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Showing posts from April 12, 2020

Origin Story: Plants in Native American Food Culture

These are additional digital humanities visualization tests for a project looking to explore the types of wild plants used by Native Nations in the Upper Midwest. Immediately after starting this project, I saw how the different ways of looking at information could change how I organized my thoughts about the subject itself.  Each color represents one of the major tribes of the region as represented by the dataset. This data was collection from the Native American Ethnobotany Database. The database was compiled through historical ethnographic and ethnobotanical field work publications.

Visualization Test

undefined: none Cherokee Cherokee: none Chippewa Chippewa: none Dakota Dakota: none Meskwaki Meskwaki: none Ojibwa Ojibwa: none Omaha Omaha: none Pawnee Pawnee: none Ponca Ponca: none Winnebago Winnebago: none Iroquois Iroquois: none Lakota Lakota: none Food Food: 2 Drug Drug: 2 Food Food: 2 Drug Drug: 1 Food Food: 1 Food Food: 1 Food Food: 2 Food Food: 3 Food Food: 1 Food Food: 1 Food Food: 1 Drug Drug: 2 Drug Drug: 1

There Is A Season

When I was reading Tim Frandy’s dissertation I couldn’t help but hear this song over and over in my head. It might be ironic that this to me feels like an Indigenous perspective but actually comes directly from lines in the Bible. Given some of the complex interactions with religious missionaries, in particular Jesuits, and Native Americans, this might not be the best choice of a song to represent their world view, but creep in it did. This version is the first recorded version of Turn! Turn! Turn! This folk song has many renditions, and this one doesn’t sound like the most iconic one from The Byrds. I included this version in my response because the Limeliters was how Lou Gotlieb made the money that he would later use to start and maintain his Morningstar commune outside of San Francisco.  This song and Tim's writing and again when reading Mountain Wolf Woman reminded me of the first seasonal round I ever saw. When I saw this cyclic, seasonal representation of food and li...