Indian freedmen and their descendants have garnered much public and scholarly attention, but women's roles have largely been absent from that discussion. Now a scholar who gained an insider's perspective into the Black Seminole community in Texas and Mexico offers a rare and vivid picture of these women and their contributions. In "Dreaming with the Ancestors," Shirley Boteler Mock explores the role that Black Seminole women have played in shaping and perpetuating a culture born of African roots and shaped by southeastern Native American and Mexican influences.

Mock reveals a unique maroon culture, forged from an eclectic mixture of religious beliefs and social practices. At its core is an amalgam of African-derived traditions kept alive by women. The author interweaves documentary research with extensive interviews she conducted with leading Black Seminole women to uncover their remarkable history. She tells how these women nourished their families and held fast to their Afro-Seminole language -- even as they fled slavery, endured relocation, and eventually sought new lives in new lands. Of key importance were the "warrior women" -- keepers of dreams and visions that bring to life age-old African customs.

Featuring more than thirty illustrations and maps, including historic photographs never before published, "Dreaming with the Ancestors" combines scholarly analysis with human interest to open a new window on both African American and American Indian history and culture.

In Santa Barbara's Legacy: An Environmental History of Huancavelica, Peru, Nicholas A. Robins presents the first comprehensive environmental history of a mercury producing region in Latin America. Tracing the origins, rise and decline of the regional population and economy from pre-history to the present, Robins explores how people's multifaceted, intimate and often toxic relationship with their environment has resulted in Huancavelica being among the most mercury-contaminated urban areas on earth. The narrative highlights issues of environmental justice and the toxic burdens that contemporary residents confront, especially many of those who live in adobe homes and are exposed to mercury, as well as lead and arsenic, on a daily basis. The work incorporates archival and printed primary sources as well as scientific research led by the author.

Conversations with LeAnne Howe is the first collection of interviews with the groundbreaking Choctaw author, whose genre-bending works take place in the US Southeast, Oklahoma, and beyond our national borders to bring Native American characters and themes to the global stage. Best known for her American Book Award-winning novel Shell Shaker (2001), LeAnne Howe (b. 1951) is also a poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, theorist, and humorist. She has held numerous honors including a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship in Amman, Jordan, from 2010 to 2011, and she was the recipient of the Modern Language Association's first Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages for her travelogue, Choctalking on Other Realities (2013). Spanning the period from 2002 to 2020, the interviews in this collection delve deeply into Howe's poetics, her innovative critical methodology of tribalography, her personal history, and her position on subjects ranging from the Lone Ranger to Native American mascots. Two previously unpublished interviews, "'An American in New York': LeAnne Howe" (2019) and "Genre-Sliding on Stage with LeAnne Howe" (2020), explore unexamined areas of her personal history and how it impacted her creative work, including childhood trauma and her incubation as a playwright in the 1980s. These conversations along with 2019's Occult Poetry Radio interview also give important insights on the background of Howe's newest critically acclaimed work, Savage Conversations (2019), about Mary Todd Lincoln's hallucination of a "Savage Indian" during her time in Bellevue Place sanitarium. Taken as a whole, Conversations with LeAnne Howe showcases the development and continued impact of one of the most important Indigenous American writers of the twenty-first century.

Human Rights, Hegemony and Utopia in Latin America: Poverty, Forced Migration and Resistance in Mexico and Colombia by Camilo Perez-Bustillo and Karla Hernandez Mares explores the evolving relationship between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic visions of human rights, within the context of cases in contemporary Mexico and Colombia, and their broader implications. The first three chapters provide an introduction to the books overall theoretical framework, which will then be applied to a series of more specific issues (migrant rights and the rights of indigenous peoples) and cases (primarily focused on contexts in Mexico and Colombia,), which are intended to be illustrative of broader trends in Latin America and globally.

Society is continually moving towards global interaction, and nations often contain citizens of numerous cultures and backgrounds. Bi-culturalism incorporates a higher degree of social inclusion in an effort to bring about social justice and change, and it may prove to be an alternative to the existing dogma of mainstream Europe-based hegemonic bodies of knowledge. The Handbook of Research on Indigenous Knowledge and Bi-Culturalism in a Global Context is a collection of innovative studies on the nature of indigenous bodies' knowledge that incorporates the sacred or spiritual influence across various countries following World War II, while exploring the difficulties faced as society immerses itself in bi-culturalism. While highlighting topics including bi-cultural teaching, Africology, and education empowerment, this book is ideally designed for academicians, urban planners, sociologists, anthropologists, researchers, and professionals seeking current research on validating the growth of indigenous thinking and ideas.

