I'm about to have to log off, so this will be my last post for at least a few days....
While I've been offline, I've really enjoyed the peace away from my phone. I read The Southeastern Indians by Charles Hudson. As I've said before, I dislike reading the work of anthropologists because of their compulsive racism. After pausing the historical narrative at regular intervals to needlessly express how backwards and strange Indians seem to "us," (meaning he never expected an Indian to actually read the book...) he even has the gall to suggest that white southerners are culturally comparable to Indians because they enjoy hunting, fishing, and eating corn. As an Indian from Mississippi, I can tell you how absurdly incorrect he is.
Otherwise, the book is fine. Many anthropologists have the habit of speaking of certain people as though they will never have access to the books about themselves, similarly to how a biologist would speak of a dog or monkey. Really makes you think.
Interestingly, while I read the book I had a prophetic dream related to the text. dreamed that I saw a snake with horns. I thought it must be a tie snake (an indigenous species of dragon) but it didn't seem right, because I was always told tie snakes have branching antlers, like a deer or a Chinese dragon. The next day I continued my reading, and I learned that in the earliest artistic depictions, tie snakes actually did have short horns (and sometimes wings.) I assume the anthropologists must have significant evidence to support that the depictions of them slowly changed, or became more unified, over time. There was also a period in which rattlesnakes were stylized with an emphasis on the horns over their eyes. Possibly the branches were added to make the artwork more clear (this seems like an obvious move as a modern character designer...and easier than changing the appearance of an animal everyone has seen.) Or there's the more obvious explanation, which is that enough witnesses saw a tie snake, that at some point it was confirmed with everyone what they really looked like, similarly to how medieval British artists depicted even the most common animals with great liberty in their proportions, as if they never saw one clearly before.
Most of the snake drawings in the book are in profile, but in my dream I saw it head-on, and its horns curved a bit like the crescent in this samurai helmet. Weirdly, a few years ago I sketched a design for a winter hat with similar "horns," but in the end I never made it.
As I don't yet have my new phone, I found a digital copy of the book to screenshot. I wish it had more art, or better quality photographs. It is extremely hard to find traditional looking southeastern visual artworks, at least on the internet, unlike indigenous artists from other regions who have preserved more of their original style. Muskoke textile and tattoo arts are alive and well in the US-recognized Muskoke Nation in Oklahoma, so I imagine someone out there is cool enough to still be engraving designs on seashells and such. I'm pretty good at mimicking the style of modern artists, but I would need a much larger gallery of works to study, if I was to remotely capture the style of these great classics. The abstraction of thought it takes to make works so stylish as the designs on classical Mississippian pottery is incredible. It's similar to the work of Aztec artists, but so unique!
There are several examples in the book way more stunning than these, but here are all the snakes that blew my mind when they came out of my dream: