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They Came to Japan
An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543-1640
Michael Cooper, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1995
The Japan accidentally discovered by the Europeans in 1543 was a country torn by internecene wars waged by independent barons who recognised no effective central government and were free to appropriate as many neighbouring fiefs as force of arms and treachery would permit. The Japan which deported the Europeans a century later was a stable, highly centralised bureaucracy under the firm control of a usurping family which was to continue to rule the country until well into the Victorian age. Europeans living in Japan at the time have not only recorded the events of this fascinating period but also provided a picture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Japanese life. Apart from a few lacunae, a remarkably full description of the country in this century—its history, people, traditions, culture, and religion—can be pieced together.
They Came to Japan collects and translates excerpts from more than thirty early European accounts of Japan, many previously unpublished and extremely rare. Arranged into thematic chapters on aspects of Japanese society, these commentaries are most interesting not for what they say about the Japan but about the European writers themselves. Their attitude towards the newly discovered country and its inhabitants is clearly reflected in their letters and reports, especially when implicit comparisons are made between Japan and Europe. During the course of their discovery of the East, the Europeans had generally adopted the role of representatives of a superior race. They had taken for granted that Europe was synonymous with the civilised world, and thus the discovery of the highly developed Japanese culture and civilisation, which had grown up quite independently of Europe, came as a salutary shock. Because they could not aggressively assert themselves by force of arms in such a remote place, as was their norm, this was to be the first confrontation between East and West on equal terms.
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Translation and Subjectivity
On Japan and cultural nationalism
Naoki Sakai
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

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Things Seen and Unseen
Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism
Harry D. Harootunian
University of Chicago Press, 1988
This long-awaited work explores the place of kokugaku (rendered here as "nativism") during Japan's Tokugawa period. Kokugaku, the sense of a distinct and sacred Japanese identity, appeared in the eighteenth century in reaction to the pervasive influence of Chinese culture on Japan. Against this influence, nativists sought a Japanese sense of difference grounded in folk tradition, agricultural values, and ancient Japanese religion. H. D. Harootunian treats nativism as a discourse and shows how it functioned ideologically in Tokugawa Japan.
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The Taming of the Samurai
Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan
Eiko Ikegami
Harvard University Press, 1995

Modern Japan offers us a view of a highly developed society with its own internal logic. Eiko Ikegami makes this logic accessible to us through a sweeping investigation into the roots of Japanese organizational structures. She accomplishes this by focusing on the diverse roles that the samurai have played in Japanese history. From their rise in ancient Japan, through their dominance as warrior lords in the medieval period, and their subsequent transformation to quasi-bureaucrats at the beginning of the Tokugawa era, the samurai held center stage in Japan until their abolishment after the opening up of Japan in the mid-nineteenth century.

This book demonstrates how Japan’s so-called harmonious collective culture is paradoxically connected with a history of conflict. Ikegami contends that contemporary Japanese culture is based upon two remarkably complementary ingredients, honorable competition and honorable collaboration. The historical roots of this situation can be found in the process of state formation, along very different lines from that seen in Europe at around the same time. The solution that emerged out of the turbulent beginnings of the Tokugawa state was a transformation of the samurai into a hereditary class of vassal-bureaucrats, a solution that would have many unexpected ramifications for subsequent centuries.

Ikegami’s approach, while sociological, draws on anthropological and historical methods to provide an answer to the question of how the Japanese managed to achieve modernity without traveling the route taken by Western countries. The result is a work of enormous depth and sensitivity that will facilitate a better understanding of, and appreciation for, Japanese society.

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To My Dearest Wife, Lide
Letters from George B. Gideon Jr. during Commodore Perry’s Expedition to Japan, 1853–1855
Edited by M. Patrick Sauer and David A. Ranzan
University of Alabama Press, 2019
A personal account of Commodore Perry’s landmark expedition to Japan and life in the antebellum navy
 
George B. Gideon Jr. served as second assistant engineer aboard the  USS Powhatan from 1852 to 1856. From his position on the steam  frigate, Gideon traveled to Singapore, Labuan, Borneo, Hong Kong, and many other Asian lands. During his time at sea, Gideon penned dozens of letters to his wife, Lide, back home in Philadelphia. Recently  discovered in the attic of his great-great-grandniece, were fifty-one letters penned by Gideon providing thorough and insightful commentary  throughout the voyage.

Through these correspondences, Gideon laboriously documents the details of his daily life on board, from the food they ate to the technical aspects of his work, as well as observations concerning the historical events unfolding around him, such as Chinese piracy, the Taiping Rebellion, the Crimean War, and the devastation of Shimoda.  To My Dearest Wife, Lide: Letters from George B. Gideon Jr. during  Commodore Perry’s Expedition to Japan, 1853–1855 is a rare first-person account of the landmark American naval expedition to Japan to establish commercial relations between the two countries. Gideon’s letters have been meticulously transcribed and annotated by the editors and are an invaluable primary historical source.

Gideon’s letters are candid and revealing, delving into the rampant dysfunction in the navy of the 1850s—sickness and disease, alcohol abuse, and poor leadership, among other challenges. Gideon also unabashedly shares his own cynical views of the navy’s role in supporting American economic interests in Japan. This firsthand account of the political mission of the Perry expedition is a unique contribution to naval and military history and gives readers a better view of life aboard a navy ship.
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Technology of Empire
Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883–1945
Daqing Yang
Harvard University Press, 2010

Nearly half a century ago, the economic historian Harold Innis pointed out that the geographical limits of empires were determined by communications and that, historically, advances in the technologies of transport and communications have enabled empires to grow. This power of communications was demonstrated when Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s radio speech announcing Japan’s surrender and the dissolution of its empire was broadcast simultaneously throughout not only the Japanese home islands but also all the territories under its control over the telecommunications system that had, in part, made that empire possible.

In the extension of the Japanese empire in the 1930s and 1940s, technology, geo-strategy, and institutions were closely intertwined in empire building. The central argument of this study of the development of a communications network linking the far-flung parts of the Japanese imperium is that modern telecommunications not only served to connect these territories but, more important, made it possible for the Japanese to envision an integrated empire in Asia. Even as the imperial communications network served to foster integration and strengthened Japanese leadership and control, its creation and operation exacerbated long-standing tensions and created new conflicts within the government, the military, and society in general.

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Tokyo Rising
The City Since the Great Earthquake
Edward Seidensticker
Harvard University Press, 1991
The Great Earthquake of 1923 left much of Tokyo desolate. Shitamachi, the Low City, heart of Tokyo's cultural life for centuries, was a smoking ruin--hundreds of blocks of wooden dwellings, teahouses, and entertainment quarters gone forever. Yet Tokyo was a city that would not die. Here, in his brilliant sequel to Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake, Edward Seidensticker carries the story of this irrepressible metropolis forward to the present, showing it rising not only from the disaster of the earthquake but a second time, from the still more serious catastrophe of 1945, to become a city in which skyscrapers stand in the midst of neighborhoods jammed full of little bars and "soaplands," baseball is the national sport, one can spend $500 on a meal, the best subway system in the world is matched by the worst traffic jams, and only a multimillionaire can afford to buy a house. Exciting, horrifying, utterly distinctive, modern Tokyo comes to life in Tokyo Rising as never before.
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A Time of Crisis
Japan, the Great Depression, and Rural Revitalization
Kerry Smith
Harvard University Press, 2001
This study of Japan's transformation by the economic crises of the 1930s focuses on efforts to overcome the effects of the Great Depression in rural areas, particularly the activities of local activists and policymakers in Tokyo. The author argues that these efforts changed the nation's thinking about the countryside, as well as Japan's conception of its economic and cultural relationship to the nation, in ways that have important implications for our understanding of both the war years and the postwar reconstruction. The reactions of inhabitants of rural areas to the depression shed new light on how average Japanese responded to the problems of modernization and how they re-created the countryside.
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Tradition, Treaties, and Trade
Qing Imperialism and Chosŏn Korea, 1850–1910
Kirk W. Larsen
Harvard University Press, 2008

Relations between the Chosŏn and Qing states are often cited as the prime example of the operation of the “traditional” Chinese ”tribute system.” In contrast, this work contends that the motivations, tactics, and successes (and failures) of the late Qing Empire in Chosŏn Korea mirrored those of other nineteenth-century imperialists. Between 1850 and 1910, the Qing attempted to defend its informal empire in Korea by intervening directly, not only to preserve its geopolitical position but also to promote its commercial interests. And it utilized the technology of empire—treaties, international law, the telegraph, steamships, and gunboats.

Although the transformation of Qing–Chosŏn diplomacy was based on modern imperialism, this work argues that it is more accurate to describe the dramatic shift in relations in terms of flexible adaptation by one of the world’s major empires in response to new challenges. Moreover, the new modes of Qing imperialism were a hybrid of East Asian and Western mechanisms and institutions. Through these means, the Qing Empire played a fundamental role in Korea’s integration into regional and global political and economic systems.

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Truman and Korea
The Political Culture of the Early Cold War
Paul G. Pierpaoli, Jr.
University of Missouri Press, 1999

Detailing for the first time the story of America's homefront during the Korean War, Truman and Korea fills an important gap in the historical scholarship of the postwar era. Paul Pierpaoli analyzes the political, economic, social, and international ramifications of America's first war of Soviet containment, never losing sight of the larger context of the cold war. He focuses on how and why the Truman administration undertook a bloody, inconclusive war on the Korean peninsula while permanently placing the nation on a war footing.

Truman and Korea illuminates the importance of the Korean conflict as a critical turning point in the cold war by examining both the immediate and the long-term domestic and foreign policy effects of the conflict. Pierpaoli addresses such important topics as presidential war powers and debates concerning the Defense Production Act; the inner workings of the many war mobilization agencies; the operations and politics of nationwide price and wage controls; questions concerning cold war tax policies and fiscal and monetary policies; and the evolution of national security policy.

Pierpaoli shows that President Truman's decision to intervene in the Korean War quickly became subsumed by larger cold war concerns. By the autumn of 1950 the Korean mobilization program had become the nation's de facto cold war preparedness program, which would come to span nearly forty years and eight presidential administrations. After 1950 the cold war not only continued to significantly shape political and ideological discourse in the United States but also began to reshape aggregate economic policy. By doing so, it altered the nation's industrial and economic contours, giving birth to the concept of an institutionalized "national security state," which in turn spawned the cold war military-industrial-scientific complex.

Based upon extensive research in the papers and official presidential files of Harry S. Truman, as well as many manuscript collections and records of wartime and government agencies, Truman and Korea offers a new perspective on the Korean War era and its inextricable ties to broader cold war decision making.

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Talking to North Korea
Ending the Nuclear Standoff
Glyn Ford
Pluto Press, 2018
Few attempts have been made to understand the internal logic of Kim Jong-un’s regime and why life in North Korea is so difficult.
 
This provocative insider’s account blasts apart the myths which paint North Korea as a rogue state run by a mad leader. Informed by extraordinary access to the country's leadership, Glyn Ford investigates the regime from the inside, providing game-changing insights. Acknowledging that North Korea is a deeply flawed and barbaric state, he nonetheless shows that sections of the leadership are desperate to modernize and end their isolation.
 
With chapters on recent developments including the Trump / Kim summit, Ford supports a dialogue between East and West and provides a road map to avert the looming threat of a war that would threaten the lives of millions.
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Texts from the Pyramid Age
Nigel C. Strudwick
SBL Press, 2005
Ancient Egypt is well known for its towering monuments and magnificent statuary, but other aspects of its civilization are less well known, especially its written texts. Now Texts from the Pyramid Age provides ready access to new translations of a representative selection of texts ranging from the historically significant to the repetitive formulae of the tomb inscriptions from Old Kingdom Egypt (ca. 2700-2170 B.C.). These royal and private inscriptions, coming from both the secular and religious milieus and from all kinds of physical contexts, not only shed light on the administration, foreign expeditions, and funerary beliefs of the period but also bring to life the Egyptians themselves, revealing how they saw the world and how they wanted the world to see them. Strudwick's helpful introduction to the history and literature of this seminal period provides important background for reading and understanding these historical texts.
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Thutmose III
A New Biography
Eric H. Cline and David O'Connor, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2006

Thutmose III was without question one of Egypt's greatest pharaohs. His 54-year reign was packed with momentous events as well as being unusually long. Thutmose III includes an overview of his life, and detailed examinations of civil administration, the religion and cults, the monumental architecture and royal building program, royal tombs and iconography, royal portraiture and ideology, the artistic production, the Northern and Southern campaigns, as well as the Aegean and other foreign visitors to Egypt during Thutmose's time. Finally, the book concludes with a look at the end of his reign and the accession of Amenhotep II.

This extensive treatment of a pivotal figure in the ancient Mediterranean world during the Late Bronze Age will provide a uniquely comprehensive view of one of Egypt's greatest pharaohs and will be of interest to a wide audience, including specialists in Egypt and the Near East, graduate and undergraduate students, and those with a general interest in Egypt.

Eric H. Cline is Associate Professor of Ancient History and Archaeology in the Department of Classical and Semitic Languages and Literatures at George Washington University.

David O'Connor is Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts.

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Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew
Entangled Lives in Morocco
Lawrence Rosen
University of Chicago Press, 2015
In this remarkable work by seasoned scholar Lawrence Rosen, we follow the fascinating intellectual developments of four ordinary Moroccans over the span of forty years. Walking and talking with Haj Hamed Britel, Yaghnik Driss, Hussein Qadir, and Shimon Benizri—in a country that, in a little over a century, has gone from an underdeveloped colonial outpost to a modern Arab country in the throes of economic growth and religious fervor—Rosen details a fascinating plurality of viewpoints on culture, history, and the ways both can be dramatically transformed.

