Synopses & Reviews
Published through the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.and#160;
The rich storytelling traditions of the Alto Perenand#233; Arawaks of eastern Peru are showcased in this bilingual collection of traditional narratives, ethnographic accounts, womenand#8217;s autobiographical stories, songs, chants, and ritual speeches. The Alto Perenand#233; speakers are located in the colonization frontier at the foot of the eastern Andes and the western fringe of the Amazonian jungle. Unfortunately, their language has a slim chance of surviving because only about three hundred fluent speakers remain. This volume collects and preserves the power and vitality of Alto Perenand#233; oral and linguistic traditions, as told by thirty members of the Native community.
and#160;Upper Perenand#233; Arawak Narratives of History, Landscape, and Ritual covers a range of themes in the Alto Perenand#233; oral tradition, through genres such as myths, folk tales, autobiographical accounts, and ethnographic texts about customs and rituals, as well as songs, chants, and oratory. Transcribed and translated by Elena Mihas, a specialist in Northern Kampa language varieties, and grounded in the actual performances of Alto Perenand#233; speakers, this collection makes these stories available in English for the first time. Each original text in Alto Perenand#233; is accompanied by an English translation and each theme is introduced with an essay providing biographical, cultural, and linguistic information. This collection of oral literature is masterful and authoritative as well as entertaining and provocative, testifying to the power of Alto Perenand#233; storytelling.
Review
"A splendid anthology, full of rigorously researched and strongly written essays that will rapidly become must reading for historians of early America."and#8212;P. Harvey, CHOICE
Review
"These powerful and well-written essays, collected in a clearly organized volume, shed valuable light on a long-neglected aspect of colonial history. Indian slavery can no longer be ignored."and#8212;Mikaand#235;la M. Adams, North Carolina Historical Review
Review
"This collection brings much needed scholarly attention to the many faces of Indian slavery and hopefully indicates a growing interest on an exciting topic."and#8212;Janne Lahti, Southwestern Historical Quarterly
Review
"Indian slavery was a real, prolonged, contradictory, catastrophic, and essential facet of native history and American colonial history. Unlike Hernando de Soto's slaving and stealing expedition in the mid-sixteenth-century Southeast, this collection leaves us with a wealth of pearls."and#8212;Tiya Miles, Journal of American History
Review
"This volume is valuable to students and scholars who study North American Indians, New World slavery, European expansion and colonization, and the history of colonial North America more generally."and#8212;Heidi Scott Giusto, Florida Historical Quarterly
Review
"This is a tremendously valuable book. . . . There is no better single-volume introduction to the history of Indian slavery in early America. All serious students of early American history, the colonial South, and slavery in general will benefit from time spent with this edited collection."and#8212;Jon Parmenter, Journal of Southern History
Review
and#8220;Josephine Waggonerand#8217;s writings offer a unique perspective on the Lakota. Witness will become a widely referenced primary source. Emily Levine has meticulously examined all known collections of Waggonerand#8217;s manuscripts, sometimes comparing handwritten drafts with multiple typed copies to preserve information in full. Levineand#8217;s extensive notes are well chosen and informative. Witness will interest both specialist and popular audiences.and#8221;and#8212;Raymond DeMallie, Chancellorsand#8217; Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at Indiana University
Review
and#8220;Nowhere is Aboriginal media more active, more vibrant, and more significant than in Canada. . . . The efforts ofand#160;small, underfunded, ambitious, and creative groups of filmmakers in Vancouver make for an engaging story. . . . This is a clear, useful, and well-researched book.and#8221;and#8212;Michael Evans, author of Fast Runner: Filming the Legend of Atanarjuat and#160;and#160;
Review
and#8220;[A] beautifully detailed ethnography of Vancouverand#8217;s growing Aboriginal media hub. . . . Dowell convincingly argues that Aboriginal media is an act of visual sovereignty.and#8221;and#8212;Jennifer Kramer, author of
Switchbacks: Art, Ownership, and Nuxalk National Identityand#160;
Review
and#8220;
The Awakening Coast is of utmost importance because it shows usand#8212;firsthand through the lens of the missionariesand#8212;how indigenous peoples as late as the nineteenth century could or could not respond ideologically, economically, politically, and socially to the imposed new trends from the and#8216;outside,and#8217; including their incorporation in 1894 to Nicaragua. How much deeper can one go into finding appropriate sources?and#8221;and#8212;Christine Hand#252;nefeldt, author of
Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Limaand#8217;s Slaves, 1800and#8211;1854Review
