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In this volume some of the leading scholars working in Native North America explore contemporary perspectives on Native culture, history, and representation. Written in honor of the anthropologist Raymond D. Fogelson, the volume charts the currents of contemporary scholarship while offering an invigorating challenge to researchers in the field. The essays employ a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches and range widely across time and space. The introduction and first section consider the origins and legacies of various strands of interpretation, while the second part examines the relationship among culture, power, and creativity. The third part focuses on the cultural construction and experience of history, and the volume closes with essays on identity, difference, and appropriation in several historical and cultural contexts. Aimed at a broad interdisciplinary audience, the volume offers an excellent overview of contemporary perspectives on Native peoples.
On a typical day in Bennett County, South Dakota, farmers and ranchers work their fields and tend animals, merchants order inventory and stock shelves, teachers plan and teach classes, health workers aid the infirm in the county hospital or clinic, and women make quilts and heirlooms for their families or the county fair. Life is usually unhurried, with time for chatting with neighbors and catching up on gossip. But Bennett County is far from typical. Nearly a century ago the county was carved out of Pine Ridge Reservation and opened to white settlers. Today Bennett County sits awkwardly between the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Sioux Reservations, with nearly one-third of its land classified as "I...
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, over twenty different American Indian tribal groups inhabited present-day Mississippi. Today, Mississippi is home to only one tribe, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. In Mississippi's American Indians, author James F. Barnett Jr. explores the historical forces and processes that led to this sweeping change in the diversity of the state's native peoples. The book begins with a chapter on Mississippi's approximately 12,000-year prehistory, from early hunter-gatherer societies through the powerful mound building civilizations encountered by the first European expeditions. With the coming of the Spanish, French, and English to the New World, nat...
For more than a century, the Northern Arapaho people have lived on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming—the fourth largest reservation in the country. In The Four Hills of Life, Jeffrey D. Anderson masterfully draws together aspects of the Northern Arapahos’ world—myth, language, art, ritual, identity, and history—to offer a vivid picture of a culture that has endured and changed over time. Anderson shows that Northern Arapaho unity and identity from the nineteenth century on derive primarily from a shared system of ritual practices that transmit vital cultural knowledge. He also provides an in-depth study of the problems that Euro-American society continues to impose on reservation life and of the responses of the Northern Arapahos.
Ancestral Mounds deconstructs earthen mounds and myths in examining their importance in contemporary Native communities. Two centuries of academic scholarship regarding mounds have examined who, what, where, when, and how, but no serious investigations have addressed the basic question, why? Drawing on ethnographic and archaeological studies, Jay Miller explores the wide-ranging themes and variations of mounds, from those built thousands of years ago to contemporary mounds, focusing on Native southeastern and Oklahoma towns. Native peoples continue to build and refurbish mounds each summer as part of their New Year’s celebrations to honor and give thanks for ripening maize and other crops and to offer public atonement. The mound is the heart of the Native community, which is sustained by song, dance, labor, and prayer. The basic purpose of mounds across North America is the same: to serve as a locus where community effort can be engaged in creating a monument of vitality and a safe haven in the volatile world.
Following the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, the Potawatomis, once concentrated around southern Lake Michigan, increasingly dispersed into nine bands across four states, two countries, and a thousand miles. How is it, author Christopher Wetzel asks, that these scattered people, with different characteristics and traditions cultivated over two centuries, have reclaimed their common cultural heritage in recent years as the Potawatomi Nation? And why a “nation”—not a band or a tribe—in an age when nations seem increasingly impermanent? Gathering the Potawatomi Nation explores the recent invigoration of Potawatomi nationhood, looks at how marginalized communities adapt to social change, and rev...
"According to Cherokee tradition, Kituwah is located at the center of the world and is home to the most sacred and oldest of all beloved, or mother, towns. Just by entering Kituwah, or indeed any village site, Cherokees reexperience the creation of the world, when the water beetle first surfaced with a piece of mud that later became the island on which they lived. People of Kituwah is a comprehensive account of the spiritual worldview and lifeways of the Eastern Cherokee people, from that beginning to today. Building on vast primary and secondary materials, native and non-native, John D. Loftin and Benjamin E. Frey show how Cherokee religious life evolved both before and after the calamitous coming of colonialism. This book offers an in-depth understanding of Cherokee culture and society"--Page 4 of cover.
First published in 1980 by the Canadian Museum of Civilization, this study presents narratives from different genres of Rock Cree oral literature in northwestern Manitoba together with interpretive and comparative commentary. The collection comprises narratives of the trickster-transformer Wisahkicahk, animal-human characters, spirit guardians, the wihtikow or cannibal monster, humorous experiences, sorcery, and early encounters with Catholicism.
This work explores the dynamic issues of race and religion within the Cherokee Nation and to look at the role of secret societies in shaping these forces during the nineteenth century.
Argues that the simple dichotomy between "traditional" and "assimmilationist" Cherokee writing oversimplifies the work of many authors and silences their more nuanced voices.