Leonard Peltier is an activist and member of AIM, who, in 1977, was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life terms for the shooting of two FBI agents during Pine Ridge. Peltier’s supporters (who include Willie, Joni and Kristofferson) present him as a political prisoner due to concern over the fairness of his proceedings. His conviction is the subject of the 1992 documentary directed by Michael Apted and narrated by Robert Redford, Incident at Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story, which you can watch in full right here. If you find yourself with 90 minutes to spare, watch it. It’s a humdinger.

(There’s also They Buried The Heart of Leonard Peltier, which, oh lord, you should watch too. Redford’s narration is substituted for the whitest sing-song narration you ever heard…)

“Yosemite: The Fate Of Heaven”:

“Yosemite–The Fate Of Heaven” is a stunning film portrait of Yosemite National Park. Breathtaking cinematography graphically depicts the fragile wonder of the place naturalist John Muir once called “a great temple lighted from above.” The film illustrates how our passion for Yosemite’s beauty jeopardizes the very wilderness we love so much.

Read by Robert Redford, the film’s narration is taken from the diaries of Lafayette Bunnell, a doctor who accompanied the Mariposa Battalion in 1851 on a mission to “hunt down Indians.” The campaign brought soldiers for the first time into the sacred valley home of the Ahwahnechee tribe in the Sierra Nevada. “My astonishment was overwhelming,” wrote Bunnell of the valley’s grandeur. “Here before me was the power and glory of the Supreme Being.” Bunnell understood immediately that his small band would be the first and last white men to see the natural wonder of the valley unspoiled.

More than 130 years later, tens of thousands trek to the park from all over the world to enjoy the valley’s magnificent landscapes and wildlife. The film introduces us to hikers and campers for whom Yosemite is a true shrine, including a free-hand rock climber who “dances” up walls of sheer granite and a woman whose family survived the depression by camping at the park and fishing its rivers. Vintage photographs and observations from Bunnell’s eloquent diary remind us that America’s love affair with Yosemite is well over a century old.

Wrote Bunnell on leaving Yosemite. “Those scenes of beauteous enchantment I leave to those who remain to enjoy them.” Today Yosemite is a protected national park, but that may not be enough to guarantee its future. The continual onslaught of nature lovers–over 1,000 cars a day–only intensifies the conflict between preservation and public enjoyment. Sanitation workers remove 25,000 pounds of trash a day. Work crews toil to repair natural trails damaged by wear. Park rangers protect tourists from roaming bears, and curious deer from potato chip hand-outs. Nature rules here, but human beings, we learn, are both the biggest threat to the park’s future and its best hope.

Watch the entire thing, just like I’m doing now, over at The Creak of Boots.

Located in New Mexico an hour from Santa Fe, the 33,677 acres Bandelier National Monument preserves the homes of Ancestral Pueblo People. The park is named after Swiss anthropologist Adolph Bandelier, who researched the cultures of the area in the late 19th century. Bandelier was designated a National Monument on February 11, 1916, while most of its backcountry became a “designated wilderness” in October 1976. .

Above are paintings by Pablita Velarde, which were comissioned by Bandelier under the Works Progression Administration in the early 40s. See many more here.

Blackfeet Indians Of Glacier National Park is comprised of 24 images by artist Winold Reiss and was published by the Great Northern Railway in 1940. See more photos and buy it on Ebay here.

From Folkstreams.net …

This 1986 film examines the traditional Native American craft of split ash basketmaking as a means of economic and cultural survival for Aroostook Micmac Indians of northern Maine. This documentary of rural off-reservation Indian artisans aims to break down stereotypical images. Basketmakers are filmed at their craft in their homes, at work on local potato farms and at business meetings of the Basket Bank, a cooperative formed by the Aroostook Micmac Council. First person commentaries are augmented by authentic 17th century Micmac music.

Watch it at Folkstreams!

From Prairie Edge Trading Company and Gallery:

It was traditional in some ancient Plains Indian cultures for women to render geometric patterns and men, pictographic design. Historically, a robe was worn with the head to the left when it was wrapped around the body, and the painting would be displayed on the outside with the fur next to the body for warmth.

Chief Dan George, as Old Lodge Skins in Little Big Man, goes up to the mountain to die:

“Come out and fight
It is a good day to die
Thank you for making me a human being
Thank you for helping me to become a warrior
Thank you for my victories
And for my defeats
Thank you for my vision
And the blindness in which I saw further
You make all things and direct them in their ways, oh Grandfather
And now, you have decided that human beings will soon walk a road that leads nowhere
I am going to die now, unless death wants to fight
And I ask you for the last time to grant me my old power
To make things happen.”

Watch it here.

The Smithsonian has an AMAZING collection of Kiowa Drawings, including the above paintings from the Kiowa Five — Spencer Asah, James Auchiah, Jack Hokeah, Stephen Mopope, Monroe Tsatoke and, briefly, Lois Smokey, available to look at through their online gallery. The Kiowa Five studied at the University of Oklahoma in the late 1920s and were prominent in the development of contemporary Indian painting. Their paintings were effectively promoted by their professor, Oscar B. Jacobson, through international exhibition and a limited-edition portfolio, plates of which are included in the collection.

