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  • Native America

    Rhode Island

  • #2
    I thoroughly enjoyed that Charlie.
    Bruce
    In life there are losers and finders. Which one are you?

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    • #3
      Thanks Charlie, This fall I will be watching for "Native America" on PBS.
      Michigan Yooper
      If You Don’t Stand for Something, You’ll Fall for Anything

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      • #4
        I can’t wait till this comes out .
        Charlie I need another 100 years of youth to see and do just 1/2 the things I have interests in .
        I am pretty sure I will find a bucket list on this show .

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        • #5
          I am so looking forward to this in the fall. I have put off doing an ancestor DNA test for fear I'd find not one drop of NA blood in my veins! Lol
          i would be so disappointed.
          Child of the tides

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          • 2ndoldman
            2ndoldman commented
            Editing a comment
            Deb, your inbox is full.

          • Kentucky point
            Kentucky point commented
            Editing a comment
            I forget who was it in my family, but my great grandmother (I could be wrong) was 100% Apache. That would be cool to confirm!

        • #6
          What a wonderful production! If you missed Part 1, it can be viewed at the link until 11/21. You may need to set it to your own local PBS affiliate. It was especially gratifying to me to see Hopi myth taken seriously, as I have embraced their vision of history for much of my life now. Focusing on Chaco Canyon, visualizing the migration of the clans through animation, grounding this continent in that broader history that so few really appreciate. Bravo. I look forward to future episodes.

          Season 2 of Native America is a groundbreaking portrait of contemporary Indian Country. Building on the success of the first season, this four-part Native…



          About an hour after the show concluded, I remembered something from many years ago, and struggled to put word to those memories:

          My Hopi Dream

          I had a dream of walking in a long column of people, along the edge of canyons. For ages and ages. Migrations, moving from home to home, living our imperative, leading to a final home, land claimed for our creator. For long ages we walked, the generations walked.

          I read the Book of the Hopi. It was the summer and fall of 1969. I learned a different history of this place. I was a student of Western civilization, and this was not what I had been taught. But it was truer then what I had been taught. It was the story of mankind, it was the memory of our time on Earth, and walking through the desert sky.

          I knew the USA to be a transitory story, the younger brothers tale. Fast cars and asphalt, electric wires through the sky, presidents and tv screens, buying things and things and more things, the Jones and Dow Jones, and heros made of money.

          But I remembered that other time and place, stone homes in a desert canyon's night. And I knew it to be truer, men living as they should. I had walked those red rock places, heard the Pleiades singing in our night eyes, long columns walking from home to home, living that imperative, remembering a different history, trying to keep the balance, our lives a part of myth. Before younger brother arrived crazy and forgetting.

          I visited those stone homes in the canyon walls and mesa tops. I remembered the dream as the memory of my friends and I. Hopi on our journey home.

          The generations past, that other world. I was visiting only, in this place called USA.

          Passing through this crazieness, protective of my earlier homes, time capsules in the red rock. In that bigger time, that longer story.

          The Hopi and the Kogi guard those memories now, while the younger brother crazies through his time. Presidents and tv screens, red rock homes sleeping beneath the Pleiades.

          A fleeting thing, this USA.

          Long columns of people on the canyon rim, going home in that other place. That bigger time, that longer story, this ever proper myth.




          Rhode Island

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          • #7
            I watched it, and found it entertaining.
            "The education of a man is never completed until he dies." Robert E. Lee

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            • #8
              I've seen the first two episodes of this series. The first episode was just barely OK. The 2nd episode I did not like at all. To be more specific, I disliked it for several reasons. I won't be watching it again.There were enough errors in it to make me want to throw bricks at the TV. It is unworthy of being a PBS production.

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              • Andy W.
                Andy W. commented
                Editing a comment
                Agree..yawn!

