Title: Spirit wars: Native North American religions in the age of nation building
Author: Niezen, Ronald
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Religion | Cultural Anthropology | Native American Studies | Religion | American Studies | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Spirit Wars is an exploration of the ways in which the destruction of spiritual practices and beliefs of native peoples in North America has led to conditions of collective suffering--a process sometimes referred to as cultural genocide. Ronald Niezen approaches this topic through wide-ranging case studies involving different colonial powers and state governments: the seventeenth-century Spanish occupation of the Southwest, the colonization of the Northeast by the French and British, nineteenth-century westward expansion and nationalism in the swelling United States and Canada, and twentieth-century struggles for native people's spiritual integrity and freedom. Each chapter deals with a specific dimension of the relationship between native peoples and non-native institutions, and together these topics yield a new understanding of the forces directed against the underpinnings of native cultures.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Real Indians: identity and the survival of Native America
Author: Garroutte, Eva Marie 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | Native American Studies | Native American Ethnicity | History | American Studies
Publisher's Description: At the dawn of the twenty-first century, America finds itself on the brink of a new racial consciousness. The old, unquestioned confidence with which individuals can be classified (as embodied, for instance, in previous U.S. census categories) has been eroded. In its place are shifting paradigms and . . . [more]
Similar Items

Title: Surviving through the days: translations of Native California stories and songs: a California Indian reader 
Author: Luthin, Herbert W 1954-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | American Studies | Native American Studies | American Literature
Publisher's Description: This anthology of treasures from the oral literature of Native California, assembled by an editor admirably sensitive to language, culture, and history, will delight scholars and general readers alike. Herbert Luthin's generous selection of stories, anecdotes, myths, reminiscences, and songs is drawn from a wide sampling of California's many Native cultures, and although a few pieces are familiar classics, most are published here for the first time, in fresh literary translations. The translators, whether professional linguists or Native scholars and storytellers, are all acknowledged experts in their respective languages, and their introductions to each selection provide welcome cultural and biographical context. Augmenting and enhancing the book are Luthin's engaging, informative essays on topics that range from California's Native languages and oral-literary traditions to critical issues in performance, translation, and the history of California literary ethnography.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Indians in the making: ethnic relations and Indian identities around Puget Sound
Author: Harmon, Alexandra 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Native American Studies | United States History | Ethnic Studies | California and the West
Publisher's Description: In the Puget Sound region of Washington state, indigenous peoples and their descendants have a long history of interaction with settlers and their descendants. Indians in the Making offers the first comprehensive account of these interactions, from contact with traders of the 1820s to the Indian fishing rights activism of the 1970s. In this thoroughly researched history, Alexandra Harmon also provides a theoretically sophisticated analysis that charts shifting notions of Indian identity, both in native and in nonnative communities.During the period under consideration, each major shift in demographic, economic, and political conditions precipitated new deliberations about how to distinguish Indians from non-Indians and from each other. By chronicling such dialogues over 150 years, this groundbreaking study reveals that Indian identity has a complex history. Examining relations in various spheres of life - labor, public ceremony, marriage and kinship, politics and law - Harmon shows how Indians have continually redefined themselves. Her focus on the negotiations that have given rise to modern Indian identity makes a significant contribution to the discourse of contemporary multiculturalism and ethnic studies.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Lines in the water: nature and culture at Lake Titicaca
Author: Orlove, Benjamin S
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Environmental Studies | Latin American Studies | Conservation
Publisher's Description: This beautifully written book weaves reflections on anthropological fieldwork together with evocative meditations on a spectacular landscape as it takes us to the remote indigenous villages on the shore of Lake Titicaca, high in the Peruvian Andes. Ben Orlove brings alive the fishermen, reed cutters, boat builders, and families of this isolated region, and describes the role that Lake Titicaca has played in their culture. He describes the landscapes and rhythms of life in the Andean highlands as he considers the intrusions of modern technology and economic demands in the region. Lines in the Water tells a local version of events that are taking place around the world, but with an unusual outcome: people here have found ways to maintain their cultural autonomy and to protect their fragile mountain environment. The Peruvian highlanders have confronted the pressures of modern culture with remarkable vitality. They use improved boats and gear and sell fish to new markets but have fiercely opposed efforts to strip them of their indigenous traditions. They have retained their customary practice of limiting the amount of fishing and have continued to pass cultural knowledge from one generation to the next--practices that have prevented the ecological crises that have followed commercialization of small-scale fisheries around the world. This book--at once a memoir and an ethnography--is a personal and compelling account of a research experience as well as an elegantly written treatise on themes of global importance. Above all, Orlove reminds us that human relations with the environment, though constantly changing, can be sustainable.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Disciplined hearts: history, identity, and depression in an American Indian community
Author: O'Nell, Theresa DeLeane 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology | Native American Ethnicity | Native American Studies
