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

In their homelands in what is now New York state, Iroquois and their issues have come to dominate public debate as the residents of the region seek ways to resolve the multibillion dollar land claims against the state. This initial dispute over territorial title has grown to encompass gambling, treaties, taxation, and what it means to claim Native sovereignty in a world experiencing fantastic technological change. New York's influence is such that the experiences of Iroquois interaction with the state will surely affect how Natives and other states deal with similar issues. This is an...

Daughters of Mother Earth is nothing less than a new way of looking at history--or more correctly, the reestablishment of a very old way. It holds that for too long, elements unnatural to Native American ways of knowing have been imposed on the study of Native America. Euro-American discourse styles, emphasizing elite male privilege and conceptual linearity, have drowned out the democratic and woman-centered Native approaches. Even when the damage of western linearity is understood to occur, analysis of Native American history, society, and culture has still been relentlessly placed...

From the Chickasaw fighting the Choctaw in the Southeast to the Sioux battling the Cheyenne on the Great Plains, warfare was endemic among the North American Indians when Europeans first arrived on this continent. An impressive array of offensive weaponry and battle tactics gave rise to an equally impressive range of defensive technology. Native Americans constructed very effective armor and shields using wood, bone, and leather. Their fortifications ranged from simple refuges to walled and moated stockades to multiple stockades linked in strategic defensive networks.

In this book,...

The United States government thought it could make Indians "vanish." After the Indian Wars ended in the 1880s, the government gave allotments of land to individual Native Americans in order to turn them into farmers and sent their children to boarding schools for indoctrination into the English language, Christianity, and the ways of white people. Federal officials believed that these policies would assimilate Native Americans into white society within a generation or two. But even after decades of governmental efforts to obliterate Indian culture, Native Americans refused to vanish into...

There is no question that native cultures in the New World exhibit many forms of mathematical development. This Native American mathematics can best be described by considering the nature of the concepts found in a variety of individual New World cultures. Unlike modern mathematics in which numbers and concepts are expressed in a universal mathematical notation, the numbers and concepts found in native cultures occur and are expressed in many distinctive ways. Native American Mathematics, edited by Michael P. Closs, is the first book to focus on mathematical development...

The Maya Tropical Forest, which occupies the lowlands of southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, is the closest rainforest to the United States and one of the most popular tourist destinations in the Western Hemisphere. It has been home to the Maya peoples for nearly four millennia, starting around 1800 BC. Ancient cities in the rainforest such as Palenque, Yaxchilan, Tikal, and Caracol draw thousands of tourists and scholars seeking to learn more about the prehistoric Maya. Their contemporary descendants, the modern Maya, utilize the forest's natural resources in village life and...

Responding to anti-Indianism in America, the wide-ranging perspectives culled in Unlearning the Language of Conquest present a provocative account of the contemporary hegemony still at work today, whether conscious or unconscious. Four Arrows has gathered a rich collection of voices and topics, including:

• Waziyatawin Angela Cavender Wilson's "Burning Down the House: Laura Ingalls Wilder and American Colonialism," which probes the mentality of hatred woven within the pages of this iconographic children's literature.
• Vine Deloria's "Conquest Masquerading as...

As contemporary Native and non-Native Americans explore various forms of "gender bending" and gay and lesbian identities, interest has grown in "berdaches," the womanly men and manly women who existed in many Native American tribal cultures. Yet attempts to find current role models in these historical figures sometimes distort and oversimplify the historical realities.

This book provides an objective, comprehensive study of Native American women-men and men-women across many tribal cultures and an extended time span. Sabine Lang explores such topics as their religious and secular...

Unpublished letters and diaries by eyewitnesses, interviews with decedents, an intimate knowledge of the country enrich this narrative of the heroic Nez Perce Indian War waged in 1877 against relocation.

The result is a well documented chronicle offering new perspective on prewar Indian-white relations, United States government pressures and nontreaty rebellions, the five battles, subjection and surrender, and on the character of the leaders on both sides.

"From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever," Chief Joseph said in surrender. But as a guardian and...

Melanesia has been the research focus of some of anthropology's legendary names. In the best tradition of Melanesian scholarship, Jane Goodale writes here of the Kaulong who live in the deep forests of New Britain, an island in the vast territory of Papua New Guinea. Even in the last half of the twentieth century, the Kaulong's contact with the outside world through government patrols and missionaries has been minimal. Their story enhances our understanding of Melanesia and adds new and significant material to the comparison of Oceanic cultures and societies.

In the course of her...

Drawing on the remembrances of elders who were born in the early 1900s and saw the last masked Yup'ik dances before missionary efforts forced their decline, Agayuliyararput is a collection of first-person accounts of the rich culture surrounding Yup'ik masks. Stories by thirty-three elders from all over southwestern Alaska, presented in parallel Yup'ik and English texts, include a wealth of information about the creation and function of masks and the environment in which they flourished. The full-length, unannotated stories are complete with features of oral storytelling such as...

This book and an accompanying compact disk offer a rare glimpse into Native American sacred traditions of song and dance. Arising from a unique exhibit and live performance at the Northwest Folklife Festival, Spirit of the First People is a collection of personal narratives, stories, and essays on the music of the First People in the region that now encompasses Washington State. From tribe to tribe and reservation to reservation across the state, a wide range of musical genres and individual styles have developed, including social dance songs, game songs, and hymns.

Skagit...

What makes Northwest Coast Native American art authentic? And why, when most of art history is a history of the avant-garde, is tradition so deeply valued by contemporary Native American artists and their patrons? In Privileging the Past, Judith Ostrowitz approaches these questions through a careful consideration of replicas, reproductions, and creative translations of past forms of Northwest Coast dances, ceremonies, masks, painted screens, and houses.

Ostrowitz examines several different art forms--two very different architectural constructions, a dance performance, and...

Sidner Larson's Captured in the Middle embodies the very nature of Indian storytelling, which is circular, drawing upon the personal experiences of the narrator at every turn. Larson teaches about contemporary American Indian literature by describing his own experiences as a child on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana and as a professor at the University of Oregon.

Larson argues that contemporary Native American literary criticism is stalled. On one hand are the scholars who portray Indians stereotypically, assuming that the experiences of all tribal groups have largely...

Anthropologist Rodney Frey culminates a decade of work with the Schitsu'umsh (the Coeur d'Alene Indians of Idaho) in this portrait of the unique bonds between a people and the landscape of their traditional homeland. The result of an intensive collaboration between investigator and Native people, the book includes many traditional stories that invite the reader's participation in the world of the Schitsu'umsh.

The Schitsu'umsh landscape of lake and mountains is described with a richness that emphasizes its essential material and spiritual qualities. The historical trauma of the...

For more than fifteen hundred years Yupik and proto-Yupik Eskimo peoples have lived at the site of the Alaskan village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island. Their history is a record of family and kin, and of the interrelationship between those who live in Gambell and the spiritual world on which they depend; it is a history dominated by an abiding desire for community survival.

Relying on oral history blended with ethnography and ethnohistory, Carol Zane Jolles views the contemporary Yupik people in terms of the enduring beliefs and values that have contributed to the...