front cover of I Have Spoken
I Have Spoken
American History Through The Voices Of The Indians
Virginia I. Armstrong
Ohio University Press, 1971

I Have Spoken is a collection of American Indian oratory from the 17th to the 20th century, concentrating on speeches focusing around Indian-white relationships, especially treaty-making negotiations. A few letters and other writings are also included.

Here, in their own words, is the Indian’s story told with integrity, with drama, with caustic wit, with statesmanship, with poetic impact; a story of proffered friendship, of broken promises, of hope, of disillusionment, of pride, of a whole land and life gone sour.

[more]

logo for University of Utah Press
I The Song
Jill M Soens
University of Utah Press, 1999
I, the Song is an introduction to the rich and complex classical North American poetry that grew out of and reflects Indian life before the European invasion. No generalization can hold true for all the classical poems of North American Indians. They spring from thirty thousand years of experience, five hundred languages and dialects, and ten linguistic groups and general cultures. But the poems from these different cultures and languages belong to poetry unified by similar experiences and shared continent.

Built on early transcriptions of Native American “songs” and arranged by subject, these poems are informed by additional context that enables readers to appreciate more fully their imagery, their cultural basis, and the moment that produced them. They let us look at our continent through the eyes of a wide range of people: poets, hunters, farmers, holy men and women, and children. This poetry achieved its vividness, clarity, and intense emotional powers partly because the singers made their poems for active use as well as beauty, and also because they made them for singing or chanting rather than isolated reading.

Most striking, classical North American Indian poetry brings us flashes of timeless vision and absolute perception: a gull’s wing red over the dawn; snow-capped peaks in the moonlight; a death song. Flowing beneath them is a powerful current: the urge to achieve a selfless attention to the universe and a determination to see and delight in the universe on its own terms.
[more]

front cover of Identity Politics of Difference
Identity Politics of Difference
The Mixed-Race American Indian Experience
Michelle Montgomery
University Press of Colorado, 2021

In Identity Politics of Difference, author Michelle R. Montgomery uses a multidisciplinary approach to examine questions of identity construction and multiracialism through the experiences of mixed-race Native American students at a tribal school in New Mexico. She explores the multiple ways in which these students navigate, experience, and understand their racial status and how this status affects their educational success and social interactions.

Montgomery contextualizes students’ representations of their racial identity choices through the compounded race politics of blood quantum and stereotypes of physical features, showing how varying degrees of "Indianness" are determined by peer groups. Based on in-depth interviews with nine students who identify as mixed-race (Native American–White, Native American–Black, and Native American–Hispanic), Montgomery challenges us to scrutinize how the category of “mixed-race” bears different meanings for those who fall under it based on their outward perceptions, including their ability to "pass" as one race or another.

Identity Politics of Difference includes an arsenal of policy implications for advancing equity and social justice in tribal colleges and beyond and actively engages readers to reflect on how they have experienced the identity politics of race throughout their own lives. The book will be a valuable resource to scholars, policy makers, teachers, and school administrators, as well as to students and their families.

[more]

front cover of In Order to Live Untroubled
In Order to Live Untroubled
Inuit of the Central Artic 1550 to 1940
Renee Fossett
University of Manitoba Press, 2001
Despite the long human history of the Canadian central arctic, there is still little historical writing on the Inuit peoples of this vast region. Although archaeologists and anthropologists have studied ancient and contemporary Inuit societies, the Inuit world in the crucial period from the 16th to the 20th centuries remains largely undescribed and unexplained. In Order to Live Untroubled helps fill this 400-year gap by providing the first, broad, historical survey of the Inuit peoples of the central arctic.Drawing on a wide array of eyewitness accounts, journals, oral sources, and findings from material culture and other disciplines, historian Renee Fossett explains how different Inuit societies developed strategies and adaptations for survival to deal with the challenges of their physical and social environments over the centuries. In Order to Live Untroubled examines how and why Inuit created their cultural institutions before they came under the pervasive influence of Euro-Canadian society. This fascinating account of Inuit encounters with explorers, fur traders, and other Aboriginal peoples is a rich and detailed glimpse into a long-hidden historical world.
[more]

front cover of In Search of First Contact
In Search of First Contact
The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery
Annette Kolodny
Duke University Press, 2012
In Search of First Contact is a monumental achievement by the influential literary critic Annette Kolodny. In this book, she offers a radically new interpretation of two medieval Icelandic tales, known as the Vinland sagas. She contends that they are the first known European narratives about contact with North America. After carefully explaining the evidence for that conclusion, Kolodny examines what happened after 1837, when English translations of the two sagas became widely available and enormously popular in the United States. She assesses their impact on literature, immigration policy, and concepts of masculinity.

Kolodny considers what the sagas reveal about the Native peoples encountered by the Norse in Vinland around the year A.D. 1000, and she recovers Native American stories of first contacts with Europeans, including one that has never before been shared outside of Native communities. These stories contradict the dominant narrative of "first contact" between Europeans and the New World. Kolodny rethinks the lingering power of a mythic American Viking heritage and the long-standing debate over whether Leif Eiriksson or Christopher Columbus should be credited as the first discoverer. With this paradigm-shattering work, Kolodny shows what literary criticism can bring to historical and social scientific endeavors.

[more]

front cover of In the Sierra Madre
In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Biggers
University of Illinois Press, 2006

A stunning history of legendary treasure seekers and enigmatic natives in Mexico's Copper Canyon

The Sierra Madre--no other mountain range in the world possesses such a ring of intrigue. In the Sierra Madre is a groundbreaking and extraordinary memoir that chronicles the astonishing history of one of the most famous, yet unknown, regions in the world. Based on his one-year sojourn among the Raramuri/Tarahumara, award-winning journalist Jeff Biggers offers a rare look into the ways of the most resilient indigenous culture in the Americas, the exploits of Mexican mountaineers, and the fascinating parade of argonauts and accidental travelers that has journeyed into the Sierra Madre over centuries. From African explorers, Bohemian friars, Confederate and Irish war deserters, French poets, Boer and Russian commandos, Apache and Mennonite communities, bewildered archaeologists, addled writers, and legendary characters including Antonin Artaud, B. Traven, Sergei Eisenstein, George Patton, Geronimo, and Pancho Villa, Biggers uncovers the remarkable treasures of the Sierra Madre.
[more]

front cover of Inappropriation
Inappropriation
The Contested Legacy of Y-Indian Guides
Paul Hillmer
University of Missouri Press, 2023
In 1926, Harold Keltner, a YMCA Boys Work secretary from St. Louis, and Joe Friday, a member of the Canadian Ojibwe First Peoples, channeled white middle-class fascination with Native Americans into what became the Y-Indian Guides youth pro­gram, engaging over a half million participants across the nation at the height of its 77-year history. Intended to soften the stereo­typical stern father, the program traced a complicated thread of American history, touching upon themes of family, race, class, and privilege.

The Y-Indian Guides was a father-son (and later parent-child) program that encouraged real and enduring bonds through play and an authentic appreciation of family. While “playing Indian” seemed harmless to most participants during the pro­gram’s heyday, Paul Hillmer and Ryan Bean demonstrate the problematic nature of its methods. In the process of seeking to admire and emulate Indigenous Peoples, Y-Indian Guide participants often misrepresented American Indians and reinforced harmful ste­reotypes. Ultimately, this history demonstrates many ways in which American culture undermines and harms its Indigenous communities.

 
[more]

front cover of Inconstant Companions
Inconstant Companions
Archaeology and North American Indian Oral Traditions
Ronald J. Mason
University of Alabama Press, 2008
One of the most significant theoretical issues in contemporary American archaeology—the role of oral tradition in scientific research.
 
Ronald J. Mason explores the tension between aboriginal oral traditions and the practice of archaeology in North America. That exploration is necessarily interdisciplinary and set in a global context. Indeed, the issues at stake are universal in the current era of intellectual "decolonization" and multiculturalism.
 
Unless committed to writing, even the most esteemed utterances are inevitably forgotten with the passing of generations, however much the succeeding ones try to reproduce what they think they had heard. Writing shares with archaeo-logical remains a greater, if unequal, durability. Through copious examples across academic and ethnographic spectra and over millennia, Mason examines the disparate functions of traditional "ways of knowing" in contrast to the paradigm of science and critical historiography.
  

[more]

front cover of Indian Country
Indian Country
Telling a Story in a Digital Age
Victoria L. LaPoe
Michigan State University Press, 2017
Storytelling has always been an important part of Native culture. Stories play a part in everyday Native life—they are often oral and rich in detail and language and serve as a form of recording history. Digital media now allow for the extension of this storytelling. This necessary text evaluates how digital media are changing the rich cultural act of storytelling within Native communities, with a specific focus on Native newsroom norms and routines. The authors argue that the non-Native press often leave consumers with a stereotypical view of American Indians, and aim to give a more authentic representation to Native journalism. With interviews from more than forty Native journalists around the country, this book is essential to understanding how digital media possibly advances the distribution of storytelling within the American Indian community.
 
