Metropolitan Indigenous Cultural Centres have become a focal point for making Indigenous histories and contemporary cultures public in settler-colonial societies over the past three decades. While there are extraordinary success stories, there are equally stories that cause concern: award-winning architecturally designed Indigenous cultural centres that have been abandoned; centres that serve the interests of tourists but fail to nourish the cultural interests of Indigenous stakeholders; and places for vibrant community gathering that fail to garner the economic and politic support to remain viable. Indigenous cultural centres are rarely static. They are places of 'emergence', assembled and re-assembled along a range of vectors that usually lie beyond the gaze of architecture. How might the traditional concerns of architecture - site, space, form, function, materialities, tectonics - be reconfigured to express the complex and varied social identities of contemporary Indigenous peoples in colonised nations? This book, documents a range of Indigenous Cultural Centres across the globe and the processes that led to their development. It explores the possibilities for the social and political project of the Cultural Centre that architecture both inhibits and affords. Whose idea of architecture counts when designing Indigenous Cultural Centres? How does architectural history and contemporary practice territorialise spaces of Indigenous occupation? What is architecture for Indigenous cultures and how is it recognised? This ambitious and provocative study pursues a new architecture for colonised Indigenous cultures that takes the politics of recognition to its heart. It advocates an ethics of mutual engagement as a crucial condition for architectural projects that design across cultural difference. The book's structure, method, and arguments are dialogically assembled around narratives told by Indigenous people of their pursuit of public recognition, spatial justice, and architectural presence in settler dominated societies. Possibilities for decolonising architecture emerge through these accounts.

Brave Hearts: Indian Women of the Plains tells the story of Plains Indian women through a series of fascinating vignettes. They are a remarkable group of women - some famous, some obscure. Some were hunters, some were warriors and, in a rare case, one was a chief; some lived extraordinary lives, while others lived more quietly in their lodges. Some were born into traditional families and knew their place in society while others were bi-racial who struggled to find their place in a world conflicted between Indian and white. Some never knew anything but the old, nomadic way of life, while others lived on to suffer through the reservation years. Others were born on the reservation but did their best in difficult times to keep to the old ways. Some never left the reservation while others ventured out into the larger world. All, in their own way, were Plains Indian women.

Our lives are mostly composed of ordinary reality - the flow of moment-to-moment existence - and yet it has been largely overlooked as a subject in itself for anthropological study. In this work, the author achieves an understanding of this part of reality for the Mehinaku Indians, an Amazonian people, in two stages: first by observing various aspects of their experience and second by relating how these different facets come to play in a stream of ordinary consciousness, a walk to the river. In this way, abstract schemata such as 'cosmology,' 'sociality,' 'gender,' and the 'everyday' are understood as they are actually lived. This book contributes to the ethnography of the Amazon, specifically the Upper Xingu, with an approach that crosses disciplinary boundaries between anthropology, philosophy, and psychology. In doing so it attempts to comprehend what Malinowski called the 'imponderabilia of actual life.'

A twenty-two acre strip of land-known as Puvungna-lies at the edge of California State University's Long Beach campus. The land, indisputably owned by California, is also sacred to several Native American tribes. And these twenty-two acres have been the nexus for an acrimonious and costly conflict over control of the land. Of Sacred Lands and Strip Malls tells the story of Puvungna, from the region's deep history, through years of struggle between activists and campus administration, and ongoing reverberations from the conflict. As Loewe makes clear, this is a case study with implications beyond a single controversy; at stake in the legal battle is the constitutionality of state codes meant to protect sacred sites from commercial development, and the right of individuals to participate in public hearings. The case also raises questions about the nature of contract archaeology, applied anthropology, and the relative status of ethnography and ethnohistorical research. It is a compelling snapshot of issues surrounding contemporary Native American landscapes.

In this remarkable book, Brad Steiger shows how to enter a dimension of reality between the physical and the nonphysical, between the world of spirits and the world of humans. Drawing upon information relayed to him by shamans from many tribes during thirty years of research and study, Steiger teaches easy-to-master techniques of entering Dreamtime and receiving valuable personal guidance. He explains how to identify one's totem animal and spirit guide, how to project healing energy in dreams, how to travel in astral dreamscapes, how to guard against disruptive entities, and how to receive prophetic glimpses of the future.

