BiblioVault - Books about Native American Studies

The Eagle Returns

The Legal History of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Michigan State University Press, 2012

An absorbing and comprehensive survey, The Eagle Returns: The Legal History of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians shows a group bound by kinship,geography, and language, struggling to reestablish their right to self-governance. Hailing from northwest Lower Michigan, the Grand Traverse Band has become a well-known national leader in advancing Indian treaty rights, gaming, and land rights, while simultaneously creating and developing a nationally honored indigenous tribal justice system. This book will serve as a valuable reference for policymakers, lawyers, and Indian people who want to explore how federal Indian law and policy drove an Anishinaabe community to the brink of legal extinction, how non-Indian economic and political interests conspired to eradicate the community’s self-sufficiency, and how Indian people fought to preserve their culture, laws, traditions, governance, and language.

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Early Images of the Americas

Transfer and Invention

Edited by Jerry M. Williams and Robert E. Lewis

University of Arizona Press, 1993

Contributions from anthropology, history, political science, literature, the natural sciences, religion, and philosophy provide a comprehensive overview of the diverse influences America had on Europe. Topics covered include the impact of early botanical and geographic studies on Europe and on the scientific revolution, the structure of indigenous and colonial cultures, and the ideology and ethics of conquest and enslavement. Together, these essays constitute a reevaluation of the images held by the first colonists via new ways of understanding some of the main figures, processes, and events of that era.

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Earth Diplomacy

Indigenous American Art, Ecological Crisis, and the Cold War

Jessica L. Horton

Duke University Press, 2024

In Earth Diplomacy, Jessica L. Horton reveals how Native American art in the mid-twentieth century mobilized Indigenous cultures of diplomacy to place the earth itself at the center of international relations. She focuses on a group of artists, including Pablita Velarde, Darryl Blackman, and Oscar Howe, who participated in exhibitions and lectures abroad as part of the United States’s Cold War cultural propaganda. Horton emphasizes how their art modeled a radical alternative to dominant forms of statecraft, a practice she calls “earth diplomacy”: a response to extractive colonial capitalism grounded in Native ideas of deep reciprocal relationships between humans and other beings that govern the world. Horton draws on extensive archival research and oral histories as well as analyses of Indigenous creative work, including paintings, textiles, tipis, adornment, and artistic demonstrations. By interweaving diplomacy, ecology, and art history, Horton advances Indigenous frameworks of reciprocity with all beings in the cosmos as a path to transforming our broken system of global politics.

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Earth Politics

Religion, Decolonization, and Bolivia's Indigenous Intellectuals

Waskar Ari

Duke University Press, 2014

Earth Politics focuses on the lives of four indigenous activist-intellectuals in Bolivia, key leaders in the Alcaldes Mayores Particulares (AMP), a movement established to claim rights for indigenous education and reclaim indigenous lands from hacienda owners. The AMP leaders invented a discourse of decolonization, rooted in part in native religion, and used it to counter structures of internal colonialism, including the existing racial systems. Waskar Ari calls their social movement, practices, and discourse earth politics, both because the AMP emphasized the idea of the earth and the place of Indians on it, and because of the political meaning that the AMP gave to the worship of the Aymara gods. Depicting the social worlds and life work of the activists, Ari traverses Bolivia's political and social landscape from the 1920s into the early 1970s. He reveals the AMP 's extensive geographic reach, genuine grassroots quality, and vibrant regional diversity. Ari had access to the private archives of indigenous families, and he collected oral histories, speaking with men and women who knew the AMP leaders. The resulting examination of Bolivian indigenous activism is one of unparalleled nuance and depth.

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Eastern Cherokee Fishing

Heidi M. Altman

University of Alabama Press, 2006

Cherokee identity as revealed in fishing methods and materials.

In Eastern Cherokee Fishing, life histories, folktales, and reminiscences about fish gathered from interviews with Cherokee and non-Cherokee people provide a clear and personal picture of the changes in the Qualla Boundary (Eastern Band of the) Cherokee in the last 75 years. Coupled with documentary research, these ethnographic histories illuminate changes in the language, culture, and environment (particularly, aquatic resources) since contact with Europeans and examine the role these changes have played in the traditions and lives of the contemporary Cherokees.

