Results by title

338 books match the query 'Indigenous Studies' and 8 start with h

cover of Haunting Biology: Science and Indigeneity in Australia

Haunting Biology

Science and Indigeneity in Australia

Emma Kowal

Duke University Press, 2023

In Haunting Biology Emma Kowal recounts the troubled history of Western biological studies of Indigenous Australians and asks how we now might see contemporary genomics, especially that conducted by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scientists. Kowal illustrates how the material persistence of samples over decades and centuries folds together the fates of different scientific methodologies. Blood, bones, hair, comparative anatomy, human biology, physiology, and anthropological genetics all haunt each other across time and space, together with the many racial theories they produced and sustained. The stories Kowal tells feature a variety of ghostly presences: a dead anatomist, a fetishized piece of hair hidden away in a war trunk, and an elusive white Indigenous person. By linking this history to contemporary genomics and twenty-first-century Indigeneity, Kowal outlines the fraught complexities, perils, and potentials of studying Indigenous biological difference in the twenty-first century.
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cover of Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity

Hawaiian Blood

Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity

J. Kauanui Kahaulani

Duke University Press, 2008

In the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act (HHCA) of 1921, the U.S. Congress defined “native Hawaiians” as those people “with at least one-half blood quantum of individuals inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands prior to 1778.” This “blood logic” has since become an entrenched part of the legal system in Hawai‘i. Hawaiian Blood is the first comprehensive history and analysis of this federal law that equates Hawaiian cultural identity with a quantifiable amount of blood. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui explains how blood quantum classification emerged as a way to undermine Native Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli) sovereignty. Within the framework of the 50-percent rule, intermarriage “dilutes” the number of state-recognized Native Hawaiians. Thus, rather than support Native claims to the Hawaiian islands, blood quantum reduces Hawaiians to a racial minority, reinforcing a system of white racial privilege bound to property ownership.

Kauanui provides an impassioned assessment of how the arbitrary correlation of ancestry and race imposed by the U.S. government on the indigenous people of Hawai‘i has had far-reaching legal and cultural effects. With the HHCA, the federal government explicitly limited the number of Hawaiians included in land provisions, and it recast Hawaiians’ land claims in terms of colonial welfare rather than collective entitlement. Moreover, the exclusionary logic of blood quantum has profoundly affected cultural definitions of indigeneity by undermining more inclusive Kanaka Maoli notions of kinship and belonging. Kauanui also addresses the ongoing significance of the 50-percent rule: Its criteria underlie recent court decisions that have subverted the Hawaiian sovereignty movement and brought to the fore charged questions about who counts as Hawaiian.

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cover of Healing Like Our Ancestors: The Nahua Tiçitl, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Central Mexico, 1535–1660

Healing Like Our Ancestors

The Nahua Tiçitl, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Central Mexico, 1535–1660

Edward Anthony Polanco

University of Arizona Press, 2024

Offering a provocative new perspective, Healing Like Our Ancestors examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Nahua healers in central Mexico and how their practices have been misconstrued and misunderstood in colonial records.

Early colonial Spanish settlers defined, assessed, and admonished Nahua titiçih (healing specialists) and tiçiyotl (healing knowledge) in the process of building a society in Mexico that mirrored Iberia. Nevertheless, Nahua survivance (intergenerational knowledge transfer) has allowed communities to heal like their ancestors through changes and adaptations. Edward Anthony Polanco draws from diverse colonial primary sources, largely in Spanish and Nahuatl (the Nahua ancestral language), to explore how Spanish settlers framed titiçih, their knowledge, and their practices within a Western complex. Polanco argues for the usage of Indigenous terms when discussing Indigenous concepts and arms the reader with the Nahuatl words to discuss central Mexican Nahua healing. In particular, this book emphasizes the importance of women as titiçih and highlights their work as creators and keepers of knowledge. These vital Nahua perspectives of healing—and how they differed from the settler narrative—will guide community members as well as scholars and students of the history of science, Latin America, and Indigenous studies.
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cover of Held in Memory, Shared in Story: Teachings of the Middle Kuskokwim

Held in Memory, Shared in Story

Teachings of the Middle Kuskokwim

Ann Fienup-Riordan

University of Alaska Press, 2026

Along the winding banks of the Middle Kuskokwim River, stories live in the languages of the land. Shared from our Elders, around kitchen tables on long winter nights and beside summer campfires, these teachings carry the wisdom of the people who have called this place home for generations. Held in Memory, Shared in Story gathers these voices into a collection, a record of resilience and the deep relationship we share with world around us. This book captures the knowledge, shared in writing and orally, of our region and celebrates the storytellers, the listeners, and all who keep these traditions alive. To read these stories is to walk beside the people of the Middle Kuskokwim, to see through their eyes, to hear their laughter, and to understand that the heart of a culture lives in the stories shared across generations.

