Select answers from Kelly Wisecup, author of Assembled for Use Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures

Q: I love the image on the cover of your book. Could you share who is the creator and what it means to you? More broadly are there ways in which textual assemblage relations to other modes of material culture assemblage?

A: Thanks for this question! The cover is a piece by the Seneca artist Marie Watt, entitled "Generous Ones (Blue Sky"). You can see the piece and more about Marie here: https://www.mariewattstudio.com/work/project/generous-ones-blue-sky-2014. I was so delighted when Marie agreed for the image to appear on the book cover, as back in 2016, when I was still in the midst of figuring the book out, Marie visited Northwestern's Block Museum to install an exhibition. As part of that, she and the Block hosted a community sewing circle--the idea was that people would participate in embroidering words onto pieces of felt that Marie would later stitch together into a piece. (She often works with community sewing circles to make her larger pieces.) Hundreds of people ended up sewing together in a campus gym, and that experience was one where I felt how stitching and sewing materials together could make relations. You can see more about the event and see a video with the final piece here: https://blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/projects/marie-watt.html.

Q: Can you please transcribe one of the recipe pages? Thank-you.

A: See the great work that Ivy Schweitzer and her team of collaborators have done with the Occom Circle, a database of Occom's writings held at Dartmouth. The recipe pages are transcribed here: https://collections.dartmouth.edu/occom/html/diplomatic/754900-2-diplomatic.html.

Q: Hi Kelly! I use Joseph Laurent’s Abenaki Dialogues in my research as well, can’t wait to read your book. I am wondering if Laurent saw his dialogues as part of a much older genre of Indian-settler language dictionaries, especially in New England, and how you see them in this older genre as a 19th century text. Also, have you found anything by Laurent or anyone from Odanak writing in French during this era? Why English do you think? Thank you! Julia

A: Julia, your work on Odanak was so helpful to my thinking about Laurent--thanks for your article on Native property in British Canada. And thanks for this question--in the chapter, I think about Laurent's Dialogues in relation to the Jesuit priest Sebastian Rasles' French-Abenaki dictionary, and Pierre Paul Wzokhilain's Wobanaki kimzowi awighigan--I think Laurent is certainly aware of these prior texts and building on them. A visit to the Musée des Abénakis at Odanak was also helpful--there are copies of dictionaries in the collections there (including Aubery's Abenaki-French dictionary) that had been in the possession of families for generations. So, why English? The Dialogues are published in 1884, the same year the camp at Pequaket is established, and I speculate in the book that part of Laurent's goal was for Abenaki children to learn English (along with their own language and French)--I think the transnational travel may have been one rationale for the choice to translate into English. Stephen carries on this work in the 1970-80s--he's working across French, English, and Abenaki to bring the various dictionaries together.

Q: I know you’ve done a lot of Native map work, and considering how maps have erased or speak over a lot of indigenous existences. Watching you constellate the movements and pathways of these texts and the pathways the text also traveled, I’m wondering if you can speak a little bit toward some of the subversive and private ways these texts were used by the Native persons and communities they were created from—and how those ways might be a new map for the ways we continue “making” texts and reorganizing the archive.

A: This is a fantastic question--thank you, Natalie! Your query about subversive and private uses makes me think about Charlotte Johnston's albums--her work in Anishinaabemowin with her family members other Ojibwe people is one example of this, I think. The books are facilitating acts of singing together, and these bind Charlotte to other people in ways that mean they ask for her help when they are ill or when they've experienced the loss of a family member. She is enmeshed in these relationships in ways that are both visible to ministers and others and very much private, in spaces of grief and illness. I also think about Octavie Laurent's copy of the Dialogues--the Abenaki woman, Rhonda Besaw, who sold it to Amherst College, told me that she wanted the book to go somewhere where it would be loved. I think about that a lot--about what it means to make texts and reorganize the archive through acts of love, and how Amherst College's collection of texts by Native writers means that Octavie's copy is among other books loved by their makers and users. And thinking about maps and love--talking with my students about your poem, "They Don't Love You Like I Love You" and its conception of maps is in this thinking --if readers want to find this poem, you can read it here: https://poets.org/poem/they-dont-love-you-i-love-you.

Q: This is a really wonderful project, thank you. As an historian I’m used to thinking about change over time—do you see strategies changing as fields like anthropology and history are professionalizing? Or are they staying the same? And I’m also curious if gender plays into the story - in some ways these kinds of literature (scrapbooks and recipes) reflects non-Indigenous forms that are coded female. I don’t know if these questions are clear, but your work is making me think.

