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Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race
By Nancy Shoemaker. 2015
In the nineteenth century, nearly all Native American men living along the southern New England coast made their living traveling…
the world's oceans on whaleships. Many were career whalemen, spending twenty years or more at sea. Their labor invigorated economically depressed reservations with vital income and led to complex and surprising connections with other Indigenous peoples, from the islands of the Pacific to the Arctic Ocean. At home, aboard ship, or around the world, Native American seafarers found themselves in a variety of situations, each with distinct racial expectations about who was "Indian" and how "Indians" behaved. Treated by their white neighbors as degraded dependents incapable of taking care of themselves, Native New Englanders nevertheless rose to positions of command at sea. They thereby complicated myths of exploration and expansion that depicted cultural encounters as the meeting of two peoples, whites and Indians. Highlighting the shifting racial ideologies that shaped the lives of these whalemen, Nancy Shoemaker shows how the category of "Indian" was as fluid as the whalemen were mobile.Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation
By Sean P. Harvey. 2015
Exploring the morally entangled territory of language and race in 18th- and 19th-century America, Sean Harvey shows that whites' theories…
of an "Indian mind" inexorably shaped by Indian languages played a crucial role in the subjugation of Native peoples and informed the U.S. government's efforts to extinguish Native languages for years to come.Tippecanoe 1811
By Peter Dennis, John F. Winkler. 2015
This is the gripping story of the Tippecanoe campaign of 1811: "The prophet's battle". It was a conflict born out…
of festering tensions inscribed by the 1795 Treaty of Greeneville, which had concluded the Northwestern Indian War and attempted to prevent white settlers' encroachment onto newly-defined Indian territories. For 16 years there had been peace, but in 1811 the number of settlers in the Ohio territory had swollen from 3,000 to 250,000. War was again coming to the North West. Within these pages John F. Winkler explores the dramatic buildup to the war and provides a clear view of the intense fighting with the aid of superb illustrations and maps. He explores the mystical figure of Tenskatawa, who came to be known as "The prophet" and who tried to unite the tribes of the Northwest to drive the American settlers back once and for all - promising a great success that he had seen in a vision. However it was his brother, the charismatic war leader Tecumseh who would organize the tribes militarily, and the Battle of Tippecanoe would be joined as a stealthy assassination attempt by 100 hand-picked warriors trying to kill William Henry Harrison. Kill Harrison, The Prophet asserted, and the rest would fold. Uncover the truth about the brutal combat that followed, and the impact of the battle on the War of 1812.The Sea Is My Country
By Joshua L. Reid. 2015
For the Makahs, a tribal nation at the most northwestern point of the contiguous United States, a deep relationship with…
the sea is the locus of personal and group identity. Unlike most other indigenous tribes whose lives are tied to lands, the Makah people have long placed marine space at the center of their culture, finding in their own waters the physical and spiritual resources to support themselves. This book is the first to explore the history and identity of the Makahs from the arrival of maritime fur-traders in the eighteenth century through the intervening centuries and to the present day. Joshua L. Reid discovers that the "People of the Cape" were far more involved in shaping the maritime economy of the Pacific Northwest than has been understood. He examines Makah attitudes toward borders and boundaries, their efforts to exercise control over their waters and resources as Europeans and then Americans arrived, and their embrace of modern opportunities and technology to maintain autonomy and resist assimilation. The author also addresses current environmental debates relating to the tribe's customary whaling and fishing rights and illuminates the efforts of the Makahs to regain control over marine space, preserve their marine-oriented identity, and articulate a traditional future.Where the Tall Grass Grows
By Bobby Bridger. 2011
In this entertaining and thought-provoking book, noted historian and musician Bobby Bridger explores the impact of Native American culture on…
the American psyche. The book also examines the impact of indigenous American mythology on contemporary identity and the development of modern popular entertainment, particularly the Hollywood film industry.Renowned for "A Ballad of the West," Bobby Bridger has written three books and has had a career in show business that spans the rockabilly to the cosmic cowboy scene in Austin, Texas; the flowering of folk music; and Broadway theater. His multifaceted talents have found expression in singing, acting, writing, painting, and sculpting.Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier
By Timothy J. Shannon. 2008
More than perhaps any other Native American group, the Iroquois found it to their advantage to interact with and adapt…
to white settlers. Despite being known as fierce warriors, the Iroquois were just as reliant on political prowess and sophisticated diplomacy to maintain their strategic position between New France and New York. Colonial observers marveled at what Benjamin Franklin called their "method of doing business" as Europeans learned to use Iroquois ceremonies and objects to remain in their good graces. Though the Iroquois negotiated with the colonial governments, they refused to be pawns of European empires, and their savvy kept them in control of much of the Northeast until the American Revolution. Iroquois Diplomacy and the Early American Frontier is a must-read for anyone fascinated by Native American history or interested in a unique perspective on the dawn of American government.Sacred Feathers
By Donald B. Smith. 2013
Much of the ground on which Canada's largest metropolitan centre now stands was purchased by the British from the Mississauga…
Indians for a payment that in the end amounted to ten shillings. Sacred Feathers (1802-1856), or Peter Jones, as he became known in English, grew up hearing countless stories of the treachery in those negotiations, early lessons in the need for Indian vigilance in preserving their land and their rights. Donald B. Smith's biography of this remarkable Ojibwa leader shows how well those early lessons were learned and how Jones used them to advance the welfare of his people.A groundbreaking book, Sacred Feathers was one of the first biographies of a Canadian Aboriginal to be based on his own writings - drawing on Jones's letters, diaries, sermons, and his history of the Ojibwas - and the first modern account of the Mississauga Indians. As summarized by M.T. Kelly in Saturday Night when the book was first published in 1988, "This biography achieves something remarkable. Peter Jones emerges from its pages alive. We don't merely understand him by the book's end: we know him."The Age of Light, Soap, and Water
By Mariana Valverde. 2008
"BACK IN PRINT WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION The turn of the last century saw a great wave of moral fervour…
among Protestant social reformers in English Canada. Their targets for moral reform were various: sex hygiene, immigration policy, slum clearance, prostitution, and "white slavery."Mariana Valverde's groundbreaking The Age of Light, Soap, and Waterexamines the work and the ideas of moralist clergy, social workers, politicians, and bureaucrats who sought to maintain - or create - a white Protestant Canada. The morality idealized by evangelical, feminist, and medical activists was not, as is often assumed, completely repressive and puritanical. On the contrary, the self-defined social purity movement at the centre of this book talked endlessly about sex in order to create a healthy sexuality among both native-born and immigrant Canadians. Sexual health was linked to racial purity, and both of these were in turn linked to efforts to abolish urban slums by means of symbolic as well as physical "light, soap, and water."This study uncovers a little known dimension of Canadian social history and shows that moral reform was not the project of a marginal puritanical group but was central to the race, class, and gender organization of modern English Canada.Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens
By J. R. Miller. 2000
Highly acclaimed when the first edition appeared in 1989, "Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens" is the first comprehensive account of Indian-white…
relations throughout Canada's history. J.R. Miller charts the deterioration of the relationship from the initial, mutually beneficial contact in the fur trade to the current impasse in which Indians are resisting displacement and marginalization.This new edition is the result of substantial revision to incorporate current scholarship and bring the text up to date. It includes new material on the North, and reflects changes brought about by the Oka crisis, the sovereignty issue, and the various court decisions of the 1990s. It also includes new material on residential schools, treaty making, and land claims.From Viracocha to the Virgin of Copacabana: Representation of the Sacred at Lake Titicaca
By Verónica Salles-Reese. 1997
Surrounded by the peaks of the Andean cordillera, the deep blue waters of Lake Titicaca have long provided refreshment and…
nourishment to the people who live along its shores. From prehistoric times, the Andean peoples have held Titicaca to be a sacred place, the source from which all life originated and the site where the divine manifests its presence. In this interdisciplinary study, Verónica Salles-Reese explores how Andean myths of cosmic and ethnic origins centered on Lake Titicaca evolved from pre-Inca times to the enthronement of the Virgin of Copaca-bana in 1583. She begins by describing the myths of the Kolla (pre-Inca) people and shows how their Inca conquerors attempted to establish legitimacy by reconciling their myths of cosmic and ethnic origin with the Kolla myths. She also shows how a similar pattern occurred when the Inca were conquered in turn by the Spanish.Ritual and Pilgrimage in the Ancient Andes: The Islands of the Sun and the Moon
