#timucua

Today, two scholars are working to decipher the grammar of Timucua using bilingual colonial manuscripts.

This project is especially important because Timucua is a language isolate, meaning it’s not related to any other language we know of. So it has the potential to teach us things about language that no other language can.

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This is a summary (and maybe slight critique) of LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer History—chapter 09. Sexual and Gender Diversity in Native America and the Pacific Islands by Will Roscoe.

This piece is interesting as the theme study was published by the National Park Foundation and the National Park Service. (Connections can be made to the history of parks as places of constructing heteromasculinity and heteronormativity as well as their role in colonialism, but also the historic presence of queerness in rural places. )

This chapter discusses the significant diversity in gender roles, sexualities and identities among the indigenous peoples of ‘the united states’ though in my writing I would refer to the land, at least when discussing the land prior to colonialism, as Turtle Island.

Two Spirits in Native Tradition: Roles, Genders, Identities and Diversity

Roscoe chooses to begin the story from the perspective of a French colonizer whose intentions were to claim land for the French in what is now called Florida. His party is lost and tired and is saved by a Native who was probably from the Timucua people (09-2). This person gave the colonizers water and was described as, “an Indian woman of tall stature, which also was an Hermaphrodite” and later he encountered another ‘hermaphrodite’ serving as an emissary of a Timucuan king.  

“The multiplicity of gender and sexuality among native peoples was noted as early as 1540 along the Colorado River by Alarcon, in the 1770s in Hawai’I by Cook’s third expedition and in the same decade by Russian explorers in Alaska” (09-3). By being noticed, these gender diverse people had become targets for colonial violence. Such as when in 1513, “Vasco Nunez de Balboa had forty-two spirits in Panama thrown to his dogs” (09-3). I want to pause and be genuinely horrified and to feel sorrow for these people whose ‘crime’ was being different from what the colonists in their fucked-up worldview, knew.

Hermaphrodite is a term that was used by Europeans and other colonists to describe native people they encountered who appeared to be crossing or mixing genders. For the Europeans from this time, the term hermaphrodite “could indicate intersexuality, androgyny, or homosexuality” (09-4). In reality, “the sheer diversity of Native American and Pacific Island cultures makes the use of any umbrella term problematic” (09-3).

Orlando!

JG Thirlwell will be presenting his Silver Mantis project in Orlando, Florida on Friday December 9 2022. The performance will take place at Timucua, 2000 S. Summerlin Ave., Orlando, FL 32806 at 7.30pm.

Silver Mantis is a 50 minute live surround-sound electro-acoustic presentation, performed with keyboards, prepared piano and theremin. It is performed with a projection created exclusively for the project by acclaimed Swedish visual artist Sten Backman.

The English word "barbecue" and its cognates in other languages come from the Spanish word barbacoa. Etymologists believe this to be derived from barabicu found in the language of the Arawak people of the Caribbean and the Timucua people of Florida;it has entered some European languages in the form of the aforementioned barbacoa. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the word to Haiti and translates it as a "framework of sticks set upon posts". Gonzalo Fernández De Oviedo y Valdés, a Spanish explorer, was the first to use the word "barbecoa" in print in Spain in 1526 in the Diccionario de la Lengua Española (2nd Edition) of the Real Academia Española. After Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492, the Spaniards apparently found Taíno roasting meat over a grill consisting of a wooden framework resting on sticks above a fire. The flames and smoke rose and enveloped the meat, giving it a certain flavor.

Traditional barbacoa involves digging a hole in the ground and placing some meat—usually a whole lamb—above a pot so the juices can be used to make a broth. It is then covered with maguey leaves and coal, and set alight. The cooking process takes a few hours. Olaudah Equiano, an African abolitionist, described this method of roasting alligators among the Mosquito People (Miskito people) on his journeys to Cabo Gracias a Dios in his narrative The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.

Linguists have suggested the word was loaned successively into Spanish, then Portuguese, French, and English. In the form barbacado the word was used in English in 1648 by the supposed Beauchamp Plantagenet in the tract A description of the province of New Albion: "the Indians in stead of salt doe barbecado or dry and smoak fish".According to the OED, the first recorded use in modern form was in 1661, in Edmund Hickeringill's Jamaica Viewed: "Some are slain, And their flesh forthwith Barbacu'd and eat";it also appears in 1672 in the writings of John Lederer following his travels in the North American southeast in 1669–70.First known use as a noun was in 1697 by the English buccaneer William Dampier. In his New Voyage Round the World, Dampier wrote, " ... and lay there all night, upon our Borbecu's, or frames of Sticks, raised about 3 foot from the Ground".

Samuel Johnson's 1756 dictionary gave the following definitions:

"To Barbecue – a term for dressing a whole hog" (attestation to Pope)

"Barbecue – a hog dressed whole"

While the standard modern English spelling of the word is barbecue, variations including barbeque and truncations such as bar-b-q or BBQ may also be found.The spelling barbeque is given in Merriam-Webster and the Oxford Dictionaries as a variant. In the southeastern United States, the word barbecue is used predominantly as a noun referring to roast pork, while in the southwestern states cuts of beef are often cooked