Interviewees include a great range of informants, from native speakers of Cherokee with extensive knowledge of traditional fishing methods to Euro-American English speakers whose families have lived in North Carolina for many generations and know about contemporary fishing practices in the area. The topic of fishing thus offers perspective on the Cherokee language, the vigor of the Cherokee system of native knowledge, and the history of the relationship between Cherokee people and the local environment. Heidi Altman also examines the role of fishing as a tourist enterprise and how fishing practices affect tribal waters.

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Eating the Landscape

American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience

Enrique Salmón

University of Arizona Press, 2012

"Eating is not only a political act, it is also a cultural act that reaffirms one’s identity and worldview," Enrique Salmón writes in Eating the Landscape. Traversing a range of cultures, including the Tohono O’odham of the Sonoran Desert and the Rarámuri of the Sierra Tarahumara, the book is an illuminating journey through the southwest United States and northern Mexico. Salmón weaves his historical and cultural knowledge as a renowned indigenous ethnobotanist with stories American Indian farmers have shared with him to illustrate how traditional indigenous foodways—from the cultivation of crops to the preparation of meals—are rooted in a time-honored understanding of environmental stewardship.

In this fascinating personal narrative, Salmón focuses on an array of indigenous farmers who uphold traditional agricultural practices in the face of modern changes to food systems such as extensive industrialization and the genetic modification of food crops. Despite the vast cultural and geographic diversity of the region he explores, Salmón reveals common themes: the importance of participation in a reciprocal relationship with the land, the connection between each group’s cultural identity and their ecosystems, and the indispensable correlation of land consciousness and food consciousness. Salmón shows that these collective philosophies provide the foundation for indigenous resilience as the farmers contend with global climate change and other disruptions to long-established foodways. This resilience, along with the rich stores of traditional ecological knowledge maintained by indigenous agriculturalists, Salmón explains, may be the key to sustaining food sources for humans in years to come.

As many of us begin to question the origins and collateral costs of the food we consume, Salmón’s call for a return to more traditional food practices in this wide-ranging and insightful book is especially timely. Eating the Landscape is an essential resource for ethnobotanists, food sovereignty proponents, and advocates of the local food and slow food movements.

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Edgar Heap of Birds

Bill Anthes

Duke University Press, 2015

For over three decades, contemporary Native American artist Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds has pursued a disciplined practice in multiple media, having shown his paintings, drawings, prints, and text-based conceptual art throughout numerous national and international galleries and public spaces. In the first book-length study of this important artist, Bill Anthes analyzes Heap of Birds's art and politics in relation to the international contemporary art scene, Native American history, and settler colonialism. Foregrounding how Heap of Birds roots his practice in Cheyenne spirituality and an indigenous way of seeing and being in the world, Anthes describes how Heap of Birds likens his art to "sharp rocks"—weapons delivering trenchant critiques of the loss of land, life, and autonomy endured by Native Americans. Whether appearing as interventions in public spaces or in a gallery, Heap of Birds's carefully honed artworks pose questions about time, modernity, identity, power, and the meaning and value of contemporary art in a global culture.

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Edward Palmer's Arkansaw Mounds

Edited and preface by Marvin D. Jeter

University of Alabama Press, 2010

"This thoroughly researched volume is highly recommended to anyone—at any level—who is interested in the archaeology of the Southeast." —CHOICE

During the 1880s a massive scientific effort was launched by the Smithsonian Institution to discover who had built the prehistoric burial mounds found throughout the United States. Arkansaw Mounds tells the story of this exploration and of Edward Palmer, one of the nineteenth century’s greatest natural historians and archaeologists, who was recruited to lead the research project. Arkansas was unusually rich in prehistoric remains, especially mounds, and became a major focus of the study. Palmer and his team of researchers discovered that the mounds had been built by the ancestors of the historic North American Indians, shattering the then-popular theory that a lost non-Indian race had built them.

