Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Ethnic Studies - American - Native American Studies

Native American students entering college often experience a dramatic confrontation of cultures. As one of the writers in this remarkable collective memoir remarks, "When I was a child, I was taught certain things: don't stand up to your elders; don't question authority; life is precious; the earth is precious; take it slowly; enjoy it. And then you go to college and you learn all these other things that never fit." Making things fit, finding that elusive balance between tribal values and the demands of campus life is a recurring theme in this landmark collection of personal...

In the early eighteenth century, West Greenland became a colonial territory of Denmark. Nevertheless, a large number of Inuit communities maintained significant aspects of their cultural and economic practices. When home rule was introduced in 1979, the benign paternalism of colonial days was superseded by the incorporation of ethnic and institutional relations under a unified political system in Greenland. A national Greenlandic Inuit community was created, forcing further cultural adaptation on the part of the Inuit.

Jens Dahl analyses life in Saqqaq, a small Greenlandic hunting...

In 1925, Beatrice Blackwood of the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum took thirty-three photographs of Kainai people on the Blood Indian Reserve in Alberta as part of an anthropological project. In 2001, staff from the museum took copies of these photographs back to the Kainai and worked with community members to try to gain a better understanding of Kainai perspectives on the images. 'Pictures Bring Us Messages' is about that process, about why museum professionals and archivists must work with such communities, and about some of the considerations that need to be addressed...

After a vision in which he beheld himself as a leader in the revitalization of native medicine and culture, medicine man Russell WIllier began to share his healing practices and world view with three anthropologists. In this volume they describe how WIllier treats chronic, stress-related condition and physiological dysfunctions with herbal remedies, sweat-lodge therapy, religious ceremony, and other techniques.

Cry of the Eagle also discusses the process by which the anthropologists experienced the medicine man's work. That process required change in both Willier and his...

The classic ethnographic study of the Bella Coola (Nuxalk) Indians of British Columbia, originally published in 1948 and long out of print, is now available again. It is both a comprehensive guide to Nuxalk culture and a central document in the study of ethnographic methods.

Between 1922 and 1924, T.F. McIlwraith, then an anthropologist with the National Museum of Canada, spent part of each year with the Nuxalk, acquiring an exhaustive knowledge of their culture. In these volumes he documented the structure of Nuxalk society, the practice of religion, and the role of mythology and...

Until now few people have been aware of the prevalence of belief in some form of rebirth or reincarnation among North American native peoples. This collection of essays by anthropologists and one psychiatrist examines this concept among native American societies, from near the time of contact until the present day.

Amerindian Rebirth opens with a foreword by Gananath Obeyesekere that contrasts North American and Hindu/Buddhist/Jain beliefs. The introduction gives an overview, and the first chapter summarizes the context, distribution, and variety of recorded belief. All the papers...

This book is about a just future for Indians in Canada. It defines justice in terms of the survival and well-being of Indians as Indians, that is, defined by their traditional principles and philosophies, not by the Indian Act or by their experience of colonialism. Menno Boldt calls for social action, not theory, holding that unless Indians revitalize, adapt, and develop their traditional philosophies and principles for living and surviving in the context of Canadian society, polity, and economy, they will become extinct as Indians; they will survive only as a legal-racial category created...

'You're so fat ' was the greeting extended to the author's wife on her return to the Algonquin community of Pikogan in northwestern Quebec. The Anishnaabe elder was in fact complimenting her for looking robust and healthy.

Non-Natives have much to learn in order to understand Native experience and culture. Spielmann sets out to show how one might use the techniques of conversation analysis and discourse analysis to accomplish this. Ultimately, he seeks to capture the essence of Native experience by exploring how Native people talk about that experience, an approach that is missing...

Virtually unknown of First Nations in Canada, the Arrow Lakes or Sinixt Interior Salish of the North American Columbia Plateau have been declared officially extinct. This book investigates why this circumstance came about and how contemporary Sinixt have responded.

Most of the Arrow Lakes people have lived in diaspora for a hundred years or more, due in part to destructive mining activity in their historical territory. Since 1989, many have made pilgrimages to an ancient burial ground and village site at Vallican, British Columbia, where they have worked against many obstacles to...