[more]

front cover of The Indian Craze
The Indian Craze
Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915
Elizabeth Hutchinson
Duke University Press, 2009
In the early twentieth century, Native American baskets, blankets, and bowls could be purchased from department stores, “Indian stores,” dealers, and the U.S. government’s Indian schools. Men and women across the United States indulged in a widespread passion for collecting Native American art, which they displayed in domestic nooks called “Indian corners.” Elizabeth Hutchinson identifies this collecting as part of a larger “Indian craze” and links it to other activities such as the inclusion of Native American artifacts in art exhibitions sponsored by museums, arts and crafts societies, and World’s Fairs, and the use of indigenous handicrafts as models for non-Native artists exploring formal abstraction and emerging notions of artistic subjectivity. She argues that the Indian craze convinced policymakers that art was an aspect of “traditional” Native culture worth preserving, an attitude that continues to influence popular attitudes and federal legislation.

Illustrating her argument with images culled from late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century publications, Hutchinson revises the standard history of the mainstream interest in Native American material culture as “art.” While many locate the development of this cross-cultural interest in the Southwest after the First World War, Hutchinson reveals that it began earlier and spread across the nation from west to east and from reservation to metropolis. She demonstrates that artists, teachers, and critics associated with the development of American modernism, including Arthur Wesley Dow and Gertrude Käsebier, were inspired by Native art. Native artists were also able to achieve some recognition as modern artists, as Hutchinson shows through her discussion of the Winnebago painter and educator Angel DeCora. By taking a transcultural approach, Hutchinson transforms our understanding of the role of Native Americans in modernist culture.

[more]

front cover of Indian Given
Indian Given
Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States
María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo
Duke University Press, 2016
In Indian Given María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo addresses current racialized violence and resistance in Mexico and the United States with a genealogy that reaches back to the sixteenth century. Saldaña-Portillo formulates the central place of indigenous peoples in the construction of national spaces and racialized notions of citizenship, showing, for instance, how Chicanos/as in the U.S./Mexico borderlands might affirm or reject their indigenous background based on their location.  In this and other ways, she demonstrates how the legacies of colonial Spain's and Britain's differing approaches to encountering indigenous peoples continue to shape perceptions of the natural, racial, and cultural landscapes of the United States and Mexico. Drawing on a mix of archival, historical, literary, and legal texts, Saldaña-Portillo shows how los indios/Indians provided the condition of possibility for the emergence of Mexico and the United States.
 
[more]

front cover of The Indian History of an American Institution
The Indian History of an American Institution
Native Americans and Dartmouth
Colin G. Calloway
Dartmouth College Press, 2010
Dartmouth College began life as an Indian school, a pretense that has since been abandoned. Still, the institution has a unique, if complicated, relationship with Native Americans and their history. Beginning with Samson Occom’s role as the first “development officer” of the college, Colin G. Calloway tells the entire, complex story of Dartmouth’s historical and ongoing relationship with Native Americans. Calloway recounts the struggles and achievements of Indian attendees and the history of Dartmouth alumni’s involvements with American Indian affairs. He also covers more recent developments, such as the mascot controversies, the emergence of an active Native American student organization, and the partial fulfillment of a promise deferred. This is a fascinating picture of an elite American institution and its troubled relationship— at times compassionate, at times conflicted—with Indians and Native American culture.
[more]

front cover of Indian Metropolis
Indian Metropolis
Native Americans in Chicago, 1945-75
James B. LaGrand
University of Illinois Press, 2002

front cover of Indian Names in Michigan
Indian Names in Michigan
Virgil J. Vogel
University of Michigan Press, 1986
Vogel traces the origin of hundreds of Indian place names
[more]

front cover of Indian Nation
Indian Nation
Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms
Cheryl Walker
Duke University Press, 1997
Indian Nation documents the contributions of Native Americans to the notion of American nationhood and to concepts of American identity at a crucial, defining time in U.S. history. Departing from previous scholarship, Cheryl Walker turns the "usual" questions on their heads, asking not how whites experienced indigenous peoples, but how Native Americans envisioned the United States as a nation. This project unfolds a narrative of participatory resistance in which Indians themselves sought to transform the discourse of nationhood.
Walker examines the rhetoric and writings of nineteenth-century Native Americans, including William Apess, Black Hawk, George Copway, John Rollin Ridge, and Sarah Winnemucca. Demonstrating with unique detail how these authors worked to transform venerable myths and icons of American identity, Indian Nation chronicles Native American participation in the forming of an American nationalism in both published texts and speeches that were delivered throughout the United States. Pottawattomie Chief Simon Pokagon’s "The Red Man’s Rebuke," an important document of Indian oratory, is published here in its entirety for the first time since 1893.
By looking at this writing through the lens of the best theoretical work on nationality, postcoloniality, and the subaltern, Walker creates a new and encompassing picture of the relationship between Native Americans and whites. She shows that, contrary to previous studies, America in the nineteenth century was intercultural in significant ways.
[more]

front cover of Indian New England Before the Mayflower
Indian New England Before the Mayflower
Howard S. Russell
University Press of New England, 1983
In offering here a highly readable yet comprehensive description of New England's Indians as they lived when European settlers first met them, the author provides a well-rounded picture of the natives as neither savages nor heroes, but fellow human beings existing at a particular time and in a particular environment. He dispels once and for all the common notion of native New England as peopled by a handful of savages wandering in a trackless wilderness. In sketching the picture the author has had help from such early explorers as Verrazano, Champlain, John Smith, and a score of literate sailors; Pilgrims and Puritans; settlers, travelers, military men, and missionaries. A surprising number of these took time and trouble to write about the new land and the characteristics and way of life of its native people. A second major background source has been the patient investigations of modern archaeologists and scientists, whose several enthusiastic organizations sponsor physical excavations and publications that continually add to our perception of prehistoric men and women, their habits, and their environment. This account of the earlier New Englanders, of their land and how they lived in it and treated it; their customs, food, life, means of livelihood, and philosophy of life will be of interest to all general audiences concerned with the history of Native Americans and of New England.
[more]

front cover of Indian Place Names in Alabama
Indian Place Names in Alabama
William A. Read, and revised edition by James B. McMillan
University of Alabama Press, 1984

"What is the 'meaning' of names like Coosa and Tallapoosa? Who named the Alabama and Tombigbee and Tennessee rivers? How are Cheaha and Conecuh and Talladega pronounced? How did Opelika and Tuscaloosa get their names? Questions like these, which are asked by laymen as well as by historians, geographers, and students of the English language, can be answered only by study of the origins and history of the Indian names that dot the map of Alabama.—from the Foreword

Originally published by Professor Read in 1937, this volume was revised, updated, and annotated in 1984 by James B. McMillan and remains the single best compedium on the topic.

[more]

front cover of Indian Reservations in the United States
Indian Reservations in the United States
Territory, Sovereignty, and Socioeconomic Change
Klaus Frantz
University of Chicago Press, 1999
In the most comprehensive and detailed cultural-geographic study ever conducted of the American Indian reservations in the forty-eight contiguous states, Klaus Frantz explores the reservations as living environments rather than historical footnotes. Although this study provides well-researched documentation of the generally deplorable living conditions on the reservations, it also seeks to discover and highlight the many possibilities for positive change.

Informed by both historical research and extensive fieldwork, this book pays special attention to the natural resource base and economic outlook of the reservations, as well as the crucial issue of tribal sovereignty. Chapters also cover the demography of American Indian groups and their socioeconomic status (including standard of living, employment, and education). A new afterword treats some of the developments since the book's initial publication in German, such as the effects of the 1988 Indian gaming law that allowed Indian reservations to operate gambling establishments (with mixed success).

"Provides a good overview of the basic questions and problems facing reservation Indians today."—Peter Bolz, Journal of American History (on the German edition)
[more]

front cover of Indian Resilience and Rebuilding
Indian Resilience and Rebuilding
Indigenous Nations in the Modern American West
Donald L. Fixico
University of Arizona Press, 2013
Indian Resilience and Rebuilding provides an Indigenous view of the last one-hundred years of Native history and guides readers through a century of achievements. It examines the progress that Indians have accomplished in rebuilding their nations in the 20th century, revealing how Native communities adapted to the cultural and economic pressures in modern America. Donald Fixico examines issues like land allotment, the Indian New Deal, termination and relocation, Red Power and self-determination, casino gaming, and repatriation. He applies ethnohistorical analysis and political economic theory to provide a multi-layered approach that ultimately shows how Native people reinvented themselves in order to rebuild their nations.  

Fixico identifies the tools to this empowerment such as education, navigation within cultural systems, modern Indian leadership, and indigenized political economy. He explains how these tools helped Indian communities to rebuild their nations. Fixico constructs an Indigenous paradigm of Native ethos and reality that drives Indian modern political economies heading into the twenty-first century.