and#8220;In the process of describing the experience of Indian students at a small Baptist college in Oklahoma, Lisa Neuman plays with our ideas about culture and identity and how Indians did the same as they negotiated the complicated dimensions of their Indianness. This deeply researched and thoughtful study, full of surprises and insights, is a wonderful addition to the literature and deserves a wide readership from scholars interested in Native American education.and#8221;and#8212;David Wallace Adams, author of Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875and#8211;1928
Review
and#8220;Donald Fixico challenges scholars of American and Indian history to revise their thinking, enlarge their and#8216;seeing,and#8217; and engage in an effort to understand Native people and their communities. He constructs a convincing argument about the uniqueness of Indian history and his explanation for seeing the world through Indian lenses leads Fixico to craft a terminology that makes a great deal of sense.and#8221;and#8212;Margaret Connell Szasz, Regents Professor of Native American and Celtic History at the University of New Mexico and author of Scottish Highlanders and Native Americans: Indigenous Education in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
Review
"[From Homeland to New Land] is an outstanding examination of the historical record that will become the definite work on the Mahican people from the colonial period to the Removal Era."and#8212;Bob Edmonds, McCormick Messenger
Review
"Rubin offers an interdisciplinary perspective on Indians in Christian missions by successfully combining methodologies originating in the sociology of religion with those in ethnohistory."and#8212;S.A. Klein, Choice
Review
"There is a great deal in Tears of Repentance that should be of interest to anthropologists researching colonialism, religion, and personhood."and#8212;Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database
Review
"Tears of Repentance is recommended for all scholars of early New England."and#8212;Matthew Sparacio, H-AmIndian
Review
andquot;This is a work that offers someone new to the topic a useful overview of the history and meaning of Indian conversions. For the specialist reader, it is useful to see the whole knit together afresh and to reap the benefits of Rubin's careful and synthetic analysis of the extensive primary sources and secondary literatures.andquot;andmdash;Ann Marie Plane, Connecticut History Review
Review
"With this delightful and penetrating journey into transcultural relations and how foundational anthropologists portrayed Indians, Scherer and DeMallie have enriched the understanding of the complexities of 19th-century American anthropology."and#8212;N. J. Parezo, CHOICE
Review
and#8220;[Life Among the Indians] catalogues the journey of a pioneering American ethnologist and captures the contradictions that came to the surface when Victorians attempted to communicate the humanity of American Indians to a popular audience.and#8221;and#8212;Frederick E. Hoxie, Swanlund Professor of History at the University of Illinois and author of This Indian Country
Review
and#8220;Upper Perenand#233; Arawak Narratives of History, Landscape, and Ritual demonstrates a sophisticated and interesting use of discourse-centered approaches to culture and serves as a model for contemporary scholarship that integrates linguistic and sociocultural anthropology. From an ethnohistorical perspective, this work is especially valuable because it demonstrates how much cultural variability exists within and among the various indigenous communities of the Upper Amazon region. Another strength is the authorand#8217;s attention to individual narratorsand#8217; personal histories as a way of contextualizing the different narratives transcribed and translated in later sections.and#8221;and#8212;Jonathan Hill, author of Made-from-Bone: Trickster Myths, Music, and History in an Amazonian Community
Review
and#8220;Performing Indigeneity lays out a sophisticated treatment of the cross-cultural politics embodied in the productive but hard-to-define category and#8216;indigeneity.and#8217; Laura Graham and Glenn Pennyand#8217;s ground-breaking collection brilliantly guides readers through the emergence and renegotiation of such tropes as cultural heritage, human rights, environment, and aboriginality.and#8221;and#8212;Philip J. Deloria, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan and author of Indians in Unexpected Places
Review
and#8220;This terrific set of essays brings together some of the best and freshest thinking in a field burgeoning with creativity. Native arts and activism are flourishing, and so are interdisciplinary conversations about Indigeneity. Every chapter offers surprises: gems of insight from unexpected angles. This is a bold step forward.and#8221;and#8212;Beth A. Conklin, chair of the Department of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University and author of Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society
Review
