Oldest European fort in the inland U.S. discovered in Appalachians
Posted: 23 Jul 2013 08:37 AM PDT
Oldest European fort in the inland U.S. discovered in Appalachians
Posted: 23 Jul 2013 08:37 AM PDT
The songs are sung by the Cherokee group Walela.
The Cherokee Mornings Song is a traditional greeting to the Rising Sun. Sunrise is a sacred time, the dawn of a new day.
Wi n’ de Ya ho — Cherokee Morning Song — Walela
Wash Your Spirit Clean — Walela
~Wash your spirit clean~
Give away the things you don’t need
Let it all go and you’ll soon see
And you’ll wash your spirit clean
Wash your spirit clean
Go and pray upon a mountain
Go and pray beside the ocean
And you’ll wash your spirit clean
Wash Your spirit clean
Be grateful for the struggle
Be thankful for the lessons
And you’ll wash your spirit clean
Wash your spirit clean
Give away the things you don’t need
Let it all go and you’ll soon see
And you’ll wash your spirit clean
Wash your spirit clean
Mari Boine – Sow Your Gold
Mari Boine – Goaskinviellja / Eagle Brother
Mari Boine, previously known as Mari Boine Persen, (born 8 November 1956) is a Norwegian Sami musician known for having added jazz and rock to the yoiks of her native people. Gula Gula (first released by Iđut, 1989, later re-released by Real World) was her breakthrough release, and she continued to record popular albums throughout the 1990s.
Boine was born and raised in Gámehisnjárga, a village on the river Anarjohka in Karasjok municipality in Finnmark, in the far north of Norway.
Her parents were Sami (Lapps). They made a living from salmon fishing and farming. She grew up steeped in the region’s natural environment, but also amidst the strict Laestadian Christian movement with discrimination against her people: for example, singing in the traditional Sami joik style was considered ‘the devil’s work’. The local school that she attended reflected a very different world from her family’s. All the teaching was in Norwegian.
As she grew up she started to rebel against being an inferior Lappish woman in Norwegian society. For instance, the booklet accompanying the CD ‘Leahkastin’ (Unfolding) is illustrated with photographs with racist captions like ‘Lapps report for anthropological measurement’, ‘Typical female Lapp’, ‘A well-nourished Lapp’; and it ends with a photo of Boine herself as a girl, captioned ‘Mari, one of the rugged Lapp-girl types’ and attributed ‘(Photo: Unidentified priest)’.
She was asked to perform at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, but refused because she perceived the invitation as an attempt to bring a token minority to the ceremonies.
In 2003 Boine was awarded the Nordic Council Music Prize. She was appointed knight, first class in the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav for her artistic diversity on September 18, 2009.
Her songs are strongly rooted in her experience of being in a despised minority. For example, the song ‘Oppskrift for Herrefolk’ (‘Recipe for a Master Race’) on her breakthrough CD ‘Gula Gula’, sung in Norwegian unlike the rest of the songs which are in Sami, speaks directly of ‘discrimination and hate’, and ironically recommends ways of oppressing a minority: ‘Use bible and booze and bayonet’; ‘Use articles of law against ancient rights’.
Her other songs are more positive, often singing of the beauty and wildness of Sapmi (Lapland). The title track of ‘Gula Gula’ asks the listener to remember ‘that the earth is our mother’.
She sings in a traditional folk style, using the yodelling ‘yoik’ voice, with a range of accompanying instruments and percussion. For example, on ‘Gula Gula’ the instruments used are drum, guitar, electric bass clarinet, dozo n’koni, ganga, claypot, darboka, tambourine, seed rattles, cymbal, clarinet, piano, frame drum, saz, drone drum, hammered dulcimer, bosoki, overtone flute, bells, bass, quena, charango and antara.
The Moon and the Night Spirit — Eg Fele (live)
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2009/04/royals-prove-inbreeding-is-a-bad-idea/
Those jokes about inbred royals might have some basis in fact, according to a new study in the journal PLOS One .
The Hapsburg dynasty ruled Spain from 1516 to 1700, reigning over the height of the Spanish empire. The dynasty ended when the last king, Charles II, who suffered physical and mental disabilities, died without issue despite two marriages. Inbreeding had been thought to play a role in the family’s extinction.
