Jay Miller

Old Religion Among The Delawares: The Gamwing (Big House Rite)

Contrary to Anthony F. C. Wallaces famous argument that the Gamwing (Big House rite) was an 1805 new religion among the Delawares, a review of his sources, native testimony, and continuing cultural import suggests instead that it was their ancient integrative ritual, held to mark the conjunction of men and women, hunt and crops, and Creator and creation as a world renewal ceremony of universal thanksgiving.

The Gift of birds : featherwork of native South American peoples

Presenting 10 essays by experts in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and ornithology on the native peoples of South America and their use of birds, this volume offers a fascinating view into the lives and customs of some of the indigenous peoples living in the rainforest and coastal areas of Brazil and Peru. This book includes color photographs of South American natives in festival and ritual celebrations and everyday activities, along with spectacular objects of featherwork, textiles, and pottery. University Museum Monograph, 75

Tsimshian Ethno-Ethnohistory: A "Real" Indigenous Chronology

Tsimshian of the North Pacific Coast of Canada and Alaska insist that adawx, the term for one of their densely cultural epics, be translated as history. Each saga is firmly based in their matrilineal social structure (of houses, clusters, towns, and clans) and intensely both private and personal within these kinship networks. Despite massive depopulation and crushing outside pressures, Tsimshians have long committed themselves to perpetuating these histories because of their guarantees of renewing immortality, providing a sequence of at least fifteen episodic overlays across ten thousand years.

Back to basics : Chiefdoms in Puget Sound. Commentary

An exchange of articles about the native peoples in the present vicinity of Seattle has failed to consider the significant factors of terrain, of elite families, and of religion as the all-pervasive institution. The fluid structuring of authority among sigers (task leaders) made possible increasingly more complex mobilizations of power within this culture. In all, the overemphasis on individuality in Eurocentric academia needs to integrate the group orientation more prevalent in Native America.

Keres: Engendered Key to the Pueblo Puzzle

Almost a thousand years separate the flourishing of Chaco Canyon from the Keresan Pueblos of today, yet their distinctive and regionally overwhelming native priesthoods provide a direct link between these people and their place, as still confirmed by their neighbors. The carefully preplanned construction of Chacoan towns in the open—away from cliffs, walls, caverns, and pinnacles—further emphasizes their human-defined shapes as D or O quadrants linked by roads, beacons, and pilgrimages. After a long “engendering” development during the Archaic period, these priesthoods became enshrined by the building of more than a dozen greathouses at Chaco, with others in outlying “clan” districts, that continue to benefit all of the Pueblos to this day.

The 1806 purge among the Indiana Delaware: sorcery, gender, boundaries, and legitimacy

In 1805-6, along the White River of Indiana, a Monsi Delaware woman made a brief appearance as a prophet, preaching a revitalized « new religion » among the Delaware. In the climax that followed her resignation, several Delawares were executed on the charge of witchcraft. The lives of four of the victims, one woman and three men, are sufficiently described in the records to indicate that their offenses included collusion with Moravians and other missionaries and with U.S. government officials. Comparing native memories of the events with Moravian contemporary accounts reveals that the punishment did indeed fit the crimes. These sanctioned killings defined the boundaries of a renewed Delaware tribe by removing deviants who overstepped thes identified limits.