Bellarmine Bombs Down UWG

The ball was flying out of University Field on Tuesday evening — and unfortunately for first-year University of West Georgia softball coach Mandy Harris, it wasn’t doing so when the home team was at the plate.

The Wolves dropped a pair of games against Bellarmine University to open a daunting week, falling in the opener, 3-1, before succumbing in the nightcap, 11-2, behind a combined five Knight home runs in the two games.

In the opener, Bellarmine (12-8) used a two-run dinger from Madi Ratliff to give it the lead for good at 2-1 in the top of the fourth. The visitors from the Bluegrass State tacked on another home run — this one a solo shot courtesy of Lauren Summe — to give Bellarmine hurler Alicia Miller (5-4) some insurance.

West Georgia (5-11) out-hit the Knights, 8-5, in the game, but got its only run on a solo blast from Kristen Sheffield in the bottom of the second.

In the second game, Ratliff struck again to get things going for the Knights, delivering a three-run homer over the left-center fence to put Bellarmine ahead 4-0 in the third.

West Georgia got a run back on a Nicole Yancey solo shot in the bottom of the sixth, but the Knights busted the game open with a seven-run seventh, getting solo home runs from Megan Murdoch and Scarlett Powers for deep balls No. 4 and No. 5 on the day.

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Weaving, a Metaphor for the Lives of Three Navajo Women

Noted anthropologist, Dr. Louise Lamphere, visited the University of West Georgia recently. She spoke to a packed house about her work.

Lamphere, a distinguished professor of anthropology, emeritus at the University of New Mexico, said her 2007 work, “Weaving Women’s Lives: Three Generations in a Navajo Family,” is not so much about the loom, but about how the women have lived.

The professor wrote the book with Eva Price, who is 82, her daughter, Carole Cadman, and granddaughter, Valerie Darwin.

Weaving is a metaphor, Lamphere said, for the “ways in which all three of these woman have woven together Navajo traditions and Anglo American practices in their daily lives.”

All three have studied in American schools, learned English and worked wage jobs. But they have also participated in traditional Navajo puberty, marriage and healing ceremonies.

Central to their lives are three Navajo concepts: the importance of place, the emphasis on generosity and reciprocity, and k’é.

This last is “loosely translated as kinship of family but a more standard definition includes notions of cooperation, compassion, friendliness, unselfishness and peacefulness,” she said.

The women’s lives, rather than representing a continuum – starting with Price’s traditional life, Cadman in the middle, and ending with Darwin, a student at the University of New Mexico and who is the most assimilated – the women have managed hybrid lives.

“I prefer to think of them as engaged in cultural preservation, yet weaving together these elements of Navajo traditions and Anglo American traditions,” Lamphere told the audience packed into Kathy Cashen Recital Hall on Jan. 27.

Lamphere met Price and Cadman in 1965, when she was working on her dissertation. The relationship grew over the decades. Lamphere watched and learned as the family weathered marriages and childbirth, illnesses and deaths, jobs gained and lost.

In writing the book, Lamphere said she wanted to present “women’s narratives, their voices and place them, at the same time, in the context of the larger American society.”

For her part, Price wanted to work on the book “because she always felt it was important to teach her children and her grandchildren ways of behaving that would give them a long life…. and blessings and harmony and balance in the universe.”