her character.  As an adolescent, she is constantly bickering and battling with Bao-yu.  She is also jealous of Bao-chai, a more conventional young lady who has also come to live with the family and will marry Bao-yu. 



Here is a picture of Baochai from that same miniseries.  However, this picture depicts her as a teenager.  While Dai-yu is always bickering or brooding, Baochai has a much calmer, friendlier demeanor, and she is particularly noted for her kindness to servants.  As a poet and needleworker, she is talented but not as talented as Dai-yu is.   According to David Hawkes, Baochai and Dai-yu are two variants on the ideal woman. 



The picture below depicts Bao-yu and Dai-yu together in the garden near their houses.  (Yes, as adolescents, each of the young people in the family had his or her own house in the garden.  Previously they had lived with Grandmother Jia.)  This picture is quite fantastic, but it gives you an idea of how stunning the garden is.  (It was built as a venue for a one-day visit by Bao-yu's older sister, one of the Emperor's concubines.)


Here is a more realistic picture of what the garden may have looked like.  In fact, after the filming of the 1987 miniseries, the Chinese government recreated the novel's Grand View Garden.


For more information about this site, see the links below:

http://english.sina.com/p/2008/0806/176446.html

http://www.beijingguide2008.com/grand_view_garden_beijing/grand_view_garden_beijing.html

Finally, the picture below from www.culturalchina.com shows just how crowded with family members and servants The Story of the Stone is!  For example, when Jia Zheng quizzes his son in the new garden, a number of male family members and other "literary gentlemen" accompany them.  Moreover, quite a bit of the latter part of Volume 1 is devoted to the rivalries between the family's servants as well as those between members of the family.  At one point a concubine has a spell cast on both Bao-yu and Wang Xi-Feng because she feels that the family bullies her son.  Bao-yu is the first wife's son, but the bustling Wang Xi-Feng happens to be the young family member who manages the household.  Bao-yu's jade, by the way, breaks the spell once a Daoist monk repurifies the stone.

Bettina Judd's Reading 9/17 at MC

 I thought I'd blow off some of this blog's dust today and write about Bettina Judd's reading at MC.  It's been good to read poems from other times and places ("The Ballad of Mulan" and so on), but I've always liked going to readings to hear what other people are writing NOW.

Bettina Judd's poetry fits in nicely with last week's readings...Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage," Muriel Ruykeser's "Absolom," and even Seamus Heaney's "The Tollund Man" and "The Bog Queen."  Research is a significant part of Ms. Judd's writing process since many of her poems are about historical figures or individuals who are in the news.  The first few poems that she read were from a project that she is doing on gynecological experimentation and its impact on Black women's bodies.  Several were from the point of view of Joyce Heth, a slave whom P.T. Barnum had bought and exhibited as George Washington's nurse in 1835 and 1836.  Barnum claimed that she was 160; Ms. Heth was actually in her 70s.  (Below is a picture from a play, "The Exploitation of Joyce Heth," that was performed in New York.)

Another picture is one of Barnum's advertisements:

For more about Ms. Heth's story, see this link from George Mason University:

http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/jackson/5pts/museum/heth.html

Bettina Judd also read poems about more contemporary women.  One was the girl, Latasha Harlins, who was shot in the back of the head by a Korean-American store owner in 1991.  The relatively light sentence that the store owner received was one of the causes of the L.A. riots in 1992.  Having grown up in L.A. and its suburbs, Ms. Judd recalled the impact of Harlins' murder.  She added that at the time she had seen tapes of the shooting on TV.  Another startling poem was about a woman who was tortured and killed by her ex-lover.  A third was about a woman who lay dying and ignored in a NYC emergency ward.

As you can see, Ms. Judd's work is about the violence of history, especially as it affects Black women.  These poems are not for everyone.  Curiously, she read her poems in a soft, quiet voice, swallowing her words.  However, these were not poems for shouting and declaiming.  I would be interested in hearing her read in a different venue...but I was glad to see how packed the room was.

