Eight years was but four days and four nights when the world was new. It was while such days and nights continued that men were led out, in the night-shine of the World of Seeing. For even when they saw the great star, they thought it the Sun-father himself, it so burned their eye-balls. Men and creatures were more alike then than now…Continue to Zuni Men of the Early Times →
Bristling with anger, humor and a deep sadness, Chris Eyre’s second feature “Skins” is a torrent of moods, feelings and scorched fury. In examining a struggle of acceptance and reconciliation between two brothers, the film acknowledges a culture whose scarred past and uncertain future remain inchoate and incomplete. Continue to Eyre returns with “Skins” →
One of the wittiest and shrewdest of the Sioux chiefs was American Horse, who succeeded to the name and position of an uncle, killed in the battle of Slim Buttes in 1876. The younger American Horse was born a little before the encroachments of the whites upon the Sioux country became serious and their methods aggressive, and his early manhood brought him into that most trying and critical period of our history. Continue to American Horse (Oglalla Sioux) →
A great deal about Cornstalk, a Shawnee chief, has been written, referring to him by at least three names. He was born ca 1720 in one of the Shawnee villages in the drainage of the upper Susquehanna River. Cornstalk is said to have been born in western Pennsylvania at least by 1720, but some sources say 1708, 1710, or 1715 and his current grave marker says 1727. He moved with his family when he was about 10 to Ohio.
At that time, the Shawnees were undergoing another of their migrations and his family moved to Ohio River country on it’s Scioto River tributary, in what is now southern Ohio.
By the end of the French and Indian War in the early 1760’s, he had become a principal leader of the Tribe and remained so until he was murdered by whites at Fort Randolph (Point Pleasant, now West Virginia) in 1777.
The Beothuk were the aboriginal inhabitants of Newfoundland when Europeans arrived, and were the first indigenous people the Europeans encountered in North America. They are now an extinct tribe, at least as a culture. Recently, dna has been found in Iceland that indicates, they may, indeed, have some descendants still living.
Long, long ago, before our fathers or grand-fathers were born, before the white people knew anything about the western half of North America, the Indians who told these stories lived on the Western plains.
To the west of their home rose high mountains, black with pine-trees on their lower slopes and capped with snow, but their tents were pitched on the rolling prairie. For a little while in spring this prairie was green and dotted with flowers, but for most of the year it stretched away brown and bare, north, east, and south, farther than one could see.