This illuminating and comprehensive analysis of Native nation’s resilience in the twentieth century demonstrates how Native Americans reinvented themselves, rebuilt their nations, and ultimately became major forces in the United States. Indian Resilience and Rebuilding, redefines how modern American history can and should be told.
[more]

front cover of Indian Self Rule
Indian Self Rule
First-Hand Accounts of Indian-White Relations from Roosevelt to Reagan
edited by Kenneth R. Philp
Utah State University Press, 1995
Now back in print, this important collection of first-hand accounts from individuals who had leading roles in Indian-white relations is a necessary reference for anyone interested in the modern Indian experience. Reviewing fifty years of Indian history since the Indian Reorganization Act was passed during FDR's New Deal administration, the contributors include Indian leaders and activists from a wide cross-section of America's varied native communities.
[more]

front cover of Indian Spectacle
Indian Spectacle
College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America
Guiliano, Jennifer
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Amid controversies surrounding the team mascot and brand of the Washington Redskins in the National Football League and the use of mascots by K–12 schools, Americans demonstrate an expanding sensitivity to the pejorative use of references to Native Americans by sports organizations at all levels. In Indian Spectacle, Jennifer Guiliano exposes the anxiety of American middle-class masculinity in relation to the growing commercialization of collegiate sports and the indiscriminate use of Indian identity as mascots.
 
Indian Spectacle explores the ways in which white, middle-class Americans have consumed narratives of masculinity, race, and collegiate athletics through the lens of Indian-themed athletic identities, mascots, and music. Drawing on a cross-section of American institutions of higher education, Guiliano investigates the role of sports mascots in the big business of twentieth-century American college football in order to connect mascotry to expressions of community identity, individual belonging, stereotyped imagery, and cultural hegemony.  
 
Against a backdrop of the current level of the commercialization of collegiate sports—where the collective revenue of the fifteen highest grossing teams in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has well surpassed one billion dollars—Guiliano recounts the history of the creation and spread of mascots and university identities as something bound up in the spectacle of halftime performance, the growth of collegiate competition, the influence of mass media, and how athletes, coaches, band members, spectators, university alumni, faculty, and administrators, artists, writers, and members of local communities all have contributed to the dissemination of ideas of Indianness that is rarely rooted in native people’s actual lives. 
 
[more]

front cover of Indian Stereotypes in TV Science Fiction
Indian Stereotypes in TV Science Fiction
First Nations' Voices Speak Out
By Sierra S. Adare
University of Texas Press, 2005

According to an early 1990s study, 95 percent of what college students know about Native Americans was acquired through the media, leading to widespread misunderstandings of First Nations peoples. Sierra Adare contends that negative "Indian" stereotypes do physical, mental, emotional, and financial harm to First Nations individuals.

At its core, this book is a social study whose purpose is to explore the responses of First Nations peoples to representative "Indian" stereotypes portrayed within the TV science fiction genre. Participants in Adare's study viewed episodes from My Favorite Martian, Star Trek, Star Trek: Voyager, Quantum Leap, The Adventures of Superman, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Reactions by viewers range from optimism to a deep-rooted sadness. The strongest responses came after viewing a Superman episode's depiction of an "evil medicine man" who uses a ceremonial pipe to kill a warrior. The significance of First Nations peoples' responses and reactions are both surprising and profound. After publication of "Indian" Stereotypes in TV Science Fiction, ignorance can no longer be used as an excuse for Hollywood's irresponsible depiction of First Nations peoples' culture, traditions, elders, religious beliefs, and sacred objects.

[more]

front cover of Indian Tales of North America
Indian Tales of North America
An Anthology for the Adult Reader
Edited by Tristam P. Coffin
University of Texas Press, 1961
This collection of folktales, originally published in 1961, presents stories from a wide range of North American indigenous peoples. The stories are grouped into three categories: “The Way the World Is,” “What Man Must Know and Learn,” and “The Excitement of Living.”
[more]

front cover of Indian Voices
Indian Voices
Listening to Native Americans
Owings, Alison
Rutgers University Press, 2012

In Indian Voices, Alison Owings takes readers on a fresh journey across America, east to west, north to south, and around again. Owings's most recent oral history—engagingly written in a style that entertains and informs—documents what Native Americans say about themselves, their daily lives, and the world around them.

Young and old from many tribal nations speak with candor, insight, and (unknown to many non-Natives) humor about what it is like to be a Native American in the twenty-first century. Through intimate interviews many also express their thoughts about the sometimes staggeringly ignorant, if often well-meaning, non-Natives they encounter—some who do not realize Native Americans still exist, much less that they speak English, have cell phones, use the Internet, and might attend powwows and power lunches.

Indian Voices, an inspiring and important contribution to the literature about the original Americans, will make every reader rethink the past—and present—of the United States.

[more]

front cover of Indian Water in the New West
Indian Water in the New West
Thomas R. McGuire
University of Arizona Press, 1993
Brings together the views of engineers, lawyers, ecologists, economists, professional mediators, federal officials, an anthropologist, and a Native American tribal leader--all either students of these processes or protagonists in them--to discuss how the legitimate claims of both Indians and non-Indians to scarce water in the West are being settled.
[more]

front cover of Indians and Anthropologists
Indians and Anthropologists
Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Critique of Anthropology
Thomas Biolsi
University of Arizona Press, 1997
In 1969 Vine Deloria, Jr., in his controversial book Custer Died for Your Sins, criticized the anthropological community for its impersonal dissection of living Native American cultures. Twenty-five years later, anthropologists have become more sensitive to Native American concerns, and Indian people have become more active in fighting for accurate representations of their cultures. In this collection of essays, Indian and non-Indian scholars examine how the relationship between anthropology and Indians has changed over that quarter-century and show how controversial this issue remains. Practitioners of cultural anthropology, archaeology, education, and history provide multiple lenses through which to view how Deloria's message has been interpreted or misinterpreted. Among the contributions are comments on Deloria's criticisms, thoughts on the reburial issue, and views on the ethnographic study of specific peoples. A final contribution by Deloria himself puts the issue of anthropologist/Indian interaction in the context of the century's end.

CONTENTS
Introduction: What's Changed, What Hasn't, Thomas Biolsi & Larry J. Zimmerman
Part One--Deloria Writes Back
Vine Deloria, Jr., in American Historiography, Herbert T. Hoover
Growing Up on Deloria: The Impact of His Work on a New Generation of Anthropologists, Elizabeth S. Grobsmith
Educating an Anthro: The Influence of Vine Deloria, Jr., Murray L. Wax
Part Two--Archaeology and American Indians
Why Have Archaeologists Thought That the Real Indians Were Dead and What Can We Do about It?, Randall H. McGuire
Anthropology and Responses to the Reburial Issue, Larry J. Zimmerman
Part Three-Ethnography and Colonialism
Here Come the Anthros, Cecil King
Beyond Ethics: Science, Friendship and Privacy, Marilyn Bentz
The Anthropological Construction of Indians: Haviland Scudder Mekeel and the Search for the Primitive in Lakota Country, Thomas Biolsi
Informant as Critic: Conducting Research on a Dispute between Iroquoianist Scholars and Traditional Iroquois, Gail Landsman
The End of Anthropology (at Hopi)?, Peter Whiteley
Conclusion: Anthros, Indians and Planetary Reality, Vine Deloria, Jr.
[more]

front cover of Indians and Archaeology of Missouri, Revised Edition
Indians and Archaeology of Missouri, Revised Edition
Carl H. Chapman & Eleanor F. Chapman
University of Missouri Press, 1983

This expanded edition of Indians and Archaeology of Missouri gives an excellent introduction to the cultural development of Missouri’s Indians during the past twelve thousand years. Providing a new chapter on the Hunter Foragers of the Dalton period and substantial revision of other chapters to incorporate recent discoveries, the Chapmans present knowledge based upon decades of experience with archaeological excavations in an understandable and fascinating form.

The first edition of Indians and Archaeology of Missouri has been recognized in Missouri and nationally as one of the best books of its kind. The Missouri Historical Review called it “simply indispensable.” The Plains Anthropologist added similar praise: “Clearly written and exceptionally well illustrated…it is the answer to the amateur’s prayers.” Archaeology described it as “a boon to Missouri’s many amateur archaeologists, a useful source of information for professionals and interesting reading for the layman.”

[more]

front cover of Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador's Modern Indigenous Movements
Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador's Modern Indigenous Movements
Marc Becker
Duke University Press, 2008
In June 1990, Indigenous peoples shocked Ecuadorian elites with a powerful uprising that paralyzed the country for a week. Militants insisted that the government address Indigenous demands for land ownership, education, and economic development. This uprising was a milestone in the history of Ecuador’s social justice movements, and it inspired popular organizing efforts across Latin America. While the insurrection seemed to come out of nowhere, Marc Becker demonstrates that it emerged out of years of organizing and developing strategies to advance Indigenous rights. In this richly documented account, he chronicles a long history of Indigenous political activism in Ecuador, from the creation of the first local agricultural syndicates in the 1920s through the galvanizing protests of 1990. In so doing, he reveals the central role of women in Indigenous movements and the history of productive collaborations between rural Indigenous activists and urban leftist intellectuals.

