Naming the World examines language shift among the Northern Arapaho of the Wind River Reservation, Wyoming, and the community’s diverse responses as it seeks social continuity. Andrew Cowell argues that, rather than a single “Arapaho culture,” we find five distinctive communities of practice on the reservation, each with differing perspectives on social and more-than-human power and the human relationships that enact power.

As the Arapaho people resist Euro-American assimilation or domination, the Arapaho language and the idea that the language is sacred are key rallying points—but also key points of contestation. Cowell finds that while many at Wind River see the language as crucial for maintaining access to more-than-human power, others primarily view the language in terms of peer-oriented identities as Arapaho, Indian, or non-White. These different views lead to quite different language usage and attitudes in relation to place naming, personal naming, cultural metaphors, new word formation, and the understudied practice of folk etymology.

Cowell presents data from conversations and other natural discourse to show the diversity of everyday speech and attitudes, and he links these data to broader debates at Wind River and globally about the future organization of indigenous societies and the nature of Arapaho and indigenous identity.
 

A Nation Rising chronicles the political struggles and grassroots initiatives collectively known as the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. Scholars, community organizers, journalists, and filmmakers contribute essays that explore Native Hawaiian resistance and resurgence from the 1970s to the early 2010s. Photographs and vignettes about particular activists further bring Hawaiian social movements to life. The stories and analyses of efforts to protect land and natural resources, resist community dispossession, and advance claims for sovereignty and self-determination reveal the diverse objectives and strategies, as well as the inevitable tensions, of the broad-tent sovereignty movement. The collection explores the Hawaiian political ethic of ea, which both includes and exceeds dominant notions of state-based sovereignty. A Nation Rising raises issues that resonate far beyond the Hawaiian archipelago, issues such as Indigenous cultural revitalization, environmental justice, and demilitarization.

Contributors. Noa Emmett Aluli, Ibrahim G. Aoudé, Kekuni Blaisdell, Joan Conrow, Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, Edward W. Greevy, Ulla Hasager, Pauahi Ho'okano, Micky Huihui, Ikaika Hussey, Manu Ka‘iama, Le‘a Malia Kanehe, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Anne Keala Kelly, Jacqueline Lasky, Davianna Pomaika'i McGregor, Nalani Minton, Kalamaoka'aina Niheu, Katrina-Ann R. Kapa'anaokalaokeola Nakoa Oliveira, Jonathan Kamakawiwo'ole Osorio, Leon No'eau Peralto, Kekailoa Perry, Puhipau, Noenoe K. Silva, D. Kapua‘ala Sproat, Ty P. Kawika Tengan, Mehana Blaich Vaughan, Kuhio Vogeler, Erin Kahunawaika’ala Wright

Many of the poems in National Monuments explore bodies, particularly the bodies of indigenous women worldwide, as monuments—in life, in photos, in graves, in traveling exhibitions, and in plastic representations at the airport. Erdrich sometimes imagines what ancient bones would say if they could speak. Her poems remind us that we make monuments out of what remains—monuments are actually our own imaginings of the meaning or significance of things that are, in themselves, silent.
     As Erdrich moves from the expectedly "poetic" to the voice of a newspaper headline or popular culture, we are jarred into wondering how we make our own meanings when the present is so immediately confronted by the past (or vice versa). The language of the scientists that Erdrich sometimes quotes in epigraphs seems reductive in comparison to the richness of tone and meaning that these poems—filled with puns, allusions, and wordplay—provide.
     Erdrich's poetry is literary in the best sense of the word, infused with an awareness of the poetic canon. Her revisions of and replies to poems by William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and others offer an indigenous perspective quite different from the monuments of American literature they address.

Although spectral Indians appear with startling frequency in US literary works, until now the implications of describing them as ghosts have not been thoroughly investigated. In the first years of nationhood, Philip Freneau and Sarah Wentworth Morton peopled their works with Indian phantoms, as did Charles Brocken Brown, Washington Irving, Samuel Woodworth, Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, William Apess, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others who followed. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Native American ghosts figured prominently in speeches attributed to Chief Seattle, Black Elk, and Kicking Bear. Today, Stephen King and Leslie Marmon Silko plot best-selling novels around ghostly Indians and haunted Indian burial grounds. Renée L. Bergland argues that representing Indians as ghosts internalizes them as ghostly figures within the white imagination. Spectralization allows white Americans to construct a concept of American nationhood haunted by Native Americans, in which Indians become sharers in an idealized national imagination. However, the problems of spectralization are clear, since the discourse questions the very nationalism it constructs. Indians who are transformed into ghosts cannot be buried or evaded, and the specter of their forced disappearance haunts the American imagination. Indian ghosts personify national guilt and horror, as well as national pride and pleasure. Bergland tells the story of a terrifying and triumphant American aesthetic that repeatedly transforms horror into glory, national dishonor into national pride.