Oh yes...and Ms. Judd talked about *her* approach to writing poetry.  She discussed the projects that she works on.  The poems about gynecological experimentation actually came out of a series of watercolors that she had been working on.  She tries to write a poem a day, not worrying about whether that poem is good or bad.  It is "just" a draft, and she will continue to work on it.  This appears to be an approach that she has taken from the Cave Canem Poets.  Here is a link to their site!  (Caution:  This link has been broken some of the time, so...beware!)

http://cavecanempoets.org/

Here are some links to poems by Bettina Judd.  The first is "A Conversation After Teeth." 

http://penzitspronouncedpants.blogspot.com/2008/08/guest-pnz-conversation-after-teeth.html

Another is her poem, "Sankofa: Gender Bend."

http://www.torchpoetry.org/Fall%2007/bettinajudd.htm

Here is her MySpace page where you may listen to her read some poems, including "Sankofa."

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=199530233

And here is a link to her blog:

http://www.ablackgirl.com/wordpress/


Next up...the Poetry at Noon for World Peace Day on 9/22!

African Art

To finish up for now (Thursday), I'd like to add some links to exhibits on African art.  When we visit the Freer Gallery in March, if we have time or inclination, we may be able to visit the nearby Museum of African Art.  However, while we are reading Heart of Darkness and later on when we are reading Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative and Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter, I'd like for you to be able to look at the links below.  By the way, the picture above is of a power figure from the Congo.  In fact, the figure dates from the 19th century!!  In your opinion, what would Marlow have made of such a figure?

(Here I've posted a copy of a British painting from 1912 as contrast.  J.W. Waterhouse is not the most avant-garde of artists, but his Penelope and Her Suitors may give you an idea of what people in the early 20th century were used to considering as art and why African art might have been shocking to them.)

For more information about the African power figure and its context, see the link below from the Brooklyn Museum:

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/collections/african_art/22.1421.php

This link takes you to information about that museum's entire collection:

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/collections/african_art/

Just twenty five years after Heart of Darkness' serialization, the Brooklyn Museum presented an exhibit of African art.  At this time, this art was influencing European artists such as Picasso.

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/research/digital-collections/pna1923/

Closer to home, here are some links to the Smithsonian's Museum of African Art:

http://africa.si.edu/exhibits/africanvision/index2.html

http://africa.si.edu/collections/index.htm

In 1993, the Bayly Museum of Art at the University of Virginia set up an electronic exhibit on African art:

http://www.lib.virginia.edu/clemons/RMC/exhib/93.ray.aa/African.html

NYC has a Museum for African Art.  Currently, it is based in Long Island City, but it will soon be moving to a new home in Manhattan.

http://www.africanart.org/index.php

The Guggenheim Museum includes a searchable map of Africa on its web site.  Here are links to its pages on Central Africa (the region where the Congo is) and Western Africa (the region where Senegal and Nigeria are).

http://artnetweb.com/guggenheim/africa/central.html

http://artnetweb.com/guggenheim/africa/west.html

The Guggenheim also has a page on African film.  Unfortunately, it seems to have been written in the 1990s:

http://www.artnetweb.com/guggenheim/film/


Here is some background information on African art from a web site at Sweet Briar College in Virginia:

http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/teachers/Chronology.html

http://hum.lss.wisc.edu/hjdrewal/Looking.html

http://hum.lss.wisc.edu/hjdrewal/aesthetics.html

Anne-Marie O'Connor from the LA Times writes here about the ongoing reassessment of African art:

http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-et-africanart29jan29,0,5808956.story

This is a little off topic, but I thought that you might be interested in this essay on African history from NYC's Metropolitan Museum of Art:

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ahis/hd_ahis.htm

I'd like to close with a site from Senegal's DAK'ART Biennale.  It is in French.  The next exhibition will be this summer, so if you plan to go to Dakar....

http://www.biennaledakar.org/