Sotto voce: Inscription as Voiceover in Malick’s Days of Heaven

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 84-97
Author(s):  
Fred Rush ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
New World ◽  
Critical Function ◽  
Te Deum ◽  
Philosophical Basis ◽  
General Schema ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Days Of Heaven

Terrence Malick’s widespread use of voiceover is generally noted, as is its nonstandard bearing. Malick’s use of voiceover is non-standard in virtue of its loose narrative fit. That too is often marked. Much less discussed is the philosophical basis for Malick’s voiceover, more specifically its ontological function in bounding the filmworld with intentionality. This paper addresses such ontological questions. It first develops a general schema for voiceover and Malick’s use of it in several of his films. Malick’s discovery of the potential for oblique forms of voiceover in Truffaut is treated. The discussion then focuses on the film Days of Heaven (1978) and, in particular, on an undiscussed and easy to miss visual riddle in one of the key scenes, involving the marriage of two of the principal characters. The riddle concerns an inscription in what for most viewers will be indecipherable symbols written on a backdrop formed by the side of a wagon. It turns out that the inscription is in Blackfoot syllabary and translates the opening of the Te Deum prayer. The paper argues that the inscription is best understood as a cousin to voiceover and, in particular, to Malick’s conception of voiceover. The inscription has, accordingly, an ontological and critical function in conjunction with the scene it accompanies. The paper concludes with remarks concerning The New World (2005), a Malick film that includes several prayers in voiceover and more comprehensively and resolutely represents the linguistic presence and expressiveness of Native Americans.

To Sin No More

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rex Galindo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
New Spain ◽  
New World ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Rural And Urban Areas ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Spanish Atlantic ◽  
Franciscan Order

For 300 years, Franciscans were at the forefront of the spread of Catholicism in the New World. In the late seventeenth century, Franciscans developed a far-reaching, systematic missionary program in Spain and the Americas. After founding the first college of propaganda fide in the Mexican city of Querétaro, the Franciscan Order established six additional colleges in New Spain, ten in South America, and twelve in Spain. From these colleges Franciscans proselytized Native Americans in frontier territories as well as Catholics in rural and urban areas in eighteenth-century Spain and Spanish America. This is the first book to study these colleges, their missionaries, and their multifaceted, sweeping missionary programs. By focusing on the recruitment of non-Catholics to Catholicism as well as the deepening of religious fervor among Catholics, the book shows how the Franciscan colleges expanded and shaped popular Catholicism in the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic world. This book explores the motivations driving Franciscan friars, their lives inside the colleges, their training, and their ministry among Catholics, an often-overlooked duty that paralleled missionary deployments. It argues that Franciscan missionaries aimed to reform or “reawaken” Catholic parishioners just as much as they sought to convert non-Christian Native Americans.

The First Calvinist Encounters with New World Religions

2021 ◽  
pp. 252-269
Author(s):  
Mark Valeri
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
New World ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Jean De Lery ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Civic Virtues ◽  
Cultural Observation

European Calvinists first encountered Native Americans during three brief expeditions of French adventurers to Brazil and Florida during the mid-sixteenth century. Although short-lived and rarely noted, these expeditions produced a remarkable commentary by Huguenots on the Tupinamba people of Brazil and the Timucuan people of Florida. Informed by Calvinist understandings of human nature and humanist approaches to cultural observation, authors such as Jean de Léry produced narratives that posed European and Christian decadence against the sociability and honesty of Native Americans. They used their experiences in America to suggest that Huguenots in France, like indigenous people in America, ought to be tolerated for their civic virtues whatever their doctrinal allegiances. Huguenot travel writings indicate variations in Calvinist approaches to Native peoples from the mid-sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries.

The limits of power: the political ecology of the Spanish Empire in the Greater Southwest

Antiquity ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 66 (250) ◽  
pp. 153-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Sheridan
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
New World ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
The Political ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
History Of

The Spanish conquest of the Americas was one of the most dramatic cultural and biological transformations in the history of the world. Small groups of conquistadores toppled enormous empires. Millions of Native Americans died from epidemic disease. Old World animals and plants revolutionized Native American societies, while New World crops fundamentally altered the diet and land-tenure of peasants across Europe. In the words of historian Alfred Crosby (1972: 3),The two worlds, which God had cast asunder, were reunited, and the two worlds, which were so very different, began on that day [I1 October 14921 to become alike.

Black on Red: Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century New World Black Interpretative Uses of Native American Political Experience

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 324-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Anna Gordon ◽  
Keisha Lindsay
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
New World ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
The Political ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
And Gender

AbstractIn an effort to address the dearth of literature regarding how African American political theorists have historically interpreted the meaning of Native political experience to make sense of their own, we chart what four influential New World Black writers, from the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, say about Native Americans. While there is some diversity among the particular interpretive foci of these historical works, each generally invokes Native Americans as having a shared experience of oppression with Blacks that warrants resistance; being crushed by circumstances in which African-descended people have survived and thrived; exemplifying oppression that has no redemptive power; providing evidence of the ongoing possibility of Black extinction; and as racially inferior to Blacks and thus in need of Black ladies’ supposedly civilizing qualities. This paper uses these historical Africana perspectives on Indigenous and Black relations to explore the political implications of forging individual and shared identities at the intersection of race and gender.