In the United States, Native peoples must be able to demonstrably look and act like the Natives of U.S. national narrations in order to secure their legal rights and standing as Natives. How they choose to navigate these demands and the implications of their choices for Native social formations are the focus of this powerful critique. Joanne Barker contends that the concepts and assumptions of cultural authenticity within Native communities potentially reproduce the very social inequalities and injustices of racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, homophobia, and fundamentalism that define U.S. nationalism and, by extension, Native oppression. She argues that until the hold of these ideologies is genuinely disrupted by Native peoples, the important projects for decolonization and self-determination defining Native movements and cultural revitalization efforts are impossible. These projects fail precisely by reinscribing notions of authenticity that are defined in U.S. nationalism to uphold relations of domination between the United States and Native peoples, as well as within Native social and interpersonal relations. Native Acts is a passionate call for Native peoples to decolonize their own concepts and projects of self-determination.

Native American Autobiography is the first collection to bring together the major autobiographical narratives by Native American people from the earliest documents that exist to the present.  The thirty narratives included here cover a range of tribes and cultural areas, over a span of more than 200 years.
    From the earliest known written memoir—a 1768 narrative by the Reverend Samson Occom, a Mohegan, reproduced as a chapter here—to recent reminiscences by such prominent writers as N. Scott Momaday and Gerald Vizenor, the book covers a broad range of Native American experience.  The sections include “Traditional Lives;” “The Christian Indians, from the Eighteenth Century to Indian Removal, 1830;” “The Resisting Indians, from Indian Removal to Wounded Knee, 1830-90;” “The Closed Frontier, 1890-;” “The Anthropologists' Indians, 1900-;” “‘Native American Renaissance,’ 1968-;” and “Traditional Lives Today.”  Editor Arnold Krupat provides a general introduction, a historical introduction to each of the seven sections, extensive headnotes for each selection, and suggestions for further reading, making this an ideal resource for courses in American literature, history, anthropology, and Native American studies.  General readers, too, will find a wealth of fascinating material in the life stories of these Native American men and women.

"This is the first comprehensive anthology of American Indian autobiography ever published.  It will be of interest to virtually anyone teaching or studying the literatures of the native peoples of North America, as well as to a general audience, because of the informative, literate introductions and the absorbing narratives themselves."—William L. Andrews, series editor

Though study of American Indian cultures had been fostered for several centuries by missionaries and explorers, it was not until he nineteenth century that a disciplined and systematic approach to the study of New World cultures began to emerge. With Schoolcraft, Powell, Boas, and others, an adventurers’ avocation first became a profession, and it is to these early scholars that we owe the major theoretical perspectives and insights which provided a grounding for American anthropology and folklore studies.

In these twenty-one essays, many of which originally appeared in such now obscure periodicals as Southern Literary Messenger, American Whig Review, and DeLestry’s Western Magazine, Clements presents representative works by most of the major early figures in the field. The collection includes early statements and applications of most of the theoretical approaches to folklore employed in the nineteenth century, and it encompasses each of the major folklore genres studied by nineteenth-century researchers.

Extensive headnotes to each essay provide information about the author, discussion of the theoretical context of each essay, and direction to more contemporary treatments of the theories and materials involved, and the problems addressed. These together with a brief introduction tracing the genesis of American folklore studies, and chronological arrangement of the articles themselves, make Native American Folklore a convenient introduction to and survey of the major ideas and figures of American folklore studies in its formative period.

Beliefs and feelings about language vary dramatically within and across Native American cultural groups and are an acknowledged part of the processes of language shift and language death. This volume samples the language ideologies of a wide range of Native American communities--from the Canadian Yukon to Guatemala--to show their role in sociocultural transformation.

These studies take up such active issues as "insiderness" in Cherokee language ideologies, contradictions of space-time for the Northern Arapaho, language socialization and Paiute identity, and orthography choices and language renewal among the Kiowa. The authors--including members of indigenous speech communities who participate in language renewal efforts--discuss not only Native Americans' conscious language ideologies but also the often-revealing relationship between these beliefs and other more implicit realizations of language use as embedded in community practice.