Becker explains how rural laborers and urban activists worked together in Ecuador, merging ethnic and class-based struggles for social justice. Socialists were often the first to defend Indigenous languages, cultures, and social organizations. They introduced rural activists to new tactics, including demonstrations and strikes. Drawing on leftist influences, Indigenous peoples became adept at reacting to immediate, local forms of exploitation while at the same time addressing broader underlying structural inequities. Through an examination of strike activity in the 1930s, the establishment of a national-level Ecuadorian Federation of Indians in 1944, and agitation for agrarian reform in the 1960s, Becker shows that the history of Indigenous mobilizations in Ecuador is longer and deeper than many contemporary observers have recognized.

[more]

front cover of Indians at Hampton Institute, 1877-1923
Indians at Hampton Institute, 1877-1923
Donal F. Lindsey
University of Illinois Press, 1995
"For students of race and culture, this book contains vital information and analysis on the origins
of a multicultural society. . . . Lindsey shows the complicated way that one black institution,
while still under white control, devised to manage the education and socialization of African and
Native American students, not for their needs but in the interests of the broader Anglo-American
society." -- American Historical Review
 
[more]

front cover of Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest
Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest
Robert Boyd
Oregon State University Press, 2011
This publication is supported by a generous grant from the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde through their Cultural Resources Publication Sponsorship Program

Instead of discovering a land blanketed by dense forests, early explorers of the Pacific Northwest encountered a varied landscape including open woods, meadows, and prairies. Far from a pristine wilderness, much of the Northwest was actively managed and shaped by the hands of its Native American inhabitants. Their primary tool was fire.

This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to one of the most important issues concerning Native Americans and their relationship to the land. Over more than 10,000 years, Native Americans in the Northwest learned the intricacies of their local environments and how to use fire to create desired effects, mostly in the quest for food.

Drawing on historical journals, Native American informants, and ethnobotanical and forestry studies, this book’s contributors describe local patterns of fire use in eight ecoregions, representing all parts of the Native Northwest, from southwest Oregon to British Columbia and from Puget Sound to the Northern Rockies. Their essays provide glimpses into a unique understanding of the environment, one that draws on traditional ecological knowledge. Together, these writings also offer historical perspective on the contemporary debate over “prescribed burning” and management of public lands.

This updated edition includes a foreword by Frank K. Lake and a new epilogue by editor Robert T. Boyd. Contributors include Stephen Arno, Stephen Barrett, Theresa Ferguson, David French, Eugene Hunn, Leslie Johnson, Jeff LaLande, Estella Leopold, Henry Lewis, Helen H. Norton, Reg Pullen, William Robbins, John Ross, Nancy Turner, and Richard White.
 
[more]

front cover of Indians Illustrated
Indians Illustrated
The Image of Native Americans in the Pictorial Press
John M Coward
University of Illinois Press, 2016
After 1850, Americans swarmed to take in a raft of new illustrated journals and papers. Engravings and drawings of "buckskinned braves" and "Indian princesses" proved an immensely popular attraction for consumers of publications like Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly . In Indians Illustrated , John M. Coward charts a social and cultural history of Native American illustrations--romantic, violent, racist, peaceful, and otherwise--in the heyday of the American pictorial press. These woodblock engravings and ink drawings placed Native Americans into categories that drew from venerable "good" Indian and "bad" Indian stereotypes already threaded through the culture. Coward's examples show how the genre cemented white ideas about how Indians should look and behave--ideas that diminished Native Americans' cultural values and political influence. His powerful analysis of themes and visual tropes unlocks the racial codes and visual cues that whites used to represent--and marginalize--native cultures already engaged in a twilight struggle against inexorable westward expansion.
[more]

front cover of Indians in the Family
Indians in the Family
Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion
Dawn Peterson
Harvard University Press, 2017

During his invasion of Creek Indian territory in 1813, future U.S. president Andrew Jackson discovered a Creek infant orphaned by his troops. Moved by an “unusual sympathy,” Jackson sent the child to be adopted into his Tennessee plantation household. Through the stories of nearly a dozen white adopters, adopted Indian children, and their Native parents, Dawn Peterson opens a window onto the forgotten history of adoption in early nineteenth-century America. Indians in the Family shows the important role that adoption played in efforts to subdue Native peoples in the name of nation-building.

As the United States aggressively expanded into Indian territories between 1790 and 1830, government officials stressed the importance of assimilating Native peoples into what they styled the United States’ “national family.” White households who adopted Indians—especially slaveholding Southern planters influenced by leaders such as Jackson—saw themselves as part of this expansionist project. They hoped to inculcate in their young charges U.S. attitudes toward private property, patriarchal family, and racial hierarchy.

U.S. whites were not the only ones driving this process. Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw families sought to place their sons in white households, to be educated in the ways of U.S. governance and political economy. But there were unintended consequences for all concerned. As adults, these adopted Indians used their educations to thwart U.S. federal claims to their homelands, setting the stage for the political struggles that would culminate in the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

[more]

front cover of The Indians of Hungry Hollow
The Indians of Hungry Hollow
Bill Dunlop, Ottawa, and Marcia Fountain-Blacklidge, Chippewa
University of Michigan Press, 2004

Michael Blake's Dances with Wolves transformed denigrating Indian sterotypes and created widespread interest in Native American culture. The subsequent popularity of books on this topic underscores the power of a tale well told. While Blake's story relates the early chapters of Native Americans' survival struggles, later accounts of this struggle remain untold.
The Indians of Hungry Hollow authentically presents these later chapters. The days of Hungry Hollow have long passed, but the opportunity to capture its lessons of community, strong values, and an urge to thrive in matters of the heart and soul are still very much with us.
These are stories of survival, community, sharing, and caring. The situations are often dire: winter in the middle of the Depression; an Indian settlement illegally taken from its inhabitants and set on fire; boaters stranded by bad weather and threatened with death. But if the situations are extreme, the telling of the stories is consistently optimistic yet completely without self-pity or sentimentality, and the characters always find a way through the darkness.
Dunlop's unique style of storytelling is compelling and informative, and these historically significant stories help to elucidate the transition of the American Indian culture from post-tribal days to the present.
Bill Dunlop is a respected Ottawa elder and storyteller. Marcia Fountain-Blacklidge is a professional writer, counselor, and consultant.
[more]

front cover of The Indians of Texas
The Indians of Texas
From Prehistoric to Modern Times
By William W. Newcomb, Jr.
University of Texas Press, 1961
A classic work on the indigenous peoples of Texas.
[more]

front cover of Indians of the Rio Grande Delta
Indians of the Rio Grande Delta
Their Role in the History of Southern Texas and Northeastern Mexico
By Martín Salinas
University of Texas Press, 1990

Indians of the Rio Grande Delta is the first single-volume source on these little-known peoples. Working from innumerable primary documents in various Texan and Mexican archives, Martin Salinas has compiled data on more than six dozen named groups that inhabited the area in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Depending on available information, he reconstructs something of their history, geographical range and migrations, demography, language, and culture. He also offers general information on various unnamed groups of Indians, on the lifeways of the indigenous peoples, and on the relations between the Indian groups and the colonial Spanish missions in the region.

[more]

logo for University of Michigan Press
The Indians of the Western Great Lakes, 1615-1760
W. Vernon Kinietz
University of Michigan Press, 1965
The stories of the Huron, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Chippewa tribes in the years before contact with European settlers
[more]

front cover of Indians Playing Indian
Indians Playing Indian
Multiculturalism and Contemporary Indigenous Art in North America
Monika Siebert
University of Alabama Press, 2015
Explores how American Indian artists have responded to the pervasive misunderstanding of indigenous peoples as cultural minorities in the United States and Canada

Contemporary indigenous peoples in North America confront a unique predicament. While they are reclaiming their historic status as sovereign nations, mainstream popular culture continues to depict them as cultural minorities similar to other ethnic Americans. These depictions of indigenous peoples as “Native Americans” complete the broader narrative of America as a refuge to the world’s immigrants and a home to contemporary multicultural democracies, such as the United States and Canada. But they fundamentally misrepresent indigenous peoples, whose American history has been not of immigration but of colonization.
 
Monika Siebert’s Indians Playing Indian first identifies this phenomenon as multicultural misrecognition, explains its sources in North American colonial history and in the political mandates of multiculturalism, and describes its consequences for contemporary indigenous cultural production. It then explores the responses of indigenous artists who take advantage of the ongoing popular interest in Native American culture and art while offering narratives of the political histories of their nations in order to resist multicultural incorporation.
 
