JINGLE DRESS
Created during Spanish flu, jingle dress dance now helping First Nations people cope with COVID-19: "I was really surprised when I started doing the research. I couldn't find a single photograph of what you would call a jingle dress before circa 1920 in the United States or Canada," said Brenda Child, a professor at the University of Minnesota."As a historian, it occurred to me that something very big had happened that created this new healing tradition."For Child, the creation of the jingle dress dance shows how First Nations people have learned to cope with new illnesses introduced to their communities. (Submitted by Brenda Child)That big event was the Spanish flu pandemic of 1919, and First Nations and Native American communities across North America all tell a similar story of the origin of the jingle dress
HORSES
The Shared History of Wild Horses and Indigenous People: But according to Indigenous oral histories and spiritual beliefs from Saskatchewan to Oklahoma, America’s Native horses never went extinct. They survived the Ice Age and lived among Native people before, and after, the arrival of European colonizers, and a mountain of historical and archaeological evidence proves it—from ancient clay and wood horse figurines from North America and horse petroglyphs in Peru to accounts recorded by early explorers.
Indeed, in recent years Western science has begun to confirm what Indigenous communities have always known. Riding and caring for horses can activate the sympathetic nervous system in children and influence the rhythm of the human heart rate. Equine therapy is becoming increasingly popular for treating PTSD in military veterans and children experiencing anxiety and depression or recovering from trauma. “Horses are incredibly sacred, they’re more than sacred,” Running Horse Collin says. “Our people didn’t need those kind of studies, we just knew it worked.”
Yet, the official story that was written into the history books, and which persists today, is that the New World had no horses before the arrival of the Spanish. According to the narrative, the first horses to arrive in the New World in 1519 were the progenitors of every horse found on the continent in later years. That it would have been biologically impossible for a small group of horses in Mexico to populate regions thousands of miles away in as little as two years is never discussed.
ASTRONOMY
Relearning The Star Stories Of Indigenous Peoples - Audio recordings: How the lost constellations of Indigenous North Americans can connect culture, science, and inspire the next generation of scientists. Here’s a question Pantalony gets sometimes: What is a series of star stories doing in a museum dedicated to technology and science?“People are surprised, but then it makes sense,” he says. “Of course cultures would have different stories based on this massive canopy from horizon to horizon that unfolds before our eyes every night.” Just like the telescope that sits in the museum, the story about Mars circling around in the sky like a startled moose is also an instrument of astronomical observation.In 2008, Canada began a major effort to right the wrongs of colonization. The process, which aimed to recognize the rights of Indigenous groups and shape a new relationship of respect, was broadly referred to as truth and reconciliation. At the museum, this took the shape of a conscious effort to include Indigenous culture and technology in the story of Canadian science—from snowshoes to star stories.
The oldest book written in the American Continent Is a Mayan guide to Astronomy: The Grolier Codex sometimes referred to as the “Sáenz Codex” or the “Maya Codex of Mexico” is a screenfold book fashioned from bark paper, coated with stucco on both sides and painted on one side. Ten painted pages survive of a twenty-page book; formerly there were judged to be eleven pages but two fragments are now considered to come from the same page. In 1976, the “United States-Mexico Artifacts Treaty of 1970” was invoked by the Attorney General of Mexico. This resulted in the seizure of the codex and its return to Mexico.Sáenz donated the codex to the Mexican government and it is currently kept in a vault in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City and is not on public display.The claimed discovery of the Grolier Codex would make it the only pre-Columbian codex discovered in the course of the 20th century, except for some codex fragments excavated by archaeologists.It’s another example of ancient writings come to life , the oldest on our continent. Other documents previously presumed to be inauthentic could need reexamination—in which case, we may (and almost certainly do) have a lot to learn about our past.
HUNTING
13 discoveries in the last year have fundamentally altered our understanding of human history
B.S. Bering Strait: Archaeologists determined that stone tools and artifacts discovered in a remote cave in Zacatecas, Mexico, were about 32,000 years old. They described the finding in a July study.The new evidence upended the idea that the first people arrived in North America after continent-hopping from modern-day Siberia via the Bering land bridge between 18,000 and 13,000 years ago. During the last Ice Age 32,000 years ago, that land bridge was impassable. So the research suggests the first Americans arrived by sea. According to the study authors, these migrants were likely anatomically modern humans.
