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Dancing the New World: Aztecs, Spaniards, and the Choreography of Conquest
By Paul A. Scolieri. 2013
From Christopher Columbus to "first anthropologist" Friar Bernardino de Sahagún, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers, conquistadors, clerics, scientists, and travelers wrote…
about the "Indian" dances they encountered throughout the New World. This was especially true of Spanish missionaries who intensively studied and documented native dances in an attempt to identify and eradicate the "idolatrous" behaviors of the Aztec, the largest indigenous empire in Mesoamerica at the time of its European discovery. Dancing the New World traces the transformation of the Aztec empire into a Spanish colony through written and visual representations of dance in colonial discourse-the vast constellation of chronicles, histories, letters, and travel books by Europeans in and about the New World. Scolieri analyzes how the chroniclers used the Indian dancing body to represent their own experiences of wonder and terror in the New World, as well as to justify, lament, and/or deny their role in its political, spiritual, and physical conquest. He also reveals that Spaniards and Aztecs shared an understanding that dance played an important role in the formation, maintenance, and representation of imperial power, and describes how Spaniards compelled Indians to perform dances that dramatized their own conquest, thereby transforming them into colonial subjects. Scolieri's pathfinding analysis of the vast colonial "dance archive" conclusively demonstrates that dance played a crucial role in one of the defining moments in modern history-the European colonization of the Americas.Maya Political Science: Time, Astronomy, and the Cosmos
By Prudence M. Rice. 1980
How did the ancient Maya rule their world? Despite more than a century of archaeological investigation and glyphic decipherment, the…
nature of Maya political organization and political geography has remained an open question. Many debates have raged over models of centralization versus decentralization, superordinate and subordinate status--with far-flung analogies to emerging states in Europe, Asia, and Africa. But Prudence Rice asserts that neither the model of two giant "superpowers" nor that which postulates scores of small, weakly independent polities fits the accumulating body of material and cultural evidence.The Jumanos: Hunters and Traders of the South Plains
By Nancy Parrott Hickerson. 1994
In the late sixteenth century, Spanish explorers described encounters with North American people they called "Jumanos." Although widespread contact with…
Jumanos is evident in accounts of exploration and colonization in New Mexico, Texas, and adjacent regions, their scattered distribution and scant documentation have led to long-standing disagreements: was "Jumano" simply a generic name loosely applied to a number of tribes, or were they an authentic, vanished people?In the first full-length study of the Jumanos, anthropologist Nancy Hickerson proposes that they were indeed a distinctive tribe, their wide travel pattern linked over well-established itineraries. Drawing on extensive primary sources, Hickerson also explores their crucial role as traders in a network extending from the Rio Grande to the Caddoan tribes' confederacies of East Texas and Oklahoma.The United States government thought it could make Indians "vanish. " After the Indian Wars ended in the 1880s, the…
government gave allotments of land to individual Native Americans in order to turn them into farmers and sent their children to boarding schools for indoctrination into the English language, Christianity, and the ways of white people. Federal officials believed that these policies would assimilate Native Americans into white society within a generation or two. But even after decades of governmental efforts to obliterate Indian culture, Native Americans refused to vanish into the mainstream, and tribal identities remained intact. This revisionist history reveals how Native Americans' sense of identity and "peoplehood" helped them resist and eventually defeat the U. S. government's attempts to assimilate them into white society during the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s). Tom Holm discusses how Native Americans, though effectively colonial subjects without political power, nonetheless maintained their group identity through their native languages, religious practices, works of art, and sense of homeland and sacred history. He also describes how Euro-Americans became increasingly fascinated by and supportive of Native American culture, spirituality, and environmental consciousness. In the face of such Native resiliency and non-Native advocacy, the government's assimilation policy became irrelevant and inevitably collapsed. The great confusion in Indian affairs during the Progressive Era, Holm concludes, ultimately paved the way for Native American tribes to be recognized as nations with certain sovereign rights.In the Palace of Nezahualcoyotl
By Eduardo De J. Douglas. 2010
Around 1542, descendants of the Aztec rulers of Mexico created accounts of the pre-Hispanic history of the city of Tetzcoco,…