Reconciling and Rehumanizing Indigenous-Settler Relations: An Applied Anthropological Perspective presents a unique and honest account of an applied anthropologist's experience in working with Indigenous peoples of Canada. It illustrates Dr. Nadia Ferrara's efforts in reconciliation and rehumanization, showing that it is all about recognizing our shared humanity. In this self-reflective narrative, the author describes her personal experience of marginalization and how it contributed to a more in-depth understanding of how others are marginalized, as well as the fundamental sense of belongingness and connectedness. The book is enriched with stories and insights from her fieldwork as a clinician, a university professor, and a bureaucrat. Dr. Ferrara shows how she has applied her experience as an art therapist in Indigenous communities to her current work in policy development to ensure the policies created reflect their current realities. Reconciling and Rehumanizing Indigenous-Settler Relations describes the cultural competency course for public servants Dr. Ferrara is leading, as a means to break down stereotypes and showcase the resilience of Indigenous peoples. She makes a compassionate and urgent call to all North Americans to connect with their responsibility and compassion, and acknowledge the injustices that the original peoples of this land have faced and continue to face. Reconciliation requires concrete action and it starts with the individual's self-reflection, engagement in authentic human-to-human dialogue, learning from one another, and working together towards a better future, all of which is chronicled in this insightful book.

Political Principles and Indian Sovereignty examines the connection between the well being of Indian people, the sovereignty of Indian Nations and the democratic principles on which the United States was founded. Problems faced by Native Americans in health, education and general welfare are linked to the loss of sovereignty caused by the U.S. Government.

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In recent years, the field of study variously called local, indigenous or traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) has experienced a crisis brought about by the questioning of some of its basic assumptions. This has included reassessing notions that scientific methods can accurately elicit and describe TEK or that incorporating it into development projects will improve the physical, social or economic well-being of marginalized peoples. The contributors to this volume argue that to accurately and appropriately describe TEK, the historical and political forces that have shaped it, as well as people's day-to-day engagement with the landscape around them must be taken into account. TEK thus emerges, not as an easily translatable tool for development experts, but as a rich and complex element of contemporary lives that should be defined and managed by indigenous and local peoples themselves.

This book addresses the intersections between the interdisciplinary realms of Ecocriticism and Indigenous and Native American Studies, and between academic theory and pragmatic eco-activism conducted by multiethnic and indigenous communities. It illuminates the multi-layered, polyvocal ways in which artistic expressions render ecological connections, drawing on scholars working in collaboration with Indigenous artists from all walks of life, including film, literature, performance, and other forms of multimedia to expand existing conversations. Both local and global in its focus, the volume includes essays from multiethnic and Indigenous communities across the world, visiting topics such as Navajo opera, Sami film production history, south Indian tribal documentary, Maori art installations, Native American and First Nations science-fiction literature and film, Amazonian poetry, and many others. Highlighting trans-Indigenous sensibilities that speak to worldwide crises of environmental politics and action against marginalization, the collection alerts readers to movements of community resilience and resistance, cosmological thinking about inter- and intra-generational multi-species relations, and understandings of indigenous aesthetics and material ecologies. It engages with emerging environmental concepts such as multispecies ethnography, cosmopolitics, and trans-indigeneity, as well as with new areas of ecocritical research such as material ecocriticism, biosemiotics, and media studies. In its breadth and scope, this book promises new directions for ecocritical thought and environmental humanities practice, providing thought-provoking insight into what it means to be human in a locally situated, globally networked, and cosmologically complex world.

