Daily Archives: December 5, 2009

Death of Richard Antoun

Professor Richard Antoun. via ZeroAnthropology.

It was very disturbing to hear of the violent death of SUNY-Binghamton Anthropology Professor Emeritus Richard Antoun yesterday.  Professor Antoun was stabbed in his office by a graduate student, apparently one who had done poorly on their candidacy exams.  I’ve known some tightly wrapped graduate students, but the idea one of them could pull out a knife and stab me to death is, uh, “worrisome”.  Professor Antoun was a close friend of my current boss, and my heart goes out to her as well.  There is a pretty full roundup of this terrible news and an euology from a former student over at ZeroAnthropology.

New Westminster, 1903

Aboriginal women at New Westminster, 1903.

There is something about the above picture that is so evocative: Native women washing clothes or getting water while in the background the first construction of the Fraser River Bridge at New Westminster rises.  With a different caption this could be the Ganges River, or the Colorado: always women, always squatting, always the back turned to the viewer and the colonial future in the background.

From the idiosyncratic New Westminster online photo archives – this uses the LoC system so you have to search for, say, “Indians” rather than “First Nations”.

New Westminster, ca. 1865