The chapters discuss the impact of contemporary language issues related to grammar, language use, the relation between language and social identity, and emergent language ideologies themselves in Native American speech communities. And although they portray obvious variation in attitudes toward language across communities, they also reveal commonalities--notably the emergent ideological process of iconization between a language and various national, ethnic, and tribal identities.

As fewer Native Americans continue to speak their own language, this timely volume provides valuable grounded studies of language ideologies in action--those indigenous to Native communities as well as those imposed by outside institutions or language researchers. It considers the emergent interaction of indigenous and imported ideologies and the resulting effect on language beliefs, practices, and struggles in today's Indian Country as it demonstrates the practical implications of recognizing a multiplicity of indigenous language ideologies and their impact on heritage language maintenance and renewal.

This issue sheds new light on the role of Native American slavery in the development of colonial economies and in shaping the colonial world across cultural and political boundaries. Though enslavement took various forms—from outright chattel to limited-term servitude—indigenous slavery was ubiquitous in the major colonial empires by the late seventeenth century. Focusing on five examples of Native American slavery in the early modern period, the contributors present important new frames for scholarship in this growing area of study. Articles address an early Spanish abolition campaign, buccaneers’ involvement in the enslavement of Maya groups, native slaves in the early plantation economy of Barbados, the enslavement of indigenous surrenderers after King Philip’s War, and the interactions between French explorers and indigenous slaves in the Lower Mississippi Valley.

Contributors. Carolyn Arena, Arne Bialuschewski, Linford D. Fisher, George Edward Milne, Andrés Reséndez

In Native Americans and the Christian Right, Andrea Smith advances social movement theory beyond simplistic understandings of social-justice activism as either right-wing or left-wing and urges a more open-minded approach to the role of religion in social movements. In examining the interplay of biblical scripture, gender, and nationalism in Christian Right and Native American activism, Smith rethinks the nature of political strategy and alliance-building for progressive purposes, highlighting the potential of unlikely alliances, termed “cowboys and Indians coalitions” by one of her Native activist interviewees. She also complicates ideas about identity, resistance, accommodation, and acquiescence in relation to social-justice activism.

Smith draws on archival research, interviews, and her own participation in Native struggles and Christian Right conferences and events. She considers American Indian activism within the Promise Keepers and new Charismatic movements. She also explores specific opportunities for building unlikely alliances. For instance, while evangelicals’ understanding of the relationship between the Bible and the state may lead to reactionary positions on issues including homosexuality, civil rights, and abortion, it also supports a relatively progressive position on prison reform. In terms of evangelical and Native American feminisms, she reveals antiviolence organizing to be a galvanizing force within both communities, discusses theories of coalition politics among both evangelical and indigenous women, and considers Native women’s visions of sovereignty and nationhood. Smith concludes with a reflection on the implications of her research for the field of Native American studies.

Most Native Americans in the United States live in cities, where many find themselves caught in a bind, neither afforded the full rights granted U.S. citizens nor allowed full access to the tribal programs and resources—particularly health care services—provided to Native Americans living on reservations. A scholar and a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, Renya K. Ramirez investigates how urban Native Americans negotiate what she argues is, in effect, a transnational existence. Through an ethnographic account of the Native American community in California’s Silicon Valley and beyond, Ramirez explores the ways that urban Indians have pressed their tribes, local institutions, and the federal government to expand conventional notions of citizenship.

Ramirez’s ethnography revolves around the Paiute American activist Laverne Roberts’s notion of the “hub,” a space that allows for the creation of a sense of belonging away from a geographic center. Ramirez describes “hub-making” activities in Silicon Valley, including sweat lodge ceremonies, powwows, and American Indian Alliance meetings, gatherings at which urban Indians reinforce bonds of social belonging and forge intertribal alliances. She examines the struggle of the Muwekma Ohlone, a tribe aboriginal to the San Francisco Bay area, to maintain a sense of community without a land base and to be recognized as a tribe by the federal government. She considers the crucial role of Native women within urban indigenous communities; a 2004 meeting in which Native Americans from Mexico and the United States discussed cross-border indigenous rights activism; and the ways that young Native Americans in Silicon Valley experience race and ethnicity, especially in relation to the area’s large Chicano community. A unique and important exploration of diaspora, transnationalism, identity, belonging, and community, Native Hubs is intended for scholars and activists alike.