Ethnic minority communities make claims for cultural rights from states in different ways depending on how governments include them in policies and practices of accommodation or assimilation. However, institutional explanations don't tell the whole story, as individuals and communities also protest, using emotionally compelling narratives about past wrongs to justify their claims for new rights protections. Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic minority rights movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador examines how ethnic minority communities use memories of state and paramilitary violence to shame states into cooperating with minority cultural agendas such as the right to mother tongue education. Shaming and claiming is a social movement tactic that binds historic violence to contemporary citizenship. Combining theory with empirics, the book accounts for how democratization shapes citizen experiences of interest representation and how memorialization processes challenge state regimes of forgetting at local, state, and international levels. Democratization and Memories of Violence draws on six case studies in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador to show how memory-based narratives serve as emotionally salient leverage for marginalized communities to facilitate state consideration of minority rights agendas. This book will be of interest to postgraduates and researchers in comparative politics, development studies, sociology, international studies, peace and conflict studies and area studies.

This study explores how the five tribes of Oklahoma - Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles - strove to achieve political unity within their tribes during the first decades of the 20th century by forging a new sense of peoplehood around the idea of blood.

Power of the Land is the first in-depth look at the past 120 years of struggle over the Oglala Lakota land base on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

This readable yet sophisticated survey of treaty-making between Native and European Americans before 1800, recovers a deeper understanding of how Indians tried to forge a new society with whites on the multicultural frontiers of North America-an understanding that may enlighten our own task of protecting Native American rights and imagining racial justice.

The Literary and Legal Genealogy of Native American Dispossession offers a unique interpretation of how literary and public discourses influenced three U.S. Supreme Court Rulings written by Chief Justice John Marshall with respect to Native Americans. These cases, Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823), Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), collectively known as the Marshall Trilogy, have formed the legal basis for the dispossession of indigenous populations throughout the Commonwealth. The Trilogy cases are usually approached as 'pure' legal judgments. This book maintains, however, that it was the literary and public discourses from the early sixteenth through to the early nineteenth centuries that established a discursive tradition which, in part, transformed the American Indians from owners to 'mere occupants' of their land. Exploring the literary genesis of Marshall's judgments, George Pappas draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, to analyse how these formative U.S. Supreme Court rulings blurred the distinction between literature and law.

With the exception of two short periods of direct British intervention during the Anglo-Afghan Wars of 1839-42 and 1878-80, the history of nineteenth-century Afghanistan has received little attention from western scholars. This study seeks to shift the focus of debate from the geostrategic concern with Afghanistan as the bone of contention between imperial Russian and British interests to a thorough investigation of the sociopolitical circumstances prevailing within the country. On the basis of unpublished British documents and works by Afghan historians, it lays the groundwork for a better understanding of the political mechanisms at work during the early Muhammadzai era by analysing them both from the viewpoint of the center and the pierphery.

Most American Indian reservations are islands of poverty in a sea of wealth, but they do not have to remain that way. To extract themselves from poverty, Native Americans will have to build on their rich cultural history including familiarity with markets and integrate themselves into modern economies by creating institutions that reward productivity and entrepreneurship and that establish tribal governments that are capable of providing a stable rule of law. The chapters in this volume document the involvement of indigenous people in market economies long before European contact, provide evidence on how the wealth of Indian Nations has been held hostage to bureaucratic red tape, and explains how their wealth can be unlocked through self-determination and sovereignty.

Most American Indian reservations are islands of poverty in a sea of wealth, but they do not have to remain that way. To extract themselves from poverty, Native Americans will have to build on their rich cultural history including familiarity with markets and integrate themselves into modern economies by creating institutions that reward productivity and entrepreneurship and that establish tribal governments that are capable of providing a stable rule of law. The chapters in this volume document the involvement of indigenous people in market economies long before European contact, provide evidence on how the wealth of Indian Nations has been held hostage to bureaucratic red tape, and explains how their wealth can be unlocked through self-determination and sovereignty.

