It would seem that most of the large swaths of rural poverty in America are those with historical roots of slavery, colonization, and exploitation. These include: the Deep South and Mississippi Delta region where slavery, share cropping, and cotton plantations abounded; Appalachia (esp. West Virginia and Kentucky) where the coal mining industry disappeared; Texas-Mexico border where the Latinx populations have long been exploited; the Southwest and Northern Plains (including Alaska) with Native Americans who live on reservations after having been exploited, dealt with broken treaties and general decimation of their people and communities; central corridor of California with high numbers of exploited immigrant farm laborers.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/sacheen-littlefeather-oscars-apology-1235198863/

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/native-american-language-preservation-rcna31396

Should outsiders attempting to preserve Indigenous knowledge, histories, or language be allowed to make money off of their work?

Perhaps summarizing Graeber and Wengrow too much here, but..

The Enlightenment came to us courtesy of discussions with Indigenous Peoples from the Americas.

https://unimelb.academia.edu/DuaneHamacher

I've bookmarked a bunch of his work to read in addition to The First Astronomers.

Star knowledge can be some of the most important social knowledge with respect to Indigenous peoples and as a result astronomers are some of the most prestigious and sacred roles in these societies.

Just as Western historians erase indigenous ideas as misunderstandings or fabrications or outright appropriation of those ideas as pre-existing ideas in European culture, is it possible that we do the same thing with orality and memory? Are medievalists seeing mnemotechniques of the time and not properly interpreting them by not seeing them in their original contexts and practices?

The idea of talking rocks, as an example, is dismissed as lunacy, crazy, or some new-age hokum, but in reality it's at the far end of the spectrum. It's so unknowable for Western audiences that it's wholly dismissed rather than embraced, extended, and erased.

What does the spectrum of potentially appropriated ideas look like? What causes their adoption or not, particularly in cases of otherwise cultural heterodoxy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_Rock,_Georgia

Note the proximity to New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee nation.

Not to mention a more sophisticated view of their culture and contributions instead of viewing them as "lesser", which is the dominant mode in most Western cultures.

I love the ideas hiding in some of these design elements. The pieces are very atomic, but can be built up into some fascinating bigger designs.

I'm curious if there are any mnemonics attached to these that add additional levels of meaning in the art in which they're embedded?

The attached video was incredibly helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc3K-MyH3xg

Particularly interesting to see the phrase "spiritualities were tied to the land" now knowing the power of mnemonics for a variety of indigenous peoples.

In this framing, the IndieWeb is a group of Indigenous peoples who lived on the web before the colonializing Facebook arrived to tell us how we ought to be living.

How does this juxtapose with the ideas of indigenous scocieties in James Suzman's article The 300,000-year case for the 15-hour week (Financial Times, 2020-08-27)

It looks to me like Andy and Michael are grasping at recreating with modern technology and tools what many (most? all?) indigenous cultures around the world used to ritually learn and memorize their culture's knowledge. Mnemonics, spaced repetition, graded initiation, orality, dance, and song were all used as a cohesive whole to do this.

The best introduction to many of these methods and their pedagogic uses is best described by Lynne Kelly's book Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory, and the Transmission of Culture.

If they take her ideas as a basis and then layer on their own thinking, I think they'll get much further much quicker. Based on my reading of their work thus far, they're limiting themselves.

As most humanists of the time may have had incredibly well-trained memories (particularly in comparison with the general loss of the art now), this is particularly interesting to me. Having had a great memory, the real value of these writings and materials is to help their memories dramatically outlive their own lifetimes. This is particularly useful as their systems of passing down ideas via memory was dramatically different than those of indigenous peoples who had a much more institutionalized version of memory methods and passing along their knowledge.

indigenous peoples, religion,

I can't help but thinking here about stories of native peoples feeling like photographs of them were like having their soul stolen.

You might be interested in the last section of a recent episode of <cite>On the Media</cite>. It discusses a documentary (bordering on reality show) relating to indigenous peoples of Canada, which I think made brief mention of Australia and a similar project there. While I'm sure there are some very striking differences between these indigenous peoples, there are also some not surprising similarity in the ways in which they are exploited and marginalized.

In general I liked the idea of what the documentary was and represented and wish there were versions for other countries.