scholarly journals Peopling of Western Japan, Focusing on Kyushu, Shikoku, and Ryukyu Archipelago

Radiocarbon ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-502 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiroto Takamiya ◽  
Hiromi Obata
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
New World ◽  
Ryukyu Archipelago ◽  
Southern Japan ◽  
Western Japan

The discovery of the Iwajuku site in Japan is the beginning of the study of the first Paleolithic cultures in the region. In this paper we examine the timing of the earliest colonization of southern Japan, especially focusing on the areas of Kyushu, Shikoku, and the Ryukyu archipelago. Osteological studies have proposed the ultimate origin of these western Japanese Paleolithic populations in Southeast Asia. If this hypothesis is correct, Native Americans may be remotely related to the populations of this region. Greater attention to data from areas such as Japan is necessary to understand the timing and nature of New World colonization.

The Lost Woodlands of Ancient Nasca

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Beresford-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Environmental Impact ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
El Niño ◽  
New World ◽  
Climatic Factors ◽  
El Nino ◽  
Dry Forest ◽  
Desert Ecosystem ◽  
Human Environmental Impact

This book presents an archaeological case of prehistoric human environmental impact: a study of ecological and cultural change from the arid south coast of Peru, beginning around 750 bc and culminating in a collapse during the Middle Horizon, around ad 900. Its focus is the lower Ica Valley — today depopulated and bereft of cultivation and yet with archaeological remains attesting to substantial prehistoric occupations — thereby presenting a prima facie case for changed environmental conditions. Previous archaeological interpretations of cultural changes in the region rely heavily on climatic factors such as El Niño floods and long droughts. While the archaeological, geomorphological, and archaeobotanical records presented here do indeed include new evidence of huge ancient flood events, they also demonstrate the significance of more gradual, human-induced destruction of Prosopis pallida (huarango) riparian dry-forest. The huarango is a remarkable leguminous hardwood that lives for over a millennium and provides forage, fuel, and food. Moreover, it is crucial to the integration of a fragile desert ecosystem, enhancing microclimate and soil fertility and moisture. Its removal exposed this landscape to the effects of El Niño climatic perturbations long before Europeans arrived in Peru. This case study therefore contradicts the popular perception that Native Americans inflicted barely perceptible disturbance upon a New World Eden. Yet, it also records correlations between changes in society and degrees of human environmental impact. These allow inferences about the specific contexts in which significant human environmental impacts in the New World did, and did not, arise.

American Indians Encounter the Bible

2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-157
Author(s):  
Christopher Vecsey
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
American Indians ◽  
New World ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Indian Languages ◽  
The Bible ◽  
To Receive

Abstract This article explores how Native Americans have received the Bible. Over the centuries some Indians have been inspired by the Bible, and some have been repelled by its long-standing place in colonization. The Christian invaders in the New World carried the Bible in their minds. It served as their inspiration, their justification, and their frame of reference as they encountered Indigenous peoples. In effect, the Bible was the template for exploration, conquest, identification of selves and others. The Christian invaders brought along or produced physical Bibles, which served their catechetical purposes, and in time they began to translate the Bible—in whole and in part—into American Indian languages. Therefore this article illustrates that to the present day Native Americans continue to receive the Bible actively and variously, attempting to fit it to their unfolding cultural stories. Ultimately, it has not lost its potency, nor have they lost their power to consider it on their own terms.

What's New in the New World??

2009 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 35-40
Author(s):  
Edward Buscombe
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
New World ◽  
History Of

Abstract An essay on an extended DVD of Terrence Malick's The New World, focusing on representation of relations between Native Americans and settlers from England, and the film's place in the history of the Pocahontas story.

Too Little, Too Late? The Radiocarbon Chronology of Alaska and the Peopling of the New World

2006 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 595-620 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R. Bever
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Late Pleistocene ◽  
New World ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Human Occupation ◽  
Radiocarbon Dates ◽  
Point Of Entry ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Terminal Pleistocene ◽  
Radiocarbon Chronology

Alaska is commonly viewed as a gateway between the Old and New Worlds, and as such, figures prominently in most models of the peopling of the New World. With a growing number of archaeological sites dating to the terminal Pleistocene, Alaska might be expected to provide direct evidence bearing on the colonization of the Americas. Based on 27 site components with 114 radiocarbon dates, this paper discusses the archaeological record of late Pleistocene Alaska, organized around the characteristics and chronology of three complexes: the microblade-bearing Denali complex, the Nenana complex, and the Mesa complex. This paper shows that the archaeological record of late Pleistocene Alaska is quite diverse, and not lacking in controversy and conflicting interpretations. In addition, this period of archaeological diversity coincides with the Younger Dryas climatic event. However, none of the reliably dated sites is older than the earliest evidence of human occupation further south in the Americas. Despite this, evidence from DNA studies points strongly to a north-central Asian homeland for Native Americans, upholding Alaska as the point of entry into the New World. Suggestions are offered, then, as to why the Alaskan record remains silent about the initial peopling of the New World.

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