Stories of the primordial woman who married a bear, appear in matriarchal traditions across the global North from Indigenous North America and Scandinavia to Russia and Korea. In The Woman Who Married the Bear, authors Barbara Alice Mann, a scholar of Indigenous American culture, and Kaarina Kailo, who specializes in the cultures of Northern Europe, join forces to examine these Woman-Bear stories, their common elements, and their meanings in the context of matriarchal culture. The authors reach back 35,000 years to tease out different threads of Indigenous Woman-Bear traditions, using the lens of bear spirituality to uncover the ancient matriarchies found in rock art, caves, ceremonies, rituals, and traditions. Across cultures, in the earliest known traditions, women and bears are shown to collaborate through star configurations and winter cave-dwelling, symbolized by the spring awakening from hibernation followed by the birth of “cubs.” By the Bronze Age, however, the story of the Woman-Bear marriage had changed: it had become a hunting tale, refocused on the male hunter. Throughout the book, Mann and Kailo offer interpretations of this earliest known Bear religion in both its original and its later forms. Together, they uncover the maternal cultural symbolism behind the bear marriage and the Original Instructions given by Bear to Woman on sustainable ecology and lifeways free of patriarchy and social stratification.

This collection of essays examines, in context, eastern Native American speeches, which are translated and reprinted in their entirety. Anthologies of Native American orators typically focus on the rhetoric of western speakers but overlook the contributions of Eastern speakers. The roles women played, both as speakers themselves and as creators of the speeches delivered by the men, are also commonly overlooked. Finally, most anthologies mine only English-language sources, ignoring the fraught records of the earliest Spanish conquistadors and French adventurers. This study fills all these gaps and also challenges the conventional assumption that Native thought had little or no impact on liberal perspectives and critiques of Europe. Essays are arranged so that the speeches progress chronologically to reveal the evolving assessments and responses to the European presence in North America, from the mid-sixteenth century to the twentieth century.

Providing a discussion of the history, culture, and oratory of eastern Native Americans, this work will appeal to scholars of Native American history and of communications and rhetoric. Speeches represent the full range of the woodland east and are taken from primary sources.

The Revolutionary War is ordinarily presented as a conflict exclusively between colonists and the British, fought along the northern Atlantic seacoast. "George Washington's War on Native America" recounts the tragic events on the forgotten western front of the American Revolution--a war fought against and ultimately won by Native America. Although history texts often erroneously present the Natives, primarily the Iroquois League and the Ohio Union, as "allies" (or lackeys) of the British, Native America was in fact working from its own agenda: to prevent settlers from invading the Old Northwest.
Throughout the war, the unwavering goal of the Revolutionary Army, under George Washington, and its associated settler militias was to break the power of the Iroquois League, which had successfully held off invasion for the preceding two centuries, and the newly formed Ohio Union. To destroy the Natives who stood in the way of land seizure, Washington authorized a series of rampages intended to destroy the League and the Union by starvation. As a result, uncounted thousands of Natives perished from New York and Pennsylvania to Ohio. Barbara Alice Mann tells how, in the wake of the massive assaults, Native America nonetheless won the war in the West and managed to maintain control of the land west and north of the Allegheny-Ohio River systems.

This book explores the different types of compromises Indian people were forced to make and must continue to do so in order to be included in the colonizer's religion and culture. The contributors in this collection are in conversation with the contributions made by Tink Tinker, an American Indian scholar who is known for his work on Native American liberation theology. The contributors engage with the following questions in this book: How much of one's identity must be sacrificed in order to belong in the world of the colonizer? How much of one's culture requires silencing? And more importantly, how can the colonized survive when constantly asked and forced to compromise? Specifically, what is uniquely Indian and gets completely lost in this interaction? Scholars of religious studies, American studies, American Indian studies, theology, sociology, and anthropology will find this book particularly useful.

This book explores the different types of compromises Indian people were forced to make and must continue to do so in order to be included in the colonizer's religion and culture. The contributors in this collection are in conversation with the contributions made by Tink Tinker, an American Indian scholar who is known for his work on Native American liberation theology. The contributors engage with the following questions in this book: How much of one's identity must be sacrificed in order to belong in the world of the colonizer? How much of one's culture requires silencing? And more important, how can the colonized survive when constantly asked and forced to compromise. Specifically, what is uniquely Indian and gets completely lost in this interaction? Scholars of religious studies, American studies, American Indian studies, theology, sociology, and anthropology will find this book particularly useful.