Publisher's Description: "This is a good place for your work. Depression is a big problem here. About 70-80% of our people are depressed." When she arrived at the Flathead Reservation in Montana to start an ethnographic study of depression, medical anthropologist Theresa DeLeane O'Nell repeatedly encountered such statements. This astonishingly widespread concern propelled the author into the complex lives of these modern American Indian people and into the historical roots of their contemporary situation.In Disciplined Hearts, O'Nell draws on recent anthropological theory to locate Flathead depression in the culturally organized experiences of an oppressed people. According to O'Nell, Flathead narratives of depression are tales in which narrators use their demoralization as a guide for modern Indian life. Underlying their tales, she says, is the dramatic assertion that depression is the natural condition of "real Indians" - those who have "disciplined" their hearts by recasting their personal sadness into compassion for others.This rich account of family and community life describes the moral imagination with which Flathead Indian people weave together historical and personal loss, American Indian identity, and social responsibility. Based on her ethnographic and clinical work, O'Nell pinpoints American Indian depression within a complex interplay of cultural ideas of the self and the Indian family, emotion and ethnic identity, and historical relations between Indians and whites.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Immigration and the political economy of home: West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis, 1945-1992 
Author: Buff, Rachel 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Ethnic Studies | American Studies | Native American Studies | Native American Ethnicity | United States History
Publisher's Description: Rachel Buff's innovative study of festivals in two American communities launches a substantive inquiry into the nature of citizenship, race, and social power. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork as well as archival research, Buff compares American Indian powwows in Minneapolis with the West Indian American Day Carnival in New York. She demonstrates the historical, theoretical, and cultural links between two groups who are rarely thought of together and in so doing illuminates our understanding of the meaning of home and citizenship in the post-World War II period. The book also follows the history of federal Indian and immigration policy in this period, tracing the ways that migrant and immigrant identities are created by both national boundaries and transnational cultural memory. In addition to offering fascinating discussions of these lively and colorful festivals, Buff shows that their importance is not just as a form of performance or entertainment, but also as crucial sites for making and remaking meanings about group history and survival. Cultural performances for both groups contain a history of resistance to colonial oppression, but they also change and creatively respond to the experiences of migration and the forces of the global mass-culture industry. Accessible and engaging, Immigration and the Political Economy of Home addresses crucial contemporary issues. Powwow culture and carnival culture emerge as vital, dynamic sites that are central not only to the formation of American Indian and West Indian identities, but also to the understanding modern America itself: the history of its institution of citizenship, its postwar cities, and the nature of metropolitan culture.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: At the heart of the Empire: Indians and the colonial encounter in late-Victorian Britain 
Author: Burton, Antoinette M 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Women's Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies | South Asia | Victorian History | Travel | European History | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Antoinette Burton focuses on the experiences of three Victorian travelers in Britain to illustrate how "Englishness" was made and remade in relation to imperialism. The accounts left by these three sojourners - all prominent, educated Indians - represent complex, critical ethnographies of "native" metropolitan society and offer revealing glimpses of what it was like to be a colonial subject in fin-de-siècle Britain. Burton's innovative interpretation of the travelers' testimonies shatters the myth of Britain's insularity from its own construction of empire and shows that it was instead a terrain open to continual contest and refiguration.Burton's three subjects felt the influence of imperial power keenly during even the most everyday encounters in Britain. Pandita Ramabai arrived in London in 1883 seeking a medical education and left in 1886, having resisted the Anglican Church's attempts to make her an evangelical missionary. Cornelia Sorabji went to Oxford to study law and became the first Indian woman to be called to the Bar. Behramji Malabari sought help for his Indian reform projects in England, and subjected London to colonial scrutiny in the process. Their experiences form the basis of this wide-ranging, clearly written, and imaginative investigation of diasporic movement in the colonial metropolis.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: American Indian treaties: the history of a political anomaly
Author: Prucha, Francis Paul
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Native American Studies | Law
Publisher's Description: American Indian affairs are much in the public mind today - hotly contested debates over such issues as Indian fishing rights, land claims, and reservation gambling hold our attention. While the unique legal status of American Indians rests on the historical treaty relationship between Indian tribes and the federal government, until now there has been no comprehensive history of these treaties and their role in American life.Francis Paul Prucha, a leading authority on the history of American Indian affairs, argues that the treaties were a political anomaly from the very beginning. The term "treaty" implies a contract between sovereign independent nations, yet Indians were always in a position of inequality and dependence as negotiators, a fact that complicates their current attempts to regain their rights and tribal sovereignty.Prucha's impeccably researched book, based on a close analysis of every treaty, makes possible a thorough understanding of a legal dilemma whose legacy is so palpably felt today.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: For those who come after: a study of Native American autobiography 
Author: Krupat, Arnold
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Native American Studies | Autobiography
Publisher's Description: Drawing on the life stories of Native Americans solicited by historians during the 19th century and, later, by anthropologists concerned with amplifying the cultural record, Arnold Krupat examines the Indian autobiography as a specific genre of American writing.