By Charles Stanish, Brian S. Bauer. 2001
The Islands of the Sun and the Moon in Bolivia's Lake Titicaca were two of the most sacred locations in…
the Inca empire. A pan-Andean belief held that they marked the origin place of the Sun and the Moon, and pilgrims from across the Inca realm made ritual journeys to the sacred shrines there. In this book, Brian Bauer and Charles Stanish explore the extent to which this use of the islands as a pilgrimage center during Inca times was founded on and developed from earlier religious traditions of the Lake Titicaca region. Drawing on a systematic archaeological survey and test excavations in the islands, as well as data from historical texts and ethnography, the authors document a succession of complex polities in the islands from 2000 BC to the time of European contact in the 1530s AD. They uncover significant evidence of pre-Inca ritual use of the islands, which raises the compelling possibility that the religious significance of the islands is of great antiquity. The authors also use these data to address broader anthropological questions on the role of pilgrimage centers in the development of pre-modern states.Angels of the Workplace
By Mercedes Steedman. 2008
In this renowned 1997 study of the clothing industry in Canada, Mercedes Steedman examines how the intricate weaving together of…
the meanings of class, gender, ethnicity, family, and the workplace created a job ghetto for women. Although women comprised a significant majority of garment workers, their roles were limited both in the workplace and in the trade union bureaucracy. Detailing the disparaties between men and women in terms of wages and representation, Angels of the Workplace is the definitive history of discrimination against women in Canada's clothing industry. Steedman shows the crucial role that women played at the front of the picket lines during labour strikes and reveals how they gained sympathy and favourable media coverage for the workers' cause. Tracing both the new hopes for more equitable work brought about by left-wing unionism, and the disappointments caused by the cooperation of labour and management in the "new unionism" of the 1930s, Angels of the Workplace reveals how formalized workplace gender discrimination was formalized for the rest of the century.The Force of Family
By Cara Krmpotich. 2014
Over the course of more than a decade, the Haida Nation triumphantly returned home all known Haida ancestral remains from…
North American museums. In the summer of 2010, they achieved what many thought was impossible: the repatriation of ancestral remains from the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. The Force of Family is an ethnography of those efforts to repatriate ancestral remains from museums around the world.Focusing on objects made to honour the ancestors, Cara Krmpotich explores how memory, objects, and kinship connect and form a cultural archive. Since the mid-1990s, Haidas have been making button blankets and bentwood boxes with clan crest designs, hosting feasts for hundreds of people, and composing and choreographing new songs and dances in the service of repatriation. The book comes to understand how shared experiences of sewing, weaving, dancing, cooking and feasting lead to the Haida notion of "respect," the creation of kinship and collective memory, and the production of a cultural archive.Mississauga Portraits
By Donald B. Smith. 2013
The word "Mississauga" is the name British Canadian settlers used for the Ojibwe on the north of Lake Ontario -…
now the most urbanized region in what is now Canada. The Ojibwe of this area in the early and mid-nineteenth century lived through a time of considerable threat to the survival of the First Nations, as they lost much of their autonomy, and almost all of their traditional territory.Donald B. Smith's Mississauga Portraits recreates the lives of eight Ojibwe who lived during this period - all of whom are historically important and interesting figures, and seven of whom have never before received full biographical treatment. Each portrait is based on research drawn from an extensive collection of writings and recorded speeches by southern Ontario Ojibwe themselves, along with secondary sources. These documents - uncovered over the 40 years that Smith has spent researching and writing about the Ojibwe - represent the richest source of personal First Nations writing in Canada from the mid-nineteenth century.Mississauga Portraits is a sequel to Smith's immensely popular Sacred Feathers, which provided a detailed biography of Mississauga chief and Methodist minister Peter Jones (1802-1856). The first chapter in Mississauga Portraits on Jones tightly links the two books, which together give readers a vivid composite picture of life in mid-nineteenth-century Aboriginal Canada.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.