Birdsong | READING LIST
Hey everyone. YES I'm alive. I just finished painting (with non-toxic ECO PAINT) my small home office and had to remove LOTS of things to do the job and am not done yet. Today I might get the curtain rod up. I found a cute fold up desk for $30 on Craig's List and put together a sturdy rolling rack to hold photo albums - and I'm no spring chick so this TOOK TIME😀!
The American Indian Adoptees blog (2009 - now) just hit TWO MILLION views. It's my job to post and write there. It is a miracle so many people found the blog/website and still read it. I am so grateful.
LOOTERS: HELL YES! It's been SO GOOD to finally see so much LOOT and Native artifacts and remains being repatriated. Finally! Prayers answered...
Trace
LOVE Bird Song like me?
- If you’ve been stuck indoors all day, take a moment to pause and listen to some sweet birdsongs, compiled by the Washington Post‘s Richard Sima in his report on the mental health benefits offered by our feathered friends’ music and presence:
One hypothesis on nature’s salubrious effects, known as the attention restoration theory, posits that being in nature is good for improving concentration and decreasing the mental fatigue associated with living in stressful urban environments. Natural stimuli, such as birdsong, may allow us to engage in “soft fascination,” which holds our attention but also allows it to replenish.
Nature — and birdsong — also reduce stress. Previous research has found that time spent in green outdoor spaces can lower blood pressure and cortisol levels, Hammoud said.
It is not yet understood how birdsong affects our brains, but neuroimaging studies have found brain responses of stress reduction to other forms of nature exposure.
👇 READING 👇
Artist Wendy Red Star: Bíilukaa
In a new tome titled after a word meaning “our side,” referring to how Apsáalooke people speak of themselves, artist Wendy Red Star highlights the links between her vast body of work and familial history. The book includes interviews she conducted with her parents, her sister, and Indigenous art curators Annika Johnson and Adriana Greci Green. The layered transcripts and full-page spreads of her artwork — from childhood drawings to works based on Apsáalooke cultural objects held in collections — bring each other to life, rendering her already personal work all the more powerful.
Radius Books, April 2023
👀Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts by Chadwick Allen
As part of the University of Minnesota Press’s Indigenous Americas series, scholar Chadwick Allen explores Indigenous mound building and earthwork art as simultaneously visual, literary, and mathematical practices in this title released last spring. The book is incredibly in-depth and traverses disciplines such as literary studies and archaeology with a critical eye that counters the white supremacist notion of Native earth art forms as bygone or archaic. Allen’s analysis of several contemporary artists and organizations, including Monique Mojica (Kuna and Rappahannock) and the Chickasaw Cultural Center, serves as a reminder that they are alive, ever-shifting, and defiant of easy categorization.
Buy on Bookshop | University of Minnesota Press, March 2022
👇👇👇 BOOK!
Speaking with Light features the work of more than twenty-five
artists, including Nicholas Galanin, Sky Hopinka, Zig Jackson, Kapulani
Landgraf, Dylan McLaughlin, Alan Michelson, Shelley Niro, Jolene
Rickard, Wendy Red Star, Cara Romero, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, and a new
commission by Sarah Sense.
👃SMELLY HUMOR! OR FUN! PRICELESS!
Repatriation-Inspired Fragrance Line Hopes to Heal Collector Wounds
The exotic scents of the Rapatriement line offer solace and joy to dismayed collectors who were forced to return looted artifacts.
The six perfumes highlight various archaeological and historical sites in Cambodia, Egypt, Italy, Nepal, Peru, and Zimbabwe. “You will feel like you are digging in the soil to loot the items yourself,” a representative of LMVH, Arnault’s luxury brand, explained to Hyperallergic at a press event that took place at the American Museum of National History’s Sackler Educational Lab.
👅Each perfume will connect you to local smells and cultures in unexpected ways. Gizeh has notes of the Nile waters, myrrh, cotton, and authoritarianism, while Adiona incorporates the smell of sweaty Italian laborers, Gucci leather belts, olive oil, and imminent governmental collapse.
The limited edition perfumes are available for purchase at rapatriementchic.com for $25,000 and they will each come with a blockchain certificate and related NFT.
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