Also included in the collection is the Silverhorn Target Record Book, a series of drawings that appear in a book used for recording Army target practice sessions. Most of the drawings are by Silver Horn (Haungooah), but some drawings are by other, unknown artists. The drawings were made in the 1890s while Silver Horn was enlisted in Troop L of the 7th Cavalry, based at Fort Sill, Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).

****The National Anthropological Archives offers digital images of every photograph and work of art in its collection for $50. Order here.

Newspaper Rock State Historical Monument is situated along the access road into the Needles district of Canyonlands National Park. The 200 square foot rock is a part of the vertical Wingate sandstone cliffs that enclose the upper end of Indian Creek Canyon, and is covered by hundreds of ancient Indian petroglyphs —one of the largest, best preserved and easily accessed groups in the Southwest. The petroglyphs have a mixture of human, animal, material and abstract forms, and to date no-one has been able to fully interpret their meaning.

The first carvings were made around 2,000 years ago, and although a few are as recent as the early 20th century, left by the first modern day explorers of this region, the main groups have been assigned to the Anasazi (AD 1 to 1300), Fremont (AD 700 to 1300) and Navajo (AD 1500 onwards).

More photos from PiedmontFossil’s 1981 Western Tour can be found here

I posted this song a long, long time ago, so if you missed it the first time, do yourself a favor and listen. If you’ve already heard it, listen again and then buy the rest of the album here. I could try to explain who Gerald Primeaux, Sr. is or what his harmonized Native American Church music sounds like, but I’m sure I’d get it all wrong. Instead, read the wonderful information on his page at Turtle Island Storytellers Network, an American Indian online speakers bureau that promotes 80 tribal storytellers, historians and song carriers. The network, funded by the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, National Park Service and the National Endowment for the Arts, was developed to provide speaking and consulting opportunities for tribal elders, oral historians, storytellers and song carriers from 13 states in the Northwest and Northern Plains states:

Gerald Primeaux Senior, I am a Huntawa Lakota from the Yankton Sioux Reservation. My name is Chactawa which means Twin Eagle Boy. I was born in 1963 on the Yankton, South Dakota, my dad was Asa Primeaux Senior. His dad, my grampa, was Harry Primeaux Senior. My great grandfather was Mitchell Primeaux and his dad was Ed Primeaux, that was on my dad’s side. My mom’s side, we come from the Rainbow Tiyospaye, Rainbow side. My mom was Loretta Charity Rainbow and her dad Harry Rainbow and then his dad was a medicine man just went by the name of Rainbow in our, among our people, that’s where we come from. They call us the Yankton Sioux, the land of the friendly people, you know, that’s where I’m from, that’s where I come from.

We grew up watching our Elders, like my father and my grandfather, and the way they expressed themselves through songs, through this Native American Church style, through going into the sweat lodge, through the dance arbors, to pow wow and then sun dance. I feel like a very fortunate person to be able to carry on something that they did before me and when I had no understanding of it but I think throughout the years, understanding comes with the knowledge and the know how. And then now feeling that, being strong in that, through song, through words, through our language, putting it through music, trying to learn like that the way they taught us.

My grandfather always told me, Harry Primeaux, “When you do something, you’re going to sing, grandson,” he said, “listen.” He said, “Sing it right. Know what you’re singing about.”

So through there now, I’m at the position to where, through the language and through my prayers, I put them through song. You know, to try to remember the prayers like when we’re singing, that’s what it’s about. It’s about keeping the Mother Earth turning

The old people said it made the blind see, it healed the broken bones. You know, the story goes, it came to the Indian people through they say the trail of tears, you know, the trail of the tears the white man was putting us on reservations and they were saying we couldn’t pray this way, we couldn’t talk this way or we couldn’t, they were saying that to us and a woman fell behind when she was trying to keep up with her people and she fell over, ready to just give herself up and die, you know.

So maybe through that life she was carrying, a plant was saying, talking to her, telling her, “Why don’t you eat me? Eat me and you will be well. So this lady ate this medicine. She was able to get a little bit of strength so she could sit up again and she gathered all what she can around her and she stayed there for about a week eating medicine. She was able to get her strength back. She was nourished. So she walked forward and she caught up with her people.

She kind of shared with the medicine man what she, what she found on the ground and how it talked to her, how it had some kind of life into it. So they ate it.

But that’s how it came to us, as a medicine and now its spread out all over the place and, it has similar ways, it all has similar ways. You go into pray, you go into eat medicine, you go in there to get healed, maybe encourage to where they stay all night and they pray all night to where by the time that sun comes up there is a way of greeting that sun. Greeting the new day to go forward, you know, that was how the understanding that was taught into me.

MP3: Gerald Primeaux, Sr. – Two Harmonized Peyote Songs