Similar Items

Title: Aboriginal slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America
Author: Donald, Leland 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Pacific Rim Studies
Publisher's Description: With his investigation of slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America, Leland Donald makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the aboriginal cultures of this area. He shows that Northwest Coast servitude, relatively neglected by researchers in the past, fits an appropriate cross-cultural definition of slavery. Arguing that slaves and slavery were central to these hunting-fishing-gathering societies, he points out how important slaves were to the Northwest Coast economies for their labor and for their value as major items of exchange. Slavery also played a major role in more famous and frequently analyzed Northwest Coast cultural forms such as the potlatch and the spectacular art style and ritual systems of elite groups.The book includes detailed chapters on who owned slaves and the relations between masters and slaves; how slaves were procured; transactions in slaves; the nature, use, and value of slave labor; and the role of slaves in rituals. In addition to analyzing all the available data, ethnographic and historic, on slavery in traditional Northwest Coast cultures, Donald compares the status of Northwest Coast slaves with that of war captives in other parts of traditional Native North America.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Storm over Mono: the Mono Lake battle and the California water future 
Author: Hart, John 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Environmental Studies | Natural History | California and the West
Publisher's Description: A dramatic environmental saga unfolds in John Hart's compelling story of the fight to save Mono Lake. This ancient inland sea, in the eastern Sierra near Yosemite National Park, is among the oldest in North America. But over the past fifty years, as its feeder streams were steadily drained to supply water to ever-growing, ever-thirsty Los Angeles, the lake's water volume eventually was reduced by half. Mono Lake's bizarre but productive ecosystem began to collapse: salinity greatly increased, nesting and migrating birds were threatened, and fierce alkali dust storms became a common occurrence.Then, in the mid-1970s, a handful of people, most of them students with minimal financial resources, began a campaign to save the dying lake. They took on not only Los Angeles but the entire state government and a whole way of thinking about water. Their fight seemed doomed in the beginning, but long years of grassroots education and effort finally paid off. In 1994, the California Water Resources Control Board ruled that Los Angeles's use of Mono Lake's waters be restricted. Over time, the lake will return to a healthy condition.John Hart integrates natural, social, and political history into a story that is a source of hope for anyone concerned about the environment. Storm over Mono demonstrates the important role of science in public policy debates and validates the concept of the public trust, the idea that certain things belong to us all, not metaphorically but in simple legal fact.Complementing Hart's narrative are 32 stunning color photographs by a dozen leading nature photographers, along with numerous black-and-white photographs, illustrations, and maps.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Ancient Titicaca: the evolution of complex society in southern Peru and northern Bolivia
Author: Stanish, Charles 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Archaeology | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: One of the richest and most complex civilizations in ancient America evolved around Lake Titicaca in southern Peru and northern Bolivia. This book is the first comprehensive synthesis of four thousand years of prehistory for the entire Titicaca region. It is a fascinating story of the transition from hunting and gathering to early agriculture, to the formation of the Tiwanaku and Pucara civilizations, and to the double conquest of the region, first by the powerful neighboring Inca in the fifteenth century and a century later by the Spanish Crown. Based on more than fifteen years of field research in Peru and Bolivia, Charles Stanish's book brings together a wide range of ethnographic, historical, and archaeological data, including material that has not yet been published. This landmark work brings the author's intimate knowledge of the ethnography and archaeology in this region to bear on major theoretical concerns in evolutionary anthropology. Stanish provides a broad comparative framework for evaluating how these complex societies developed. After giving an overview of the region's archaeology and cultural history, he discusses the history of archaeological research in the Titicaca Basin, as well as its geography, ecology, and ethnography. He then synthesizes the data from six archaeological periods in the Titicaca Basin within an evolutionary anthropological framework. Titicaca Basin prehistory has long been viewed through the lens of first Inca intellectuals and the Spanish state. This book demonstrates that the ancestors of the Aymara people of the Titicaca Basin rivaled the Incas in wealth, sophistication, and cultural genius. The provocative data and interpretations of this book will also make us think anew about the rise and fall of other civilizations throughout history.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Standing ground: Yurok Indian spirituality, 1850-1990
Author: Buckley, Thomas C. T