Each chapter of Indians Playing Indian showcases a different medium of contemporary indigenous art—museum exhibition, cinema, digital fine art, sculpture, multimedia installation, and literary fiction—and explores specific rhetorical strategies artists deploy to forestall multicultural misrecognition and recover political meanings of indigeneity. The sites and artists discussed include the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC; filmmakers at Inuit Isuma Productions; digital artists/photographers Dugan Aguilar, Pamela Shields, and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie; sculptor Jimmie Durham; and novelist LeAnne Howe.
[more]

front cover of Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América
Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América
Rodolfo Kusch
Duke University Press, 2010
Originally published in Mexico in 1970, Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América is the first book by the Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch (1922–79) to be translated into English. At its core is a binary created by colonization and the devaluation of indigenous practices and cosmologies: an opposition between the technologies and rationalities of European modernity and the popular mode of thinking, which is deeply tied to Indian ways of knowing and being. Arguing that this binary cuts through América, Kusch seeks to identify and recover the indigenous and popular way of thinking, which he contends is dismissed or misunderstood by many urban Argentines, including leftist intellectuals.

Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América is a record of Kusch's attempt to immerse himself in the indigenous ways of knowing and being. At first glance, his methodology resembles ethnography. He speaks with and observes indigenous people and mestizos in Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. He questions them about their agricultural practices and economic decisions; he observes rituals; he asks women in the market the meaning of indigenous talismans; he interviews shamans; he describes the spatial arrangement and the contents of shrines, altars, and temples; and he reproduces diagrams of archaeological sites, which he then interprets at length. Yet he does not present a "them" to a putative "us." Instead, he offers an inroad to a way of thinking and being that does not follow the logic or fit into the categories of Western social science and philosophy. In his introduction, Walter D. Mignolo discusses Kusch's work and its relation to that of other twentieth-century intellectuals, Argentine history, and contemporary scholarship on the subaltern and decoloniality.

[more]

front cover of Indigenous Archaeology in the Philippines
Indigenous Archaeology in the Philippines
Decolonizing Ifugao History
Stephen B. Acabado and Marlon M. Martin
University of Arizona Press, 2022
Dominant historical narratives among cultures with long and enduring colonial experiences often ignore Indigenous histories. This erasure is a response to the colonial experiences. With diverse cultures like those in the Philippines, dominant groups may become assimilationists themselves. Collaborative archaeology is an important tool in correcting the historical record. In the northern Philippines, archaeological investigations in Ifugao have established more recent origins of the Cordillera Rice Terraces, which were once understood to be at least two thousand years old. This new research not only sheds light on this UNESCO World Heritage site but also illuminates how collaboration with Indigenous communities is critical to understanding their history and heritage.

Indigenous Archaeology in the Philippines highlights how collaborative archaeology and knowledge co-production among the Ifugao, an Indigenous group in the Philippines, contested (and continue to contest) enduring colonial tropes. Stephen B. Acabado and Marlon M. Martin explain how the Ifugao made decisions that benefited them, including formulating strategies by which they took part in the colonial enterprise, exploiting the colonial economic opportunities to strengthen their sociopolitical organization, and co-opting the new economic system. The archaeological record shows that the Ifugao successfully resisted the Spanish conquest and later accommodated American empire building.

This book illustrates how descendant communities can take control of their history and heritage through active collaboration with archaeologists. Drawing on the Philippine Cordilleran experiences, the authors demonstrate how changing historical narratives help empower peoples who are traditionally ignored in national histories.
 
[more]

front cover of Indigenous Archival Activism
Indigenous Archival Activism
Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory
Rose Miron
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

Who has the right to represent Native history?
 

The past several decades have seen a massive shift in debates over who owns and has the right to tell Native American history and stories. For centuries, non-Native actors have collected, stolen, sequestered, and gained value from Native stories and documents, human remains, and sacred objects. However, thanks to the work of Native activists, Native history is now increasingly being repatriated back to the control of tribes and communities. Indigenous Archival Activism takes readers into the heart of these debates by tracing one tribe’s fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite their history.

 

Rose Miron tells the story of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and their Historical Committee, a group of mostly Mohican women who have been collecting and reorganizing historical materials since 1968. She shows how their work is exemplary of how tribal archives can be used strategically to shift how Native history is accessed, represented, written and, most importantly, controlled. Based on a more than decade-long reciprocal relationship with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation, Miron’s research and writing is shaped primarily by materials found in the tribal archive and ongoing conversations and input from the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee.

 

As a non-Mohican, Miron is careful to consider her own positionality and reflects on what it means for non-Native researchers and institutions to build reciprocal relationships with Indigenous nations in the context of academia and public history, offering a model both for tribes undertaking their own reclamation projects and for scholars looking to work with tribes in ethical ways.

[more]

front cover of Indigenous Dance and Dancing Indian
Indigenous Dance and Dancing Indian
Contested Representation in the Global Era
Matthew Krystal
University Press of Colorado, 2020
Focusing on the enactment of identity in dance, Indigenous Dance and Dancing Indian is a cross-cultural, cross-ethnic, and cross-national comparison of indigenous dance practices.

Considering four genres of dance in which indigenous people are represented--K'iche Maya traditional dance, powwow, folkloric dance, and dancing sports mascots--the book addresses both the ideational and behavioral dimensions of identity. Each dance is examined as a unique cultural expression in individual chapters, and then all are compared in the conclusion, where striking parallels and important divergences are revealed. Ultimately, Krystal describes how dancers and audiences work to construct and consume satisfying and meaningful identities through dance by either challenging social inequality or reinforcing the present social order.

Detailed ethnographic work, thorough case studies, and an insightful narrative voice make Indigenous Dance and Dancing Indian a substantial addition to scholarly literature on dance in the Americas. It will be of interest to scholars of Native American studies, social sciences, and performing arts.

[more]

front cover of Indigenous Dispossession, Anti-Immigration, and the Public Pedagogy of US Empire
Indigenous Dispossession, Anti-Immigration, and the Public Pedagogy of US Empire
Leah Perry
The Ohio State University Press, 2024

From the founding of the United States, enduringly consequential debates over Indigeneity and immigration have occurred on the battlefield and in Congress, in courtrooms, at territorial borders, and in mainstream culture. In Indigenous Dispossession, Anti-Immigration, and the Public Pedagogy of US Empire, Leah Perry traces the ways that the US created its empire through public pedagogies—which she defines as policy and media discourses—surrounding Indigenous dispossession, gendered state violence, and racialized immigration. These pedagogies have propelled the expansion of US empire, including the redrawing of the US as a neoliberal democracy. Perry argues that by changing the discourse around gender, race, immigration, and Indigeneity, the United States has continued its imperial project through different eras, always predicated on Indigenous dispossession.

In exploring crucial components of empire, such as welfare, eugenics, disability, sexual violence, foodways, queerness, and policing, Perry interrogates violence against Indigenous peoples and against immigrants, examining these not independently—as is so often the case—but as co-constitutive. Indigenous Dispossession, Anti-Immigration, and the Public Pedagogy of US Empire thus intervenes in and fills a gap in immigration studies, Indigenous studies, race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and US history.

[more]

front cover of Indigenous Economics
Indigenous Economics
Sustaining Peoples and Their Lands
Ronald L. Trosper
University of Arizona Press, 2022

What does “development” mean for Indigenous peoples? Indigenous Economics lays out an alternative path showing that conscious attention to relationships among humans and the natural world creates flourishing social-ecological economies.

Economist Ronald L. Trosper draws on examples from North and South America, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia to argue that Indigenous worldviews centering care and good relationships provide critical and sustainable economic models in a world under increasing pressure from biodiversity loss and climate change. He explains the structure of relational Indigenous economic theory, providing principles based on his own and others’ work with tribal nations and Indigenous communities. Trosper explains how sustainability is created at every level when relational Indigenous economic theory is applied—micro, meso, and macro.

Good relationships support personal and community autonomy, replacing the individualism/collectivism dichotomy with relational leadership and entrepreneurship. Basing economies on relationships requires changing governance from the top-down approaches of nation-states and international corporations; instead, each community creates its own territorial relationships, creating plurinational relational states. This book offers an important alternative to classic economic theory. In Indigenous Economics, support for Indigenous communities’ development and Indigenous peoples’ well-being go hand-in-hand.

Publication of this book is made possible in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Program in Public Understanding of Science.

[more]

front cover of Indigenous Environmental Justice
Indigenous Environmental Justice
Edited by Karen Jarratt-Snider and Marianne O. Nielsen
University of Arizona Press, 2020
This volume clearly distinguishes Indigenous environmental justice (IEJ) from the broader idea of environmental justice (EJ) while offering detailed examples from recent history of environmental injustices that have occurred in Indian Country. With connections to traditional homelands being at the heart of Native identity, environmental justice is of heightened importance to Indigenous communities. Not only do irresponsible and exploitative environmental policies harm the physical and financial health of Indigenous communities, they also cause spiritual harm by destroying land held in a place of exceptional reverence for Indigenous peoples.

