Jay Miller

Classic works, with corrections, on the 1870 Ghost Dances, prelude to those of 1890, by Leslie Spier, Verne Ray, Anna Gayton Spier, Thomas Waterman, especially for Columbia Plateau, Klamath Basin, Central California, and Puget Sound.

For some reason, one of the hardest things for a human to do is to eat right. Whether that is because we have limited access to resources in all areas or if it is because we simply have too much access to unhealthy food, there are many reasons that eating healthy is a challenge. Sure, we can eat just about anything and it will sustain us. We will manage to move from one moment to the next and be able to call ourselves healthy. But is it really healthy to subsist on a diet of processed foods and sugary drinks? Just because we are alive does not mean that we are healthy. And the older we get, the more our bad habits begin to catch up with us.

Chinook matrons share cultural traditions with Dr Verne Ry, who adds details from historical records. Appendices feature the 1846 Northwest summary by John Scouler, MD, and 1906 elder depositions and testimonies at Bay Center.

Five sets of Native Northwest Place Names over 100 years show pitfalls and pleasures of documention efforts among native speakers, scholars, and inept amateurs.

Mo is 31. He works in an immigration removal centre. He’s a Detention Officer. He wears a shirt, a tie, and sometimes even trousers. He’s from Bishops Stortford. Mo’s in trouble. Mo’s in love. Dangerous and unsettling, beautiful and hilarious, Removal Men is a play with live music and songs. It tells the story of a fragmented 21st century Britain, trying to be powerful, trying to love, trying to escape.

A collection of short stories and modern art. "Everything is fucked forever" fits somewhere between Harmony Korine's "A crack up at the race riots" and "The Bible".

Ancestral Mounds deconstructs earthen mounds and myths in examining their importance in contemporary Native communities. Two centuries of academic scholarship regarding mounds have examined who, what, where, when, and how, but no serious investigations have addressed the basic question, why? Drawing on ethnographic and archaeological studies, Jay Miller explores the wide-ranging themes and variations of mounds, from those built thousands of years ago to contemporary mounds, focusing on Native southeastern and Oklahoma towns. Native peoples continue to build and refurbish mounds each summer as part of their New Year’s celebrations to honor and give thanks for ripening maize and other crops and to offer public atonement. The mound is the heart of the Native community, which is sustained by song, dance, labor, and prayer. The basic purpose of mounds across North America is the same: to serve as a locus where community effort can be engaged in creating a monument of vitality and a safe haven in the volatile world.

The Tsimshians are a Northwest Coast Native people known for their dazzling works of art and rich array of social, religious, and oral traditions that have captured the attention of scholars for over a century. Jay Miller brings together for the first time a wealth of material about the Tsimshians, presenting an unforgettable picture of their cultural universe. That universe is built around the metaphor of light, which was brought into the world by Raven; its refraction forms the chief social, religious, and symbolic institutions of Tsimshian culture. Family heraldic crests express light in one way, masks in another. Miller argues convincingly that the genius of Tsimshian culture, and one of the main reasons for its continuing vitality, is that its people are sensitive to different, and often creative, ways of capturing and embodying light.

This is the first comprehensive overview of the Native people of Puget Sound, who speak a Coast Salishan language called Lushootseed. They originally lived in communal cedar plank houses clustered along rivers and bays. Their complex, continually evolving religious attitudes and rituals were woven into daily life, the cycle of seasons, and long-term activities. Despite changes brought on by modern influences and Christianity, traditional beliefs still infuse Lushootseed life. Drawing on established written sources and his own two decades of fieldwork, Miller depicts the Lushootseed people in an innovative way, building his cultural representation around the grand ritual known as the Shamanic Odyssey. In this ritual cooperating shamans journeyed together to the land of the dead to recover some kind of vitality stolen from the living. Miller sees the Shamanic Odyssey as a central lens on Lushootseed culture, epitomizing and validating in a public setting many of its important concerns and themes. In particular, the rite brought together a number of distinct aspects or "vehicles" of culture, including the cosmos, canoe, house, body, and the network of social relations radiating across the Lushootseed waterscape.