A: Thanks for the question, Cathleen! I thought (worried) a lot :) ) about change over time as I wrote. I think it's both there and not there--I do see a centralization of archiving and collecting--the Bureau of American Ethnology is one example of this. In the 1870s-1880s, it's seeking to centralize the materials that Indian agents are collecting and increasingly to make it those agents who are doing the collecting, rather than amateur collectors. This is quite different from the situation in the late 18th century, when local historical societies are calling on citizens to send in stories and objects (though of course amateur collecting continues). But in chapter 5 on the Chicago World's Fair, I describe how the Fair was seen by its curators and by scholars today as a real shift in ethnographic practice--toward Franz Boas's contextual approach and toward the professionalization that the departments of anthropology (at Columbia for instance) that Boas led. But for many Indigenous people who were at the fair, the ethnographic squabbles over how to display Indigenous peoples and locate them in time and place looked quite familiar and quite similar effects to those Indigenous people were observing decades earlier. So I try to balance the "change over time" narrative of ethnography with its recurrent themes and familiar consequences for Indigenous peoples. In terms of Indigenous compilations, I do see a narrative that moves toward printed compilations (which means that more copies can circulate, both in colonial archives and among Indigenous communities)--so this is a narrative that moves toward proliferation. And, toward the end of the 19th century, I see a thematization of compilation--by this, I mean that writers start to use compilation as a narrative theme or perspective--we can think about Simon Pokagon imagining an account book kept by a supreme being who will judge settlers for their actions; or we can think about the scenes in Gertrude Bonnin's work where bureaucratic documents and books are sources of deceit and trauma for Indigenous people.

Q: Is there evidence that this process of Indigenous assembling, compiling, textual experimentation, and archival interventions also emerged in Western North America?

A: I think about Indigenous compilation as a textual relative to ledger art, which as I'm sure you know is an artistic practice that emerged on the western plains (and also in prisons in the southeast--thinking here of Richard Henry Pratt's work with Kiowa men incarcerated at Fort Marion in Florida). The ways that ledger art takes the page as a space for figurative illustration (rather than any lines on the page, or even its orientation within a ledger) is parallel to the ways that Indigenous compilers worked with textual materials --assembling materials into spatial proximity was just as (and sometimes more) important than the unit of the sentence or paragraph. And, my thinking about contemporary Indigenous interventions into museums was hugely influenced by the Kaw/Osage artist Chris Pappan's exhibition at the Field Museum in 2018-2019 (you can read about it here: https://wsimag.com/art/43537-drawing-on-tradition-kanza-artist-chris-pappan)--Pappan uses ledger art to change the relationship between Indigenous peoples and museum display cases.

by Patricia Anderson

Preaspiration in Tunica is marked with an \h\ before a consonant. We see it in words like lahpa (the verb for land a boat) and hihkut'E (rat) to name a few. The presence of a leading \h\ results in a breathy sound before the consonant.

Preaspiration is meaningful in Tunica. Consequently, tika and tihka mean different things ("big" and "to squeeze something until it bursts", respectively).  There are many minimal pairs in Tunica, such as sapani and sahpani ("a cooling off of the weather" and "elastic"), kɔta and kɔhta ("gray" and "to build a fence"), and lepi and lehpi ("to explain" and "to shut or close").

However, not every word in Tunica has an aspirated pair. In the Notebooks, we see frequent corrections to preaspiration, presumably during a subsequent editing phase given that these corrections generally happen in a different ink. 

Preaspiration is an important feature that the Tunica revitalization effort seeks to standardize and highlight when applicable; the variation found in the Haas notebooks informs these standardization decisions.

The 2022 recipient of the Karl Spencer Lashley Award is Nicholas Spitzer, Atkinson Family Chair, Distinguished Professor, and Vice Chair, University of California, San Diego, “in recognition of his discovery of neurotransmitter switching in single neurons of adult mammals, and his demonstration of causal links between neurotransmitter switching and behavioral state.”  The 2022 Lashley Award was presented at the Society's November 2022 Meeting.

Nick Spitzer discovered neurotransmitter switching in adult mammals in response to sustained environmental stimuli or sustained stress.  Switches typically replace an excitatory transmitter with an inhibitory one or vice versa, and postsynaptic receptors change to match the newly expressed transmitter.  In elegant experiments, Professor Spitzer showed that transmitter switches are linked to changes in behavioral state, playing a critical regulating role in behaviors as diverse as motor skill learning, behavioral responses to changes in day length, and behavioral expression of fear.  Neurotransmitter switching is a novel form of neuroplasticity that may lie at the root of numerous long-term behavioral changes.