and#8220;One is not born indigenous. Thatand#8217;s the far-reaching upshot of this remarkable collection, which radically expands our notion of indigeneity. Along with their collaborators, Laura Graham and Glenn Penny break with any sense of essential selfhood, giving us a performative and dialogic concept that sees the indigenous as a creative space of collective imagination.and#8221;and#8212;Matti Bunzl, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois
Review
"This important contribution to media and indigenous studies is destined to become required reading in these areas."and#8212;C. R. King, CHOICE
Review
and#8220;This is literary detective work at its best. Carpenter and Sorisio have described a rich, previously unknown archive that fills in the historical contexts in which we can read Sarah Winnemuccaand#8212;her tribal and activist networks, the fates of her family members, and the virulent criticism to which she was constantly subjected. This book also establishes Winnemucca as a significant writer beyond her memoir, Life among the Piutes. Carpenter and Sorisio have dramatically advanced our understanding of this intriguing and complicated Native author.and#8221;and#8212;Siobhan Senier, editor of Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Writing from Indigenous New England
Review
and#8220;Sarah Winnemuccaand#8217;s unexplored newspaper articles, and those published regarding her, represent a vital archive of indigenous literary history that will be critical to any scholar working on Winnemucca and nineteenth-century American Indian authors.and#8221;and#8212;Penelope M. Kelsey, author of Tribal Theory in Native American Literature: Dakota and Haudenosaunee Writing and Indigenous Worldviews
Review
"The Allotment Plot is a refreshing, nuanced, and insightful reinterpretation of a moment in Nez Perce history that illuminates both the blind nature of federal policy and the tribal resilience reflected in post-reservation Indian resistance and selfdetermination."and#8212;David R. M. Beck, American Historical Review
Review
"A meticulously researched and carefully developed analysis of events before, during, and after allotment on the Nez Perce reservation."and#8212;Elizabeth James, Oregon Historical Quarterly
Review
"The Allotment Plot is a good addition to the field and offers readers much to consider."and#8212;C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, H-Net
Review
"This book deserves a close read and a place on every Arizona historian's bookshelf."and#8212;Victoria Smith, Journal of Arizona History
Review
and#8220;In this extensively researched book, Osburn presents a compelling history of the Mississippi Choctaws and sheds new light on these often forgotten people.and#8221;and#8212;Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, author of
Journey to the West: The Alabama and Coushatta Indiansand#160;
Review
and#8220;
Choctaw Resurgence in Mississippi rests on extraordinary amounts of newly uncovered sources, with an unusually high degree of originality.and#8221;and#8212;Ted Ownby, Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi.
Review
and#8220;Aboriginal weapons are an important subject in themselves and for their role within Native societies and Native-white relations. Roland Bohrand#8217;s knowledge of how Aboriginal weapons work and why they were constructed as they were allows the author to critique the ethnocentric and technologically ignorant assumptions of many earlier scholars. As a bowyer himself, Bohr brings knowledge of making and using bows and arrows lacking in earlier scholarship to his careful historical research.and#8221;and#8212;Dr. Laura Peers, curator of the Americas at the Pitt Rivers Museum and reader in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford
Review
andquot;Indian Play illustrates the expressive and playful dimensions of Native American identities.andquot;andmdash;Sally McBeth, Western Historical Quarterly
Review
andquot;[Uses of Plants by the Hidatsas of the Northern Plains is] indispensable to anyone interested in Native American life on the plains; valuable for ethnobiology and Native American studies.andquot;andmdash;E. N. Anderson, CHOICE
Review
and#8220;Every aspect of life is part of this classic ethnology, from acquisition of food to spirituality to the raising of the four sacred wooden pillars of a new Earth Lodge. . . . Editor Michael Scullin does a wonderful job of weaving the many living parts of Buffalobird-womanand#8217;s story. . . . The bookand#8217;s precisionand#8212;many specific uses for many plantsand#8212;is a pleasure to read. One gets a sense of a people who rose to the challenge of using what nature provided them to wrest a living from a demanding environment.and#8221;and#8212;Bruce Johansen, Jacob J. Isaacson Professor of Communication and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and author of The Native Peoples of North America: A History
Review
and#8220;Democracy and genocide are two activities that most would declare antagonistic. Yet Brendan Lindsay presents primary evidence that reveals the hatred and murderous acts committed by early Californians and government officials, as a grassroots movement, to settle the and#8216;Golden Stateand#8217; by exterminating and dispossessing Native peoples of their ancestral homelands.and#8221;and#8212;Jack Norton, Hupa historian and emeritus professor of Native American studies, Humboldt State University
