Our Ho

The book is set in the anthropologically much-neglected multi-ethnic interior of Highland Middle India. It is the result of fieldwork done over a period of more than a decade among the Ho, an indigenous community of approximately one million people, who have shared cultural norms and the space of the hilly region of the Chota Nagpur Plateau with other aboriginal (adivasi) and artisan communities for ages. The book explores the structured tapestry of Ho people’s relations and interrelatedness within their culture-specific sociocosmic universe ensuring their social reproduction in the present and affording them the means for and the awareness of living in a world of plenty. This world of abundance – with the Ho as its conceptual centre – includes the Ho’s dead, their complex spirit world and supreme deity, and their tribal and nontribal fellow humans, and it manifests itself in manifold facets of their lives: socially, ritually, economically, and linguistically. "This is an important piece of work. The ethnographic details in it are invaluable. The fieldwork is superb. What comes across so magnificently is that unique quality of the author's human and emotional contact and shared understanding with the people." MICHAEL YORKE: University College, London; Upside Films

What was easy just got easier with the Special Edition of the book that started it all, The Easiest Way, now including this special bonus, The Easiest Way to Understanding HO'OPONOPONO, The Clearest Answers to Your Most Frequently Asked Questions. The Easiest Way to Understanding HO'OPONOPONO, answers the what, where, when and why about cleaning. Cleaning is simply erasing your memories and bringing you back to zero, so that Inspiration (God, Love) can guide you.

Ho-Chunk powwows are the oldest powwows in the Midwest and among the oldest in the nation, beginning in 1902 outside Black River Falls in west-central Wisconsin. Grant Arndt examines Wisconsin Ho-Chunk powwow traditions and the meanings of cultural performances and rituals in the wake of North American settler colonialism. As early as 1908 the Ho-Chunk people began to experiment with the commercial potential of the powwows by charging white spectators an admission fee. During the 1940s the Ho-Chunk people decided to de-commercialize their powwows and rededicate dancing culture to honor their soldiers and veterans. Powwows today exist within, on the one hand, a wider commercialization of and conflict between intertribal “dance contests” and, on the other, efforts to emphasize traditional powwow culture through a focus on community values such as veteran recognition, warrior songs, and gift exchange. In Ho-Chunk Powwows and the Politics of Tradition Arndt shows that over the past two centuries the dynamism of powwows within Ho-Chunk life has changed greatly, as has the balance of tradition and modernity within community life. His book is a groundbreaking study of powwow culture that investigates how the Ho-Chunk people create cultural value through their public ceremonial performances, the significance that dance culture provides for the acquisition of power and recognition inside and outside their communities, and how the Ho-Chunk people generate concepts of the self and their society through dancing.

In February of 1982, I flew to Buenos Aires then on to Cordoba, Argentina to meet with Dr Reimar Horten, (1915-1994) the designer of a series of sail and powered all wing flying machines. He lived in retirement on a ranch 15 to 20 miles from the small town of Villa General Belgrano. After an over night flight from Miami,Florida I arrived at the Cordoba. Reimar Horten, with a full head of white hair, met me and we drove off to his ranch in a white Ford pickup truck. Reimar had total recall. I have met only two such people in my life. We spoke only in English and our conversations were recorded on cassette tapes...which several years later I donated to the National Air & Space Museum library. After several days of speaking only English, Reimar was speaking English to everyone, his wife, helpers on his ranch, shop keepers in Villa General Belgano, and families he'd meet walking on the road into town when he offered them a ride in the back of his truck. Few English-speaking people ever visited this remote area of Argentina at the foot hills of Andes Mountains. His wife, Gisela ,frequently had to remind her husband that all these Argentines had no idea of what he was saying to them so please speak Spanish. I lived at the Horten ranch for one month recording my conversation with Reimar Horten. I returned the following year (1983) for another month. Our two month conversation resulted in 86 two hour taped cassettes. The material presented in this volume (a second volume contains conversations with Walter Horten over numerous visits to his home in Baden Baden, West Germany) has been used in my five copyrighted books on the Horten Brothers. I thank them immensely and now the world hears their voice, their personal struggles, failures, as well as their successes in seeking to perfect the performances of the all-wing aircraft.

Hoʻoulu marks the end of a process for Dr. Manu Meyer, a Harvard educated, University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo professor of education. With the publication of this book, Manu leaves Western construct behind and embraces Native Hawaiian and indigenous education and life models. Ho'oulu gathers her writings and ruminations on transforming information to knowledge, facts to metaphor, and sensation to contemplation. Her collected writings culminate in an unedited version of her doctoral thesis Native Hawaiian epistemology: contemporary narratives. The publication of this book marks a beginning. Manu has learned enough to know, she's known it all along-- she has a deep seated, unshakable faith in who she always was, a Hawaiian. With this vision, the world is now full of a different set of choices. It's our Ho'oulu, our time of becoming--Back cover.