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This study of the 1870 and 1890 Ghost Dance movements among North
American Indians offers an innovative theory about why these
movements arose when they did. Emphasizing the demographic
situation of American Indians prior to the movements, Professor
Thornton argues that the Ghost Dances were deliberate efforts to
accomplish a demographic revitalization of American Indians
following their virtual collapse. By joining the movements, he
contends, tribes sought to assure survival by increasing their
numbers through returning the dead to life. Thornton supports this
thesis empirically by closely examining the historical context of
the two movements and by assessing tribal participation in them,
revealing particularly how population size and decline influenced
participation among and within American Indian tribes. He also
considers American Indian population change after the Ghost Dance
periods and shows that participation in the movements actually did
lead the way to a demographic recovery for certain tribes. This
occurred, Thornton argues, not, of course, by returning dead
American Indians to life, but by creating enhanced tribal
solidarity.
Winter counts--pictorial calendars by which Plains Indians kept
track of their past--marked each year with a picture of a memorable
event. The Lakota, or Western Sioux, recorded many different events
in their winter counts, but all include "the year the stars fell,"
the spectacular Leonid meteor shower of 1833-34. This volume is an
unprecedented assemblage of information on the important collection
of Lakota winter counts at the Smithsonian, a core resource for the
study of Lakota history and culture. Fourteen winter counts are
presented in detail, with a chapter devoted to the newly discovered
Rosebud Winter Count. Together these counts constitute a visual
chronicle of over two hundred years of Lakota experience as
recorded by Native historians. A visually stunning book, "The Year
the Stars Fell" features full-color illustrations of the fourteen
winter counts plus more than 900 detailed images of individual
pictographs. Explanations, provided by their nineteenth-century
Lakota recorders, are arranged chronologically to facilitate
comparison among counts. The book provides ready access to primary
source material, and serves as an essential reference work for
scholars as well as an invaluable historical resource for Native
communities.
"The Cherokees: A Population History" is the first full-length
demographic study of an American Indian group from the
protohistorical period to the present. Thornton shows the effects
of disease, warfare, genocide, miscegenation, removal and
relocation, and destruction of traditional lifeways on the
Cherokees. He discusses their mysterious origins, their first
contact with Europeans (prob-ably in 1540), and their fluctuation
in population during the eighteenth century, when the Old World
brought them smallpox. The toll taken by massive relocations in the
following century, most notably the removal of the Cherokees from
the Southeast to In-dian Territory, and by warfare, predating the
American Revolution and including the Civil War, also enters into
Thornton's calculations. He goes on to measure the resurgence of
the Cherokees in the twentieth century, focusing on such population
centers as North Carolina, Oklahoma, and California.
This study of the 1870 and 1890 Ghost Dance movements among North
American Indians offers an innovative theory about why these
movements arose when they did. Emphasizing the demographic
situation of American Indians prior to the movements, Professor
Thornton argues that the Ghost Dances were deliberate efforts to
accomplish a demographic revitalization of American Indians
following their virtual collapse. By joining the movements, he
contends, tribes sought to assure survival by increasing their
numbers through returning the dead to life. Thornton supports this
thesis empirically by closely examining the historical context of
the two movements and by assessing tribal participation in them,
revealing particularly how population size and decline influenced
participation among and within American Indian tribes. He also
considers American Indian population change after the Ghost Dance
periods and shows that participation in the movements actually did
lead the way to a demographic recovery for certain tribes.
"The White Man does not understand the Indian for the reason that
he does not understand America. He is too far removed from its
formative process. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet
grasped rock and soil." The words of Lakota writer Luther Standing
Bear foretold the current debate on the value of Native American
studies in higher education. Studying Native America addresses for
the first time in a comprehensive way the place of this critical
discipline in the university curriculum. Leading scholars in
anthropology, demography, English and literature, history, law,
social work, linguistics, public health, psychology, and sociology
have come together to explore what Native American studies has
been, what it is, and what it may be in the future. The book's
thirteen contributors and editor Russell Thornton, stress the
frequent incompatibility of traditional academic teaching methods
with the social and cultural concerns that gave rise to the field
of Native American studies. Beginning with the intellectual and
institutional history of Native American studies, the book examines
its literature, language, historical narratives, and anthropology.
The volume discusses the effects on Native American studies of law
and constitutionalism; cosmology, epistemology, and religion;
identity; demography; colonialism and post-colonialism; science and
technology; and repatriation of human remains and cultural objects.
Contributors to Studying Native America include Raymond J.
DeMallie, Bonnie Duran, Eduardo Duran, Raymond D. Fogelson, Clara
Sue Kidwell, Kerwin Lee Klein, Melissa L. Meyer, John H. Moore,
Peter Nabokov, Katheryn Shanley, C. Matthew Snipp, Rennard
Strickland, Russell Thornton, J. Randolph Valentine, Robert Allen
Warrior, Richard White, and Maria Yellowhorse-Braveheart. The book
is sponsored in part by the Social Science Research Council.
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