Review
and#8220;Historian Brendan Lindsay has documented the attempted extermination of Californiaand#8217;s first people and provided a detailed, comprehensive historical treatment of Californiaand#8217;s genocide. He offers a groundbreaking study that will change the historiography of California and genocide studiesand#8212;a penetrating but readable book that will quickly become a classic.and#8221;and#8212;Larry Myers (Pomo), executive secretary of the California Native American Heritage Commission
Review
"[Murder State is] one of the most important works ever published on the history of American Indians in California in the mid-nineteenth century."and#8212;Steven Newcomb, Indian Country
Review
and#8220;A significant historical account detailing white pioneers perpetrating genocide against California Indians. . . . [Employs] compelling evidence.and#8221;and#8212;Clifford E. Trafzer,
Journal of American Studiesand#160;
Review
and#8220;Lindsayand#8217;s methodology and conclusions . . . highlight important questions for scholars to ask of frontier societies, their legal systems, and their citizens.and#8221;and#8212;Brenden Rensink,
Western Historical Quarterlyand#160;
Review
and#8220;Perhaps the most provocative aspect of his book is Lindsayand#8217;s connection of American democracy to the killing of Indians.and#8221;and#8212;Robert G. Lee,
American Historical ReviewReview
andquot;Use of Plants by the Hidatsa is an easy, enjoyable read and a unique, valuable source of information on how people used plants.andquot;andmdash;Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology
Review
"A worthy contribution to comparative military history."and#8212;Alison R. Bernstein, Journal of American History
Review
andquot;Defending Whose Country? is a welcome contribution to the existing body of literature and posits some interest questions in this understudied area of military history.andquot;andquot;andmdash;Alexios Alecou, Army History
Review
andquot;A book written from a Native personand#39;s point of view provides a rareandmdash;and therefore much neededandmdash;narrative about American societyand#39;s impact on indigenous peoples.andquot;andmdash;Edward Valandra, Great Plains Quarterly
Review
andquot;This is an unprecedented addition to the field of Dakota/Lakota scholarship.andquot;andmdash;Shannon D. Smith, Nebraska History
Review
andquot;Rubin brings a firm grasp of sociological and religious theory to the field of Native American history.andquot;andmdash;Journal of American Studies
Review
andquot;Indian Play deserves a place on the bookshelf of any serious American Indian educational scholar. Th e work is an excellent addition to the literature of both the boarding school movement and the creativity of American Indian resistance.andquot;andmdash;Sarah Shillinger, Great Plains Quarterly
Review
andquot;[Murder State] is solid in its synthesis of an array of scholarship, clear in its arguments, and much needed in situating Californiaandrsquo;s indigenous presence in the stateandrsquo;s history.andquot;andmdash;Damon Akins, H-AmIndian
Review
andquot;A fascinating read for anyone interested in the evolution of native North American hunting, warfare, and society after contact with Europeans.andquot;andmdash;James Donohue, South Dakota History
Review
andquot;The Awakening Coast is essential reading for experts on Mosquitia and a welcomed addition to Latin American cultural-historical geography.andquot;andmdash;Andrew Hilburn, Journal of Latin American Geography
Synopsis
European enslavement of American Indians began with Christopher Columbusand#8217;s arrival in the New World. The slave trade expanded with European colonies, and though African slave labor filled many needs, huge numbers of Americaand#8217;s indigenous peoples continued to be captured and forced to work as slaves. Although central to the process of colony building in what became the United States, this phenomena has received scant attention from historians.
Indian Slavery in Colonial America, edited by Alan Gallay, examines the complicated dynamics of Indian enslavement. How and why Indians became both slaves of the Europeans and suppliers of slaveryand#8217;s victims is the subject of this book. The essays in this collection use Indian slavery as a lens through which to explore both Indian and European societies and their interactions, as well as relations between and among Native groups.
Synopsis
During the 1920s and 1930s, Josephine Waggoner (1871and#8211;1943), a Lakota woman who had been educated at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, grew increasingly concerned that the history and culture of her people were being lost as elders died without passing along their knowledge. A skilled writer, Waggoner set out to record the lifeways of her people and correct much of the misinformation about them spread by white writers, journalists, and scholars of the day. To accomplish this task, she traveled to several Lakota and Dakota reservations to interview chiefs, elders, traditional tribal historians, and other tribal members, including women.
