Gordon Lee Johnson writes primarily to tell the stories of today’s California Indian, but he is also interested in addressing the universal human condition. Johnson was SAR’s 2017 Indigenous Writer-in-Residence and was recently featured in a Los Angeles Times article on California Native American artists and the struggle to preserve their culture in the modern world.
Earlier this month, the American Anthropological Association hosted the 117th annual meeting in San Jose, California. For many, the gathering is a five-day whirlwind of presentations, panels, committee meetings, awards, and social gatherings. Among the 6,000 anthropologists and related professionals in attendance, there were hundreds of SAR alumni.
With both Native Hawaiian and Chinese ancestry, Maile Andrade comes from a family of people who used their hands: her mother was a painter and a composer, her father a boat builder. “I think being an artist is something that is a gift,” she says. Explore her artistic perspective and hear about the work she produced as SAR’s 2012 Eric and Barbara Dobkin Native Artist Fellow.
The base for Gerry Quotskuyva’s Gnarly Root Project is a four-foot section of raw cottonwood root that sat in his garage drying for over a decade. Large-form sculptures are new to the Sedona, AZ, artist who was featured recently in an Albuquerque Journal article.
Abou Farman (Anthropology, The New School) was recently at SAR as a participant in the advanced seminar “Death Culture in the 21st Century,” co-chaired by Shannon Lee Dawdy (University of Chicago) and Tamara E. Kneese (U. San Francisco). Knowing about my interest in Amazonia, Abou passed along information on a recent tragedy in Amazonian Peru that took place not far from the major city of Pucallpa.
On a recent Sunday afternoon at the Indian Arts Research Center, Pueblo weavers Aric Chopito (Zuni Pueblo) and Louie Garcia (Prio Manso Tiwa tribe of Guadalupe Pueblo) and embroiderer Isabel Gonzales (Jemez Pueblo) came together with director Brian Vallo for a guided tour of the collections. The tour followed a panel discussion with the participants for SAR members and the public about the history and revitalization of the Pueblo weaving tradition, as well as the physical, financial, and cultural struggles that these artists continue to face.
SAR scholars have pursued many unusual research projects over the decades, but one of the more memorable of recent years was that of Miriam Kolar (Weatherhead Resident Scholar, 2016-2017). Kolar, who received her doctorate from Stanford, is a prominent practitioner of the emerging specialty of archaeoacoustics, which brings together acoustic science and archaeology in an effort to understand how sound was used in used in prehistoric times to coordinate collective activity and, in some cases, to inspire awe during religious rituals.