Histories of rights have too often marginalized Native Americans and African Americans. Addressing this lacuna, Native Land Talk expands our understanding of freedom by examining rights theories that Indigenous and African-descended peoples articulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As settlers began to distrust the entitlements that the English used to justify their rule, the colonized and the enslaved formulated coherent logics of freedom and belonging. By anchoring rights in nativity, they countered settlers’ attempts to dispossess and disenfranchise them. Drawing on a plethora of texts, including petitions, letters, newspapers, and official records, Yael Ben-zvi analyzes nativity’s unsettling potentials and its discursive and geopolitical implications. She shows how rights were constructed in relation to American, African, and English spaces, and explains the obstacles to historic solidarity between Native American and African American struggles.

Many indigenous Hawaiian men have felt profoundly disempowered by the legacies of colonization and by the tourist industry, which, in addition to occupying a great deal of land, promotes a feminized image of Native Hawaiians (evident in the ubiquitous figure of the dancing hula girl). In the 1990s a group of Native men on the island of Maui responded by refashioning and reasserting their masculine identities in a group called the Hale Mua (the “Men’s House”). As a member and an ethnographer, Ty P. Kāwika Tengan analyzes how the group’s mostly middle-aged, middle-class, and mixed-race members assert a warrior masculinity through practices including martial arts, woodcarving, and cultural ceremonies. Some of their practices are heavily influenced by or borrowed from other indigenous Polynesian traditions, including those of the Māori. The men of the Hale Mua enact their refashioned identities as they participate in temple rites, protest marches, public lectures, and cultural fairs.

The sharing of personal stories is an integral part of Hale Mua fellowship, and Tengan’s account is filled with members’ first-person narratives. At the same time, Tengan explains how Hale Mua rituals and practices connect to broader projects of cultural revitalization and Hawaiian nationalism. He brings to light the tensions that mark the group’s efforts to reclaim indigenous masculinity as they arise in debates over nineteenth-century historical source materials and during political and cultural gatherings held in spaces designated as tourist sites. He explores class status anxieties expressed through the sharing of individual life stories, critiques of the Hale Mua registered by Hawaiian women, and challenges the group received in dialogues with other indigenous Polynesians. Native Men Remade is the fascinating story of how gender, culture, class, and personality intersect as a group of indigenous Hawaiian men work to overcome the dislocations of colonial history.

How has American Indians' participation in the broader market - as managers of casinos, negotiators of oil leases, or commercial fishermen - challenged the U.S. paradigm of economic development? Have American Indians paid a cultural price for the chance at a paycheck? How have gender and race shaped their experiences in the marketplace? Contributors to Native Pathways ponder these and other questions, highlighting how indigenous peoples have simultaneously adopted capitalist strategies and altered them to suit their own distinct cultural beliefs and practices. Including contributions from historians, anthropologists, and sociologists, Native Pathways offers fresh viewpoints on economic change and cultural identity in twentieth-century Native American communities. Foreword by Donald L. Fixico.

The revised and updated Teacher's Guide for Native People of Wisconsin is available Winter 2015, ISBN 9780870207495.This teacher's guide helps students grasp fully the rich content of Native People of Wisconsin. The guide offers more structured activities that reengage students in the text itself in a manner that diverges from teacher's guides to our earlier publications. Activities for each chapter focus on interdisciplinary standards-related reading strategies, journaling, and other multidimensional skills that both reinforce and complement the content of the text. Included with the teacher's guide is an accompanying CD-ROM, produced specifically for Native People of Wisconsin of segments from several of the video series on Wisconsin Studies produced by the Wisconsin Educational Communications Board. Such interactive learning integrates reasoning and reading skills (and state standards) beyond the social studies and promise to make Native People of Wisconsin an essential part of the classroom curriculum.

William M. Denevan writes that, "The discovery of America was followed by possibly the greatest demographic disaster in the history of the world." Research by some scholars provides population estimates of the pre-contact Americas to be as high as 112 million in 1492, while others estimate the population to have been as low as eight million. In any case, the native population declined to less than six million by 1650.
    In this collection of essays, historians, anthropologists, and geographers discuss the discrepancies in the population estimates and the evidence for the post-European decline. Woodrow Borah, Angel Rosenblat, William T. Sanders, and others touch on such topics as the Indian slave trade, diseases, military action, and the disruption of the social systems of the native peoples. Offering varying points of view, the contributors critically analyze major hemispheric and regional data and estimates for pre- and post-European contact.
    This revised edition features a new introduction by Denevan reviewing recent literature and providing a new hemispheric estimate of 54 million, a foreword by W. George Lovell of Queen's University, and a comprehensive updating of the already extensive bibliography. Research in this subject is accelerating, with contributions from many disciplines. The discussions and essays presented here can serve both as an overview of past estimates, conflicts, and methods and as indicators of new approaches and perspectives to this timely subject.