President by Massacre pulls back the curtain of "expansionism," revealing how Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Zachary Taylor massacred Indians to "open" land to slavery and oligarchic fortunes. President by Massacre examines the way in which presidential hopefuls through the first half of the nineteenth century parlayed militarily mounted land grabs into "Indian-hating" political capital to attain the highest office in the United States. The text zeroes in on three eras of U.S. "expansionism" as it led to the massacre of Indians to "open" land to African slavery while luring lower European classes into racism's promise to raise "white" above "red" and "black." This book inquires deeply into the existence of the affected Muskogee ("Creek"), Shawnee, Sauk, Meskwaki ("Fox"), and Seminole, before and after invasion, showing what it meant to them to have been so displaced and to have lost a large percentage of their members in the process. It additionally addresses land seizures from these and the Tecumseh, Tenskwatawa, Black Hawk, and Osceola tribes. President by Massacre is written for undergraduate and graduate readers who are interested in the Native Americans of the Eastern Woodlands, U.S. slavery, and the settler politics of U.S. expansionism. Provides the first comprehensive review of American Indian policies formulated and carried out by three nineteenth-century United States presidents (Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Zachary Taylor) Reflects the expertise of an American Indian author among the most notable thinkers in contemporary Native American Studies Stands apart from other books on the market by tackling the subject matter from a native perspective

Before invasion, Turtle Island-or North America-was home to vibrant cultures that shared long-standing philosophical precepts. The most important and wide-spread of these was the view of reality as a collaborative binary known as the Twinned Cosmos of Blood and Breath. This binary system was built on the belief that neither half of the cosmos can exist without its twin; both halves are, therefore, necessary and good. Western anthropologists typically shorthand the Twinned Cosmos as "Sky and Earth," but this erroneously saddles it with Christian baggage and, worse, imposes a hierarchy that puts sky quite literally above earth. None of this Western ideology legitimately applies to traditional Indigenous American thought, which is about equal cooperation and the continual recreation of reality. Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath examines traditional historical concepts of spirituality among North American Indians both at and, to the extent it can be determined, before contact. In doing so, Barbara Mann rescues the authentically indigenous ideas from Western, and especially missionary, interpretations. In addition to early European source material, she uses Indian oral traditions, traced as much as possible to early sources, and Indian records, including pictographs, petroglyphs, bark books, and wampum. Moreover, Mann respects each Native culture as a discrete unit, rather than generalizing them as is often done in Western anthropology. To this end, she collates material in accordance with actual historical, linguistic, and traditional linkages among the groups at hand, with traditions clearly identified by group and, where recorded, by speaker. In this way she provides specialists and non-specialists alike a window into the seemingly lost, and often caricatured world of Indigenous American thought.

For the first time, an accomplished scholar offers a painstakingly researched examination of the United States' involvement in deliberate disease spreading among native peoples in the military conquest of the West. The speculation that the United States did infect Indian populations has long been a source of both outrage and skepticism. Now there is an exhaustively researched exploration of an issue that continues to haunt U.S.-Native American relations. Barbara Alice Mann's The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier Expansion offers riveting accounts of four specific incidents: The 1763 smallpox epidemic among native peoples in Ohio during the French and Indian War; the cholera epidemic during the 1832 Choctaw removal; the 1837 outbreak of smallpox among the high plains peoples; and the alleged 1847 poisonings of the Cayuses in Oregon. Drawing on previously unavailable sources, Mann's work is the first to give one of the most controversial questions in U.S. history the rigorous scrutiny it requires.

Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas provides a thorough, organized look at the social, political, economic, and religious roles of women among the Iroquois, explaining their fit with the larger culture. Gantowisas means more than simply <<woman>> - gantowisas is <<woman acting in her official capacity>> as fire-keeping woman, faith-keeping woman, gift-giving woman; leader, counselor, judge; Mother of the People. This is the light in which the reader will find her in Iroquoian Women. Barbara Alice Mann draws upon worthy sources, be they early or modern, oral or written, to present a Native American point of view that insists upon accuracy, not only in raw reporting, but also in analysis. Iroquoian Women is the first book-length study to regard Iroquoian women as central and indispensable to Iroquoian studies.