Mexico, one of the imperial capitals of the Aztec Empire. Painted in iconic script ("picture writing"), the Codex Xolotl, the Quinatzin Map, and the Tlohtzin Map appear to retain and emphasize both pre-Hispanic content and also pre-Hispanic form, despite being produced almost a generation after the Aztecs surrendered to Hernán Cortés in 1521. Yet, as this pioneering study makes plain, the reality is far more complex. Eduardo de J. Douglas offers a detailed critical analysis and historical contextualization of the manuscripts to argue that colonial economic, political, and social concerns affected both the content of the three Tetzcocan pictorial histories and their archaizing pictorial form. As documents composed by indigenous people to assert their standing as legitimate heirs of the Aztec rulers as well as loyal subjects of the Spanish Crown and good Catholics, the Tetzcocan manuscripts qualify as subtle yet shrewd negotiations between indigenous and Spanish systems of signification and between indigenous and Spanish concepts of real property and political rights. By reading the Tetzcocan manuscripts as calculated responses to the changes and challenges posed by Spanish colonization and Christian evangelization, Douglas's study significantly contributes to and expands upon the scholarship on central Mexican manuscript painting and recent critical investigations of art and political ideology in colonial Latin America.Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica
By Rosemary A. Joyce. 1980
Gender was a fluid potential, not a fixed category, before the Spaniards came to Mesoamerica. Childhood training and ritual shaped,…
but did not set, adult gender, which could encompass third genders and alternative sexualities as well as "male" and "female." At the height of the Classic period, Maya rulers presented themselves as embodying the entire range of gender possibilities, from male through female, by wearing blended costumes and playing male and female roles in state ceremonies.This Land Was Mexican Once: Histories of Resistance from Northern California
By Linda Heidenreich. 2007
The territory of Napa County, California, contains more than grapevines. The deepest roots belong to Wappo-speaking peoples, a group whose…
history has since been buried by the stories of Spanish colonizers, Californios (today's Latinos), African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Euro Americans. Napa's history clearly is one of co-existence; yet, its schoolbooks tell a linear story that climaxes with the arrival of Euro Americans. In "This Land was Mexican Once," Linda Heidenreich excavates Napa's subaltern voices and histories to tell a complex, textured local history with important implications for the larger American West, as well.Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation, and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life
By Fernando, Santos-Granero. 2009
Analyzing slavery and other forms of servitude in six non-state indigenous societies of tropical America at the time of European…
contact, Vital Enemies offers a fascinating new approach to the study of slavery based on the notion of "political economy of life. " Fernando Santos-Granero draws on the earliest available historical sources to provide novel information on Amerindian regimes of servitude, sociologies of submission, and ideologies of capture. Estimating that captive slaves represented up to 20 percent of the total population and up to 40 percent when combined with other forms of servitude, Santos-Granero argues that native forms of servitude fulfill the modern understandings of slavery, though Amerindian contexts provide crucial distinctions with slavery as it developed in the American South. The Amerindian understanding of life forces as being finite, scarce, unequally distributed, and in constant circulation yields a concept of all living beings as competing for vital energy. The capture of human beings is an extreme manifestation of this understanding, but it marks an important element in the ways Amerindian "captive slavery" was misconstrued by European conquistadors. Illuminating a cultural facet that has been widely overlooked or miscast for centuries, Vital Enemies makes possible new dialogues regarding hierarchies in the field of native studies, as well as a provocative re-framing of pre- and post-contact America.Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast
By Paige Raibmon. 2005
In this innovative history, Paige Raibmon examines the political ramifications of ideas about "real Indians. " Focusing on the Northwest…
Coast in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, she describes how government officials, missionaries, anthropologists, reformers, settlers, and tourists developed definitions of Indian authenticity based on such binaries as Indian versus White, traditional versus modern, and uncivilized versus civilized. They recognized as authentic only those expressions of "Indianness" that conformed to their limited definitions and reflected their sense of colonial legitimacy and racial superiority. Raibmon shows that Whites and Aboriginals were collaborators--albeit unequal ones--in the politics of authenticity. Non-Aboriginal people employed definitions of Indian culture that limited Aboriginal claims to resources, land, and sovereignty, while Aboriginals utilized those same definitions to access the social, political, and economic means necessary for their survival under colonialism. Drawing on research in newspapers, magazines, agency and missionary records, memoirs, and diaries, Raibmon combines cultural and labor history. She looks at three historical episodes: the participation of a group of Kwakwaka'wakw from Vancouver in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago; the work of migrant Aboriginal laborers in the hop fields of Puget Sound; and the legal efforts of Tlingit artist Rudolph Walton to have his mixed-race step-children admitted to the white public school in Sitka, Alaska. Together these episodes reveal the consequences of outsiders' attempts to define authentic Aboriginal culture. Raibmon argues that Aboriginal culture is much more than the reproduction of rituals; it also lies in the means by which Aboriginal people generate new and meaningful ways of identifying their place in a changing modern environment.Domination Without Dominance: Inca-Spanish Encounters in Early Colonial Peru
By Gonzalo Lamana. 2008
Offering an alternative narrative of the conquest of the Incas, Gonzalo Lamana both examines and shifts away from the colonial…