New waves of land grabbing are working to dispossess peasants in both the Global South and the Global North. But peasants are fighting back. They have come together to contest dispossession through place-based and transnational forms of activism. In so doing, they have articulated a demand for food sovereignty. They claim that a democratically organized food system in which smallholder producers produce their own food on their own territory can feed the world whilst cooling the planet. This book explores practices of peasant resistance. Its aim is to show how grass roots peasant activists have been able to demand transnational social and political change. In the process, the book examines the grassroots forms of activism that enable peasants to reclaim land upon which to work and from which to live. It explores how diverse grass roots movements have been able to connect and unite in order to contest transnational dynamics of oppression. Moreover, it discusses how practices of peasant activism transform how we think, and ought to think, about human rights and global democracy. By also highlighting the problems that peasants continue to face, the book indicates that the future of sustainable peasant livelihoods depends on the will of global organizations and transnational society to not just listen to the voices of peasant activists, but to respond to them too.

New waves of land grabbing are working to dispossess peasants in both the Global South and the Global North. But peasants are fighting back. They have come together to contest dispossession through place-based and transnational forms of activism. In so doing, they have articulated a demand for food sovereignty. They claim that a democratically organized food system in which smallholder producers produce their own food on their own territory can feed the world whilst cooling the planet. This book explores practices of peasant resistance. Its aim is to show how grass roots peasant activists have been able to demand transnational social and political change. In the process, the book examines the grassroots forms of activism that enable peasants to reclaim land upon which to work and from which to live. It explores how diverse grass roots movements have been able to connect and unite in order to contest transnational dynamics of oppression. Moreover, it discusses how practices of peasant activism transform how we think, and ought to think, about human rights and global democracy. By also highlighting the problems that peasants continue to face, the book indicates that the future of sustainable peasant livelihoods depends on the will of global organizations and transnational society to not just listen to the voices of peasant activists, but to respond to them too.

In recent years the concept and study of civil society has received a lot of attention from political scientists, economists, and sociologists, but less so from anthropologists. A ground-breaking ethnographic approach to civil society as it is formed in indigenous communities in Latin America, this volume explores the multiple potentialities of civil society s growth and critically assesses the potential for sustained change. Much recent literature has focused on the remarkable gains made by civil society and the chapters in this volume reinforce this trend while also showing the complexity of civil society - that civil society can itself sometimes be uncivil. In doing so, these insightful contributions speak not only to Latin American area studies but also to the changing shape of global systems of political economy in general. Edward F. Fischer is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt University. His work focuses on issues of political economy, identity politics, and globalization; he has conducted long-term fieldwork with the Maya of Guatemala and in Germany. His publications include Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala (1996), Cultural Logics and Global Economies: Maya Identity in Thought and Practice (2001), Tecpan Guatemala: A Modern Maya Town in Local and Global Context (2002, with Carol Hendrickson), and Broccoli and Desire: Global Connections and Maya Struggles in Postwar Guatemala (2006, with Peter Benson). His current research focuses on the interplay of moral values and economic rationalities."

This book examines how Indigenous peoples' rights and Indigenous rights movements represent an important and often overlooked shift in international politics - a shift that powerful states are actively resisting in a multitude of ways. While Indigenous peoples are often dismissed as marginal non-state actors, this book argues that far from insignificant, global Indigenous politics is potentially forging major changes in the international system, as the implementation of Indigenous peoples' rights requires a complete re-thinking and re-ordering of sovereignty, territoriality, liberalism, and human rights. After thirty years of intense effort, the transnational Indigenous rights movement achieved passage of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in September 2007. This book asks: Why did movement need to fight so hard to secure passage of a bare minimum standard on Indigenous rights? Why is it that certain states are so threatened by an emerging international Indigenous rights regime? How does the emerging Indigenous rights regime change the international status quo? The questions are addressed by exploring how Indigenous politics at the global level compels a new direction of thought in IR by challenging some of its fundamental tenets. It is argued that global Indigenous politics is a perspective of IR that, with the recognition of Indigenous peoples' collective rights to land and self-determination, complicates the structure of international politics in new and important ways, challenging both Westphalian notions of state sovereignty and the (neo-)liberal foundations of states and the international human rights consensus. Qualitative case studies of Canadian and New Zealand Indigenous rights, based on original field research, analyse both the potential and the limits of these challenges. This work will be of interest to graduates and scholars in international relations, Indigenous studies, international organizations, IR theory and social movements.