front cover of Pachamama Politics
Pachamama Politics
Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Andean Ecuador
Teresa A. Velásquez
University of Arizona Press, 2022
Ecuador became the first country in the world to grant the Pachamama, or Mother Earth, constitutional rights in 2008. This landmark achievement represented a shift to incorporate Indigenous philosophies of Sumak Kawsay or Buen Vivir (to live well) as a framework for social and political change. The extraordinary move coincided with the rise of neoextractivism, where the self-described socialist President Rafael Correa contended that Buen Vivir could be achieved through controversial mining projects on Indigenous and campesino territories, including their watersheds.

Pachamama Politics provides a rich ethnographic account of the tensions that follow from neoextractivism in the southern Ecuadorian Andes, where campesinos mobilized to defend their community-managed watershed from a proposed gold mine. Positioned as an activist-scholar, Teresa A. Velásquez takes the reader inside the movement—alongside marches, road blockades, and river and high-altitude wetlands—to expose the rifts between social movements and the “pink tide” government. When the promise of social change turns to state criminalization of water defenders, Velásquez argues that the contradictions of neoextractivism created the political conditions for campesinos to reconsider their relationship to indigeneity.

The book takes an intersectional approach to the study of anti-mining struggles and explains how campesino communities and their allies identified with and redeployed Indigenous cosmologies to defend their water as a life-sustaining entity. Pachamama Politics shows why progressive change requires a shift away from the extractive model of national development to a plurinational defense of community water systems and Indigenous peoples and their autonomy.
 
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The Palace of the Snow Queen
Winter Travels in Lapland and Sápmi
Barbara Sjoholm
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

An exploration of the winter wonders and entangled histories of Scandinavia’s northernmost landscapes—now back in print with a new afterword by the author
 

After many years of travel in the Nordic countries—usually preferring to visit during the warmer months—Barbara Sjoholm found herself drawn to Lapland and Sápmi one winter just as mørketid, the dark time, set in. What ensued was a wide-ranging journey that eventually spanned three winters, captivatingly recounted in The Palace of the Snow Queen

 

From observing the annual construction of the Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, to crossing the storied Finnmark Plateau in Norway, to attending a Sámi film festival in Finland, Sjoholm dives deep into the rich traditions and vibrant creative communities of the North. She writes of past travelers to Lapland and contemporary tourists in Sápmi, as well as of her encounters with Indigenous reindeer herders, activists, and change-makers. Her new afterword bears witness to the perseverance of the Sámi in the face of tourism, development, and climate change.  

 

Written with keen insight and humor, The Palace of the Snow Queen is a vivid account of Sjoholm’s adventures and a timely investigation of how ice and snow shape our imaginations and create a vision that continues to draw visitors to the North.

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People and Plants in Ancient Eastern North America
Edited by Paul E. Minnis
University of Arizona Press
The environmental diversity of North America is astounding—from the circumpolar tundra with few plants more than a few centimeters tall to the lush, semitropical forests of the southeastern United States and Caribbean Basin. No less remarkable is the record of plants usage by the various indigenous people who have been living there for more than twelve millennia. For the vast majority of this time, their livelihood—food, shelter, fuel, and medicine—depended on their knowledge and use of the environment.

The most comprehensive overview in more than half a century about the interconnectedness of prehistoric Native Americans and their botanical world, this book and its forthcoming companion volume, People and Plants in Ancient Western North America, present the latest information on three major topics: the use of native plants, the history of crops and their uses, and how humans affected their environment. In this volume, expert scholars summarize the prehistoric ethnobotany of four regions: the Eastern Woodlands (W. Cowan, K. Gremillion, M. Scarry, B. Smith, and G. Wagner), Northeast (G. Crawford and D. Smith), Plains (M. Adair), and Caribbean (L. Newsom and D. Pearsall).