Through the intellectual lives of these four men, this book explores a number of interpretative and theoretical issues that have made Arab culture distinct, especially in relationship to the West: how nothing is ever hard and fast, how everything is relational and always a product of negotiation. It showcases the vitality of the local in a global era, and it contrasts Arab notions of time, equality, and self with those in the West. Likewise, Rosen unveils his own entanglement in their world and the drive to keep the analysis of culture first and foremost, even as his own life enmeshes itself in those of his study. An exploration of faith, politics, history, and memory, this book highlights the world of everyday life in Arab society in ways that challenge common notions and stereotypes. 
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Talk of Darkness
By Fatna El Bouih
University of Texas Press, 2008

Fatna El Bouih was first arrested in Casablanca as an 18-year-old student leader with connections to the Marxist movement. Over the next decade she was rearrested, forcibly disappeared, tortured, and transferred between multiple prisons. While imprisoned, she helped organize a hunger strike, completed her undergraduate degree in sociology, and began work on a Master's degree.

Beginning with the harrowing account of her kidnapping during the heightened political tension of the 1970s, Talk of Darkness tells the true story of one woman's struggle to secure political prisoners' rights and defend herself against an unjust imprisonment.

Poetically rendered from Arabic into English by Mustapha Kamal and Susan Slyomovics, Fatna El Bouih's memoir exposes the techniques of state-instigated "disappearance" in Morocco and condemns the lack of laws to protect prisoners' basic human rights.

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Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa
Mungo Park
Duke University Press, 2000
Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa has long been regarded as a classic of African travel literature. In fulfilling his mission to find the Niger River and in documenting its potential as an inland waterway for trade, Park was significant in opening Africa to European economic interests. His modest, low-key heroism made it possible for the British public to imagine themselves as a welcomed force in Africa. As a tale of adventure and survival, it has inspired the imaginations of readers since its first publication in 1799 and writers from Wordsworth and Melville to Conrad, Hemingway, and T. Coreghessan Boyle have acknowledged the influence of Park’s narrative on their work.
Unlike the large expeditions that followed him, Park traveled only with native guides or alone. Without much of an idea of where he was going, he relied entirely on local people for food, shelter, and directions throughout his eventful eighteen month journey. While his warm reaction to the people he met made him famous as a sentimental traveler, his chronicle also provides a rare written record of the lives of ordinary people in West Africa before European intervention. His accounts of war, politics, and the spread of Islam, as well as his constant confrontations with slavery as practiced in eighteenth-century West Africa, are as valuable today as they were in 1799. In preparing this new edition, editor Kate Ferguson Marsters presents the complete text and includes reproductions of all the original maps and illustrations.
Park’s narrative serves as a crucial text in relation to scholarship on the history of slavery, colonial enterprise, and nineteenth-century imperialism. The availability of this full edition will give a new generation of readers access to a travel narrative that has inspired other readers and writers over two centuries and will enliven scholarly discussion in many fields.
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To Speak and Be Heard
Seeking Good Government in Uganda, ca. 1500–2015
Holly Elisabeth Hanson
Ohio University Press, 2021

A history of a political practice through which East Africans have sought to create calm, harmonious polities for five hundred years.

“To speak and be heard” is a uniquely Ugandan approach to government that aligns power with groups of people that actively demonstrate their assent both through their physical presence and through essential gifts of goods and labor. In contrast to a parliamentary democracy, the Ugandan system requires a level of active engagement much higher than simply casting a vote in periodic elections.

These political strategies—assembly, assent, and powerful gifts—can be traced from before the emergence of kingship in East Africa (ca. 1500) through enslavement, colonial intervention, and anticolonial protest. They appear in the violence of the Idi Amin years and are present, sometimes in dysfunctional ways, in postcolonial politics. Ugandans insisted on the necessity of multiple voices contributing to and affirming authority, and citizens continued to believe in those principles even when colonial interference made good governance through building relationships almost impossible.

Through meticulous research, Holly Hanson tells a history of the region that differs from commonly accepted views. In contrast to the well-established perception that colonial manipulation of Uganda’s tribes made state failure inevitable, Hanson argues that postcolonial Ugandans had the capacity to launch a united, functional nation-state and could have done so if leaders in Buganda, Britain, and Uganda’s first governments had made different choices.

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Taifa
Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania
James R. Brennan
Ohio University Press, 2012

Taifa is a story of African intellectual agency, but it is also an account of how nation and race emerged out of the legal, social, and economic histories in one major city, Dar es Salaam. Nation and race—both translatable as taifa in Swahili—were not simply universal ideas brought to Africa by European colonizers, as previous studies assume. They were instead categories crafted by local African thinkers to make sense of deep inequalities, particularly those between local Africans and Indian immigrants. Taifa shows how nation and race became the key political categories to guide colonial and postcolonial life in this African city.

Using deeply researched archival and oral evidence, Taifa transforms our understanding of urban history and shows how concerns about access to credit and housing became intertwined with changing conceptions of nation and nationhood. Taifa gives equal attention to both Indians and Africans; in doing so, it demonstrates the significance of political and economic connections between coastal East Africa and India during the era of British colonialism, and illustrates how the project of racial nationalism largely severed these connections by the 1970s.

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The Threat of Liberation
Imperialism and Revolution in Zanzibar
Amrit Wilson
Pluto Press, 2013

The Threat of Liberation returns to the tumultuous years of the Cold War, when, in a striking parallel with today, imperialist powers were seeking to institute ‘regime change’ and install pliant governments.

Using iconic photographs, declassified US and British documents, and in-depth interviews, Amrit Wilson examines the role of the Umma Party of Zanzibar and its leader, the visionary Marxist revolutionary, Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu. Drawing parallels between US paranoia about Chinese Communist influence in the 1960s with contemporary fears about Chinese influence, it looks at the new race for Africa’s resources, the creation of AFRICOM and how East African politicians have bolstered US control. The book also draws on US cables released by Wikileaks showing Zanzibar's role in the ‘War on Terror’ in Eastern Africa today.

The Threat of Liberation reflects on the history of a party which confronted imperialism and built unity across ethnic divisions, and considers the contemporary relevance of such strategies.

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Themes in West Africa’s History
Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong
Ohio University Press, 2006

There has long been a need for a new textbook on West Africa’s history. In Themes in West Africa’s History, editor Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong and his contributors meet this need, examining key themes in West Africa’s prehistory to the present through the lenses of their different disciplines.

The contents of the book comprise an introduction and thirteen chapters divided into three parts. Each chapter provides an overview of existing literature on major topics, as well as a short list of recommended reading, and breaks new ground through the incorporation of original research. The first part of the book examines paths to a West African past, including perspectives from archaeology, ecology and culture, linguistics, and oral traditions. Part two probes environment, society, and agency and historical change through essays on the slave trade, social inequality, religious interaction, poverty, disease, and urbanization. Part three sheds light on contemporary West Africa in exploring how economic and political developments have shaped religious expression and identity in significant ways.

Themes in West Africa’s History represents a range of intellectual views and interpretations from leading scholars on West Africa’s history. It will appeal to college undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars in the way it draws on different disciplines and expertise to bring together key themes in West Africa’s history, from prehistory to the present.

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Thomas Sankara
An African Revolutionary
Ernest Harsch
Ohio University Press, 2014
Thomas Sankara, often called the African Che Guevara, was president of Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa, until his assassination during the military coup that brought down his government. Although his tenure in office was relatively short, Sankara left an indelible mark on his country’s history and development. An avowed Marxist, he outspokenly asserted his country’s independence from France and other Western powers while at the same time seeking to build a genuine pan-African unity. Ernest Harsch traces Sankara’s life from his student days to his recruitment into the military, early political awakening, and increasing dismay with his country’s extreme poverty and political corruption. As he rose to higher leadership positions, he used those offices to mobilize people for change and to counter the influence of the old, corrupt elites. Sankara and his colleagues initiated economic and social policies that shifted away from dependence on foreign aid and toward a greater use of the country’s own resources to build schools, health clinics, and public works. Although Sankara’s sweeping vision and practical reforms won him admirers both in Burkina Faso and across Africa, a combination of domestic opposition groups and factions within his own government and the army finally led to his assassination in 1987. This is the first English-language book to tell the story of Sankara’s life and struggles, drawing on the author’s extensive firsthand research and reporting on Burkina Faso, including interviews with the late leader. Decades after his death, Sankara remains an inspiration to young people throughout Africa for his integrity, idealism, and dedication to independence and self-determination.
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Tired of Weeping
Mother Love, Child Death, and Poverty in Guinea-Bissau
Jonina Einarsdottir
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
In this comprehensive and provocative study of maternal reactions to child death in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa, anthropologist Jónína Einarsdóttir challenges the assumption that mothers in high-poverty societies will neglect their children and fail to mourn their deaths as a survival strategy. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 1993 to 1998 among the matrilineal Papel, who reside in the Biombo region, this work includes theoretical discussion of reproductive practices, conceptions of children, childcare customs, interpretations of diseases and death, and infanticide. Einarsdóttir also brings compelling narratives of life experiences and reflections of Papel women.
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To Be Nsala's Daughter
Decomposing the Colonial Gaze
Chérie N. Rivers
Duke University Press, 2023
In To Be Nsala’s Daughter, Chérie N. Rivers shows how colonial systems of normalized violence condition the way we see and, through collaboration with contemporary Congolese artists, imagines ways we might learn to see differently. Rivers focuses on a photograph of a Congolese man, Nsala, looking at the disembodied hand and foot of his daughter, which were removed as punishment for his failure to deliver the requisite amount of rubber in King Léopold’s Congo. This photograph, taken by British missionary Alice Seeley Harris, featured prominently in abolitionist campaigns to end colonial atrocities in Central Africa in the early twentieth century. But in addition to exposing the visible violence of colonialism, Rivers argues, this photograph also exposes the invisible—and continued—violence of the colonial gaze. With a poetic, personal collage of stories and images, To Be Nsala’s Daughter traces the past and present of the colonial gaze both in Congo and in the author’s lived experience as a mixed-race Black woman in the United States.
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Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid
Belinda Bozzoli
Ohio University Press, 2004

A compelling study of the origins and trajectory of one of the legendary black uprisings against apartheid, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid draws on insights gained from the literature on collective action and social movements. It delves into the Alexandra Rebellion of 1986 to reveal its inner workings.

Belinda Bozzoli’s aim is to examine how the residents of Alexandra, a poverty-stricken segregated township in Johannesburg, manipulated and overturned the meanings of space, time, and power in their sequestered world. She explains how they used political theater to convey, stage, and dramatize their struggle and how young and old residents generated differing ideologies and tactics, giving rise to a distinct form of generational politics.

Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid asks the reader to enter into the world of the rebels and to confront the moral complexity and social duress they experienced as they invented new social forms and violently attacked old ones. It is an important study of collective action that will be of great interest to sociologists and to scholars of Africa, particularly to those interested in the antiapartheid struggle.

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The Terrorist Album
Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police
Jacob Dlamini
Harvard University Press, 2020

An award-winning historian and journalist tells the very human story of apartheid’s afterlife, tracing the fates of South African insurgents, collaborators, and the security police through the tale of the clandestine photo album used to target apartheid’s enemies.

From the 1960s until the early 1990s, the South African security police and counterinsurgency units collected over 7,000 photographs of apartheid’s enemies. The political rogue’s gallery was known as the “terrorist album,” copies of which were distributed covertly to police stations throughout the country. Many who appeared in the album were targeted for surveillance. Sometimes the security police tried to turn them; sometimes the goal was elimination.

All of the albums were ordered destroyed when apartheid’s violent collapse began. But three copies survived the memory purge. With full access to one of these surviving albums, award-winning South African historian and journalist Jacob Dlamini investigates the story behind these images: their origins, how they were used, and the lives they changed. Extensive interviews with former targets and their family members testify to the brutal and often careless work of the police. Although the police certainly hunted down resisters, the terrorist album also contains mug shots of bystanders and even regime supporters. Their inclusion is a stark reminder that apartheid’s guardians were not the efficient, if morally compromised, law enforcers of legend but rather blundering agents of racial panic.

With particular attentiveness to the afterlife of apartheid, Dlamini uncovers the stories of former insurgents disenchanted with today’s South Africa, former collaborators seeking forgiveness, and former security police reinventing themselves as South Africa’s newest export: “security consultants” serving as mercenaries for Western nations and multinational corporations. The Terrorist Album is a brilliant evocation of apartheid’s tragic caprice, ultimate failure, and grim legacy.

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These Oppressions Won’t Cease
An Anthology of the Political Thought of the Cape Khoesan, 1777-1879
Robert Ross
University of Cincinnati Press, 2018
The Khoesan were the first people in Africa to undergo the rigors of European colonization. By the early nineteenth century, they had largely been brought under colonial rule, dispossessed of their land and stock, and forced to work as laborers for farmers of European descent. Nevertheless, a portion of them were able to regain a degree of freedom and maintain their independence by taking refuge in the mission stations of the Western and Eastern Cape, most notably in the Kat River valley. Through petitions, speeches at meetings, letters to the newspapers and correspondence between themselves, the Cape Khoesan articulated a continuous critique of the oppressions of colonialism, always stressing the need for equality before the law, as well as their opposition to attempts to limit their freedom of movement through vagrancy legislation and related measures. This was accompanied by a well-grounded distrust of the British settlers in the Eastern Cape and a concomitant hope, rarely realized, in the benevolence of the British government in London. Comprising 98 texts, These Oppressions Won’t Cease – was an utterance expressed by Willem Uithaalder, commander of Khoe rebel forces in the war of 1850-53 – contains the essential documents of Khoesan political thought in the nineteenth century.
 
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Terrific Majesty
The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention
Carolyn Hamilton
Harvard University Press, 1998

Since his assassination in 1828, King Shaka Zulu—founder of the powerful Zulu kingdom and leader of the army that nearly toppled British colonial rule in South Africa—has made his empire in popular imaginations throughout Africa and the West. Shaka is today the hero of Zulu nationalism, the centerpiece of Inkatha ideology, a demon of apartheid, the namesake of a South African theme park, even the subject of a major TV film.

Terrific Majesty explores the reasons for the potency of Shaka’s image, examining the ways it has changed over time—from colonial legend, through Africanist idealization, to modern cultural icon. This study suggests that “tradition” cannot be freely invented, either by European observers who recorded it or by subsequent African ideologues. There are particular historical limits and constraints that operate on the activities of invention and imagination and give the various images of Shaka their power. These insights are illustrated with subtlety and authority in a series of highly original analyses.