imprint that still permeates most accounts of the conquest. Lamana focuses on a key moment of transition: the years that bridged the first contact between Spanish conquistadores and Andean peoples in 1531 and the moment, around 1550, when a functioning colonial regime emerged. Using published accounts and array of archival sources, he focuses on questions of subalternization, meaning making, copying, and exotization, which proved crucial to both the Spaniards and the Incas. On the one hand, he re-inserts different epistemologies into the conquest narrative, making central to the plot often-dismissed, discrepant stories such as books that were expected to talk and year-long attacks that could only be launched under a full moon. On the other hand, he questions the dominant image of a clear distinction between Inca and Spaniard, showing instead that on the battlefield as much as in everyday arenas such as conversion, market exchanges, politics, and land tenure, the parties blurred into each other in repeated instances of mimicry. Lamana's redefinition of the order of things reveals that, contrary to the conquerors' accounts, what the Spanairds achieved was a "domination without dominance. " This conclusion undermines common ideas of Spanish (and Western) superiority. It shows that casting order as a by-product of military action rests on a pervasive fallacy: the translation of military superiority into cultural superiority. In constant dialogue with critical thinking from different disciplines and traditions, Lamana illuminates how this new interpretation of the conquest of the Incas revises current understandings of Western colonialism and the emergence of still-current global configurations.Nez Perce 1877
By Peter Dennis, Robert Forczyk. 2011
Osprey's examination of one of the most famous battles of the latter part of the American Indian Wars (1622-1918). With…
the wars between the US and the Native Americans drawing to a close, one tribe in Eastern Oregon continued to resist. The Nez Perce, led by the "Red Napoleon" Chief Joseph, refused to surrender and accept resettlement. Instead, Chief Joseph organized a band of 750 warriors and set off for the Canadian border, pursued by 2,000 US Army troops under Major-General Oliver Howard. The army chased the natives for three months, fighting 13 actions. Finally, just 40 miles from the Canadian border, the Army ran Chief Joseph to the ground, and forced him to surrender after a five-day battle near Bear Paw Mountain.Natural and Moral History of the Indies
By José De Acosta. 2002
The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, the classic work of New World history originally published by José de…
Acosta in 1590, is now available in the first new English translation to appear in several hundred years. A Spanish Jesuit, Acosta produced this account by drawing on his own observations as a missionary in Peru and Mexico, as well as from the writings of other missionaries, naturalists, and soldiers who explored the region during the sixteenth century. One of the first comprehensive investigations of the New World, Acosta's study is strikingly broad in scope. He describes the region's natural resources, flora and fauna, and terrain. He also writes in detail about the Amerindians and their religious and political practices. A significant contribution to Renaissance Europe's thinking about the New World, Acosta's Natural and Moral History of the Indies reveals an effort to incorporate new information into a Christian, Renaissance worldview. He attempted to confirm for his European readers that a "new" continent did indeed exist and that human beings could and did live in equatorial climates. A keen observer and prescient thinker, Acosta hypothesized that Latin America's indigenous peoples migrated to the region from Asia, an idea put forth more than a century before Europeans learned of the Bering Strait. Acosta's work established a hierarchical classification of Amerindian peoples and thus contributed to what today is understood as the colonial difference in Renaissance European thinking.Focusing on one of the most fascinating and debated figures in the history of modern Brazil, Stringing Together a Nation…
is the first full-length study of the life and career of Cndido Mariano da Silva Rondon (1865-1958) to be published in English. In the early twentieth century, Rondon, a military engineer, led what became known as the Rondon Commission in a massive undertaking: the building of telegraph lines and roads connecting Brazil's vast interior with its coast. Todd A. Diacon describes how, in stringing together a nation with telegraph wire, Rondon attempted to create a unified community of "Brazilians" from a population whose loyalties and identities were much more local and regional in scope. He reveals the work of the Rondon Commission as a crucial exemplar of the issues and intricacies involved in the expansion of central state authority in Brazil and in the construction of a particular kind of Brazilian nation. Using an impressive array of archival and documentary sources, Diacon chronicles the Rondon Commission's arduous construction of telegraph lines across more than eight hundred miles of the Amazon Basin; its exploration, surveying, and mapping of vast areas of northwest Brazil; and its implementation of policies governing relations between the Brazilian state and indigenous groups. He considers the importance of Positivist philosophy to Rondon's thought, and he highlights the Rondon Commission's significant public relations work on behalf of nation-building efforts. He reflects on the discussions--both contemporaneous and historiographical--that have made Rondon such a fundamental and controversial figure in Brazilian cultural history."All the Real Indians Died Off": And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans
By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Dina Gilio-Whitaker. 2016
Unpacks the twenty-one most common myths and misconceptions about Native AmericansIn this enlightening book, scholars and activists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and…
