A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
The book observes social interactions’ role in the diffusion of ideas and material culture; the way different social units, especially households, interacted within and between communities; and the importance of interaction and interconnectivity in understanding the archaeology of the Southwest’s northern periphery. Chapters demonstrate a movement away from strictly economic-driven models of social connectivity and interaction and illustrate that members of social groups lived in dynamic situations that did not always have clear-cut and unwavering boundaries. Social connectivity and interaction were often fluid, changing over time.
Interaction and Connectivity in the Greater Southwest is an impressive collection of established and up-and-coming Southwestern archaeologists collaborating to strengthen the theoretical underpinnings of the discipline. It will be of interest to professional and academic archaeologists, as well as researchers with interests in diffusion, identity, cultural transmission, borders, large-scale interaction, or social organization.
Contributors:
Richard V. N. Ahlstrom, James R. Allison, Jean H. Ballagh, Catherine M. Cameron, Richard Ciolek-Torello, John G. Douglass, Suzanne L. Eckert, Hayward H. Franklin, Patricia A. Gilman, Dennis A. Gilpin, William M. Graves, Kelley A. Hays-Gilpin, Lindsay D. Johansson, Eric Eugene Klucas, Phillip O. Leckman, Myles R. Miller, Barbara J. Mills, Matthew A. Peeples, David A. Phillips Jr., Katie Richards, Heidi Roberts, Thomas R. Rocek, Tammy Stone, Richard K. Talbot, Marc Thompson, David T. Unruh, John A. Ware, Kristina C. Wyckoff
Citing evidence from past excavations, ethnography, the traditions of present-day Native Americans in the Midwest, ground-penetrating radar and LIDAR imaging, and recent findings of other archaeologists, Robert A. Birmingham and Amy L. Rosebrough argue that effigy mound groups are cosmological maps that model belief systems and relations with the spirit world. The authors advocate for their preservation and emphasize that Native peoples consider the mounds sacred places.
This edition also includes an expanded list of public parks and preserves where mounds can be respectfully viewed, such as the Kingsley Bend mounds near Wisconsin Dells, an outstanding effigy group maintained by the Ho-Chunk Nation, and the Man Mound Park near Baraboo, the only extant human-shaped effigy mound in the world.
From origin stories to contemporary struggles over treaty rights and sovereignty issues, Indian Nations of Wisconsin explores Wisconsin's rich Native tradition. This unique volume—based on the historical perspectives of the state’s Native peoples—includes compact tribal histories of the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Oneida, Menominee, Mohican, Ho-Chunk, and Brothertown Indians. Author Patty Loew focuses on oral tradition—stories, songs, the recorded words of Indian treaty negotiators, and interviews—along with other untapped Native sources, such as tribal newspapers, to present a distinctly different view of history. Lavishly illustrated with maps and photographs, Indian Nations of Wisconsin is indispensable to anyone interested in the region's history and its Native peoples.
The first edition of Indian Nations of Wisconsin: Histories of Endurance and Renewal, won the Wisconsin Library Association's 2002 Outstanding Book Award.
Place names are cultural artifacts that tell us as much about how people lived as do relics dug from the ground, writes Virgil Vogel, one of America's foremost authorities on place names. They are historical records from which the location and migration of people, plants, and animals can be charted. Onalaska and Aztalan, not surprisingly, are place names transplanted to Wisconsin from the far north and south. Some names tell of topographic features that have long since disappeared or are little noticed today. Beaver Dam once had an Indian name meaning just that; Sheboygan, "big pipe" in Ojibwa, described the shape of a river bend. Other names are vestiges of ancient languages nowhere else recorded. Some commemorate historic events: Winneconne is believed by many to mean "place of the skulls."
The Indian names of Wisconsin's towns, rivers, and lakes reveal the minds of the Indian peoples, their cosmic views, their values, their relation to their environment , and their ways of life and convey as well something of the history of their white invaders.
Virgil Vogel's thirty years of research into Native American influence on geographical names has resulted in an absorbing account that illuminates the history and culture of Wisconsin Indians. Vogel tells his story thematically—names from the spirit world, names of trails and portages, French-Indian personal names, tribal names, and so on—to show that place names are part of a larger cultural and natural world. In recovering the history and meaning of these names, he has restored an important and colorful part of America's heritage.
Fixico identifies the tools to this empowerment such as education, navigation within cultural systems, modern Indian leadership, and indigenized political economy. He explains how these tools helped Indian communities to rebuild their nations. Fixico constructs an Indigenous paradigm of Native ethos and reality that drives Indian modern political economies heading into the twenty-first century.
This illuminating and comprehensive analysis of Native nation’s resilience in the twentieth century demonstrates how Native Americans reinvented themselves, rebuilt their nations, and ultimately became major forces in the United States. Indian Resilience and Rebuilding, redefines how modern American history can and should be told.
A Chronicle of the Longest Military Action in American History
"Splendid. . . .a book that has the rare quality of being both an excellent reference work and a pleasure to read."—Wall Street Journal
"As complete and balanced an overview of nearly a century of fighting between the U.S. Army and dozens of Indian nations as there is." —Martin Naparsteck, Salt Lake Tribune
"Excellent. . . . Indian Wars is an outstanding introduction to the 'longest campaign ever waged by any of the United States armed forces.' It also has the virtue of speaking eloquently to the past while offering valuable guidance for the future."—Military.com
The Indian wars remain the most misunderstood campaign ever waged by the U. S. Army. From the first sustained skirmishes west of the Mississippi River in the 1850s to the sweeping clashes of hundreds of soldiers and warriors along the upper plains decades later, these wars consumed most of the active duty resources of the army for the greater part of the nineteenth century and resulted in the disruption of nearly all of the native cultures in the West. Yet the popular understanding of the Indian wars is marred by stereotypes and misinformation as well as a tendency to view these individual wars—the battles against the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Nez Perce, the Apache, and other groups—as distinct incidents rather than parts of a single overarching campaign. Dispelling notions that American Indians were simply attempting to stop encroachment on their homelands or that they shared common views on how to approach the Europeans, Bill Yenne explains in Indian Wars: The Campaign for the American West, that these wars, fought for more than five decades across a landscape the size of continental Europe, were part of a general long-term strategy by the U. S. Army to control the West as well as extensions of conflicts among native peoples that predated European contact.
Complete with a general history of Indian and European relations from the earliest encounters to the opening of the west, and featuring legendary figures from both sides, including Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, George Custer, Kit Carson, and George Crook, Indian Wars allows the reader to better understand the sequence of events that transformed the West and helped define the American temperament.
In 1758 Peter Williamson appeared on the streets of Aberdeen, Scotland, dressed as a Native American and telling a remarkable tale. He claimed that as a young boy he had been kidnapped from the city and sold into slavery in America. In performances and in a printed narrative he peddled to his audiences, Williamson described his tribulations as an indentured servant, Indian captive, soldier, and prisoner of war. Aberdeen’s magistrates called him a liar and banished him from the city, but Williamson defended his story.
