Explore the history and tradition of Wabanaki art.

When Joanne B. Mulcahy first helped Mary Peterson -- a respected elder of the Akhiok community -- find a safe home away from the violence and alcoholism that had altered village life, she never imagined that they would meet again five years later and begin more than twelve years of interviews, letters, and visits that would transform the lives of both women.

Birth and Rebirth on an Alaskan Island offers the fascinating story of Mary's life, from her experience growing up within the traditional society of Akhiok to her work as a teacher, a Community Health Aide, a mother, a grandmother, and an Alutiiq midwife and healer. Through her story we discover a society that blended native Alutiiq culture with the Russian Orthodox teachings handed down from late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonists; that mixed modern education and employment with a subsistence lifestyle; that sanctioned arranged marriages but upheld civil divorce laws; and, above all, that recovered its confidence in traditional healing -- both of the body and of the community.

More than a personal story of survival, Birth and Rebirth on an Alaskan Island portrays, in Akhiok, a resilience formed through a return to a strong sense of community. As we become acquainted with the Kodiak world through Mary Peterson's story, we come to realize the strength of the native oral tradition and to see that knowing and healing are pivotal elements of the Alutiiq way -- particularly as they bring to light the previously unrecognized efforts, inspirations, and accomplishments of countless women healers.

This riveting volume dispels the sanitized history surrounding Native American practices toward their enemies that preceded the European exploration and colonization of North America. "We abandon truth when we gloss over the clashes between Native Americans and Europeans, encounters of parties equally matched in barbarity," says George Franklin Feldman, "We neglect true history when we hide the uniqueness of the varied cultures that evolved during the thousands of years before Europeans invaded North America." The research is impeccable, the writing sparkling, and the evidence incontrovertible: headhunting and cannibalism were practiced by many of the native peoples of North America.

International institutions (United Nations, World Bank) and multinational companies have voiced concern over the adverse impact of resource extraction activities on the livelihood of indigenous communities. This volume examines mega resource extraction projects in Australia, Bolivia, Canada, Chad, Cameroon, India, Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines.

Between 1864 and 1877, during the height of the Plains Indian wars, Pawnee Indian scouts rendered invaluable service to the United States Army. They led missions deep into contested territory, tracked resisting bands, spearheaded attacks against enemy camps, and on more than one occasion saved American troops from disaster on the field of battle. In "War Party in Blue, " Mark van de Logt tells the story of the Pawnee scouts from their perspective, detailing the battles in which they served and recounting hitherto neglected episodes.

Employing military records, archival sources, and contemporary interviews with current Pawnee tribal members--some of them descendants of the scouts--Van de Logt presents the Pawnee scouts as central players in some of the army's most notable campaigns. He argues that military service allowed the Pawnees to fight their tribal enemies with weapons furnished by the United States as well as to resist pressures from the federal government to assimilate them into white society.

According to the author, it was the tribe's martial traditions, deeply embedded in their culture, that made them successful and allowed them to retain these time-honored traditions. The Pawnee style of warfare, based on stealth and surprise, was so effective that the scouts' commanding officers did little to discourage their methods. Although the scouts proudly wore the blue uniform of the U.S. Cavalry, they never ceased to be Pawnees. The Pawnee Battalion was truly a war party in blue.

This book offers a revealing look at how newspapers covered the key events of the Plains Indian Wars between 1862-1891-reporting that offers some surprising viewpoints as well as biases and misrepresentations. The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars takes readers back to the late 19th century to show how newspaper reporting impacted attitudes toward the conflict between the United States and Native Americans. Emphasizing primary sources and eyewitness accounts, the book focuses on eight watershed events between 1862 and 1891-the Great Sioux Uprising in Minnesota, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the Flight of the Nez Perce, the Cheyenne Outbreak, the Trial of Standing Bear, and the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and its aftermath. Each chapter examines an individual event, analyzing the balance and accuracy of the newspaper coverage and how the reporting of the time reinforced stereotypes about Native Americans. Includes historical photos of prominent Native Americans and a scene of the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre Presents an extensive bibliography of books, articles, and a list of frontier newspapers that served as primary source material

