Sublime

Once he became a full-time Yellowstone resident and settled into his daily routine of watching the Druids, Rick found that he didn’t want to do anything else. Strictly speaking, he worked only forty hours a week, but he came to the park every morning regardless of whether he was on the clock. When he wasn’t officially on duty, he didn’t wear his

“Ancestry” in our culture implies chromosomal connection; ancestors are those humans from whom I have inherited my body tissues. Biogenetics replaces the spirit world. In other societies an ancestor could be a tree, a bear, a salmon, a member of the dead, a spirit in a dream, a special spooky place. These may be addressed as “Ancestor” and an altar

The phrase ‘noble savage’ was in fact popularized a century or so after Rousseau, as a term of ridicule and abuse. It was deployed by a clique of outright racists, who in 1859 – as the British Empire reached its height of power – took over the British Ethnological Society and called for the extermination of inferior peoples.

American Indian ethnohistorian David Rich Lewis gives a convincing history of the invention of the modern equivalent of the Noble Savage, the trope of ‘Ecological Indian’, tracing it through 60s counterculture, the Crying Indian of the 1970s’ ‘Keep America Beautiful’ advertising campaigns, a script writer’s creation of a fictional speech by Chief