With focused essays on important topics such as the uranium mining on Navajo and Hopi lands, the Dakota Access Pipeline dispute on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, environmental cleanup efforts in Alaska, and many other pertinent examples, this volume offers a timely view of the environmental devastation that occurs in Indian Country. It also serves to emphasize the importance of self-determination and sovereignty in victories of Indigenous environmental justice.

The book explores the ongoing effects of colonization and emphasizes Native American tribes as governments rather than ethnic minorities. Combining elements of legal issues, human rights issues, and sovereignty issues, Indigenous Environmental Justice creates a clear example of community resilience in the face of corporate greed and state indifference.
 
[more]

front cover of Indigenous Intellectuals
Indigenous Intellectuals
Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes
Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
Via military conquest, Catholic evangelization, and intercultural engagement and struggle, a vast array of knowledge circulated through the Spanish viceroyalties in Mexico and the Andes. This collection highlights the critical role that indigenous intellectuals played in this cultural ferment. Scholars of history, anthropology, literature, and art history reveal new facets of the colonial experience by emphasizing the wide range of indigenous individuals who used knowledge to subvert, undermine, critique, and sometimes enhance colonial power. Seeking to understand the political, social, and cultural impact of indigenous intellectuals, the contributors examine both ideological and practical forms of knowledge. Their understanding of "intellectual" encompasses the creators of written texts and visual representations, functionaries and bureaucrats who interacted with colonial agents and institutions, and organic intellectuals.

Contributors. Elizabeth Hill Boone, Kathryn Burns, John Charles, Alan Durston, María Elena Martínez, Tristan Platt, Gabriela Ramos, Susan Schroeder, John F. Schwaller, Camilla Townsend, Eleanor Wake, Yanna Yannakakis
 
[more]

front cover of Indigenous Kinship, Colonial Texts, and the Contested Space of Early New England
Indigenous Kinship, Colonial Texts, and the Contested Space of Early New England
Marie Balsley Taylor
University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

New England history often treats Indigenous people as minor or secondary actors within the larger colonial story. Focusing on those Native Americans who were sachems, or leaders, in local tribes when Europeans began arriving, Marie Balsley Taylor reframes stories of Indigenous and British interactions and illuminates the vital role that Indigenous kinship and diplomacy played in shaping the textual production of English colonial settlers in New England from the 1630s until King Philip’s War.

Taylor argues that genres like the conversion narrative, the post-sermon question and answer session, and scientific treatise—despite being written in English for European audiences—were jointly created by Indigenous sachems and settlers to facilitate interaction within the contested space of colonial New England. Analyzing the writings of Thomas Shepard, John Eliot, John Winthrop Jr., and Daniel Gookin and the relationships these English Protestants formed with Indigenous leaders like Wequash, Cutshamekin, Cassacinamon, and Waban, this innovative study offers a new approach to early American literature—indicating that Native thought and culture played a profound role in shaping the words and deeds of colonial writers.

[more]

front cover of Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America
Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America
David M. Gordon
Ohio University Press, 2012

Indigenous knowledge has become a catchphrase in global struggles for environmental justice. Yet indigenous knowledges are often viewed, incorrectly, as pure and primordial cultural artifacts. This collection draws from African and North American cases to argue that the forms of knowledge identified as “indigenous” resulted from strategies to control environmental resources during and after colonial encounters.

At times indigenous knowledges represented a “middle ground” of intellectual exchanges between colonizers and colonized; elsewhere, indigenous knowledges were defined through conflict and struggle. The authors demonstrate how people claimed that their hybrid forms of knowledge were communal, religious, and traditional, as opposed to individualist, secular, and scientific, which they associated with European colonialism.

Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment offers comparative and transnational insights that disturb romantic views of unchanging indigenous knowledges in harmony with the environment. The result is a book that informs and complicates how indigenous knowledges can and should relate to environmental policy-making.

Contributors: David Bernstein, Derick Fay, Andrew H. Fisher, Karen Flint, David M. Gordon, Paul Kelton, Shepard Krech III, Joshua Reid, Parker Shipton, Lance van Sittert, Jacob Tropp, James L. A. Webb, Jr., Marsha Weisiger

[more]

front cover of Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions
Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions
New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory
Edited by Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider
University of Arizona Press, 2014
Spanish missions in North America were once viewed as confining and stagnant communities, with native peoples on the margins of the colonial enterprise. Recent archaeological and ethnohistorical research challenges that notion. Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions considers how native peoples actively incorporated the mission system into their own dynamic existence. The book, written by diverse scholars and edited by Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider, covers missions in the Spanish borderlands from California to Texas to Georgia.

Offering thoughtful arguments and innovative perspectives, the editors organized the book around three interrelated themes. The first section explores power, politics, and belief, recognizing that Spanish missions were established within indigenous landscapes with preexisting tensions, alliances, and belief systems. The second part, addressing missions from the perspective of indigenous inhabitants, focuses on their social, economic, and historical connections to the surrounding landscapes. The final section considers the varied connections between mission communities and the world beyond the mission walls, including examinations of how mission neophytes, missionaries, and colonial elites vied for land and natural resources.

Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions offers a holistic view on the consequences of missionization and the active negotiation of missions by indigenous peoples, revealing cross-cutting perspectives into the complex and contested histories of the Spanish borderlands. This volume challenges readers to examine deeply the ways in which native peoples negotiated colonialism not just inside the missions themselves but also within broader indigenous landscapes. This book will be of interest to archaeologists, historians, tribal scholars, and anyone interested in indigenous encounters with colonial institutions.
[more]

front cover of Indigenous Motherhood in the Academy
Indigenous Motherhood in the Academy
Robin Zape-tah-hol-ah Minthorn
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Indigenous Motherhood in the Academy highlights the experiences and narratives emerging from Indigenous mothers in the academy who are negotiating their roles in multiple contexts. The essays in this volume contribute to the broader higher education literature and the literature on Indigenous representation in the academy, filling a longtime gap that has excluded Indigenous women scholar voices. This book covers diverse topics such as the journey to motherhood, lessons through motherhood, acknowledging ancestors and grandparents in one’s mothering, how historical trauma and violence plague the past, and balancing mothering through the healing process. More specific to Indigenous motherhood in the academy is how culture and place impacts mothering (specifically, if Indigenous mothers are not in their traditional homelands as they raise their children), how academia impacts mothering, how mothering impacts scholarship, and how to negotiate loss and other complexities between motherhood and one’s role in the academy.
[more]

front cover of Indigenous Peoples, National Parks, and Protected Areas
Indigenous Peoples, National Parks, and Protected Areas
A New Paradigm Linking Conservation, Culture, and Rights
Edited by Stan Stevens
University of Arizona Press, 2014
A vast number of national parks and protected areas throughout the world have been established in the customary territories of Indigenous peoples. In many cases these conservation areas have displaced Indigenous peoples, undermining their cultures, livelihoods, and self-governance, while squandering opportunities to benefit from their knowledge, values, and practices. This book makes the case for a paradigm shift in conservation from exclusionary, uninhabited national parks and wilderness areas to new kinds of protected areas that recognize Indigenous peoples’ conservation contributions and rights. It documents the beginnings of such a paradigm shift and issues a clarion call for transforming conservation in ways that could enhance the effectiveness of protected areas and benefit Indigenous peoples in and near tens of thousands of protected areas worldwide.
 
Indigenous Peoples, National Parks, and Protected Areas integrates wide-ranging, multidisciplinary intellectual perspectives with detailed analyses of new kinds of protected areas in diverse parts of the world. Eleven geographers and anthropologists contribute nine substantive fieldwork-based case studies. Their contributions offer insights into experience with new conservation approaches in an array of countries, including Australia, Canada, Guatemala, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Peru, South Africa, and the United States.
 
This book breaks new ground with its in-depth exploration of changes in conservation policies and practices—and their profound ramifications for Indigenous peoples, protected areas, and social reconciliation.
[more]

front cover of Indigenous Textual Cultures
Indigenous Textual Cultures
Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire
Tony Ballantyne, Lachy Paterson, and Angela Wanhalla, editors
Duke University Press, 2020
As modern European empires expanded, written language was critical to articulations of imperial authority and justifications of conquest. For imperial administrators and thinkers, the non-literacy of “native” societies demonstrated their primitiveness and inability to change. Yet as the contributors to Indigenous Textual Cultures make clear through cases from the Pacific Islands, Australasia, North America, and Africa, indigenous communities were highly adaptive and created novel, dynamic literary practices that preserved indigenous knowledge traditions. The contributors illustrate how modern literacy operated alongside orality rather than replacing it. Reconstructing multiple traditions of indigenous literacy and textual production, the contributors focus attention on the often hidden, forgotten, neglected, and marginalized cultural innovators who read, wrote, and used texts in endlessly creative ways. This volume demonstrates how the work of these innovators played pivotal roles in reimagining indigenous epistemologies, challenging colonial domination, and envisioning radical new futures.

