Conventional literary representations of Western American history repress the violent conquest central to U.S. westward expansion through images of open space, autonomous individualism, and masculine heroism. In particular, the genre of autobiography has traditionally reproduced autonomous, transcendent, and masculinist notions of selfhood. This book analyzes New Western autobiographical narratives that contest such colonial understandings of race, gender, and landscape. Through a comparative analysis of memoirs and multiform narratives by diverse Euro-American, Native American, and Chicana writers, this study explores the ways in which "New Western" writing both reproduces and transforms conventional representations of the American West. Through the lens of narrative form, this book closely analyzes contemporary texts that express contradictory historical visions and notions of selfhood, even as they push the boundaries of autobiography. The book's introduction provides a theoretical and historical overview of Western American historiography and literary representations. The book is then divided into four chapters, three of which compare contradictory visions of Western identity in texts by diverse Euro-American and Native American authors from the late twentieth century. The fourth chapter focuses on these issues in the work of a popular Chicana author. Drawing upon a wide array of methodologies and perspectives, Narrating the American West offers valuable insights to students and scholars in a variety of fields, including postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, the New Western History, Native American Studies, American Studies, gender studies, and autobiography theory.

This is the first global study of the single most important intellectual and artistic movement in Brazilian cultural history before Modernism. The Indianist movement, under the direct patronage of the Emperor Pedro II, was a major pillar of the Empire's project of state-building, involving historians, poets, playwrights and novelists in the production of a large body of work extending over most of the nineteenth century. Tracing the parallel history of official indigenist policy and Indianist writing, Treece reveals the central role of the Indian in constructing the self-image of state and society under Empire. He aims to historicize the movement, examining it as a literary phenomenon, both with its own invented traditions and myths, and standing at the interfaces between culture and politics, between the Indian as imaginary and real. As this book demonstrates, the Indianist tradition was not merely an example of Romantic exoticism or escapism, recycling infinite variations on a single model of the Noble Savage imported from the European imaginary. Instead, it was a complex, evolving tradition, inextricably enmeshed with the contemporary political debates on the status of the indigenous communities and their future within the post-colonial state. These debates raised much wider questions about the legacy of colonial rule-the persistence of authoritarian models of government, the social and political marginalization of large numbers of free but landless Brazilians, and above all the maintenance of slavery. The Indianist "stage" offered the Indian alternately as tragic victim and exile, as rebel and outlaw, as alien to the social pact, as mother or protector of the post-colonial Brazilianfamily, or as self-sacrificing ally and "voluntary slave."

Blackfoot Ways of Knowing is a journey into the heart and soul of Blackfoot culture. As a scholar and researcher, Betty Bastien places Blackfoot tradition within a historical context of precarious survival amid colonial displacement and cultural genocide. In sharing her personal story of reclaimed identity, Bastien offers a gateway into traditional Blackfoot ways of understanding and experiencing the world.For the Siksikaitsitapi, knowledge is experiential, participatory, and ultimately sacred. Bastien maps her own process of coming to know, stressing the recovery of the Blackfoot language and Blackfoot notions of reciprocal responsibilities and interdependence. Rekindling traditional ways of knowing is essential for Indigenous peoples in Canada to heal and rebuild their communities and cultures. By sharing what she has learned, Betty Bastien hopes to ensure that the next generation of Indigenous people will enjoy a future of hope and peace.

Felix Cohen (1907-1953) was a leading architect of the Indian New Deal and steadfast champion of American Indian rights. Appointed to the Department of the Interior in 1933, he helped draft the Indian Reorganization Act (1934) and chaired a committee charged with assisting tribes in organizing their governments. His ""Basic Memorandum on Drafting of Tribal Constitutions,"" submitted in November 1934, provided practical guidelines for that effort.Largely forgotten until Cohen's papers were released more than half a century later, the memorandum now receives the attention it has long deserved. David E. Wilkins presents the entire work, edited and introduced with an essay that describes its origins and places it in historical context. Cohen recommended that each tribe consider preserving ancient traditions that offered wisdom to those drafting constitutions. Strongly opposed to ""sending out canned constitutions from Washington,"" he offered ideas for incorporating Indigenous political, social, and cultural knowledge and structure into new tribal constitutions. On the Drafting of Tribal Constitutions shows that concepts of Indigenous autonomy and self-governance have been vital to Native nations throughout history. As today's tribal governments undertake reform, Cohen's memorandum again offers a wealth of insight on how best to amend previous constitutions. It also helps scholars better understand the historic policy shift brought about by the Indian Reorganization Act.