The worlds of readers and writers on the one hand and listeners and speakers on the other differ in many ways. What happens when the stories, beliefs, or histories of North American Native people, many traditionally communicated orally, are transferred to paper or other media? Why do tellers, teachers, editors, filmmakers, and translators undertake this work? What do the words mean for different audiences? How can they be most effectively and responsibly presented and interpreted? This collection of essays confronts these and other issues that arise in attempting to record oral cultures...

In the early eighteenth century, West Greenland became a colonial territory of Denmark. Nevertheless, a large number of Inuit communities maintained significant aspects of their cultural and economic practices. When home rule was introduced in 1979, the benign paternalism of colonial days was superseded by the incorporation of ethnic and institutional relations under a unified political system in Greenland. A national Greenlandic Inuit community was created, forcing further cultural adaptation on the part of the Inuit.

Jens Dahl analyses life in Saqqaq, a small Greenlandic hunting...

Canada's Aboriginal Peoples: A Short Introduction fills a previously overlooked gap by providing the first comprehensive overview of Canada's First Nations people. Drawn from the highly successful Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples it offers extensive coverage of Canada's aboriginal peoples, including the Algonquians/Eastern Woodlands, Algonquians/Plains, Algonquians/Subarctic, Inuit, Iroquoians, Ktunaxa, Metis, Na-Dene, Salish, Siouan, Tsimshian, and Wakashans, as well as the many nations within these larger groupings.

With a new preface by Paul Robert Magocsi and an...

What does the media coverage of a crisis situation reveal about the nature of dominant-minority relations locally, regionally, and nationally? Sandra Lambertus asks this question of the media coverage of the largest RCMP operation in Canadian history - the 1995 Gustafsen Lake Native Indian standoff.

Drawing from extensive newspaper, television, and radio news products, legal and law enforcement documents, ethnographic interviews with 26 journalists, as well as RCMP, and Native leaders, Lambertus examines the construction and national dissemination of vilifying stereotyped portrayals...

Numerous studies, inquiries, and statistics accumulated over the years have demonstrated the poor health status of Aboriginal peoples relative to the Canadian population in general. Aboriginal Health in Canada is about the complex web of physiological, psychological, spiritual, historical, sociological, cultural, economic, and environmental factors that contribute to health and disease patterns among the Aboriginal peoples of Canada.

The authors explore the evidence for changes in patterns of health and disease prior to and since European contact, up to the present. They...

The history of Aboriginal people in Canada taught in schools and depicted in the media tends to focus on Aboriginal displacement from native lands and the consequent social and cultural disruptions they have endured. Collectively, they are portrayed as passive victims of European colonization and government policy, and, even when well intentioned, these depictions are demeaning and do little to truly represent the role Aboriginal peoples have played in Canadian life. Hidden in Plain Sight adds another dimension to the story, showing the extraordinary contributions Aboriginal...

What is known about Aboriginal mental health and mental illness, and on what basis is this 'knowing' assumed? This question, while appearing simple, leads to a tangled web of theory, method, and data rife with conceptual problems, shaky assumptions, and inappropriate generalizations. It is also the central question of James Waldram's Revenge of the Windigo.

This erudite and highly articulate work is about the knowledge of Aboriginal mental health: who generates it; how it is generated and communicated; and what has been - and continues to be - its implications for...

In Fighting Firewater Fictions, Richard W. Thatcher describes and explains the emergence and perpetuation of the 'firewater complex' - the cultural construct of an informally sanctioned, destructive, binge-drinking norm in First Nations reserve communities.

The complex has reified alcoholism as an inevitability in the First Nations - an approach that has resulted in essential aspects of collective and personal responsibility being vacated in favour of therapeutic interventions assisted by social personnel of questionable expertise. This substitution has had the effect of...

The twelve essays that make up Reflections on Native-Newcomer Relations illustrate the development in thought by one of Canada's leading scholars in the field of Native history - J.R. Miller. The collection, comprising pieces that were written over a period spanning nearly two decades, deals with the evolution of historical writing on First Nations and Metis, methodological issues in the writing of Native-newcomer history, policy matters including residential schools, and linkages between the study of Native-newcomer relations and academic governance and curricular matters. Half of...