Wrote this in 2024. Today is Treaty Day, a commemoration of the signing of the Treaty of 1868. This Treaty ended our 4 year exile and incarceration at Hwéeldi. I tried writing something new to have published by today but wasn’t able to. So this two year old article will have to do for now

Coming soon to the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (and it'll be open access) The passion of butterflies: Notes on “translating” a Navajo poem by Rex Lee Jim

Fort de Chartres

The visitor center at Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge looks great, so much work has gone into creating this space, it's nice to see what it's become

Woodchucks dropping a new album cover

You can do a lot worse than reading these two books by Renato Rosaldo

I'm sorry to hear of the passing of Renato Rosaldo. His work was quite influential on my thinking. My favorite memory of Rosaldo, was when he came to Austin several years ago and gave a poetry reading, he and I had a lovely conversation about poetry and anthropology

Writing in 1976, Robert Penn Warren did not think it likely that the bicentennial would inspire Americans to engage in "self-scrutiny" of their history, but would, instead, be a time to promote self-indulgent stories about the US and to engage in grand, but vacuous, spectacle

Rolling on the waves

Easy peasy

Beaver heading out to the open water

Into the blue world

At the old railroad

I read this book when I was young, and honestly, I was glad to have found the work of Stephen Jay Gould as well, I still have Gould's books, but long ago parted ways with Dawkins's dismal book

This is one of my favorite books about Johnny Appleseed

Like most people (certainly those of us from Indiana), I enjoy revisiting Ross Lockridge's Raintree County during the long 4th of July week. Who among us hasn't wandered around Henry County in search of the Golden Raintree planted by Johnny Appleseed

I still remember when a student dismissed Johnny Appleseed in class, they chose him at random to give an example of someone no one ever thinks about, and I said that the odds of her professor being from the city where he's buried and that there's an annual festival was pretty low and yet here we are

"Garrick's revision of Romeo and Juliet, which allowed Juliet to awaken from her sleep moments before Romeo's poison took effect so that the two lovers could enjoy a final farewell, was further proof that Shakespeare was viewed as a human playwright...and could be improved upon"--Lawrence Levine

Into the green world

Bumpy ride

"He tells the story to a visiting anthropologist and linguist Joel Sherzer, throwing in one or two Spanish and English words to highlight humor...but he interjects a very Kuna moral, about caring for others...and not giving people credit for their achievements."--Joel Sherzer

"It just so happens that all my energies are concentrated, and always have been, and always will be, on one thing, the recording of sound and of the human voice. That doesn't make for an easy life, you understand."--Penelope Fitzgerald

Raccoon life

Checking on the Bucky Dome

"Carl Edgar told me that he simply liked to lie awake at night reciting place names in his head, as he traveled Ditidaht territory in his mind, testing himself to recall the names and mythical narratives, while conjuring images of places enriched by the experiences of his own life"--Dorothy Kennedy

Early morning, lake shelbyville

The world famous Shelby goat tower

Sunrise over the lake

I appreciated that the links were bad in the email they sent out. It really added to my confidence

Morning

I've been thinking about Galen Strawson's Against Narrativity as I've been reading Barnes's Departure(s), partly because Strawson pops up in the acknowledgements to the book, partly because the book seems a way of thinking about Strawson's views

"The more you recall, retell, narrate yourself, the further you risk moving away from accurate self-understanding, from the truth of your being."--Galen Strawson

We are looking to fill an open-rank position in Sociolinguistics in Oxford, in conjunction with Worcester College. Come be a part of the exciting developments in language and linguistics in Oxford! www.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/news/2026/05...

Cypress

"Music came out of storytelling. The old people, she said, began to tell stories. The more often they told the stories, the more melodic their style became; and finally, they were singing."--Leanne Hinton, Havasupai songs

"I suspect [Hummingbird] had considerable interest in such Yumans as might hear them or hear of them. He was part of an Indian early-twentieth-century intellectual community, an Indian renaissance we might say, that was nourished, not awed, by the receipt of Christianity."

"This idea, 'No theory outside the West,' was developed especially by James Mill in Britain and G.W.F. Hegel on the Continent, both of them theorists of Europe as the metropolitan center of universal knowledge."--Thomas Trautmann

Wapomeo Island A.J. Casson 1979

Morning reading, I first read Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes in the 90s and have been reading him ever since, including that time he wrote about Tony Webster

yes! @dunsworth.bsky.social "You can accept the truth of evolution on one hand and also, sanely and soundly...reject...claims that what people say and do today is evidence for what their ancestors did and for how that imaginary behavior shaped our biology." ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2026/05/ideo...

Perfect morning

And another beaver

More beaver

Beaver were out today

Ended up in a bison jam

On the boardwalk

Stacker compiled a list of the most common birds seen in Illinois from Project FeederWatch.

In the grass

Sleeping

Went down to Land Between the Lakes to see the bison