Indigenous cultures meticulously protect and preserve their traditions. Those traditions often have deep connections to the homelands of indigenous peoples, thus forming strong relationships between culture, land, and communities. Autoethnography can help shed light on the nature and complexity of these relationships. Indigenous Research of Land, Self, and Spirit is a collection of innovative research that focuses on the ties between indigenous cultures and the constructs of land as self and agency. It also covers critical intersectional, feminist, and heuristic inquiries across a variety of indigenous peoples. Highlighting a broad range of topics including environmental studies, land rights, and storytelling, this book is ideally designed for policymakers, academicians, students, and researchers in the fields of sociology, diversity, anthropology, environmentalism, and history.

Until its use declined in the nineteenth century, Indians of the southeastern United States were devoted to a caffeinated beverage commonly known as black drink. Brewed from the parched leaves of the yaupon holly (Ilex vomitoria), black drink was used socially and ceremonially. In certain ritual purification rites, Indians would regurgitate after drinking the tea. This study details botanical, clinical, spiritual, historical, and material aspects of black drink, including its importance not only to Native Americans, but also to many of their European-American contemporaries.

This book details the intersections between the personal life and exceptional writing of Louise Erdrich, perhaps the most critically and economically successful American Indian author ever. Known for her engrossing explorations of Native American themes, Louise Erdrich has created award-winning novels, poetry, stories, and more for three decades. Tracks on a Page: Louise Erdrich, Her Life and Works examines Erdrich's oeuvre in light of her experiences, her gender, and her heritage as the daughter of a Chippewa mother and German-American father. The book covers Erdrich from her birth to the present, offering fresh information and perspectives based on original research. By interweaving biography and literary analysis, the author, who is herself Native American, gives readers a complete and nuanced understanding of the ways in which Erdrich's identity as a woman and an American Indian have influenced her life and her writing. Tracks on a Page is the first, book-length work to approach Erdrich and her works from a non-Euro-Western perspective. It contextualizes both life and writing through the lenses of American Indian history, politics, economics, and culture, offering readers new and intriguing ways to appreciate this outstanding author. Chronological organization takes the reader from Erdrich's childhood, through her years at Dartmouth College, her personal life, and her career as a writer

Lincoln's war, the North's attack on the South, took the life of 622,000 citizens and altered the government's structure. Marx and Engels watched the war from afar and applauded his efforts. The media and our government-controlled schools have presented a deceptive view of every historical event and have whitewashed the most scandalous political leaders and vilified leaders who have worked in the best interests of the people. Following Lincoln's precedent-setting war, we have been repeatedly lied into wars. Currently, our young men and women shed their blood in foreign lands while well-connected corporations make massive profits rebuilding the infrastructure that other corporations have demolished. Meanwhile, our politicians, possessing inside knowledge, grow richer through their investments and the bribes they accept from deep-pocketed lobbyists. They have not listened to their constituents for decades. CIA thugs, in behalf of the corporations, commit terrorist acts in other countries which the U.S. government and media blame on the so-called insurgents. In 2010, the Pentagon paid the following to the top five out of 100 (1) Lockheed Martin Corp. $16,700,588,328; (2) Northrop Grumman Corp. $11,145,533,497; (3) Boeing Co. $10,462,626,196; (4) Raytheon Co. $6,727,232,555; (5) Science Applications International Corp. $5,474,482,583. Yet, throughout the country, vital infrastructure is crumbling and politicians are selling taxpayer-funded public properties to private interests as a profitable venture. The new owners exploit the public by raising service rates while diminishing the services.

Ancient Mound Builders created thousands of sacred earthen structures all across America. These native Indian cultures flourished for 4000 years before the first settlers came, creating mysterious giant earthen shapes of birds, bears, snakes, and alligator mounds, along with great conical mounds that held the bones of their leaders and loved ones. Who were these sophisticated and spiritual ancient people? They were talented shamans, farmers, hunters, fishermen, artists, and midwives who held special reverence for Mother Earth. Learn more about them and see some of their amazing artistic achievements inside "The Mound Builders of Ancient North America." Study a detailed TimeLine that helps to place everything in exact perspective. See what was also happening elsewhere in the world during the Mound Builders heydays. Surprising fetes of engineering and geographic earthworks remind us that these ancient cultures held impressive worldviews.

From "Aztec" to "Zuni," here are portraits of the daily lives of the First Nations people who lived and still live on the continent of North America; the great floating island the Northeastern woodland tribes called Turtle Island. Songs, chants and legends from the tip of southern Mexico to Alaska and Arctic Canada are included. Covering a time span of a thousand years, the book includes tribes now decimated or who are a nearly forgotten and rarely mentioned part of history.

This book of word-sketches paints a picture of their world: at times harsh and cruel, at other times spiritual and filled with beauty. These word-sketches convey the humanness of the original inhabitants of Turtle Island, the Native American Indians; paints them as neither noble nor savage, but simply as people who learned to live with nature's challenges and hardships and to endure.

To read these portraits of tribes and individuals, their land and customs, their needs, both physical and spiritual, is to understand the magnificent heritage that is the gift to the world from Native American Indian people.

This book makes a wide, conceptual challenge to the theory that the English of the colonial period thought of Native Americans as irrational and subhuman, dismissing any intimations to the contrary as ideology or propaganda. It makes a controversial intervention by demonstrating that the true tragedy of colonial relations was precisely the genuineness of benevolence, and not its cynical exploitation or subordination to other ends that was often the compelling force behind conflict and suffering. It was because the English genuinely believed that the Indians were their equals in body and mind that they fatally tried to embrace them. From an intellectual exploration of the abstract ideas of human rights in colonial America and the grounded realities of the politics that existed there to a narrative of how these ideas played out in relations between the two peoples in the early years of the colony, this book challenges and subverts current understanding of English colonial politics and religion.