Terrific Majesty is an exceptional work whose special contribution lies in the methodological lessons it delivers; above all its sophisticated rehabilitation of colonial sources for the precolonial period, through the demonstration that colonial texts were critically shaped by indigenous African discourse. With its sensitivity to recent critical studies, the book will also have a wider resonance in the fields of history, anthropology, cultural studies, and postcolonial literature.

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Tomorrow Is Another Country
The Inside Story of South Africa's Road to Change
Allister Sparks
University of Chicago Press, 1996
The companion to Allister Sparks's award-winning The Mind of South Africa, this book is an extraordinary account from South Africa's premier journalist of the negotiating process that led to majority rule. Tomorrow is Another Country retells the story of the behind-the-scenes collaborations that started with a meeting between Kobie Coetsee, then minister of justice, and Nelson Mandela in 1985. By 1986, negotiations involved senior government officials, intelligence agents, and the African National Congress. For the next four years, they assembled in places such as a gamepark lodge, the Palace Hotel in Lucerne, Switzerland, a fishing hideaway, and even in a hospital room. All the while, De Klerk's campaign assured white constituents nothing would change. Sparks shows how the key players, who began with little reason to trust one another, developed friendships which would later play a crucial role in South Africa's struggle to end apartheid.

"A gripping, fast-paced, authoritative account of the long and mostly secret negotiations that brought South Africa's bitter conflict to its near-miraculous end. Sparks's description of these talks sometimes brings a lump to one's throat. He shows how the participants' deep mutual suspicion was gradually replaced by excitement at the prospect of making a momentous agreement—and also by the dawning realization that the people on the other side were human beings, perhaps even decent human beings."—Adam Hochschild, New York Times Book Review

"A splendid and original history. . . . Sparks's skillful weaving of myriad strands—Mandela's secret sessions with the committee, the clandestine talks in England between the African National Congress and the government, the back-channel communications between Mandela and the A.N.C. in exile, the trepidation of Botha and the apparent transformation of his successor, De Klerk—possesses the drama and intrigue of a diplomatic whodunit."—Richard Stengel, Time

"Sparks offers many reasons for hope, but the most profound of them is the story this book tells."—Jacob Weisberg, Washington Post

"The most riveting of the many [accounts] that have been published about the end of apartheid."—The Economist
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Thabo Mbeki
Adekeye Adebajo
Ohio University Press, 2017
Former South African president Thabo Mbeki is a complex figure. He was a committed young Marxist who, while in power, embraced conservative economic policies and protected white corporate interests; a rational and dispassionate thinker who was particularly sensitive to criticism and dissent; and a champion of African self-reliance who relied excessively on foreign capital. As a key liberation leader in exile, he was instrumental in the ANC’s antiapartheid struggle. Later, he helped build one of the world’s most respected constitutional democracies. As president, though, he was unable to overcome inherited socioeconomic challenges, and his disastrous AIDS policies will remain a major blotch on his legacy. Mbeki is the most important African political figure of his generation. He will be remembered as a foreign policy president for his peacemaking efforts and his role in building continental institutions, not least of which was the African Union. In this concise biography, ideally suited for the classroom, Adekeye Adebajo seeks to illuminate Mbeki’s contradictions and situate him in a pan-African pantheon.
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The Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Mary Ingouville Burton
Ohio University Press, 2017

In 1995, South Africa’s new government set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a lynchpin of the country’s journey forward from apartheid. In contrast to the Nuremberg Trials and other retributive responses to atrocities, the TRC’s emphasis on reconciliation marked a restorative approach to addressing human rights violations and their legacies. The hearings, headed by Bishop Desmond Tutu, began in spring of 1996.

The commission was set up with three purposes: to investigate abuses, to assist victims with rehabilitation, and to consider perpetrators’ requests for amnesty. More than two decades after the first hearings, the TRC’s legacy remains mixed. Many families still do not know what became of their loved ones, and the commission came under legal challenges both from ex-president F. W. de Klerk and the African National Congress. Yet, the TRC fulfilled a vital role in the transition from apartheid to democracy, and has become a model for other countries.

This latest addition to the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series is a trenchant look at the TRC’s entire, stunningly ambitious project. And as a longtime activist for justice in South Africa and a former commissioner of the TRC, Mary Ingouville Burton is uniquely positioned to write this complex story.

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To the Fairest Cape
European Encounters in the Cape of Good Hope
Jack, Malcolm
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Crossing the remote, southern tip of Africa has fired the imagination of European travellers from the time Bartholomew Dias opened up the passage to the East by rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. Dutch, British, French, Danes, and Swedes formed an endless stream of seafarers who made the long journey southwards in pursuit of wealth, adventure, science, and missionary, as well as outright national, interest. Beginning by considering the early hunter-gatherer inhabitants of the Cape and their culture, Malcolm Jack focuses in his account on the encounter that the European visitors had with the Khoisan peoples, sometimes sympathetic but often exploitative from the time of the Portuguese to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. This commercial and colonial background is key to understanding the development of the vibrant city that is modern Cape Town, as well as the rich diversity of the Cape hinterland.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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To Swim with Crocodiles
Land, Violence, and Belonging in South Africa, 1800-1996
Jill E Kelly
Michigan State University Press, 2018
To Swim with Crocodiles: Land, Violence, and Belonging in South Africa, 1800–1996 offers a fresh perspective on the history of rural politics in South Africa, from the rise of the Zulu kingdom to the civil war at the dawn of democracy in KwaZulu-Natal. The book shows how Africans in the Table Mountain region drew on the cultural inheritance of ukukhonza—a practice of affiliation that binds together chiefs and subjects—to seek social and physical security in times of war and upheaval. Grounded in a rich combination of archival sources and oral interviews, this book examines relations within and between chiefdoms to bring wider concerns of African studies into focus, including land, violence, chieftaincy, ethnic and nationalist politics, and development. Colonial indirect rule, segregation, and apartheid attempted to fix formerly fluid polities into territorial “tribes” and ethnic identities, but the Zulu practice of ukukhonza maintained its flexibility and endured. By exploring what Zulu men and women knew about and how they remembered ukukhonza, Kelly reveals how Africans envisioned and defined relationships with the land, their chiefs, and their neighbors as white minority rule transformed the countryside and local institutions of governance. 
 
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Traditional Healers and Childhood in Zimbabwe
Pamela Reynolds
Ohio University Press, 1995

Based on the author’s fieldwork among the people of Zezuru, this study focuses on children as clients and as healers in training. In Reynolds’s ethnographic investigation of possession and healing, she pays particular attention to the way healers are identified and authenticated in communities, and how they are socialized in the use of medicinal plants, dreams, and ritual healing practices. Reynolds examines spiritual interpretation and remediation of children’s problems, including women’s roles in these activities, and the Zezuru concepts of trauma, evil, illness, and death. Because this study was undertaken just after the War of Liberation in Zimbabwe, it also documents the devastating effects of the war.

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The Travelers' World
Europe to the Pacific
Harry Liebersohn
Harvard University Press, 2006

In a beautifully crafted narrative that transports the reader from the salons of Europe to the shores of Tahiti, Harry Liebersohn examines the transformation of global knowledge during the great age of scientific exploration. He moves beyond the traditional focus on British and French travelers to include Germans, Russians, and some Americans, as well as the Tahitian, Hawaiian, and other Pacific islanders they encountered. Germany gets special attention because its travelers epitomized the era’s cosmopolitanism and its philosophers engaged most fully in a multicultural understanding of humanity.

Famous adventurers like Captain Cook make appearances, but it’s the observations of such naturalists as Philibert Commerson, George Forster, and Adelbert von Chamisso that helped most to generate a new understanding of these far-flung societies. These European travelers saw non-Europeans neither as “savages” nor as projections of colonial fantasies. Instead the explorers accumulated a rich storehouse of perceptions through negotiations with patrons at home, collaborators abroad, salon philosophers, and missionary rivals.

Liebersohn illuminates the transformative nature of human connections. He examines the expectations these servants of empire brought to the peoples they encountered, and acknowledges the effects of Oceanian behaviors, including unexpected notions of sexuality, on the Europeans. Equally important, he details the reception of these travelers upon their return home.

An unforgettable voyage filled with delightful characters, dramatic encounters, and rich cultural details, The Travelers’ World heralds a moment of intellectual preparation for the modern global era. We now travel effortlessly to distant places, but the questions about perception, truth, and knowledge that these intercontinental mediators faced still resonate.

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They Make Themselves
Work and Play among the Baining of Papua New Guinea
Jane Fajans
University of Chicago Press, 1997
For generations of anthropologists, the Baining people have presented a challenge, because of their apparent lack of cultural or social structure. This group of small-scale horticulturists seems devoid of the complex belief systems and social practices that characterize other traditional peoples of Papua New Guinea. Their daily existence is mundane and repetitive in the extreme, articulated by only the most elementary familial relationships and social connections. The routine of everyday life, however, is occasionally punctuated by stunningly beautiful festivals of masked dancers, which the Baining call play and to which they attribute no symbolic significance.

In a new work sure to evoke considerable repercussions and debate in anthropological theory, Jane Fajans courageously takes on the "Baining Problem," arguing that the Baining define themselves not through intricate cosmologies or social networks, but through the meanings generated by their own productive and reproductive work.
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Treasured Possessions
Indigenous Interventions into Cultural and Intellectual Property
Haidy Geismar
Duke University Press, 2013
What happens when ritual practitioners from a small Pacific nation make an intellectual property claim to bungee jumping? When a German company successfully sues to defend its trademark of a Māori name? Or when UNESCO deems ephemeral sand drawings to be "intangible cultural heritage"? In Treasured Possessions, Haidy Geismar examines how global forms of cultural and intellectual property are being redefined by everyday people and policymakers in two markedly different Pacific nations. The New Hebrides, a small archipelago in Melanesia managed jointly by Britain and France until 1980, is now the independent nation-state of Vanuatu, with a population that is more than 95 percent indigenous. New Zealand, by contrast, is a settler state and former British colony that engages with its entangled Polynesian and British heritage through an ethos of "biculturalism" that is meant to involve an indigenous population of just 15 percent. Alternative notions of property, resources, and heritage—informed by distinct national histories—are emerging in both countries. These property claims are advanced in national and international settings, but they emanate from specific communities and cultural landscapes, and they are grounded in an awareness of ancestral power and inheritance. They reveal intellectual and cultural property to be not only legal constructs but also powerful ways of asserting indigenous identities and sovereignties.
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Trans-Americanity
Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico
José David Saldívar
Duke University Press, 2012
A founder of U.S.-Mexico border studies, José David Saldívar is a leading figure in efforts to expand the scope of American studies. In Trans-Americanity, he advances that critical project by arguing for a transnational, antinational, and "outernational" paradigm for American studies. Saldívar urges Americanists to adopt a world-system scale of analysis. "Americanity as a Concept," an essay by the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, the architect of world-systems analysis, serves as a theoretical touchstone for Trans-Americanity. In conversation not only with Quijano and Wallerstein, but also with the theorists Gloria Anzaldúa, John Beverley, Ranajit Guha, Walter D. Mignolo, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Saldívar explores questions of the subaltern and the coloniality of power, emphasizing their location within postcolonial studies. Analyzing the work of José Martí, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, and many other writers, he addresses concerns such as the "unspeakable" in subalternized African American, U.S. Latino and Latina, Cuban, and South Asian literature; the rhetorical form of postcolonial narratives; and constructions of subalternized identities. In Trans-Americanity, Saldívar demonstrates and makes the case for Americanist critique based on a globalized study of the Américas.
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Transatlantic Scots
Edited by Celeste Ray, foreword by James Hunter
University of Alabama Press, 2005
Examines the impact of the Scottish legacy on North American cultures and heritage
 
During the past four decades, growing interest in North Americans' cultural and ancestral ties to Scotland has produced hundreds of new Scottish clan and heritage societies.  Well over 300 Scottish Highland games and gatherings annually take place across the U.S. and Canada. 

Transatlantic Scots is a multidisciplinary collection that studies the regional organization and varied expressions of the Scottish Heritage movement in the Canadian Maritimes, the Great Lakes, New England, and the American South. From diverse perspectives, authorities in their fields consider the modeling of a Scottish identity that distances heritage celebrants from prevalent visions of whiteness. Considering both hyphenated Scots who celebrate centuries-old transmission of Scottish traditions and those for whom claiming or re-claiming a Scottish identity is recent and voluntary, this book also examines how diaspora themes and Highland imagery repeatedly surface in regional public celebrations and how traditions are continually reinvented through the accumulation of myths. The underlying theoretical message is that ethnicity and heritage survive because of the flexibility of history and tradition. 

This work is a lasting contribution to the study of ethnicity and identity, the renegotiation of history and cultural memory into heritage, and the public performance and creation of tradition.

 
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Tunica Archaeology
Jeffrey P. Brain
Harvard University Press, 1988
Sequel to Tunica Treasure, this volume presents the results of a decade of research on the Tunica Indians of Mississippi and Louisiana. The author traces the Tunica from the moment of first contact in the sixteenth century to the present day, with special emphasis on the critical eighteenth century. He describes considerable new archaeological data and integrates relevant ethnohistorical details into a reconstruction of the dynamic story of changes in American Indian culture during a historic period.
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Tracing the Relational
The Archaeology of Worlds, Spirits, and Temporalities
Meghan E. Buchanan and B. Jacob Skousen
University of Utah Press, 2015
Tracing the Relational examines the recent emergence of relational ontologies in archaeological interpretation and how this perspective can help archaeologists better understand the past. Traditional representational approaches reflect modern or Western perspectives, which focus on the individual and see the world in terms of dichotomies that separate culture and nature, human and object, sacred and secular. In contrast, ancient societies saw themselves as connected to and entangled with other human and nonhuman entities. In order to gain deeper insight into how people in the ancient world lived, experienced, and negotiated their lives, contributors argue, archaeologists must explore the myriad relationships and entanglements between humans and other beings, places, and things. As contributors unravel these relationships, they demonstrate that movement is an inherent feature of these relational webs and is the driving force behind a continually shifting reality. Chapters focus on various regions and time periods throughout the Americas, tracing how movements between other-worldly dimensions, spirits and deities, and temporalities were integral to everyday life.
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Theorizing Native Studies
Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
This important collection makes a compelling argument for the importance of theory in Native studies. Within the field, there has been understandable suspicion of theory stemming both from concerns about urgent political issues needing to take precedence over theoretical speculations and from hostility toward theory as an inherently Western, imperialist epistemology. The editors of Theorizing Native Studies take these concerns as the ground for recasting theoretical endeavors as attempts to identify the larger institutional and political structures that enable racism, inequities, and the displacement of indigenous peoples. They emphasize the need for Native people to be recognized as legitimate theorists and for the theoretical work happening outside the academy, in Native activist groups and communities, to be acknowledged. Many of the essays demonstrate how Native studies can productively engage with others seeking to dismantle and decolonize the settler state, including scholars putting theory to use in critical ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and postcolonial studies. Taken together, the essays demonstrate how theory can serve as a decolonizing practice.