Published for the first time and augmented by extensive annotations, Witness offers a rare participantand#8217;s perspective on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Lakota and Dakota life. The first of Waggonerand#8217;s two manuscripts presented here includes extraordinary firsthand and as-told-to historical stories by tribal members, such as accounts of life in the Powder River camps and at the agencies in the 1870s, the experiences of a mixed-blood Hand#250;and#331;kpapand#543;a girl at the first off-reservation boarding school, and descriptions of traditional beliefs. The second manuscript consists of Waggonerand#8217;s sixty biographies of Lakota and Dakota chiefs and headmen based on eyewitness accounts and interviews with the men themselves. Together these singular manuscripts provide new and extensive information on the history, culture, and experiences of the Lakota and Dakota peoples.
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Synopsis
While Indigenous media have gained increasing prominence around the world, the vibrant Aboriginal media world on the Canadian West Coast has received little scholarly attention. As the first ethnography of the Aboriginal media community in Vancouver,
Sovereign Screens reveals the various social forces shaping Aboriginal media production including community media organizations and avant-garde art centers, as well as the national spaces of cultural policy and media institutions.
Kristin L. Dowell uses the concept of visual sovereignty to examine the practices, forms, and meanings through which Aboriginal filmmakers tell their individual stories and those of their Aboriginal nations and the intertribal urban communities in which they work. She explores the ongoing debates within the community about what constitutes Aboriginal media, how this work intervenes in the national Canadian mediascape, and how filmmakers use technology in a wide range of genresand#8212;including experimental mediaand#8212;to recuperate cultural traditions and reimagine Aboriginal kinship and sociality.and#160; Analyzing the interactive relations between this social community and the media forms it produces, Sovereign Screens offers new insights into the on-screen and off-screen impacts of Aboriginal media.and#160;
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Synopsis
The indigenous and Creole inhabitants (Mosquitians of African descent) of the Mosquito Reserve in present-day Nicaragua underwent a key transformation when two Moravian missionaries arrived in 1849. Within a few short generations, the new faith became so firmly established there that eastern Nicaragua to this day remains one of the worldand#8217;s strongest Moravian enclaves.
and#160;The Awakening Coast offers the first comprehensive English-language selection of the writings of the multinational missionaries who established the Moravian faith among the indigenous and Afro-descendant populations through the turbulent years of the Great Awakening of 1881 to 1882, when converts flocked to the church and the missionand#8217;s membership more than doubled. The anthology tracks the intersection of religious, political, and economic forces that led to this dynamic religious shift and illustrates how the missionand#8217;s first fifty years turned a relatively obscure branch of Protestantism into the most important political and spiritual institution in the region by contextualizing the Great Awakening, Protestant evangelism, and indigenous identity during this time of dramatic social change.
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Synopsis
In 1916 anthropologist Gilbert L. Wilson worked closely with Buffalobird-woman, a highly respected Hidatsaand#160;born in 1839 on the Fort Berthold Reservation in western North Dakota, for a study of the Hidatsasand#8217; uses of local plants. What resulted was a treasure trove of ethnobotanical information that was buried for more than seventy-five years in Wilsonand#8217;s archives, now held jointly by the Minnesota Historical Society and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Wilson recorded Buffalobird-womanand#8217;s insightful and vivid descriptions of how the nineteenth-century Hidatsa people had gathered, prepared, and used the plants and wood in their local environment for food, medicine, smoking, fiber, fuel, dye, toys, rituals, and construction.
From courtship rituals that took place while gathering Juneberries, to descriptions of how the women kept young boys from stealing wild plums as they prepared them for use, to recipes for preparing and cooking local plants, Uses of Plants by the Hidatsas of the Northern Plains provides valuable details of Hidatsa daily life during the nineteenth century.
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Synopsis
When Indian Universityand#8212;now Bacone Collegeand#8212;opened its doors in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in 1880, it was a small Baptist institution designed to train young Native Americans to be teachers and Christian missionaries among their own people and to act as agents of cultural assimilation. From 1927 to 1957, however, Bacone College changed course and pursued a new strategy of emphasizing the Indian identities of its students and projecting often-romanticized images of Indianness to the non-Indian public in its fund-raising campaigns. Money was funneled back into the school as administrators hired Native American faculty who in turn created innovative curricular programs in music and the arts that encouraged their students to explore and develop their Native identities. Through their frequent use of humor and inventive wordplay to reference Indiannessand#8212;and#8220;Indian playand#8221;and#8212;students articulated the (often contradictory) implications of being educated Indians in mid-twentieth-century America. In this supportive and creative culture, Bacone became an and#8220;Indian school,and#8221; rather than just another and#8220;school for Indians.and#8221;
In examining how and why this transformation occurred, Lisa K. Neuman situates the studentsand#8217; Indian play within larger theoretical frameworks of cultural creativity, ideologies of authenticity, and counterhegemonic practices that are central to the fields of Native American and indigenous studies today.
