Crow Indians

The introduction of the horse by the Spaniards and of guns by the French in the fur trade created a rivalry between Great Plains tribes over hunting territories resulting in the displacement of some tribes by other tribes. These rivalries continued with the displacement caused by the American expansion onto the Great Plains in which some tribes, such as the Shoshone, Pawnee, and Crow, sided with the Americans against their historical tribal enemies, the Dakota Sioux, Oglala Sioux, the Cheyenne, and Arapaho.

The Apsaalooke nation of Montana is one of many tribes in the Great Plains that practice the ritual of fasting (Vision Quest). In this document I will explain Apsaalooke fasting also called Bilisshíissaannuua To Go Without Water. This will be done by explain some core elements of Apsaalooke belief to give the reader a string knowledge base, so that one can contextualize fasting with in Apsaalooke culture. This documents also highlights the Dryhead Preservation and recordation project during the summer of 2013, funding and conducted by the Bureau of Land Management, Custer National Forest and The Crow tribal Historic Preservation Office. This Survey was conducted in hope to preserve the Archaeology of fasting that was found on the Dryhead, East Pryor Mountain and help use to understand this Apsaalooke Fasting and landscape.

The Apsaalooke nation of Montana is one of many tribes in the Great Plains that practice the ritual of fasting (Vision Quest). In this document I will explain Apsaalooke fasting also called Bilisshíissaannuua To Go Without Water. This will be done by explain some core elements of Apsaalooke belief to give the reader a string knowledge base, so that one can contextualize fasting with in Apsaalooke culture.

In this heart-warming and insightful memoir, Sylvie Brieu brings the seasoned eyes of an experienced outsider to capture a portrait of a rebellious America where women play a prominent role and where natural beauty is the best antidote to despair. A fresh and unique perspective on America, almost 200 years after Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous journey.
Land of adventure and freedom, the American West fascinates with its wide-open spaces, the traditions of its emblematic tribes and the eternal myth of the cowboy. It is where America has forged its legend and reinforced it through movies, television and literature. Montana is at the heart of this great legend.
From the Rockies to the Great Plains and from Yellowstone to the Little Bighorn, distinguished author and journalist Sylvie Brieu leads us on a captivating road trip to encounter Native Americans, rodeo champions, authors, artists and wildlife specialists, such as Backfeet spiritual leaders, Darnell and Smokey Rides At the Door, legendary eco-warrior Doug Peacock and inspiring photographer Brad Orsted. Their unconditional love for a now threatened but exquisite natural environment fuels their deep sense of community and resilience. Far from the clichés of an individualistic nation, these colorful personalities join together to create a new environmental age. Is it possible that the future of the United States is being played out on the wild frontier?

« ... In "The Soul of America", Sylvie Brieu has provided the literary equivalent of the sunlight, the moisture, the scents and sounds that dominate and define the American West but natives like me often get too busy to appreciate. Her years of research included endless miles on dusty roads, going horseback through sacred Blackfeet lands, kayaking the Yellowstone River, and wearing out a few pairs of shoes. Now distilled into this fine book, Brieu’s fresh approach will give pause to Montanans and other Westerners... » - Scott McMillion, Editor in Chief, Montana Quarterly

Spirit Capture, unlike all too many of the proliferating collections of photographs of American Indians, is a rich, attractively designed book with several distinguishing features. First, it acts as a showcase for a judicious selection of images from the enormous archive of some 90,000 photographs held by the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and, as such, anticipated and paralleled the exhibition of the same title mounted during the spring of 1999 at the NMAI\u27s George Gustav Heye Center in Manhattan. The NMAI inevitably possesses large numbers of famous pictures, but this collection\u27s editor has avoided reproducing too many of them. Indeed, when such images as Charles M. Bell\u27s portrait of a seated Red Cloud, with a single feather in his hair, or George Trager\u27s sobering depiction of the mass grave of the massacred at Wounded Knee do appear, they serve a specific purpose, usually contrasting with a lesser known image that constitutes the subject of discussio...

In the past decades, cultural heritage stored at museums and
archives has been returned to source communities in various forms and
under diverse circumstances. This contribution to the Elements series
explores and discusses specifically the return of digital “ethnographic”
images to Indigenous and non-Indigenous people that share a
common recent history of coexistence and dispute over the same
territory. The author argues that the affective reception of what a given
archive labels as tangible and intangible heritage varies according to
each audience’s particular memory practices, historical experience and
way of relating to shared hegemonic notions of “whiteness” and
“indigeneity.”

Since its rediscovery in the 1970s, Edward S. Curtis’s project to exhaustively photograph and describe American Indian cultures in the early twentieth century has invited shifting critical assessments. Complicating earlier arguments that it represents a nostalgic and inauthentic drama of a “vanishing” race, in which Indians functioned merely as props, recent scholars seek to recover his sitters’ agency or contemporary artists’ acts of reclamation. This article con- tributes to those efforts, but by exploring the temporal ambiguities inherent in the notion – then common among ethnographic photographers – of “preserving” a people for future viewers. It thus examines a photograph that Curtis contributed in 1913 to the Modern Historic Records Association, a short-lived organization that intended to assemble time capsules and archival vaults for historians in the distant future. Focussing on this single photograph – “The Oath – Apsaroke” (1908) – also allows us to track the way that Curtis’s images could break free from his book project and resonate unpredictably across multiple domains, such as debates over the existence and meaning of Indian oaths.

Reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos "[N]ot only men, but all things and all beings pray to Him(Wakan Tanka-the Great Spirit) continually in differing ways."-Hehaka Sapa (Black Elk) A S CONTEMPORARY LIFE BECOMES MORE AND MORE FRAGMENTED AND UNSUSTAINABLE, many individuals are left perplexed and searching for more complete and sustainable models to understand themselves and their place in the world around them. It is the spiritual crisis brought about by a desacralized worldview that began in the modern West with the emergence of the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment that has created an existential and ontological void and uprooted the centrality of the sacred in the lives of the human collectivity. Very few would question or challenge the reality of climate change and the perilous situation of the present day, yet it is often overlooked that indigenous communities have in many cases been impacted the hardest by the environmental crisis and have been on the frontline of the struggle to protect the earth, as witnessed most recently by the events at the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The First Peoples of the world provide an integral vision as to how human beings can live in balance and harmony within themselves and simultaneously with the world around them. It needs to be remembered that it was not until relatively recently that the religion and shamanic traditions of the First Peoples-with all their diversity-were viewed to be one of the world's religions itself. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act, passed and put into law in 1978, allowed indigenous peoples to freely practice their traditional religion without fear of persecution. The timeless wisdom of the diverse cultures of the world speaks in a singular voice on the nature of the Absolute or Spirit, which is often referred to as the perennial philosophy (philosophia perennis). Joseph Epes Brown, renowned scholar of the Native American Traditions and World Religions, writes: 112 | PARABOLA FALL 2017 | 113 Book Reviews A sacred service, an open esoteric secretthe Act of Consecration of Man.

The term xo’pini indicates power in the Mandan culture, and it had strong social repercussions. Xo’pini power was increased by undertaking a number of actions that we may call “sacralised”, such as fasting, self-torture and honouring the sacred bundles. It decreased by performing secular activities, such as war, hunting, horse taming. During certain ceremonies husbands offered the elders the chance to have intercourse with their wives. In this case the xo’pini power went directly from the elders to the husbands and because of this weak elders could refuse to take advantage of the gift of the wives. This paper tries to reconstruct the logic underlying the exchange of xo’pini power.

Riferendosi alle pratiche rituali dei Crow connesse con il culto del Tabacco, Lowie, l'etnologo cui dobbiamo la maggior parte dei documenti su questo popolo, dichiara: "In short the Tobacco ceremony resembles not a unified plot but rather a chain of casually coupled episodes from the tribal repertory" (Lowie 1935: 296). Il culto del Tabacco (ma Lowie si guarda dal definirlo "culto" o "rito") sarebbe solo una somma disorganica di tratti comuni ad altre cerimonie, messi insieme in modo più o meno arbitrario. In effetti Lowie ha una considerazione simile praticamente di tutte le cerimonie dei Crow, compresa ad esempio la Sun Dance, e questa posizione è coerente con la sua valutazione della religione complessiva di questo popolo, che giudica poco sviluppata, confusa, incoerente. Nonostante l'affetto che indubbiamente provava per i Crow, Lowie non può fare a meno di considerare, sotto l'aspetto religioso, i Crow "carenti" rispetto ad altri popoli delle Pianure, compresi i vicini Hidatsa, un popolo affine da cui i Crow si sono separati nella metà del XVIII secolo e con il quale si considerano imparentati. Questo giudizio di incoerenza e di "carenza" appare assai ingeneroso verso i Crow e deriva, come abbiamo cercato di dimostrare altrove (Menicocci 2009) dal particolare carattere della cultura crow orientata prevalentemente dall'istituto della visione e non da predisposizioni particolari di questo popolo. In particolare, nel caso specifico del culto del Tabacco, pare davvero difficile immaginare che i Crow abbiano semplicemente affastellato a caso temi tratti dalla loro religione in un culto che aveva un valore rilevante nella loro cultura. Lo stesso Lowie riteneva che questo culto fosse centrale per i Crow ed anzi vi attribuisce un carattere distintivo nel fondare la loro cultura rispetto a tutti gli altri popoli, compresi i vicini Hidatsa. Ciascun popolo dell'area aveva un proprio culto distintivo e peculiare e quello dei Crow sarebbe stato proprio il culto del Tabacco.

Il saggio analizza due miti Crow che evocano, per superarla, una crisi cosmica: il livello celeste e quello degli uomini rischiano di perdere le distinzioni, con risultati caotici, poiché un essere celeste è stato rifiutato da una fanciulla umana. I miti consentono di portare luce su alcuni dei codici dei Crow e sulle relazioni tra questi codici. In particolare sono fondate la separazione tra il livello umano e quello celeste e gli usi matrimoniali che caratterizzano gli uomini. L'analisi dei miti mostra anche come i Crow abbiano deliberatamente scelto di configurare i limiti del loro cosmo come ambigui, mai perfettamente delineati, allo scopo verosimilmente di poter affidare all'istituto della visione il compito di poter giocare su queste ambiguità per risolvere le singole crisi individuali.