Contributors. Christopher Bracken, Glen Coulthard, Mishuana Goeman, Dian Million, Scott Morgensen, Robert Nichols, Vera Palmer, Mark Rifkin, Audra Simpson, Andrea Smith, Teresia Teaiwa

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Towards a New Ethnohistory
Community-Engaged Scholarship among the People of the River
Keith Thor Carlson
University of Manitoba Press, 2018

front cover of Talking Stone
Talking Stone
Rock Art of the Cosos
Paul Goldsmith
University of Utah Press, 2017

Hidden away in the canyons of a highly restricted military base on the edge of the Mojave Desert is the largest concentration of rock art in North America, possibly in the world. Images of animals, shamans, and puzzling abstract forms were pecked and painted on stone over thousands of years by a now long-gone culture. Talking Stone: Rock Art of the Cosos is a multivocal investigation of this art.

Acclaimed cinematographer Paul Goldsmith takes the reader on a visual journey through this limited access area with more than 160 stunning color photographs. The book is structured around Goldsmith’s treks into the remote desert canyons and his meetings with archaeologists, Native Americans, a psychologist, an artist, bow hunters, and the commanding officer in charge of the military base. The result is a visually striking book that gives the viewer a personal and visceral experience of this enigmatic art.

Includes 160 color photographs.

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front cover of Toward a Behavioral Ecology of Lithic Technology
Toward a Behavioral Ecology of Lithic Technology
Cases from Paleoindian Archaeology
Todd A. Surovell
University of Arizona Press, 2009
Modern humans and their hominid ancestors relied on chipped-stone technology for well over two million years and colonized more than 99 percent of the Earth's habitable landmass in doing so. Yet there currently exist only a handful of informal models derived from ethnographic observation, experiments, engineering, and "common sense" to explain variability in archaeological lithic assemblages.

Because the fundamental processes of making, using, and discarding stone tools are, at root, exercises in problem solving, Todd Surovell asks what conditions favor certain technological solutions. Whether asking if a biface should be made thick or thin or if a flake should be saved or discarded, Surovell seeks answers that extend beyond a case-by-case analysis. One avenue for addressing these questions theoretically is formal mathematical modeling.

Here Surovell constructs a series of models designed to link environmental variability to human decision making as it pertains to lithic technology. To test the models, Surovell uses data from the analysis of more than 40,000 artifacts from five Rocky Mountain and Northern Plains Folsom and Goshen complex archaeological sites dating to the Younger Dryas stadial (ca. 12,600-11,500 years BP). The primary result is the production of powerful new analytical tools useful to the interpretation of archaeological assemblages.

Surovell's goal is to promote modeling and explore the general issues governing technological decisions. In this light, his models can be applied to any context in which stone tools are made and used.
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Two Terminal Archaic/Early Woodland Sites in Central Michigan
Scott G. Beld
University of Michigan Press, 1991
This volume contains the analysis of two prehistoric sites in Gratiot County, Michigan. The author presents a description of the features and artifacts from both sites and discusses the possible cultural affiliation of the sites, which he dates to the Terminal Archaic/Early Woodland.
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The Tombigbee Watershed in Southeastern Prehistory
Ned J. Jenkins
University of Alabama Press, 1986

Representing the synthesis of approximately ten years of archaeological research along the central Tombigbee River, this book offers new theoretical and interpretive contributions to the study of human activity in the Tombigbee River Valley from 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1450. The authors have devised a new taxonomic approach that allows them to portray cultures as they gathered momentum and peaked in their potential as social, economic, and political structures. The data acquired for this study are from the massive cultural resource management program that accompanied the construction of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway.

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Twelve Millennia
Archaeology of the Upper Mississippi River Valley
James L Theler
University of Iowa Press, 2003

The people of Taquile Island on the Peruvian side of beautiful Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the Americas, are renowned for the hand-woven textiles that they both wear and sell to outsiders. One thousand seven hundred Quechua-speaking peasant farmers, who depend on potatoes and the fish from the lake, host the forty thousand tourists who visit their island each year. Yet only twenty-five years ago, few tourists had even heard of Taquile. In Weaving a Future: Tourism, Cloth, and Culture on an Andean Island, Elayne Zorn documents the remarkable transformation of the isolated rocky island into a community-controlled enterprise that now provides a model for indigenous communities worldwide.

Over the course of three decades and nearly two years living on Taquile Island, Zorn, who is trained in both the arts and anthropology, learned to weave from Taquilean women. She also learned how gender structures both the traditional lifestyles and the changes that tourism and transnationalism have brought. In her comprehensive and accessible study, she reveals how Taquileans used their isolation, landownership, and communal organizations to negotiate the pitfalls of globalization and modernization and even to benefit from tourism. This multi-sited ethnography set in Peru, Washington, D.C., and New York City shows why and how cloth remains central to Andean society and how the marketing of textiles provided the experience and money for Taquilean initiatives in controlling tourism.

The first book about tourism in South America that centers on traditional arts as well as community control, Weaving a Future will be of great interest to anthropologists and scholars and practitioners of tourism, grassroots development, and the fiber arts.

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Tribal Government Today, Revised Edition
James J. Lopach
University Press of Colorado, 1998
An account of Fourth World peoples within a First World nation, Tribal Government Today, Revised Edition, is a critical analysis of the contemporary progress of Indian tribes toward self-government and economic sufficiency. Focusing on seven reservations in Montana representing the diverse opportunities and problems facing Indian tribes in the West, this book approaches tribal government from the twin perspectives of reservation politics and the legal context within which reservation conflicts must be solved.
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Time, Typology, and Point Traditions in North Carolina Archaeology
Formative Cultures Reconsidered
I. Randolph Daniel Jr.
University of Alabama Press, 2021
A reconsideration of the seminal projectile point typology
 
In the 1964 landmark publication The Formative Cultures of the Carolina Piedmont, Joffre Coe established a projectile point typology and chronology that, for the first time, allowed archaeologists to identify the relative age of a site or site deposit based on the point types recovered there. Consistent with the cultural-historical paradigm of the day, the “Coe axiom” stipulated that only one point type was produced at one moment in time in a particular location. Moreover, Coe identified periods of “cultural continuity” and “discontinuity” in the chronology based on perceived similarities and differences in point styles through time.
 
In Time, Typology, and Point Traditions in North Carolina Archaeology: Formative Cultures Reconsidered, I. Randolph Daniel Jr. reevaluates the Coe typology and sequence, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses. Daniel reviews the history of the projectile point type concept in the Southeast and revisits both Coe’s axiom and his notions regarding cultural continuity and change based on point types. In addition, Daniel updates Coe’s typology by clarifying or revising existing types and including types unrecognized in Coe’s monograph. Daniel also adopts a practice-centered approach to interpreting types and organizes them into several technological traditions that trace ancestral-descendent communities of practice that relate to our current understanding of North Carolina prehistory.
 
Appealing to professional and avocational archaeologists, Daniel provides ample illustrations of points in the book as well as color versions on a dedicated website. Daniel dedicates a final chapter to a discussion of the ethical issues related to professional archaeologists using private artifact collections. He calls for greater collaboration between professional and avocational communities, noting the scientific value of some private collections.
 
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Transitions
Archaic and Early Woodland Research in the Ohio Country
Martha P. Otto
Ohio University Press, 2008

The late archaic and early woodland peoples lived in the Ohio region between 5,000 and 2,000 years ago. This was a time of transition, when hunters and gatherers began to grow native seed crops, establish more permanent settlements, and develop complex forms of ritual and ceremonialism, sometimes involving burial mound construction.

The focused archaeological studies described in Transitions: Archaic and Early Woodland Research in the Ohio Country shed light on this important episode in human cultural development. The authors describe important archaeological sites such as the rich Late Archaic settlements of southwestern Ohio and the early Adena Dominion Land Company enclosure in Franklin County. They present detailed accounts of Native American behavior, such as the use of smoking pipes by Adena societies and a reconstruction of mound use and ritual.

Transitions is the result of a comprehensive, long-term study focusing on particular areas of Ohio with the most up-to-date and detailed treatment of Ohio’s native cultures during this important time of change. This book will be of great value to students and other readers who wish to go beyond the general and often dated treatments of Ohio archaeology currently available.

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Those Who Remain
A Photographer's Memoir of South Carolina Indians
Gene J. Crediford
University of Alabama Press, 2009
Through interviews and a generous photograph montage stretching over two decades, reveals the commonality and diversity among these people of Indian identity
 
When DeSoto (in 1540) and later Juan Pardo (in 1567) marched through what was known as the province of Cofitachequi (which covered the southern part of today’s North Carolina and most of South Carolina), the native population was estimated at well over 18,000. Most shared a common Catawba language, enabling this confederation of tribes to practice advanced political and social methods, cooperate and support each other, and meet their common enemy. The footprint of the Cofitachequi is the footprint of this book.
 
The contemporary Catawba, Midland, Santee, Natchez-Kusso, Varnertown, Waccamaw, Pee Dee, and Lumbee Indians of North and South Carolina, have roots in pre-contact Cofitachequi. Names have changed through the years; tribes split and blended as the forces of nature, the influx of Europeans, and the imposition of federal government authority altered their lives. For a few of these tribes, the system has worked well—or is working well now. For others, the challenge continues to try to work with and within the federal government’s system for tribal recognition—a system governing Indians but not created by them. Through interviews and a generous photograph montage stretching over two decades, Gene Crediford reveals the commonality and diversity among these people of Indian identity; their heritage, culture, frustrations with the system, joys in success of the younger generation, and hope for the future of those who come after them. This book is the story of those who remain.
 
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Traditions, Transitions, and Technologies
Themes in Southwestern Archaeology
Sarah H. Schlanger
University Press of Colorado, 2016
Traditions, Transitions, and Technologies offers diverse perspectives on the state of Southwestern archaeology at the end of the twentieth century, linking the legacies of the past to present trends by placing current research into historical context. Organized around classic themes central to the history of the discipline, this volume explores important new research avenues for understanding the connections between historic Pueblo communities and their distant ancestors, the origins of farming traditions, and the development of the Southwest's distinctive tools and technologies. Providing a unique overview of past and present work in this important region, Traditions, Transitions, and Technologies will be of interest to all doing archaeological research in the Southwestern United States.
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Tellico Archaeology Rev Ed
12000 Years Native American History
Jefferson Chapman
University of Tennessee Press, 1995
This book is an updated edition of Jefferson Chapman's 1985 account of one of the most productive and significant research efforts in the eastern United States. For fourteen years (1967–1981), archaeologists from the University of Tennessee conducted excavations and surveys in the Little Tennessee River Valley, which was being inundated by the TVA's creation of the Tellico Reservoir. The project produced a wealth of new information about more than 12,000 years of Native American history in the region.  

This revision retains the full text and illustrations of the original edition, with its compelling descriptions of ancient ways of life and the archaeological detective work that was done to obtain that knowledge. The new material, contained in a postscript, summarizes the discoveries, research methods, and other developments that have, over the past ten years, further enhanced our knowledge of the Native Americans who occupied the area. Included, for example, are details about some fascinating new techniques for dating human remains, as well as discussions of burial practices, native crops, new archaeological laws, and the "Bat Creek Stone," a controversial artifact that, according to some claims, gives evidence of migrations of Mediterranean peoples to the New World during Roman times.

The Author: Jefferson Chapman is director of the Frank H. McClung Museum at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a research associate professor in the department of anthropology.
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Tennessee's Indian Peoples
From White Contact To Removal 1540-1840
Ronald N. Satz
University of Tennessee Press, 1979
Hernando De Soto’s invasion of Indian lands in 1540 marked the onslaught of great change in the lives of Tennessee’s Native Americans. Although these first Tennesseans boasted a cultural heritage of thousands of years, only three centuries of contact with the white man elapsed before their population was decimated and the remnants driven out. The Indians were a settled people when de Soto visited, not the savage or exotic woods creatures so often depicted. Tennessee’s Indian Peoples, then, is a story of men and women – human beings. Author, Ronald N. Satz tells how the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, Shawnees, and other Indian peoples lived, reared families, farmed and hunted, worshipped, played, fought, and governed themselves. He describes also the eventful destruction of their societies – destroyed not only by external pressures for Indian lands, but also by internal change wrought by increasing dependence on the white man’s trade goods.

Ronald N. Satz is Dean of Graduate Studies and University Research and teaches history at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. In addition to numerous articles and book reviews, his published work includes American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (1975). He has received fellowships from both the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Satz has served as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the American Indian Quarterly.
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front cover of The Tennessee, Green, and Lower Ohio Rivers Expeditions of Clarence Bloomfield Moore
The Tennessee, Green, and Lower Ohio Rivers Expeditions of Clarence Bloomfield Moore
Clarence Bloomfield Moore, edited and introduced by Richard R. Polhemus
University of Alabama Press, 2002

This richly illustrated book is the eighth of nine Classics in Southeastern Archaeology volumes based on Moore's investigations along the waterways of eastern North America.