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: American Studies | Anthropology | Native American Ethnicity
Publisher's Description: This colorful, richly textured account of spiritual training and practice within an American Indian social network emphasizes narrative over analysis. Thomas Buckley's foregrounding of Yurok narratives creates one major level of dialogue in an innovative ethnography that features dialogue as its central theoretical trope. Buckley places himself in conversation with contemporary Yurok friends and elders, with written texts, and with twentieth-century anthropology as well. He describes Yurok Indian spirituality as "a significant field in which individual and society meet in dialogue - cooperating, resisting, negotiating, changing each other in manifold ways. 'Culture,' here, is not a thing but a process, an emergence through time."   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Keeping slug woman alive: a holistic approach to American Indian texts
Author: Sarris, Greg
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Native American Studies | Anthropology | Native American Ethnicity | Cultural Anthropology | Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | American Literature | American Studies
Publisher's Description: This remarkable collection of eight essays offers a rare perspective on the issue of cross-cultural communication. Greg Sarris is concerned with American Indian texts, both oral and written, as well as with other American Indian cultural phenomena such as basketry and religion. His essays cover a range of topics that include orality, art, literary criticism, and pedagogy, and demonstrate that people can see more than just "what things seem to be." Throughout, he asks: How can we read across cultures so as to encourage communication rather than to close it down?Sarris maintains that cultural practices can be understood only in their living, changing contexts. Central to his approach is an understanding of storytelling, a practice that embodies all the indeterminateness, structural looseness, multivalence, and richness of culture itself. He describes encounters between his Indian aunts and Euro-American students and the challenge of reading in a reservation classroom; he brings the reports of earlier ethnographers out of museums into the light of contemporary literary and anthropological theory.Sarris's perspective is exceptional: son of a Coast Miwok/Pomo father and a Jewish mother, he was raised by Mabel McKay - a renowned Cache Creek Pomo basketweaver and medicine woman - and by others, Indian and non-Indian, in Santa Rosa, California. Educated at Stanford, he is now a university professor and recently became Chairman of the Federated Coast Miwok tribe. His own story is woven into these essays and provides valuable insights for anyone interested in cross-cultural communication, including educators, theorists of language and culture, and general readers.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Frontiers of historical imagination: narrating the European conquest of native America, 1890-1990
Author: Klein, Kerwin Lee 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | California and the West | American Studies | Anthropology | United States History | Intellectual History | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: The American frontier, a potent symbol since Europeans first stepped ashore on North America, serves as the touchstone for Kerwin Klein's analysis of the narrating of history. Klein explores the traditions through which historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and literary critics have understood the story of America's origin and the way those understandings have shaped and been shaped by changing conceptions of history. The American West was once the frontier space where migrating Europe collided with Native America, where the historical civilizations of the Old World met the nonhistorical wilds of the New. It was not only the cultural combat zone where American democracy was forged but also the ragged edge of History itself, where historical and nonhistorical defied and defined each other. Klein maintains that the idea of a collision between people with and without history still dominates public memory. But the collision, he believes, resounds even more powerfully in the historical imagination, which creates conflicts between narration and knowledge and carries them into the language used to describe the American frontier. In Klein's words, "We remain obscurely entangled in philosophies of history we no longer profess, and the very idea of 'America' balances on history's shifting frontiers."   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The voice in the margin: Native American literature and the canon 
Author: Krupat, Arnold
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Native American Studies | American Literature
