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They know who they are. Of predominantly Chippewa, Cree, French, and Scottish descent, the Métis people have flourished as a distinct ethnic group in Canada and the northwestern United States for nearly two hundred years. Yet their Métis identity is often ignored or misunderstood in the United States. Unlike their counterparts in Canada, the U.S. Métis have never received federal recognition. In fact, their very identity has been questioned. In this rich examination of a Métis community—the first book-length work to focus on the Montana Métis—Martha Harroun Foster combines social, political, and economic analysis to show how its people have adapted to changing conditions while retai...
Frequently dismissed as a 'nature poet' and an 'Indian Princess' E. Pauline Johnson (1861-1913) was not only an accomplished thinker and writer but a contentious and passionate personality who 'talked back' to Euro-Canadian culture. Paddling Her Own Canoe is the only major scholarly study that examines Johnson's diverse roles as a First Nations champion, New Woman, serious writer and performer, and Canadian nationalist. A Native advocate of part-Mohawk ancestry, Johnson was also an independent, self-supporting, unmarried woman during the period of first-wave feminism. Her versatile writings range from extraordinarily erotic poetry to polemical statements about the rights of First Nations. Ba...
This book argues that long-ignored, non-western political systems from the distant and more recent past can provide critical insights into improving global governance. These societies show how successful collection action can occur by dividing sovereignty, consensus building, power from below, and other mechanisms. For a better tomorrow, we need to free ourselves of the colonial constraints on our political imagination. A pandemic, war in Europe, and another year of climatic anomalies are among the many indications of the limits of global governance today. To meet these challenges, we must look far beyond the status quo to the thousands of successful mechanisms for collective action that hav...
The Greater Plains tells a new story of a region, stretching from the state of Texas to the province of Alberta, where the environments are as varied as the myriad ways people have inhabited them. These innovative essays document a complicated history of human interactions with a sometimes plentiful and sometimes foreboding landscape, from the Native Americans who first shaped the prairies with fire to twentieth-century oil regimes whose pipelines linked the region to the world. The Greater Plains moves beyond the narrative of ecological desperation that too often defines the region in scholarly works and in popular imagination. Using the lenses of grasses, animals, water, and energy, the co...
Recollecting is a rich collection of essays that illuminate the lives of late eighteenth-century to the mid twentieth-century Aboriginal women, who have been overlooked in sweeping narratives of the history of the West. Some essays focus on individual women - a trader, a performer, a non-human woman - while others examine cohorts of women - wives, midwives, seamstresses, nuns. Authors look beyond the documentary record and standard representations of women, drawing also on records generated by the women themselves, including their beadwork, other material culture, and oral histories.
Anthropologists need history to understand how the past has shaped the present. Historians need anthropology to help them interpret the past. Where anthropologists’ and historians’ needs intersect is ethnohistory. The contributors to this volume have been inspired in large part by the teaching and writing of distinguished ethnohistorian Raymond J. DeMallie, whose exemplary combination of ethnographic and archival research demonstrates the ways anthropology and history can work together to create an understanding of the past and the present. Transforming Ethnohistories comprises ten new avenues of ethnohistorical research ranging in topic from fiddling performances to environmental distur...
In recent years there has been growing interest in identifying the social and cultural attributes that define the Metis as a distinct people. In this groundbreaking study, Brenda Macdougall employs the concept of wahkootowin � the Cree term for a worldview that privileges family and values interconnectedness � to trace the emergence of a Metis community in northern Saskatchewan. Wahkootowin describes how relationships worked and helps to explain how the Metis negotiated with local economic and religious institutions while nurturing a society that emphasized family obligation and responsibility. This innovative exploration of the birth of Metis identity offers a model for future research and discussion.
From New Peoples to New Nations is a broad historical account of the emergence of the Metis as distinct peoples in North America over the last three hundred years. Examining the cultural, economic, and political strategies through which communities define their boundaries, Gerhard J. Ens and Joe Sawchuk trace the invention and reinvention of Metis identity from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Their work updates, rethinks, and integrates the many disparate aspects of Metis historiography, providing the first comprehensive narrative of Metis identity in more than fifty years. Based on extensive archival materials, interviews, oral histories, ethnographic research, and first-hand working knowledge of Metis political organizations, From New Peoples to New Nations addresses the long and complex history of Metis identity from the Battle of Seven Oaks to today's legal and political debates.
Pemmican Empire explores the fascinating and little-known environmental history of the role of pemmican (bison fat) in the opening of the British-American West.
Marie Rose Delorme Smith was a woman of French-Métis ancestry who was born during the fur trade era and who spent her adult years as a pioneer rancher in the Pincher Creek district of southern Alberta. The Identities of Marie Rose Delorme Smith examines how Marie Rose negotiates her identities--as mother, boarding house owner, homesteader, medicine woman, midwife, and writer--during the changing environment of the western plains during the late nineteenth century.