This volume contributes significantly to our understanding of the lives of prehistoric people as well as the forces that influenced their communities, their ingenuity, and their ecological impact. It also serves as a guide for designing environmentally sustainable lives today.
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front cover of People and Plants in Ancient Western North America
People and Plants in Ancient Western North America
Edited by Paul E. Minnis
University of Arizona Press
The environmental diversity of North America is astounding—from circumpolar tundra with a small number of plants more than a few centimeters tall to the lush semitropical forests of the southeastern United States and the Caribbean Basin. No less remarkable is the record of plant usage by the various indigenous peoples who have been living here for more than 12,000 years. For the vast majority of this time, their livelihood—food, shelter, fuel, and medicine—depended on their knowledge and use of the plants that surrounded them.

The most comprehensive overview in more than half a century on the interconnectedness of people and plants, this book and its companion volume, People and Plants in Ancient Eastern North America, present the latest information on three major topics: the uses of native plants, the history of crops and their uses, and the impact of humans on their environment. They not only contribute to our understanding of the lives of prehistoric people but also serve as guides for designing sustainable living today.
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People of the Desert and Sea
Ethnobotany of the Seri Indians
Richard Stephen Felger, Mary Beck Moser
University of Arizona Press, 1985
"People of the Desert and Sea is one of those books that should not have to wait a generation or two to be considered a classic. A feast for the eye as well as the mind, this ethnobotany of the Seri Indians of Sonora represents the most detailed exploration of plant use by a hunting-and-gathering people to date. . . . Scholarship in the best sense of the term—precise without being pedantic, exhaustive without exhausting its readers."—Journal of Arizona History

"To read and gaze through this elegantly illustrated book is to be exposed, as if through a work of science fiction, to an astonishing and unknown cultural world."North Dakota Quarterly

 
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front cover of Persistence of Good Living
Persistence of Good Living
A’uwe Life Cycles and Well-Being in the Central Brazilian Cerrados
James R. Welch
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Cultural understandings of well-being often differ from scientific measures such as health, happiness, and affluence. For the Indigenous A’uwẽ (Xavante) people in the tropical savannas of Brazil, special forms of intimate and antagonistic social relations, camaraderie, suffering, and engagement with the environment are fundamental aspects of community wellness.

Anthropologist James R. Welch transparently presents ethnographic insights from his long-term fieldwork in two A’uwẽ communities. He addresses how distinctive constructions of age organization contribute to social well-being in an era of major ecological, economic, and sociocultural change. Welch shows how A’uwẽ perspectives on the human life cycle help define ethnic identity, promote cultural resilience, and encourage the betterment of youth. They provide frameworks that people may creatively mobilize to responsibly and respectfully engage with others at different stages of life. They also motivate people to access and manage landscape resources essential to the social construction of good living. Through careful analysis, Welch shows how contemporary traditional peoples can foster enthusiasm for service to family and community amid dominant cultures that prioritize individual well-being.

This book is an essential resource for students and scholars interested in sociocultural anthropology, Indigenous cultures, health and culture, and human ecology.
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Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain
Nahua Sacred Journeys in Mexico's Huasteca Veracruzana
by Alan R. Sandstrom & Pamela Effrein Sandstrom illustrated by Michael K. Aakhus, Ana Laura Ávila-Myers & Michael A. Sandstrom
University Press of Colorado, 2022
An ethnographic study based on decades of field research, Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain explores five sacred journeys to the peaks of venerated mountains undertaken by Nahua people living in northern Veracruz, Mexico. Punctuated with elaborate ritual offerings dedicated to the forces responsible for rain, seeds, crop fertility, and the well-being of all people, these pilgrimages are the highest and most elaborate form of Nahua devotion and reveal a sophisticated religious philosophy that places human beings in intimate contact with what Westerners call the forces of nature. Alan and Pamela Sandstrom document them for the younger Nahua generation, who live in a world where many are lured away from their communities by wage labor in urban Mexico and the United States.
 
Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain contains richly detailed descriptions and analyses of ritual procedures as well as translations from the Nahuatl of core myths, chants performed before decorated altars, and statements from participants. Particular emphasis is placed on analyzing the role of sacred paper figures that are produced by the thousands for each pilgrimage. The work contains drawings of these cuttings of spirit entities along with hundreds of color photographs illustrating how they are used throughout the pilgrimages. The analysis reveals the monist philosophy that underlies Nahua religious practice in which altars, dancing, chanting, and the paper figures themselves provide direct access to the sacred.
 
In the context of their pilgrimage traditions, the ritual practices of Nahua religion show one way that people interact effectively with the forces responsible for not only their own prosperity but also the very survival of humanity. A magnum opus with respect to Nahua religion and religious practice, Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain is a significant contribution to several fields, including but not limited to anthropology, Indigenous literatures of Mesoamerica, Nahuatl studies, Latinx and Chicanx studies, and religious studies.
 
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front cover of Piman Shamanism and Staying Sickness (Ká
Piman Shamanism and Staying Sickness (Ká
cim Múmkidag)
Donald M. Bahr, Juan Gregorio, David I. Lopez, and Albert Alvarez
University of Arizona Press, 1974
Piman shamanism is based on the belief that morality and some forms of sickness are interrelated. The shaman, or medicine man, has a dual role in the Piman Indian culture. He is the guardian of the Pimans’ health and their consciousness of cultural identity.
 
This definitive study of shamanic theory and practice was developed through a four-person collaboration: three Tohono O’odham Indians—a shaman, a translator, and a trained linguist—and a non-Indian explicator. It provides an in-depth examination of the Piman philosophy of sickness as well as an introduction to the world view of an entire people.
 
Using the most highly developed techniques of modern ethnolinguistics, anthropologist Bahr investigates the culturally based concept of staying sickness. He conducted extensive discussions in the Piman language with shaman Gregorio. The native informant theorized at length about the cause of staying sickness, the dúajida (divination), and ritual prayers. The translator and the linguist analyzed the content and style of Gregorio’s discussions. Texts in the Piman language of Gregorio’s discussions are included, as well as literal and idiomatic English translations.
 
American Anthropologist cites “the infinite care with which each utterance has been analyzed” and “the richness of cultural expression captured in the texts themselves and in their explanation. To read Piman Shamanism and Staying Sickness is to become familiar with the unique properties of Piman thinking and modes of expression: abstract, elliptical, contracted, and yet filled with a rich and natural imagery.”
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The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History
James H. Cox
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Bringing fresh insight to a century of writing by Native Americans


The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History challenges conventional views of the past one hundred years of Native American writing, bringing Native American Renaissance and post-Renaissance writers into conversation with their predecessors. Addressing the political positions such writers have adopted, explored, and debated in their work, James H. Cox counters what he considers a “flattening” of the politics of American Indian literary expression and sets forth a new method of reading Native literature in a vexingly politicized context. 

Examining both canonical and lesser-known writers, Cox proposes that scholars approach these texts as “political arrays”: confounding but also generative collisions of conservative, moderate, and progressive ideas that together constitute the rich political landscape of American Indian literary history. Reviewing a broad range of genres including journalism, short fiction, drama, screenplays, personal letters, and detective fiction—by Lynn Riggs, Will Rogers, Sherman Alexie, Thomas King, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Winona LaDuke, Carole laFavor, and N. Scott Momaday—he demonstrates that Native texts resist efforts to be read as advocating a particular set of politics

Meticulously researched, The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History represents a compelling case for reconceptualizing the Native American Renaissance as a literary–historical constellation. By focusing on post-1968 Native writers and texts, argues Cox, critics have often missed how earlier writers were similarly entangled, hopeful, frustrated, contradictory, and unpredictable in their political engagements.

