Tribe by
We have a strong instinct to belong to small groups defined by clear purpose and understanding--"tribes." This tribal connection has been largely lost in modern society, but regaining it may be the key to our psychological survival. Decades before the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin lamented that English settlers were constantly fleeing over to the Indians-but Indians almost never did the same. Tribal society has been exerting an almost gravitational pull on Westerners for hundreds of years, and the reason lies deep in our evolutionary past as a communal species. The most recent example of that attraction is combat veterans who come home to find themselves missing the incredibly intimate bonds of platoon life. The loss of closeness that comes at the end of deployment may explain the high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by military veterans today. Combining history, psychology, and anthropology, Tribe explores what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty, belonging, and the eternal human quest for meaning. It explains the irony that-for many veterans as well as civilians-war feels better than peace, adversity can turn out to be a blessing, and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations. Tribe explains why we are stronger when we come together, and how that can be achieved even in today's divided world.
Junípero Serra by
Franciscan missionary friar Junípero Serra (1713-1784), one of the most widely known and influential inhabitants of early California, embodied many of the ideas and practices that animated the Spanish presence in the Americas. In this definitive biography, translators and historians Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz bring this complex figure to life and illuminate the Spanish period of California and the American Southwest. In Junípero Serra: California, Indians, and the Transformation of a Missionary, Beebe and Senkewicz focus on Serra's religious identity and his relations with Native peoples. They intersperse their narrative with new and accessible translations of many of Serra's letters and sermons, which allows his voice to be heard in a more direct and engaging fashion. Serra spent thirty-four years as a missionary to Indians in Mexico and California. He believed that paternalistic religious rule offered Indians a better life than their oppressive exploitation by colonial soldiers and settlers, which he deemed the only realistic alternative available to them at that time and place. Serra's unswerving commitment to his vision embroiled him in frequent conflicts with California's governors, soldiers, native peoples, and even his fellow missionaries. Yet because he prevailed often enough, he was able to place his unique stamp on the first years of California's history. Beebe and Senkewicz interpret Junípero Serra neither as a saint nor as the personification of the Black Legend. They recount his life from his birth in a small farming village on Mallorca. They detail his experiences in central Mexico and Baja California, as well as the tumultuous fifteen years he spent as founder of the California missions. Serra's Franciscan ideals are analyzed in their eighteenth-century context, which allows readers to understand more fully the differences and similarities between his world and ours. Combining history, culture, and linguistics, this new study conveys the power and nuance of Serra's voice and, ultimately, his impact on history.
Linguistic Ideologies of Native American Language Revitalization by
The concept of this volumenbsp;is that the paradigm of European national languages (official orthography; language standardization; full use of language in most everyday contexts) is imposed in cookie-cutter fashion on most language revitalization efforts of Native American languages.nbsp; While this model fits the sovereign status of many Native American groups, it does not meet the linguistic ideology of Native American communities, and creates projects and products that do not engage the communities which they are intended to serve.nbsp; The concern over heritage language loss has generated since 1990 enormous activity that is supposed to restore full private and public function of heritage languages in Native American speech communities.nbsp;The thinking goes:nbsp;nbsp;if you donbsp;what the volumenbsp;terms the "Lost Language Ghost Dance," your heritage language will flourish once more. Yet the heritage language only flourishes on paper, and not in any meaningful way for the community it is trying to help. nbsp; Instead, this volume proposes a model of Native American language revitalization that is different from the national/official language model, one that respects and incorporates language variation, and entertains variable outcomes.nbsp; This is because it is based on Native American linguistic ideologies.nbsp; This volume argues thatnbsp;the cookie-cutter application of the official language ideology is unethical because it undermines the intent of language revitalization itself:nbsp; the continued daily, meaningful use of a heritage language in its speech community.nbsp;
Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians but Were Afraid to Ask by
"I had a profoundly well-educated Princetonian ask me, 'Where is your tomahawk?' I had a beautiful woman approach me in the college gymnasium and exclaim, 'You have the most beautiful red skin.' I took a friend to see Dances with Wolves and was told, 'Your people have a beautiful culture.' . . . I made many lifelong friends at college, and they supported but also challenged me with questions like, 'Why should Indians have reservations?'" What have you always wanted to know about Indians? Do you think you should already know the answers--or suspect that your questions may be offensive? In matter-of-fact responses to over 120 questions, both thoughtful and outrageous, modern and historical, Ojibwe scholar and cultural preservationist Anton Treuer gives a frank, funny, and sometimes personal tour of what's up with Indians, anyway. --What is the real story of Thanksgiving? --Why are tribal languages important? --What do you think of that incident where people died in a sweat lodge? White/Indian relations are often characterized by guilt and anger. Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians but Were Afraid to Ask cuts through the emotion and builds a foundation for true understanding and positive action.