A young Charles II, c. 1673, via Wikimedia Commons
A group of biologists from Spain developed an extended pedigree of more than 3,000 individuals over 16 generations so that they could calculate the “inbreeding coefficient” of the Spanish Hapsburg kings. The inbreeding coefficient is a measure of relatedness between two individuals. Here’s an example:
Take a first-cousin mating. First cousins share a set of grandparents. For any particular gene in the male, the chance that his female first cousin inherited the same gene from the same source is 1/8. Further, for any gene the man passes to his child, the chance is 1/8 that the woman has the same gene and ½ that she transmits that gene to the child so 1/8 X ½ = 1/16. Thus, a first-cousin marriage has a coefficient of inbreeding F =1/16 [0.0625].
The six kings of Spain married a total of 11 times. Nine of the marriages were “consanguineous unions in a degree of third cousins or closer.” There were even two uncle-niece unions (eww). Over time, the biologists calculated, the inbreeding coefficient rose from 0.025 for Philip I, the founder of the dynasty, to 0.254 for Charles II. His inbreeding coefficient–0.254–is as high as that expected from a parent-child or a brother-sister relationship (double eww).
In addition to the high inbreeding coefficients, the biologists cited two other lines of evidence that inbreeding was the cause of the Spanish Hapsburgs’ demise: First, the family experienced a high rate of infant mortality, with half of the children failing to reach age one (compared with 80 percent survival at that time in Spanish villages). Second, many of Charles II’s disabilities and illnesses–short stature, weakness, intestinal problems, sporadic hematuria, impotence/infertility–could be explained by two genetic disorders, combined pituitary hormone deficiency and distal renal tubular acidosis. The probability that an individual would inherit two recessive traits would be extremely low, but inbreeding made that much more likely.
This wouldn’t seem to have much relevance here in the present, except as an interesting side story in the history books. However, the authors note that consanguineous marriages account for 20 to 50 percent of all unions in certain populations in Asia and Africa and reach as high as 77.1 percent among army families in Pakistan. In those families, more than 60 percent of marriages are between first cousins.
Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2009/04/royals-prove-inbreeding-is-a-bad-idea/#ixzz2TaIXYT4H
May 2013,
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A Formosan clouded![]() |
The Formosan clouded leopard, a clouded-leopard subspecies native to Taiwan, is now extinct, according to a team of zoologists.
“There is little chance that the clouded leopard still exists in Taiwan,” zoologist Chiang Po-jen told Taiwan’s Central News Agency (CNA). “There may be a few of them, but we do not think they exist in any significant numbers.”
Zoologists from Taiwan and the United States have looked for the animal on and off since 2001, to no avail. To see if any of the animals remained, the researchers set up about 1,500 infrared cameras and scent traps in the Taiwanese mountains but found nothing.
Now, the only one left in the country is a stuffed specimen at the National Taiwan Museum, zoologist Liu Jian-nan told CNA. There are two live clouded leopards at Taipei Zoo, but they are an imported subspecies from Southeast Asia.
The range of clouded leopards (Neofelis nebulosa) spans from the hills of the Himalayas to Southeast Asia to China. The animals are known for the patches on their fur that resemble clouds. They also sport fangs larger than those of any other feline.
In 2006, research revealed that clouded leopards found in the Sunda Islands of Southeast Asia — which which include Borneo, Java, Sumatra and Bali — were a separate species, now known as Sunda clouded leopards (Neofelis diardi).
Formosan clouded leopards, which were not thought to be a separate species, have been driven to extinction by habitat destruction and illegal hunting for their skin and bones.
When the plane carrying a maverick bush pilot and a sick, young, Inuit woman, Kanaalaq, crashes hundreds of miles from civilization, they are at the mercy of nature’s worst. While search parties try to find the downed plane Charlie decides to trek over land, promising the woman that he will return with help. Despite her weakened condition, she follows Charlie and nurses him back to health when insects, cold and starvation threaten to kill him shortly after he leaves. Kanaalaq teaches him the skills he will need to survive and he comes to respect her wisdom and love her valiant spirit as they each set out into the wilderness. Each will finds a startling and solitary destiny in the beautiful and stark tundra.
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Uploaded on May 25, 2010
Rabbit-Proof Fence is a 2002 Australian drama film based on the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara. It is based on a true story concerning the author’s mother, as well as two other mixed-race Aboriginal girls, who ran away from the Moore River Native Settlement, north of Perth, to return to their Aboriginal families, after having been placed there in 1931. The film follows the girls as they trek/walk for nine weeks along 1,500 miles (2,400 km) of the Australian rabbit-proof fence to return to their community at Jigalong, while being pursued by a white authority figure and an Aboriginal tracker.
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