Pop Culture

Shunka Warak’in’s Cultural Landscape

Remember the Shunka Warak’in? In 1995, Lance Foster, an Ioway (Hotcâgara) told me: We had a strange animal called shunka warak’in that snuck into camps at night and stole dogs. It was said to look something like a hyena and cried like a person when they killed it. Its skin is said to be kept by someone still.Lance Foster Foster, who had heard of the mounted ringdocus, thought it was an example of the shunka warak’in, which he knew of from his own experiences and those of relatives in Montana and Idaho. The present location of the mounted Shunka Warak’in [...]

Proto-Nazi Hoax: The “Ape” in Green Hell

If this was such an extraordinary image, why did the alleged photographer not show the back end of the primate and why did he keep it stored away for almost ten years? The photograph (above) of an alleged “Ameranthropoid ape” supposedly was taken in South America by François de Loys. It has a checkered history, and was used for proto-Nazi racist promotion in the late 1920s and early 1930s, despite the fact it is most certainly a spider monkey (below). Basically, two schools exist about this photo. 1) There are those that believe the François de Loys story and thus [...]