Separating fact from fiction, Timothy J. Shannon explains what Williamson’s tale says about how working people of eighteenth-century Britain, so often depicted as victims of empire, found ways to create lives and exploit opportunities within it. Exiled from Aberdeen, Williamson settled in Edinburgh, where he cultivated enduring celebrity as the self-proclaimed “king of the Indians.” His performances and publications capitalized on the curiosity the Seven Years’ War had ignited among the public for news and information about America and its native inhabitants. As a coffeehouse proprietor and printer, he gave audiences a plebeian perspective on Britain’s rise to imperial power in North America.
Indian Captive, Indian King is a history of empire from the bottom up, showing how Williamson’s American odyssey illuminates the real-life experiences of everyday people on the margins of the British Empire and how those experiences, when repackaged in travel narratives and captivity tales, shaped popular perceptions about the empire’s racial and cultural geography.
In The Invasion of Indian Country in the 20th Century, Donald Fixico details the course of this struggle, providing a wealth of information on the resources possessed by individual tribes and the way in which they were systematically defrauded and stripped of these resources. Fixico contends that federal policies originally devised to protect Indian interests ironically worked against the Indian nations as the tribes employed new tactics with the Council of Energy Resources Tribes, using the law in courts and applying aggressive business leadership to combat the capitalist invasion by mainstream America.
Fixico's analysis of this war being waged throughout the century and today serves as an indispensable reference tool for anyone interested in Native American history and current government policy with regard to Indian lands.
Informed by both historical research and extensive fieldwork, this book pays special attention to the natural resource base and economic outlook of the reservations, as well as the crucial issue of tribal sovereignty. Chapters also cover the demography of American Indian groups and their socioeconomic status (including standard of living, employment, and education). A new afterword treats some of the developments since the book's initial publication in German, such as the effects of the 1988 Indian gaming law that allowed Indian reservations to operate gambling establishments (with mixed success).
"Provides a good overview of the basic questions and problems facing reservation Indians today."—Peter Bolz, Journal of American History (on the German edition)
In the late 1860s, before becoming president, Grant collaborated with Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian who became his first commissioner of Indian affairs, on a plan to rescue the tribes from certain destruction. Grant hoped to save the Indians from extermination by moving them to reservations, where they would be guarded by the U.S. Army, and welcoming them into the nation as American citizens. By so doing, he would restore the executive branch’s traditional authority over Indian policy that had been upended by Jackson.
In Interrupted Odyssey, Stockwell rejects the common claim in previous Grant scholarship that he handed the reservations over to Christian missionaries as part of his original policy. In part because Grant’s plan ended political patronage, Congress overturned his policy by disallowing Army officers from serving in civil posts, abandoning the treaty system, and making the new Board of Indian Commissioners the supervisors of the Indian service. Only after Congress banned Army officers from the Indian service did Grant place missionaries in charge of the reservations, and only after the board falsely accused Parker of fraud before Congress did Grant lose faith in his original policy.
Stockwell explores in depth the ousting of Parker, revealing the deep-seated prejudices that fueled opposition to him, and details Grant’s stunned disappointment when the Modoc murdered his peace commissioners and several tribes—the Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Sioux—rose up against his plans for them.
Though his dreams were interrupted through the opposition of Congress, reformers, and the tribes themselves, Grant set his country firmly toward making Indians full participants in the national experience. In setting Grant’s contributions against the wider story of the American Indians, Stockwell’s bold, thoughtful reappraisal reverses the general dismissal of Grant’s approach to the Indians as a complete failure and highlights the courage of his policies during a time of great prejudice.
In Identity Politics of Difference, author Michelle R. Montgomery uses a multidisciplinary approach to examine questions of identity construction and multiracialism through the experiences of mixed-race Native American students at a tribal school in New Mexico. She explores the multiple ways in which these students navigate, experience, and understand their racial status and how this status affects their educational success and social interactions.
Montgomery contextualizes students’ representations of their racial identity choices through the compounded race politics of blood quantum and stereotypes of physical features, showing how varying degrees of "Indianness" are determined by peer groups. Based on in-depth interviews with nine students who identify as mixed-race (Native American–White, Native American–Black, and Native American–Hispanic), Montgomery challenges us to scrutinize how the category of “mixed-race” bears different meanings for those who fall under it based on their outward perceptions, including their ability to "pass" as one race or another.
Identity Politics of Difference includes an arsenal of policy implications for advancing equity and social justice in tribal colleges and beyond and actively engages readers to reflect on how they have experienced the identity politics of race throughout their own lives. The book will be a valuable resource to scholars, policy makers, teachers, and school administrators, as well as to students and their families.
In 1902, the federal government opened Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, to transform American Indian students into productive farmers, carpenters, homemakers, nurses, cooks, and seamstresses. Indian students helped build the school and worked daily at Sherman; teachers provided vocational education and placed them in employment through the Outing Program.
Contributors to The Indian School on Magnolia Avenue have drawn on documents held at the Sherman Indian Museum to explore topics such as the building of Sherman, the school’s Mission architecture, the nursing program, the Special Five-Year Navajo Program, the Sherman cemetery, and a photo essay depicting life at the school.
Despite the fact that Indian boarding schools—with their agenda of cultural genocide— prevented students from speaking their languages, singing their songs, and practicing their religions, most students learned to read, write, and speak English, and most survived to benefit themselves and contribute to the well-being of Indian people.
Scholars and general readers in the fields of Native American studies, history, education, public policy, and historical photography will find
The Indian School on Magnolia Avenue an indispensable volume.
of a multicultural society. . . . Lindsey shows the complicated way that one black institution,
while still under white control, devised to manage the education and socialization of African and
Native American students, not for their needs but in the interests of the broader Anglo-American
society." -- American Historical Review
Illustrating her argument with images culled from late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century publications, Hutchinson revises the standard history of the mainstream interest in Native American material culture as “art.” While many locate the development of this cross-cultural interest in the Southwest after the First World War, Hutchinson reveals that it began earlier and spread across the nation from west to east and from reservation to metropolis. She demonstrates that artists, teachers, and critics associated with the development of American modernism, including Arthur Wesley Dow and Gertrude Käsebier, were inspired by Native art. Native artists were also able to achieve some recognition as modern artists, as Hutchinson shows through her discussion of the Winnebago painter and educator Angel DeCora. By taking a transcultural approach, Hutchinson transforms our understanding of the role of Native Americans in modernist culture.
Contemporary indigenous peoples in North America confront a unique predicament. While they are reclaiming their historic status as sovereign nations, mainstream popular culture continues to depict them as cultural minorities similar to other ethnic Americans. These depictions of indigenous peoples as “Native Americans” complete the broader narrative of America as a refuge to the world’s immigrants and a home to contemporary multicultural democracies, such as the United States and Canada. But they fundamentally misrepresent indigenous peoples, whose American history has been not of immigration but of colonization.
