The Badianus Manuscript: America's oldest Herbal

The Spanish conquest of Mexico happened so fast that nobody had time to think about what sort of regime or society would emerge afterwards. It would be Catholic, of course, but other than that the Spanish did not agree about anything, and the native aristocracy remained powerful enough for decades to exert their own views.

Church of Santa Cruz, only surviving remnant of the college

The College of Santa Cruz, founded by the Franciscans in Mexico City in 1536, is a good case of how these conflicts played out. The purpose of the college was to train Aztecs from elite families to be Catholic priests. The college had two Spanish Franciscans as teachers, aided by a native assistant, and several dozen sons of elite Aztec families attended. They were taught Spanish, Latin, theology, and "grammar," that is, the basics of Latin literature and composition. But other forces, led by the Dominicans, opposed this whole plan; they kept the school from ever receiving adequate funding and in 1555 banned any native from becoming a priest. By then, our sources say, the school was already a ruin. During its brief life, however, the school did manage to train dozens of Aztec men. One of its instructors was Bernardino de Sahagún, who published several books on the Aztecs and the Nahuatl language and also the famous General History of the Indies, an immense project on which he was helped by students at Santa Cruz.

One of the most notable graduates of Santa Cruz was Martin de la Cruz. De la Cruz wrote, in Nahualt, the manuscript that was then translated into Latin by Juan Badiano as Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis, the first work to document Native American knowledge of plants. Badiano's autograph copy ended up in the Vatican Library, where it languished in obscurity for 400 years. The Vatican Library was infamous until recent times for its habit of hiding important, potentially controversial books under boring titles that nobody would ever ask for, and then sometimes of being unable to find them if they were asked for. Anyway hardly anyone had read this book until 1929 when an American named Charles Clark arrived from the Smithsonian searching for early Latin American manuscripts. With backing from Vice President and Smithsonian board member Charles Dawes, Clark was able to get the Vatican to let him photograph and then publish the manuscript, something almost unheard of in those days.

The Spanish were very interested in Native plants and their properties. In the letter Cortes wrote to Emperor Charles V describing his conquest of Mexico, he mentioned that the market district of Tenochitlan included "a street of herb sellers where there are all manner of roots and medicinal plants that are found in the land. There are houses as it were of apothecaries where they sell medicines made from those herbs both for drinking and for use as ointments and salves." Valuable plants were one of the things Europeans were seeking around the world, and of course cacao, tobacco, corn, potatoes, hot peppers, and other American plants ended up being worth many times more than all the gold in the world.

So plant lore was big business in 1552, when someone got de la Cruz to write this manuscript and then paid Badiano to translate it. The Latin version was written on fine parchment and bound in velvet. It is one of the purest sources for Aztec thinking about the natural world, written by a knowledgeable native in his own language.

Cacao

It describes, among many other things, giving patients hypnotic preparations of datura before surgery, which is pretty much what was done to me when they operated on my wrist. Plants are listed for treating bleeding, skin rashes, headaches, colds, wounds, and so on, including those great stables of pre-modern medicine, laxatives and purgatives. Some of these plants are still used by folk healers in Mexico for the same purposes described by de la Cruz, showing strong continuity within the oral culture.

Anyway I can't recall having heard of this manuscript or its authors until this week, and I got excited about it and wanted to share.

American Indians Disappearing from the Culture

From John Smith's Discoverie of Virginia to around 1970,  American Indians were central to Euro-American popular culture. Stories, visual art, advertising, songs – all of it was saturated with images of Native Americans. Until 1890 or so that was because Indians were central to American life. Defeating them, taking their land, and getting along with the survivors was a big part of our national project. But even during the war years the picture of Native Americans in Euro-American culture was not all negative; on the contrary there was from the 1600s on a romanticizing of "wild" Indians as noble, stoic, and wise. Wars against Indians were always opposed by a significant faction of whites, however ineffectual that opposition may have been. Conflict did not prevent Euro-Americans from taking over much of Native culture, from eating corn to smoking tobacco.

But from around 1890 Native Americans ceased to be major players in American politics, and Indian issues faded from the news. They remained, however, very large in our culture and especially in movies and television.

A Native boy growing up in the 1950s saw his ancestors on television almost every night. Maybe they were portrayed as savage barbarians, but they were certainly not pathetic; on the contrary they were badasses fighting hard for their land, and white people feared them. I remember a scene in which John Wayne points to a spear left behind by an Indian raid and says, "that's Comanche," at which everyone gets very quiet. From The Searchers to stories of the first Thanksgiving, Indians were huge in American popular culture.