Synopsis
For too many years, the academic discipline of history has ignored American Indians or lacked the kind of open-minded thinking necessary to truly understand them. Most historians remain oriented toward the American experience at the expense of the Native experience. As a result, both the status and the quality of Native American history have suffered and remain marginalized within the discipline. In this impassioned work, noted historian Donald L. Fixico challenges academic historiansand#8212;and everyone elseand#8212;to change this way of thinking. Fixico argues that the current discipline and practice of American Indian history are insensitive to and inconsistent with Native peopleand#8217;s traditions, understandings, and ways of thinking about their own history. In
Call for Change, Fixico suggests how the discipline of history can improve by reconsidering its approach to Native peoples.
He offers the and#8220;Medicine Wayand#8221; as a paradigm to see both history and the current world through a Native lens. This new approach paves the way for historians to better understand Native peoples and their communities through the eyes and experiences of Indians, thus reflecting an insightful indigenous historical ethos and reality.
Synopsis
This history of the Mahicans begins with the appearance of Europeans on the Hudson River in 1609 and ends with the removal of these Native people to Wisconsin in the 1830s. Marshaling the methods of history, ethnology, and archaeology, William A. Starna describes as comprehensively as the sources allow the Mahicans while in their Hudson and Housatonic Valley homeland; after their consolidation at the praying town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts; and following their move to Oneida country in central New York at the end of the Revolution and their migration west.
The emphasis throughout this book is on describing and placing into historical context Mahican relations with surrounding Native groups: the Munsees of the lower Hudson,and#160;eastern Iroquoians, and the St. Lawrence and New England Algonquians. Starna also examines the Mahicansand#8217; interactions with Dutch, English, and French interlopers. The first and most transformative of these encounters was with the Dutch and the trade in furs, which ushered in culture change and the loss of Mahican lands. The Dutch presence, along with the new economy, worked to unsettle political alliances in the region that, while leading to new alignments, often engendered rivalries and war. The result is an outstanding examination of the historical record that will become the definitive work on the Mahican people from the colonial period to the Removal Era.
Synopsis
Tears of Repentance revisits and reexamines the familiar stories of intercultural encounters between Protestant missionaries and Native peoples in southern New England from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on Protestant missionariesand#8217; accounts of their ideals, purposes, and goals among the Native communities they served and of the religion as lived, experienced, and practiced among Christianized Indians, Julius H. Rubin offers a new way of understanding the motives and motivations of those who lived in New Englandand#8217;s early Christianized Indian village communities.
Rubin explores how Christian Indians recast Protestant theology into an Indianized quest for salvation from their worldly troubles and toward the promise of an otherworldly paradise. The Great Awakening of the eighteenth century reveals how evangelical pietism transformed religious identities and communities and gave rise to the sublime hope that New Born Indians were children of God who might effectively contest colonialism. With this dream unfulfilled, the exodus from New England to Brothertown envisioned a separatist Christian Indian commonwealth on the borderlands of America after the Revolution.
Tears of Repentance is an important contribution to American colonial and Native American history, offering new ways of examining how Native groups and individuals recast Protestant theology to restore their Native communities and cultures.
Synopsis
Alice C. Fletcher (1838and#8211;1923), one of the few women who became anthropologists in the United States during the nineteenth century, was a pioneer in the practice of participant-observation ethnography. She focused her studies over many years among the Native tribes in Nebraska and South Dakota.
Life among the Indians, Fletcherand#8217;s popularized autobiographical memoir written in 1886and#8211;87 about her first fieldwork among the Sioux and the Omahas during 1881and#8211;82, remained unpublished in Fletcherand#8217;s archives at the Smithsonian Institution for more than one hundred years. In it Fletcher depicts the humor and hardships of her field experiences as a middle-aged woman undertaking anthropological fieldwork alone, while showing genuine respect and compassion for Native ways and beliefs that was far ahead of her time. What emerges is a complex and fascinating picture of a woman questioning the cultural and gender expectations of nineteenth-century America while insightfully portraying rapidly changing reservation life.
Fletcherand#8217;s account of her early fieldwork is available here for the first time, accompanied by an essay by the editors that sheds light on Fletcherand#8217;s place in the development of anthropology and the role of women in the discipline.
