Featured Navajo turquoise and silver cuff bracelet, need your opinions.

I hadn’t even thought of it until you said something but there are theorists who posit that Native Americans originated from one of the most tribes of Israel. Maybe the auction house was just being really liberal with their ID but following that hunch to its end.

 

boy...they musta bin ' really ' lost !!!!!!!

 

Well... some Jews did end up in China, and there are a smallish group in southeast Asia who swear they're one of the Lost Tribes, so.... Not totally out of the realm.

 

I'd just like to add that yes, Native American is OK, but not a term much used in Canada. Komokwa knows much more that I do about Native American/Indigenous/ First Nations art than I do. But recent events have brought relations and history of settlers and First Nations to the fore, so the difficult history is what we are grappling with today. Many tribes occupied territory that straddled the border between Canada and the US so even today some tribes or bands, as they are sometimes called, have relatives in both countries. There is a difference in how Americans and Canadians treated the indigenous people in the early days and both countries have different policies governing relations between the various tribes/bands and the government. One unseen problem that happened with "first contact" between explorers and indigenous people was small pox. The Europeans brought it with them, as it were, and the indigenous people had no immunity. How many succumbed exactly is unknown, but it is thought about 75% or more of the Native population died. I think many now know about the residential schools in Canada, the Pope's visit and apology. We have a federally mandated "Truth and Reconciliation" program underway which is trying to address some the problems that First Nations have enumerated. One problem is the Doctrine of Discovery which Europeans used to call any land they discovered "theirs." Of course, money and commerce was at the base of it. Link to some information about this doctrine which undermined so much of the colonial attitude during the era of exploration: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/30/1167056438/vatican-doctrine-of-discovery-colonialism-indigenous#:~:text=Press-,Vatican repudiates the 'Doctrine of Discovery,' which underpinned colonialism,who had been living there. I know I've written a lot here but as they say, there are two sides to every story and we're hearing the other side now.

 

If u wrote 500 pages , it would still not be a lot !


The Haida nation went from an estimated population of 20,000 prior to 1770 to less than 600 by the end of the 19th century.....

& that's not even the tip of the small pox story.

The story of the Canadian 1st nations.... including the Inuit , and Metis....is rich..full of wonder and vast, and cruel to the point of genocide.

Today we are being bludgeoned with it from all sides , getting to a state where it's becoming almost desensitizing .........

It's a bitter part of Canadian history that deserves to be brought into the light...
but it's not all of Canadian history..

 

I have to admit I'd wondered. There had to have been a decent number of Native Americans here when the white dudes decided it was a good place to live. Now though, there aren't all that many around. Smallpox partially explains where they went.

 

a microcosm....

It was May 1792. The lush environs of the Georgia Strait had once been among the most densely populated corners of the land that is now Canada, with humming villages, harbours swarming with canoes and valleys so packed with cookfires that they had smog.

Everywhere they looked, there were corpses. Abandoned, overgrown villages were littered with skulls; whole sections of coastline strewn with bleached, decayed bodies.

“The skull, limbs, ribs and backbones, or some other vestiges of the human body, were found in many places, promiscuously scattered about the beach in great numbers,” wrote explorer George Vancouver in what is now Port Discovery, Wash.

But the Vancouver Expedition experienced only eerie quiet.

They kept seeing rotting houses and massive clearings cut out of the Pacific forest — evidence that whoever lived here had been able to muster armies of labourers.

And yet the only locals the sailors encountered were small groups of desperately poor people, many of them horribly scarred and missing an eye.

“There are reasons to believe that (this land) has been infinitely more populous,” wrote Vancouver in an account of the voyage published after his death.

But the 40-year-old Englishman seemed to have gone to his grave never grasping the full gravity of what he witnessed in British Columbia: The “docile” and “cordial” people he met were the shattered survivors of an apocalypse.

The people of the Pacific Northwest had just been hit with the tail end of one of the most devastating plagues in human history.

It’s possible that smallpox killed as many as 95 per cent of the population of the Georgia Strait. Given that estimate, as many as 100,000 people may have lived in the area at a time when the entire state of New York counted barely 200,000.

In British Columbia, as with depopulated regions across the continent, Europeans were literally stepping over the bones of the dead to find vast landscapes populated by small bands of traumatized survivors.

“Here was an almost empty land, so it seemed, for the taking,” wrote Cole Harris.

As George Vancouver steered HMS Discovery north from the the Strait of Georgia in the spring of 1792, his eyes glimmered with what could be done with the seemingly empty forests surrounding him.

“The innumerable pleasing landscapes … require only to be enriched by the industry of man with villages, mansions, cottages and other buildings, to render it the most lovely country that can be imagined,” he wrote.

And indeed, that’s exactly what happened.

....... ......... ..........

The peoples of the West Coast were well-versed in war: Accustomed to raiding and invasion, they maintained Viking-like fleets of war canoes, lived in fortified cities and went to battle in terrifying suits of armour complemented with trade metals from Russian Alaska.

Against a well-prepared and well-coordinated native population, any invaders could have expected epic battles followed by years of guerrilla warfare. Before smallpox, West Coast oral history contained accounts of rivers being made “black” by the canoes of invaders.

............

Instead, as wave after wave of epidemic hit the area, the emptied landscape became one of the easiest conquests in British history.

In 1862, just as the colony of British Columbia was getting its footing, the indigenous descendants of the 1782 survivors were hit again. Another smallpox epidemic once again killed more than half of B.C.’s native population and peppered the landscape with mass graves and abandoned settlements.


.( credit Tristin Hopper....The National Post ..)

 

Back in the early nineties, I went to Acoma. Wonderful. Bought a larger turquoise cuff from a dignified older woman. Interestingly, set in brass not silver.

 

(sigh) I hope the disaster was at least accidental. Those poor "docile" people were shell-shocked survivors of a mass casualty event. Down in the lower 48, some scum did it deliberately.

 

not really....depending on whose story ...........

 

A post apocalyptic 'New World',conquered not by courageous missionairies,but by the Bug.

 

Thanks, Kentworld and Komo, for the explanations! I have heard about small pox as a colonising weapon being transmitted to the indigenous people with gift blankets. I know it was all about money and power. As usual.
The only hope I have is that the world has changed since then. Hasn't it....

 

Iva-Some have changed but sadly we still have many strains of homo-sapiens w/ The Wagner Group/Putin mentality-in all nations & ethnologies.

 

I'm glad Komokwa elaborated on what I wrote. Apart from small pox, the other deadly thing that the white man brought with him was "fire water" (alcohol). The Haida were known to be a very fierce and warlike tribe. OTOH, when they had "get-togethers" with other tribes, the party could go on for a very long time and the host tribe had to be prepared with plenty of food. Gifts were also obligatory. Here's a story about my great-grandmother: one winter she was inside her home and some native men came in and sat against the wall. They were just trying to warm up. However they also weren't very clean so the atmosphere inside started to smell rather badly. My grandmother sprinkled pepper on the stove which made the men sneeze and they got up and left.

 

War between the Tlingit and the Russians is well documented.....and worth reading....
Sitka battle of 1804 , is a highlight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sitka

.

 

I’ll say! Legend has it the Apache would say “hoy ve” on the rare occasion they were defeated in battle. Could be something there.

 

Have seen it called a shadow box setting.

 

this is a classic shadow box...
turq set in and below the silver opening..

 

The shadow box setting's striking-could also work with opals (and protect those fragile stones).