American Indian Myth and Legends by
Indian (Native American) myths and legends of creation, sun, moon, stars, heroes, monsters, warriors, love, lust, Coyote the trickster, animals, ghosts, and the end of the world.
More than 160 tales from eighty tribal groups gives us a rich and lively panorama of the Native American mythic heritage. From across the continent comes tales of creation and love; heroes and war; animals, tricksters, and the end of the world. In addition to mining the best folkloric sources of the nineteenth century, the editors have also included a broad selection of contemporary Native American voices.
Profiles in Wisdom by
Taking the lead from John F. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize winning Profiles in Courage, Steven McFadden presents the stories and thinking of 17 Native American spiritual elders. As our existing culture shifts, what do the ancient ones who have been trained in the sacred traditions of Turtle Island (America) have to say to us? With this question and others, journalist McFadden begins his quest to speak with contemporary Native American elders. The elders offer penetrating and poetic insight on a host of crucial matters.
The Powhatan Tribes by
Examines the history, culture, and changing fortunes of the Powhatan Indians.
Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico by 
Native American Folktales by
Folktales are at the heart of Native American culture. Prepared especially for students and general readers, this book conveniently collects 31 of the most important Native American folktales. These are drawn from the major Native American cultural and geographical areas and are organized in sections on origins; heroes, heroines, villains, and fools; society and conflict; and the supernatural. The tales reflect the environment, cultural adaptations, and prevailing concerns of the areas from which they are taken. Each tale begins with a brief introductory headnote, and the book closes with a selected bibliography. Students in social studies classes will welcome this book as a window on Native American culture, while students in literature courses will value its exploration of Native American oral traditions. Prepared especially for students and general readers, this book conveniently collects and comments on 31 of the most important Native American folktales. These are drawn from the major Native American cultural and geographical areas and reflect the environment, cultural adaptations, and prevailing concerns of the regions from which they are taken.
What the Native Americans Wore by
The clothing worn by the members of different Native American tribes reflected their environments. Clothing, jewelry, and other decorative items were made from material found in the area around them-from sealskins and shells to buckskin and porcupine quills. This book discusses common clothing items of various Native American tribes as well as the cultural or religions significance of these items
Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia by
Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 recodified the state's long-standing racial hierarchy as a more rigid Black-white binary. Then, Virginia officials asserted that no Virginia Indians could be other than legally Black, given centuries of love and marriage across color lines. How indigenous peoples of Virginia resisted erasure and built their identities as Native Americans is the powerful story this book tells. Spanning a century of fraught history, Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia describes the critical strategic work that tidewater Virginia Indians, descendants of the seventeenth-century Algonquian Powhatan chiefdom, undertook to sustain their Native identity in the face of deep racial hostility from segregationist officials, politicians, and institutions. Like other Southeastern Native groups living under Jim Crow regimes, tidewater Native groups and individuals fortified their communities by founding tribal organizations, churches, and schools; they displayed their Indianness in public performances; and they enlisted whites, including well-known ethnographers, to help them argue for their Native distinctness. Describing an arduous campaign marked by ingenuity, conviction, and perseverance, Laura J. Feller shows how these tidewater Native people drew on their shared histories as descendants of Powhatan peoples, and how they strengthened their bonds through living and marrying within clusters of Native Virginians, both on and off reservation lands. She also finds that, by at times excluding African Americans from Indian organizations and Native families, Virginian Indians themselves reinforced racial segregation while they built their own communities. Even as it paved the way to tribal recognition in Virginia, the tidewater Natives' sustained efforts chronicled in this book demonstrate the fluidity, instability, and persistent destructive power of the construction of race in America.
