books, December or late December, whichever

[diatryma]

I brought a lot of books home to read over break, then spent my time knitting, on the computer, or eating cookies standing in front of the fire. Some of them were recommendations for the boy, though.

Erin E Moulton, Chasing the Milky Way. Too many bounces at the end, a little too... I don’t know, the end just didn’t work for me. The rest is

Comments

[trifold_flame]

Tiny devil's advocating- 7th century culture in some Native American (Canadian?) tribe might be way different from extant tribal culture in the same area. So maybe it's okay to make some stuff up. Maybe? If it has some historical basis?

I dunno. I did not read the book, so what do I know about how it was done?

[diatryma]

In this case, the artifact was... maybe two hundred years old, of a specific tribe that knew about it and remained in the area. I'm okay with making things up with historical basis, not just when there's a void, but I am pretty sure that no tribes near or on Lake Michigan made copper hands and entrusted them to sacred women whose councils guarded watersheds all along the Great Lakes and points east.

There was so much great specificity in the book, particularly with racial issues and appropriation, and then there's this lump of artifact right in the middle. I might be completely wrong, too, and projecting What Indians Are Really Like onto history and finding it wanting because of course they didn't work metal, they were pretechnological savages, weren't they, that kind of nonsense. I just don't trust the writer to have gotten it right, not the way I trust Griffith. Plus there's a difference between getting it wrong for the two groups.

[trifold_flame]

Tribes of the great lakes region worked copper all the time- from way back in the day. There's native copper in the area (you don't have to smelt it, you find it in lumps). I give you evidence:

http://www.mpm.edu/research-collections/anthropology/online-collections-research/old-copper-culture

I like to read about the history of the Americas, and I've been fortunate to visit museums where I got to see some really early great lakes region copper-work. Not trying to be a PITA, just figured you might find the information interesting. The trade networks that spanned the Ancient Americas carried copper from the Great Lakes region all over the Americas.

[diatryma]

Cool! I had wondered about this but figured I would have heard *something*. I'll amend the post. Thanks!