Dina Gilio-Whitaker tackle a wide range of myths about Native American culture and history that have misinformed generations. Tracing how these ideas evolved, and drawing from history, the authors disrupt long-held and enduring myths such as: "Columbus Discovered America" "Thanksgiving Proves the Indians Welcomed Pilgrims" "Indians Were Savage and Warlike" "Europeans Brought Civilization to Backward Indians" "The United States Did Not Have a Policy of Genocide" "Sports Mascots Honor Native Americans" "Most Indians Are on Government Welfare" "Indian Casinos Make Them All Rich" "Indians Are Naturally Predisposed to Alcohol" Each chapter deftly shows how these myths are rooted in the fears and prejudice of European settlers and in the larger political agendas of a settler state aimed at acquiring Indigenous land and tied to narratives of erasure and disappearance. Accessibly written and revelatory, "All the Real Indians Died Off" challenges readers to rethink what they have been taught about Native Americans and history.From the Trade Paperback edition.Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community
By Brenda J. Child. 2012
A groundbreaking exploration of the remarkable women in Native American communities. Too often ignored or underemphasized in favor of their…
male warrior counterparts, Native American women have played a more central role in guiding their nations than has ever been understood. Many Native communities were, in fact, organized around women's labor, the sanctity of mothers, and the wisdom of female elders. In this well-researched and deeply felt account of the Ojibwe of Lake Superior and the Mississippi River, Brenda J. Child details the ways in which women have shaped Native American life from the days of early trade with Europeans through the reservation era and beyond. The latest volume in the Penguin Library of American Indian History, Holding Our World Together illuminates the lives of women such as Madeleine Cadotte, who became a powerful mediator between her people and European fur traders, and Gertrude Buckanaga, whose postwar community activism in Minneapolis helped bring many Indian families out of poverty. Drawing on these stories and others, Child offers a powerful tribute to the many courageous women who sustained Native communities through the darkest challenges of the last three centuries. .Waheenee: An Indian Girl's Story
By Jeffery R. Hanson, Gilbert Livingston Wilson. 1927
"I was born in an earth lodge by the mouth of the Knife River, in what is now North Dakota,…
three years after the smallpox winter." So begins the story of Waheenee, a Hidatsa Indian woman, born in 1839 amid a devastated tribe. In 1906 Gilbert L. Wilson first visited the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation and began to study the remnants of the Hidatsa tribe. He returned in 1908, sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, and for every summer of the next ten years he worked among the Hidatsas, making notes of all he saw. One of his chief informants was Waheenee-wea, or Buffalo-Bird Woman, who told him this, her life story.Moon of Popping Trees
By Rex Alan Smith. 1981
The last significant clash of arms in the American Indian Wars took place on December 29, 1890, on the banks…
of Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. Of the 350 Teton Sioux Indians there, two-thirds were women and children. When the smoke cleared, 84 men and 62 women and children lay dead, their bodies scattered along a stretch of more than a mile where they had been trying to flee. Of some 500 soldiers and scouts, about 30 were dead—some, probably, from their own crossfire. Wounded Knee has excited contradictory accounts and heated emotions. To answer whether it was a battle or a massacre, Rex Alan Smith goes further into the historical records and cultural traditions of the combatants than anyone has gone before. His work results in what Alvin Josephy Jr., editor of American Heritage, calls "the most definitive and unbiased" account of all, Moon of Popping Trees.Lewis and Clark among the Indians
By James P. Ronda. 2002
"Particularly valuable for Ronda's inclusion of pertinent background information about the various tribes and for his ethnological analysis. An appendix…
also places the Sacagawea myth in its proper perspective. Gracefully written, the book bridges the gap between academic and general audiences."—ChoiceMourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography (American Indian Lives)
By Jay Miller, Mourning Dove. 1990
"An exciting story that transports the reader to another time and place. . . . Anyone interested in American Indian…
history, culture, religion, and literature should read this informative volume that was produced at such great cost. Mourning Dove literally gave her life to do this work, and Jay Miller has painstakingly edited it to share the words and wisdom of Humishuma with the non-Salish world."—American Indian Culture and Research JournalLeft Handed, Son of Old Man Hat: A Navaho Autobiography
By Edward Sapir, Left Handed, Walter Dyk. 1995
With a simplicity as disarming as it is frank, Left Handed tells of his birth in the spring "when the…
cottonwood leaves were about the size of my thumbnail," of family chores such as guarding the sheep near the hogan, and of his sexual awakening. As he grows older, his account turns to life in the open: nomadic cattle-raising, farming, trading, communal enterprises, tribal dances and ceremonies, lovemaking, and marriage. As Left Handed grows in understanding and stature, the accumulated wisdom of his people is made known to him. He learns the Navajo life founded upon principles: the necessity of honesty, foresightedness, self-discipline. The style of the narrative is almost biblical in its rhythms; but biblical, too, in many respects, is the traditional way of life it recounts.