Publisher's Description: In its consideration of American Indian literature as a rich and exciting body of work, The Voice in the Margin invites us to broaden our notion of what a truly inclusive American literature might be, and of how it might be placed in relation to an international - a "cosmopolitan" - literary canon. The book comes at a time when the most influential national media have focused attention on the subject of the literary canon. They have made it an issue not merely of academic but of general public concern, expressing strong opinions on the subject of what the American student should or should not read as essential or core texts. Is the literary canon simply a given of tradition and history, or is it, and must it be, constantly under construction? The question remains hotly contested to the present moment.Arnold Krupat argues that the literary expression of the indigenous peoples of the United States has claims on us to more than marginal attention. Demonstrating a firm grasp of both literary history and contemporary critical theory, he situates Indian literature, traditional and modern, in a variety of contexts and categories. His extensive knowledge of the history and current theory of ethnography recommends the book to anthropologists and folklorists as well as to students and teachers of literature, both canonical and noncanonical. The materials covered, the perspectives considered, and the learning displayed all make The Voice in the Margin a major contribution to the exciting field of contemporary cultural studies.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Savagism and civilization: a study of the Indian and the American mind
Author: Pearce, Roy Harvey
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: History | United States History | Native American Studies
Similar Items

Title: An empire on display: English, Indian, and Australian exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War
Author: Hoffenberg, Peter H 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | European History | Victorian History | Asian History | South Asia | Pacific Rim Studies | European Studies
Publisher's Description: The grand exhibitions of the Victorian and Edwardian eras are the lens through which Peter Hoffenberg examines the economic, cultural, and social forces that helped define Britain and the British Empire. He focuses on major exhibitions in England, Australia, and India between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Festival of Empire sixty years later, taking special interest in the interactive nature of the exhibition experience, the long-term consequences for the participants and host societies, and the ways in which such popular gatherings revealed dissent as well as celebration. Hoffenberg shows how exhibitions shaped culture and society within and across borders in the transnational working of the British Empire. The exhibitions were central to establishing and developing a participatory imperial world, and each polity in that world provided distinctive information, visitors, and exhibits. Among the displays were commercial goods, working machines, and ethnographic scenes. Exhibits were intended to promote external commonwealth and internal nationalism. The imperial overlay did not erase significant differences but explained and used them in economic and cultural terms. The exhibitions in cities such as London, Sydney, and Calcutta were living and active public inventories of the Empire and its national political communities. The process of building and consuming such inventories persists today in the cultural bureaucracies, museums, and festivals of modern nation-states, the appeal to tradition and social order, and the actions of transnational bodies.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Ceremonial costumes of the Pueblo Indians: their evolution, fabrication, and significance in the prayer drama 
Author: Roediger, Virginia More
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Dance | Art
Publisher's Description: When the University of California Press first published Roediger's Ceremonial Costumes of the Pueblo Indians in 1941, it was immediately hailed as both a beautiful book and the most comprehensive description ever of the making and meaning of the Pueblo costumes of New Mexico and Arizona. It has been widely acknowledged as a classic and eagerly sought after in antiquarian bookstores.Exactly fifty years after its original publication, here is the book back in print, with a new introduction by the renowned anthropologist Fred Eggan. Roediger's vivid paintings are reproduced once more in full color, capturing the beauty and drama of the Pueblo ceremonies - the turquoise dance moccasins, the tableted headdress of the Zuni corn maidens, the bright-blanketed Kachina maiden, and the buffalo, brilliant eagle, and horned deer costumes.It was Roediger who first viewed the ceremony and ritual of the Pueblo peoples as dramatic performance, a view that has gained great currency since. As a student of drama at Yale University she was fascinated by the intensely theatrical dimension to Pueblo worship, and it is this original perspective that informs and illuminates her study.After a brief survey of the history, location, and life of the Pueblo peoples, Roediger embarks on a thorough analysis of the materials used in the Pueblo costumes. She explains both their symbolic significance and their manufacture - from the weaving of cloth and the tanning of leather to the preparation of birds' feathers, evergreens, paints, and dyes. She then provides a meticulous description of the costumed dancer - body paint, garments, ornaments, accessories, and dance properties such as rattles, headdresses, and masks.In her final section, Roediger explores the relation of the costumes to the prayer dramas, particularly to the reverential, solemn, ecstatic public dance with which these climax. Vivid details emerge here about such rituals as the animal dances from the Rio Grande region and the Rain Dance of the Zuni.Fifty years after its original publication, Virginia Roediger's book remains the most comprehensive study of the ceremonial costumes of the Pueblo peoples. A book of great visual appeal and unrivaled detail, it will be welcomed back by scholars and general readers alike.   [brief]
Similar Items