Nature and Antiquities examines the relation between the natural sciences, anthropology, and archaeology in the Americas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking the reader across the Americas from the Southern Cone to Canada, across the Andes, the Brazilian Amazon, Mesoamerica, and the United States, the book explores the early history of archaeology from a Pan-American perspective.
 
The volume breaks new ground by entreating archaeologists to acknowledge the importance of ways of knowing that resulted from the study of nature in the history of archaeology. Some of the contributions to this volume trace the part conventions, practices, and concepts from natural history and the natural sciences played in the history and making of the discipline. Others set out to uncover, reassemble, or adjust our vision of collections that research historians of archaeology have disregarded or misrepresented—because their nineteenth-century makers would refuse to comply with today’s disciplinary borders and study natural specimens and antiquities in conjunction, under the rubric of the territorial, the curious or the universal. Other contributions trace the sociopolitical implications of studying nature in conjunction with “indigenous peoples” in the Americas—inquiring into what it meant and entailed to comprehend the inhabitants of the American continent in and through a state of nature.

Corbin Harney’s long life encompassed remarkable changes in the lives of Native Americans and in the technological and political development of the world. Born into an impoverished Western Shoshone family on the Nevada-Idaho border and orphaned as a newborn, he was brought up by grandparents who taught him the traditional ways of their people and the ancient spiritual beliefs that sustained their culture. As an adult, Harney found his calling as a traditional healer and spiritual leader. Soon he became involved in the Shoshone struggle for civil rights, including their efforts to protect and heal their traditional lands in what became the Nevada Test Site. This involvement led Harney to his eventual role as a leader of the international antinuclear movement.The Nature Way is a rich compendium of Corbin Harney’s experience and wisdom. His account of his life incorporates the tragic history of Native Americans in the Great Basin after the arrival of Euro-Americans, his realization of his own identity as a Native American, and his long study of his people’s traditions and spiritual practices. His summary of the Shoshone and Paiute use of indigenous plants for food and healing highlights their understanding that the Earth and her denizens and products must be respected and protected in order to preserve the connection that all creatures have with sacred Mother Earth. Finally, his account of his role as an antinuclear activist expands on his awareness of the human responsibility to protect the Earth, especially from the extreme danger posed by nuclear technology and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Corbin Harney’s voice is one of the clearest expressions yet of the values, concerns, and spirituality of contemporary Native America. He offers all of us an eloquent plea that we respect and cooperate with Nature to ensure the survival of the planet.

Navaho Legends is one of the earliest collections of Navajo oral traditions in English, and still the best. Originally published in 1897, Washington Matthews’s sensitive translation contains extensive versions of the Original Legend and two other tales. These richly detailed legends remain among the most complete sources of Navajo cultural, ritual, and ceremonial information.

This edition is fully faithful to the original, containing Matthews’s introduction, extensive notes, interlinear prayer translations, musical notations, and index, plus a new note on orthography by Robert Young.

"Our God Tscorenci was our Father and created the sun, which is like a mirror. He sees us from up on high and makes photographs of our reflection. When we die the photograph disappears. Many have been lost."
—Kenchori, an Asháninka from Peruvian Amazonia, when asked to tell a story concerning cameras (From W. Baker, Backward: An Essay on Indians, Time, and Photography).

Historically photographs say less about the Navajo than about photographers of Navajos. In Navajo and Photography James Faris calls attention to the inability of photographs of Navajo by non-Navajo to communicate either the lived experiences of native people or their history. Beginning with the earliest photographs of Navajos in captivity at Bosque Redondo and including the most recent glossy picture books and calendars, Faris’s survey points out assumptions that have always governed photographic representation of the Navajo people. Full of the work of photographers such as Edward S. Curtis and Laura Gilpin, as well as photographs by many less-well known figures, readers will find Navajo and Photography an enlightening juxtaposition of cultures.

Navajo Architecture may well be the most complete study to date of the folk architecture of a tribal society. Enhanced by nearly 200 photographs and drawings, the book explores the whole range of a Native American tradition as it has evolved through the present day—and is already yielding to modernization.
 
Stephen C. Jett and Virginia E. Spencer have devoted years of fieldwork to studying the origin, evolution, and construction of Navajo buildings: not only hogans, houses, and summer dwellings, but also numerous other structures related to activities such as food preparation, hunting, sweat-bathing, and funerary observation. In addition, they have defined the geographic distribution of dwelling forms to reveal both utilization of local resources and local differences in degree of acculturation.