Synopsis
This engaging collection of essays discusses the complexities of and#8220;beingand#8221; indigenous in public spaces. Laura R. Graham and H. Glenn Penny bring together a set of highly recognized junior and senior scholars, including indigenous scholars, from a variety of fields to provoke critical thinking about the many ways in which individuals and social groups construct and display unique identities around the world. The case studies in
Performing Indigeneity underscore the social, historical, and immediate contextual factors at play when indigenous people make decisions about when, how, why, and who can and#8220;beand#8221; indigenous in public spaces.
and#160;Performing Indigeneity invites readers to consider how groups and individuals think about performance and display and focuses attention on the ways that public spheres, both indigenous and nonindigenous ones, have received these performances. The essays demonstrate that performance and display are essential to the creation and persistence of indigeneity, while also presenting the conundrum that in many cases and#8220;indigeneityand#8221; excludes some of the voices or identities that the category purports to represent.
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Synopsis
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Northern Paiute) has long been recognized as an important nineteenth-century American Indian activist and writer. Yet her acclaimed performances and speaking tours across the United States, along with the copious newspaper articles that grew out of those tours, have been largely ignored and forgotten.and#160;
The Newspaper Warrior presents new material that enhances public memory as the first volume to collect hundreds of newspaper articles, letters to the editor, advertisements, book reviews, and editorial comments by and about Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. This anthology gathers together her literary production for newspapers and magazines from her 1864 performances in San Francisco to her untimely death in 1891, focusing on the years 1879 to 1887, when Winnemucca Hopkins gave hundreds of lectures in the eastern and western United States; published her book, Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883); and established a bilingual school for Native American children.
Editors Cari M. Carpenter and Carolyn Sorisio masterfully assemble these exceptional and long-forgotten articles in a call for a deeper assessment and appreciation of Winnemucca Hopkinsand#8217;s stature as a Native American author, while also raising important questions about the nature of Native American literature and authorship.
Synopsis
The Allotment Plot reexamines the history of allotment on the Nez Perce Reservation from 1889 to 1892 to account for and emphasize the Nez Perce side of the story. By including Nez Perce responses to allotment, Nicole Tonkovich argues that the assimilationist aims of allotment ultimately failed due in large part to the agency of the Nez Perce people themselves throughout the allotment process. The Nez Perce were actively involved in negotiating the terms under which allotment would proceed and simultaneously engaged in ongoing efforts to protect their stories and other cultural properties from institutional appropriation by the allotment agent, Alice C. Fletcher, who was a respected anthropologist, and her photographer and assistant, E. Jane Gay. The Nez Perce engagement in this process laid a foundation for the long-term survival of the tribe and its culture.
Making use of previously unknown archival sources, Fletcherand#8217;s letters, Gayand#8217;s photographs and journalistic accounts, oral tribal histories, and analyses of performances such as parades and verbal negotiations, Tonkovich assembles a masterful portrait of Nez Perce efforts to control their own future and provides a vital counternarrative of the allotment period, which isand#160;often portrayed as disastrous to Native polities.
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Synopsis
From 1886 to 1913, hundreds of Chiricahua Apache men, women, and children lived and died as prisoners of war in Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma. Their names, faces, and lives have long been forgotten by history, and for nearly one hundred years these individuals have been nothing more than statistics in the history of the United Statesand#8217; tumultuous war against the Chiricahua Apache.
Based on extensive archival research, From Fort Marion to Fort Sill offers long-overdue documentation of the lives and fate of many of these people. This outstanding reference work provides individual biographies for hundreds of the Chiricahua Apache prisoners of war, including those originally classified as POWs in 1886, infants who lived only a few days, children removed from families and sent to Indian boarding schools, and second-generation POWs who lived well into the twenty-first century. Their biographies are often poignant and revealing, and more than 60 previously unpublished photographs give a further glimpse of their humanity.
This masterful documentary work, based on the unpublished research notes of former Fort Sill historian Gillett Griswold, at last brings to light the lives and experiences of hundreds of Chiricahua Apaches whose story has gone untold for too long.
Synopsis
When the Choctaws were removed from their Mississippi homeland to Indian Territory in 1830, several thousand remained behind, planning to take advantage of Article 14 in the removal treaty, which promised that any Choctaws who wished to remain in Mississippi could apply for allotments of land. When the remaining Choctaws applied for their allotments, however, the government reneged, and the Choctaws were left dispossessed and impoverished. Thus begins the history of the Mississippi Choctaws as a distinct people.