Now, not so much. This is partly because we are just not as interested in the past as we once were, and partly because of white shame that makes it hard to portray cowboys driving their cattle across Indian land as heroes. And partly because of pressure from Native America leaders to get rid of offensive, stereotypical images.

This is on my mind because Land O' Lakes has decided to remove the Indian woman from their butter. This does not seem to have been because of any particular campaign by Native Americans, but because they want to feature some of their farmers in their product design to emphasize that they are a farmer-owned cooperative. But it has been celebrated by some Native leaders:

Kevin Allis, the chief executive of the National Congress of American Indians, a public education and advocacy group, said the organization saw it as a “positive sign,” adding, “We encourage all companies that peddle products displaying stereotypical Native ‘themed’ imagery to follow suit.”

“Americans need to learn the truth about the beauty and diversity of tribal nations, peoples and cultures today,” he said, “and discarding antiquated symbols like this are a step in the right direction.”

I wonder if this is wise. Because once we get rid of all the offensive, stereotypical images of Indians, we are not going to be left with sensitive, nuanced images of beauty and diversity. What's going to happen is that Indians will disappear. Or, I guess, that their prominence in the culture will fall until it matches their share in the population, which is around 1.5%.

I do understand that in some cases nothing would be better than the offense offered by the culture, for example I think African Americans are right to fight minstrel show mockery of black people. But I think the situations of Native and African Americans are very different. The old stereotypes made African Americans laughable, while those of Native Americans made them violent and savage but on the other hand formidable and sometimes wise. There is in the old stereotypes of Indians much that is true – the Iroquois and the Lakota were very violent, and proud of it – and on the other hand much that matches the ways contemporary Native Americans want to be understood, especially in their spirituality and their attachment to the earth of their homes. It seems to me that there is much in the popular culture that Native leaders could work with in building a real understanding of their peoples. Plus there is the stark demographic fact that there are ten times as many African Americans as Native Americans, which makes them a lot harder to ignore.

So I wonder if the cause of Native American rights would really be helped by the disappearance of Indians from all sports team names, advertising, bad movies, corny tv shows, and so on. At least those things keep Indians in the public mind, and at their worst give Native leaders a chance to protest them and be heard.

The Land O' Lakes woman also raises another question: what bits of culture would meet the standards of Indian activists like Kevin Allis? It happens all the time that a big corporation will consult with some members of an ethnic group and hire people of that ethnicity and so on and still get accused stereotyping and cultural appropriation (like Disney with Moana). Because the Land O' Lakes image is not, it turns out, the random product of American advertising, but was created by a Native American artist who tried to make it specific to the Indian nations of Minnesota:

The original logo of the company’s “butter maiden” first appeared on Land O’Lakes packaging in 1928, created by Arthur C. Hanson, an artist who worked for a local advertising firm.

It was redone about 30 years later by Patrick DesJarlait, a Chippewa artist who died in 1972. As a Native American, he was a rarity in the illustration business at the time, his son Robert DesJarlait said in an interview on Friday.

“He redid her features and the dress she is wearing, a Plains-style dress with beaded panels,” said Mr. DesJarlait, a member of the Red Lake Ojibwe tribe in Minnesota. “He added floral designs for the Chippewa culture. It was basically a redesign. He gave her a clearer image. So he was modernizing her a bit.”

Though some groups have held up the illustration as an example of stereotyping, Mr. DesJarlait said, he didn’t see it that way. “She was never created as a stereotype,” he said.

Mr. DesJarlait said he believed that the company did not discard the imagery to get rid of a stereotype, but out of discomfort with representations of Native Americans of any kind.
“She just disappeared,” he said.

The Effigy Mounds of North America

In southern Wisconsin – and, since ancient Indians did not know about state boundaries, a little into Iowa, and a little into Illinois – are dozens of strange mounds shaped like beasts and birds.

The most common shapes are birds and bears. These maps made by pioneering archaeologists are important, because since their time many mounds have been lost to plowing, road building, and the growth of towns, and most have suffered erosion and other damage. These days most are 3 to 6 feet tall (0.9-1.8 m).

They are difficult to date because later people sometimes dug burials into them, placing their own dead in ground consecrated by the ancients. But modern thinking is that they were built between 600 and 1200 AD, with some experts opting for a more constricted range of 700 to 900. Archaeologists call the builders the Effigy Mound Culture, and they were not at all related to the Mississippian "Mound Builders" of Cahokia and Etowah.