The Navajo Nation court system is the largest and most established tribal legal system in the world. Since the landmark 1959 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Williams v. Lee that affirmed tribal court authority over reservation-based claims, the Navajo Nation has been at the vanguard of a far-reaching, transformative jurisprudential movement among Indian tribes in North America and indigenous peoples around the world to retrieve and use traditional values to address contemporary legal issues.

A justice on the Navajo Nation Supreme Court for sixteen years, Justice Raymond D. Austin has been deeply involved in the movement to develop tribal courts and tribal law as effective means of modern self-government. He has written foundational opinions that have established Navajo common law and, throughout his legal career, has recognized the benefit of tribal customs and traditions as tools of restorative justice.

In Navajo Courts and Navajo Common Law, Justice Austin considers the history and implications of how the Navajo Nation courts apply foundational Navajo doctrines to modern legal issues. He explains key Navajo foundational concepts like Hózhó (harmony), K'é (peacefulness and solidarity), and K'éí (kinship) both within the Navajo cultural context and, using the case method of legal analysis, as they are adapted and applied by Navajo judges in virtually every important area of legal life in the tribe.

In addition to detailed case studies, Justice Austin provides a broad view of tribal law, documenting the development of tribal courts as important institutions of indigenous self-governance and outlining how other indigenous peoples, both in North America and elsewhere around the world, can draw on traditional precepts to achieve self-determination and self-government, solve community problems, and control their own futures.

New approach to the study of myths relating to the origin of the Navajos. Based on extensive fieldwork and research, including Navajo hunter informants and unpublished manuscripts of Father Berard Haile. Part 1: The Navajo Tradition, Perspectives and History; Part II: Navajo Hunter Mythology—A Collection of Texts; Part III: The Navajo Hunter Tradition: An Interpretation.

The Navajo are one of the most studied people in the world; yet their social organization is one of the least well understood. In Navajo Kinship and Marriage, Gary Witherspoon, a fluent speaker of the Navajo language who lived among the Navajo for eight years, offers a new theoretical approach to kinship based on its cultural dimensions. Witherspoon makes a primary distinction between culture (patterns for behavior) and the system of social relations (observable patterns of behavior) in this definitive work on Navajo kinship and marriage.

"Witherspoon . . . clarifies problems pertaining to Navajo kinship and marriage through his skillful use of the concepts of cultural and social systems. He adds to the body of knowledge on the Navajo by his own fieldwork and unique life experiences." —R. S. Freed, Sociology

"Not only can Witherspoon's book on Navajo kinship help unravel the web for the Anglo willing to concentrate, it can also bring to Navajo readers an understanding of why Anglos don't understand Navajo family relationships." —Joanne Reuter, Navajo Times

"This is an important work on Navajo kinship and marriage." —David F. Aberle, American Anthropology

 

Navajoland is the heart and soul of the American Southwest. While the Navajo Reservation incorporates portions of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, this is only about half the traditional homeland of 220,000 Diné, the People. In one way or another, nearly all of it, including the original homeland, is sacred to them. Before Spaniards and Americans affixed their own names to the land, every topographic feature had at least one Navajo name. Many of these made their way onto maps—in various forms—or are still in use among Navajo speakers.

Navajo Places is the most ambitious attempt yet to preserve this rich legacy. Through years of research, interviews, and consultation with Navajo authorities, Laurance Linford has compiled a place-name guide that goes beyond reservation boundaries to include the entirety of the traditional Navajo homeland. The volume contains over 1,200 entries, plus a pronunciation guide and sections on Navajo history and the relation of ritual and sacred legend to landscape.

An invaluable resource for anyone interested in the Four Corners region.

The last few decades have given rise to an electrifying movement of Native American activism, scholarship, and creative work challenging five hundred years of U.S. colonization of Native lands. Indigenous communities are envisioning and building their nations and are making decolonial strides toward regaining power from colonial forces.

The Navajo Nation is among the many Native nations in the United States pushing back. In this new book, Diné author Lloyd L. Lee asks fellow Navajo scholars, writers, and community members to envision sovereignty for the Navajo Nation. He asks, (1) what is Navajo sovereignty, (2) how do various Navajo institutions exercise sovereignty, (3) what challenges does Navajo sovereignty face in the coming generations, and (4) how did individual Diné envision sovereignty?

Contributors expand from the questions Lee lays before them to touch on how Navajo sovereignty is understood in Western law, how various institutions of the Navajo Nation exercise sovereignty, what challenges it faces in coming generations, and how individual Diné envision power, authority, and autonomy for the people.