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El Q'anil

Man of Lightning

Victor Montejo

University of Arizona Press, 2001

The legend of El Q'anil, the "Man of Lightning," stands alongside such classic Maya literary artifacts as Popol Vuh and Chilam Balam but has been preserved only through the oral tradition of the Jakaltek Maya. In this tale, the young man Xhuwan Q'anil brings lightning to his people in order to save them from destruction. He undertakes a journey of adventure, participates in a great war, and is subsequently immortalized. It is a story that all Jakaltek children learn, one that reinforces their identity by showing that their people have a hero who lives in each Jakaltek Maya today. Víctor Montejo, who was raised in Maya culture and knows its lore intimately, compiled several versions of the legend in Guatemala during the height of paramilitary operations in that country in the 1980s. His contemporary reconstruction lovingly preserves this legend and reflects concern for the survival of Maya culture in the face of oppression. Just as the Maya people of western Guatemala continue to pray for peace at the sanctuary of Q'anil, the legend of the Man of Lightning affirms a culture's enduring traditions. In this edition, the text is presented in English, Spanish, and Jakaltek Maya to secure its deserved place in world literature.

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The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development

Rights, Culture, Strategy

Karen Engle

Duke University Press, 2010

Around the world, indigenous peoples use international law to make claims for heritage, territory, and economic development. Karen Engle traces the history of these claims, considering the prevalence of particular legal frameworks and their costs and benefits for indigenous groups. Her vivid account highlights the dilemmas that accompany each legal strategy, as well as the persistent elusiveness of economic development for indigenous peoples. Focusing primarily on the Americas, Engle describes how cultural rights emerged over self-determination as the dominant framework for indigenous advocacy in the late twentieth century, bringing unfortunate, if unintended, consequences.

Conceiving indigenous rights as cultural rights, Engle argues, has largely displaced or deferred many of the economic and political issues that initially motivated much indigenous advocacy. She contends that by asserting static, essentialized notions of indigenous culture, indigenous rights advocates have often made concessions that threaten to exclude many claimants, force others into norms of cultural cohesion, and limit indigenous economic, political, and territorial autonomy.

Engle explores one use of the right to culture outside the context of indigenous rights, through a discussion of a 1993 Colombian law granting collective land title to certain Afro-descendant communities. Following the aspirations for and disappointments in this law, Engle cautions advocates for marginalized communities against learning the wrong lessons from the recent struggles of indigenous peoples at the international level.

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The Emergence of the Moundbuilders

The Archaeology of Tribal Societies in Southeastern Ohio

Elliot M. Abrams

Ohio University Press, 2004

Native American societies, often viewed as unchanging, in fact experienced a rich process of cultural innovation in the millennia prior to recorded history. Societies of the Hocking River Valley in southeastern Ohio, part of the Ohio River Valley, created a tribal organization beginning about 2000 bc.

Edited by Elliot M. Abrams and AnnCorinne Freter, The Emergence of the Moundbuilders: The Archaeology of Tribal Societies in Southeastern Ohio presents the process of tribal formation and change in the region based on analyses of all available archaeological data from the Hocking River Valley. Drawing on the work of scholars in archaeology, anthropology, geography, geology, and botany, the collection addresses tribal society formation through such topics as the first pottery made in the valley, aggregate feasting by nomadic groups, the social context for burying their dead in earthen mounds, the formation of religious ceremonial centers, and the earliest adoption of corn.

Providing the most current research on indigenous societies in the Hocking Valley, The Emergence of the Moundbuilders is distinguished by its broad, comparative overview of tribal life.

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Enduring Nations

Native Americans in the Midwest

Edited by R. David Edmunds

University of Illinois Press, 2007

Enduring Nations documents how tribal peoples have adapted to cultural change while shaping midwestern history. Examining the transformation of Native American communities, which often occurred in response to shifting government policy, the contributors explore the role of women, controversial tribal enterprises and economies, social welfare practices, and native peoples' frequent displacement to locations such as reservations and urban centers. Central to both past and contemporary discussions of Native American cultural change is whether Native American identity should be determined by genetics, shared cultural values, or a combination of the two.