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The Politics of Kinship
Race, Family, Governance
Mark Rifkin
Duke University Press, 2024
What if we understood the idea of family as central to representing alternative forms of governance as expressions of racial deviance? In The Politics of Kinship, Mark Rifkin shows how ideologies of family, including notions of kinship, recast Indigenous and other forms of collective self-organization and self-determination as disruptive racial tendencies in need of state containment and intervention. Centering work in Indigenous studies, Rifkin illustrates how conceptions of family and race work together as part of ongoing efforts to regulate, assault, and efface other political orders. The book examines the history of anthropology and its resonances in contemporary queer scholarship, contemporary Indian policy from the 1970s onward, the legal history of family formation and privacy in the United States, and the association of blackness with criminality across US history. In this way, Rifkin seeks to open new possibilities for envisioning what kinds of relations, networks, and formations can and should be seen as governance on lands claimed by the United States.
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Postindian Aesthetics
Affirming Indigenous Literary Sovereignty
Edited by Debra K. S. Barker and Connie A. Jacobs
University of Arizona Press, 2022
Postindian Aesthetics is a collection of critical, cutting-edge essays on Indigenous writers who are creatively and powerfully contributing to a thriving Indigenous literary aesthetic. This book argues for a literary canon that includes Indigenous literature that resists colonizing stereotypes of what has been and often still is expected in art produced by American Indians.

The works featured are inventive and current, and the writers covered are visionaries who are boldly redefining Indigenous literary aesthetics. The artists covered include Orlando White, LeAnne Howe, Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Heid E. Erdrich, Sherwin Bitsui, and many others.

Postindian Aesthetics is expansive and comprehensive with essays by many of today’s leading Indigenous studies scholars. Organized thematically into four sections, the topics in this book include working-class and labor politics, queer embodiment, national and tribal narratives, and new directions in Indigenous literatures. By urging readers to think beyond the more popularized Indigenous literary canon, the essays in this book open up a new world of possibilities for understanding the contemporary Indigenous experience.

The volume showcases thought-provoking scholarship about literature written by important contemporary Indigenous authors who are inspiring critical acclaim and offers new ways to think about the Indigenous literary canon and encourages instructors to broaden the scope of works taught in literature courses more broadly.

ContributorsEric Gary Anderson
Ellen L. Arnold
Debra K. S. Barker
Laura J. Beard
Esther G. Belin
Jeff Berglund
Sherwin Bitsui
Frank Buffalo Hyde
Jeremy M. Carnes
Gabriel S. Estrada
Stephanie Fitzgerald
Jane Haladay
Connie A. Jacobs
Daniel Heath Justice
Virginia Kennedy
Denise Low
Molly McGlennen
Dean Rader
Kenneth M. Roemer
Susan Scarberry-García
Siobhan Senier
Kirstin L. Squint
Robert Warrior
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front cover of Pre-Mamom Pottery Variation and the Preclassic Origins of the Lowland Maya
Pre-Mamom Pottery Variation and the Preclassic Origins of the Lowland Maya
Debra S. Walker
University Press of Colorado, 2022
Pre-Mamom Pottery Variation and the Preclassic Origins of the Lowland Maya summarizes archaeological researchers’ current views on the adoption and first use of pottery across the Maya lowlands. Covering the early Middle Preclassic period, when communities began using and producing pottery for the first time (roughly 1000–600 BC), through to the establishment of a recognizably Maya tradition, termed the Mamom ceramic sphere (about 600–300 BC), the book demonstrates that the adoption was broadly contemporary, with variation in how the new technology was adapted locally.
 
Analyzing ceramics found at sites in Belize, Petén (Guatemala), and Mexico, the contributors provide evidence that the pre-Mamom expansion of pottery resulted from increased dependence on maize agriculture, exploitation of limestone caprock, and greater reliance on a preexisting system of long-distance exchange. The chapters describe the individual experiences of new potting communities at various sites across the region. They are supplemented by appendixes presenting key chronological data as well as the principal types and varieties of pre-Mamom ceramic complexes across the various spheres: Xe, Eb, Swasey, Cunil, and Ek.
 
