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Excellent points. I think I would be annoyed if somebody else up and patented it and said we couldn’t use it anymore. By the same token, I wouldn’t want to tell anybody else they couldn’t use it. It belongs to the Ancestors, is pre-(Columbian)historic and nobody should have the right to exclude anyone else from its use. I wonder what the laws are on this. Could somebody patent the design of Stonehedge and exclude others from using it?
It has not been part of any tee-shirt to date.
Perhaps the correct approach would be to adapt the design into some larger motif that we could claim was the exclusive insignia of our group?
Anyone who has reasonable claim to Occoneechee ancestry should be able to use it and nobody with reasonable claim to Occoneechee can be denied from using it regardless of U.S. patents, copyrights and other foreign laws that do not apply to our people.
If a group related to Occoneechee Indians wants to use it fine–the more it is used by that group the more people will identify the symbol with that group. And the more other groups naturally will not use it. However, anyone with Occoneechee ancestry could still use it if desired. Again copyrights and other foreign laws should be kept out of Indian business.
Trying to patent this is like trying to patent the Siouan language and likey to draw significant heat from other Indian communities regarding theft of Indian culture.
Barry
“I am the first and last of my nation, subject only to the great spirit”
Anybody who wants to can wear a museum reproduction. Period. There are no laws or customs to prevent it, nor should there be.
Well, excuuuuuse me… but I was referring to a trade mark, not a patent (that’s just the office that registers them, in the US). And there are in fact ancient Native American symbols so registered. Like for example the hand with an eye in the palm, which I believe was registered about 40 years ago by the Southeast Indian Antiquities Survey (or something like that); anyway a group that sent out a newsletter from Nashville, and the symbol was their letterhead logo.
You might or might not wish to become informed on the topic (as opposed to all huffy about it), by reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_trademark_law
Hello, well Pappydick is right there are differences between the 2 and we need to get the legal poop on it.
This topic has to potential to get all huffy, it has to do with rights and claims, just like all other types of native American Issues, so why not the “art”.!
The difference between Euro art and ours is that for the most part ours is mneumonic, “thiers” is static, that is “none functioning” in a cultural format since they had a written language, form and function is the key!
I once said that I was going to post some materials on what I think this pattern on the shell and spoon might be, I still plan on doing that, and will, like always source out examples to base a theory on.
I see no reason to get personal or any thing else on this topic, as for other groups wanting to use this item we can’t stop them even if we tried, Saponi or other wise.
Have Fun doing what you want with this pattern Gecko, it belongs to all of us!
Harrington, M.R. Some Unusual Iroquois Specimens. American Anthropologist, 1909 Vol. 11:85-91
“….The author discusses a Native American tribe called the Tutelo who are so similar to the Iroquois that he felt it appropriate to mention them. The only thing that differentiates them from the Cayuga is a necklace called a wampum. It is made from shells flattened into discs. They are very decorative and used in a Tutelo adoption ceremony. If a member of a Tutelo family passed away, the family members could select an outsider to take the place of the deceased. The outsider would wear the wampum during the adoption ceremony.
Harrington does not make any theoretical claims, but he does describe the specimens in great detail.”
http://www.publicanthropology.org/Archive/Aa1909.htm#top
Thought this was an interesting detail.
Brenda
I found this on a website sent to me by a man who has taken it upon himself to protect burial mounds around the St. Louis area.
This conch shell gorget was found near one of the mounds…looks similar in a way, doesn’t it?
I was just looking at southern sites and came across an old Waccamaw site.
This old site has a beaded rosette in the top left hand corner, the central figure is a basket pattern from the soutwestern folks that used to called “Papago”. the outside of this rosette has an edge design that looks similar to the arms on the shell gorget.
These outward arms look like what could be achieved with the arms found on the gorgets if done in beadwork, aswell the cnteral portions could be filled in with color etc.