The Karl Spencer Lashley Award was established in 1957 by a gift from Dr. Lashley, a member of the Society and a distinguished neuroscientist and neuropsychologist.  His entire scientific life was spent in the study of behavior and its neural basis.  Dr. Lashley’s famous experiments on the brain mechanisms of learning, memory and intelligence helped inaugurate the modern era of integrative neuroscience, and the Lashley Award recognizes innovative work that continues exploration in the field.

The members of the selection committee are William T. Newsome III (chair), Harman Family Provostial Professor, Vincent V. C. Woo Director of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute, Professor of Neurobiology and, by courtesy, of Psychology, Stanford University; John E. Dowling, Gordon and Llura Gund Research Professor of Neurosciences Emeritus, Harvard University; Catherine Dulac, Higgins Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Lee and Ezpeleta Professor of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, and Investigator for Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Ann M. Graybiel, Institute Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Investigator, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; John G. Hildebrand, Regents Professor of Neuroscience, University of Arizona; Eric Knudsen, Sewell Professor of Neurobiology Emeritus, Stanford University School of Medicine; Edvard Moser, Professor of Neuroscience, Director, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Norwegian University of Science and Technology; and Larry R. Squire, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry, Neurosciences, and Psychology, University of California, San Diego, Research Career Scientist, Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Diego.

The 2022 Patrick Suppes Prize in the Philosophy of Science will be split between two equally deserving recipients, Craig Callender for What Makes Time Special and Sabina Leonelli for Data-Centric Biology. The 2022 Suppes Prize was presented at the Society's November 2022 Meeting.

Craig Callender: What Makes Time Special?

This book is an ambitious and original exploration of the question in the title, involving an in-depth account of the understanding of time in both contemporary physics and contemporary psychology. It addresses a fundamental challenge to physics’ claim to tell us what the physical universe is really like: physics does not seem able to accommodate time as we encounter it in everyday life, with its special sense of ‘now’, the asymmetry of past and future, and our sense of the flow of time. Yet it seems pure scientific hubris to dismiss our experience of time as chimerical on account of our favourite theories in physics.

The book provides a masterful survey of the role of time in Newtonian gravitation, relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and quantum gravity, concluding that none find an easy place for time as we know it, with relativity and quantum gravity positively inimical to it.

Then the book deploys insights from biology, cognitive science and psychology to construct a brilliant reconciliation. Our model of time as we experience it is forged by our minds to deal with the perceptual and evolutionary problems thrown at it. Time can be as physics portrays but we misrepresent if for very good reason. This way of saving both views at once is well grounded in the science and is compellingly argued. The Suppes Prize Committee congratulates  the book for opening serious new inroads on a classic problem that philosophy has long struggled with.

Sabina Leonelli: Data-Centric Biology

Sabina Leonelli recognizes the ways in which the abilities to accumulate, preserve, and distribute massive amounts of data are changing many scientific fields.  Her ground-breaking study attends to the philosophical issues raised by this important trend.  Focusing on biology, she shows how big data modifies orthodox ideas about experiment and theory, and she addresses the new philosophical questions it raises.  The Suppes Prize Committee sees Data-Centric Biology as a pioneering book that opens up a major new area of science for philosophical discussion.

The possibility of amassing and storing huge amounts of data invites researchers to perform exploratory experiments, and shifts emphasis from theory construction to practical goals.  When data become broadly shared, new norms arise: withholding data is sinful.  As Leonelli shows, the concept of data evolves.  Data are relative to goals, since they must be stored – “packaged” – to aid particular research questions.

This requires a new style of scientific work.  Databases require “curating” to enable investigators around the globe to find information potentially relevant to their projects.  Leonelli explores the challenges facing those who assume this novel role.

As she notes, one of the few previous philosophers to take an interest in the production of data was Patrick Suppes.  Her rich account may be seen as the flowering of a seed that he once planted.  The committee regards her book, not as the last word on its topic, but as one that will inspire and shape an important subfield in the philosophy of science.

The Patrick Suppes Prize honors accomplishments in three deeply significant scholarly fields, with the prize rotating each year between philosophy of science, psychology or neuroscience, and history of science. The Patrick Suppes Prize in the Philosophy of Science is awarded for an outstanding book in philosophy of science appearing within the preceding six years.

The committee members were Nancy Cartwright (chair), Distinguished Professor, University of California, San Diego, Professor of Philosophy and co-director of CHESS, Durham University; Lorraine Daston, Professor, Director, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Visiting Professor of Social Thought and History, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago; Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University; and Stephen Stigler, Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago.