Contributors. Noelani Arista, Tony Ballantyne, Alban Bensa, Keith Thor Carlson, Evelyn Ellerman, Isabel Hofmeyr, Emma Hunter, Arini Loader, Adrian Muckle, Lachy Paterson, Laura Rademaker, Michael P. J. Reilly, Bruno Saura, Ivy T. Schweitzer, Angela Wanhalla
[more]

front cover of Indigenous Women and Work
Indigenous Women and Work
From Labor to Activism
Edited by Carol Williams
University of Illinois Press, 2012
The essays in Indigenous Women and Work create a transnational and comparative dialogue on the history of the productive and reproductive lives and circumstances of Indigenous women from the late nineteenth century to the present in the United States, Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa, and Canada. Surveying the spectrum of Indigenous women's lives and circumstances as workers, both waged and unwaged, the contributors offer varied perspectives on the ways women's work has contributed to the survival of communities in the face of ongoing tensions between assimilation and colonization. They also interpret how individual nations have conceived of Indigenous women as workers and, in turn, convert these assumptions and definitions into policy and practice. The essays address the intersection of Indigenous, women's, and labor history, but will also be useful to contemporary policy makers, tribal activists, and Native American women's advocacy associations.
 
Contributors are Tracey Banivanua Mar, Marlene Brant Castellano, Cathleen D. Cahill, Brenda J. Child, Sherry Farrell Racette, Chris Friday, Aroha Harris, Faye HeavyShield, Heather A. Howard, Margaret D. Jacobs, Alice Littlefield, Cybèle Locke, Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Kathy M'Closkey, Colleen O'Neill, Beth H. Piatote, Susan Roy, Lynette Russell, Joan Sangster, Ruth Taylor, and Carol Williams.

[more]

front cover of Individuality Incorporated
Individuality Incorporated
Indians and the Multicultural Modern
Joel Pfister
Duke University Press, 2004
Spanning the 1870s to the present, Individuality Incorporated demonstrates how crucial a knowledge of Native American-White history is to rethinking key issues in American studies, cultural studies, and the history of subjectivity. Joel Pfister proposes an ingenious critical and historical reinterpretation of constructions of “Indians” and “individuals.” Native Americans have long contemplated the irony that the government used its schools to coerce children from diverse tribes to view themselves first as “Indians”—encoded as the evolutionary problem—and then as “individuals”—defined as the civilized industrial solution. As Luther Standing Bear, Charles Eastman, and Black Elk attest, tribal cultures had their own complex ways of imagining, enhancing, motivating, and performing the self that did not conform to federal blueprints labeled “individuality.” Enlarging the scope of this history of “individuality,” Pfister elaborates the implications of state, corporate, and aesthetic experiments that moved beyond the tactics of an older melting pot hegemony to impose a modern protomulticultural rule on Natives. The argument focuses on the famous Carlisle Indian School; assimilationist novels; Native literature and cultural critique from Zitkala-Sa to Leslie Marmon Silko; Taos and Santa Fe bohemians (Mabel Dodge Luhan, D. H. Lawrence, Mary Austin); multicultural modernisms (Fred Kabotie, Oliver La Farge, John Sloan, D’Arcy McNickle); the Southwestern tourism industry’s development of corporate multiculturalism; the diversity management schemes that John Collier implemented as head of the Indian New Deal; and early formulations of ethnic studies. Pfister’s unique analysis moves from Gilded Age incorporations of individuality to postmodern incorporations of multicultural reworkings of individuality to unpack what is at stake in producing subjectivity in World America.
[more]

front cover of Inheriting the Past
Inheriting the Past
The Making of Arthur C. Parker and Indigenous Archaeology
Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh
University of Arizona Press, 2009
In recent years, archaeologists and Native American communities have struggled to find common ground even though more than a century ago a man of Seneca descent raised on New York’s Cattaraugus Reservation, Arthur C. Parker, joined the ranks of professional archaeology. Until now, Parker’s life and legacy as the first Native American archaeologist have been neither closely studied nor widely recognized. At a time when heated debates about the control of Native American heritage have come to dominate archaeology, Parker’s experiences form a singular lens to view the field’s tangled history and current predicaments with Indigenous peoples.

In Inheriting the Past, Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh examines Parker’s winding career path and asks why it has taken generations for Native peoples to follow in his footsteps. Closely tracing Parker’s life through extensive archival research, Colwell-Chanthaphonh explores how Parker crafted a professional identity and negotiated dilemmas arising from questions of privilege, ownership, authorship, and public participation. How Parker, as well as the discipline more broadly, chose to address the conflict between Native American rights and the pursuit of scientific discovery ultimately helped form archaeology’s moral community.

Parker’s rise in archaeology just as the field was taking shape demonstrates that Native Americans could have found a place in the scholarly pursuit of the past years ago and altered its trajectory. Instead, it has taken more than a century to articulate the promise of an Indigenous archaeology—an archaeological practice carried out by, for, and with Native peoples. As the current generation of researchers explores new possibilities of inclusiveness, Parker’s struggles and successes serve as a singular reference point to reflect on archaeology’s history and its future.
[more]

front cover of Injun Joe's Ghost
Injun Joe's Ghost
The Indian Mixed-Blood in American Writing
Harry J. Brown
University of Missouri Press, 2004
What does it mean to be a “mixed-blood,” and how has our understanding of this term changed over the last two centuries? What processes have shaped American thinking on racial blending? Why has the figure of the mixed-blood, thought too offensive for polite conversation in the nineteenth century, become a major representative of twentieth-century native consciousness?

In Injun Joe’s Ghost, Harry J. Brown addresses these questions within the interrelated contexts of anthropology, U.S. Indian policy, and popular fiction by white and mixed-blood writers, mapping the evolution of “hybridity” from a biological to a cultural category. Brown traces the processes that once mandated the mixed-blood’s exile as a grotesque or criminal outcast and that have recently brought about his ascendance as a cultural hero in contemporary Native American writing.

Because the myth of the demise of the Indian and the ascendance of the Anglo-Saxon is traditionally tied to America’s national idea, nationalist literature depicts Indian-white hybrids in images of degeneracy, atavism, madness, and even criminality. A competing tradition of popular writing, however, often created by mixed-blood writers themselves, contests these images of the outcast half-breed by envisioning “hybrid vigor,” both biologically and linguistically, as a model for a culturally heterogeneous nation.

Injun Joe’s Ghost focuses on a significant figure in American history and culture that has, until now, remained on the periphery of academic discourse. Brown offers an in-depth discussion of many texts, including dime novels and Depression-era magazine fiction, that have been almost entirely neglected by scholars. This volume also covers texts such as the historical romances of the 1820s and the novels of the twentieth-century “Native American Renaissance” from a fresh perspective. Investigating a broad range of genres and subject over two hundred year of American writing, Injun Joe’s Ghost will be useful to students and professionals in the fields of American literature, popular culture, and native studies.
[more]

front cover of Inside the Eagle's Head
Inside the Eagle's Head
An American Indian College
Angelle A. Khachadoorian
University of Alabama Press, 2010
 
The Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute (SIPI) is a selfdescribed National American Indian Community College in Albuquerque, New Mexico. SIPI is operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, an agency of the U.S. government that has overseen and managed the relationship between the government and American Indian tribes for almost two hundred years. Students at SIPI are registered members of federally recognized American Indian tribes from throughout the contiguous United States and Alaska.
A fascinatingly hybridized institution, SIPI attempts to meld two conflicting institutional models—a tribally controlled college or university and a Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Indian school—with their unique corporate cultures, rules, and philosophies. Students attempt to cope with the institution and successfully make their way through it by using (consciously or not) an array of metaphorical representations of the school. Students who used discourses of discipline and control compared SIPI to a BIA boarding school, a high school, or a prison, and focused on the school’s restrictive policies drawn from the BIA model. Those who used discourses of family and haven emphasized the emotional connection built between students and other members of the SIPI community following the TCU model. Speakers who used discourses of agency and selfreliance asserted that students can define their own experiences at SIPI. Through a series of interviews, this volume examines the ways in which students attempt to accommodate this variety of conflicts and presents an innovative and enlightening look into the contemporary state of American Indian educational institutions.
[more]

front cover of Inter/Nationalism
Inter/Nationalism
Decolonizing Native America and Palestine
Steven Salaita
University of Minnesota Press, 2016

“The age of transnational humanities has arrived.” According to Steven Salaita, the seemingly disparate fields of Palestinian Studses and American Indian studies have more in common than one may think. In Inter/Nationalism, Salaita argues that American Indian and Indigenous studies must be more central to the scholarship and activism focusing on Palestine. 