Lidar map of Effigy Mounds National Monument, Iowa

As to what they mean or why they were built, nobody knows. It is possible to connect the images to Native American legends, but it is possible to connect them to many different legends that have no special unified theme.

Here is what I think: for some people, in many different times and places around the world, spirituality becomes attached to moving dirt. Building mounds and earthworks becomes the defining holy act. So when these people wanted to honor the gods or honor a great human leader or define some place as sacred, they reached for the baskets and the digging sticks.

Other people had the habit of honoring the gods with stone or wood, or music and dancing.

So to the extent that they have a meaning, it is that people want to put effort into their faith. They want to labor for the gods, for their heroes, for their community.

The Effigy-building people left their mark on the landscape in a dramatic way, and it is marvelous that we can see their works and feel some of the awe and wonder that hangs about these sacred places.

Edward Curtis on Prince Edward Island, 1914

Native American masks and costumes photographed on one trip in 1914, now in the Library of Congress. This is the mask of a Qagyuhl culture hero known as the Octopus Hunter, who kills a giant octopus in a famous tale.

This one is captioned, "Woman wearing a fringed Chilkat blanket, a hamatsa neckring and mask representing deceased relative who had been a shaman."

Qagyuhl dancers

Pekka Hämäläinen, "Lakota America"

Pekka Hämäläinen wrote one of my favorite books of American history, The Comanche Empire, so when his new book came out I eagerly ordered a copy. Lakota America (2019) is a more narrowly political book, with less ethnography and ecology, but shows the same profound scholarship and perhaps even greater insight into past societies and events. It is not an easy to read but after finishing it I know things I did not know and understand history in a new way, which is the greatest praise I can give a historian's work.

Sioux history begins in the late 1600s, when they lived mostly in what is now Minnesota, along the boundary between the forest and the tallgrass prairie. For the first century of their history we have two kinds of sources: the accounts of French traders and soldiers and the Native records known as winter counts (above). The oldest of these reach back to the very early 1700s. They are series of pictographs, usually one for each year, written in a spiral pattern. They require interpretation, but by anchoring oral tradition to particular times and places they create a generally trustworthy record of how some Indians saw the major events of their lives. Hämäläinen makes much use of them to show how differently the world sometimes looked from the Native perspective.

From those first mentions, and probably before, the Sioux were a numerous and powerful people. Hämäläinen makes this one of his themes. The Sioux conquered other tribes because there were just more of them, 20,000 or so when tribes like the Kiowa, the Crow and the Pawnee never numbered more than 5,000. The Sioux were not politically united. They were divided into seven tribes: Yankton, Yanktonais, Mdewakantons, Sissetons, Wahpetons, Wahpekutes, and Lakota. Their name for themselves is Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, the Seven Council Fires. The Lakota, who in the 19th century made up a majority of the Sioux, were further divided into seven bands, including the famous Hunkpapa and Oglala. But they saw themselves as one people and there was no civil war among them (although there were plenty of murders), and they generally allied to oppose outsiders. To Hämäläinen the secret of their success was the institutions, rituals, vocabulary and other cultural practices they used to bind such a large group of people together in a rapidly changing world. The identity of being Sioux was powerful and appealing enough that it endured and grew despite the turmoil the people lived through. In that era of frequent, deadly epidemics it was also vital for large tribes to incorporate newcomers into their ranks, and the Sioux also excelled at this, rivaled perhaps only by that other great warrior people, the Iroquois.

To me the most striking thing about plains Indian life is how new it all is. The plains Indians as we know them did even really exist until they had horses, which did not reach the northern plains until around 1700. Based on the winter counts, the Sioux got their first mounts in the 1740s. Horses did not breed very well in that land of bitter winters and frequent droughts, so it took decades for the Sioux to build up herds big enough to support them in a life on the plains. The first depiction of a mounted raid in a Sioux winter count comes from 1757. It was the Lakotas, always the westernmost of the Sioux tribes, who took the lead in this, and over the next fifty years they gradually became the dominant group within the broader Sioux brotherhood. In the 1750s the Lakota began moving onto the plains, but it took a long time for them to become true plains people, rather than inhabitants of river valleys who sometimes ventured onto the plains to hunt. From the booming fur trade with the French they acquired guns, although they continued to use the bow and arrow as well right down to the 1870s.