Contributors are Bradley J. Birzer, Brenda J. Child, Thomas Burnell Colbert, Gregory Evans Dowd, R. David Edmunds, Brian Hosmer, Rebecca Kugel, James B. LaGrand, Melissa L. Meyer, Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Alan G. Shackelford, Susan Sleeper-Smith, and Stephen Warren.

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Engaged Archaeology in the Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico

Kelley A. Hays-Gilpin

University Press of Colorado, 2021

This volume of proceedings from the fifteenth biennial Southwest Symposium makes the case for engaged archaeology, an approach that considers scientific data and traditional Indigenous knowledge alongside archaeological theories and methodologies. Focusing on the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico, the contributors show what can be gained when archaeologists engage with Indigenous communities and natural scientists: improved contemporary archaeological practice through better understandings of heritage and identity, anthropogenic landscapes, and societal potential for resilience.

Organized around the theme of interdisciplinary perspectives, the book highlights collaborations with those who have other ways of knowing the past, from the traditional and proprietary knowledge of communities to new scientific methods, and considers the social context of archaeological practice and the modern relationships that inform interpretations of the past. Chapters show how cutting-edge practices lead to new archaeological understandings when archaeologists work in partnership with descendant and stakeholder communities and across international and disciplinary borders. Authors work across anthropological subfields and with the sciences, demonstrating that anthropological archaeology’s methods are starting points for investigation that allow for the expansion of understanding by incorporating long-remembered histories with innovative analytic methods.

Engaged Archaeology in the Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico identifies current and near-future trends in archaeological practice in the US Southwest and northwestern Mexico, including repatriation, community engagement, and cross-disciplinary approaches, and focuses on Native American archaeologists and their communities, research, collaborations, and interests. It will be of interest to archaeologists and anthropologists working in the Southwest and to any researchers interested in interdisciplinary approaches to archaeology, heritage studies, and the natural sciences.

Contributors: Christopher Caseldine, Chip Colwell, Guillermo Córdova Tello, Patrick Cruz, T. J. Ferguson, Cécile R. Ganteaume, Vernelda Grant, Neysa Grider-Potter, Christopher Grivas, Michael Heilen, Jane H. Hill, Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, Teresita Majewski, Debra L. Martin, Estela Martínez Mora, John A. McClelland, Emiliano Ricardo Melgar Tísoc, Darsita R. North, Scott Ortman, Peter J. Pilles Jr., Susan Sekaquaptewa, Arleyn W. Simon, Kimberly Spurr, Sarah Striker, Kerry F. Thompson, John A. Ware, Peter M. Whiteley, Lisa C. Young

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Erosion

American Environments and the Anxiety of Disappearance

Gina Caison

Duke University Press, 2024

In Erosion, Gina Caison traces how American authors and photographers have grappled with soil erosion as a material reality that shapes narratives of identity, belonging, and environment. Examining canonical American texts and photography, including John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Octavia Butler’s Parable series, John Audubon’s Louisiana writings, and Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, Caison shows how concerns over erosion reveal anxieties of disappearance that are based in the legacies of settler colonialism. Soil loss not only occupies a complex metaphorical place in the narrative of American identity; it becomes central to preserving the white settler colonial state through Indigenous dispossession and erasure. At the same time, Caison examines how Indigenous texts and art such as Lynn Riggs's play Green Grow the Lilacs, Karenne Wood’s poetry, and Monique Verdin's photography challenge colonial narratives of the continent by outlining the material stakes of soil loss for their own communities. From California to Oklahoma to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Caison ultimately demonstrates that concerns over erosion reverberate into issues of climate change, land ownership, Indigenous sovereignty, race, and cultural and national identity.

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Ethnic Medicine in the Southwest

Edited by Edward H. Spicer; (by) Eleanor Bauwens, Margarita Artschwager Kay, Mary Elizabeth Shutler, and Loudell F. Snow

University of Arizona Press, 1977

Health is a major concern to all people. In this volume, four writers examine the medical arts of Yaqui, Anglo, Black and Mexican American communities to further understand the relationship between alternative and scientific medicine.

