“Nanye-hi (Nancy Ward): Beloved Woman of the Cherokee
Nanye-hi was born into the Cherokee Wolf clan circa 1738. In 1755, she stood by her husband during a fight against the Creeks, chewing the lead for bullets in order to provide his ammunition with deadly ridges. When her husband was fatally shot, Nanye-hi grabbed a rifle, rallied her fellow fighters and entered the battle herself. With her on their side, the Cherokee won the day.
These actions led to Nanye-hi being named Ghighau (Beloved Woman) of the Cherokee, a powerful position whose duties included leading the Women’s Council and sitting on the Council of Chiefs. Nanye-hi also took part in treaty talks (to the surprise of male colonists when they were on the other side of the bargaining table).”
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“When you’re dealing with an octopus who’s being attentively curious
about something, it is very hard to imagine that there’s nothing
experienced by it,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, professor of history and
philosophy of science at the University of Sydney in Australia, and
author of Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life. “It seems kind of irresistible. That itself is not evidence, that’s just an impression.”
Likewise, imagining an octopus’s inner life is a hard thing to do from
our human standpoint. Try it for a moment – imagine what it’s like to be
suspended in the cool blueish twilight down at the seabed, perhaps a
slight drag of current pulling you this way and that, your eight arms
waving gently around you. When you picture the tips of your suckered
limbs moving, what do you imagine it feels like? Is it, perhaps,
something like wiggling your human fingers and toes?
“The octopus’s arms are, in some ways, more like lips or tongues than
hands,” says Godfrey-Smith. “There’s a whole great cascade of sensory
information of that taste-based form that’s coming in every time the
animal does anything. That’s very different from our situation.”
Take a closer look at the octopus’s nervous system, and things get
even stranger. The octopus’s arms have more autonomy than our human arms
and legs do. Each has its own miniature brain, giving it a degree of independence from the animal’s central brain.
Our own nervous system, however, is highly centralised, with the brain
the seat of sensory integration, emotion, initiating movement, behaviour
and other actions.
In the case of the octopus, people sometimes ask whether there might be multiple selves present – Peter Godfrey-Smith