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Despite overwhelming poverty and significant racial prejudice in the rural South, the Mississippi Choctaws managed, over the course of a century and a half, to maintain their ethnic identity, persuade the Office of Indian Affairs to provide them with services and lands, create a functioning tribal government, and establish a prosperous and stable reservation economy. The Choctawsand#8217; struggle against segregation in the 1950s and 1960s is an overlooked story of the civil rights movement, and this study of white supremacist support for Choctaw tribalism considerably complicates our understanding of southern history. Choctaw Resurgence in Mississippi traces the Choctawand#8217;s remarkable tribal rebirth, attributing it to their sustained political and social activism.
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Synopsis
Gifts from the Thunder Beings examines North American Aboriginal peoplesand#8217; use of Indigenous and European distance weapons in big-game hunting and combat. Beyond the capabilities of European weapons, Aboriginal peoplesand#8217; ways of adapting and using this technology in combination with Indigenous weaponry contributed greatly to the impact these weapons had on Aboriginal cultures. This gradual transition took place from the beginning of the fur trade in the Hudsonand#8217;s Bay Company trading territory to the treaty and reserve period that began in Canada in the 1870s.
Technological change and the effects of European contact were not uniform throughout North America, as Roland Bohr illustrates by comparing the northern Great Plains and the Central Subarcticand#8212;two adjacent but environmentally different regions of North Americaand#8212;and their respective Indigenous cultures. Beginning with a brief survey of the subarctic and Northern Plains environments and the most common subsistence strategies in these regions around the time of contact, Bohr provides the context for a detailed examination of social, spiritual, and cultural aspects of bows, arrows, quivers, and firearms. His detailed analysis of the shifting usage of bows and arrows and firearms in the northern Great Plains and the Central Subarctic makes Gifts from the Thunder Beings an important addition to the canon of North American ethnology.
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Synopsis
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Euro-American citizenry of California carried out mass genocide against the Native population of their state, using the processes and mechanisms of democracy to secure land and resources for themselves and their private interests. The murder, rape, and enslavement of thousands of Native people were legitimized by notions of democracyand#8212;in this case mob ruleand#8212;through a discreetly organized and brutally effective series of petitions, referenda, town hall meetings, and votes at every level of California government.
and#160;Murder State is a comprehensive examination of these events and their early legacy. Preconceptions about Native Americans as shaped by the popular press and by immigrantsand#8217; experiences on the Overland Trail to California were used to further justify the elimination of Native people in the newcomersand#8217; quest for land. The allegedly and#8220;violent natureand#8221; of Native people was often merely their reaction to the atrocities committed against them as they were driven from their ancestral lands and alienated from their traditional resources.
and#160;In this narrative history employing numerous primary sources and the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on genocide, Brendan C. Lindsay examines the darker side of California history, one rarely studied in detail, and the motives of both Native Americans and Euro-Americans at the time. Murder State calls attention to the misuse of democracy to justify and commit genocide.
Synopsis
In the campaign against Japan in the Pacific during the Second World War, the armed forces of the United States, Australia, andand#160;the Australian colonies of Papua and New Guinea made use of indigenous peoples in new capacities. The United States had long used American Indians as soldiers and scouts in frontier conflicts and in wars with other nations. With the advent of the Navajo Code Talkers in the Pacific theater, Native servicemen were now being employed for contributions that were unique to their Native cultures. In contrast, Australia, Papua, and New Guinea had long attempted to keep indigenous peoples out of the armed forces altogether. With the threat of Japanese invasion, however, they began to bring indigenous peoples into the military as guerilla patrollers, coastwatchers, and regular soldiers.
Defending Whose Country? is a comparative study of the military participation of Papua New Guineans, Yolngu, and Navajos in the Pacific theater. In examining the decisions of state and military leaders to bring indigenous peoples into military service, as well as the decisions of indigenous individuals to serve in the armed forces, Noah Riseman reconsiders the impact of the largely forgotten contributions of indigenous soldiers in the Second World War.
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About the Author
Joanna C. Scherer is an emeritus anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institutionand#8217;s National Museum of Natural History. She is the author of the award-winning book, A Danish Photographer of Idaho Indians: Benedicte Wrensted. Raymond J. DeMallie is Chancellorsand#8217; Professor of Anthropology, codirector of the American Indian Studies Research Institute, and curator of North American Ethnology at the Mathers Museum at Indiana University. He is the editor of The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elkand#8217;s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt, available in a Bison Books edition.