Thunderbirds

Okay, so it's been more than a month, but I haven't forgot my promise to post a blanket. This particular choice was inspired by ongoing preparations for the hawking season. (Today's task: build a new hawk box for Stekoa.)

The thunderbirds on this Pendleton have always reminded me of the ones on the Nebraska State Capitol here in Lincoln, although now I see they're nowhere near as similar as I had imagined.

The hawk box, incidentally, is the most technologically advanced one I've done yet, with HD DoubleCorr™ construction, BlackOut Automotive Ventilation™, and X-Ray Vision Flooring Technology™. (That is to say, I've upgraded from a standard cardboard moving box to a double-thickness one from Home Depot, ventilation is provided by side dashboard vents from a 2009 Subaru WRX, and I'm trying to protect the cardboard floor with old X-ray film obtained from a vet.)

Long live the Queen

HM Queen Elizabeth II is now Britain's longest-reigning monarch, having surpassed Queen Victoria.

Linking to a previous post featuring the Hudson's Bay coronation blanket. I'll try to do a new blanket post soon; it's been a while.

E II R

Pendleton is the best-known marketer of trade blankets in the States, but credit for the creation of the blanket trade must go to "Canada's Merchants", the Hudson's Bay Company. Chartered in England in 1670 and headquartered at York Factory (now in Manitoba, but originally the commercial capital of Rupert's Land), HBC was established to compete with French fur traders and served for a time as the de facto government of British North America.


Along with firearms, cookware, beads, etc., European fur traders often paid their Native and Métis suppliers in wool blankets. The iconic HBC product is the "multistripe" or "candy-stripe" blanket, a white point blanket with headers in "Queen Anne's colours" of green, red, yellow, and indigo—although other blanket-makers (including Pendleton) copied this design, so closely is it associated with Hudson's Bay that stripes in those colours have been incorporated into the modern company's logos. Nevertheless, HBC point blankets were and are made in a variety of other colours, some of which have changed with the whims of fashion while others (notably red, green, and blue) have remained constant or nearly so.

The blanket below, royal purple with white points and headers, is a one-off design, made only in 1953 to commemorate the coronation of HM Queen Elizabeth II. It is consequently among the rarest of the 20th-century Hudson's Bay blankets, and to my mind one of the very prettiest.


[Label]


[Another regal personage]


Word has just come down, incidentally, that the Canadian Forces are reverting to their old names: Maritime Command will once again be known as the Royal Canadian Navy, Air Command will once again be the Royal Canadian Air Force, and Land Force Command will be simply the Canadian Army. Defence Minister Peter Mackay intended the renaming as a nod to the services' "proud history and traditions", but Canadian republicans have derided the move as "abject colonialism". [Links to BBC and CBC.] A reminder, either way, that among Elizabeth's titles is Queen of Canada.

[Link to the Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, Nebraska. Among their artifacts: the oldest known surviving point blanket.]

One more dragonfly

It's been a while since I posted a blanket. This is from Pendleton's American Indian College Fund series.

Paul G. Churchill, 1945-2008

Today is Veterans' Day, an especially poignant one for me as I am just now starting to come to grips with the loss of my dad, Capt. Paul G. Churchill, USAF, who passed away on Friday.


My dad was a member of the Pershing Rifles military fraternity and the Reserve Officers' Training Corps at the University of Maryland. He was heavily involved in the Pershing Rifles' acclaimed drill team, and also served as unit chaplain. (Among his other duties, he would occasionally "bless" a ham sandwich for his friend David Skillman, who was widely but incorrectly assumed to be Jewish.) He married his college sweetheart, Jo Ann Grammer, at the University chapel, and I was born in January 1967. Upon his graduation later that year, Dad was commissioned into the U.S. Air Force. Subsequent postings included Texas and Indiana, where my brother Greg was born. Then, in 1970, he was sent to Vietnam, assigned to the 8th Aerial Port Squadron at Tan Son Nhut Air Base near Saigon.

Vietnam, the Un-War: Where the unable lead the unwilling to do the unnecessary for the ungrateful.

—unknown graffitist at Tan Son Nhut

War has been described as "long periods of boredom interrupted by brief moments of terror", and that description would be apt for my dad's tour in Southeast Asia. He endured hot, humid weather; semi-regular rocket attacks; and a brief, accidental visit to an apparent Viet Cong depot (a story I may tell later). Then, of course, there was the separation from his young family.

Much of his time off-duty was spent keeping up contact any way he could. He recorded and mailed cassette tapes as well as letters and postcards. (Many of the latter I still have). Often, after a duty shift, he would wait in line at the comm office for hours to place a five-minute radio-relay telephone call to my mom. There was always someone else on the line, a necessity which made any sort of intimacy difficult, and the connection was not always good. Once, after several requests to "Please repeat, over," an airman at the relay station broke his silence to clarify what had been said: "She said she loves you, sir." Dad said the sentiment lost a lot in translation.

