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For the Anishinaabeg people, who span a vast geographic region from the Great Lakes to the Plains and beyond, stories are vessels of knowledge. They are bagijiganan, offerings of the possibilities within Anishinaabeg life. Existing along a broad narrative spectrum, from aadizookaanag (traditional or sacred narratives) to dibaajimowinan (histories and news)—as well as everything in between—storytelling is one of the central practices and methods of individual and community existence. Stories create and understand, survive and endure, revitalize and persist. They honor the past, recognize the present, and provide visions of the future. In remembering, (re)making, and (re)writing stories, A...
Despite the central role blood quantum played in political formations of American Indian identity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there are few studies that explore how tribal nations have contended with this transformation of tribal citizenship. "Those Who Belong" explores how White Earth Anishinaabeg understood identity and blood quantum in the early twentieth century it was employed and manipulated by the U.S. government, how it came to be the sole requirement for tribal citizenship in 1961, and how a contemporary effort for constitutional reform sought a return to citizenship criteria rooted in Anishinaabe kinship, replacing the blood quantum criteria with lineal descent....
To read a crime novel today largely simulates the exercise of reading newspapers or watching the news. The speed and frequency with which today's bestselling works of crime fiction are produced allow them to mirror and dissect nearly contemporaneous socio-political events and conflicts. This collection examines this phenomenon and offers original, critical, essays on how national identity appears in international crime fiction in the age of populism and globalization. These essays address topics such as the array of competing nationalisms in Europe; Indian secularism versus Hindu communalism; the populist rhetoric tinged with misogyny or homophobia in the United States; racial, religious or ...
Decolonizing the Diet challenges the common claim that Native American communities were decimated after 1492 because they lived in “Virgin Soils” that were biologically distinct from those in the Old World. Comparing the European transition from Paleolithic hunting and gathering with Native American subsistence strategies before and after 1492, the book offers a new way of understanding the link between biology, ecology and history. Synthesizing the latest work in the science of nutrition, immunity and evolutionary genetics with cutting-edge scholarship on the history of indigenous North America, Decolonizing the Diet highlights a fundamental model of human demographic destruction: human...
Postindian Aesthetics is a collection of critical, cutting-edge essays on a new generation of Indigenous writers who are creatively and powerfully contributing to a thriving Indigenous literary canon that is redefining the parameters of Indigenous literary aesthetics.
Dispossession and removal are major subjects in understanding the relationship of American Indians to their ancestral lands. This book is the first treatment of these complex topics to focus on women writers. The author's emphasis on environmental issues makes her book as important to ecocritics as to students of literary criticism, women's studies, and Native American studies. -- from dust jacket.
Michigan Salvage is the first scholarly collection on celebrated writer Bonnie Jo Campbell, the author of two novels and three short story collections, including National Book Award finalist American Salvage (2009). Her writing captures a diverse and bustling rural America, brimming with complex characters who struggle with addiction, poverty, and land degradation—issues that have become, undeniably, part of the southwestern Michigan landscape that she calls home. The essays in this volume demonstrate many rich ways to approach Campbell’s writing, from historical and cultural overviews to essays examining the class and gender implications of her stories and novels, to teaching essays highlighting how to use her work in the classroom and beyond. Along with each essay, Michigan Salvage also features lesson plans and writing prompts meant to spark discussion and encourage further investigation into these stories and novels. This essential and teachable collection makes plain Campbell’s contributions to contemporary American literature.
Ask any Canadian what "Métis" means, and they will likely say "mixed race." Canadians consider Métis mixed in ways that other Indigenous people are not, and the census and courts have premised their recognition of Métis status on this race-based understanding. Andersen argues that Canada got it wrong. From its roots deep in the colonial past, the idea of Métis as mixed has slowly pervaded the Canadian consciousness until it settled in the realm of common sense. In the process, "Métis" has become a racial category rather than the identity of an Indigenous people with a shared sense of history and culture.
In 1894 Wisconsin game wardens Horace Martin and Josiah Hicks were dispatched to arrest Joe White, an Ojibwe ogimaa (chief), for hunting deer out of season and off-reservation. Martin and Hicks found White and made an effort to arrest him. When White showed reluctance to go with the wardens, they started beating him; he attempted to flee, and the wardens shot him in the back, fatally wounding him. Both Martin and Hicks were charged with manslaughter in local county court, and they were tried by an all-white jury. A gripping historical study, The Murder of Joe White contextualizes this event within decades of struggle of White’s community at Rice Lake to resist removal to the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation, created in 1854 at the Treaty of La Pointe. While many studies portray American colonialism as defined by federal policy, The Murder of Joe White seeks a much broader understanding of colonialism, including the complex role of state and local governments as well as corporations. All of these facets of American colonialism shaped the events that led to the death of Joe White and the struggle of the Ojibwe to resist removal to the reservation.
As researchers tried to prompt his mother to say that her ancestors lived in wigwams or teepees, Matthew L. M. Fletcher’s mother insisted her ancestors lived in stick houses. From the opening lines of Fletcher’s story collection, he sets the scene to disrupt narrative stereotypes and expectations about how Indigenous people are perceived. He provides insight into the complex world in which Anishinaabe people live, stripped of the ownership of much of their homeland. In Stick Houses, Fletcher explores what this loss of place has meant to the Anishinaabe people of Michigan. It explores how they must leave and come back. There is dispossession and separation, but there is also reunion and r...