Placenames From Longfellow's “Song of Hiawatha”

Vogel, Virgil J.

doi:10.1179/nam.1991.39.3.261

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“…One phenomenon of American placenaming practices has been the incorporation of Native American terms into the colonized landscape [although Vogel (1991) has argued that a number of these ''Indian" toponyms were in fact taken from Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha" rather than directly from indigenous placenames]. Earlier interest in this practice of colonialist use of Native American terms seems to have been more of archeological than cultural interest (Applegate 1974;Becker 1964;Nelson 1902;Sleeper 1949).…”

Section: San Carlos Reservation Dohwaa Ngoi'aa Dad$'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Indeterminacy and history in Britton Goode's Western Apache placenames: ambiguous identity on the San Carlos Apache reservation

Samuels

2001

American Ethnologist

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In this article, I explore the inherent ambiguity of cultural identities through a discussion of placenames around the San Carlos Apache reservation in southeastern Arizona. The Western Apache residents of San Carlos live in a colonized landscape. Residents maintain an attachment to Apache history and cultural sovereignty, not only by preserving and maintaining placenames in the Western Apache language, but through the performance arenas of speech play, verbal art, and code-switching puns. In this article, I concentrate on the placenames compiled by Britton Goode (1911-81), a Western Apache linguist and historian. These language practices problematize the question of identity by reading culture into and through the contingencies of everyday experience, [placenames, verbal art, identity, Western Apache, language and culture] So every day I wove on the great loom, but every night by torchlight I unwove it; and so for three years I deceived the Achaeans.-Homer, The Odyssey 19: 150-152 (Fitzgerald 1963) Penelope's "weaving trick" (Katz 1991) presents the opening and organizing image for the article that follows. Penelope's weaving and unweaving of Old Laertes's funeral shroud implicates a political practice-a kind of crafted (and crafty) filibuster. As a subaltern practice, Penelope takes to a literal end point her son Telemachus's admonition that she tend to her own (female) tasks, "the distaff and the loom" (Fitzgerald 1963:1.410). She uses the gendered practice of weaving to sabotage the desires and expectations of her untiring, unwanted suitors. It is also, I think, a fruitful anthropological image-one that highlights "the indeterminacy of rhetorical action" (Battaglia 1995:4) and the productivity of loose threads in cultural practices. As such, it makes a powerful metaphor for cultural semiosis, playing against the constructionist tropes of weaving, tapestry making, and web spinning that have dominated a certain version of cultural interpretation that often locates the meaningfulness of culture in its internal coherence. 1 American Ethnologist 28(2):277-302.

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Section: San Carlos Reservation Dohwaa Ngoi'aa Dad$'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Indeterminacy and history in Britton Goode's Western Apache placenames: ambiguous identity on the San Carlos Apache reservation

Samuels

2001

American Ethnologist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Placenames From Longfellow's “Song of Hiawatha”

Cited by 1 publication

References 1 publication

Indeterminacy and history in Britton Goode's Western Apache placenames: ambiguous identity on the San Carlos Apache reservation

Indeterminacy and history in Britton Goode's Western Apache placenames: ambiguous identity on the San Carlos Apache reservation

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