Jamez Barrett 🜃 ॐ Ⓐ<p>Harry Smith lecture on Native American cosmos.</p><p>Harry Smith describes two Native American ceremonies he witnessed in the early 1940's in the Pacific Northwest. Interspersed with his account of the ceremonies, he discusses tangentially various related topics, including Native American health before the European invasion, Native American sign language, the migration of symbols, misogyny in anthropological accounts of Native American peoples, creation myths, and cosmology.</p><p>"All I can give is a description of what happened, like for example all of the motions of people going around crawling on the floor... They were naked except for a wolf mask and this of course as I said happened after you'd been up for some- thing like 48 hours listening to incessant drumming that increased the adrenochrome in the blood to such a point that everything glistened, sort of. And just as the sun came down through the smoke (because the entire house of course was full of smoke from the fires), it made beams that shot down onto one of the actual fires that was there and very old women came in. Everybody that comes into this type of house comes in backwards. This is explained in several ways: to avoid stepping on your shadow, to go into a form of reversal... They had very old women with [skulls-I mean, rattles shaped] like skulls, but with the mouth very stylized [twisted]. Anyway, they sang some song while the whistles blew on the roof, then while all this was going on there was a certain hanging made of mountain goat wool... dropped, and there was a person there. . . with their tongue sort of down over the front of their mouth, and a string with knots in it run through the tongue, blood had run down over the blanket he was wearing. . . he had a cedar bark headdress on. There was a certain type of totem-pole that's set in the wall: a house-post... and a man on the platform, he stood there for the entire (I presume) four days. I don't know, he didn't move." - Harry Smith (1980)</p><p><a href="https://archive.org/details/naropa_harry_smith_lecture_on_native" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">archive.org/details/naropa_har</span><span class="invisible">ry_smith_lecture_on_native</span></a></p><p><a href="https://c.im/tags/Indigenous" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Indigenous</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/cosmology" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>cosmology</span></a></p>