Monika Siebert’s Indians Playing Indian first identifies this phenomenon as multicultural misrecognition, explains its sources in North American colonial history and in the political mandates of multiculturalism, and describes its consequences for contemporary indigenous cultural production. It then explores the responses of indigenous artists who take advantage of the ongoing popular interest in Native American culture and art while offering narratives of the political histories of their nations in order to resist multicultural incorporation.
Each chapter of Indians Playing Indian showcases a different medium of contemporary indigenous art—museum exhibition, cinema, digital fine art, sculpture, multimedia installation, and literary fiction—and explores specific rhetorical strategies artists deploy to forestall multicultural misrecognition and recover political meanings of indigeneity. The sites and artists discussed include the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC; filmmakers at Inuit Isuma Productions; digital artists/photographers Dugan Aguilar, Pamela Shields, and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie; sculptor Jimmie Durham; and novelist LeAnne Howe.
Considering four genres of dance in which indigenous people are represented--K'iche Maya traditional dance, powwow, folkloric dance, and dancing sports mascots--the book addresses both the ideational and behavioral dimensions of identity. Each dance is examined as a unique cultural expression in individual chapters, and then all are compared in the conclusion, where striking parallels and important divergences are revealed. Ultimately, Krystal describes how dancers and audiences work to construct and consume satisfying and meaningful identities through dance by either challenging social inequality or reinforcing the present social order.
Detailed ethnographic work, thorough case studies, and an insightful narrative voice make Indigenous Dance and Dancing Indian a substantial addition to scholarly literature on dance in the Americas. It will be of interest to scholars of Native American studies, social sciences, and performing arts.
Representations of Indian economic life have played an integral role in discourses about poverty, social policy, and cultural difference but have received surprisingly little attention. Daniel Usner dismantles ideological characterizations of Indian livelihood to reveal the intricacy of economic adaptations in American Indian history.
Officials, reformers, anthropologists, and artists produced images that exacerbated Indians’ economic uncertainty and vulnerability. From Jeffersonian agrarianism to Jazz Age primitivism, European American ideologies not only obscured Indian struggles for survival but also operated as obstacles to their success. Diversification and itinerancy became economic strategies for many Indians, but were generally maligned in the early United States. Indians repeatedly found themselves working in spaces that reinforced misrepresentation and exploitation. Taking advantage of narrow economic opportunities often meant risking cultural integrity and personal dignity: while sales of baskets made by Louisiana Indian women contributed to their identity and community, it encouraged white perceptions of passivity and dependence. When non-Indian consumption of Indian culture emerged in the early twentieth century, even this friendlier market posed challenges to Indian labor and enterprise. The consequences of this dilemma persist today.
Usner reveals that Indian engagement with commerce has consistently defied the narrow choices that observers insisted upon seeing.
In Indian Voices, Alison Owings takes readers on a fresh journey across America, east to west, north to south, and around again. Owings's most recent oral history—engagingly written in a style that entertains and informs—documents what Native Americans say about themselves, their daily lives, and the world around them.
Young and old from many tribal nations speak with candor, insight, and (unknown to many non-Natives) humor about what it is like to be a Native American in the twenty-first century. Through intimate interviews many also express their thoughts about the sometimes staggeringly ignorant, if often well-meaning, non-Natives they encounter—some who do not realize Native Americans still exist, much less that they speak English, have cell phones, use the Internet, and might attend powwows and power lunches.
Indian Voices, an inspiring and important contribution to the literature about the original Americans, will make every reader rethink the past—and present—of the United States.
Offering thoughtful arguments and innovative perspectives, the editors organized the book around three interrelated themes. The first section explores power, politics, and belief, recognizing that Spanish missions were established within indigenous landscapes with preexisting tensions, alliances, and belief systems. The second part, addressing missions from the perspective of indigenous inhabitants, focuses on their social, economic, and historical connections to the surrounding landscapes. The final section considers the varied connections between mission communities and the world beyond the mission walls, including examinations of how mission neophytes, missionaries, and colonial elites vied for land and natural resources.
Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions offers a holistic view on the consequences of missionization and the active negotiation of missions by indigenous peoples, revealing cross-cutting perspectives into the complex and contested histories of the Spanish borderlands. This volume challenges readers to examine deeply the ways in which native peoples negotiated colonialism not just inside the missions themselves but also within broader indigenous landscapes. This book will be of interest to archaeologists, historians, tribal scholars, and anyone interested in indigenous encounters with colonial institutions.
I Have Spoken is a collection of American Indian oratory from the 17th to the 20th century, concentrating on speeches focusing around Indian-white relationships, especially treaty-making negotiations. A few letters and other writings are also included.
Here, in their own words, is the Indian’s story told with integrity, with drama, with caustic wit, with statesmanship, with poetic impact; a story of proffered friendship, of broken promises, of hope, of disillusionment, of pride, of a whole land and life gone sour.
Author Michelle M. Jacob examines Saint Kateri’s influence on and relation to three important themes—caring for the environment, building community, and reclaiming the Native feminine as sacred—and brings a Native feminist perspective to the story of Saint Kateri. The book demonstrates the power and potential of Indigenous decolonizing activism, as Saint Kateri’s devotees claim the space of the Catholic Church to revitalize traditional cultural practices, teach and learn Indigenous languages, and address critical issues such as protecting Indigenous homelands from environmental degradation. The book is based on ethnographic research at multiple sites, including Saint Kateri’s 2012 canonization festivities in Vatican City and Italy, the Akwesasne Mohawk Reservation (New York and Canada), the Yakama Reservation (Washington), and the National Tekakwitha Conferences in Texas, North Dakota, and Louisiana. Through narratives from these events, Jacob addresses issues of gender justice—such as respecting the autonomy of women while encouraging collectivist thinking and strategizing—and seeks collective remedies that challenge colonial and capitalist filters.
This new volume offers a broad overview of topics pertaining to gender-related health, violence, and healing. Employing a strength-based approach (as opposed to a deficit model), the chapters address the resiliency of Indigenous women and two-spirit people in the face of colonial violence and structural racism.
The book centers the concept of “rematriation”—the concerted effort to place power, peace, and decision making back into the female space, land, body, and sovereignty—as a decolonial practice to combat injustice. Chapters include such topics as reproductive health, diabetes, missing and murdered Indigenous women, Indigenous women in the academy, and Indigenous women and food sovereignty.
As part of the Indigenous Justice series, this book provides an overview of the topic, geared toward undergraduate and graduate classes.
