sweetsop

[sweetsop]

Ann Demeulemeester S/S 2007 Ensemble at MoMu

[sweetsop]

“The slippages, the ambiguities, the mistakes are, finally, what make language function in the first place.”

— Samuel R. Delany, “Some Remarks on Narrative and Technology”

[sweetsop]

amanda souza by diego

[sweetsop]

[sweetsop]

Some of the best finesses come from being in a simultaneous state of abundance and detachment

[sweetsop]

[sweetsop]

Indigenous Science Saturday

This week we focus on Native American ways of scientific knowledge with three publications from our Native American Literature Collection. The first is a 2013 publication by UW-Madison plant ecology PhD and SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry professor Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, published in Minneapolis by Milkweed Editions. In her book, Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, focuses on plants and botany as seen through Native American traditions and Western scientific traditions by foregrounding alternative forms of Indigenous knowledge outside of traditional scientific methodologies. Critically acclaimed, the book was on the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post bestseller lists and received the 2014 Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award.

Standing Rock Sioux educator, academic, and activist Vine Deloria, Jr.’s 1997 book Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact, published in Golden, Colorado by Fulcrum Publishing, while quite popular, has been critically panned for privileging Indigenous belief systems over scientific evidence. In the book, Deloria presents a critique of Western scientific models of Native American origins and the idea that Indigenous peoples were partially responsible of the extinction of North American megafauna. Deloria likens the dominant migration theory to “academic folklore.”

The last example is an early issue from our collection of Winds of Change, the magazine of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES), a nationally distributed magazine focused on “career and educational advancement for American Indians/Alaska Natives/Native Hawaiians/First Nations, with an emphasis on STEM,” founded in 1986 and still published five times a year. We are particularly fascinated by the IBM advertisement on the back cover of this issue for “Native American Craft,” promoting the engineering manufacturing of Cherokee Nation Industries, today owned by Cherokee Nation Businesses.

View more Science Saturday posts.

[sweetsop]

alita

[sweetsop]

February, 1940 Grant Wood

[sweetsop]

[sweetsop]

Leafworks - meticulously collected and pressed pieces by Jennie Ashmore

[sweetsop]

Beyoncé at her release party for her self-titled visual album, Beyoncé (2013).

[sweetsop]

© Chikashi Suzuki

[sweetsop]

Guama Uchida | Noir Kei Ninomiya (2017)

© Chikashi Suzuki

[sweetsop]

laetitia casta photographed by markus klinko, 2000

[sweetsop]

Pierogi pillows

[sweetsop]

Quick what are you doing RIGHT now (besides scrolling Tumblr)