http://www.jldev.com/waccamaw/resources/index.asp
This thread defiently needed a bump…..One of the Occaneechi showed me this thread….I’m surprised I have over looked it….especially since I posted one of the shell pendants that was found near this
I just noticed there is 8 pages to this thread..so if I post something already here..my bad 🙂 This is info on the stuff found at the fredricks site.During the Late Prehistoric period (as evidenced by the nearby Wall site), many native ornaments were made from the columella, or central columns, of large marine gastropods. These probably were taken from species of the Melogenidae (Crown Conch) family which occur along the Atlantic seaboard from Massachusetts to Florida (Percy 1972). Small disk beads, gorgets, and pendants were made from the outer whorl of these large univalves. A small univalve called marginella (of the Marginellidae family) which occurs along the coast from the West Indies to the southern beaches of North Carolina (Percy 1972) was also used as a form of ornament.On the whole, the coastal univalves were the source material for the greatest proportion of ornaments. To a much lesser extent bivalve shells (presumably mussel) and stone fragments were made into small disk beads, and native copper and mica were used for other types of ornaments.By the time the Fredricks site was occupied by the Occaneechi, many of the previously available bead forms (pendants, tubes, and sphericals) had been modified and others (columella segments and marginellas) had been all but dropped from use. Several new types–runtees and cylinder/barrels made from columella, and wampum made from quahogs (Mercenaria mercenaria)–had appeared. Quahogs occur from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Florida (Percy 1972). Although small disk beads appear to have retained both their form and function through this time, they too show indications of the impact of European influence.In 1709 John Lawson (Lefler 1967:204), who had travelled through North Carolina in 1701 and visited Occaneechi Town, gave a general description of Indian beadmaking:This [the shell preform] the Indians grind on Stones and other things, till they make it current but the Drilling is the most difficult to the Englishmen, which the Indians manage with a Nail stuck in a Cane or Reed. Thus they roll it continually on their Thighs, with their Right-Hand holding the Bit of Shell with this Left, so in time they drill a Hole quite through it, which is a very tedious Work; but especially in making their Roanoak, four of which will scarce make one Length of Wampum.Based of the above ethnohistorical information, we can expect to see several manifestations in the archaeological record. The basic beadmaking process appears to have involved first obtaining a preform from the shell by breaking or the groove-and-snap technique, then reducing the piece, and finally drilling, grinding, and smoothing. Prehistoric tool types for this work would have included hammerstones, stone drills, burins, chisels, and anvils, grinding stones, and stone or pottery abraders. At historic beadmaking stations, one should find many of the components of the prehistoric tool kit along with the replacement or addition of metal tools such as awls/drills/needles, pincers/tongs/vices for holding preforms, and perhaps also hammers and saws for reducing the shells. Where the purple wampum were made, we should expect to find Quahog shells (Mercenaria mercenaria). Where other types of beads and ornaments were manufactured, there should be refuse from univalve shells (called periwinkles in the 1600-1700s). The lack of such beadworking tools and shell debris at the Fredricks site suggest that shell beads were not manufactured by the Occaneechi but were received in trade.Types of Shell OrnamentsEight kinds of shell ornaments were recovered from the Fredricks site: pendants, tube beads, columella segment beads, spherical columella beads, barrel/cylinder beads, small disk beads, wampum, and runtees. Most of these were found in association with burials and represent either decorative elements sewn onto garments or jewelry.
Small disk beads, most of which were probably made from the wall sections of large univalves, comprise approximately 90% of the shell ornaments from the Fredricks site. Correspondingly, small white beads also comprise about 90% of all glass beads at the site. Apparently there was a continuous use and demand for this general bead form (first shell and then of glass and shell) during the Late Prehistoric and Historic periods.
Many of the Fredricks site disks were drilled or punched with a small cylindrical object, presumably a metal nail, needle, or awl. The use of metal tools was suggested by the sharp sides of the bead holes as opposed to the hourglass concavity present on beads which had been slowly drilled from both sides. Also, a few of the Fredricks site beads revealed a larger, seemingly “unfinished” form. Several also revealed a triangular- or quadrangular-shaped hole, which suggested they were not drilled but driven through by a very hard object, again a sign of the use of metal tools
The 11 tube beads from the Fredricks site were all recovered from the chest area of Burial 4, which was a bundle burial containing a male adult and an infant. The tubes were found lying together in parallel order on the adult’s chest. The nine tubes that were complete ranged in size from 105-123 mm in length and 6.0-7.4 mm in diameter. Their hole diameters ranged from 2.0-2.7 mm. These measurements demonstrate the uniformity of these tubes. On none of them is the silca groove very apparent, unlike tube beads found at earlier sites. No doubt the use of a metal drill enabled the artisan(s) of these historic tube beads to produce a much more refined product with much less energy expenditure; however, even so some evidence of the groove should be apparent no matter how narrow the tube given the depth of this groove on other tubes from the area.
These historic tube beads actually resemble the hair pipes used by Plains Indians which were manufactured commercially by Dutch settlers in Bergen County, New Jersey, from the West Indian conch, Strombus gigas (Ewers 1957). These tubes were made from the thick lip of the outer whorl of the conch. If the tubes from Fredricks site were made from this thicker-lipped West Indian conch, it would explain the absence of a silca groove, which only occurs on the inner columella part of the shell. Although the evidence suggests that commercial manufacture of these articles by the Dutch was begun between 1776 and 1798 (Ewers 1957:42), it is possible that the tubes at the Fredricks site represent a somewhat earlier example of trade for this distant source of shell. If this is true, then tube beads, like the pendants, indicate a longer distance trade network historically than there is evidence for prehistorically at this locality.
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