In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. They point out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Metis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)-an anticolonial science laboratory in Newfoundland, Canada-to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land. Liboiron's creative, lively, and passionate text refuses theories of pollution that make Indigenous land available for settler and colonial goals. In this way, their methodology demonstrates that anticolonial science is not only possible but is currently being practiced in ways that enact more ethical modes of being in the world.

This phenomenologically oriented ethnography focuses on experiential aspects of Yanomami shamanism, including shamanistic activities in the context of cultural change. The author interweaves ethnographic material with theoretical components of a holographic principle, or the idea that the "part is equal to the whole," which is embedded in the nature of the Yanomami macrocosm, human dwelling, multiple-soul components, and shamans' relationships with embodied spirit-helpers. This book fills an important gap in the regional study of Yanomami people, and, on a broader scale, enriches understanding of this ancient phenomenon by focusing on the consciousness involved in shamanism through firsthand experiential involvement.

The tragic and fascinating history of the first epic struggle between white settlers and Native Americans in the early seventeenth century: "a riveting historical validation of emancipatory impulses frustrated in their own time" (Booklist, starred review) as determined Narragansett Indians refused to back down and accept English authority. A devout Puritan minister in seventeenth-century New England, Roger Williams was also a social critic, diplomat, theologian, and politician who fervently believed in tolerance. Yet his orthodox brethren were convinced tolerance fostered anarchy and courted God's wrath. Banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, Williams purchased land from the Narragansett Indians and laid the foundations for the colony of Rhode Island as a place where Indian and English cultures could flourish side by side, in peace. As the seventeenth century wore on, a steadily deepening antagonism developed between an expansionist, aggressive Puritan culture and an increasingly vulnerable, politically divided Indian population. Indian tribes that had been at the center of the New England communities found themselves shunted off to the margins of the region. By the 1660s, all the major Indian peoples in southern New England had come to accept English authority, either tacitly or explicitly. All, except one: the Narragansetts. In God, War, and Providence "James A. Warren transforms what could have been merely a Pilgrim version of cowboys and Indians into a sharp study of cultural contrast...a well-researched cameo of early America" (The Wall Street Journal). He explores the remarkable and little-known story of the alliance between Roger Williams's Rhode Island and the Narragansett Indians, and how they joined forces to retain their autonomy and their distinctive ways of life against Puritan encroachment. Deeply researched, "Warren's well-written monograph contains a great deal of insight into the tactics of war on the frontier" (Library Journal) and serves as a telling precedent for white-Native American encounters along the North American frontier for the next 250 years.

Newfoundland lies at the intersection of arctic and more temperate regions and, commensurate with this geography, populations of two Amerindian and two Paleoeskimocultural traditions occupied Port au Choix, in northern Newfoundland, Canada, for centuries and millennia. Over the past two decades The Port au Choix Archaeology Project has sought a comparative understanding of how these different cultures, each with their particular origin and historical trajectory, adapted to the changing physical and social environments, impacted their physical surroundings, and created cultural landscapes. This volume brings together the research of Renouf, her colleagues and her students who together employ multiple perspectives and methods to provide a detailed reconstruction and understanding of the long-term history of Port au Choix. Although geographically focussed on a northern coastal area, this volume has wider implications for understanding archaeological landscapes, human-environment interactions and hunter-gatherer societies. "

From climate catastrophes to sudden wars, the world faces conflicts of unprecedented scale. Yet around the globe, Indigenous leaders continue to move forward with determination and hope. Leaders demand change, resisting the destruction of the environment and suggesting solutions to today's global crisis. Age-old practices are experiencing a cultural revival and the lessons call for all of us to walk alongside Indigenous peoples. In the face of crisis and the progress of technology, this book shows how to stand with Indigenous peoples through uncertainty and chaos. How to stand with Indigenous peoples is about how to listen, how to walk together and how to act.

In Indigenous North American film Native Americans tell their own stories and thereby challenge a range of political and historical contradictions, including egregious misrepresentations by Hollywood. Although Indians in film have long been studied, especially as characters in Hollywood westerns, Indian film itself has received relatively little scholarly attention. In Imagic Moments Lee Schweninger offers a much-needed corrective, examining films in which the major inspiration, the source material, and the acting are essentially Native. Schweninger looks at a selection of mostly narrative fiction films from the United States and Canada and places them in historical and generic contexts. Exploring films such as Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Skins, he argues that in and of themselves these films constitute and in fact emphatically demonstrate forms of resistance and stories of survival as they talk back to Hollywood. Self-representation itself can be seen as a valid form of resistance and as an aspect of a cinema of sovereignty in which the Indigenous peoples represented are the same people who engage in the filming and who control the camera. Despite their low budgets and often nonprofessional acting, Indigenous films succeed in being all the more engaging in their own right and are indicative of the complexity, vibrancy, and survival of myriad contemporary Native cultures.

