I’m trying to remember (and find) a thread from last year or the year before, in which someone wanted an explanation for a drawing of a man dressed in Spanish clothing of about the 1500’s lying on his back in the middle of a road, dead.
Giving him last rites was a priest in robes, while another stood at his head watching. That’s as much as I can remember of it. As I recall, the poster wanted information on what it might depict and why. Let’s hope my memory is accurate on this, for once.
I have since read up on the deadly Spanish “Navaja” folding knives, often used for dueling, and their important role in Spanish history and culture. I suspect this drawing might be a portrayal of the loser in such a fight. This would be subtly reinforced by the fact that one type of these large folders was called a “santolio.”
Here is WIKI’s explanation:
“Most of the larger navajas of this period were clearly intended as fighting knives, and were popularly referred to as santólios, a contraction of the Spanish term for ‘holy oil’. The name was a reference to the oils or unguents applied to the dying as part of the Catholic last sacrament, as it was believed that a man encountering such a knife in a violent confrontation would invariably require administration of the last rites.”
You see the visual connection to the priest administering the same.
Can anyone remember this thread and direct me to it?
I googlesearched the boards for threads containing the words drawing and monks. I had a leg up because I’d posted in the thread and vaguely remembered the thrust of the conversation. Actually, had google failed me, I probably could have found it by manually searching through my user CP. Yep. It’s right there on page 15.
“Navajo
Athabaskan people and language, 1780, from Spanish Apaches de Nabaju (1629), from Tewa (Tanoan) Navahu, said to mean literally “large field” or “large planted field,” containing nava “field” and hu “valley.” Spanish Navajo was used 17c. in reference to the area now in northwestern New Mexico.”
Apropos of nothing except your notation that the Navajo are an Athabaskan people and speak an Athabaskan language…
It is a surprise how many of the tribes in the West and Southwest came down from interior Canada, where Athabaskan tongues are common.
I’m sure the Kiowa are among these. They arrived with dogs pulling travois and learned the horse from an established plains tribe that befriended them, I have read.
I’ve also read that the Apache fall into this category, and possibly the Commanche, who became highly successful after adopting the horse and taking up pursuit of the buffalo.
Linguists conventionally divide the Athabaskan family into three groups, based largely on geographic distribution:
Northern Athabaskan
Pacific Coast Athabaskan
Southern Athabaskan or Apachean
The 31 Northern Athabaskan languages are spoken throughout the interior of Alaska and the interior of northwestern Canada in the Yukon and Northwest Territories as well as in the provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Several Athabaskan languages are official languages in the Northwest Territories, including Dëne Sųłiné (Chipewyan), Dogrib or Tłįchǫ Yatʼiì, Gwich’in (Kutchin, Loucheux), and Slavey.
The seven Pacific Coast Athabaskan languages are spoken in southern Oregon and northern California. The six Southern Athabaskan languages are distantly isolated from both the Pacific Coast languages and the Northern languages as they are spoken in the American Southwest and the northwestern part of Mexico. This group includes Navajo and the six Apache languages.
Tanoan has long been recognized as a major family of Pueblo languages, consisting of Tiwa, Tewa and Towa. The inclusion of Kiowa into the family was at first controversial; the once-nomadic Kiowa people of the Plains are culturally quite distinct from the Tiwa, Tewa, and Towa pueblos. However, it is now accepted that a Tanoan family without Kiowa would be paraphyletic, as any ancestor of the pueblo languages would be ancestral to Kiowa as well. Indeed, Kiowa may be closer to Towa than Towa is to Tiwa–Tewa.
Numic is a branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It includes seven languages spoken by Native American peoples traditionally living in the Great Basin, Colorado River basin, and southern Great Plains. … These languages are classified in three groups:
Central Numic languages
Comanche
Timbisha (a dialect chain with main regional varieties being Western, Central, and Eastern)
Shoshoni (a dialect chain with main regional varieties being Western, Gosiute, Northern, and Eastern) tl;dr - Apache and Navajo are part of the same language family. Kiowa is from a different family, which also includes a handful of Pueblo languages. Comanche is from a third family, which some linguists may be related to the family which includes Kiowa.
So does that generally mean that the Athabaskan languages evolved from a single group, presumably up in Canada, and the peoples who speak them thus likely emigrated south from Canada, in earlier and latter waves?
What I read about the Kiowa having emigrated relatively recently from interior Canada was written by a Native chronicler of that tribe. What I read about the Comanche originating in Eastern Utah and Western Colorado but but being semi-starving outsiders in that area prior to moving further south and east and taking up buffalo hunting was in an award-winning book on that tribe. It claimed that the Apache and the Comanche were related by language, and fierce competitors.
When I mentioned the story about the Kiowa coming down relatively recently interior Canada to a PhD in anthropology, my cousin’s boyfriend, at dinner one night he immediately went this books, and after some reading said he was surprised, hadn’t known their origin, and was interested to discover it.
We need someone beyond Wikipedia to sort out the meaning on the ground of this linguistic information a bit, I think.
Well, then you might further be interested in another conversation I had with the Ph.D. that evening. I mentioned to him that the local Indians where I grew up in Southeastern Alaska, the warlike Tlingit, who dominated all other tribes around them, had a type of wooden slat armor and helmet that looked an awful lot like that of Japanese Samurai.
He told me that he, too, had become intrigued by this professionally, had put some study into it, and had written a piece on it (published in a professional journal, if I remember correctly). He found that the knots used by the Tlingit to tie the armor slats together were nearly identical with those used by the Japanese Samurai.
In reading the local paper in my old hometown about a year ago, I noticed that the Coast Guard had located and sunk by gunfire a drifting hulk of a Japanese fishing boat from the great earthquake and tidal waves of 2011. It was not too far off the coast of Southeastern Alaska.