This is the first book that comprehensively examines Indigenous filmmaking in North America, as it analyzes in detail a variety of representative films by Canadian and US-American Indigenous filmmakers: two films that contextualize the oral tradition, three short films, and four dramatic films. The book explores how members of colonized groups use the medium of film as a means for cultural and political expression and thus enter the dominant colonial film discourse and create an answering discourse. The theoretical framework is developed as an interdisciplinary approach, combining postcolonialism, Indigenous studies, and film studies. As Indigenous people are gradually taking control over the imagemaking process in the area of film and video, they cease being studied and described objects and become subjects who create self-controlled images of Indigenous cultures. The book explores the translatability of Indigenous oral tradition into film, touching upon the changes the cultural knowledge is subject to in this process, including statements of Indigenous filmmakers on this issue. It also asks whether or not there is a definite Indigenous film practice and whether filmmakers tend to dissociate their work from dominant classical filmmaking, adapt to it, or create new film forms and styles through converging classical film conventions and their conscious violation. This approach presupposes that Indigenous filmmakers are constantly in some state of reaction to Western ethnographic filmmaking and to classical narrative filmmaking and its epitome, the Hollywood narrative cinema. The films analyzed are The Road Allowance People by Maria Campbell, Itam Hakim, Hopiit by Victor Masayesva, Talker by Lloyd Martell, Tenacity and Smoke Signals by Chris Eyre, Overweight With Crooked Teeth and Honey Moccasin by Shelley Niro, Big Bear by Gil Cardinal, and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner by Zacharias Kunuk.

The Removal of the Five Tribes from what is now the Southeastern part of the United States to the area that would become the state of Oklahoma is a topic widely researched and studied. In this annotated bibliography, Herman A. Peterson has gathered together studies in history, ethnohistory, ethnography, anthropology, sociology, rhetoric, and archaeology that pertain to the Removal. The focus of this bibliography is on published, peer-reviewed, scholarly secondary source material and published primary source documents that are easily available. The period under closest scrutiny extends from the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830 to the end of the Third Seminole War in 1842. However, works directly relevant to the events leading up to the Removal, as well as those concerned with the direct aftermath of Removal in Indian Territory, are also included. This bibliography is divided into six sections, one for each of the tribes, as well as a general section for works that encompass more than one tribe or address Indian Removal as a policy. Each section is further divided by topic, and within each section the works are listed chronologically, showing the development of the literature on that topic over time. The Trail of Tears: An Annotated Bibliography of Southeastern Indian Removal is a valuable resource for anyone researching this subject.

"Indigeneity" has become a prominent yet contested concept in national and international politics, as well as within the social sciences. This edited volume draws from authors representing different disciplines and perspectives, exploring the dependence of indigeneity on varying sociopolitical contexts, actors, and discourses with the ultimate goal of investigating the concept's scientific and political potential.

Tourism has become one of the most powerful forces organizing the predatory geographies of late capitalism. It creates entangled futures of exploitation and dependence, extracting resources and labor, and eclipsing other ways of doing, living, and imagining life. And yet, tourism also creates jobs, encourages infrastructure development, and in many places inspires the only possibility of hope and well-being. Stuck with Tourism explores the ambivalent nature of tourism by drawing on ethnographic evidence from the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula, a region voraciously transformed by tourism development over the past forty years. Contrasting labor and lived experiences at the beach resorts of Cancun, protected natural enclaves along the Gulf coast, historical buildings of the colonial past, and maquilas for souvenir production in the Maya heartland, this book explores the moral, political, ecological, and everyday dilemmas that emerge when, as Yucatan's inhabitants put it, people get stuck in tourism's grip.

For over 150 years, Tlingit women artists have beaded colorful, intricately beautiful designs on moccasins, dolls, octopus bags, tunics, and other garments. Painful Beauty suggests that at a time when Indigenous cultural practices were actively being repressed, beading supported cultural continuity, demonstrating Tlingit women's resilience, strength, and power. Beadwork served many uses, from the ceremonial to the economic, as women created beaded pieces for community use and to sell to tourists. Like other Tlingit art, beadwork reflects rich artistic visions with deep connections to the environment, clan histories, and Tlingit worldviews. Contemporary Tlingit artists Alison Bremner, Chloe French, Shgen Doo Tan George, Lily Hudson Hope, Tanis S'eiltin, and Larry McNeil foreground the significance of historical beading practices in their diverse, boundary-pushing artworks. Working with museum collection materials, photographs, archives, and interviews with artists and elders, Megan Smetzer reframes this often overlooked artform as a site of historical negotiations and contemporary inspirations. She shows how beading gave Tlingit women the freedom to innovate aesthetically, assert their clan crests and identities, support tribal sovereignty, and pass on cultural knowledge. Painful Beauty is the first dedicated study of Tlingit beadwork and contributes to the expanding literature addressing women's artistic expressions on the Northwest Coast.