Hunting: Scientists discovered a 9,000-year-old burial site containing weapons and animal-skinning tools high in the Andes mountains of Peru. They assumed the human bones there came from a skilled male hunter.But a closer look revealed that this hunter was female. Further analysis of 27 other burial sites across North and South America, which also contained hunting tools and date back to the same time period, revealed that 40% of the hunters were female.
Amazon Rock Paintings: Thousands of drawings hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest tell the story of an ancient tribe's hunting practices about 12,000 years ago. The drawings, which cover more than 2.5 miles of rock in Colombia, depict scenes of humans hunting mastodons. They also contain images of other extinct animals like giant sloths, ancient llamas, and Ice Age horses.Archaeologists announced the drawings' discovery in late November.
WRITING/ READING/ "BOOKS"
The College Student Who Decoded the Data Hidden in Inca Knots
With the help of his professor, Gary Urton, a scholar of Pre-Columbian studies, Medrano interpreted a set of six khipus, knotted cords used for record keeping in the Inca Empire. By matching the khipus to a colonial-era Spanish census document, Medrano and Urton uncovered the meaning of the cords in greater detail than ever before. Their findings could contribute to a better understanding of daily life in the Andean civilization. The only records the Inca are known to have kept are in the form of intricately knotted khipu textiles. In 2002, Urton began Harvard’s Khipu Database Project. He traveled to museums and private collections around the world to record the numbers of knots, lengths of cords, colors of fibers, and other distinguishing details about every Inca khipu he could find—more than 900 in total.
MIGRATORY PATTERNS/ CANNIBALISM
Did Columbus find early Caribs in 15th century Caribbean? Jury is still out
"We have several different notions of what Carib might be," Keegan told Ars. "We have cultural evidence, we have Columbus' reports, we have the accounts of French missionaries in the 1700s. Trying to sort through what all these different Caribs are, or whether they're even just one single cultural group, is what we were hoping that the DNA would help sort out. But as often happens in science, our questions are more subtle than our data."
After finally being able to study enough skulls, they discovered three separate clusters instead of the expected two: a Cuba cluster, a Puerto Rico/Venezuela/Colombia cluster, and a Hispaniola/Jamaica/Bahamas cluster. That prompted Keegan et al. to reexamine a pottery style known as Meillacoid, found only in Hispaniola, Jamaica, and the Bahamas, which anthropologists had previously thought were a separate migration.
"We found that the pottery style was much more consistent with the way those people called Caribs made pottery than the way people called Arawaks made pottery," said Keegan. "Those two lines of evidence led us to conclude that [Caribs] actually were in Hispaniola, Jamaica, and the Bahamas when Columbus arrived."
As for the reports of cannibalism in Columbus' accounts, hard evidence as to whether this was truly a regular practice is still lacking. "The Caribs in the Lesser Antilles told Europeans that they kill and eat their enemies, but this could be hyperbole," said Keegan. "We don't have any skeletal evidence. We're not finding human bones that are cooked or butchered—at least we haven't yet."
One other intriguing finding from the DNA analysis concerned the evolution of Caribbean pottery styles over 2,000 years, as the Archaic Age gave way to the Ceramic Age in the region. There are five distinct marked shifts in style noted by archaeologists: red pottery decorated with white painted designs, for example; pots with tiny dots or incisions; or more ornate styles of pottery with sculpted animal faces. Some archaeologists have viewed this as evidence for fresh migrations to the Caribbean, but the DNA analysis suggests that all the styles in fact were developed by descendants of the same people who arrived in the Caribbean some 2,500 years ago."It confirms what we expect, but as a social scientist, it just goes to show that genetics can't give us a complete picture of the people who carry those genes," said Keegan. "Genes may be discrete units that we can measure, but genomes are created by cultures."
NOTE: There is not perfect resource - this one minimizes the numbers on people on the islands. More research is needed.
