“We Don’t Play with Dead Things“
Panel: “Gatekeeping/Safekeeping Material Culture”
2026 Online Symposium, May 3 2026
“Reimagining Goddess Scholarship: At the Edges of Sacred Knowledge”
Barbara Alice Mann, Ph.D., Professor Emerita of Humanities at the University of Toledo, Ohio, has published over 500 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, along with twenty-two books, including works on matriarchal cultures, especially Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (2000), on the Iroquoian matriarchy; “‘Where Are Your Women?’ Missing in Action” in Unlearning the Language of Conquest (2006); Make a Beautiful Way (2007, on matriarchal lifeways across Turtle Island) and including Mann’s popular chapter, “Slow Runners;” Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath: The Twinned Cosmos of Indigenous America (2016) on actual Indigenous spirituality, in which the female half is “Blood;” “‘Placental Waste,’” in Placenta Wit: Mother Stories, Rituals, and Research (2017); with co-author Kaarina Kailo, The Woman Who Married the Bear (2023) on ancient, matriarchal woman-bear traditions across the global north; Indigenous Struggles in the United States (2025) on the US’s intentional creation of divisions among Native Americans, especially hitting matriarchal descent counting. When Mann was a child, “the Old Folks” (her elders) gave into her keeping “Old Things,” traditions of the people; in adulthood when she went into yakademia, the Ohio Old Folks gave her the further task of “setting the record straight” (direct quote) about all the lies that European invaders had spread about Indigenous America, with special attention on the viciousness directed at women. A Bear Clan, Ohio Seneca, with community recognition, she lives in her Ohio homeland on the Panther’s Tail (the Maumee River) at the western tip of The Panther (Lake Erie), where she works for the rights of the people indigenous to Ohio, living in Ohio.
Abstract: It has always bemused Native Americans that Europeans play with dead things. They have people they call “scientists” who take every tool, medicine bundle, dish, wampum belt, spirit shield, moccasin, necklace, and grave good they can lay hold off, often without all the bother of asking first. They even take our dead.
Apparently, they do not know that dead things are dangerous to play with. Separated from their proper usage, things do not lose their mystic potency. Instead, they are bisected, missing the balancing half of it, so that the potency of the half they are holding is jumping about like a downed power line. They are dangerous to be around.
We do not gossip about dead people. When people are done with this life, their sky Breath and earth Blood go their separate ways, while the “name,” the personality of this life that was coordinating the two potencies, joining them over one lifetime, starts dissipating. It dissolves over the next ten years, until all its cohesion is gone. Talking about the now-dismantled identity can wreak havoc by calling back ghosts, lingering bits and pieces lying about unmediated. Normally, they are inert, but calling the fragments can activate bits and pieces, never to any good result.
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