How does one read across cultural boundaries? The multitude of creative texts, performance practices, and artworks produced by Indigenous writers and artists in contemporary Australia calls upon Anglo-European academic readers, viewers, and critics to respond to this critical question. Contributors address a plethora of creative works by Indigenous writers, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and painters, including Richard Frankland, Lionel Fogarty, Lin Onus, Kim Scott, Sam Watson, and Alexis Wright, as well as Durrudiya song cycles and works by Western Desert artists. The complexity of these creative works transcends categorical boundaries of Western art, aesthetics, and literature, demanding new processes of reading and response. Other contributors address works by non-Indigenous writers and filmmakers such as Stephen Muecke, Katrina Schlunke, Margaret Somerville, and Jeni Thornley, all of whom actively engage in questioning their complicity with the past in order to challenge Western modes of knowledge and understanding and to enter into a more self-critical and authentically ethical dialogue with the Other. In probing the limitations of Anglo-European knowledge-systems, essays in this volume lay the groundwork for entering into a more authentic dialogue with Indigenous writers and critics.

Guatemala emerged from the clash between Spanish invaders and Maya cultures that began five centuries ago. The conquest of these "rich and strange lands," as Hernan Cortes called them, and their "many different peoples" was brutal and prolonged. ""Strange Lands and Different Peoples"" examines the myriad ramifications of Spanish intrusion, especially Maya resistance to it and the changes that took place in native life because of it.
The studies assembled here, focusing on the first century of colonial rule (1524-1624), discuss issues of conquest and resistance, settlement and colonization, labor and tribute, and Maya survival in the wake of Spanish invasion. The authors reappraise the complex relationship between Spaniards and Indians, which was marked from the outset by mutual feelings of resentment and mistrust. While acknowledging the pivotal role of native agency, the authors also document the excesses of Spanish exploitation and the devastating impact of epidemic disease. Drawing on research findings in Spanish and Guatemalan archives, they offer fresh insight into the Kaqchikel Maya uprising of 1524, showing that despite strategic resistance, colonization imposed a burden on the indigenous population more onerous than previously thought.
Guatemala remains a deeply divided and unjust society, a country whose current condition can be understood only in light of the colonial experiences that forged it. Affording readers a critical perspective on how Guatemala came to be, ""Strange Lands and Different Peoples" "shows the events of the past to have enduring contemporary relevance.

Helen Hunt Jackson's famous expos chronicles the oppression and murder the Native American peoples suffered throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. This book was published in 1885, at a time when the final conflicts between the United States and the Native American populations were being fought. The concept of allotted reservations as a means of settling land disputes had by then been underway for decades. At this point in time, the colonial settlers from Europe had spent over a century driving back the native inhabitants of North America. Jackson casts her examination over the preceding century, cataloging the systematic process through which the Native American populace was suppressed, killed and robbed of their lands and heritage. Each separate tribe is considered, such as the Cherokees, Sioux and the Delawares: for each we are given a cultural profile, before Jackson details the interactions - peaceful and hostile - each respective tribe had with the incipient European settlers.

"This striking project will be of wide interest to scholars and students concerned with social movements and indigenous rights. The topic is important and timely, and the author is one of the most respected Mayan intellectuals and activists." -- Kay Warren, Director of Politics, Culture, and Identity Program, Watson Institute, and Professor of International Studies and Anthropology, Brown University

When Mayan leaders protested the celebration of the Quincentenary of the "discovery" of America and joined with other indigenous groups in the Americas to proclaim an alternate celebration of 500 years of resistance, they rose to national prominence in Guatemala. This was possible in part because of the cultural, political, economic, and religious revitalization that occurred in Mayan communities in the later half of the twentieth century. Another result of the revitalization was Mayan students' enrollment in graduate programs in order to reclaim the intellectual history of the brilliant Mayan past. Victor Montejo was one of those students.

This is the first book to be published outside of Guatemala where a Mayan writer other than Rigoberta Menchu discusses the history and problems of the country. It collects essays Montejo has written over the past ten years that address three critical issues facing Mayan peoples today: identity, representation, and Mayan leadership. Montejo is deeply invested in furthering the discussion of the effectiveness of Mayan leadership because he believes that self-evaluation is necessary for the movement to advance. He also criticizes the racist treatment that Mayans experience, and advocates for the construction of a more pluralistic Guatemala thatrecognizes cultural diversity and abandons assimilation. This volume maps a new political alternative for the future of the movement that promotes inter-ethnic collaboration alongside a reverence for Mayan culture.

The first full-length examination of the archaeology and history of the Namib Desert. This is a story of human survival over the last one million years in the Namib Desert - one of the most hostile environments on Earth. Namib reveals the resilience and ingenuity of desert communities and provides a vivid picture of our species' response to climate change, and ancient strategies to counter ever-present risk. Dusty fragments of stone, pottery and bone tell a history of perpetual transition, of shifting and temporary states of balance. Namib digs beneath the usual evidence of archaeology to uncover a world of arcane rituals, of travelling rain-makers, of intricate social networks which maintained vital systems of negotiated access to scarce resources. Ranging from the earliest evidence of human occupation, through colonial rule and genocide, to the invasion of the desert by South African troops during the First World War, this is the first comprehensive archaeology of the Namib. Among its important contributions are the reclaiming of the indigenous perspective during the brutal colonial occupation, and establishing new material links between the imperialist project in German South West Africa during 1885-1915 and the Third Reich, and between Nazi ideology and Apartheid. Southern Africa: University of Namibia Press/Jacana