Modern Native American Art: Angel DeCora's Transcultural Aesthetics
Angel DeCora was the best-known Native American artist of her generation but she is generally omitted from histories of “modern” Native American art. Working at a time when United States Indian policy was dedicated to eradicating Native identity, DeCora fought for the participation of Native Americans in modern American cultural and political life. This essay demonstrates the formal and conceptual modernity of DeCora's work. It explores her sophisticated engagement with contemporary social and aesthetic theory and argues that her paintings, illustrations, and designs draw on these ideas to represent the transcultural condition that defines modern Native American experience.
Art Education in American Indian Boarding Schools: Tool of Assimilation, Tool of Resistance
This dissertation examines the process of domestication of American Indian children in government-controlled schools through art education. At the end of the nineteenth century, Thomas J. Morgan, Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1889-1893), and Estelle Reel, Superintendent of Indian schools (1898-1910), brought changes to the curriculum of Indian schools by introducing the teaching of elementary art and instruction in “Native industries” such as pottery, weaving, and basketry. I claim that art education was as an instrument for the ‘colonization of consciousness,’ that is, for the redefinition of Indigenous peoples’ minds through the instilment of values and ideals of mainstream society and thus for the maintenance of a political, economic, social, and racial hierarchy. Art education served the needs of the late-nineteenth century assimilationist agenda. I consider Morgan’s and Reel’s national mandates at the turn of the twentieth century and examine their rationales for including drawing and Native crafts in the Indian schools’ curriculum. This knowledge of educational programs crafted at the bureaucratic level is applied to an analysis of art instruction in two selected institutions, the Albuquerque Indian School in New Mexico and the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, from 1889 to 1917. I examine local responses to government policies and daily practices of Indian education at the micro level in order to provide specific information as to the organization, structure, and pedagogy of art instruction within a school day in these particular localities. Finally, I discuss how students’ artworks were displayed in the context of exhibitions and national conventions as exemplary evidence of
Drivers of Live Cattle Price in the Livestock Trading System of Central Cameroon
Livestock production and trade are critical for the food security and welfare of rural households in sub-Saharan Africa. In Cameroon, animal trade consists mainly of live cattle commercialized through livestock markets. Identifying the factors contributing to cattle price formation is critical for designing effective policies for sustainable production and for increasing food availability. In this study, we evaluated the influence of a range of individual- and market-level factors on the price of cattle that were sold in all transactions (n = 118,017) recorded over a 12-month period from 31 livestock markets in the main cattle production area of the country. An information-theoretic approach using a generalized additive mixed-effect model was implemented to select the best explanatory model as well as evaluate the robustness of the identified drivers and the predictive ability of the model. The age and gender of the cattle traded were consistently found to be important drivers of the price (p < 0.01). Also, strong, but complex, relationships were found between cattle prices and both local human and bovine population densities. Finally, the model highlighted a positive association between the number of incoming trading connections of a livestock market and the price of the traded live cattle (p < 0.01). Although our analysis did not account for factors informing on specific phenotypic traits nor breed characteristics of cattle traded, nearly 50% of the observed variation in live cattle prices was explained by the final model. Ultimately, our model gives a large scale overview of drivers of cattle price formation in Cameroon and to our knowledge is the first study of this scale in Central Africa. Our findings represent an important milestone in designing efficient and sustainable animal health management programme in Cameroon and ensure livelihood sustainability for rural households.