January 6, 2022 Update

All public-facing digital services, including the Digital Library, are now available. If you encounter any issues, please contact [email protected]. 

November 19, 2021 Update

The Member Directory and collections search are now available. The Digital Library and some Center for Digital Scholarship projects are still under maintenance.

November 11, 2021

To ensure the long-term accessibility of our digital collections, we are doing a major upgrade to our technological infrastructure. We are working to restore service as quickly as possible, but access to some services including the Digital Library, collections search, and Member directory has been interrupted. If you need immediate assistance with the APS's Library & Museum collections, please contact [email protected] and we will do our best to help. We apologize for the inconvenience.
 

Select answers from Neeraja Sankaran, author of A Tale of Two Viruses: Parallels in the Research Trajectories of Tumor and Bacterial Viruses

Q: I wonder if you could talk a little more about why this particular animal-based sarcoma so captured the attention of these important scientists? Historically, why do some diseases get scientific study when others might not?

A: Opportunity is the first reason that occurs to me. So, to begin with it was a new problem—a farmer brought in a bird with a tumor and so it was what Peyton Rous investigated. After all, he had been hired at the Rockefeller specifically to do cancer research—at a place that was explicitly not an institute of cancer research. So there was little or nothing established there already—he didn’t get to walk into a lab and help tackle an on-going problem, as James Murphy who arrived a year or so later did. In 1910 Rous was new at the Rockefeller and I’m not sure that at the time he had even begun working any particular problem. So when the right opportunity came along—so opportunely (if you’ll pardon the overuse of the word)—he took it on.

Ease of the model also plays a part—one cannot investigate the transmissibility of human tumor to another human. So unless there is a suitable animal model for a disease one could not carry out certain avenues of investigation.

The fact that the sarcoma was transmissible not only by transplanting bits of cancerous tissue (not unusual) but by injecting cell-free filtrates of ground up tissue, made it unique and therefore not only interesting but also allowed him to stake out his own territory. The research actually stalled,  dried up quite early, in the face of discouraging data, negative results and leads, but since it was possible to maintain the tumor tissue—at I suspect relative low cost in terms of both funds and space—he decided to do so and supply it to others interested in further investigating the problem.

Turning for a moment to the “other” virus in this book, the bacteriophage, its 1917 discovery by Felix d’Herelle took place under very different circumstances. Here it was an offshoot/byproduct of an investigation into a very specific problem for very specific reasons. d’Herelle had been assigned the microbiological investigation of a particularly nasty outbreak of dysentery at a garrison stationed just outside Paris. Dysentery was a known disease with an established microbial cause by then (actually two since people had already distinguished between bacterial and parasitic, i.e. amoebic types, but the unusually severe symptoms of this outbreak had led the chief medical officer Bertillon to suspect that the bacterial strain was different. In d’Herelle’s words, “one did not need to be a great hygienist to find the cause…” But having pinpointed the cause fairly early, he continued to follow the cases of convalescing patients and an unusual finding during routine examinations of stools etc. led to his discovery.

To answer the second part of your question—why some diseases get attention and other do not—both extremes, i.e. continued negative results or very quick resolution of a problem might have the same effect, in a problem not being pursued. Continued negative results and dead ends might render a problem “unsolvable” until newer techniques are developed and give one idea for instance. The early trajectory of bird sarcomas is a good case in point. Rous himself stopped work on the problem as early 1915 less than 4 years after his initial discovery, quoting precisely the discouragement of negative results as his reason. And the field lay fallow for nearly a decade until new results from across the pond, revived interest all over the world. As for the negative impact of positive results—especially in the context of a hospital laboratory, where a laboratory investigation is undertaken for a specific goal, once that goal is achieved, then the case is closed and the investigator moves on. Or as it happened in the case of the bacteriophage, a new tangential discovery completely overshadows the initial investigation.

Q: The examples of correspondence you show are really interesting. What do they reveal about the scientific research process in the 20th century. How similar or different is the process today in an age of digital communication and data sharing?

A: I think one thing —the most exciting thing really—about using correspondence (epistolary sources) to reconstruct history is the immersion into the lives and times of the people writing the letters. And to me it was amazing how much some things change/have changed while others surprisingly feel as contemporary as if written yesterday! I studied microbiology before I ever became a historian and some of the things the scientists talked about were very familiar and it was actually quite remarkable to thing that ways of culturing bacteria growing them in the lab and identifying colonies had not changed in decades! But other references are completely obscure because they cite obsolete techniques etc.