Daughters of Mother Earth is nothing less than a new way of looking at history--or more correctly, the reestablishment of a very old way. It holds that for too long, elements unnatural to Native American ways of knowing have been imposed on the study of Native America. Euro-American discourse styles, emphasizing elite male privilege and conceptual linearity, have drowned out the democratic and woman-centered Native approaches. Even when the damage of western linearity is understood to occur, analysis of Native American history, society, and culture has still been relentlessly placed in male custody, following the western assumption that Euro-American men speak ably for all. This book seeks to redress that balance, allowing, as editor Barbara Alice Mann writes, "the Daughters of Mother Earth to reclaim their ancient responsibility to speak in council, to tell the truth, to guide the rising generations through spirit-spoken wisdom." The recovery of women's traditions is an important theme in this collection of essays that helps reframe Native issues as properly gendered. Thus, Paula Gunn Allen looks at Indian lifeways through the many stitches of Indian clothes and the many steps of their powwow fancy-dances. Lee Maracle calls for reconstitution of traditional social structures, based on Native American ways of knowing. Kay McGowan identifies the exact sites where woman-power was weakened historically through the heavy impositions of European culture, the better to repair them. Finally, Barbara Mann examines how communication between Natives east and west of the Mississippi came to be so deranged as to be dysfunctional, and outlines how to reestablish good east-west relations for thebenefit of all.

The Revolutionary War is ordinarily presented as a conflict exclusively between colonists and the British, fought along the northern Atlantic seacoast. This important work recounts the tragic events on the forgotten Western front of the American Revolution--a war fought against and ultimately won by Native America. The Natives, primarily the Iroquois League and the Ohio Union, are erroneously presented in history texts as "allies" (or lackeys) of the British, but Native America was working from its own internally generated agenda: to prevent settlers from invading the Old Northwest. Native America won the war in the West, holding the land west and north of the Allegheny-Ohio River systems. While the British may have awarded these lands to the colonists in the Treaty of Paris, the Native Americans did not concur. Throughout the war, the unwavering goal of the Revolutionary Army, under George Washington, and their associated settler militias was to break the power of the Iroquois League, which had successfully held off invasion for the preceding two centuries, and the newly formed Ohio Union. To destroy the Natives in the way of land seizure, Washington authorized a series of rampages intended to destroy the League and the Union by starvation. Food, livestock, homes, and trees were destroyed, first in the New York breadbaskets, then in the Ohio granaries--spreading famine across Native lands. Uncounted thousands of Natives perished from New York to Pennsylvania to Ohio. This book tells how, in the wake of the massive assaults, the Natives held back the American onslaught.

Guides readers to essential, but hard-to-find resources available from a large array of international intergovernmental organizations, and provides tips and research strategies International Government Information and Country Information: A Subject Guide is the only authoritative guide to take a subject approach to the plentiful, but hard-to-find, resources provided by international government organizations, national governments, and other foreign information sources. In addition to an overview section, twenty-one chapters, ranging from agriculture and food, to crime, health, human rights, laws and treaties, transportation, women and children, and more, cover these rich resources of topical, statistical, and analytical information. Each chapter provides descriptions of web sites, books, reports, and other important materials and concludes with research strategies, which offer tips on the most efficient ways to search for certain types of information. Students, from high school to graduate level, researchers, and librarians will find this an important reference work.;Many of the resources described in this book are available for free on the Internet, but they can be confusing or hard to find. This guide helps users find the most substantive resources for their needs, which often remain hidden even after Internet searches. The authors describe the scope of each resource listed and give advice on how best to search the resource. In addition to international government sources, the book covers resources from world-wide organizations, universities, and commercial publishers. The book concludes with appendices the identify the acronyms that are often used in place of government organizations' full names and lists Web site addresses for them. Part of the How to Find it, How to Use It series

A comprehensive reference work on the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy), containing over 200 entries covering Haudenosaunee history, present-day issues, and contributions to general North American culture. "Haudenosaunee" (People of the Longhouse) is the name the Iroquois use for their confederacy ("Iroquois" is the name given them by the French). This encyclopedia surveys the histories of the six constituent nations of the confederacy (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora, adopted about 1725). Several entries also trace ways in which the practices of the Iroquois have filtered into general North American society.

"Make a Beautiful Way" is nothing less than a new way of looking at history--or more correctly, the reestablishment of a very old way. For too long, Euro-American discourse styles, emphasizing elite male privilege and conceptual linearity, have drowned out democratic and woman-centered Native approaches. Even when myopic western linearity is understood to be at work, analysis of Native American history, society, and culture has still been consistently placed in male custody. The recovery of women's traditions is the overarching theme in this collection of essays that helps reframe Native issues as properly gendered. Paula Gunn Allen looks at Indian lifeways through the many stitches of Indian clothes and the many steps of their powwow fancy dances. Lee Maracle calls for reconstitution of traditional social structures, based on Native American ways of knowing. Kay Givens McGowan identifies the exact sites where female power was weakened through the imposition of European culture, so that we might more effectively strengthen precisely those sites. Finally, Barbara Alice Mann examines how communication between Natives who have federal recognition and those who do not, as well as between Natives east and west of the Mississippi, became dysfunctional, and outlines how to reestablish good relations for the benefit of all.