A companion to Diné Perspectives: Revitalizing and Reclaiming Navajo Thought, each chapter offers the contributors’ individual perspectives. The book, which is organized into four parts, discusses Western law’s view of Diné sovereignty, research, activism, creativity, and community, and Navajo sovereignty in traditional education. Above all, Lee and the contributing scholars and community members call for the rethinking of Navajo sovereignty in a way more rooted in Navajo beliefs, culture, and values.

Contributors:

Raymond D. Austin

Bidtah N. Becker

Manley A. Begay, Jr.

Avery Denny

Larry W. Emerson

Colleen Gorman

Michelle L. Hale

Michael Lerma

Leola Tsinnajinnie

Challenging received American history and forging a new path for Native American studies

Addressing Native American Studies' past, present, and future, the essays in New Indians, Old Wars tackle the discipline head-on, presenting a radical revision of the popular view of the American West in the process. Instead of luxuriating in its past glories or accepting the widespread historians' view of the West as a shared place, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues that it should be fundamentally understood as stolen.

Firmly grounded in the reality of a painful past, Cook-Lynn understands the story of the American West as teaching the political language of land theft and tyranny. She argues that to remedy this situation, Native American studies must be considered and pursued as its own discipline, rather than as a subset of history or anthropology. She makes an impassioned claim that such a shift, not merely an institutional or theoretical change, could allow Native American studies to play an important role in defending the sovereignty of indigenous nations today.

During the mid-1990s, a bilingual intercultural education initiative was launched to promote the introduction of indigenous languages alongside Spanish in public elementary schools in Bolivia’s indigenous regions. Bret Gustafson spent fourteen years studying and working in southeastern Bolivia with the Guarani, who were at the vanguard of the movement for bilingual education. Drawing on his collaborative work with indigenous organizations and bilingual-education activists as well as more traditional ethnographic research, Gustafson traces two decades of indigenous resurgence and education politics in Bolivia, from the 1980s through the election of Evo Morales in 2005. Bilingual education was a component of education reform linked to foreign-aid development mandates, and foreign aid workers figure in New Languages of the State, as do teachers and their unions, transnational intellectual networks, and assertive indigenous political and intellectual movements across the Andes.

Gustafson shows that bilingual education is an issue that extends far beyond the classroom. Public schools are at the center of a broader battle over territory, power, and knowledge as indigenous movements across Latin America actively defend their languages and knowledge systems. In attempting to decolonize nation-states, the indigenous movements are challenging deep-rooted colonial racism and neoliberal reforms intended to mold public education to serve the market. Meanwhile, market reformers nominally embrace cultural pluralism while implementing political and economic policies that exacerbate inequality. Juxtaposing Guarani life, language, and activism with intimate portraits of reform politics among academics, bureaucrats, and others in and beyond La Paz, Gustafson illuminates the issues, strategic dilemmas, and imperfect alliances behind bilingual intercultural education.

The advent of gaming on Indian reservations has created a new kind of tribal politics over the past three decades. Now armed with often substantial financial resources, Indigenous peoples have adjusted their political strategies from a focus on the judicial system and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to one that directly lobbies state and federal governments and non-Indigenous voters. These tactics allow tribes to play an influential role in shaping state and national policies that affect their particular interests. Using case studies of major Indian gaming states, the contributing authors analyze the interplay of tribal governance, state politics, and federalism, and illustrate the emergence of reservation governments as political power brokers.

This collection presents written texts of songs in Shoshoni and English, with both figurative and literal translations, and is packaged with a CD containing performances of the songs by Earl and Beverly Crum. The songs fall into several categories based on the contexts of their performances, such as dance songs, medicine songs, and handgame songs. The texts are framed with an introduction and commentary discussing the cultural background, meaning, forms, and performance contexts of the songs; Shoshoni language; and methodology. Glossaries of Shoshoni terms are appended. As the first major linguistic study of Shoshoni songs, Newe Hupia is an important contribution to scholarship. It also marks a significant achievement in the preservation of an important aspect of Shoshoni language and culture. And it has literary value as a presentation of Shoshoni verse and aesthetics. Furthermore, many readers and listeners will find the songs to be lyrical, pleasing to the ear, and evocative of the natural world.

The Night Chant is one of the great nine-day, Navajo winter healing ceremonies. During its course, nearly all the important characters of the Navajo pantheon are mentioned in legends, depicted in sand paintings, and impersonated with the use of masks and other ritual objects. Originally published in 1902, Washington Matthews's The Night Chant contains one of the few extensive descriptions of this important ceremony.

