Henry S. Sharp's Loon: Memory, Meaning, and Reality in a Northern Dene PDF

By Henry S. Sharp

ISBN-10: 0803202385

ISBN-13: 9780803202382

ISBN-10: 0803242921

ISBN-13: 9780803242920

In August 1975 at Foxholm Lake at the reserve of the Chipewyan, a Northern Dene humans, within the Northwest Territories of Canada, the anthropologist Henry S. Sharp and individuals of the challenge Band encountered a loon. Loons are prized for his or her meat and dermis, so the 2 Chipewyan tried—thirty times—to kill it. The loon, in a brazen show of energy, thwarted those makes an attempt and in doing so published itself to be a "spirit." during this e-book, Sharp embarks on a story exploration of the Chipewyan tradition that examines the character of a truth in which wild animals are either folks and spirits. In an unforgettable trip during the symbolic universe and way of life of the Chipewyan of project, his paintings makes use of the context and that means of the loon stumble upon to teach how spirits are an exact and nearly omnipresent element of life. To clarify how the Chipewyan create and order the shared truth in their tradition, Sharp develops a sequence of analytical metaphors that draw seriously on quantum mechanics. His valuable premise: truth is an indeterminate phenomenon created in the course of the sharing of that means among cultural beings. In aid of this argument, Sharp examines such subject matters because the nature of time, strength, gender, animals, reminiscence, gossip, magical dying, and the development of which means. Creatively argued and evocatively written, his paintings offers a compelling photograph of 1 humans engaged within the human fight to create which means.

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Additional resources for Loon: Memory, Meaning, and Reality in a Northern Dene Community

Example text

Even the more determined bush families in the Northwest Territories were compelled by still declining caribou herds, continuing low fur prices, and rising costs at the store to spend at least part of the year in Saskatchewan, where they had access to the resources of the Canadian government due them as part of their treaty rights. They chose to build their cabins at Mission rather than at Discha. The Dene settlement on the lake above the town of Discha slowly withered while Mission grew. The first major crisis in determining the future of Mission came in the mid- to late 1950s.

The band itself became involved with a store and other commercial activities. Mission had grown explosively as the children of those whose lives had been saved in the 1940s and 1950s reached the age of marriage and childbearing. In 1992, Mission had more than twelve hundred souls and was crowded. There was only one log cabin still standing at Mission, and it was unoccupied. ∫ Many houses had fences around them. Fences had previously been a sign of white occupancy, and the practice had had no more than two Dene adopt it in 1969.

The political methods of the Dene have worked for thousands of years. What brought them into village life was not politics but a change in the caribou herds upon which they depended for food. Caribou herds are subject to periodic crashes in their numbers, and one of these occurred near the end of World War II. What caused the crash will never be known, but white influence was a factor. After World War I too many white trappers moved into the Dene homeland. Too many whites who killed caribou as if their numbers were limitless.

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Loon: Memory, Meaning, and Reality in a Northern Dene Community by Henry S. Sharp


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