First Nations of Canada!

2 trades with a wonderful woman in Canada have been super great...she sent so many terrific First Nations cards and here is just a small sample:

An advertising card with a request on the back for photo submissions of favorite Aboriginal destinations. Ad cards are less available than commercial ones so I really appreciate receiving this one!

The Royal British Columbia Museum, located in Victoria BC has a Cultural Precinct with a park, carved poles, and a nice virtual tour on their website. This image includes a Mungo Martin painted house (Martin was an important First Nations artist and the step-son of another, Charlie James who created art in the transition period of late 1800s/early 1900s). Martin became the head of pole restoration & carver training at the Museum in the 1950s.

This fantastic card shows a pole and band house in Comox on Vancouver Island. Salish speaking peoples fished the regional waters for 4000 years; non-Natives settled the area in the 1850s and the native people were impacted by smallpox in the 1860s. By 1940 only one indigenous family remained on tribal held land.

The Nimpkish Memorial burial ground at Alert Bay is featured on this card. Here Kwakiutl poles mark the graves of members of the Nimpkish band.The burial ground is not open to the public but the poles are visible in their original locations.

Maya, Yucatan Mexico

One of my students traveled with her family to Mexico for Spring Break in mid-March...her parents visited several Mayan sites including Tulum and Chicten Itza and they kindly purchased postcards for me! These are such nice cards but I think next time I will ask students to mail them to me so I can enjoy the stamps as well.

Tulum was a port location for the Kingdom city of Coba. It was a later construction and lasted into the historic Spanish period. This structure was a small temple dedicated to the God of Wind.

Chichen Itza is perhaps the most well known Mayan site for tourism, easily accessible and nicely restored. It was a late era site, blending Mayan and Toltec cultural influences. This Temple of the Warriors is one of my favorite structures at Chichen...the stone columns would have supported a roof, almost like an Egyptian hypo-style hall.

Moche cat

am so behind in uploading cards I have received...in March I exchanged for this wonderful pre-Columbian feline bottle produced by the Moche culture in Peru, 200BC-200AD. The card comes from a postcard book of Animals in Ancient America. The sender found the book in a used shop for a bargain price and I'm the lucky recipient of this one!