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cover of Heritage in the Body: Sensory Ecologies of Health Practice in Times of Change

Heritage in the Body

Sensory Ecologies of Health Practice in Times of Change

Kristina Baines

University of Arizona Press, 2024

Through storytelling, ethnography, and interviews, Heritage in the Body examines the links between health and heritage in times of change. Using a series of case studies, anthropologist Kristina Baines tells the intimate stories of how Indigenous Maya and Garifuna Belizeans—both in Belize and in the United States—navigate macro-level processes such as economic development, climate change, political shifts, and global health crises in the context of changes in their own lives.

Employing an embodied ecological heritage (EEH) framework, Baines explores the links between health and heritage as a fluid series of ecological practices. Health and wellness are holistically defined and approached from a phenomenological perspective. Baines focuses on how sensory experiences change the body through practice and provides insights into community-driven alternatives as a means to maintain and support happy, healthy lives.
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cover of Horror and Indigeneity: Literature, Film, and Television

Horror and Indigeneity

Literature, Film, and Television

Edited by Murray Leeder and Gary D. Rhodes

University of Texas Press, 2026

A collection of essays about Indigeneity and horror in cinema, literature, and beyond.

How did Indigeneity come to be horrifying? Think of the “Indian burial ground” trope, a staple of 1970s horror cinema, not to mention decades of Western films and fictions that made “savage Indians” the face of fear in popular culture. Can horror do something else in the hands of Indigenous people? Creators such as Eden Robinson and Jeff Barnaby have self-consciously turned to horror to tell new kinds of stories, stories that question who is a monster and what constitutes the monstrous.

Horror and Indigeneity explores representations of Indigenous people in settler horror texts and in the growing corpus of horror by Indigenous writers and filmmakers. Widely spanning time periods and media, the contributors to this edited volume address themes such as cannibalism, eco-horror, historical trauma, and contemporary antiracism as they relate to classical horror cinema and recent works such as The Dead Can’t Dance, Lovecraft Country, and Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians. Also featuring interviews with Jones and director T. J. Cuthand, Horror and Indigeneity rethinks the terror of the Other in potent and provocactive terms.

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cover of How to Shoot the Longbow: A Guide from Historical and Applied Sources

How to Shoot the Longbow

A Guide from Historical and Applied Sources

Hugh D. H. Soar

Westholme Publishing, 2015

A Leading Expert on Traditional Archery Offers Insight Into How the Longbow Was Drawn from Medieval Sources to Modern Recreations
“Soar’s book [The Crooked Stick] is indispensible.”—Bernard Cornwell, New York Times bestselling author
Relying on more than fifty years’ experience in archery, historian Hugh D. H. Soar reflects on how the longbow was drawn and shot across the centuries through examining the design of the bow and early literature about the bow, combined with his and his colleagues’ applied knowledge using replica bows. No complete medieval longbow has survived, but those found aboard the Tudor warship Mary Rose provide the best archaeological evidence to the possible construction of the medieval bow. Contemporary treatises written about the proper manner of shooting the bow, together with the resurgence in interest and construction of replica bows beginning in the late sixteenth century that form part of the author’s collection provide the basis for this work. How to Shoot the Longbow: A Guide from Historical and Applied Sources is a fascinating and practical look at the use of a legendary invention.
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cover of How “Indians” Think: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory

How “Indians” Think

Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory

Gonzalo Lamana

University of Arizona Press, 2019

The conquest and colonization of the Americas marked the beginning of a social, economic, and cultural change of global scale. Most of what we know about how colonial actors understood and theorized this complex historical transformation comes from Spanish sources. This makes the few texts penned by Indigenous intellectuals in colonial times so important: they allow us to see how some of those who inhabited the colonial world in a disadvantaged position thought and felt about it.
 
This book shines light on Indigenous perspectives through a novel interpretation of the works of the two most important Amerindian intellectuals in the Andes, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca. Building on but also departing from the predominant scholarly position that views Indigenous-Spanish relations as the clash of two distinct cultures, Gonzalo Lamana argues that Guaman Poma and Garcilaso were the first Indigenous activist intellectuals and that they developed post-racial imaginaries four hundred years ago. Their texts not only highlighted Native peoples’ achievements, denounced injustice, and demanded colonial reform, but they also exposed the emerging Spanish thinking and feeling on race that was at the core of colonial forms of discrimination. These authors aimed to alter the way colonial actors saw each other and, as a result, to change the world in which they lived.
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