With horses and guns the Lakota pushed westward to the Missouri. This was an act of war, for other Indians already lived there: horse-riding tribes like the Kiowa and Cheyenne and also farmers who built villages along the rivers, such as the Mandan and Arikara. Hämäläinen calls the Lakota world that developed an empire, based on dominion by force over all those they encountered. Some tribes they drove off the plains entirely: Omahas, Poncas, Otoes, Iowas, and more, who fled toward the lower Missouri and the protection of European soldiers based in St. Louis. The Lakota destroyed several river villages, slaughtering or enslaving their inhabitants, until the cowed river people accepted their overlordship. The Arikaras became serfs, forbidden from leaving their villages and forced to trade their corn and beans to the Lakota at whatever price their masters felt like paying; the Lakota reminded them of who was in charge by regularly taking Arikara horses and women and daring them to complain. All other Indians, they told one British delegation, "were their slaves or dogs" (89).

When Lewis and Clarke met them the Lakota dominated a 1000-mile stretch of the winding Missouri River, from the White River to the Knife. These Americans were shocked by the way the Lakota dominated the village Indians and called them "savages," but they also figured out that it was the Lakota who held the power. For the next 70 years the Lakota were the focus of US policy in the region. One of Hämäläinen's themes is that while we imagine the Lakota and the US as rivals, they were for a long time allies, and the US government helped the Lakota solidify their vast plains empire. Trade, gifts, and eventually rations distributed at Indian Agencies helped make the Lakota stronger than other Indians, allowing them to extend their power farther and farther west.

Pushing westward from the Missouri the Lakota reached the Black Hills. The Black Hills were a great resource for any people living on the northern plains, for often these elevations caught rain when the rest of the country was dry. They were also visually stunning and, all the people who lived around them thought, spiritually charged. It was in the Black Hills, the Lakota later said, the the Great Spirit first breathed life into humans. Through the first half of the 1800s the Lakota world stretched from the Black Hills to the Missouri. But they did not stay even there. As more and more white men moved up the Missouri and the Platte, the eastern buffalo herds thinned, and the Lakota responded by shifting farther west, waging war against the Crow, Utes and others for the lands around the Yellowstone, Powder, and Bighorn Rivers. As late as 1875, just two years before the war that broke their power, the Lakota were conquering lands along the Yellowstone and Bighorn Rivers from the Crow and Utes; winter counts from 1871-1875 have much more about fights with other Indians than the looming crisis with the US government.

Eventually, of course, the Lakota were broken and forced to settle on reservations that were tiny compared to the vast empire they had controlled just a few years before. It is a sad tale of ecological devastation and human loss, of people killed and a whole way of life exterminated. But the Lakota of course have endured and still remain, their language and traditions much stronger than those of most Native American peoples.

Starting in 1851, the US government signed a series of treaties with the Lakota that gave them rights over vast areas on the plains. The most important was the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. In the map above, the blue area is the Great Sioux Reservation as the treaty defined it, which was given to the Lakota as their property in perpetuity; the other areas were not granted so fully but the Lakota were guaranteed the right to hunt on them so long as the buffalo herds endured. In the south, that did not last very long, but North America's last great bison herds were found west of the reservation toward the mountains. This treaty is, so far as I understand it, still in force, and in 1980 the US Supreme Court found that the Black Hills in particular had been unfairly stolen from the Sioux and Cheyenne. They ordered the government to pay compensation. The government offered $122 million, which the Indians refused, saying that they wanted their sacred land, not cash. Hämäläinen quotes one Lakota as saying, "It's always been ours. It will always be ours." (389)

What are we, in the 21st century, to make of these claims?

One of the Sioux winter counts records the year when they first set eyes on the Black Hills; depending on how you work the chronology, this might be any year from 1765 to 1776. This was at least 22 years after two French traders named François and Louis de La Vérendrye visited the Black Hills, which happened in 1743. It is also at least 85 years after a certain Robert Bedell landed in New York, founding the North American branch of my family, which in turn is about 60 years after certain of my other ancestors landed at Jamestown. When my ancestors reached the Chesapeake Bay country, where I now live, the Sioux were still in Minnesota, and harvesting wild rice was much more important to their culture and economy than hunting buffalo. Most of the online histories record that the Lakota conquered the Black Hills not long after they discovered them, but Hämäläinen thinks that did not happen for decades and that the Black Hills were not really Lakota territory until around 1820.