Otherwise, off-duty hours were spent in Saigon; at the officers' club, where a Filipino cover band might give Creedence Clearwater Revival or the Beatles a cruel battering; or just hanging out at the BOQ. Occasionally, there would be parties with the Australian contingent—the Yanks provided the steaks, the Aussies the beer, which represented a welcome change. Normally, the only beer available was Black Label; rumor had it that soldiers at a forward operating base once cheered the downing of a C-7 Caribou because its cargo consisted entirely of Black Label beer.

Sometime in 1970, Dad's idealism was challenged when he was ordered to supervise the loading, without paperwork, of a suspiciously unmarked black plane—his first direct contact with the reality of the secret war in Cambodia. (This would have been before the overt Cambodian Incursion, and probably represented either a ground component to the "secret war" or a preliminary operation by special-ops forces in advance of the Incursion.) His cynicism increased when he had to ship home the body of a friend killed in combat.

Dad was proud of his military service, but considered his time in Vietnam a wasted year. I'm not so sure about that. The war itself may have been a mistake, but I believe his essential decency made him a force for good and an ambassador for the American people. At a time when many servicemen treated Vietnamese people with suspicion and contempt, and ethnic slurs were applied to enemies and allies alike, Dad saw himself as a guest in Vietnam and treated its citizens accordingly. He and some friends stocked a refrigerator in the operations office with Coca-Cola and put up a sign: "Cokes 25 cents, or 10 dong for our Vietnamese friends." (I may have the conversion backwards; it might have been 10 cents and 25 dong.) This simple gesture earned him the respect and friendship of the Vietnamese civilians working there, and set an example for the men of his command.


For a recent birthday, our family gave Dad a Pendleton blanket entitled "Grateful Nation" in recognition of his service to country. In my mind, this includes not just his time in the Air Force (even after Vietnam, he kept his name on the rolls of the inactive reserves in case he was needed in uniform once again) but also his subsequent career as a teacher and his life as a true family man. As my brother and I today began the long and difficult task of sorting through his belongings—a task that could take months, as Dad was both a collector and a packrat; I once told him that when I thought about clearing out his house, I prayed I would go first—this was one of the first items I secured. Another: the Akubra hat with RAAF insignia given to Dad by an Australian officer in Vietnam in a gesture of friendship and solidarity.

If you have the chance, or can make a chance, thank a veteran today. Or anytime. I'll likely be on hiatus a few more days at least, but I'll get back online when I can. Peace to all.


Update: More on Dad from The Baker Street Blog, The Baltimore Sun, and The Carroll County Times.

Autumn, by the bushel or by the peck

The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.

—Thomas Jefferson

Sometime in the next week or so, we'll probably take a day trip down to Nebraska (by which I mean Nebraska City) to visit the Pendleton outlet and to lay in some apples and fresh-pressed cider from the orchards there. But we're not short on fruit at the moment: A friend from work sent me home a few days ago with a generous bag of heirloom apples from her family's small orchard. She couldn't tell me the variety—apparently her husband mislaid the diagram showing which trees are which—but they easily beat Granny Smiths for tartness. Ellie and I like a nice sour apple and, ignoring my friend's recommendation that they be used only for baking, we've been eating them at a good clip.

We haven't been the only beneficiaries, either. With the sudden bounty has come an uptick in the household Drosophila population. The fruit flies are a minor annoyance, but nothing more—except to our Siamese fighting fish (Betta splendens), who live in glass coffepots on the kitchen counter. For the bettas, the fruit flies are a boon equivalent to the apples for Ellie and me. When I catch the fruit flies loitering on the kitchen cabinets, I kill one or two with a tap of my finger, then step over to the coffeepots and let the water's surface tension draw the flies off my fingertip. The fish have figured out the routine by now, and as soon as I withdraw my finger, they float to the surface to suck down the flies.

The fox squirrels in the back yard, already starting to fatten up for the winter, get the apple cores. My redtail, Stekoa, would rather chase rabbits than squirrels—we'll be back at it soon—but it never hurts to propitiate the animal spirits anyway.

If there's a unifying theme to any of this, it's just that autumn is here, and I'm grateful.

[Pictured: Pendleton blanket based on a Cherokee basket. We'll need a basket at the orchard, right? And the colours are just right for the harvest theme.]

Let the games begin

Well, it's more or less official now, and so I suppose it may as well be blog fodder: After coaching youth lacrosse for several seasons, yours truly has been named the assistant coach of Lincoln's new high school club lacrosse team.

This is a slightly odd position to be in. I'm basically a neighborhood pick-up player—at best. I grew up in Maryland, where virtually everyone has a stick and knows how to use it, and attended university with a proud Division I (and now Division III) history, but the closest I've been to "organized ball" is the year or so I spent scrimmaging with the Flying Rats at the University of Georgia—and we played not regulation lacrosse as most of the collegiate world knows it, but toli, the Choctaw double-stick version of America's oldest game.

[Pictured: "Little Brother of War", a Pendleton toli blanket designed by Choctaw artist Nancy Southerland-Holmes.]