Contributors
Alisse Ali-Joseph
Michèle Companion
Mary Jo Tippeconnic Fox
Brooke de Heer
Lomayumtewa K. Ishii
Karen Jarratt-Snider
Lynn C. Jones
Anne Luna-Gordinier
Kelly McCue
Marianne O. Nielsen
Linda M. Robyn
Melinda S. Smith
Jamie Wilson
For nearly three decades, Day focused his work on the community of Saint Francis, or Odanak, in Quebec, to which Abenaki refugees from interior New England had fled, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century and continuing into the nineteenth. Drawing on t he methods of several disciplines, including ethnology, linguistics, and ethnohistory, he synthesized data from fragmentary historical records, oral traditions, and place names to reconstruct a world assumed to be lost.
Tekobbe’s methods for analyzing and understanding Indigenous knowledges online center Indigenous storytelling and “thick” (broad, deep, and complex) Indigenous meaning-making. Employing this thickness to interpret Indigenous knowledge ways resists the settler-colonial logics that tend to flatten complex Indigenous concepts into one-note representations of racial stereotypes. Native Americans’ use of social media and digital platforms to support social movements uniquely constructs Indigenous identities as living, producing, and culture-making people, which confronts the commonplace, one-dimensional narrative that Indigenous North Americans either live in isolation or are people of history resigned to the long-forgotten past. Tekobbe’s methods are applicable to additional online research to break through Western paradigms of oppositional critique, the colonial power matrix embedded in hierarchical and taxonomical classification systems, and participant objectification.
Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces offers new methodological and epistemological opportunities to explore digital communities and technologies, problematizing conventional Western critique. This book is useful to instructors in Indigenous studies, internet studies, digital literacies, cultural studies, and communications, as well as Indigenous and internet studies researchers.
This fascinating book records, preserves, and contributes to the knowledge of the history and cultural lifeways of the Siilaviŋmiut people using contextual and ethnographic writing styles that apply community-based, lived-experience, and sense-of-place approaches. The authors, who have remained in contact with Selawikers since the original research period, center Iñupiaq elders’ and local Iñupiaq historians’ continued commitments to historical knowledge about the past, their ancestors, and their vast repertoire of traditional cultural and environmental knowledge. They portray the particularity of Iñupiaq life as it was lived, sensed, and felt by Selawikers themselves and as experienced by researchers. Quoted observations, conversations, and comments eloquently acknowledge Iñupiaq insiders’ narrative voices.
Providing one of only a few ethnographic reviews of an Alaska Native village, Iñupiat of the Sii will appeal to general readers interested in learning about Iñupiaq lifeways and the experiences of anthropologists in the field. It will also be useful to instructors teaching college-level students how anthropological field research should be conducted, analyzed, and reported.
In February 2006, the Six Nations occupation of a 132-acre construction site in Caledonia, Ontario, reignited a 200-year-long struggle to reclaim land and rights in the Grand River region. Framed by this ongoing reclamation, In Divided Unity explores community-based initiatives that promote Haudenosaunee traditionalism and languages at Six Nations of the Grand River as crucial enactments of sovereignty both historically and in the present.
Drawing from Haudenosaunee oral traditions, languages, and community-based theorists, In Divided Unity engages the intersecting themes of knowledge production and resistance against the backdrop of the complicated dynamics of the Six Nations community, which has the largest population of all First Nations in Canada. Comprising the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora nations, citizens of the Six Nations Confederacy collectively refer to themselves as Haudenosaunee, which means “we build the house.”
Theresa McCarthy critiques settler colonial narratives of Haudenosaunee decline used to rationalize land theft and political subjugation. In particular, McCarthy illustrates that current efforts to discredit the reclamation continue to draw on the flawed characterizations of Haudenosaunee tradition, factionalism, and “failed” self-government popularized by conventional scholarship about the Iroquois. Countering these narratives of decline and failure, McCarthy argues that the 2006 reclamation ushered in an era of profound intellectual and political resurgence at Six Nations, propelled by the contributions of Haudenosaunee women.
Centering Haudenosaunee intellectual traditions, In Divided Unity provides an important new model for community-based activism and scholarship. Through the active practice and adaptation of ancient teachings and philosophies, McCarthy shows that the Grand River Haudenosaunee are continuing to successfully meet the challenges of reclaiming their land, political autonomy, and control of their future.
Using Neihardt's original handwritten notes and early manuscript drafts, Holloway demonstrates the poet's careful and deliberate re-creation of Black Elk's spiritual world in order to induce a transcendent experience in the reader. Through exhaustive research into Neihardt's biographical materials, published philosophical and metaphysical writings, and volumes of taped lectures, Holloway examines the sources of the book's production as well as the reactions to and the implications of his literary portrayal of the spiritual world of the Oglala.
Restoring Neihardt's reputation as a faithful witness to Black Elk's sacred landscape, Interpreting the Legacy: John Neihardt and Black Elk Speaks will be of interest to Neihardt scholars and students of literature, religious studies, and Native American studies.
As in so many conflicts between Indigenous nations and local municipalities, the media narrative about the Oneida Nation’s battle for sovereignty has been dominated by the local government’s standpoint. In Defense of Sovereignty offers another perspective, that of a nation citizen directly involved in the litigation, augmented by contributions from historians, attorneys, and a retired nation employee. It makes an important contribution to public debates about the inherent right of Indigenous nations to continue to exist and exercise self-governance within their territories without being challenged at every turn.
University of Utah Anthropological Paper No. 130
This publication presents the first volume (Las Vegas) of the early ethnographic field work of anthropologist Isabel T. Kelly. From 1932 to 1934, Kelly interviewed thirty Southern Paiute people from southeastern California, southern Nevada, and southern Utah about “the old ways.” During this time, she filled thirty-one notebooks, made several maps, took roughly fifty photographs, collected nearly 300 ethnobotanical specimens, purchased and shipped over 400 ethnographic artifacts to museums, and traveled more than 7,000 miles. Her notes comprise the most extensive primary ethnographic documentation of Southern Paiute/Chemehuevi lifeways of the middle to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries existing today.
Although Kelly intended to publish these notes, she was unable to before her death. Fowler and Garey-Sage have now synthesized the first set of these handwritten field notes and sketches, providing commentary and illustrations to put them in context for the modern reader. Kelly’s data, most of which could not be gathered anew today, are offered here for the use of generations to come.
Told in vibrant detail, the narrative of the book conveys the importance of communalism as a value system present in all human groups and one at the center of Indigenous survival. Carolyn Smith-Morris draws on her work among the Akimel O'odham and the Wiradjuri to show how communal work and culture help these communities form distinctive Indigenous bonds. The results are not only a rich study of Indigenous relational lifeways, but a serious inquiry to the continuing acculturative atmosphere that Indigenous communities struggle to resist. Recognizing both positive and negative sides to the issue, she asks whether there is a global Indigenous communalism. And if so, what lessons does it teach about healthy communities, the universal human need for belonging, and the potential for the collective to do good?
Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago examines the ways some Pokagon Potawatomi tribal members have maintained a distinct Native identity, their rejection of assimilation into the mainstream, and their desire for inclusion in the larger contemporary society without forfeiting their “Indianness.” Mindful that contact is never a one-way street, Low also examines the ways in which experiences in Chicago have influenced the Pokagon Potawatomi. Imprints continues the recent scholarship on the urban Indian experience before as well as after World War II.