            • #9
              I can think of one thing I've seen on TV a lot in the past few years that has made humming bricks very tempting.
              Rhode Island

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              • #10
                I agree with Joe. I was disappointed in the program.
                Michigan Yooper
                If You Don’t Stand for Something, You’ll Fall for Anything

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                • #11
                  I haven't been disappointed at all. I actually had the opportunity of viewing part one before its TV premier, at a special event hosted by our state university. And in the company of two friends from the Hopi nation, whom I had not seen in years, and who were here to attend a symposium. We enjoyed it, and the discussion that followed. Both were pleased by the manner in which their oral history was presented. When I saw that first episode again on TV, it brought home a flood of memories that have connected me to that region for some 50 years now. I still hope I can return there one last time, and introduce my wife to that place and people.

                  The entire series emphasizes oral histories. I am looking forward to the remaining chapters. Of course, the series is being presented as an opportunity to give voice to native peoples, and has very little to do with artifacts. Even the archaeology is minimal compared to most treatments, with greater emphasis on oral traditions, particularly in the animated portions of the episodes. I'm a huge fan of oral histories, dating back to my introduction to several clan histories of the Hopi. It was also nice to see native communities open access to such things as a Hopi pilgrimage to a cave at Chaco Canyon, and an investiture ceremony involving a tribe on Vancouver Island. In the case of the Hopi pilgrimage, they had never allowed outside filming of that cave ceremony before. And they allow no filming within their villages; that has been the case for several generations now. The series is not typical, that's for sure.
                  Rhode Island

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                  • #12
                    Regarding CMD's impression of the series: I am not surprised that he gives it a "thumbs up" I am happy that he finds value in it. And there is, indeed, much of value in what I saw. On the other hand, generally, I find it lacking regarding certain facts and interpretation of some facts and a piece that seems to promote a viewpoint rather than an objective presentation of facts with other views. And I say that with my very full appreciation for oral "history" as full of facts and errors that oral histories can be whether it is from the days of my great grandfathers or events further in their past as word of mouth can be handed down. When history is dramatized and seems to present as "facts" whether about Native Americans or any other ethic group we must analyze them very objectively because it seems whether it be PBS or another group the presenters often have an "agenda". It is an agenda that I saw. Perhaps others saw, it as did CMD. I could but won't go into explicit detail about the problems I saw. Either you saw them or you did not.

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                    • Kentucky point
                      Kentucky point commented
                      Editing a comment
                      They always have a hidden message. Not sure what it is yet.

                    • flintguy
                      flintguy commented
                      Editing a comment
                      I have to say I have been disappointed as well for similar reasons. While I value oral history, and do believe there are truths that could be taken from the stories , I would prefer a more scientific approach being taken with the series.

                  • #13
                    I am not a big expert into most Native American histories. I know very little about western nations and little about northern nations. I don't know if I saw any errors, because I wouldn't know what to look for. That being said, I would have liked to have seen less about South American cultures, and more about American cultures. Granted, the "Americas" are reference to both North and South America, but if you are going to name the show after America, make sure it's about America! Secondly, I would like to learn about Native American lifestyle than Solar timekeeping and sound projection from and underground tunnel. Tell us how they lived, how they hunted, how they farmed, etc. Not the other stuff.

                    This being said, I liked the second episode.

                    To me, this series is a good excuse to sit back and watch some TV for an hour and stop working on rocks, lol!
                    "The education of a man is never completed until he dies." Robert E. Lee

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                    • Tam
                      Tam commented
                      Editing a comment
                      I studied that Ethan and hope as you do to see
                      More of the plains people to the SE

                  • #14
                    Different thoughts . I think most of us are such intense scientifically inclined people in our hobbies, studies and some careers that this was more legend .
                    My point is and even in a college over here in Hawaii I had to write a letter to get my niece out of a legend / story telling course . She wanted something she could use in life . This is us in some ways .
                    I do feel that the sensitivity of their nature beliefs / gods and spirts were the foucus . 20 % was factual and we are extremly factual and please correct me if I am wrong hench the yawning .
                    What I am going to do is take some very tiny oyster shells and make some of my own beads with a quartzite hammer stone I have here in s Hawaii . ( I can see the grins )
                    my 2 cents !!

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                    • Andy W.
                      Andy W. commented
                      Editing a comment
                      You're right. I'm just not into mythology.