This oversized reprint volume presents original materials from Moore's northernmost expeditions conducted in the early 1900s as he surveyed areas of potential archaeological interest in the southeastern United States. Some of the sites he found were later targeted for major excavations during the days of the WPA/CCC. Many National Register Historic Sites are today located along the rivers he explored in this work. In many cases, however, Moore's report documents sites since destroyed by river action or by lake impoundments behind hydroelectric dams or by looters.

As with all of Moore's other investigations, his thorough documentation and collaboration with other scholars advanced understanding of aboriginal peoples and fueled debate among the experts. For instance, more than 296 burials were recovered from Indian Knoll on the Green River in Kentucky. Some graves included ceremonially "killed" artifacts, dogs buried with both adults and children, and exotic materials leading to speculations concerning origins, usage, and trade networks. Stone box graves were widespread and somewhat exclusive to this area, giving rise to early assumptions regarding kinship between scattered modern Indian tribes.

Richard Polhemus has compiled a comprehensive inventory of Moore's work in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky and written a concise introduction to place the work in context. In so doing, he has made available to contemporary scholars of history, archaeology, and anthropology a trove of resource material on one of the most archaeologically rich and artifact-diverse regions in the nation.

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Traces of Fremont
Society and Rock Art in Ancient Utah
Steven R Simms
University of Utah Press, 2010

Fremont is a culture (ca. 300–1300 A.D.) first defined by archaeologist Noel Morss in 1928 based on characteristics unique to the area. Initially thought to be a simple socio-political system, recent reassessments of the Fremont assume a more complex society. This volume places Fremont rock art studies in this contemporary context. Author Steven Simms offers an innovative model of Fremont society, politics, and worldview using the principles of analogy and current archaeological evidence. Simms takes readers on a trip back in time by describing what a typical Fremont hamlet or residential area might have looked like a thousand years ago, including the inhabitants' daily activities. François Gohier's captivating photographs of Fremont art and artifacts offer an engaging complement to Simms's text, aiding us in our understanding of the lives of these ancient people.

Winner of the Utah Book Award in Nonfiction.
Winner of the Society for American Archaeology Book Award for Public Audience. 

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Tohopeka
Rethinking the Creek War and the War of 1812
Edited by Kathryn E. Holland Braund
University of Alabama Press, 2012
Tohopeka contains a variety of perspectives and uses a wide array of evidence and approaches, from scrutiny of cultural and religious practices to literary and linguistic analysis, to illuminate this troubled period.
 
Almost two hundred years ago, the territory that would become Alabama was both ancient homeland and new frontier where a complex network of allegiances and agendas was playing out. The fabric of that network stretched and frayed as the Creek Civil War of 1813-14 pitted a faction of the Creek nation known as Red Sticks against those Creeks who supported the Creek National Council.  The war began in July 1813, when Red Stick rebels were attacked near Burnt Corn Creek by Mississippi militia and settlers from the Tensaw area in a vain attempt to keep the Red Sticks’ ammunition from reaching the main body of disaffected warriors. A retaliatory strike against a fortified settlement owned by Samuel Mims, now called Fort Mims, was a Red Stick victory.  The brutality of the assault, in which 250 people were killed, outraged the American public and “Remember Fort Mims” became a national rallying cry.
 
During the American-British War of 1812, Americans quickly joined the war against the Red Sticks, turning the civil war into a military campaign designed to destroy Creek power. The battles of the Red Sticks have become part of Alabama and American legend and include the famous Canoe Fight, the Battle of Holy Ground, and most significantly, the Battle of Tohopeka (also known as Horseshoe Bend)—the final great battle of the war. There, an American army crushed Creek resistance and made a national hero of Andrew Jackson.

New attention to material culture and documentary and archaeological records fills in details, adds new information, and helps disabuse the reader of outdated interpretations.
 
Contributors
Susan M. Abram / Kathryn E. Holland Braund/Robert P. Collins / Gregory Evans Dowd /
John E. Grenier / David S. Heidler / Jeanne T. Heidler / Ted Isham / Ove Jensen / Jay Lamar /
Tom Kanon / Marianne Mills / James W. Parker / Craig T. Sheldon Jr. / Robert G. Thrower / Gregory A. Waselkov
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Troubled Trails
The Meeker Affair and the Expulsion of Utes from Colorado
Robert Silbernagel
University of Utah Press, 2011

When U.S. Cavalry troops rode onto the Ute Indian Reservation in northwestern Colorado on September 29, 1879, they triggered a chain of events that cost the Utes their homeland: a deadly battle at Milk Creek, the killing of all men at the Indian agency headed by Nathan Meeker, and the taking of three women and two children who were held hostage for 23 days. The Utes didn’t seek a fight with the whites, most of whom they viewed as friends. However, powerful whites in Colorado wanted the Utes expelled. The Meeker affair was an opportunity to achieve that.

In Troubled Trails, Robert Silbernagel casts new light on the story of the Meeker Affair. Using details from historical interview transcripts and newspaper articles, he reveals the personalities of the major characters—both Indian and non-Indian. He tells the story from many perspectives, including that of Indian Agent Nathan Meeker; the U.S. military; Nicaagat, a leader of the White River Utes; and Josephine Meeker, Nathan Meeker’s daughter, who was held hostage by the Utes. Silbernagel took great pains to tell a complete story, even following on horseback the trail taken by the Utes. As a result, his book paints a multifaceted picture of what took place and, most importantly, his portrayal brings the Ute side of the story into focus.
 

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The Transit of Empire
Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism
Jodi A. Byrd
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

In 1761 and again in 1768, European scientists raced around the world to observe the transit of Venus, a rare astronomical event in which the planet Venus passes in front of the sun. In The Transit of Empire, Jodi A. Byrd explores how indigeneity functions as transit, a trajectory of movement that serves as precedent within U.S. imperial history. Byrd argues that contemporary U.S. empire expands itself through a transferable “Indianness” that facilitates acquisitions of lands, territories, and resources.

Examining an array of literary texts, historical moments, and pending legislations—from the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma’s vote in 2007 to expel Cherokee Freedmen to the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization bill—Byrd demonstrates that inclusion into the multicultural cosmopole does not end colonialism as it is purported to do. Rather, that inclusion is the very site of the colonization that feeds U.S. empire.

Byrd contends that the colonization of American Indian and indigenous nations is the necessary ground from which to reimagine a future where the losses of indigenous peoples are not only visible and, in turn, grieveable, but where indigenous peoples have agency to transform life on their own lands and on their own terms.

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Therapeutic Nations
Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights
Dian Million
University of Arizona Press, 2013
Self-determination is on the agenda of Indigenous peoples all over the world. This analysis by an Indigenous feminist scholar challenges the United Nations–based human rights agendas and colonial theory that until now have shaped Indigenous models of self-determination. Gender inequality and gender violence, Dian Million argues, are critically important elements in the process of self-determination.

Million contends that nation-state relations are influenced by a theory of trauma ascendant with the rise of neoliberalism. Such use of trauma theory regarding human rights corresponds to a therapeutic narrative by Western governments negotiating with Indigenous nations as they seek self-determination.

Focusing on Canada and drawing comparisons with the United States and Australia, Million brings a genealogical understanding of trauma against a historical filter. Illustrating how Indigenous people are positioned differently in Canada, Australia, and the United States in their articulation of trauma, the author particularly addresses the violence against women as a language within a greater politic. The book introduces an Indigenous feminist critique of this violence against the medicalized framework of addressing trauma and looks to the larger goals of decolonization. Noting the influence of humanitarian psychiatry, Million goes on to confront the implications of simply dismissing Indigenous healing and storytelling traditions.

Therapeutic Nations is the first book to demonstrate affect and trauma’s wide-ranging historical origins in an Indigenous setting, offering insights into community healing programs. The author’s theoretical sophistication and original research make the book relevant across a range of disciplines as it challenges key concepts of American Indian and Indigenous studies.
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Taking Charge
Native American Self-Determination and Federal Indian Policy, 1975–1993
George Pierre Castile
University of Arizona Press, 2006
The Indian Self-Determination Act of 1975 sought to restore self-government to peoples whose community affairs had long been administered by outsiders. This book explores whether that bold ambition was actually realized. Taking Charge is a sequel to the author’s landmark work To Show Heart, which examined Indian policy through 1975. George Castile now explores federal Indian policy in the Carter, Reagan, and first Bush administrations, tracing developments triggered by executive and congressional action—or inaction—and focusing on the dynamics of self-determination as both policy objective and byword in the wake of the landmark 1975 legislation. Drawing on unpublished presidential papers and other archival sources, Castile chronicles the efforts of three presidents to uphold Richard Nixon’s commitment to policy change, weighing such issues as the impact of Reaganomics and the advent of Indian gaming. He examines the marginalizing of Indian policy in both the executive and legislative branches in the face of larger issues, as well as the recurring tendency of policy to be driven by a single determined individual, such as South Dakota senator James Abourezk. Although self-determination is roundly advocated by all concerned with federal Indian policy, until now no book has provided a grasp of both its background and its implications. Taking Charge is an essential contribution to the critical study of that policy that allows a better understanding of contemporary Indian affairs.
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To Show Heart
Native American Self-Determination and Federal Indian Policy, 1960-1975
George Pierre Castile
University of Arizona Press, 1998
Federal policy toward Native Americans has fluctuated wildly in the twentieth century. Washington long envisioned that Indians would be assimilated into American culture—until FDR's New Deal introduced tribal self-government. Then, during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, its goal became the termination of federal wardship status for Indians. This book considers the changes in attitude that began in 1960 and culminated in the Indian Self-Determination Act of 1975. Drawing on personal interviews with key players, George Castile goes behind the scenes in Washington to reveal what motivated policy makers—and who really shaped policy—from the Kennedy to the Ford administrations.

To Show Heart is a detailed and unbiased account of one of the least understood periods in Indian affairs. It tells how "termination" became a political embarrassment during the civil rights movement, how Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty prompted politicians to rethink Indian policy, and how championing self-determination presented an opportunity for Presidents Nixon and Ford to "show heart" toward Native Americans. Along the way, Castile assesses the impact of the Indian activism of the 1960s and 1970s and offers an objective view of the American Indian Movement and the standoff at Wounded Knee. He also discusses the recent history of individual tribes, which gives greater meaning to decisions made at the national level. Castile's work greatly enhances our understanding of the formulation of current Indian policy and of the changes that have occurred since 1975. To Show Heart is an important book not only for anthropologists and historians but also for Native Americans themselves, who will benefit from this inside look at how bureaucrats have sought to determine their destinies.
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Tribal Strengths and Native Education
Voices from the Reservation Classroom
Terry Huffman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
In 1889, Sitting Bull addressed the formal, Western-style education of his people. "When you find something good in the white man's road, pick it up," he intoned. "When you find something that is bad . . . leave it alone. We shall master his machinery, and his inventions, his skills, his medicine, his planning, but we will retain our beauty and still be Indians."

Sitting Bull's vision—that cultural survival and personal perseverance derive from tribal resilience—lies at the heart of Tribal Strengths and Native Education. Basing his account on the insights of six veteran American Indian educators who serve in three reservation schools on the Northern Plains, Terry Huffman explores how Native educators perceive pedagogical strengths rooted in their tribal heritage and personal ethnicity. He recounts their views on the issues facing students and shows how tribal identity can be a source of resilience in academic and personal success. Throughout, Huffman and the educators emphasize the importance of anchoring the formal education of Indian children in Native values and worldviews—in "tribal strengths."
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To Win the Indian Heart
Music at Chemawa Indian School
Melissa D. Parkhurst
Oregon State University Press, 2014
Since 1879, Indian children from all regions of the United States have entered federal boarding schools—institutions designed to assimilate them into mainstream society. Chemawa Indian School in western Oregon, one of the nation’s oldest and the longest still in continuous operation, is an emblem of a system that has intimately impacted countless lives and communities.

In To Win the Indian Heart: Music at Chemawa Indian School, Melissa Parkhurst records the history of the school’s musical life. She explores the crucial role music was meant to play in the total transformation of Indian children, and the cultural recovery and resiliency it often inspired instead. Parkhurst chronicles the complex ways in which students, families, faculty, and administrators employed music, both as a tool for assimilation and, conversely, as a vehicle for student resistance—a subject long overlooked in literature on Indian education and the assimilation campaign.  

Combining oral histories of Chemawa alumni with archival records of campus life, the book examines the prominent forms of music making at Chemawa—school band, choirs, private lessons, pageants, dance, garage bands, and powwows. Parkhurst traces the trajectory of federal Indian policy, highlighting students’ creative responses and the ways in which music reveals the inherent contradictions in the U.S. government’s assimilation practices.
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Tribal Policing
Asserting Sovereignty, Seeking Justice
Eileen Luna-Firebaugh
University of Arizona Press, 2007
What does it mean to be a tribal police officer? What are the complexities of that role? And how do tribal communities, tribal police departments, and other law enforcement agencies collaborate to address the alarmingly high rate of violent crime in Indian country?

Author Eileen Luna-Firebaugh answers these and other questions in this well-documented text about tribal government and law enforcement in America. Based on extensive research with tribal police departments conducted over a period of eight years, Tribal Policing reveals the complicated role of police officials in Indian country and the innovative methods they are developing to address crime within their borders and to advance tribal sovereignty in the United States.

Tribal police departments face many challenges, such as heightened crime rates, a lack of resources (working patrol vehicles, 911 systems, access to police radios), and vast patrol areas. Luna-Firebaugh demonstrates that tribal officers see themselves as members of the tribal community and that tribal law enforcement is a complex balance of tribal position and authority within the community. Among other topics, Luna-Firebaugh analyzes the structure of tribal law enforcement and the ways it differs from mainstream policing; the role of women, tribal members, and others who comprise tribal law enforcement personnel; tribal jails and corrections; police training; and the legal, political, cultural, and historical issues that affect American Indian tribal policing.