Committed: remembering Native kinship in and beyond Institutions by
Between 1902 and 1934, the United States confined hundreds of adults and children from dozens of Native nations at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, a federal psychiatric hospital in South Dakota. But detention at the Indian Asylum, as families experienced it, was not the beginning or end of the story. For them, Canton Asylum was one of many places of imposed removal and confinement, including reservations, boarding schools, orphanages, and prison-hospitals. Despite the long reach of institutionalization for those forcibly held at the Asylum, the tenacity of relationships extended within and beyond institutional walls. In this accessible and innovative work, Susan Burch tells the story of the Indigenous people--families, communities, and nations, across generations to the present day--who have experienced the impact of this history. Drawing on oral history interviews, correspondence, material objects, and archival sources, Burch reframes the histories of institutionalized people and the places that held them. Committed expands the boundaries of Native American history, disability studies, and U.S. social and cultural history generally.
California Indians by
This nonfiction books explores the history, culture, customs, and beliefs of California's American Indian tribes including the Chumash, Tongva, Hupa, Yokuts, Quechan, and Coso tribes. Detailed primary source images in conjunction with easy-to-read text provide readers with an inviting reading and learning experience as they build their social studies knowledge. This book includes basic informational text features including a glossary, an index, table of contents, and reader's guide. Students will be intrigued by Native American history with this fascinating nonfiction title.
Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians by
Until the last two centuries, the human landscapes of the Great Plains were shaped solely by Native Americans, and since then the region has continued to be defined by the enduring presence of its Indigenous peoples. The Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians offers a sweeping overview, across time and space, of this story in 123 entries drawn from the acclaimed Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, together with 23 new entries focusing on contemporary Plains Indians, and many new photographs.
A History of Utah's American Indians by
The valleys, mountains, and deserts of Utah have been home to native peoples for thousands of years. Like peoples around the word, Utah's native inhabitants organized themselves in family units, groups, bands, clans, and tribes. Today, six Indian tribes in Utah are recognized as official entities. They include the Northwestern Shoshone, the Goshutes, the Paiutes, the Utes, the White Mesa or Southern Utes, and the Navajos (Dineh). Each tribe has its own government. Tribe members are citizens of Utah and the United States; however, lines of distinction both within the tribes and with the greater society at large have not always been clear. Migration, interaction, war, trade, intermarriage, common threats, and challenges have made relationships and affiliations more fluid than might be expected. In this volume, the editor and authors endeavor to write the history of Utah's first residents from an Indian perspective. An introductory chapter provides an overview of Utah's American Indians and a concluding chapter summarizes the issues and concerns of contemporary Indians and their leaders. Chapters on each of the six tribes look at origin stories, religion, politics, education, folkways, family life, social activities, economic issues, and important events. They provide an introduction to the rich heritage of Utah's native peoples. This book includes chapters by David Begay, Dennis Defa, Clifford Duncan, Ronald Holt, Nancy Maryboy, Robert McPherson, Mae Parry, Gary Tom, and Mary Jane Yazzie.
American Indians, the Irish, and Government Schooling by
For centuries American Indians and the Irish experienced assaults by powerful, expanding states, along with massive land loss and population collapse. In the early nineteenth century the U.S. government, acting through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), began a systematic campaign to assimilate Indians.
Are We Not Foreigners Here? by
Since its inception, the U.S.-Mexico border has invited the creation of cultural, economic, and political networks that often function in defiance of surrounding nation-states. It has also produced individual and group identities that are as subversive as they are dynamic. In Are We Not Foreigners Here?, Jeffrey M. Schulze explores how the U.S.-Mexico border shaped the concepts of nationhood and survival strategies of three Indigenous tribes who live in this borderland: the Yaqui, Kickapoo, and Tohono O'odham. These tribes have historically fought against nation-state interference, employing strategies that draw on their transnational orientation to survive and thrive. Schulze details the complexities of the tribes' claims to nationhood in the context of the border from the nineteenth century to the present. He shows that in spreading themselves across two powerful, omnipresent nation-states, these tribes managed to maintain separation from currents of federal Indian policy in both countries; at the same time, it could also leave them culturally and politically vulnerable, especially as surrounding powers stepped up their efforts to control transborder traffic. Schulze underlines these tribes' efforts to reconcile their commitment to preserving their identities, asserting their nationhood, and creating transnational links of resistance with an increasingly formidable international boundary.