Salaita offers a fascinating inside account of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement—which, among other things, aims to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. In doing so, he emphasizes BDS’s significant potential as an organizing entity as well as its importance in the creation of intellectual and political communities that put Natives and other colonized peoples such as Palestinians into conversation. His discussion includes readings of a wide range of Native poetry that invokes Palestine as a theme or symbol; the speeches of U.S. President Andrew Jackson and early Zionist thinker Ze’ev Jabotinsky; and the discourses of “shared values” between the United States and Israel. 

Inter/Nationalism seeks to lay conceptual ground between American Indian and Indigenous studies and Palestinian studies through concepts of settler colonialism, indigeneity, and state violence. By establishing Palestine as an indigenous nation under colonial occupation, this book draws crucial connections between the scholarship and activism of Indigenous America and Palestine.

[more]

front cover of Intimate Indigeneities
Intimate Indigeneities
Race, Sex, and History in the Small Spaces of Andean Life
Andrew Canessa
Duke University Press, 2012
Drawing on extended ethnographic research conducted over the course of more than two decades, Andrew Canessa explores the multiple identities of a community of people in the Bolivian highlands through their own lived experiences and voices. He examines how gender, race, and ethnic identities manifest themselves in everyday interactions in the Aymara village. Canessa shows that indigeneity is highly contingent; thoroughly imbricated with gendered, racial, and linguistic identities; and informed by a historical consciousness. Addressing how whiteness and indianness are reproduced as hegemonic structures in the village, how masculinities develop as men go to the mines and army, and how memories of a violent past are used to construct a present sense of community, Canessa raises important questions about indigenous politics and the very nature of indigenous identity.
[more]

front cover of The Invasion
The Invasion
Janet Lewis
Michigan State University Press, 2000

The Invasion, a novel originally published in 1932, marked the debut of historical novelist Janet Lewis, who went on to write numerous poems and short stories as well as the novels The Wife of Martin Guerre and The Trial of Soren Quist. Lewis grew up in the Lake country of the Old Northwest and The Invasion is based on family stories she heard as a child.The Invasion displays well-researched historical accuracy, an innate understanding of and feeling for Native American culture enhanced by the author's fluency in the Ojibway language, and an economy of style that is remarkable for a first novel. 
     In 1790, John Johnston, a cultivated young Irishman, came to the far corner of the Northwest Territory to make his fortune intending to spend only a year. Instead he married Ozhah-guscoday- wayquay (The Woman of the Glade), daughter of the Ojibway chief Waub- ojeeg, and settled on the St. Mary's River. Together they founded a family that was loved, respected, and famous throughout the region for honesty, fairness, and hospitality. Their home was the center of culture for the area and for every visiting traveler, Native American or white. The Invasion chronicles a time when one culture violently supplanted another even as it depicts a family that blends two cultures together. 
     Henry Rowe Schoolcraft considered the Johnston family his most valued connection to the Native American population. He eventually married Jane Johnston, daughter of John and The Woman of the Glade, and remain close to her entire family. In his diary, Schoolcraft wrote of the Johnstons, "I have in fact stumbled, as it were, on the only family in Northwest America who could in Indian lore have acted as my guide, philosopher, and friend."

[more]

front cover of The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century
The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century
American Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources
Donald Fixico
University Press of Colorado, 1998
The struggle between Indians and whites for land did not end on the battlefields in the 1800s. When this hostile era closed with Native Americans forced onto reservations, no one expected that rich natural resources lay beneath these lands that white America would desperately desire. Yet oil, timber, fish, coal, water, and other resources were discovered to be in great demand in the mainstream market, and a new war began with Indian tribes and their leaders trying to protect their tribal natural resources throughout the twentieth century.

In The Invasion of Indian Country in the 20th Century, Donald Fixico details the course of this struggle, providing a wealth of information on the resources possessed by individual tribes and the way in which they were systematically defrauded and stripped of these resources. Fixico contends that federal policies originally devised to protect Indian interests ironically worked against the Indian nations as the tribes employed new tactics with the Council of Energy Resources Tribes, using the law in courts and applying aggressive business leadership to combat the capitalist invasion by mainstream America.

Fixico's analysis of this war being waged throughout the century and today serves as an indispensable reference tool for anyone interested in Native American history and current government policy with regard to Indian lands.

[more]

front cover of The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century
The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century
American Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources, Second Edition
Donald Fixico
University Press of Colorado, 2012
The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century, Second Edition is updated through the first decade of the twenty-first century and contains a new chapter challenging Americans--Indian and non-Indian--to begin healing the earth. This analysis of the struggle to protect not only natural resources but also a way of life serves as an indispensable tool for students or anyone interested in Native American history and current government policy with regard to Indian lands or the environment.
[more]

front cover of Inventing the Savage
Inventing the Savage
The Social Construction of Native American Criminality
By Luana Ross
University of Texas Press, 1998

Luana Ross writes, "Native Americans disappear into Euro-American institutions of confinement at alarming rates. People from my reservation appeared to simply vanish and magically return. [As a child] I did not realize what a 'real' prison was and did not give it any thought. I imagined this as normal; that all families had relatives who went away and then returned."

In this pathfinding study, Ross draws upon the life histories of imprisoned Native American women to demonstrate how race/ethnicity, gender, and class contribute to the criminalizing of various behaviors and subsequent incarceration rates. Drawing on the Native women's own words, she reveals the violence in their lives prior to incarceration, their respective responses to it, and how those responses affect their eventual criminalization and imprisonment. Comparisons with the experiences of white women in the same prison underline the significant role of race in determining women's experiences within the criminal justice system.

[more]

front cover of Invisible No More
Invisible No More
Voices from Native America
Edited by Raymond Foxworth and Steve Dubb
Island Press, 2023
For too long, Native American people in the United States have been stereotyped as vestiges of the past, invisible citizens in their own land obliged to remind others, “We are still here!” Yet today, Native leaders are at the center of social change, challenging philanthropic organizations that have historically excluded Native people, and fighting for economic and environmental justice.

Edited by Raymond Foxworth of First Nations Development Institute and Steve Dubb of The Nonprofit Quarterly, Invisible No More is a groundbreaking collection of stories by Native American leaders, many of them women, who are leading the way through cultural grounding and nation-building in the areas of community, environmental justice, and economic justice. Authors in the collection come from over a dozen Native nations, including communities in Alaska and Hawaiʻi. Chapters are grouped by themes of challenging philanthropy, protecting community resources, environmental justice, and economic justice. While telling their stories, authors excavate the history and ongoing effects of genocide and colonialism, reminding readers how philanthropic wealth often stems from the theft of Native land and resources, as well as how major national parks such as Yosemite were “conserved” by forcibly expelling Native residents. At the same time, the authors detail ways that readers might imagine the world differently, presenting stories of Native community building that offer benefits for all. Accepting this invitation to reset assumptions can be at once profound and pragmatic. For instance, wildfires in large measure result from recent Western land mismanagement; Native techniques practiced for thousands of years can help manage fire for everyone’s benefit.

In a world facing a mounting climate crisis and record economic inequality, Invisible No More exposes the deep wounds of a racist past while offering a powerful call to care for one another and the planet. Indigenous communities have much to offer, not the least of which are solutions gleaned from cultural knowledge developed over generations.
 
[more]

front cover of The Ioway in Missouri
The Ioway in Missouri
Greg Olson
University of Missouri Press, 2008
Although their ancestors came from the Great Lakes region and they now live in several midwestern states, the Ioway (Baxoje) people claim a rich history in Missouri dating back to the eighteenth century. Living alongside white settlers while retaining their traditional way of life, the tribe eventually had to make difficult choices in order to survive—choices that included unlikely alliances, resistance, and even violence.
This is the first book on the Ioway to appear in thirty years and the first to focus on their role in Missouri’s colonial and early statehood periods. Greg Olson tells how the Ioway were attracted to the rich land between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers as a place in which they could peacefully reside. But it was here that they ended up facing the greatest challenges to their survival as a people, with leaders like White Cloud and Great Walker rising to meet those demands.
Olson draws on interviews with contemporary tribal members to convey an understanding of Ioway beliefs, practices, and history, and he incorporates reports of Indian agents and speeches of past Ioway leaders to illuminate the changes that took place in the tribe’s traditional ways of life. He tells of their oral traditions and creation stories, their farming and hunting practices, and their alliances with neighboring Indians, incoming settlers, and the U.S. government. In describing these alliances, he shows that the Ioway did not always agree among themselves on the direction they should take as they navigated the crosscurrents of a changing world, and that the attempts of some Ioway leaders to adapt to white society did not prevent the tribe’s descent into poverty and despair or their ultimate removal from their lands.
As modern Ioway in Kansas and Oklahoma work to recover the history of their people—and as local historians recognize their important place in Missouri history—Olson’s book offers a balanced account of the profound effects on the Ioway of other tribes, explorers, and settlers who began to move into their homelands after the Louisiana Purchase. Written for a general audience, it is a useful, accessible introduction to the changing fortunes of the Ioway people in the era of exploration, colonialism, and early statehood.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter