The site’s content is targeted to both Native and non-Native audiences, NAE Network said in a press release. Video categories include: news, government, sports, health and wellness, lifestyle, arts and entertainment, history and biography, culture and tradition.

Native American Entertainment Network is an empowering resource for all Indigenous Peoples of North America,” said Tlingit storyteller, performer and NAE Network Board Member Gene Tagaban in the release. “It provides a means for our People to tell their stories and come together through the arts — strengthening a sense of pride and honor in who we are historically and moving forward into the future.”

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For all I know, people may have known the information in Ghosts of Machu Picchu for decades. Whether the info is new or old, it does paint a coherent picture of Machu Picchu’s story.

Who and what

According to Ghosts of Machu Picchu, Pachacuti, the founder of the Inca empire and first emperor, ordered Machu Picchu built. (It took so long that it couldn’t have been anyone else.) The place served as a royal estate, a peaceful retreat for worship and rest with the royal staff.

“An actor portrays the imposing emperor-warrior Pachacuti.”

Why and where

Ghosts of Machu Picchu endorses the “sacred landscape” theory. The Inca derived power by being physically connected to mountains, which they considered deities. Machu Picchu was perfectly situated for this belief. It had “views to sacred peaks, proximity to holy water, and alignment with four powerful mountain gods.”

That made it a “formidable symbol of Inca power,” a “spectacular boast” by Pachacuti about how great and godlike he was. Every time the Inca looked up, they could see the living deity in his divine location.

How

The famous stonework isn’t necessarily a mystery. The Inca used a granite quarry on the site. They laboriously pounded the stones into shape with other stones. They rolled them into place with logs, then pounded off the rough edges until they were smooth.

What’s interesting is the complex engineering needed to make the site usable. Before anything else, the Inca built terraces to shore up the mountain and hold it in place. They put layers of gravel and rock in the terraces and under the site itself to draw off the 76 inches of rainfall per year.

Fifty to 60% of their effort went into this underground drainage system. Without it, the soil under Machu Picchu would’ve turned to mud and slid away.

“Wright’s excavation revealed a vast underground drainage system with layers of topsoil, sandy gravel, and granite waste rock.”

What happened

The short-lived Inca empire was devastated by disease and civil war. People drifted away from Machu Picchu and didn’t return because they were occupied elsewhere. All but the royal servants forgot about it. When the Spanish came, it basically had been abandoned, so they never learned about it. It remained untouched until Hiram Bingham rediscovered it in 1911.

An interesting note about Bingham: He thought he had found Vilcabamba, the undiscovered last stronghold of the Inca. Why? Because he thought 4/5 of the skeletons he found were women. Which meant they were the Virgins of the Sun who would’ve accompanied the emperor to his final redoubt.

One problem: Later researchers reexamined the skeletons and learned many of them were men. Bingham had assumed they were women because they were small. But all Peruvian Indians are small compared to Europeans. Oops.

Meanwhile, no one has ever located Vilcabamba. It remains a real Inca mystery.

Rob’s mini-review

Ghosts of Machu Picchu effectively uses recreations and computer graphics to enhance its story. It answers all the questions it sets out to answer. It’s one of the better Native-themed documentaries I’ve seen, and well worth your time.

For more on the subject, see Ben Powless at Machu Picchu, Review of 4Real Peru, and Simpsons Visit Machu Picchu.

Below:  ”While impressive today, Machu Picchu would have been an even greater site to behold in the late 1400s, with gleaming white granite walls topped by golden-colored thatched roofs.”

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The Legend of Tillamook’s Gold
By Elliot V. Kotek

Punctuated with a fine performance by a pretty youngster in Suzanne Marie Doyon (as Julie) and by veteran thesp Max Gail as Grandpa, this flick succeeds by not patronizing its audience, and by celebrating the central role that extended families play in small towns. That the film does not strive for Disney perfection is also admirable.

Set on the shoreline of the serene state of Oregon, Tillamook unravels over one summer vacation. Julie, who narrates the adventure, relocates with her financially troubled family from Los Angeles to Manzanita and into her Uncle Jimmy’s modest home. Surrounded by sparring parents, a storytelling grandfather and a college-bound sister whose life consists of a constant game of tonsil hockey with her immature boyfriend, Julie spends her summer sauntering along the oceanfront without direction until she stumbles across a Spanish gold coin. The tale of the Tillamook Treasure is local lore, the legend being that the finder of the loot is not to be a simple explorer but an individual brave enough to not be afraid of the ghost of the slave buried with the booty.

