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refractory
Pooh-Bah
Reged: 02/05/05
Posts: 1233
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Re: Native North Americans
05/21/09 06:08 PM
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Oh I dunno- there are no bears in Tierra del Fuego- but then they are too far south to care about Ursa Major anyway! OTOH they get the Magellanic Clouds. Who needs bears?
The Kootenay are believed to be distantly related to the Salishan tribes who dwell more to the west, but this is controversial. I know the guy who wrote the linguistic grammar of the language, and a draft dictionary. As with Yahgan, this language likes to string together instrument or body part and path/position terms in with normal verb roots. This is relatively more popular in the Americas than in most places. I'll bet it may color the way native peoples view nature.
Yahgans thought of the stars as campfires, though individual bright ones or nebulae had distinct names, often of myth characters. In Yahgan mythology there was a time before humans and animals (and also celestial bodies) were distinguished- as they played out their various roles in stories they transformed. Rainbows were considered harbingers of death.
Because of normally bad weather, it is doubtful that the average Yahgan ever had a really good view of the night sky in its entirety. Nobody builds observatories in Tierra del Fuego.
Jess Tauber
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