This research explores the social changes that took place in the Safford and Aravaipa valleys during the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries A.D. as a result of an influx of migrants from the Kayenta and Tusayan regions of northeastern Arizona. Focusing on domestic architecture and ceramics, the author evaluates how migration affects the expression of identity of both migrant and indigenous populations in the Safford and Aravaipa valleys and provides a model for research in other areas where migration played an important role.
Archaeologists interested in the Greater Southwest will find a wealth of information on these little-known valleys that provides contextualization for this important and intriguing time period, and those interested in migration in the ancient past will find a useful case study that goes beyond identifying incidents of migration to understanding its long-lasting implications for both migrants and the local people they impacted.
Who has the right to represent Native history?
The past several decades have seen a massive shift in debates over who owns and has the right to tell Native American history and stories. For centuries, non-Native actors have collected, stolen, sequestered, and gained value from Native stories and documents, human remains, and sacred objects. However, thanks to the work of Native activists, Native history is now increasingly being repatriated back to the control of tribes and communities. Indigenous Archival Activism takes readers into the heart of these debates by tracing one tribe’s fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite their history.
Rose Miron tells the story of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and their Historical Committee, a group of mostly Mohican women who have been collecting and reorganizing historical materials since 1968. She shows how their work is exemplary of how tribal archives can be used strategically to shift how Native history is accessed, represented, written and, most importantly, controlled. Based on a more than decade-long reciprocal relationship with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation, Miron’s research and writing is shaped primarily by materials found in the tribal archive and ongoing conversations and input from the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee.
As a non-Mohican, Miron is careful to consider her own positionality and reflects on what it means for non-Native researchers and institutions to build reciprocal relationships with Indigenous nations in the context of academia and public history, offering a model both for tribes undertaking their own reclamation projects and for scholars looking to work with tribes in ethical ways.
"This volume contains a great deal of interesting information."—Journal of the West
"The Apache point of view [is] presented with great clarity."—Books of the Southwest
"A valuable addition to the southwestern frontier shelf and long will be drawn upon and used."—Journal of Arizona History
"A genuine contribution to the story of the Apache wars, and a very readable book as well."—Westerners Brand Book
"Shining through every page is the unquenchable spirit that was the Apache. Inured, indeed trained, to suffering, Apaches stood strong beside Victorio, Nana, and finally Geronimo in a vain attempt to maintain those things they held more dear than life itself—freedom, homeland, dignity as human beings. A warm and vital people, the Apaches had, and have, a great deal to offer."—Arizona and the West
Containing advice on curing rattlesnake bites with amethysts and making saltpeter for gunpowder from concentrated human urine, The Indian Militia is a manual in four parts, the first of which outlines the ideal qualities of the militia commander. Addressing the organization and outfitting of conquest expeditions, Book Two includes extended discussions of arms and medicine. Book Three covers the proper behavior of soldiers, providing advice on marching through peaceful and bellicose territories, crossing rivers, bivouacking in foul weather, and carrying out night raids and ambushes. Book Four deals with peacemaking, town-founding, and the proper treatment of conquered peoples. Appended to these four sections is a brief geographical description of all of Spanish America, with special emphasis on the indigenous peoples of New Granada (roughly modern-day Colombia), followed by a short guide to the southern coasts and heavens. This first English-language edition of The Indian Militia includes an extensive introduction, a posthumous report on Vargas Machuca’s military service, and a selection from his unpublished attack on the writings of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas.
continually fragmenting, disassembling, and reassembling itself--and in
the process creating something new. In a series of topical essays that
show why he is one of Europe's leading authorities on American culture,
Kroes probes trends in American advertising, the image of the Vietnam
war in American films, the implications of American vernacular culture as represented in rap music, and other topics.
From Thomas Jefferson to John Rawls, justice has been at the center of America’s self-image and national creed. At the same time, for many of its peoples-from African slaves and European immigrants to women and the poor-the American experience has been defined by injustice: oppression, disenfranchisement, violence, and prejudice.
In Identity and the Failure of America, John Michael explores the contradictions between a mythic national identity promising justice to all and the realities of a divided, hierarchical, and frequently iniquitous history and social order. Through a series of insightful readings, Michael analyzes such cultural moments as the epic dramatization of the tension between individual ambition and communal complicity in Moby-Dick, attempts to effect social change through sympathy in the novels of Lydia Marie Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s antislavery activism and Frederick Douglass’s long fight for racial equity, and the divisive figures of John Brown and Nat Turner in American letters and memory.
Focusing on exemplary instances when the nature of the United States as an essentially conflicted nation turned to force, Michael ultimately posits the development of a more cosmopolitan American identity, one that is more fully and justly imagined in response to the nation’s ethical failings at home and abroad.
John Michael is professor of English and of visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. He is the author of Anxious Intellects: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment Values and Emerson and Skepticism: The Cipher of the World.
Looking at the changing reputation of the intellect itself, Perry examines many forms of anti-intellectualism, showing that some of these were encouraged by intellectuals as surely as by their antagonists. This work is interpretative, critical, and highly provocative, and it provides what is all too often missing in the study of intellectuals—a sense of historical orientation.
This is a book about loving things—books, songs, people—in the shadow of a felt, looming disaster. Through lyrical, funny, heart-wrenching essays, Peter Coviello considers pieces of culture across a fantastic range, setting them inside the vivid scenes of friendship, dispute, romance, talk, and loss, where they enter our lives. Alongside him, we reencounter movies like The Shining, shows like The Sopranos; videos; poems; novels by Sam Lipsyte, Sally Rooney, and Paula Fox; as well as songs by Joni Mitchell, Gladys Knight, Steely Dan, Pavement, and the much-mourned saint of Minneapolis, Prince.
Navigating an overwhelming feeling that Coviello calls “endstrickenness,” he asks what it means to love things in calamitous times, when so much seems to be shambling toward collapse. Balancing comedy and anger, exhilaration and sorrow, Coviello illuminates the strange ways the things we cherish help us to hold on to life and to its turbulent joys. Is There God after Prince? shows us what twenty-first-century criticism can be, and how it might speak to us, in a time of ruin, in an age of “Last Things.”
In Ill-Advised: Presidential Health and Public Trust, now available in paperback, noted historian Robert H. Ferrell presents powerful evidence of frightening medical scandals in the White House. Malpractice, missing public records, and politically motivated cover-ups have hidden sometimes severe presidential illnesses from the American people. Ferrell traces these often shocking incidents--from Grover Cleveland's secret surgery for cancer to the questionable reporting on the health of both Ronald Reagan and George Bush.
