Category: South American History

Views of the Creole Bania

2/28/2019

I spent February at the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis on a William Reese Company Fellowship, looking at the papers of Captain John Gabriel Stedman and investigating the banjo's early history in Suriname and the Caribbean.

This is a banjo, one of the earliest images of a banjo. This engraving is only one of four pre-1800s images of the banjo, taken from Stedman's memoir Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Suriname. The special collections at the Bell Library have Stedman's diaries from Suriname, notes and journals from after his time in Europe, the original 1790 manuscript, and many different versions of the published memoir. To the left is a hand-colored plate from the English first edition, while below are versions from the German, French, and Dutch editions.

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Ghosts at the Edge of the World

11/24/2016

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At the southernmost tip of South America, the Andes mountain range plummets into the ocean and collides with the pampas plains of Argentina. Here, on the island of Tierra del Fuego, the wind whips across the landscape, the Straight of Magellan churns; the beauty of nature collides with the harsh realities of an Antarctic climate. For thousands of years, the Ona tribe called this place home. But as European settlers expanded throughout South America, they took the land the Ona lived on, systematically killed the Ona, and diminished their way of life. Finally, in the 1970s, the last person of full Ona ancestry died.

The land of Tierra del Fuego, 2007.

Images above and left from Charles W. Furlong's article on the Ona and Haush from 1915.

This Thanksgiving, as Native Americans are fighting for clean water and clean air here in the United States, I wanted to feature images of the Ona, with some historical and cultural context, as a reminder of the cultures and ways of life that have been destroyed because of a lack of understanding and respect for people that are labeled different and other.

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Come in, the stacks are open.

Views of the Creole Bania

Ghosts at the Edge of the World

Come in, the stacks are open.

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