A significant amount of new material has been excavated in the last decade, changing what is known about the early Middle Preclassic period and making Pre-Mamom Pottery Variation and the Preclassic Origins of the Lowland Maya a first read of the early ceramic prehistory of the Maya lowlands. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in the archaeology of the Maya lowlands, Mesoamerican social complexity, and ceramic technology.
 
Contributors: E. Wyllys Andrews V, Jaime Awe, George J. Bey III, Ronald L. Bishop, Michael G. Callaghan, Ryan H. Collins, Kaitlin Crow, Sara Dzul Góngora, Jerald Ek, Tomás Gallareta Negrón, Bernard Hermes, Takeshi Inomata, Betsy M. Kohut, Laura J. Kosakowsky, Wieslaw Koszkul, Jon Lohse, Michael Love, Nina Neivens, Terry Powis, Duncan C. Pring, Kathryn Reese-Taylor, Prudence M. Rice, Robert M. Rosenswig, Kerry L. Sagebiel, Donald A. Slater, Katherine E. South, Lauren A. Sullivan, Travis Stanton, Juan Luis Velásquez Muñoz, Debra S. Walker, Michal Wasilewski, Jaroslaw Źrałka
 
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front cover of Preventing Child Maltreatment in the U.S.
Preventing Child Maltreatment in the U.S.
American Indian and Alaska Native Perspectives
Royleen J Ross
Rutgers University Press, 2022

This book is part of a concentrated series of books that examines child maltreatment across minoritized, cultural groups.Specifically, this volume addresses American Indian and Alaska Native populations. However, in an effort to contextualize the experiences of 574 federally recognized tribes and 50+ state recognized tribes, as well as villages, the authors focus on populations within rural and remote regions and discuss the experiences of some tribal communities throughout US history. It should be noted that established research has primarily drawn attention to the pervasive problems impacting Indigenous individuals, families, and communities. Aligned with an attempt to adhere to a decolonizing praxis, the authors share information in a strength-based framework for the Indigenous communities discussed within the text. The authors review federally funded programs (prevention, intervention, and treatment) that have been adapted for tribal communities (e.g., Safecare) and include cultural teachings that address child maltreatment. The intention of this book is to inform researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and advocates about the current state of child maltreatment from an Indigenous perspective.

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front cover of Producing Sovereignty
Producing Sovereignty
The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada
Karrmen Crey
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

Exploring how Indigenous media has flourished across Canada from the 1990s to the present

 

In the early 1990s, Indigenous media experienced a boom across Canada, resulting in a vast landscape of film, TV, and digital media. Coinciding with a resurgence of Indigenous political activism, Indigenous media highlighted issues around sovereignty and Indigenous rights to broader audiences in Canada. In Producing Sovereignty, Karrmen Crey considers the conditions—social movements, state policy, and evolutions in technology—that enabled this proliferation. 

 

Exploring the wide field of media culture institutions, Crey pays particular attention to those that Indigenous media makers engaged during this cultural moment, including state film agencies, arts organizations, provincial broadcasters, and more. Producing Sovereignty ranges from the formation of the Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance in the early 1990s and its partnership with the Banff Centre for the Arts to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s 2016 production of Highway of Tears—an immersive 360-degree short film directed by Anishinaabe filmmaker Lisa Jackson—highlighting works by Indigenous creators along the way and situating Indigenous media within contexts that pay close attention to the role of media-producing institutions.

 

Importantly, Crey focuses on institutions with limited scholarly attention, shifting beyond the work of the National Film Board of Canada to explore lesser-known institutions such as educational broadcasters and independent production companies that create programming for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. Through its refusal to treat Indigenous media simply as a set of cultural aesthetics, Producing Sovereignty offers a revealing media history of this cultural moment.

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