The 21st Century Matriarch

There are 16 eBooks in this week’s feature – authored by James. W. VanStone from 1979-1998 while he was Curator of North American Archeology and Ethnology for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. These books have many illustrations – drawings and photographs – and are well worth browsing to glimpse of the cultures of the northern part of North America. VanStone’s research in the area started in the 1950s and he was a prolific scholar throughout his career. Enjoy the sample images (click on the image to see a larger version)…but there are so many more in the books themselves – all freely available on Internet Archive.

Material culture of the Davis Inlet and Barren Ground Naskapi: the William Duncan Strong collection -1985

The Bruce collection of Eskimo material culture from Kotzebue Sound, Alaska -1980

An ethnographic collection from northern Sakhalin Island -1985

Ingalik contact ecology : an ethnohistory of the lower-middle Yukon, 1790-1935 -1979

The Simms collection of Southwestern Chippewa material culture -1988

The Speck collection of Montagnais material culture from the Lower St. Lawrence Drainage, Quebec -1982

The Isaac Cowie collection of Plains Cree material culture from Central Alberta -1991

Nunivak Island Eskimo (Yuit) technology and material culture -1988

Ethnographic collections from the Assiniboine and Yanktonai Sioux in the Field Museum of Natural History -1996

An ethnographic collection from the Northern Ute in the Field Museum of Natural History -1997

Mesquakie (Fox) material culture : the William Jones and Frederick Starr collections -1998

The Cherry collection of Deg Hit'an (Ingalik) material culture -1996

Material culture of the Chilcotin Athapaskans of west central British Columbia -1993

Indian trade ornaments in the collections of Field Museum of Natural History -1989

Material culture of the Blackfoot (Blood) Indians of southern Alberta -1992

The Noice collection of Copper Inuit material culture -1994

Not all the books on Internet Archive are old; sometimes the copyright holder give permission to make a book available with provisos like Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International – which is the case for the book I am featuring in this post

Arctic Journeys, Ancient Memories: The Sculpture of Abraham Anghik Ruben

The book is the catalog of an exhibition that was at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian from October 4, 2012-January 2, 2013. I wish I would have seen the exhibit in 2013, but finding the catalog and discovering the artist now is the next best thing! I picked 4 favorites from the images in the catalog which is well worth browsing.

The sculptures can be enjoyed visually but the backstories add to their meaning. There is an additional one that I noticed on the sculptor’s website that stands out: The Last Goodbye which depicts the sculptor’s lived experience with children being sent away to residential schools in Canada and the US. There are stories in the news recently about what happened in both countries; there are people still alive that lived it. The sculptor is only a couple of years older than me. The first step is acknowledging what happened.

Look at the sculptor’s web site and Wikipedia entry for more info.