I’ve written before about how a single observation can elevate a work of non-fiction into the realm of true art. That is certainly the case with this New York Times dispatch from Whiteclay, Nebraska, a town infamous for providing alcohol to the neighboring Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. It’s a solid piece of reporting, for sure, […]
While in Pittsburgh last week, I had a chance to catch up with an old friend who’s now an archaeology professor. He just returned to the Lower 48 after four years in Alaska, where he spent much of his time digging up the artifacts left behind by ancient inhabitants of the Aleutian Islands. On our […]
Tags:Alaska·cetaceans·mental illness·Native Americans·shamanism·whale hunting
I had to do a double-take this morning when I saw that The New York Times had a (digital) front-page feature on the Freedmen controversy. The question of whether Black Indians deserve tribal membership is something I wrote about six years ago, in a mammoth Wired piece that pondered the role of genetic analysis in […]
Tags:Cherokees·Dawes Act·Freedmen·Native Americans·racism·Wired
I’m rarely impressed by the talent portions of beauty pageants. Yes, I realize that baton twirling went out with leaded gasoline, but the mediocre singing and dancing that are now commonplace in such contests have done nothing to convince me that budding artists eschew the pageant circuit. But just when I’m nearly secure in my […]
Tags:Alaska·beauty pageants·Marjorie Tahbone·Native Americans·sports·World Eskimo-Indian Olympics
If you desire a brief respite from today’s deluge of bin Laden-related news and punditry, take a sec to check out the work of Bern Will Brown. He’s sort of the Paul Gaugin of the frozen north, having settled into the tiny Arctic hamlet of Colville Lake many decades ago. Though he originally journeyed up […]
Tags:Arctic·art·Bern Will Brown·Canada·Colville Lake·film·Native Americans·painting
The mere act of flicking on a light switch is something that can’t be taken for granted on the Navajo reservation, where tens of thousands of homes still lack electricity. Nowhere else in America do so many live in darkness, a fact driven home by this eye-popping stat: More than 18,000 households on the reservation […]
Tags:Arizona·corruption·crime·Native Americans·Navajo·New Mexico·politics
The federal government is becoming increasingly zealous about deporting convicted criminals who’ve completed their sentences. That official enthusiasm has led to some interesting legal conundrums, such as this case of an oil worker down in Texas: A descendant of the Lipan Apache tribe who was convicted this summer of re-entering the United States after being […]
Tags:deportation·diplomacy·immigration·law·Lipan Apache·Native Americans·Texas
It would take a rock-hard heart not to be moved by the plight of the Iroquois national lacrosse team, which has been frustrated in its efforts to attend the world championships in England. The team’s members hoped to travel on passports issued by their tribal government, but the British have refused to recognize the documents—despite […]
Tags:diplomacy·Iroquois·lacrosse·Native Americans·sports·State Department·travel
While researching a post about the ever-popular sport of wild cow milking, we came across a paper on the history of Native Canadian cowboys. A healthy chunk of the work is dedicated to the development of rodeo culture among Canada’s First Nations, who were often encouraged to engage in calf roping and bronco riding in […]
Despite our longtime enthusiasm for ski jumping, we just can’t seem to drum up much interest in this edition of the Winter Olympics. Perhaps that’s because we currently find ourselves smitten with an entirely different set of cold-weather games—those which comprise the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, held annually in Fairbanks, Alaska. Most are simple tests of […]
Tags:Alaska·Drop the Bomb·Native Americans·sports·Winter Olympics·World Eskimo-Indian Olympics
The way that Civil War history is written, you’d think that the conflict was confined to the easternmost quarter of the nation. But though few significant battles took place on the western frontier, the region wasn’t exactly unscathed. In the vast area known then simply as “Indian Country,” for example, tribes split along factional lines—many […]
Tags:Civil War·drugs·Kansas·Native Americans·peyote·religion·The Bulletproof Project·The New York Times
Medical history’s dustbin is full of well-meaning treatments that were basically guaranteed to increase a patient’s misery. Several months back, for example, we wrote about the use of Torpillage to treat victims of shell shock. Now, via the journals of the great Irish explorer John Palliser, comes news of a 19th-century Native American rabies remedy […]
Tags:asbestos·John Palliser·medical history·Native Americans·rabies·wolves
Just before we broke for Christmas, we posted about the possibility that America’s recent love affair with unsaturated fatty acids may be part of the reason our crime rates have dropped so precipitously. Now comes word that fat may have another positive application: curing folks afflicted with witiko psychosis, which (allegedly) causes a sudden craving […]
Tags:Algernon Blackwood·bears·cryptozoology·Native Americans·psychology·witiko psychosis
We recently stumbled across the tale of the Choctaw code talkers, who were briefly employed by the American Expeditionary Force during World War I. Upon learning of their role in the conflict, we immediately wondered why the United States military opted to use Navajos rather than Choctaws during the wider war that followed a quarter-century […]
Tags:Choctaw·cryptology·language·Native Americans·Navajo·World War I·World War II
If you’ve yet to read this jarring New York Times piece, do yourself a big favor and click over stat. It’s a damning account of how the Iraqi cops have been duped into buying a handheld “bomb detector” that apparently works no better than an old-school divining rod. Scary stuff, considering that so much of […]
Tags:Ghost Dance·Iraq·Native Americans·New York Times·The Bulletproof Project·U.S. history·Wounded Knee Massacre
Staying on yesterday’s Black Hawk theme, we found a major scientific curio related to the Sauk chief: an 1838 account of Black Hawk’s phrenological characteristics, published in the not-so-renowned American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany. We’re big lovers of old-time junk science, and this paper is chock full of such wrongheaded (though utterly sincere) treats. One […]
Tags:Black Hawk·Native Americans·neuroscience·phrenology·pseudoscience
One of our big hobby horses ’round here is the natural rate of divorce—that is, the theory that a certain percentage of marriages are invariably doomed, and that policymakers should realize this when crafting divorce laws. If those laws are too strict, you just get a lot of miserable couples who become a drag on […]
Mea culpa for letting our First Contact series lapse. It’s been nearly two months since we discussed Martin Frobisher’s encounter with the Inuit, and that’s far too long to do without primary-source accounts of the clashes of civilizations. But we’re back with a dandy today, courtesy of the Spanish explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. Though […]
Tags:Apaches·First Contact·Native Americans·ranching·Spain·U.S. history
Today’s New York Times features a fascinating account of the Shinnecock Indians’ three-decade quest for federal recognition—a quest that should finally be resolved this year, at least according to an Interior Department promise. At stake is the tribe’s right to build a casino, as well as its potential to lay claim to large swaths of […]
A few years back, Microkhan wrote a lengthy Wired opus about a thorny conflict in Oklahoma: The battle over whether descendants of freedmen should be allowed to join the Native American tribes that their ancestors had belonged to. Now the Obama administration may be entering the fray: In a letter sent to U.S. Attorney General […]