The Lakota conquest of the Black Hills and indeed their whole plains empire did not happen in the distant, misty past. It was recorded as it happened, both by the Native compilers of winter counts and Euro-American observers. It was accompanied by great violence against other Native Americans, some of  whom had claims to the Black Hills or the Missouri River country that went back centuries or millennia before the Lakota arrived on the scene. It may well be that modern Lakota have among their ancestors Mandan or Arikara people who had long lived in this land, but that is not how they defend their own claims; they defend them as Sioux.

I do not say this to refute Lakota claims; after all the US government signed those treaties and then flagrantly violated them. My point is that the distant past is not always a very good guide to what we should do in the present. The case of the Black Hills shows that it does not take centuries to make a place a sacred home. Under the right circumstances it takes only a generation.

Any given place may be the sacred home of several different peoples. If the Sioux did manage to reclaim the Black Hills I suspect they would then be challenged by other Native Americans – Crow, Blackfoot, Cheyenne – who were in the Black Hills before them. Who would adjudicate those claims? And what, meanwhile, about Euro-Americans whose ancestors came to the Black Hill to mine gold in 1875, and whose families have therefore been in the Hills for twice as long as they belonged to the Lakota?

I am skeptical of all claims that one place belongs to one people; these claims are the root of wars around the world, most notably in Israel/Palestine. My goal is always for all of us to live together, as best we can, regardless of whose ancestors did what to whose. That is past. What counts is the future, and how we can make it better for everyone.

Archaeology and Demography in Eastern North America

What does archaeology tell us about the past?

It's a question I ask myself all the time. Often when digging up artifacts of indeterminate date from soils of indeterminate origin I feel like the answer is, "not much." People were here, sure; they made pots or stone tools; they built fires and cooked things. What else?

My nagging sense of how little we sometimes learn from archaeology is what drew me to a 2010 paper in American Antiquity by George Milner and George Chaplin. They push the archaeological data to its limit in an attempt to answer an important question about the past, and they may have discovered something of value.

There is a long-running, sometimes bitter debate about how many people lived in the Americas before Europeans arrived. The bitterness comes from a sense that the low count faction is somehow minimizing European crimes, the high count faction trying to play them up, hence everybody is playing politics in one way or another.

How would you count anyway? One way is to start from those Native polities that were encountered by Europeans when they were still strong and healthy -- the Aztecs, for example, or the Timucuans of Florida who welcomed De Soto's men. You start from the explorers' or conquerors' population counts, look at how much the population of those areas fell by 1800, and then extrapolate to areas about which you have no data. Problems with this method include knowing how far to trust population estimates made by explorers and a sort of sampling error, in that Europeans were drawn to the most populous and dynamic Native communities for trade or conquest.

How might one go about estimating the population of areas that no ethnographically-minded outsiders visited until after their populations had been decimated by disease? Well, how about archaeology?

Alas, archaeology is a bad way to estimate populations; all you can really do is excavate a village and then look at historical records and see how many people explorers thought lived in similar communities, which means you are back to worrying about the accuracy of those estimates anyway.

But maybe archaeology can make a contribution here. Because to archaeologists one striking thing about North America circa 1500 AD is how many vast areas had, so far as we can tell, no inhabitants at all. The record indicates that population was quite dense in certain areas -- for example, the Mohawk Valley of New York, around the Chesapeake Bay, in the southern Appalachians, on Florida's Gulf Coast -- while other areas that look at least as good for settlement to our eyes were empty. One of these is what archaeologist have taken to calling the "Empty Quarter" around the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, a place that a few hundred years earlier had been home to Cahokia and other major towns.

When Milner and Chaplin plotted the areas in eastern North America where archaeology indicates significant Native settlement in the early 1500s, they got the map above. The size of the blobs is not very important, because by and large the bigger the blob, the lower the population density. But anyway you can see that, based on archaeological data, vast stretches of North America were unsettled. This doesn't  mean that Native Americans didn't use these areas; they did, for hunting and the like. They just didn't build villages or plant corn there.

If you take those population estimates I mentioned before and apply them to this data set, taking account of all the area where it seems nobody lived, you get a radically smaller estimate of Native populations. Of course you have to consider that some villages were probably missed or mis-dated or what have you, but anyway this is the data we have.