The Flying Rats were started by a grad student in anthropology who grew up on the Choctaw rez near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where his mom taught school. He brought some kapucha (ball sticks) with him to UGA, enlisted a few more anthro students, and voilà—the first collegiate toli team was born. I came along quite a bit later, but while we did have some gifted athletes, the average Flying Rat was still more of a cultural enthusiast than a typical jock. To this day, I know more about Native lacrosse in its various permutations than I do about the high school or collegiate rulebook, let alone running drills, or set plays, or the relative merits of a standard 2-3-1 offense vs. an "invert" against a zone defense.

Needless to say, things will be interesting. We hold our first practice on April 1st, another on April 3rd, and then throw the kids to the wolves—I mean, begin competition with teams in the metro Omaha area—on the 5th. Wish us luck...

p. 123 game

Here are the rules, as my neighbors in blogspace are playing:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

I'm going to change the rules just slightly, with the following justifications:

• No one has officially tagged me.
• This is still a baby blog; I may or may not have five readers. No idea who's dropping by or how often.
• One book???

So instead of tagging five people, I will tag five books. The first is, in keeping with the original rules, the closest book to my computer. The others will be recently read or consulted books from around the house.

Its double coat is composed of a soft, dense undercoat and a straight, hard overcoat, somewhat longer on the tail, and usually colored red. Other acceptable colors are sesame, red sesame, black sesame, black and tan, white, and light red. The white markings on the muzzle are a characteristic of this breed.

—Toyoharu Kojima, Legacy of the Dog: The Ultimate Illustrated Guide. The dog referred to is the shiba inu or "little brushwood dog", a breed most popular as a pet (an estimated eighty percent of the dogs in Japan are shibas) but still occasionally used for its original purpose as a hunting (and hawking) dog. Originally from Nagano province, shibas are also known as yamadashi no inu or "dog for the mountains". [Yoji Hagiya and I collaborated on an article about Japanese hawking several years ago, so I was glad to see a familiar dog on p. 123!]

Moving from my office to the rec room, but sticking with dogs...

A note on leg humping and "showing lipstick": These two activities will definitely embarrass your owner, but they are strictly last-resort techniques because you'll undoubtedly embarrass yourself in the process. There is a time and place for both leg humping and badly timed erections, but if your goal is to look smarter than your owner, stick with the techniques listed above.

—From "How to Make Your Owner Look Like an Idiot", in The Dangerous Book for Dogs by Rex & Sparky. We already had The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls, so how could we pass this up? And, by the way, have I mentioned how glad I am to have two female dachshunds?

Upstairs now, from room to room...

Notable collections in the American Museum of Natural History and the Heye Foundation in New York have been transferred to the new National Museum of the American Indian. Senator Barry Goldwater was known for his collection.
Kachinas of all sizes and shapes dance their way through paintings and other art forms, including jewelry, ceramics, and crafts too numerous to describe.

—Kathleen Cain, describing one of the many Native uses of cottonwoods in The Cottonwood Tree: An American Champion.

The cover featured the now-famous illustration of Chief Joseph, for whom one of the company's most famous designs is named, arrayed in a Pendleton Indian robe. Even though Chief Joseph is the most famous Indian leader associated with the Pendleton Mills, photographs of Umapine also appear on the company's promotional material, sometimes in a full-color portrait, and others (notably the 1927 catalog) in silhouette. In fact, the image of Umapine became something of a visual trademark for the Pendleton company.

—Language of the Robe: American Indian Trade Blankets, by Robert W. Kapoun with Charles J. Lohrmann.

I wondered what she had felt like, lying on her face in the corn stubble knowing that death was out there in the blackness and that her only chance was to remain absolutely still until dawn. Now, with Jake and I near, and the pheasant illuminated by the flashlight, she began to eat very much like normal. But I looked closely.

—From my favourite book, The Rites of Autumn by Dan O'Brien. His peregrine, Dolly, had killed a pheasant at dusk and then been spooked by a great horned owl. This episode happened out around Crescent Lake National Wildlife Refuge north of Oshkosh, Nebraska. The refuge and the ranchland surrounding it comprise some of the most beautiful shortgrass prairie you'd ever want to see, complete with long-billed curlews, ferruginous hawks, sharp-tailed grouse... Just go if you ever have the chance and see for yourself. But don't tell anybody else, okay?

I should really get back to work now, but I invite anyone reading this to play. You can use the original rules, my rules, or whatever modification works for you. Enjoy what you find!

Snowshoe hare blanket

Jacquard wool blankets appeal to my interests in art, Native culture, and staying warm in the winter. My favorites have always been traditional Pendleton blankets, but recently I've discovered some nice designs from Faribault Woolen Mills in Minnesota. This one I had to have:


The coloration is slightly more subdued than the picture would indicate. The end stripes are a stonewashed-denim blue, providing a nice background for the stars/snowflakes. The grey is also a bit lighter, resulting in a more subtle contrast between the summer and winter hares.

I hunt cottontails, not snowshoe hares, but still... You gotta love a bunny blanket if you're a bunny hawker.

Honor the quarry. Always.