To veteran travelers of the American Southwest, the name Chaco Canyon invokes an inaccessible, vast land of tremendous vistas and huge, empty stone houses. Today, the Canyon appears as a barren land and most visitors are struck by its apparent inhospitable nature. Yet almost 1000 years ago, during the Medieval period, Chaco Canyon was the hub of a flourishing Pueblo Indian society, with 12 multi-story great houses built of stone and wood, a dozen great kivas (large, subterranean ceremonial structures), and hundreds of smaller habitation sites, pueblos along the intermittent drainage known today as Chaco Wash. This society peaked in the year AD 1100, when more than 150 Chacoan towns, in addition to the 12 great houses in Chaco Canyon, and perhaps 30,000 people across the greater San Juan Basin of the southwestern United States were affiliated with Chaco. This landmass, which extends across portions of the four modern states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado, is roughly equal in size to the country of Ireland.

Chacoan society endured for more than 200 hundred years, evolving and changing in the period from AD 950 to about 1150. The peak of Chacoan society can be more narrowly dated from AD 1020 to 1130. Undoubtedly, many leaders came and went during these hundred years. But, we have no written records to name these leaders. Unlike the history of other continents, in the Americas, the absence of written aboriginal languages means that written chronologies of the events, processes, and lives of people do not exist. This simple fact makes reconstruction and understanding of America's pre-European past very challenging. The archaeological record does speak to us. Thematic chapters guide readers to the emergence of Chacoan society, its cultural and environmental settings, and the Pueblo people. Other chapters detail what is known of Chacoan society c. 1100, how it was settled, and where its people probably dispersed to. Also, given the nature of the topic, information about the discovery and investigations of Chacoan society by Europeans and Americans is provided. An annotated timeline provides easy reference to key dates and events. Biographical sketches offer a look at the people who have formed our thoughts about and approaches to Chacoan society, and twenty annotated excerpted primary and secondary documents walk readers through Canyon related material. A glossary of terms is provided, as are illustrations and maps. The work concludes with recommended sources for further inquiry, websites, video, and print.

The 1960s and 1970s were a time of radical change in U.S. history. During these turbulent decades, Native Americans played a prominent role in the civil rights movement, fighting to achieve self-determination and tribal sovereignty. Yet they did not always agree on how to realize their goals. In 1971, a group of tribal leaders formed the National Tribal Chairmen's Association (NTCA) to advocate on behalf of reservation-based tribes and to counter the more radical approach of the Red Power movement. Voice of the Tribes is the first comprehensive history of the NTCA from its inception in 1971 to its 1986 disbandment. Scholars of Native American history have focused considerable attention on Red Power activists and organizations, whose confrontational style of advocacy helped expose the need for Indian policy reform. Lost in the narrative, though, are the achievements of elected leaders who represented the nation's federally recognized tribes. In this book, historian Thomas A. Britten fills that void by demonstrating the important role that the NTCA, as the self-professed ""voice of the tribes,"" played in the evolution of federal Indian policy. During the height of its influence, according to Britten, the NTCA helped implement new federal policies that advanced tribal sovereignty, protected Native lands and resources, and enabled direct negotiations between the United States and tribal governments. While doing so, NTCA chairs deliberately distanced themselves from such well-known groups as the American Indian Movement (AIM), branding them as illegitimate - that is, not ""real Indians"" - and viewing their tactics as harmful to meaningful reform. Based on archival sources and extensive interviews with both prominent Indian leaders and federal officials of the period, Britten's account offers new insights into American Indian activism and intertribal politics during the height of the civil rights movement.

This volume provides social, political, and philosophical perspectives on the creation, nature, use, and ultimately, the value of indigenous concepts of education. Scholars examine concepts of education from indigenous cultures around the world, including knowledge traditions, ways of knowing, and cultural virtues. They explore in depth how these concepts are formed by communities and serve as drivers for these communities' aspirations and investigate how these ideas and Western concepts interact. Showcasing communities and contexts from North America, Africa, and Australia as arenas of knowledge production, the writers create from these analyses of varied cultures a robust theory of the implications of indigenous knowledge for wider and deeper understandings of education.