In Kerala, political activists with a background in Communism are now instead asserting political demands on the basis of indigenous identity. Why did a notion of indigenous belonging come to replace the discourse of class in subaltern struggles? Indigenist Mobilization answers this question through a detailed ethnographic study of the dynamics between the Communist party and indigenist activists, and the subtle ways in which global capitalist restructuring leads to a resonance of indigenist visions in the changing everyday working lives of subaltern groups in Kerala.

The arrival of European and Euro-American colonizers in the Americas brought not only physical attacks against Native American tribes, but also further attacks against the sovereignty of these Indian nations. Though the violent tales of the Trail of Tears, Black Hawk's War, and the Battle of Little Big Horn are taught far and wide, the political structure and development of Native American tribes, and the effect of American domination on Native American sovereignty, have been greatly neglected.
This book contains a variety of primary source and other documents--traditional accounts, tribal constitutions, legal codes, business councils, rules and regulations, BIA agents reports, congressional discourse, intertribal compacts--written both by Natives from many different nations and some non-Natives, that reflect how indigenous peoples continued to exercise a significant measure of self-determination long after it was presumed to have been lost, surrendered, or vanquished. The documents are arranged chronologically, and Wilkins provides brief, introductory essays to each document, placing them within the proper context. Each introduction is followed by a brief list of suggestions for further reading.
Covering a fascinating and relatively unknown period in Native American history, from the earliest examples of indigenous political writings to the formal constitutions crafted just before the American intervention of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, this anthology will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students of the political development of indigenous peoples the world over.

This valuable book provides a succinct, readable account of an oft-neglected topic in the historiography of the American Revolution: the role of Native Americans in the Revolution's outbreak, progress, and conclusion. There has not been an all-encompassing narrative of the Native American experience during the American Revolutionary War period-until now. Native Americans in the American Revolution: How the War Divided, Devastated, and Transformed the Early American Indian World fills that gap in the literature, provides full coverage of the Revolution's effects on Native Americans, and details how Native Americans were critical to the Revolution's outbreak, its progress, and its conclusion. The work covers the experiences of specific Native American groups such as the Abenaki, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Delaware, Iroquois, Seminole, and Shawnee peoples with information presented by chronological period and geographic area. The first part of the book examines the effects of the Imperial Crisis of the 1760s and early 1770s on Native peoples in the Northern colonies, Southern colonies, and Ohio Valley respectively. The second section focuses on the effects of the Revolutionary War itself on these three regions during the years of ongoing conflict, and the final section concentrates on the postwar years. Adds the Native American perspective to the reader's understanding of the American Revolution, a critical aspect of this period in history that is rarely covered Supplies a synthesis of the best current and past work on the topic of Native Americans in the American Revolution that will be accessible to general readers as well as undergraduate and graduate-level students Shows how the struggle over the definition and utilization of Native American identity-an issue that was initiated with the American Revolution-is still ongoing for American Indians

This classic ethnography, now in second edition, describes the traditional way of life of the Kaluli, a tropical forest people of Papua New Guinea. The book takes as its focus the nostalgic and violent Gisaro ceremony, one of the most remarkable performances in the anthropological literature. Tracking the major symbolic and emotional themes of the ceremony to their sources in everyday Kaluli life, Schieffelin shows how the central values and passions of Kaluli experience are governed by the basic forms of social reciprocity. However, Gisaro also reveals that social reciprocity is not limited to the dynamics of transaction, obligation, and alliance. It emerges, rather, as a mode of symbolic action and performative form, embodying a cultural scenario which shapes Kaluli emotional experience and moral sensibility and permeates their understanding of the human condition.