Cherry River

The multimedia exhibition Cherry River, Where the Rivers Mix was presented to audiences in August 2018 at the Missouri Headwaters State Park in Three Forks, Montana. Long before the European invasion across the Atlantic, the headwaters, or the confluence of three forks of the Missouri River, was a crossroads for Northern Plains Indians. The place-based project, Cherry River, created by artist Mary Ellen Strom and Native American researcher Shane Doyle, was produced by Mountain Time Arts, a collaborative arts and culture organization in southwestern Montana. In an effort to analyze the site, Mountain Time Arts convened a diverse group of participants. Their research question became, What does it take to change the name of a river? After six months of research, the project centered on the act of changing the name of the East Gallatin River back to the Indigenous Crow name Cherry River. The name Cherry River honors and describes the numerous chokecherry trees growing on the river’s banks that provide sustenance for wildlife and venerates Indigenous history, the ecology of running water, and riparian systems in the Northwest. The rise of interest in the rights of Indigenous people in North America aligns with many of Okwui Enwezor’s groundbreaking initiatives around the world. This assemblage of images, poetry, and first-person narratives is an example of the kind of practice in dialogue with the legacy of Enwezor’s decolonial actions and innovative use of curatorial strategies in several groundbreaking exhibitions to confront the “complex predicaments of contemporary art in a time of profound historical change and global transformation.” While Enwezor was neither an explicit source of inspiration nor invoked for the Cherry River project, the futures of Enwezor are palpable in this anticolonial project restoring the past to reimagine the present.

Gravettian hand stencils as sign language formatives

Several Upper Palaeolithic archaeological sites from the Gravettian period display hand stencils with missing fingers. On the basis of the stencils that Leroi-Gourhan identified in the cave of Gargas (France) in the late 1960s, we explore the hypothesis that those stencils represent hand signs with deliberate folding of fingers, intentionally projected as a negative figure onto the wall. Through a study of the biomechanics of handshapes, we analyse the articulatory effort required for producing the handshapes under the stencils in the Gargas cave, and show that only handshapes that are articulable in the air can be found among the existing stencils. In other words, handshape configurations that would have required using the cave wall as a support for the fingers are not attested. We argue that the stencils correspond to the type of handshape that one ordinarily finds in sign language phonology. More concretely, we claim that they correspond to signs of an ‘alternate’ or ‘non-primary’ sign language, like those still employed by a number of bimodal (speaking and signing) human groups in hunter–gatherer populations, like the Australian first nations or the Plains Indians. In those groups, signing is used for hunting and for a rich array of ritual purposes, including mourning and traditional story-telling. We discuss further evidence, based on typological generalizations about the phonology of non-primary sign languages and comparative ethnographic work, that points to such a parallelism. This evidence includes the fact that for some of those groups, stencil and petroglyph art has independently been linked to their sign language expressions. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.

We’ll Show You Boys How to Dance

Through war-dancer imagery and its display in expressive culture in the Southwest, Kiowas and others created intertribal arenas that stretched beyond Oklahoma, and Kiowas contributed to the making of a larger intertribal, twentieth-century world. Fancy-dance imagery created a contemporary picture of Kiowa young men that was built from older Kiowa constructions of gender and the popular representation of Plains Indians. Painters forged war-dancer imagery though dance, regalia, paintings, and murals.