3 author events Scheduled
The first author event features UNM Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Louise Lamphere, who will discuss Weaving Women’s Lives: Three Generations in a Navajo Family Thursday, Nov. 6, at 2 p.m. at the UNM Bookstore, Central and Cornell NE.
Photo: Louise Lamphere
Lamphere met Eva Price in 1965 in Sheep Springs, New Mexico, on the eastern side of the Navajo Reservation, while conducting fieldwork for her dissertation in social anthropology at Harvard University. Over the next 40 years, Lamphere developed a strong friendship with Price that expanded to include Price’s daughter, Carole Cadman, and granddaughter, Valerie Darwin.
When Price desired to pass along teachings about Navajo life to her children and grandchildren, Lamphere saw an opportunity to pursue her own interest in writing a book on Navajo women that would encompass their transformative experiences through the 20th century. Lamphere collaborated with Price, Cadman and Darwin to create a narrative highlighting the voices of three generations of Navajo women, placing them within the context of the larger American society rather than presenting the Navajo as an isolated indigenous culture.
Emphasizing the vibrancy and strength of Navajo culture, Weaving Women's Lives illustrates the process of incorporating new practices and ideas while retaining distinctive Navajo beliefs, values and orientations. As individual threads are woven to create a pattern, so have Navajo women pulled together elements of Navajo and Anglo culture to create a new blueprint for their lives.
The second event features Janet Chapman discussing Kenneth Milton Chapman: A Life Dedicated to Indian Arts and Artists, on Thursday Nov. 13, at 2 p.m. at the UNM Bookstore.
The accomplishments of Kenneth Milton Chapman (1875-1968) – a leading force in the revitalization of Pueblo pottery in the 1920s – are as varied as they are significant. Chapman was instrumental in establishing the Museum of New Mexico, School of American Research, and Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe. He was widely recognized for his knowledge of Pueblo pottery design elements and was UNM’s first professor of Indian arts.
With a special focus on his professional development as artist and archaeologist, this biography is the first to track Chapman’s life from his mid-western upbringing through his nearly 70 years in New Mexico. The authors -- Chapman a grandniece, and Barrie a relation by marriage – have combined material from Chapman’s unpublished memoirs with a thoroughly researched history of his life and times to reveal his role within the burgeoning field of Southwestern archaeology and the preservation of ancient Pueblo pottery, as well as his promotion of the work of living potters.
The final event features two poets, Marianne Aweagon Broyles reading from her book of poetry The Red Window, and Erika T. Wurth reading from her book of poetry Indian Trains, on Friday, Nov. 21, at 2 p.m. at the UNM Bookstore.
In her first book of poetry, The Red Window, Aweagon Broyles explores the origins and painful consequences of the outsider experience, either oppression of Native American and other peoples or the enslavement caused by mental illness. But Broyles also finds—deep in the wounds—a resilience and fight for survival.
Aweagon Broyles spent her early childhood in Boston and Boothbay Harbor, Maine, and grew up in Tennessee. An enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, she graduated from Emory University. She lives in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, and works as a psychiatric nurse in Albuquerque.
Wurth’s first book, Indian Trains is about small town Indians, community and family, thieves, prostitutes, train stealers, drug dealers, loners, jerks, dreaming alcoholics and the ones who did everything but all of that. It is about an entirely new tribe: urban mixed-bloods of multiple tribes who are respectful of where their ancestors have come from but are increasingly going to Indian powwows, Indian bars, and Urban Native organizations for cultural fulfillment rather than returning to reservations to discover their identity.
Wurth was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Colorado. She is mixed blood Apache, Chickasaw and Cherokee. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Raven Chronicles, Fiction, Cedar Hill Review, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Studies in American Indian Literature and Boulevard. She teaches creative writing at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Ill. Currently, she lives in Albuquerque and teaches as a visiting writer at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Indian Trains is her first book.
For more information, contact Lisa Walden, 277-7494, or e-mail: lwalden@unm.edu.
Media Contact: Carolyn Gonzales, (505) 277-5920; e-mail: cgonzal@unm.edu
Posted by scarr at October 27, 2008 06:53 PM