"Wives of the Leopard" explores power and culture in a pre-colonial West African state whose army of women and practice of human sacrifice earned it notoriety in the racist imagination of late nineteenth-century Europe and America. Tracing two hundred years of the history of Dahomey up to the French colonial conquest in 1894, the book follows change in two central institutions. One was the monarchy, the coalitions of men and women who seized and wielded power in the name of the king. The second was the palace, a household of several thousand wives of the king who supported and managed state functions.

Looking at Dahomey against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave trade and the growth of European imperialism, Edan G. Bay reaches for a distinctly Dahomean perspective as she weaves together evidence drawn from travelers' memoirs and local oral accounts, from the religious practices of vodun, and from ethnographic studies of the twentieth century. Wives of the Leopard thoroughly integrates gender into the political analysis of state systems, effectively creating a social history of power. More broadly, it argues that women as a whole and men of the lower classes were gradually squeezed out of access to power as economic resources contracted with the decline of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. In these and other ways, the book provides an accessible portrait of Dahomey's complex and fascinating culture without exoticizing it.

The years between 1875 and 1910 saw a revolution in the economy of the Flathead Reservation, home to the Salish and Kootenai Indians. In 1875 the tribes had supported themselves through hunting - especially buffalo - and gathering. Thirty-five years later, cattle herds and farming were the foundation of their economy. Providing for the People tells the story of this transformation. Author Robert J. Bigart describes how the Salish and Kootenai tribes overcame daunting odds to maintain their independence and integrity through this dramatic transition - how, relying on their own initiatives and labor, they managed to adjust and adapt to a new political and economic order. Major changes in the Flathead Reservation economy were accompanied by the growing power of the Flathead Indian Agent. Tribal members neither sought nor desired the new order of things, but as Bigart makes clear, they never stopped fighting to maintain their economic independence and self-support. The tribes did not receive general rations and did not allow the government to take control of their food supply. Instead, most government aid was bartered in exchange for products used in running the agency. Providing for the People presents a deeply researched, finely detailed account of the economic and diplomatic strategies that distinguished the Flathead Reservation Indians at a time of overwhelming and complex challenges to Native American tribes and traditions.

In fact, Kurds in Turkey have many diverse political and ideological orientations. Focusing on the elites of these informal groups - national, religious and economic - Cuma Cicek analyses the consequences of the divisions and subsequent prospects of consensus building. Using an innovative theoretical framework founded on constructivism, the 'three 'I's' model and various strands of sociology, Cicek considers the dynamics that affect the Kurds in Turkey across issues as diverse as the central state, geopolitics, nationalism, Europeanisation and globalisation. In so doing, he examines the consensus-building process of 1999-2015 and presents the possible route to a unified Kurdish political state.Cicek's in-depth and meticulously researched work adds an indispensable layer of nuance to our conception of the Kurdish community. This is an important book for students or researchers with an interest in the history and present of the Kurds and their future in Turkey and across the Middle East.

The Volcano Is Our Home When Alan Akana realized he had missed the gift of hearing many of his family's stories, his search for his history became a gift to all his readers. The Volcano is Our Home introduces us in a very personal way to the influences that shaped Hawaii from an isolated group of islands inhabited by remarkable people with a unique and beautiful culture into the tourist mecca known today by travelers from all over the world. The author takes you to the real Hawaii, so that you may walk these islands with new understanding of the lost way of life of those who have gone before. You will journey over 250 years with a Hawaiian family, guided by their connection to the land, each other and a rich spiritual realm. You will join them on the slopes of Kilauea Volcano as they confront the arrival of each new wave of change-from Captain Cook to the missionaries, to the overthrow of the kingdom, to the 50th State, to the 21st century. Alan Akana is one of the current generation of Hawaiians who has perfected the art of "talking story." -Gail Larsen, Founder of Real Speaking and Author of Transformational Speaking: If You Want to Change the World, Tell a Better Story An Excerpt from the Book: "My ancestors simply could not ignore the goddess who lived among them and continued to appear in their midst. As the culture changed dramatically, Pele was a constant presence from generation to generation. While villages disappeared, species became extinct, churches were established, and governments were stolen, the relationship between the people who lived on the slopes of Kilauea and Pele remained firm as ever; and the people continued to make sacrifices and prayers to her in the same way as their ancestors did centuries before them."

If you drive through Mpumalanga with an eye on the landscape flashing by, you may see, near the sides of the road and further away on the hills above and in the valleys below, fragments of building in stone as well as sections of stone-walling breaking the grass cover. Endless stone circles, set in bewildering mazes and linked by long stone passages, cover the landscape stretching from Ohrigstad to Carolina, connecting over 10 000 square kilometres of the escarpment into a complex web of stone-walled homesteads, terraced fields and linking roads. Oral traditions recorded in the early twentieth century named the area Bokoni - the country of the Koni people. Few South Africans or visitors to the country know much about these settlements, and why today they are deserted and largely ignored. A long tradition of archaeological work which might provide some of the answers remains cloistered in universities and the knowledge vacuum has been filled by a variety of exotic explanations - invoking ancient settlers from India or even visitors from outer space - that share a common assumption that Africans were too primitive to have created such elaborate stone structures. Forgotten World defies the usual stereotypes about backward African farming methods and shows that these settlements were at their peak between 1500 and 1820, that they housed a substantial population, organised vast amounts of labour for infrastructural development, and displayed extraordinary levels of agricultural innovation and productivity. The Koni were part of a trading system linked to the coast of Mozambique and the wider world of Indian Ocean trade beyond. Forgotten World tells the story of Bokoni through rigorous historical and archaeological research, and lavishly illustrates it with stunning photographic images.

Explore the history and tradition of Wabanaki art.