Tracing the emergence of the concept of US imperialism, James G. Morgan shows how radical and revisionist scholars in the 1950s and 1960s first challenged the paradigm of denying an American empire. As the Vietnam War created a critical flashpoint, bringing the idea of American imperialism into the US mainstream, radical students of the New Left turned toward Marxist critiques, admiring revolutionaries like Che Guevara. Simultaneously, a small school of revisionist scholars, led by historian William Appleman Williams at the University of Wisconsin, put forward a progressive, nuanced critique of American empire grounded in psychology, economics, and broader historical context. It is this more sophisticated strand of thinking, Morgan argues, which demonstrated that empire can be an effective analytical framework for studying US foreign policy, thus convincing American scholars to engage with the subject seriously for the first time.
This bilingual collection of essays, the fruits of a conference held in 1989 to commemorate the join Bicentennials of Georgetown University and the French Revolution, illuminates the various ways in which the American Revolution and its aftermath directly and indirectly influenced France before and after the French Revolution. The essays cluster around several basic themes: the condition of Native Americans and African-Americans, French perceptions of political, religious, and economic issues in the new republic, and the ways in which French images of America were affected by travel literature and the performing and plastic arts. The intercultural and interdisciplinary approaches taken by the fifteen authors are equally various and include social and political history, literary history and criticism, and linguistics.
Richard Cottam served in the U.S. embassy in Tehran from 1956 to 1958 and was consulted by the Department of State during the 1979 hostage crisis. This book draws upon his expert personal knowledge of Iranian politics to describe the spiraling decline of U.S.-Iranian relations since the cold war and the political consequences of those years U.S. policy, he argues, is flawed by ignorance, inertia, the tenacity of a cold war mentality, a quixotic tilt toward Iraq, and the blatant inconsistency of the Reagan administration's arms-for-hostages scheme that produced the Iran-contra scandal.
How close to reality was the official U.S. image of Libya through the Nixon-Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations? After recounting the actions of Libya and the United States in the Middle East since 1969, ElWahrfally concludes that it was very far from accurate.
Using personal interviews as well as scholarly research, ElWarfally demonstrates that recent U.S. relations with Libya, regardless of rhetoric, have been primarily determined by whether or not Libya serves U.S. interests in the region: maintaining access to Middle Eastern oil, protecting Israel, and limiting Soviet expansionism. Just as the official image of Libya has veered from one extreme to another, U.S. policy responses have also often conflicted with the publicly stated view.
The Nixon administration was at first friendly toward Libya, even though Qaddafi ejected the U.S. military and nationalized the oil industry, because of Libya's avowed anticommunism and U.S. dependence on Libyan oil. After 1976, the official U.S. image was more hostile, and Libya was attacked as a destabilizing influence in the Middle East. Outrage reached new heights during the Reagan administration, which made several unsuccessful covert attempts to unseat Qaddafi, mounted an embargo and military provocations, and in 1986 bombed Libya on a pretext later revealed to be false.
Combining theory with current history, this book demonstrates that fixed ideas and misinterpretation of events may have more to do with foreign policy behavior than facts do. Suggesting a new direction for research into relations between the superpowers and the Third World, it will interest scholars, students, and policymakers concerned with the Middle East.
Martini reinforces his assessment of American diplomacy with an analysis of the "cultural front"—the movies, myths, memorials, and other phenomena that supported continuing hostility toward Vietnam while silencing opposing views of the war and its legacies. He thus demonstrates that the "American War on Vietnam" was as much a battle for the cultural memory of the war within the United States as it was a lengthy economic, political, and diplomatic campaign to punish a former adversary.
Modern and contemporary cultures are increasingly marked by an anxiety over a perceived loss of authentic cultural identity. In this book, Vincent J. Cheng examines why we still cling to notions of authenticity in an increasingly globalized world that has exploded notions of authentic essences and absolute differences.
Who is “authentic” and who is “other” in a given culture? Who can speak for the “other?” What do we mean by authenticity? These are critical questions that today’s world––brought closer together and yet pulled farther apart by globalism and neocolonialism––has been unable to answer. Inauthentic compellingly probes these issues through revealing case studies on the pursuit of authenticity and identity.
Each chapter explores the ways in which we construct “authenticity” in order to replace seemingly vacated identities, including: the place of minorities in academia; mixed-race dynamics; the popularity of Irish culture in America; the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland; Jewish American identity; the status of Jewish America in relation to Israel and Palestine; the cultural problems of international adoptions; and the rapidly changing nature of the Asian American population in the United States.
Inauthentic combines the scholarly and the personal, informed argument and human interest. It will undoubtedly appeal to academic scholars, as well as to a broader reading audience.
Victoria Hattam locates the origins of ethnicity in the New York Zionist movement of the early 1900s. In a major revision of widely held assumptions, she argues that Jewish activists identified as ethnics not as a means of assimilating and becoming white, but rather as a way of defending immigrant difference as distinct from race—rooted in culture rather than body and blood. Eventually, Hattam shows, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Census Bureau institutionalized this distinction by classifying Latinos as an ethnic group and not a race. But immigration and the resulting population shifts of the last half century have created a political opening for reimagining the relationship between immigration and race. How to do so is the question at hand.
In the Shadow of Race concludes by examining the recent New York and Los Angeles elections and the 2006 immigrant rallies across the country to assess the possibilities of forging a more robust alliance between immigrants and African Americans. Such an alliance is needed, Hattam argues, to more effectively redress the persistent inequalities in American life.
"There I was, standing alone, unable to cry as I said goodbye to Sidimé Laye, my best friend, and to the revolution that had opened the door of modernity for me--the revolution that had invented me." This book gives us the story of a quest for a childhood friend, for the past and present, and above all for an Africa that is struggling to find its future.
In 1996 Manthia Diawara, a distinguished professor of film and literature in New York City, returns to Guinea, thirty-two years after he and his family were expelled from the newly liberated country. He is beginning work on a documentary about Sékou Touré, the dictator who was Guinea's first post-independence leader. Despite the years that have gone by, Diawara expects to be welcomed as an insider, and is shocked to discover that he is not.
The Africa that Diawara finds is not the one on the verge of barbarism, as described in the Western press. Yet neither is it the Africa of his childhood, when the excitement of independence made everything seem possible for young Africans. His search for Sidimé Laye leads Diawara to profound meditations on Africa's culture. He suggests solutions that might overcome the stultifying legacy of colonialism and age-old social practices, yet that will mobilize indigenous strengths and energies.
In the face of Africa's dilemmas, Diawara accords an important role to the culture of the diaspora as well as to traditional music and literature--to James Brown, Miles Davis, and Salif Kéita, to Richard Wright, Spike Lee, and the ancient epics of the griots. And Diawara's journey enlightens us in the most disarming way with humor, conversations, and well-told tales.
