American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The distinctive black, red and blue or green designs created by the Haida and Tlingit of the Northwest Coast of North America are iconographic of these cultures and recognized around the world. While almost every other aspect of Haida and Tlingit life has been studied and remarked for the past two hundred years, references to the significance of color, and the materials used to make color, have been rare—and, in the case of the traditional blue paint, consistently incorrect. Mistakenly attributed to copper oxides early in the ethnographic study of the Northwest Coast, subsequent scholars have persisted, without scientific verification, in claiming the traditional blue comes from copper oxides. As important and informative as the traditions of carving and weaving, if we are to provide a more comprehensive picture of the past, the use of color needs to be integrated with what we already know about the Haida and Tlingit cultures of the NW Coast, including the materials, tools, and methods of making and applying paint. The study of color use, and pigment and paint technology can provide new insights into the complex critical thinking and technical skills of individual artists, as well as the Haida and Tlingit cultures from which they came. The roles these artifacts played within their cultures can be revealed more comprehensively when we understand the significance of specific materials. Investigating the reasons for using specific colors such as blue, and the materials that make those colors, gives us new descriptive and interpretive information about daily life, sociopolitical standards, cultural practices, worldviews, and the cosmologies of the Haida and Tlingit. Identifying specific pigments can provide valuable information relating to provenance and authorship of artifacts and helps us identify sibling artifacts. We are better able to conserve the artifacts we hold according to the materials with which they are made if we have a full understanding of all those materials.

For the eight states with the greatest percentages of American Indian and Alaskan Native (AIAN) populations—Alaska, Arizona, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wyoming—we use 24 years (1991–2015) of US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data to examine whether AIANs are overrepresented in the lower paying, less desirable, non-managerial, public sector positions in local and state government bureaucracies and underrepresented in the more desirable, better paying, managerial positions (e.g., administrative and professional positions). In both workforces, we examine if levels of descriptive representation within the states changed over time. We find AIANs continue to suffer pervasive and persistent occupational segregation in non-managerial levels of bureaucratic organizations, in each state except Oklahoma. Across time in managerial ranks, we observe slight improvement in three states—Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma—and declining job shares in the remaining five states.

This paper presents the history of the Diné (Navajo) system of kinship and clanship as a response to environmental and political instability. We describe the Diné traditional system of k'éí, kinship and clanship, held together by k'é, the ethic of universal relatedness, and how, after 1930, the system has fared under conquest, settler colonialism, climate change, and replacement with a government-administered grazing-permit system. As long recognized, through the k'é principle, the clan system distributed people on the land flexibly in response to unstable conditions for farming and stock raising. Less understood is that, through kéí—the mutual rights and responsibilities of clan relatives—the system also limited that flexibility to make the distribution more orderly.

Eastern Cherokees' mythic and legendary worldview, as refracted through sacred myth narratives, forms a living tradition which grounds their identity. In particular, the central sacred stories of their world—the Creation Myth, Kanati the Hunter, Selu the Corn Goddess, and Stone Coat—embody spiritual meanings, purposes, and values which actually orient the Eastern Cherokee lifeway. These spiritual peoples' traditional religious experience and expressions cannot be reduced to economic, social, psychological, or political structures. This essay explores this Eastern Cherokee mythic epistemology. One author is a historian of religions and attorney for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians; the other author is a linguist and an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians who reads, writes, and speaks the Cherokee language.

Nelson Pereira dos Santos's 1971 film How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman is a strategic allegory for colonial and imperialist resistance, as well as a metatextual declaration of Brazilian national cinema. In the spirit of Oswald de Andrade's “Manifesto Antropofago,” dos Santos uses European encounters with the Tupinambá as an allegory for neocolonial invasions, embracing cannibalism not only as subject matter, but also as an artistic sensibility. The film adapts various source materials, principally German adventurer Hans Staden's 1556 captivity narrative, and is generally celebrated for undermining the stability of historical narratives. However, this paper argues that How Tasty remains a re-vision of an illusion, one notably devoid of a Native referent.