This informative text addresses the scarcity of published material regarding tribal law enforcement and will be a welcome addition to courses in criminal justice, the administration of justice, law enforcement, and Native American studies.
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To Show What an Indian Can Do
Sports at Native American Boarding Schools
John Bloom
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
The Carlisle Indian School and the Haskell Institute in Kansas were among the many federally operated boarding schools enacting the U.S. government's education policy toward Native Americans from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, one designed to remove children from familiar surroundings and impose mainstream American culture on them. To Show What an Indian Can Do explores the history of sports programs at these institutions and, drawing on the recollections of former students, describes the importance of competitive sports in their lives. Author John Bloom focuses on the male and female students who did not typically go on to greater athletic glory but who found in sports something otherwise denied them by the boarding school program: a sense of community, accomplishment, and dignity.
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Trust in the Land
New Directions in Tribal Conservation
Beth Rose Middleton
University of Arizona Press, 2011
“The Earth says, God has placed me here. The Earth says that God tells me to take care of the Indians on this earth; the Earth says to the Indians that stop on the Earth, feed them right. . . . God says feed the Indians upon the earth.”

—Cayuse Chief Young Chief, Walla Walla Council of 1855

America has always been Indian land. Historically and culturally, Native Americans have had a strong appreciation for the land and what it offers. After continually struggling to hold on to their land and losing millions of acres, Native Americans still have a strong and ongoing relationship to their homelands. The land holds spiritual value and offers a way of life through fishing, farming, and hunting. It remains essential—not only for subsistence but also for cultural continuity—that Native Americans regain rights to land they were promised.

Beth Rose Middleton examines new and innovative ideas concerning Native land conservancies, providing advice on land trusts, collaborations, and conservation groups. Increasingly, tribes are working to protect their access to culturally important lands by collaborating with Native and non- Native conservation movements. By using private conservation partnerships to reacquire lost land, tribes can ensure the health and sustainability of vital natural resources. In particular, tribal governments are using conservation easements and land trusts to reclaim rights to lost acreage. Through the use of these and other private conservation tools, tribes are able to protect or in some cases buy back the land that was never sold but rather was taken from them.

Trust in the Land sets into motion a new wave of ideas concerning land conservation. This informative book will appeal to Native and non-Native individuals and organizations interested in protecting the land as well as environmentalists and government agencies.
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Theft Is Property!
Dispossession and Critical Theory
Robert Nichols
Duke University Press, 2020
Drawing on Indigenous peoples' struggles against settler colonialism, Theft Is Property! reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of explaining how shifting configurations of law, property, race, and rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present. Through close analysis of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists from the nineteenth century to the present, Robert Nichols argues that dispossession has come to name a unique recursive process whereby systematic theft is the mechanism by which property relations are generated. In so doing, Nichols also brings long-standing debates in anarchist, Black radical, feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought into direct conversation with the frequently overlooked intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples.
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Two-Spirit People
Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality
Edited by Sue-Ellen Jacobs; Wesley Thomas; and Sabine Lang
University of Illinois Press, 1997
This landmark book combines the voices of Native Americans and non-Indians, anthropologists and others, in an exploration of gender and sexuality issues as they relate to lesbian, gay, transgendered, and other "marked" Native Americans. Focusing on the concept of two-spirit people--individuals not necessarily gay or lesbian, transvestite or bisexual, but whose behaviors or beliefs may sometimes be interpreted by others as uncharacteristic of their sex--this book is the first to provide an intimate look at how many two-spirit people feel about themselves, how other Native Americans treat them, and how anthropologists and other scholars interpret them and their cultures.

1997 Winner of the Ruth Benedict Prize for an edited book given by the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists.
 
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The Third Space of Sovereignty
The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.–Indigenous Relations
Kevin Bruyneel
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

The imposition of modern American colonial rule has defined U.S.–indigenous relations since the time of the American Civil War. In resistance, Kevin Bruyneel asserts, indigenous political actors work across American spatial and temporal boundaries, demanding rights and resources from the government while also challenging the imposition of colonial rule over their lives. This resistance engenders what he calls a “third space of sovereignty,” which resides neither inside nor outside the U.S. political system but rather exists on its boundaries, exposing both the practices and limitations of American colonial rule. 

The Third Space of Sovereignty offers fresh insights on such topics as the crucial importance of the formal end of treaty-making in 1871, indigenous responses to the prospect of U.S. citizenship in the 1920s, native politics during the tumultuous civil rights era of the 1960s, the question of indigenousness in the special election of California’s governor in 2003, and the current issues surrounding gaming and casinos.

In this engaging and provocative work, Bruyneel shows how native political actors have effectively contested the narrow limits that the United States has imposed on indigenous people’s ability to define their identity and to develop economically and politically on their own terms.

Kevin Bruyneel is assistant professor of politics at Babson College.

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Tribal Administration Handbook
A Guide for Native Nations in the United States
Rebecca M. Webster
Michigan State University Press, 2022
A direct response to the needs and ambitions articulated by tribal administrators and leaders, this handbook seeks to serve practitioners, students, researchers, and community members alike. It grew out of an ongoing collaboration among scholars and practitioners from tribal nations, universities, tribal colleges, and nonprofit organizations who are developing practical and teaching resources in the field of tribal administration and governance. Designed as a readable, accessible volume, it focuses on three key areas: tribal management, funding and delivering core services, and sovereign tribes engaging settler governments. While the chapters complement one another by presenting a coherent and unified constellation of voices that illuminates a shared terrain of practical Indigenous governance, each chapter ultimately stands alone to accommodate a variety of needs and interests with specific best practices, quick-reference executive summaries, and practitioner notes to aid lesson applications. This humble collection of remarkable voices initiates a conversation about tribal administration that will hopefully continue to grow in service to Native nations.
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Trusteeship in Change
Toward Tribal Autonomy in Resource Management
Richmond L. Clow
University Press of Colorado, 2001
Trusteeship in Change explores the evolution of Indian Affairs policies and administrative practices regarding the management of trust lands from treaty days to contemporary partnerships. A dozen scholars from diverse fields - archaeology, economics, forestry, environmental studies, history, geography, political science, and more - review past policies and practices and introduce new ideas and approaches for the future.

This book also includes case studies focused on wildlife management, forest preservation, tribal hunting laws, and other specific concerns in management, preservation and utilization of Native American land. An excellent source for scholars in the fields of Native American and environmental studies, Trusteeship in Change is sure to spark debate and to be an important reference book for years to come.

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Thundersticks
Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America
David J. Silverman
Harvard University Press, 2016

The adoption of firearms by American Indians between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries marked a turning point in the history of North America’s indigenous peoples—a cultural earthquake so profound, says David Silverman, that its impact has yet to be adequately measured. Thundersticks reframes our understanding of Indians’ historical relationship with guns, arguing against the notion that they prized these weapons more for the pyrotechnic terror guns inspired than for their efficiency as tools of war. Native peoples fully recognized the potential of firearms to assist them in their struggles against colonial forces, and mostly against one another.

The smoothbore, flintlock musket was Indians’ stock firearm, and its destructive potential transformed their lives. For the deer hunters east of the Mississippi, the gun evolved into an essential hunting tool. Most importantly, well-armed tribes were able to capture and enslave their neighbors, plunder wealth, and conquer territory. Arms races erupted across North America, intensifying intertribal rivalries and solidifying the importance of firearms in Indian politics and culture.

Though American tribes grew dependent on guns manufactured in Europe and the United States, their dependence never prevented them from rising up against Euro-American power. The Seminoles, Blackfeet, Lakotas, and others remained formidably armed right up to the time of their subjugation. Far from being a Trojan horse for colonialism, firearms empowered American Indians to pursue their interests and defend their political and economic autonomy over two centuries.

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Tell Me, Grandmother
Traditions, Stories, and Cultures of Arapaho People
Virginia Sutter
University Press of Colorado, 2004
"[A] readable portrayal of both the acute losses and the cultural survival of the Arapaho people."
- Watonga Republican

"Virginia Sutter uses an interesting technique to write the history of her people, the Northern Arapaho Indian Nation. She constructs her work as a series of conversations between herself and her paternal great-grandmother. . . . [T]hrough this device, the history of the Arapaho people is traced from the early nineteenth-century years, when the buffalo ran aplenty and the prairies were boundless, through present-day living conditions in American Indian tribal reservations."
- Moira Richards, www.WomenWriters.net

"Emblematic of the struggle of so many Native Americans of the twentieth century, who seek to reconcile modernity with tradition, and who struggle to recast, reframe, and restore what is Native, even as the majority culture has done its best to uproot, separate, and tell Natives that they can be either modern or Native, but certainly not both."
- Brian Hosmer, Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAIL)

Tell Me, Grandmother is at once the biography of Goes-in-Lodge, a traditional Arapaho woman of the nineteenth century, and the autobiography of her descendant, Virginia Sutter, a modern Arapaho woman with a Ph.D. in public administration. Sutter adeptly weaves her own story with that of Goes-in-Lodge - who, in addition to being Sutter's great-grandmother, was first wife of Sharpnose, the last chief of the Northern Arapaho nation.

Writing in a question-and-answer format between twentieth-century granddaughter and matriarchal ancestor, Sutter discusses four generations of home life, including details about child rearing, education, courtship, marriage, birthing, and burial. Sutter's portrait of Goes-in-Lodge is based on tribal history and interviews with tribal members. Goes-in-Lodge speaks of social and ceremonial gatherings, the Sun Dance, the sweat lodges, and the changes that took place on the Great Plains throughout her lifetime. Sutter details her own life as a child born in a teepee to a white mother and Indian father and the discrimination and injustice she faced struggling to make her way in an increasingly Euro-American world.

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The Trail of Tears across Missouri
Joan Gilbert
University of Missouri Press, 1996

As settlers moved beyond the eastern seaboard during the early nineteenth century, the government forced thousands of American Indians from their ancestral lands. The Cherokees, the largest and most important tribe in the Southeast, fought exile with a combination of passive resistance and national publicity for their plight. Because they had successfully resisted the government's efforts to move them from their homeland, their removal was particularly brutal when it finally came. The Trail of Tears across Missouri is a moving account of the 1837-1838 removal of the Cherokees from the southeastern United States to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).

After providing an overview of the Cherokees' life in the Southeast and of the events leading up to their exile, Joan Gilbert traces the mass exodus state by state from Tennessee to Arkansas. Successive chapters highlight the experiences and the hardships endured by those forced to travel with inadequate supplies of food, clothing, and transportation. It is estimated that four thousand Cherokees, nearly a quarter of the tribe, died.

In bringing the grim realities of the forced march to life, Gilbert draws from such primary sources as letters, newspaper stories, and the writings of missionaries, guides, and doctors who accompanied them. She focuses on the Cherokees' experiences as they passed through Missouri, using the journals of Dr. W. I. I. Morrow and guide B. B. Cannon.

In addition to chronicling the removal of the Cherokees, Gilbert also brings the story up to date by describing how the nation lives today and how the Trail of Tears has been commemorated.

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Their Determination to Remain
A Cherokee Community's Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina
Lance Greene
University of Alabama Press, 2023
The remarkable story of a North Carolina Cherokee community who avoided forced removal on the Trail of Tears
 
During the 1838 forced Cherokee removal by the US government, a number of close-knit Cherokee communities in the Southern Appalachian Mountains refused to relinquish their homelands, towns, and way of life. Using a variety of tactics, hundreds of Cherokees avoided the encroaching US Army and remained in the region.
 
In his book Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community’s Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina, Lance Greene explores the lives of wealthy plantation owners Betty and John Welch who lived on the southwestern edge of the Cherokee Nation. John was Cherokee and Betty was White. Although few Cherokees in the region participated in slavery, the Welches held nine African Americans in bondage.
 
During removal, the Welches assisted roughly 100 Cherokees hiding in the steep mountains. Afterward, they provided land for these Cherokees to rebuild a new community, Welch’s Town. Betty became a wealthy and powerful plantation mistress because her husband could no longer own land. Members of Welch’s Town experienced a transitional period in which they had no formal tribal government or clear citizenship yet felt secure enough to reestablish a townhouse, stickball fields, and dance grounds.
 
Greene’s innovative study uses an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating historical narrative and archaeological data, to examine how and why the Welches and members of Welch’s Town avoided expulsion and reestablished their ways of life in the midst of a growing White population who resented a continued Cherokee presence. The Welch strategy included Betty’s leadership in demonstrating outwardly their participation in modern Western lifestyles, including enslavement, as John maintained a hidden space—within the boundaries of their land—for the continuation of traditional Cherokee cultural practices. Their Determination to Remain explores the complexities of race and gender in this region of the antebellum South and the real impacts of racism on the community.
 
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Talking Indian
Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance
Jenny L. Davis
University of Arizona Press, 2018
Winner of the Beatrice Medicine Award

In south-central Oklahoma and much of “Indian Country,” using an Indigenous language is colloquially referred to as “talking Indian.” Among older Chickasaw community members, the phrase is used more often than the name of the specific language, Chikashshanompa’ or Chickasaw. As author Jenny L. Davis explains, this colloquialism reflects the strong connections between languages and both individual and communal identities when talking as an Indian is intimately tied up with the heritage language(s) of the community, even as the number of speakers declines.

Today a tribe of more than sixty thousand members, the Chickasaw Nation was one of the Native nations removed from their homelands to Oklahoma between 1837 and 1838. According to Davis, the Chickasaw’s dispersion from their lands contributed to their disconnection from their language over time: by 2010 the number of Chickasaw speakers had radically declined to fewer than seventy-five speakers.