Starting with the whaling routes that first connected the mid-Atlantic archipelago with the ports of call in New England and California in the early 1800s, Williams lays out the complex relationship between the Azores and the US that has continued into the present. We learn how particular patterns of poverty, overpopulation and social inequality in the Azores pushed large numbers of the islands' inhabitants to leave their homes in search of better opportunities for themselves and their children. He tells the story of how the early whalers who jumped ship in New Bedford, San Francisco, or Hawaii were followed by kin and fellow villagers who had heard of plentiful jobs in New England's textile mills, gold and land in California, or agricultural work on Hawaiian plantations. Williams' account allows us to understand the importance of family and community connections throughout the immigrants' arduous transition from peasant life to industrial society.
In the Cold War era, Chinese Americans were caught in a double-bind. The widespread stigma of illegal immigration, as it was often called, was most easily countered with the model minority, assimilating and forming nuclear families, but that in turn led to further stereotypes. In Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities, Heidi Kim investigates how Chinese American writers navigated a strategy to normalize and justify the Chinese presence during a time when fears of Communism ran high.
Kim explores how writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Jade Snow Wong, and C. Y. Lee, among others, addressed issues of history, family, blood purity, and law through then-groundbreaking novels and memoirs. Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities also uses legal cases, immigration documents, and law as well as mass media coverage to illustrate how writers constructed stories in relation to the political structures that allowed or disallowed their presence, their citizenship, and their blended identity.
Kim illuminates the rapidly shifting political and social pressures on Chinese American authors who selectively concealed, revealed, and reconstructed issues of citizenship, belonging, and inclusion in their writing.
Ireland’s New Worlds is the first book to compare Irish immigrants in the United States and Australia. In a profound challenge to the national histories that frame most accounts of the Irish diaspora, Malcolm Campbell highlights the ways that economic, social, and cultural conditions shaped distinct experiences for Irish immigrants in each country, and sometimes in different parts of the same country. From differences in the level of hostility that Irish immigrants faced to the contrasting economies of the United States and Australia, Campbell finds that there was much more to the experiences of Irish immigrants than their essential “Irishness.” America’s Irish, for example, were primarily drawn into the population of unskilled laborers congregating in cities, while Australia’s Irish, like their fellow colonialists, were more likely to engage in farming. Campbell shows how local conditions intersected with immigrants’ Irish backgrounds and traditions to create surprisingly varied experiences in Ireland’s new worlds.
“Well conceived and thoroughly researched . . . . This clearly written, thought-provoking work fulfills the considerable ambitions of comparative migration studies.”—Choice
Examining how Irishness is performed and commodified in the contemporary transnational environment, the contributors explore topics including Van Morrison’s music, Frank McCourt’s writing, the explosion of Irish-themed merchandising, the practices of heritage seekers, the movie The Crying Game, and the significance of red hair. Whether considering the implications of Garth Brooks’s claim of Irishness and his enormous popularity in Ireland, representations of Irish masculinity in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, or Americans’ recourse to a consoling Irishness amid the racial and nationalist tensions triggered by the events of September 11, the contributors delve into complex questions of ethnicity, consumerism, and globalization. Ultimately, they call for an increased awareness of the exclusionary effects of claims of Irishness and for the cultivation of flexible, inclusive ways of affiliating with Ireland and the Irish.
Contributors. Natasha Casey, Maeve Connolly, Catherine M. Eagan, Sean Griffin, Michael Malouf, Mary McGlynn, Gerardine Meaney, Diane Negra, Lauren Onkey, Maria Pramaggiore, Stephanie Rains, Amanda Third
The lives of immigrants in the West differed greatly from those of their counterparts on the East Coast in many ways. The development of the West—with its cheap land and mining, forestry, and agriculture industries\--created a demand for labor that enabled newcomers to achieve stability and success. Moreover, female immigrants had many more opportunities to contribute materially to their family’s well-being, either by overseeing new revenue streams for their farms and small businesses, or as paid workers outside the home.
Despite this success, Italian immigrants in the West could not escape the era’s xenophobia. Scambray also discusses the ways that Italians, perceived by many as non-White, interacted with other Euro-Americans, other immigrant groups, and Native Americans and African Americans.
By placing the Italian immigrant experience within the context of other immigrant narratives, Italian Immigration in the American West provides rich insights into the lives and contributions of individuals and families who sought to build new lives in the West. This unique study reveals the impact of Italian immigration and the immense diversity of the immigrant experience outside the East’s urban centers.
“I’ve heard that some volcanic eruptions are soft with oozing streams of lava dancing down the side of the volcano like a Las Vegas chorus line. My father’s eruptions were quick, like bricks being thrown through a window.”
Denise Tolan’s memoir-in-essay traces the legacy of violence in an Italian American family, showing how abuse reverberates both in the body and mind of a family. The book’s first part, “Blood is Not Water,” lays out how the origins of violence can infect the roots of a family tree. The second part, “Good Blood Doesn’t Lie,” shows what grows from those roots. Italian Blood is a raw, heartbreaking series of essays where everything is connected through literal and metaphorical blood. These essays offer a connection to anyone who suffered childhood shame, violence, or fear and provide reassurance that they are not alone.
Intimate Strangers charts the experiences of shin Issei lives: their existence in Japan prior to migration, their motivations for moving to the United States, their settlement, and their growing awareness of their place in American society. Toyota chronicles how these resilient young women became active agents in circumventing social restrictions to fashion new lives of meaning. The Nikkei community (Americans of Japanese ancestry who were born in the United States) has been transformed by the inclusion of shin Issei, and Toyota describes the tensions around intergroup negotiations over race, identity, and the possibility of common belonging.
Intimate Strangers is a perceptive study of migration and community incorporation enacted around cultural differences and processes.
Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research with Korean American students at the University of Illinois and closely following multiple generations of a single extended Korean American family in the Chicago metropolitan area, Abelmann investigates the complexity of racial politics at the American university today. Racially hyper-visible and invisible, Korean American students face particular challenges as they try to realize their college dreams against the subtle, day-to-day workings of race. They frequently encounter the accusation of racial self-segregation—a charge accentuated by the fact that many attend the same Evangelical Protestant church—even as they express the desire to distinguish themselves from their families and other Korean Americans. Abelmann concludes by examining the current state of the university, reflecting on how better to achieve the university’s liberal ideals despite its paradoxical celebration of diversity and relative silence on race.
Drawing on close interactions with Mexicans on both sides of the border, Zavella examines migrant journeys to and within the United States, gendered racialization, and exploitation at workplaces, and the challenges that migrants face in forming and maintaining families. As she demonstrates, the desires of migrants to express their identities publicly and to establish a sense of cultural memory are realized partly through Latin American and Chicano protest music, and Mexican and indigenous folks songs played by musicians and cultural activists.
Drawing on the insights of poststructuralist theory, postcolonial studies, and investigations of transnationalism, Imagine Otherwise conceives of Asian American literature and U.S. legal discourse as theoretical texts to be examined for the normative claims about race, gender, and sexuality that they put forth. Reading government and legal documents, novels including Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart, John Okada's No-No Boy, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Ronyoung Kim's Clay Walls, and Lois Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging, and the short stories "Immigration Blues" by Bienvenido Santos and "High-Heeled Shoes" by Hisaye Yamamoto, Chuh works through Filipino American and Korean American identity formation and Japanese American internment during World War II as she negotiates the complex and sometimes tense differences that constitute 'Asian America' and Asian American studies.