Inspired by her find, Julie is soon entranced by an imposing elk that appears intermittently, and she finds herself following bird feathers, mystical runes, fate-filled voices and her innate Native American feelings into the mountains and into a collection of real and dream-like adventures. Comment: Kind of funny how the film’s producers went from a dark poster to a light one. The new poster is so suffused with sunshine that Suzanne Marie Doyon has changed from a brunette into a blond.

I don’t think either poster is great, but at least the old one hints at something dark and interesting. The new one screams “feel-good Afterschool Special with a heartwarming message.”

Anyway, I haven’t seen this movie. Sounds like it includes heavy doses of Indian mysticism and a wise elder (Floyd Red Crow Westerman). I’ll have to see it someday.

For more on the subject, see The Best Indian Movies.

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B. W. Clough, for instance, drolly recounts “the Gazorcher’s” predicament of handing over “the goggles” to his Generation X-er daughter. Michael A. Stackpole in “Peer Review,” however, takes a turn toward serious action-adventure as he treats one crime fighter’s apparent defection into lawbreaking and his censure by fellow superheroes. In “Reflected Glory,” Paul Kupperberg soberly demonstrates how today’s world would really treat a superhero when a PR man slyly uses a superhuman vigilante to further his own career. These and the other stories well may satisfy both fans and foes of the comic-book scene. –Carl Hays

Super Reader, August 3, 2007
By Blue Tyson

Varley admits in his introduction that is is not really very familiar with this sort of thing, and it would appear to show in the result. The story average is 3.28.

So, a lot of average/ordinary, and a small number that flat out really don’t belong.

Still, it is by no means bad, and some good stories, just average taken as a whole, and without the shouldn’t have been there stuff, would have gotten a 3.5.The three Native-themed stories with each story’s preamble, my description, and Blue Tyson’s ratings (in italics):

Four Tales of Many Names

by Gerald Hausman.

The concept of the super heroic figure is neither uniquely American nor exclusive to this century. Most cultures are rife with legends of individuals who have special gifts. An indian elder tells children the legends of Hawk Storm, Fire Storm, Water Spider, and Snake’s Medicine. 3 of 5

The Long Crawl of Hugh Glass

by Roger Zelazny.

Amazing people have been accomplishing superhuman feats throughout history. It is possible, as in the factual case of Hugh Glass, that the most astounding power is the will to survive.

In 1823 an injured hunter named Hugh Glass crawled over 100 miles through the wilderness from the Grand Valley to the Missouri River.An Army scout mauled by a bear dreams of crawling through hostile territory to locate friendly indians. 3 of 5

Basic Training by Jerry Bingham.
Some people live their entire lives as though waiting for one special moment.An indian youth must climb a mesa as a rite of passage. He later uses his knowledge of heights to rescue people from a burning skyscraper. 2.5 of 5

Thoughts on indian superheroes

On the one hand, one could argue that these stories don’t belong in a volume titled Superheroes. The first protagonist is borderline super heroic; if he counts, you could say any mythological character is a superhero. The third protagonist is merely heroic, not super heroic. The second protagonist is heroic only if you call surviving an act of “heroism.”

On the other hand, it’s nice to see some recognition that indians can be heroes. That if Americans are going to mythologize Uncle Sam, John Wayne, Paul Bunyan, Daniel Boone, Johnny Appleseed, and George Washington (for telling no lies), they should mythologize indians too. Not merely as noble savages or resistance fighters–e.g., Crazy Horse or Geronimo–but as actual heroes. So it’s fitting that two of the 25 stories star indians.

Even the Hugh Glass story, a cowboy-style adventure, incorporates indians into the mythology. To survive, Glass must test himself against the harsh land and its inhabitants. As with Jackson’s Frontier Thesis, we’ve defined ourselves as a nation by our interactions with indians.

Unfortunately, Tyson’s three-star rating for the book is reasonable. I agree with him that only five or so stories deserve a 4 or 4.5 of 5. Rob’s rating on the usual 10-point scale: 7.0 of 10.

For more on the subject, see Why Write About Superheroes?

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“Seeing Red” takes us back to a different time, the 19th century, and examines how anger was communicated as a force for social change by three different American indian writers: S. Alice Callahan, E. Pauline Johnson, and Sarah Winnemucca.

Callahan, Johnson and Winnemucca used a prevailing literary genre of the time–sentimentality. Though the frank expression of emotion was what moved sentimental literature, how much room did these three writers, as Native women, have to articulate their anger about what was being threatened and destroyed, and how successful were they? Carpenter, an English and native american studies professor asks this question. She also raises some thought-provoking questions about white Americans’ appropriation of indian-ness or indian causes as a way to express their own anger.Garrigues’s conclusion:[B]y examining the early possibilities for expression of anger in Native literature, Carpenter recognizes that these expressions were the roots for Joy Harjo’s “we have just begun to touch the dazzling whirlwind of our anger” and lay the groundwork for Sherman Alexie’s mix of anger and humor.