Milner and Chaplin produce a range of estimates from their data, but their best figure for the population of the whole of eastern North America is between 800,000 and 1.6 million. This matches quite well with the lowest estimate anybody ever cites, Ubelaker's figure of 1 million, which was reached using a completely different method. Other estimates for the population of this area go as high as 5 to 8 million, so archaeology points to a figure on the low side of historical estimates.

As I said, I like this because it takes the archaeological data seriously: this is what we have, so what does it tell us?

Christi Belcourt

Christi Belcourt is a Métis artist and environmental activist much of whose work is directly tied to particular events or causes.

The rest of the texts is from the artist's statement on her web site.

Everything I do in my life is my love for the earth and my awe of it all. How is it possible we are even alive? The great power and mystery surrounds us every minute of every day. Everything – the plants, insects, winds, stars, rocks, animals, us – is a giant web of pure spirit. Nothing is separate from anything else. The spirit world surrounds us at all moments and is present in all things. If its possible we live in a planet surrounded by stars, then nothing is impossible. 

My heart overflows with love for the beauty of this world. The mystery of this planet and this universe is too vast and too powerful to even begin to understand. All I know is that all life, even the rocks, need to be treated with respect.

The sacred laws of this world are of respect and reciprocity. When we stop following them, we as a species are out of balance with the rest of the world.

This wondrous planet, so full of mystery, is a paradise. All I want to do is give everything I have, my energy, my love, my labour – all of it in gratitude for what we are given. I’ll never be able to give back enough. My love for this world overwhelms me. My love for this world, and my love for everyone and everything is what drives me.

Lakota Shield

Shield of the Hunkpapa Lakota Joseph No Two Horns (He Nupa Wanica), collected at the Standing Rock Reservation, North Dakota, 1885. Now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A Massacre in the Bow and Arrow Wars

Interesting archaeological news from Alaska:

Archaeologists have uncovered a 350-year-old massacre in Alaska that occurred during a war that may have started over a dart game. The discovery reveals the gruesome ways the people in a town were executed and confirms part of a legend that has been passed down over the centuries by the Yup'ik people.

A recent excavation in the town of Agaligmiut (which today is often called Nunalleq) has uncovered the remains of 28 people who died during the massacre and 60,000 well-preserved artifacts.

The settlement was burned down, and the top layer was full of arrow points.

Some of the 28 people found "had been tied up with grass rope and executed," said archaeologist Rick Knecht, adding that "they were face down and some of them had holes in the back of their skulls from what looks like a spear or an arrow." When exactly the massacre occurred is not certain, though Knecht said the complex was constructed sometime between A.D. 1590 and 1630. It was destroyed by an attack and fire sometime between 1652 and 1677, he added.

That was during what the Yup'ik call the "Bow and Arrow Wars," a long series of tribal conflicts. The oral tales of that time trace the conflicts back to some original crime, in one version an accident during a dart game when one boy put out another's eye. In others it was a rivalry over a woman. Some historians now think the underlying cause was the Little Ice Age, which made Alaska very cold during the 17th century and may have led to food shortages. Whatever the cause, it is an amazing archaeological site and an amazing find, the latest from a very fruitful cooperation between the tribe and the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

Cherokee Inscriptions in Manitou Cave

A team of researchers that includes Euro-American professors and Cherokee elders has announced the results of their study of the long-known but never read inscriptions in Manitou Cave, Alabama. The inscriptions are in the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah, and two of them were signed by Richard Guess, one of Sequoyah's sons.

One reason the inscriptions had never been translated is that Sequoyah's script was designed to look much like English writing, so many people thought the Manitou Cave inscriptions were in Latin letters but some kind of code.

The inscriptions relate to ritual events of 1828, including a ball game; one is signed "we are the ones with blood flowing from our noses." (The Cherokee ball game, something like lacrosse, was a rough sport.)

This is my favorite detail:

"The ceiling inscriptions are written backwards, as if addressing readers inside the rock itself," Simek said. "This corresponds with part of one inscription which reads 'I am your grandson.' This is how the Cherokee might formally address the Old Ones, which can include deceased Cherokee ancestors as well as comprise other supernatural beings who inhabited the world before the Cherokee came into existence."

How wonderful that these survive, so that Cherokee and everyone else can see and learn about  this piece of history.

Feather Cloak from 17th-Century Brazil

Now in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan.

It was donated by Milanese cleric and collector Manfredo Settala (1600-1680), who kept a famous private museum. This cloak may be the one hanging on the right-hand wall in this 1666 engraving of Settala's collection. Via The History Blog.