Improvised Adolescence explores how teenagers from southern Somalia, who spent much of their childhood in East African refugee camps, are adapting to resettlement in the American Midwest. The collapse of the Somali state in 1991, and subsequent chaos in the Horn of Africa, disrupted the lives of these young people educationally, culturally, and developmentally. Folklorist Sandra Grady has intermittently observed the lifeworld of these teens—their homes, their entertainment choices, their interaction with classmates and teachers at school, and their plans for the future—for more than seven years to understand the cultural tools they’ve used in their journey from this disrupted childhood. They negotiate two sets of cultural expectations: in the resettled Somali Bantu community, traditional rites of passage continue to mark the change from child to adult; in the surrounding U.S. culture, an unfamiliar in-between category—“adolescent”—delays adulthood. Offering analysis that is both engaging and theoretically grounded, Grady tracks the emergence in this immigrant community of an improvised adolescence.
Best books for public & secondary school libraries from university presses, American Library Association
The emergence of African American studies in the 1970s filled a critical gap in higher education. Now a prominent scholar who has helped to define the contours of that field integrates personal reflection with an analysis of its development to recount the political, cultural, and intellectual issues that helped shape the discipline.
A participant in the Black Student Movement in its early years, Perry A. Hall provides an insider's look at the struggle to persuade academia to accept the mission of Black Studies and the struggle inside the movement to define its objectives. He examines how the discipline evolved within the context of the wider social revolution changing the face of America, showing how the presence of blacks on campuses brought about the need for new perspectives in college curricula. And because African American Studies today represents a variety of approaches, he examines how they evolved and how they interact both within the field and with other areas of knowledge.
Hall critiques the popular "Afrocentric" approach in African American Studies, arguing that it is not synonymous with the discipline overall. He develops an alternative "transformationist" paradigm that builds on the idea of double-consciousness advanced by W. E. B. Du Bois and shows how it can be used to sort out conceptions of black identity that have emerged from sociology and psychology. He explores the importance of vernacular culture—especially popular music—in creating unique frames of reference for African Americans and also applies his paradigm to education and public policy analysis.
An important intellectual autobiography, Hall's work shows how insights gleaned over thirty years can be applied in the vineyards of academia today. Its message speaks clearly to scholars of his own generation and today's, and shows how African American Studies can continue to be relevant in the next century.
The Author: Perry A. Hall is associate professor of African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and a former member of the executive board of the National Council for Black Studies. His articles have appeared in Western Journal of Black Studies, Word: A Black Culture Journal, Journal of Negro Education, and the Black Studies Handbook.
Historically, most black voters in the United States have aligned themselves with one of the two major parties: the Republican Party from the time of the Civil War to the New Deal and, since the New Deal—and especially since the height of the modern civil rights movement—the Democratic Party. However, as In the Balance of Power convincingly demonstrates, African Americans have long been part of independent political movements and have used third parties to advance some of the most important changes in the United States, notably the abolition of slavery, the extension of voting rights, and the enforcement of civil rights.
Since the early nineteenth century, there has been an undercurrent of political independence among African Americans. They helped develop the Liberty Party in the 1840s and have continued to work with third parties to challenge the policies of the two major parties. But despite the legal gains of the modern civil rights movement, elements of Jim Crow remain deeply embedded in our electoral process.
In the Balance of Power presents a history and analysis of African American third-party movements that can help us better understand the growing diversity among black voters today.
REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION
Reveals the multiple independent political tactics and strategies that African Americans have used to expand democracy and uphold civil and political rights since the founding of the nation.
This new edition of Ali’s groundbreaking narrative includes an epilogue by independent political analyst and leader Jacqueline Salit. New material addresses the historic presidencies of both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, as well as the rising tide of independent and anti-party sentiments.
Integrated in principle, segregated in fact: is this the legacy of fifty years of "progress" in American racial policy? Is there hope for much better? Roy L. Brooks, a distinguished professor of law and a writer on matters of race and civil rights, says with frank clarity what few will admit--integration hasn't worked and possibly never will. Equally, he casts doubt on the solution that many African-Americans and mainstream whites have advocated: total separation of the races. This book presents Brooks's strategy for a middle way between the increasingly unworkable extremes of integration and separation.
Limited separation, the approach Brooks proposes, shifts the focus of civil rights policy from the group to the individual. Defined as cultural and economic integration within African-American society, this policy would promote separate schooling, housing, and business enterprises where needed to bolster the self-sufficiency of the community, without trammeling the racial interests of individuals inside or outside of the group, and without endangering the idea of a shared Americanness. But all the while Brooks envisions African-American public schools, businesses, and communities redesigned to serve the enlightened self-interest of the individual. Unwilling to give up entirely on racial integration, he argues that limited separation may indeed lead to improved race relations and, ultimately, to healthy integration.
This book appears at a crucial time, as Republicans dismantle past civil rights policies and Democrats search for new ones. With its alternative strategy and useful policy ideas for bringing individual African-Americans into mainstream society as first-class citizens, Integration or Separation? should influence debate and policymaking across the spectra of race, class, and political persuasion.
One contributor evaluates the legal basis of the Panthers’ revolutionary struggle, explaining how they utilized and critiqued the language of the Constitution. Others explore the roles of individuals, looking at a one-time Panther imprisoned for a murder he did not commit and an FBI agent who monitored the activities of the Panthers’ Oakland branch. Contributors assess the Panthers’ relations with Students for a Democratic Society, the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, and the Peace and Freedom Party. They discuss the Party’s use of revolutionary aesthetics, and they show how the Panthers manipulated and were manipulated by the media. Illuminating some of the complexities involved in placing the Panthers in historical context, this collection demonstrates that the scholarly search for the Black Panthers has only just begun.
Contributors. Bridgette Baldwin, Davarian L. Baldwin, David Barber, Rod Bush, James T. Campbell, Tim Lake, Jama Lazerow, Edward P. Morgan, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Roz Payne, Robert O. Self, Yohuru Williams, Joel Wilson
Is It Nation Time? gathers new and classic essays on the Black Power movement and its legacy by renowned thinkers who deal rigorously and unsentimentally with such issues as the commodification of blackness, the piety of cultural recovery, and class tensions within the movement. For anyone who wants to understand the roots of the complex political and cultural desires of contemporary black America, this will be an essential collection.
Contributors:
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Farah Jasmine Griffin
Phillip Brian Harper
Gerald Horne
Robin D. G. Kelley
Wahneema Lubiano
Adolph Reed Jr.
Jeffrey Stout
Will Walker
S. Craig Watkins
Cornel West
E. Francis White
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