In Talking Indian, Davis—a member of the Chickasaw Nation—offers the first book-length ethnography of language revitalization in a U.S. tribe removed from its homelands. She shows how in the case of the Chickasaw Nation, language programs are intertwined with economic growth that dramatically reshape the social realities within the tribe. She explains how this economic expansion allows the tribe to fund various language-­learning forums, with the additional benefit of creating well-paid and socially significant roles for Chickasaw speakers. Davis also illustrates how language revitalization efforts are impacted by the growing trend of tribal citizens relocating back to the Nation.
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Those Who Belong
Identity, Family, Blood, and Citizenship among the White Earth Anishinaabeg
Jill Doerfler
Michigan State University Press, 2015
Despite the central role blood quantum played in political formations of American Indian identity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there are few studies that explore how tribal nations have contended with this transformation of tribal citizenship. Those Who Belong explores how White Earth Anishinaabeg understood identity and blood quantum in the early twentieth century, how it was employed and manipulated by the U.S. government, how it came to be the sole requirement for tribal citizenship in 1961, and how a contemporary effort for constitutional reform sought a return to citizenship criteria rooted in Anishinaabe kinship, replacing the blood quantum criteria with lineal descent. Those Who Belong illustrates the ways in which Anishinaabeg of White Earth negotiated multifaceted identities, both before and after the introduction of blood quantum as a marker of identity and as the sole requirement for tribal citizenship. Doerfler’s research reveals that Anishinaabe leaders resisted blood quantum as a tribal citizenship requirement for decades before acquiescing to federal pressure. Constitutional reform efforts in the twenty-first century brought new life to this longstanding debate and led to the adoption of a new constitution, which requires lineal descent for citizenship.
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To Be the Main Leaders of Our People
A History of Minnesota Ojibwe Politics, 1825-1898
Rebecca Kugel
Michigan State University Press, 1998

In the spring of 1868, people from several Ojibwe villages located along the upper Mississippi River were relocated to a new reservation at White Earth, more than 100 miles to the west. In many public declarations that accompanied their forced migration, these people appeared to embrace the move, as well as their conversion to Christianity and the new agrarian lifestyle imposed on them. Beneath this surface piety and apparent acceptance of change, however, lay deep and bitter political divisions that were to define fundamental struggles that shaped Ojibwe society for several generations.
     In order to reveal the nature and extent of this struggle for legitimacy and authority, To Be The Main Leaders of Our People reconstructs the political and social history of these Minnesota Ojibwe communities between the years 1825 and 1898. Ojibwe political concerns, the thoughts and actions of Ojibwe political leaders, and the operation of the Ojibwe political system define the work's focus. Kugel examines this particular period of time because of its significance to contemporary Ojibwe history. The year 1825, for instance, marked the beginning of a formal alliance with the United States; 1898 represented not an end, but a striking point of continuity, defying the easy categorizations of Native peoples made by non-Indians, especially in the closing years of the nineteenth century.
     In this volume, the Ojibwe "speak for themselves," as their words were recorded by government officials, Christian missionaries, fur traders, soldiers, lumbermen, homesteaders, and journalists. While they were nearly always recorded in English translation, Ojibwe thoughts, perceptions, concerns, and even humor, clearly emerge. To Be The Main Leaders of Our People expands the parameters of how oral traditions can be used in historical writing and sheds new light on a complex, but critical, series of events in ongoing relations between Native and non-Native people.

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The Tree That Bends
Discourse, Power, and the Survival of Maskoki People
Patricia Riles Wickman
University of Alabama Press, 1999
A new paradigm for the interpretation of southeastern Native American and Spanish colonial history and a new way to view the development of the United States

In her compelling and controversial arguments, Wickman rejects the myths that erase Native Americans from Florida through the agency of Spaniards and diseases and make the area an empty frontier awaiting American expansion. Through research on both sides of the Atlantic and extensive oral history interviews among the Seminoles of Florida and Oklahoma, Wickman shatters current theories about the origins of the people encountered by the Spaniards and presents, for the first time ever, the Native American perspective. She describes the genesis of the groups known today as Creek, Seminole, and Miccosukee—the Maskoki peoples—and traces their common Mississippian heritage, affirming their claims to continuous habitation of the Southeast and Florida. Her work exposes the rhetoric of conquest and replaces it with the rhetoric of survival.


An important cross-disciplinary work, The Tree That Bends reveals the flexibility of the Maskoki people and the sociocultural mechanisms that allowed them to survive the pressures introduced at contact. Their world was capable of incorporating the New without destroying the Old, and their descendants not only survive today but also succeed as a discrete culture as a result.


 

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They Met at Wounded Knee
The Eastmans' Story
Gretchen Cassel Eick
University of Nevada Press, 2020
After ten years as a foreign and military policy lobbyist in Washington and four as director of an interfaith lobby, Gretchen Eick, moved to Kansas, earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Kansas and became Professor of History at Friends University. She was awarded two Fulbright Scholar awards, teaching in Latvia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), and a Fulbright Hays to South Africa. Her book on the civil rights movement—Dissent in Wichita: The Civil Right Movement in the Midwest, 1954-1972 (U of IL Press, 2001/2007) won three awards: The Richard Wentworth award from the University of Illinois as the best book in American history that press published over two years, the University of Kansas’ Hall Center Award for the best book by a Kansas author (the first time the award went to someone not teaching at K.U.), and the William Rockhill Nelson award for the best nonfiction book by a Kansas or Missouri author. The book resulted in two museum exhibits, a 2009 Telly Award-winning public television documentary about the first successful student-led sit-in, the 1958 Dockum Drug Store Sit-in in Wichita, and mention in the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture.

 
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Translated Nation
Rewriting the Dakhóta Oyáte
Christopher J. Pexa
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

How authors rendered Dakhóta philosophy by literary means to encode ethical and political connectedness and sovereign life within a settler surveillance state

Translated Nation examines literary works and oral histories by Dakhóta intellectuals from the aftermath of the 1862 U.S.–Dakota War to the present day, highlighting creative Dakhóta responses to violences of the settler colonial state. Christopher Pexa argues that the assimilation era of federal U.S. law and policy was far from an idle one for the Dakhóta people, but rather involved remaking the Oyáte (the Očéti Šakówiŋ Oyáte or People of the Seven Council Fires) through the encrypting of Dakhóta political and relational norms in plain view of settler audiences.

From Nicholas Black Elk to Charles Alexander Eastman to Ella Cara Deloria, Pexa analyzes well-known writers from a tribally centered perspective that highlights their contributions to Dakhóta/Lakhóta philosophy and politics. He explores how these authors, as well as oral histories from the Spirit Lake Dakhóta Nation, invoke thióšpaye (extended family or kinship) ethics to critique U.S. legal translations of Dakhóta relations and politics into liberal molds of heteronormativity, individualism, property, and citizenship. He examines how Dakhóta intellectuals remained part of their social frameworks even while negotiating the possibilities and violence of settler colonial framings, ideologies, and social forms. 

Bringing together oral and written as well as past and present literatures, Translated Nation expands our sense of literary archives and political agency and demonstrates how Dakhóta peoplehood not only emerges over time but in everyday places, activities, and stories. It provides a distinctive view of the hidden vibrancy of a historical period that is often tied only to Indigenous survival.

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A Tale of Three Villages
Indigenous-Colonial Interactions in Southwestern Alaska, 1740–1950
Liam Frink
University of Arizona Press, 2016
People are often able to identify change agents. They can estimate possible economic and social transitions, and they are often in an economic or social position to make calculated—sometimes risky—choices. Exploring this dynamic, A Tale of Three Villages is an investigation of culture change among the Yup’ik Eskimo people of the southwestern Alaskan coast from just prior to the time of Russian and Euro-North American contact to the mid-twentieth century.

Liam Frink focuses on three indigenous-colonial events along the southwestern Alaskan coast: the late precolonial end of warfare and raiding, the commodification of subsistence that followed, and, finally, the engagement with institutional religion. Frink’s innovative interdisciplinary methodology respectfully and creatively investigates the spatial and material past, using archaeological, ethnoecological, and archival sources.

The author’s narrative journey tracks the histories of three villages ancestrally linked to Chevak, a contemporary Alaskan Native community: Qavinaq, a prehistoric village at the precipice of colonial interactions and devastated by regional warfare; Kashunak, where people lived during the infancy and growth of the commercial market and colonial religion; and Old Chevak, a briefly occupied “stepping-stone” village inhabited just prior to modern Chevak. The archaeological spatial data from the sites are blended with ethnohistoric documents, local oral histories, eyewitness accounts of people who lived at two of the villages, and Frink’s nearly two decades of participant-observation in the region.

Frink provides a model for work that examines interfaces among indigenous women and men, old and young, demonstrating that it is as important as understanding their interactions with colonizers. He demonstrates that in order to understand colonial history, we must actively incorporate indigenous people as actors, not merely as reactors.
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Tracking Prehistoric Migrations
Pueblo Settlers among the Tonto Basin Hohokam
Jeffery J. Clark
University of Arizona Press, 2001
This monograph takes a fresh look at migration in light of the recent resurgence of interest in this topic within archaeology. The author develops a reliable approach for detecting and assessing the impact of migration based on conceptions of style in anthropology. From numerous ethnoarchaeological and ethnohistoric case studies, material culture attributes are isolated that tend to be associated only with the groups that produce them. Clark uses this approach to evaluate Puebloan migration into the Tonto Basin of east-central Arizona during the early Classic period (A.D. 1200-1325), focusing on a community that had been developing with substantial Hohokam influence prior to this interval. He identifies Puebloan enclaves in the indigenous settlements based on culturally specific differences in the organization of domestic space and in technological styles reflected in wall construction and utilitarian ceramic manufacture.

Puebloan migration was initially limited in scale, resulting in the co-residence of migrants and local groups within a single community. Once this co-residence settlement pattern is reconstructed, relations between the two groups are examined and the short-term and long-term impacts of migration are assessed. The early Classic period is associated with the appearance of the Salado horizon in the Tonto Basin. The results of this research suggest that migration and co-residence was common throughout the basins and valleys in the region defined by the Salado horizon, although each local sequence relates a unique story. The methodological and theoretical implications of Clark's work extend well beyond the Salado and the Southwest and apply to any situation in which the scale and impact of prehistoric migration are contested.
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The Terms of Our Surrender
Colonialism, Dispossession and the Resistance of the Innu
Elizabeth Cassell
University of London Press, 2021
An analysis of the laws determining indigenous land ownership in eastern Canada.
 
Based on extensive fieldwork and oral history, The Terms of Our Surrender is a powerful critical appraisal of unceded indigenous land ownership in eastern Canada. Set against an ethnographic, historical, and legal framework, this book traces the myriad ways the Canadian state has evaded the 1763 Royal Proclamation that guaranteed First Nations people a right to their land and way of life.

Focusing on the Innu of Quebec and Labrador, whose land has been taken for resource extraction and development, this book strips back the law of fiduciary duty to its origins. The Terms of Our Surrender argues for the preservation of land ownership and positions First Nations people as natural land defenders amidst a devastating climate crisis. This volume offers a voice to the Innu people, detailing the spirituality practices, culture, and values that make it impossible for them to willingly cede their land.

This book is intended to bridge the gap in knowledge between legal practitioners and those working at the intersections of human rights, social work, and public policy. It offers a potent template for using the law to fight back against the indignities suffered by indigenous communities.
 
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Telling Stories the Kiowa Way
Gus Palmer
University of Arizona Press, 2003
Among the Kiowa, storytelling takes place under familiar circumstances. A small group of relatives and close friends gather. Tales are informative as well as entertaining. Joking and teasing are key components. Group participation is expected. And outsiders are seldom involved.

This book explores the traditional art of storytelling still practiced by Kiowas today as Gus Palmer shares conversations held with storytellers. Combining narrative, personal experience, and ethnography in an original and artful way, Palmer—an anthropologist raised in a traditional Kiowa family—shows not only that storytelling remains an integral part of Kiowa culture but also that narratives embedded in everyday conversation are the means by which Kiowa cultural beliefs and values are maintained.

Palmer's study features contemporary oral storytelling and other discourses, assembled over two and a half years of fieldwork, that demonstrate how Kiowa storytellers practice their art. Focusing on stories and their meaning within a narrative and ethnographic context, he draws on a range of material, including dream stories, stories about the coming of Táimê (the spirit of the Sun Dance) to the Kiowas, and stories of tricksters and tribal heroes. He shows how storytellers employ the narrative devices of actively participating in oral narratives, leaving stories wide open, or telling stories within stories. And he demonstrates how stories can reflect a wide range of sensibilities, from magical realism to gossip.

Firmly rooted in current linguistic anthropological thought, Telling Stories the Kiowa Way is a work of analysis and interpretation that helps us understand story within its larger cultural contexts. It combines the author's unique literary talent with his people's equally unique perspective on anthropological questions in a text that can be enjoyed on multiple levels by scholars and general readers alike.

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Towns and Temples Along the Mississippi
Edited by David H. Dye and Cheryl Anne Cox
University of Alabama Press, 1990

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

Specialists from archaeology, ethnohistory, physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology bring their varied points of view to this subject in an attempt to answer basic questions about the nature and extent of social change within the time period. The scholars' overriding concerns include presentation of a scientifically accurate depiction of the native cultures in the Central Mississippi Valley prior and immediately subsequent to European contact and the need to document the ensuing social and biological changes that eventually led to the widespread depopulation and cultural reorientation. Their findings lead to three basic hypotheses that will focus the scholarly research for decades to come.

Contributors include:

George J. Armelagos, Ian W. Brown, Chester B. DePratter, George F. Fielder, Jr., James B. Griffin, M. Cassandra Hill, Michael P. Hoffman, Charles Hudson, R. Barry Lewis, Dan F. Morse, Phyllis A. Morse, Mary Lucas Powell, Cynthia R. Price, James F. Price, Gerald P. Smith, Marvin T. Smith, and Stephen Williams

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Thirty Years Into Yesterday
A History of Archaeology at Grasshopper Pueblo
Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey
University of Arizona Press, 2005
For thirty years, the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School at Grasshopper—a 500-room Mogollon pueblo located on what is today the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona—probed the past, taught scholars of international repute, and generated controversy. This book offers an extraordinary window into a changing American archaeology and three different research programs as they confronted the same pueblo ruin.

Like the enigmatic Mogollon culture it sought to explore and earlier University of Arizona field schools in the Forestdale Valley and at Point of Pines, Grasshopper research engendered decades of controversy that still lingers in the pages of professional journals. Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey, players in the controversy who are intimately familiar with the field school that ended in 1992, offer a historical account of this major archaeological project and the intellectual debates it fostered.

