Needle in the Hay

People go extinct. Isn't that odd? The link will take you to the Wikipedia page on Tasmanian Aborigines, an indigenous population that went extinct with the death of the last full-blooded woman in 1876. There are "no meaningful cultural practice[s]" by which to remember them. It only took 73 years to kill them off.

Around here, I guess, though, we have the Mandan. The last full-blooded Mandan died in 1971. It doesn't say so on Wikipedia, but I read a Smithsonian article that claimed that 90% of the Mandan population was wiped out by smallpox. Obviously, more of their culture remains. I've never known anybody to claim to be "Mandan," but I have heard "Mandan-Hidatsa" with some regularity, and Arikara is often mixed in there, too.

I don't know. Humans go extinct, population by population, sure...but still it troubles me.

In that vein:









The whole town is like that. It's a city of signs.

"Lord, let me die, but not die

Out."