Helene E. Hagan

Helene E. Hagan was born in Morocco in 1939. She was raised and educated in North Africa. After obtaining a Licence-es-Lettres in British and American Studies from the University of Bordeaux, France, she pursued her studies at Stanford University where she obtained a Master's Degree in French Literature and Education (1971) and later a third Master's Degree in Cultural and Psychological Anthropology (1983) She raised three children in Palo Alto, California, where she also successfully ran an import business, La Ruche, French Imports. Later, from 1985 to 1990, while teaching as an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Human Consciousness at John F. Kennedy University, she also owned and managed another retail business, Lakota Contemporary American Indian Designs in Marin County, California, where she lived for twelve years. She presently resides in northern California, as the President of the Tazzla Institute for Cultural Diversity she founded in 1993, and more recently as the Executive producer of the Amazigh Film Festival USA. She pursued fieldwork both in the south of Morocco, and on Pine Ridge Indian Reservatiion in South Dakota, where she directed a photo project with elders (funded by the South Dakota Council on Humanities) while working at the archives of the Oglala Lakota College, three-Mile Creek,South Dakota. She is the author of numerous articles, published in a variety of journals and magazines from 1969 to 2009. Among them, available on the internet are: "Plastic Medicine People" reproduced by many web sites, "The People of Nacirema" (1998), a whimsical anthropological look at life in Marin County, "Apuleius of Madauros, Amazigh Philosopher and World Advocate", and "The Argan Tradition in southwest Morocco" (Vol.14, 2005, The Amazigh Voice) She is the author of five books, "The Shining Ones: Etymological Essay on the Amazigh Origins of Ancient Egyptian Civilization." (2001) , "Tuareg Jewelry: Traditional Patterns and Symbols",(2005) a study which is far more than an overview of jewelry or a photographic essay. It includes a very profound reflection on the Amazigh perspective of the world held by Tuareg people of Africa. The book was reviewed by a Tuareg scholar who found its insight to be richly accurate and the best ever written on his people in the English language. Her third book, "Tazz'unt, Ritual, Ecology and Social Order in the Tessawt Valley of the High Atlas of Morocco" (2011) remains in her view her best anthropological work. In 2013, she published a book of essays which she titled" Fifty Years in America." Her latest book , published in September 2018 is now available on amazon.com, under the title "Russell Means: The European Ancestry of a Militant Indian. " Helene's passion is videography. She has created over sixty television programs about North African Berber culture, American Indian groups and individuals, and on ecological subjects. A list of those programs, available on dvd's is on her web site at http://www.tazzla.org and you can also consult her two other web sites at www.laaff.org and www.helenehagan.com