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Conference presentation
Indigenous Understandings: Fusing Landscape and Skyscape
Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (06/17/2021)
06/17/2021
DOI: 10.17077/006137
Abstract
The talk examines the relational ontology of the Native American Lenape Delaware people who form part of the larger Algonquian-speaking group of North America. It is sometimes said that in the past as people contemplated the night sky, they ended up telling stories that were meant to explain what they saw in the sky above. Certainly, there is ample proof for the existence such astral tales when viewed cross-culturally. What I discuss, however, is the way in which what the Lenape people saw and experienced on earth was projected onto the stars above along with the associated cosmovision and belief system they embraced. Instead of passive sky-watching, they were fusing together landscape and skyscape. In the case of the Lenape cosmovision discussed here I will show that it is intimately linked to the tenets of bear ceremonialism. It was a remarkable belief system that managed to weave together landscape and skyscape: what was happening on earth and experienced on a daily basis was exteriorized, given expression and importance by projecting aspects of this rich earthly belief system onto the massive sky screen above.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Indigenous Understandings: Fusing Landscape and Skyscape
- Creators
- Roslyn M Frank - University of Iowa, Spanish and Portuguese
- Resource Type
- Conference presentation
- Conference
- Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (06/17/2021)
- DOI
- 10.17077/006137
- Number of pages
- 40 slides
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2021 Roslyn M Frank
- Comment
- The talk was given at the virtual meeting of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), June 17, 2021, as part of the round-table session “The benefits of interdisciplinary comparative approaches to indigenous ethnoastronomy”
- Language
- English
- Date presented
- 06/17/2021
- Academic Unit
- Spanish and Portuguese
- Record Identifier
- 9984203755802771
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