Mark Cherrington

Mapping Cosmology

Seeing José Benítez Sánchez’s artworks in person is a dramatic experience. His art is intensely colorful and packed with forms and motion. Every square inch is filled, and figures and shapes crowd each other, all formed of yarn pressed onto a beeswax-covered panel. Your eye hardly knows where to land as it tracks the motion and flow of the various elements, and yet for all the artwork’s exuberance there is no chaos here. Every element is calculated and balanced with a sure hand and a master’s eye.

A Return to Culture

Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would be King is a parable about the price of cultural hubris. His two heroes decide that if they bring their innately superior culture to remote and backward people they can become the kings of the title. Looking for the most backward and un-Western culture they can find, they choose Kafiristan, in the mountains between present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, and before the story ends, they pay a high price, indeed, for their bloated ambition.

Indigenous Peoples and Climate Change

Just five years ago, governments, pundits, and the general public were talking about climate change—to the extent they were talking about it at all—as a vague issue that was open to question. Today it is not just accepted as a fact; it is seen as a crisis. But indigenous peoples have known for decades that climate change is happening, and they know better than most exactly what it means.

Oh, Canada!

"Residential schools.” On the surface, the term sounds benign, even bucolic, the sort of place where upper-class Britons would send their children in preparation for Oxford. But for Native Peoples in Canada, residential schools are the stuff of nightmares.

The Last Word

This issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly focuses on one of the most critical yet little-known problems in the United States today: the rapid and catastrophic disappearance of Native American languages.

	How much is a language worth?
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