Update: All episodes of We Shall Remain are available on the web. PBS will begin airing We Shall Remain, a five part series on Native American history on April 13. It is showing in Vancouver on Detroit PBS (Shaw channel 43) at 6p. We Shall Remain is part of PBS’ American Experience series. From the [...]
The Tahltan of northwestern BC are not the only people making decisions and facing challenges about resource extraction and traditional sustenance cultures. Karl Vick details in the Washington Post (or here) plans for a massive mining development, The Pebble Mine, in Bristol Bay, Alaska. The issues sound eerily familiar: The mining companies count on … [...]
The Whale Hunt presents Jonathan Harris’ experience among Inuipiat Eskimos of Barrow Alaska in stunning photography and a unique, narrative-driven interface. From Harris’ statement: The purpose of this project was threefold: First, to experiment with a new interface for human storytelling. The photographs are presented in a framework that tells the moment-to-moment story of the [...]
The San Francisco Chronicle writes today about two indigenous communities in Alaska affected by proposals to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The story is intriguing because the two communities have opposing views on drilling. In sum: In Kaktovik, a village at the northern edge of the oil-rich coastal plain of the refuge, [...]
I blogged earlier about a dispute between the Navajo and other Native American groups in Arizona and the Arizona Snowbowl Ski Area (Flagstaff). The Navajo and others went to court to try and stop the ski area from expanding the skiable terrain and from making snow with wastewater. Potential environmental issues were compounded by the [...]
Two shorts of note today, both via Yahoo Protecting Knowledge Group. 1) The New York Times reports on the economic and environmental complexities of closing a The Black Mesa Mine in northeastern Arizona. The closure is presented first as a win for environmentalists and a loss for Native Americans workers but the article notes later [...]
The New York Times reports today about making snow for a ski area on a sacred mountain in the US Southwest. The Denver Post carried the story last week and I blogged about it briefly here. The story does a good job of explaining the legal conflict which pits the operators of the Arizona Snowbowl [...]
Daniel Oppenheimer has written a useful and interesting article on David Samuels’s recent ethnography Putting a Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation for the Valley Advocate, a news and arts weekly published in Easthampton, MA. The article is extensive, reviewing the book and, perhaps of greater interest [...]
I am currently reading Putting a Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation (Arizona, 2004) by David Samuels, and thoroughly enjoying it. It is terrific ethnography … part linguistic anthropology and part ethnomusicology … describing the role of popular music and bands (mainly old country music) for Apache [...]
Thanks to Paul Kedrosky for blogging on Gene Weingarten’s recent Washinton Post Magazine piece on contemporary life among the Yup’ik Eskimo of Savoonga, Alaska (and to my brother-in-law Rob for the head’s up). The header essentially sensationalizes the jist of the article: They’ve survived one of the world’s most inhospitable climates and the barren isolation [...]