Ties That Bind by
This beautifully written book tells the haunting saga of a quintessentially American family. It is the story of Shoe Boots, a famed Cherokee warrior and successful farmer, and Doll, an African slave he acquired in the late 1790s. Over the next thirty years, Shoe Boots and Doll lived together as master and slave and also as lifelong partners who, with their children and grandchildren, experienced key events in American history--including slavery, the Creek War, the founding of the Cherokee Nation and subsequent removal of Native Americans along the Trail of Tears, and the Civil War. This is the gripping story of their lives, in slavery and in freedom. Meticulously crafted from historical and literary sources, Ties That Bind vividly portrays the members of the Shoeboots family. Doll emerges as an especially poignant character, whose life is mostly known through the records of things done to her--her purchase, her marriage, the loss of her children--but also through her moving petition to the federal government for the pension owed to her as Shoe Boots's widow. A sensitive rendition of the hard realities of black slavery within Native American nations, the book provides the fullest picture we have of the myriad complexities, ironies, and tensions among African Americans, Native Americans, and whites in the first half of the nineteenth century.
First Peoples by
Weaving Native perspectives throughout the narrative, First Peoples provides a survey of American Indian history complete with an assortment of original source documents to give you a first-hand experience with history.
Mesoamerican Voices by
Mesoamerican Voices, first published in 2006, presents a collection of indigenous-language writings from the colonial period, translated into English. The texts were written from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries by Nahuas from central Mexico, Mixtecs from Oaxaca, Maya from Yucatan, and other groups from Mexico and Guatemala. The volume gives college teachers and students access to important new sources for the history of Latin America and Native Americans. It is the first collection to present the translated writings of so many native groups and to address such a variety of topics, including conquest, government, land, household, society, gender, religion, writing, law, crime, and morality.
Occupied America by
The most comprehensive book on Mexican Americans describing their political ascendancy Authored by one of the most influential and highly-regarded voices of Chicano history and ethnic studies, Occupied America is the most definitive introduction to Chicano history. nbsp;This comprehensive overview of Chicano history is passionately written and extensively researched. nbsp;With a concise and engaged narrative, and timelines that give students a context for pivotal events in Chicano history, Occupied America illuminates the struggles and decisions that frame Chicano identity today.
Latin America in Colonial Times by
Few milestones in human history are as dramatic and momentous as the meeting of three great civilizations on American soil in the sixteenth century. Latin America in Colonial Times presents that story in an engaging but scholarly new package, revealing how a new civilization - Latin America - emerged from that encounter. The authors give equal attention to the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors and settlers, to the African slaves they brought across the Atlantic and to the indigenous peoples whose lands were invaded. From the dawn of empires in the fifteenth century, through the conquest age of the sixteenth, to the end of empire in the nineteenth, Latin America in Colonial Times combines broad brush strokes with the anecdotal details that bring the era to life.
Art of the Andes by
Established as the best single-volume introduction to Andean art and architecture, this wide-ranging survey describes, among others, the strikingly varied artistic achievements of the Chavín, Paracas, Moche, Nasca, Chimú and Inca cultures. Their impressive cities, tall pyramids, intriguing earthworks, shining goldwork and intricate textiles constitute one of the greatest artistic traditions in history. For this fully revised third edition, Professor Stone has rewritten and expanded the text throughout, touching on many of the recent discoveries and advances in the field. These include new work on the huge stone pyramids and other structures at Caral; continued excavations of Inca child sacrifices perched on mountaintops throughout the empire, with their perfectly preserved clothing and miniature offerings of metal, ceramics and shell; spectacular murals and the remarkable burial of a tattooed female warrior-leader at the Moche site of Huaca Cao Viejo; and many new finds of high-status textiles, along with fresh analyses of weaving technology and new interpretations of designs and motifs.
The Elusive Eden by
California is a region of rich geographic and human diversity. The Elusive Eden charts the historical development of California, beginning with landscape and climate and the development of Native cultures, and continues through the election of Governor Gavin Newsom. It portrays a land of remarkable richness and complexity, settled by waves of people with diverse cultures from around the world.Now in its fifth edition, this up-to-date text provides an authoritative, original, and balanced survey of California history incorporating the latest scholarship. Coverage includes new material on political upheavals, the global banking crisis, changes in education and the economy, and California's shifting demographic profile. This edition of The Elusive Eden features expanded coverage of gender, class, race and ethnicity, giving voice to the diverse individuals and groups who have shaped California. With its continued emphasis on geography and environment, the text also gives attention to regional issues, moving from the metropolitan areas to the state's rural and desert areas.Lively and readable, The Elusive Eden is organized in ten parts. Each chronological section begins with an in-depth narrative chapter that spotlights an individual or group at a critical moment of historical change, bringing California history to life.