                    • Kentucky point
                      Kentucky point commented
                      Editing a comment
                      A cool idea would for them to have Ron, or Jay come onto the show to make primitive things. I think the ratings would go up. :-)

                  • #15
                    The United States is embedded in a larger history, encompassing the continent, and the hemisphere. And we all here know by now it extends back many thousands of years. We are just a fairly recent, really, a very recent, polity, occupying a significant % of the land area in North Ammerica. Because there is a remnant of a Puebloan culture still living in Az and NM, a fragment of that larger history continues to the present day. It's not that the so-called Anasazi were a formal part of any Mesoamerican civilized polity, but they were a part of that history, in terms of trade, and shared spiritual beliefs. You can understand history from the point of view of the conquerors, the history I was taught as a child, or the point of view of the conquered or suppressed, coming to vogue in the 70's. And numerous other perspectives told as histories. You can understand our own nation has its roots in our colonial European past, but one can also know and appreciate it is also the most recent dominant culture in a land with many stories. Whether monumental architecture, and imperial polities in Andes or Valley of Mexico, or simply small bands of humans, all are histories largely lost to Westerners in general, and Americans in particular, but it's a history still ongoing in the clash of civilization and Amazonia, for example, and simply understanding that my own time and place is part of a still evolving movement of people and impact that "began" in 1492 grounds me in a larger story. I enjoy having that perspective, regardless of how it plays with archaeologists or prehistorians.

                    History can't be changed. It's in the past tense forever. But, it can be told in many different ways. That's history as written. It can change. It's the reason things from 100 years ago can appear "quaint". We see the past from the perspective of our present, not theirs. Times change, and we see the past different then our forebears did, our parents.

                    So, seeing America as the latest chapter in a hemisphere wide history, with the ruins of Chaco Canyon from another age that was millennium long, yet the Hopi, and Zuni, and people of Acoma the sky city, and the Rio Grande pueblos, like an endangered species, still living remainders of a frontier zone on the periphery of Mesoamerica, that history longer then our own. It's still alive. Oraibi in Az., and Acoma, in NM, both 1000 years old. But of course there are other perspectives and people embrace the history they are most comfortable with. I like to ground my life in a mythic component. I admit it, and, after all, I have only myself to please. As an example, when a crow, or crows, show up in a field I'm walking, and carry on when I find something, I talk to them and thank them, because in the worldview of the local First Nation peoples, the crow is the creator's messenger. Thanking the crows harms nobody, is no threat to anyone else's world view, even though my wife thinks I'm nuts, but I just prefer to adopt that approach. It adds something perhaps, that is otherwise missing, having been raised in a belief system I walked away from at a young age. These are things that are obviously personal, and I don't really talk much about on an artifact forum. But, again, it enriches my life to a degree. It's like making an existential leap of faith. It did begin many years ago, with a chance encounter with the Hopi, so no surprise at all if the first chapter of this PBS series had a "full circle" effect on me.

                    Maybe if I looked at the series from other perspectives, I would be disappointed? I'm not sure. I know I have no problem at all with opinions that find fault with the series. I should expect diversity of opinion, and it's not my intention to say "please confirm my whole approach to all this". Indeed, maybe I make a mistake trying to describe my approach at all. Maybe I should leave what is too personal out of any description. It's only a TV series. As far as presentations of history are concerned, I can find more fault with a show like "Ancient Aliens", which makes effort to diminish humans from their own accomplishments. That show has been running for years now, and has actually convinced many that it is truthful history. To some degree, that distresses me, but then again, in a Post Truth landscape, these perspectives enjoy a day in the sun. And perhaps I am guilty of also believing a delusion-based perspective. But, if it harms nobody else, and provides a sense of being part of a greater history, well, again, I have nobody else to please, so it's of no general import beyond myself. So, to each his or her own.

                    Acoma, the Sky City, 1000 years old, and part of that longer history, that larger history, and reminding me of how much more youthful our own history and imprint on the continent is....

                    Click image for larger version  Name:	E118FF29-32AD-4400-B149-E6F185B7A515-3900-000002762ED53BF6.jpeg Views:	1 Size:	209.9 KB ID:	330439
                    Last edited by CMD; 11-05-2018, 10:04 AM.
                    Rhode Island

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