Thirty Years Into Yesterday charts the development of the Grasshopper program under three directors and through three periods dominated by distinct archaeological paradigms: culture history, processual archaeology, and behavioral archaeology. It examines the contributions made each season, the concepts and methods each paradigm used, and the successes and failures of each. The book transcends interests of southwestern archaeologists in demonstrating how the three archaeological paradigms reinterpreted Grasshopper, illustrating larger shifts in American archaeology as a whole. Such an opportunity will not come again, as funding constraints, ethical concerns, and other issues no doubt will preclude repeating the Grasshopper experience in our lifetimes.

Ultimately, Thirty Years Into Yesterday continues the telling of the Grasshopper story that was begun in the authors’ previous books. In telling the story of the archaeologists who recovered the material residue of past Mogollon lives and the place of the Western Apache people in their interpretations, Thirty Years Into Yesterday brings the story full circle to a stunning conclusion.
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The Two Hendricks
Unraveling a Mohawk Mystery
Eric Hinderaker
Harvard University Press, 2011

In September 1755, the most famous Indian in the world—a Mohawk leader known in English as King Hendrick—died in the Battle of Lake George. He was fighting the French in defense of British claims to North America, and his death marked the end of an era in Anglo-Iroquois relations. He was not the first Mohawk of that name to attract international attention. Half a century earlier, another Hendrick worked with powerful leaders in the frontier town of Albany. He cemented his transatlantic fame when he traveled to London as one of the “four Indian kings.”

Until recently the two Hendricks were thought to be the same person. Eric Hinderaker sets the record straight, reconstructing the lives of these two men in a compelling narrative that reveals the complexities of the Anglo-Iroquois alliance, a cornerstone of Britain’s imperial vision. The two Hendricks became famous because, as Mohawks, they were members of the Iroquois confederacy and colonial leaders believed the Iroquois held the balance of power in the Northeast. As warriors, the two Hendricks aided Britain against the French; as Christians, they adopted the trappings of civility; as sachems, they stressed cooperation rather than bloody confrontation with New York and Great Britain.

Yet the alliance was never more than a mixed blessing for the two Hendricks and the Iroquois. Hinderaker offers a poignant personal story that restores the lost individuality of the two Hendricks while illuminating the tumultuous imperial struggle for North America.

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They Sang for Horses
The Impact of the Horse on Navajo and Apache Folklore
LaVerne Harrell Clark
University Press of Colorado, 2001
No Native American groups placed more emphasis on the horse in their lives than did the Navajo and Apache of the Southwest. They Sang for Horses, first published in 1966 and now considered a classic, remains the only comprehensive treatment of the profound mystical influence that the horse has exerted for more than three hundred years.

In this completely redesigned and expanded edition, LaVerne Harrell Clark examines how storytellers, singers, medicine men, and painters created the animal's evolving symbolic significance by adapting existing folklore and cultural symbols. Exploring the horse's importance in ceremonies, songs, prayers, customs, and beliefs, she investigates the period of the horse's most pronounced cultural impact on the Navajo and the Apache, starting from the time of its acquisition from the Spanish in the seventeenth century and continuing to the mid-1960s, when the pickup truck began to replace it as the favored means of transportation. In addition, she presents a look at how Navajos and Apaches today continue to redefine the horse's important role in their spiritual as well as material lives.

This classic work is a must for historians, readers interested in Native American folklore and mythology, and anyone who has ever been captivated by the magic and romance of the horse.

Co-winner of the 1967 University of Chicago Folklore Award.

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Transforming Diné Education
Innovations in Pedagogy and Practice
Edited by Pedro Vallejo and Vincent Werito
University of Arizona Press, 2022
Transforming Diné Education: Innovations in Pedagogy and Practice gathers the voices of Diné scholars, educators, and administrators to offer critical insights into contemporary programs that place Diné-centered pedagogy into practice.

Bringing together decades of teaching experience, contributors offer perspectives from school- and community-based programs, as well as the tribal, district, and university level. They address special education, language revitalization, wellness, self-determination and sovereignty, and university-tribal-community partnerships. These contributions foreground Diné ways of knowing both as an educational philosophy and as an active practice applied in the innovative programs the book highlights. The contributors deepen our understanding of the state of Navajo education by sharing their perspectives about effective teaching practices and the development of programs that advance educational opportunities for Navajo youth.

This work provides stories of Diné resilience, resistance, and survival. It articulates a Diné-centered pedagogy that will benefit educators and learners for generations to come. Transforming Diné Education fills a need in the larger literature of curricular and programmatic development and provides tools for academic success for all American Indian students.

Contributors
Berlinda Begay
Lorenda Belone
Michael “Mikki” Carroll
Quintina “Tina” Deschenie
Henry Fowler
Richard Fulton
Davis E. Henderson
Kelsey Dayle John
Lyla June Johnston
Tracia Keri Jojola
Tiffany S. Lee
Shawn Secatero
Michael Thompson
Pedro “Pete” Vallejo
Christine B. Vining
Vincent Werito
Duane “Chili” Yazzie
 
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Trails to Tiburón
The 1894 and 1895 Field Diaries of W J McGee
W. J. McGee; Transcribed by Hazel McFeely Fontana; Annotated and with an Introduction by Bernard L. Fontana
University of Arizona Press, 2000
When William John McGee set out from Washington, D.C., for the Sonoran Desert in 1894, he was inspired by a passion for adventure as much as a thirst for knowledge. McGee lived in an era when discovery was made through travel rather than study, and reputations were forged by going where no outsiders had gone before.

A self-taught scientist in the newly forming field of anthropology, McGee led two expeditions through southern Arizona and northern Sonora for the Bureau of American Ethnology. There he conducted ethnographic research among the Papagos (Tohono O'odham) and the Seris, and his subsequent publication The Seri Indians helped secure his place in the anthropological community.

McGee's complete journals of the expeditions, kept in small field notebooks and preserved in the Library of Congress, are published here for the first time. These journals contain detailed descriptions of the country and people McGee encountered and convey the adventure of traveling through wild and unfamiliar places—including a voyage to Isla Tiburón, or Shark Island, in the Gulf of California—and being plagued by foul weather, a shortage of supplies, and fear of attack from hostile Indians.

Trails to Tiburón features 57 historical photographs taken on the expedition, capturing the places McGee saw and the people he encountered. Fontana's notes to the diary provide useful botanical, geological, and ethnographic information, while his introduction places McGee and his field work in the context of late-nineteenth-century anthropology and science.

Trails to Tiburón reveals McGee's versatility as a field worker and shows his methods, often questioned today, to be the reasonable response of a man caught up in the intellectual fervor of his time. For anyone wanting to share in the spirit of adventure, these journals are a landmark in the annals of exploration.
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Through an Indian's Looking-Glass
A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot
Drew Lopenzina
University of Massachusetts Press, 2017
The life of William Apess (1798–1839), a Pequot Indian, Methodist preacher, and widely celebrated writer, provides a lens through which to comprehend the complex dynamics of indigenous survival and resistance in the era of America's early nationhood. Apess's life intersects with multiple aspects of indigenous identity and existence in this period, including indentured servitude, slavery, service in the armed forces, syncretic engagements with Christian spirituality, and Native struggles for political and cultural autonomy. Even more, Apess offers a powerful and provocative voice for the persistence of Native presence in a time and place that was long supposed to have settled its "Indian question" in favor of extinction.

Through meticulous archival research, close readings of Apess's key works, and informed and imaginative speculation about his largely enigmatic life, Drew Lopenzina provides a vivid portrait of this singular Native American figure. This new biography will sit alongside Apess's own writing as vital reading for those interested in early America and indigeneity.
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Two Toms
Lessons from a Shoshone Doctor
Thomas H. Johnson
University of Utah Press, 2011

In 1969, Tom Wesaw was an 83-year-old Shoshone doctor and religious leader on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. He could no longer drive, which posed problems in making house calls. The arrival of young anthropologist Tom Johnson changed that. Johnson would drive Wesaw, and cook, pump water, and build fires for sweat lodges. In exchange, the elder Tom would show the younger Tom his work. The two were together so often that the people of Wind River began to refer to them affectionately by one name: Two Toms. By the light of the lamp Wesaw gave him, Johnson would write down what he learned. The Shoshone doctor wanted his student to share everything he saw and heard. Now, in Two Toms: Lessons from a Shoshone Doctor, he has.

Presented as an engaging narrative, Johnson’s book reveals details about the Shoshone culture and it chronicles the story of the friendship between these two men of different backgrounds. Filled with valuable anthropological information, this book is also highly readable and entertaining.
 
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Time of Anarchy
Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America
Matthew Kruer
Harvard University Press, 2021

A gripping account of the violence and turmoil that engulfed England’s fledgling colonies and the crucial role played by Native Americans in determining the future of North America.

In 1675, eastern North America descended into chaos. Virginia exploded into civil war, as rebel colonists decried the corruption of planter oligarchs and massacred allied Indians. Maryland colonists, gripped by fears that Catholics were conspiring with enemy Indians, rose up against their rulers. Separatist movements and ethnic riots swept through New York and New Jersey. Dissidents in northern Carolina launched a revolution, proclaiming themselves independent of any authority but their own. English America teetered on the edge of anarchy.

Though seemingly distinct, these conflicts were in fact connected through the Susquehannock Indians, a once-mighty nation reduced to a small remnant. Forced to scatter by colonial militia, Susquehannock bands called upon connections with Indigenous nations from the Great Lakes to the Deep South, mobilizing sources of power that colonists could barely perceive, much less understand. Although the Susquehannock nation seemed weak and divided, it exercised influence wildly disproportionate to its size, often tipping settler societies into chaos. Colonial anarchy was intertwined with Indigenous power.

Piecing together Susquehannock strategies from a wide range of archival documents and material evidence, Matthew Kruer shows how one people’s struggle for survival and renewal changed the shape of eastern North America. Susquehannock actions rocked the foundations of the fledging English territories, forcing colonial societies and governments to respond. Time of Anarchy recasts our understanding of the late seventeenth century and places Indigenous power at the heart of the story.

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The Tanana Chiefs
Native Rights and Western Law
Edited by William Schneider
University of Alaska Press, 2018
At the turn of the twentieth century, life was changing drastically in Alaska. The gold rush brought an onslaught of white settlers to the area, railroad companies were pushing into the territory, and telegraph lines opened up new lines of communication. The Native groups who had hunted and fished on the land for more than a century realized that if they did not speak up now, they would lose their land forever.

This is the story of a historic meeting between Native Athabascan leaders and government officials, held in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1915. It was one of the first times that Native voices were part of the official record. They sought education and medical assistance, and they wanted to know what they could expect from the federal government. They hoped for a balance between preserving their way of life with seeking new opportunities under the law.

The Tanana Chiefs chronicles the efforts by Alaska Natives to gain recognition for rights under Western law and the struggles to negotiate government-to-government relationships with the federal government. It contains the first full transcript of the historic meeting as well as essays that connect that first gathering with the continued efforts of the Tanana Chiefs Conference, which continues to meet and fight for Native rights.
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Tewa Worlds
An Archaeological History of Being and Becoming in the Pueblo Southwest
Samuel Duwe
University of Arizona Press, 2020

Tewa Worlds tells a history of eight centuries of the Tewa people, set among their ancestral homeland in northern New Mexico. Bounded by four sacred peaks and bisected by the Rio Grande, this is where the Tewa, after centuries of living across a vast territory, reunited and forged a unique type of village life. It later became an epicenter of colonialism, for within its boundaries are both the ruins of the first Spanish colonial capital and the birthplace of the atomic bomb. Yet through this dramatic change the Tewa have endured and today maintain deep connections with their villages and a landscape imbued with memory and meaning.

Anthropologists have long trekked through Tewa country, but the literature remains deeply fractured among the present and the past, nuanced ethnographic description, and a growing body of archaeological research. Samuel Duwe bridges this divide by drawing from contemporary Pueblo philosophical and historical discourse to view the long arc of Tewa history as a continuous journey. The result is a unique history that gives weight to the deep past, colonial encounters, and modern challenges, with the understanding that the same concepts of continuity and change have guided the people in the past and present, and will continue to do so in the future.
 

Focusing on a decade of fieldwork in the northern portion of the Tewa world—the Rio Chama Valley—Duwe explores how incorporating Pueblo concepts of time and space in archaeological interpretation critically reframes ideas of origins, ethnogenesis, and abandonment. It also allows archaeologists to appreciate something that the Tewa have always known: that there are strong and deep ties that extend beyond modern reservation boundaries.

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The Tewa World
Space, Time, Being and Becoming in a Pueblo Society
Alfonso Ortiz
University of Chicago Press, 1972
"This is a book that springs from richness. . . valuable not only for anthropologists and sociologists. . . the interested but unskilled layman will find a treasure trove as well. One thing seems certain. If this book does not become THE authority for the scholar, it will certainly never be ignored. Ortiz has done himself and his people proud. They are both worthy of the acclamation."—The New Mexican
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Tewa Tales
Elsie Clews Parsons
University of Arizona Press, 1994
The Tewa are a Pueblo Indian group from New Mexico, some of whom migrated around 1700, in the aftermath of the second Pueblo Revolt, to their present location on First Mesa of the Hopi Reservation in northern Arizona.

This collection of more than one hundred tales from both New Mexico and Arizona Tewa, first published in 1926, bears witness to their rich cultural history. In addition to emergence and animal stories, these tales also provide an account of many social customs such as wedding ceremonials and relay racing--that show marked differences between the two tribal groups. A comparison of tales from the two divisions of the tribe reveals something of what has happened to both emigrant and home-staying Tewa over two centuries of separation. Yet, while only half of the Arizona tales are distinctly parallel to the New Mexican, additional similarities may be found in such narrative features as the helpfulness of Spider old woman and her possession of medicine, creating life magically under a blanket, or Coyote beguiling girls into marriage.

Elsie Clews Parsons was a pioneering anthropologist in the Southwest whose works included the encyclopedic Pueblo Indian Religion. The Tewa tales she gathered for this volume are thus notable not only as fascinating stories that will delight curious readers, but also as authentic reflections of a people less known to scholars.
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Trail to Heaven
Knowledge and Narrative in a Northern Native Community
Robin Ridington
University of Iowa Press, 1992


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