Edward H. Spicer's informative Introduction sets the stage for comparing "popular" and "scientific" medicine. "Graduates of medical schools have been taught that their body of knowledge is the one true medical tradition. The world has many medicines and thousands of practitioners who do not believe that "Western" medicine is a universal cure-all. These practitioners may be as certain that what they practice is the one true medical tradition," says Spicer. In the communities studied, the belief is that illnesses may be caused by overwork, withcraft or sin, and treatment may include herbs, prayer, or massage. Practitioners are successful and respected although they are not licenses in the legal sense.

In these alternative medical traditions, "Western" medicine may find a key to new growth and effectiveness. Ethnic Medicine in the Southwest is a fascinating look at commonly practiced arts that will interest not only ethnic and health services specialists but all those interested in cultural traditions.

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Ethnographies of U.S. Empire

Carole McGranahan and John F. Collins, editors

Duke University Press, 2018

How do we live in and with empire? The contributors to Ethnographies of U.S. Empire pursue this question by examining empire as an unequally shared present. Here empire stands as an entrenched, if often invisible, part of everyday life central to making and remaking a world in which it is too often presented as an aberration rather than as a structuring condition. This volume presents scholarship from across U.S. imperial formations: settler colonialism, overseas territories, communities impacted by U.S. military action or political intervention, Cold War alliances and fissures, and, most recently, new forms of U.S. empire after 9/11. From the Mohawk Nation, Korea, and the Philippines to Iraq and the hills of New Jersey, the contributors show how a methodological and theoretical commitment to ethnography sharpens all of our understandings of the novel and timeworn ways people live, thrive, and resist in the imperial present.

Contributors: Kevin K. Birth, Joe Bryan, John F. Collins, Jean Dennison, Erin Fitz-Henry, Adriana María Garriga-López, Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha, Matthew Gutmann, Ju Hui Judy Han, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Eleana Kim, Heonik Kwon, Soo Ah Kwon, Darryl Li, Catherine Lutz, Sunaina Maira, Carole McGranahan, Sean T. Mitchell, Jan M. Padios, Melissa Rosario, Audra Simpson, Ann Laura Stoler, Lisa Uperesa, David Vine

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Etowah

The Political History of a Chiefdom Capital

Adam King

University of Alabama Press, 2002

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

Detailed reconstruction of the waxing and waning of political fortunes among the chiefly elites at an important center of the prehistoric world

At the time the first Europeans arrived in the New World, thousands of earthen platform mounds dotted the landscape of eastern North America. Only a few of the mound sites have survived the ravages of time and the devastation of pilferers; one of these valuable monuments is Etowah, located near Cartersville in northern Georgia. Over a period of more than 100 years, excavations of the site’s six mounds, and in particular Mound C, have yielded a wealth of artifacts, including marble statues, copper embossed plates, ceremonial items, and personal adornments. These objects indicate an extensive trading network between Mississippian centers and confirm contact with Spanish conquistadores near Etowah in the mid-1500s.

Adam King has analyzed the architecture and artifacts of Etowah and deduced its vital role in the prehistory of the area. He advances a plausible historical sequence and a model for the ancient town's complex political structure. The chiefdom society relied upon institutional social ranking, permanent political offices, religious ideology, a redistribution of goods and services, and the willing support of the constituent population. King reveals strategies used by the paramount chiefs to maintain their sources of power and to control changes in the social organization. Elite alliances did not necessarily involve the extreme asymmetry of political domination and tribute extraction. King's use of ceramic assemblages recovered from Etowah to determine the occupation history and the construction sequence of public facilities (mounds and plazas) at the center is significant.

This fresh interpretation of the Etowah site places it in a contemporary social and political context with other Mississippian cultures. It is a one-volume sourcebook for the Etowah polity and its neighbors and will, therefore, command an eager audience of scholars and generalists.

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