One thing about research then vs. now that is striking is the pace—letters took much longer of course, (there’s a reason its been dubbed snail mail in this digital age)—and often materials took even longer. Also easier nowadays to send the same message to multiple people at once. Back when cc literally meant carbon copying, i.e. placing a sheet of carbon paper under the paper to receive an imprint of the original letter—that was much more difficult or impractical. But still these were mechanics. To give an entirely unsatisfactory answer to this question “the more things change the more they stay the same.” or equally unhelpfully—some things have changed drastically others remained the same. Exactly what the some and other are, however, varies in each case.

Q: Can you talk more about Rous s'working methods? How did they figure out the chicken virus?

A: I don’t think that Rous’s working methods were in and of themselves particularly unique. He proceeded rather systematically to examine the tumor at different levels: gross, microscopic, chemical and try to induce it in a new animal to try and pinpoint the cause. The Koch’s postulates scheme of searching for the cause of a disease was in place even if the disease was not infectious. The early papers (1910-12) go into the details of the initial plan of attack, so to speak.

It took a long time to figure the chicken virus—nearly a century if you think about the actual mechanism and some parts are being figured out even now, I’d venture to say.

Q: Is our understanding of what viruses are still evolving?

A: Oh absolutely! In the light of what they can do, new discoveries etc. Furthermore, they themselves are evolving. But our understanding of some of the basic characteristics, that set them apart from other categories of beings for instance, have not really changed since the 1950s.

Q: When did scientists start to see viruses? Was seeing viruses under a microscope, key to proving viruses caused some tumors?

A: May I refer you to chapter 6 of my book? Jokes aside, though, it sort of depends on the specific type of seeing. The crystallization of virus particles in the 1930s allowed us to “see” viruses—or rather, the configuration of their constituent molecules—in a certain way; the cultivation in different types of media—e.g. leaves of plants, bacterial cultures (both in liquid and on solid media), chick embryos and ultimately on cell cultures—offered a different set of pictures of viruses. These images are of the lesions they cause in their hosts. So while you could not actually see the viruses themselves, you could see them through their effects. Without a doubt though, it was the invention of the electron microscope (1937) that brought the viruses into the visual realm.

To the second part, I’d have to say, that this sort of seeing was not key... not really. What it did was to help clinch the evidence. But the similarity of viruses to other like-sized things in cells, etc., sometimes confounded matters instead of clarifying them. Even more than photographs (photoshop manipulators take note!) electron micrographs are open to both manipulation and, even more so to differing interpretations of what one was seeing.

Q: The APS sounds like a very rich archive! Do you have plans for future projects using these collections?

A: Would love to!

October 18-20, 2021

Papers for "Meanings of Independence" can be found below.  You will be required to enter a password provided by conference organizers to access them. Please contact Adrianna Link at [email protected] if you are attending the conference but have not yet received the password.

Papers are not to be cited or circulated without the written permission of the author

The following events will be held via Zoom (times listed in EDT)

Monday, October 18

1:00–2:15 p.m.: Sexuality & Identity in the American Revolution

"Violations, Mortifications, Transformations: The Pinckney Women Confront the Revolutionary War"
Lorri Glover (Saint Louis University)

“Slavery, Freedom, and Survival: Life at Westover Plantation in Revolutionary Virginia”
Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch (University of Toledo)

“Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution”
Mary Sarah Bilder (Boston College)

“'Damn the Bougre': LGBTQ+ People and the American Revolution"
John G. McCurdy (Eastern Michigan University)

Tuesday, October 19

1:00–2:15 p.m.: Slavery, Race, & Revolution

“'Cruel war against human nature itself’: Understanding the American Revolution’s Impact on Slavery within the Context of Imperial Governance"
Holly Brewer (University of Maryland)

“Reexamining Activism in the Revolutionary Era: The Life-Long Efforts of the Revolution's Soldiers of Color”
Benjamin Remillard (University of New Hampshire)

“A Call to Stand Up: Meanings of Independence for People of African Descent"
Sherri Burr (University of New Mexico)

Wednesday, October 20

1:00–2:15 p.m.: Contesting Power & Authority in the Age of Revolutions

 “Sigenauk’s War of Independence: New Indian Leadership and the Struggle for Autonomy in the Revolutionary Borderlands"
John Nelson (Texas Tech University)

“the disagreeable situation in between the Civil in the Military’: Prisoners of War and Local Governance in the American Revolution”
Susan Brynne Long (University of Delaware)

“Taxation With and Without Representation: The Union Crisis in Scotland, The  Imperial Crisis in North America, and the Prospects and Costs of Incorporating Union"
Ned Landsman (SUNY Stony Brook)