By shining the light on the anger that was, with varying degrees of success, expressed by these early American indian writers, Carpenter helps us look at what part anger plays as an agent of change in the contemporary world, in Native discourse and resistance, and in our daily lives.Comment:  ”White Americans’ appropriation of indian-ness or indian causes as a way to express their own anger”…hey, I resemble that!

For more on the subject, see The Best Indian Books.

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When Dee Brown wrote his book “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” he could not have known that it would become a classic.

This year an illustrated 40th anniversary edition was published in hardback. It is a beautiful book and the photos add so much to the stories that made the book great. There are photos of a young Black Elk, Sitting Bull, Hollow Horn Bear, Short Bull and Kicking Bear.

The 543 page book is truly a collector’s treasure.Comment:  I was in a bookstore Monday and I saw this new edition of Bury My Heart. I only glanced at it, but it looks great. It would make a fine present for anyone who’s interested in history but doesn’t know much about Indians. And it goes without saying that readers of this blog should have it in their libraries.

For more on the subject, see Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee:  The Movie.

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On Wednesday [12/2/09] on the station TVO our second graphic novel (nominated as one of the BEST in graphic novels for kids in Canada) was featured on a program called Empire of the Word, Episode 2.

The program is about literacy and features the Honorable James T. Battleman, former Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, and how he learned to read from comic books that he found at the local garbage dump. At the end of the program Battleman is being read to by an First Nations youth from a northern community. The last 3 minutes of the program is where our graphic novel is featured.

Meegwetch,
Chad

Comment:  I wasn’t sure what TVO was, but according to Wikipedia:

TVOntario, often referred to only as TVO (call signs: CICA, CICE, CICO), is a publicly-funded, educational English language television station and media organization in the Canadian province of Ontario. It is a crown corporation owned by the Government of Ontario. For more on the subject, see Comic Books Featuring Indians.

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By Juley Harvey Trail-Gazette

Red Feather Woman, along with her veteran musician/producer husband, Doug Haywood, who has toured with Jackson Browne, told the Christmas story in song and words of the traveling warrior, Starman. He traveled “to find the medicine of old–this is how the story is told.”

Starman learned from an elder how to travel to different parts of the world by astral projection. He gathered herbs needed for healing in the villages. One night in winter, he saw the brightest star he’d ever seen.

“It seemed to glow brighter and brighter. Giant beams engulfed him,” Red Feather Woman said.

He knew he was going on a journey and he was instantly in the desert. He followed a road into a strange village with square houses. The people wore long, flowing garments and the men had hair all over their faces. Starman sensed something was happening, but didn’t know what. He was drawn to the back of a peaceful crowd, where a “beautiful woman held a little baby in her arms. There was a glow around the mother and the child.” Starman remembered a story about when special children and chiefs are born–they have a glow.

Before he left on his journey, he had found an eagle feather, which he placed in his belt. When he noticed people were presenting gifts to the child, he took out his eagle feather and laid it before the infant. It was a simple gift among the gold and incense, but Starman knew the power of the eagle feather. It was the most important gift he could give. The mother looked at Starman and smiled. She knew it was a special gift.Comment:  Nice story. It would make a great children’s book, comic book, cartoon, or video.

Without invalidating anything in the Bible, it adds a multicultural layer of complexity. Between the scenes of the Nativity story, a Native mystic leaves baby Jesus a gift.

This implies that Native religions recognize the holiness of Jesus, and that God recognizes Natives as part of his creation. Thus, any Christians who go killing or conquering indigenous people are even more clearly in the wrong.

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The report, titled New Media, Technology and Internet Use in Indian Country: Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses and released on Nov. 19, includes a survey of Native American technology use normed against other national surveys as well as case studies of six successful projects, efforts to close the digital divide on tribal lands.

Native Americans live in communities where broadband often is unavailable or unaffordable, a press release announcing the report stated. Adding to the problem is a lack of data on Native broadband adoption, availability and connectivity.

Loris Taylor, executive director of Native Public Media, said in the release, “I’ve visited Native communities where Internet black holes exist because broadband deployment either ignored them or simply went around them. For the first time in history, we have solid broadband data that underscores the fact that Native Americans are using the Internet when they have access to it and building their own tribal centric broadband highways when no one else will.”

To view the report, click here.

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The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
by Sherman Alexie
(112)

Buy new: $15.00 $10.20
165 used & new from $5.49

(Ranking is updated hourly. Visit the Bestsellers in Native American list for authoritative information on this product’s current rank.)

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