 

Washington Matthews studied Navajo language and lifeways as an ethnologist and linguistics expert in the late-nineteenth century. His unique opportunities to observe ceremonies and record the roles of participants resulted in landmark studies of Navajo ritual and tradition. Matthews spent more than twenty years working with hatathli, or singers, to record the many songs and rites that comprise the intricate Night Chant. provides a detailed description of healing rites, songs, myths, and prayers for the ceremony, which is performed only during 'frosty weather.' This edition includes powerful contemporary observations in a foreword by John Farella.

Despite evidence of warfare and violent conflict in pre-Columbian North America, scholars argue that the scale and scope of Native American violence is exaggerated. They contend that scholarly misrepresentation has denigrated indigenous peoples when in fact they lived together in peace and harmony. In rebutting that contention, this groundbreaking book presents clear evidence—from multiple academic disciplines—that indigenous populations engaged in warfare and ritual violence long before European contact. In ten well-documented and thoroughly researched chapters, fourteen leading scholars dispassionately describe sources and consequences of Amerindian warfare and violence, including ritual violence. Originally presented at an American Anthropological Association symposium, their findings construct a convincing case that bloodshed and killing have been woven into the fabric of indigenous life in North America for many centuries.

The editors argue that a failure to acknowledge the roles of warfare and violence in the lives of indigenous North Americans is itself a vestige of colonial repression—depriving native warriors of their history of armed resistance. These essays document specific acts of Native American violence across the North American continent. Including contributions from anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and ethnographers, they argue not only that violence existed but also that it was an important and frequently celebrated component of Amerindian life.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza

1.  Traditional Native Warfare in Western Alaska
Ernest S. Burch Jr.

2.  Barbarism and Ardour of War from the Tenderest Years”: Cree-Inuit Warfare in the Hudson Bay Region
Charles A. Bishop and Victor P. Lytwyn

3.  Aboriginal Warfare on the Northwest Coast: Did the Potlatch Replace Warfare?
Joan A. Lovisek

4.  Ethnohistoric Descriptions of Chumash Warfare
John R. Johnson

5.  Documenting Conflict in the Prehistoric Pueblo Southwest
Polly Schaafsma

6.  Cahokia and the Evidence for Late Pre-Columbian War in the North American Midcontinent
Thomas E. Emerson

7.  Iroquois-Huron Warfare
Dean R. Snow

8.  Desecrating the Sacred Ancestor Temples: Chiefly Conflict and Violence in the American Southeast
David H. Dye and Adam King

9.  Warfare, Population, and Food Production in Prehistoric Eastern North America
George R. Milner

10.  The Osteological Evidence for Indigenous Warfare in North America
Patricia M. Lambert

11.  Ethical Considerations and Conclusions Regarding Indigenous Warfare and Violence in North America
Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza

References
About the Contributors
Index

Revealing firsthand narratives of Indian captivity from eighteenth-century New Hampshire and Vermont. Narratives of Europeans who experienced Indian captivity represent one of the oldest genres of American literature. They are often credited with establishing the stereotype of Indians as cruel and bloodthirsty. While early southern New England accounts were heavily influenced by a dominant Puritan interpretation which had little room for individual and cultural distinctions, later northern New England narratives show growing independence from this influence. The eight narratives selected for this book challenge old stereotypes and provide a clearer understanding of the nature of captive taking. Indians used captives to replace losses in their tribes and families, and also to participate in the French and British ransom market. These stories portray Indian captors as individuals with a unique culture and offer glimpses of daily life in frontier communities. Calloway complements them with valuable historical background material. His book will appeal especially to readers interested in Native American peoples and life on the north country frontier of Vermont and New Hampshire.

While research demonstrates how Indigenous populations have been disproportionately affected by the global nuclear production complex, less attention has been given to tactics that have successfully resisted such projects. Danielle Endres’s Nuclear Decolonization shifts the conversation around nuclear colonialism in important ways, offering an account of how the Western Shoshone, Southern Paiute, and Skull Valley Goshute peoples and nations prevented two high-level nuclear waste sites from being built on their lands. Using a decolonial approach, Endres highlights two sets of rhetorical tactics—Indigenous Lands rhetorics and national interest rhetorics—used to fight nuclear colonialism. The book reframes nuclear decolonization as fundamentally a struggle for the return of Indigenous lands while also revealing how Native activists selectively move between Indigenous nationhood and US citizenship in order to resist settler decision-making. Working at the intersection of Indigenous antinuclear advocacy, Indigenized environmental justice, and decolonization, Nuclear Decolonization centers Native activism and voices while amplifying the power and resilience of Indigenous peoples and nations.