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: 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: Countering colonization: Native American women and Great Lakes missions, 1630-1900 
Author: Devens, Carol
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Native American Studies | American Studies | Native American Ethnicity | Women's Studies | Religion
Publisher's Description: With Countering Colonization , Carol Devens offers a well-documented, revisionary history of Native American women. From the time of early Jesuit missionaries to the late nineteenth century, Devens brings Ojibwa, Cree, and Montagnais-Naskapi women of the Upper Great Lakes region to the fore. Far from being passive observers without regard for status and autonomy, these women were pivotal in their own communities and active in shaping the encounter between Native American and white civilizations.While women's voices have been silenced in most accounts, their actions preserved in missionary letters and reports indicate the vital part women played during centuries of conflict. In contrast to some Indian men who accepted the missionaries' religious and secular teachings as useful tools for dealing with whites, many Indian women felt a strong threat to their ways of life and beliefs. Women endured torture and hardship, and even torched missionaries' homes in an attempt to reassert control over their lives. Devens demonstrates that gender conflicts in Native American communities, which anthropologists considered to be "aboriginal," resulted in large part from women's and men's divergence over the acceptance of missionaries and their message.This book's perspective is unique in its focus on Native American women who acted to preserve their culture. In acknowledging these women as historically significant actors, Devens has written a work for every scholar and student seeking a more inclusive understanding of the North American past.   [brief]
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: As we are now: mixblood essays on race and identity
Author: Penn, W. S 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Ethnic Studies | Native American Studies | American Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Social Problems | United States History
Publisher's Description: The thirteen contributors to As We Are Now invite readers to explore with them the untamed territory of race and mixblood identity in North America. A "mixblood," according to editor W.S. Penn, recognizes that his or her identity comes not from distinct and separable strains of ancestry but from the sum of the tension and interplay of all his or her ancestral relationships. These first-person narratives cross racial, national, and disciplinary boundaries in a refreshingly experimental approach to writing culture. Their authors call on similar but varied cultural and aesthetic traditions - mostly oral - in order to address some aspect of race and identity about which they feel passionate, and all resist the essentialist point of view. Mixblood Native American, Mestizo/a, and African-American writers focus their discussion on the questions indigenous and minority people ask and the way in which they ask them, clearly merging the singular "I" with the communal "we." These are new voices in the dialogue of ethnic writers, and they offer a highly original treatment of an important subject.   [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: Making Muslim space in North America and Europe 
Author: Metcalf, Barbara Daly 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | History | Islam | Middle Eastern Studies | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: Focusing on the private and public use of space, this volume explores the religious life of the new Muslim communities in North America and Europe. Unlike most studies of immigrant groups, these essays concentrate on cultural practices and expressions of everyday life rather than on the political issues that dominate today's headlines. The authors emphasize the cultural strength and creativity of communities that draw upon Islamic symbols and practices to define "Muslim space" against the background of a non-Muslim environment.The range of perspectives is broad, encompassing middle-class professionals, mosque congregations, factory workers in France and the north of England, itinerant African traders, and prison inmates in New York. The truism that "Islam is a religion of the word" takes on concrete meaning as these disparate communities find ways to elaborate word-centered ritual and to have the visual and aural presence of sacred words in the spaces they inhabit.The volume includes 46 black-and-white photographs that illustrate Muslim populations in Edmonton, Philadelphia, the Green Haven Correction Facility, Manhattan, Marseilles, Berlin, and London, among other places. The focus on space directs attention to the new kinds of boundaries and consciousness that exist not only for these Muslim populations, but for people from all backgrounds in today's ever more integrated world.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Encounters with aging: mythologies of menopause in Japan and North America
Author: Lock, Margaret M
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Women's Studies | Japan
Publisher's Description: Margaret Lock explicitly compares Japanese and North American medical and political accounts of female middle age to challenge Western assumptions about menopause. She uses ethnography, interviews, statistics, historical and popular culture materials, and medical publications to produce a richly detailed account of Japanese women's lives. The result offers irrefutable evidence that the experience and meanings - even the endocrinological changes - associated with female midlife are far from universal. Rather, Lock argues, they are the product of an ongoing dialectic between culture and local biologies.Japanese focus on middle-aged women as family members, and particularly as caretakers of elderly relatives. They attach relatively little importance to the end of menstruation, seeing it as a natural part of the aging process and not a diseaselike state heralding physical decline and emotional instability. Even the symptoms of midlife are different: Japanese women report few hot flashes, for example, but complain frequently of stiff shoulders.Articulate, passionate, and carefully documented, Lock's study systematically undoes the many preconceptions about aging women in two distinct cultural settings. Because it is rooted in the everyday lives of Japanese women, it also provides an excellent entree to Japanese society as a whole.Aging and menopause are subjects that have been closeted behind our myths, fears, and misconceptions. Margaret Lock's cross-cultural perspective gives us a critical new lens through which to examine our assumptions.   [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: 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: The New World of the gothic fox: culture and economy in English and Spanish America
Author: Véliz, Claudio
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Latin American Studies | Latin American History
Publisher's Description: Claudio Véliz adopts the provocative metaphor of foxes and hedgehogs that Isaiah Berlin used to describe opposite types of thinkers. Applying this metaphor to modern culture, economic systems, and the history of the New World, Véliz provides an original and lively approach to understanding the development of English and Spanish America over the past 500 years.According to Véliz, the dominant cultural achievements of Europe's English- and Spanish-speaking peoples have been the Industrial Revolution and the Counter-Reformation, respectively. These overwhelming cultural constructions have strongly influenced the subsequent historical developments of their great cultural outposts in North and South America. The British brought to the New World a stubborn ability to thrive on diversity and change that was entirely consistent with their vernacular Gothic style. The Iberians, by contrast, brought a cultural tradition shaped like a vast baroque dome, a monument to their successful attempt to arrest the changes that threatened their imperial moment.Véliz writes with erudition and wit, using a multitude of sources - historians and classical sociologists, Greek philosophers, today's newspaper sports pages, and modern literature - to support a novel explanation of the prosperity and expanding cultural influence of the gothic fox and the economic and cultural decline endured by the baroque hedgehog.   [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: Twice dead: organ transplants and the reinvention of death
Author: Lock, Margaret M
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Ethics | Sociology | Sociology | Ethics | Sociology | Ethnic Studies | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: Tales about organ transplants appear in mythology and folk stories, and surface in documents from medieval times, but only during the past twenty years has medical knowledge and technology been sufficiently advanced for surgeons to perform thousands of transplants each year. In the majority of cases individuals diagnosed as "brain dead" are the source of the organs without which transplants could not take place. In this compelling and provocative examination, Margaret Lock traces the discourse over the past thirty years that contributed to the locating of a new criterion of death in the brain, and its routinization in clinical practice in North America. She compares this situation with that in Japan where, despite the availability of the necessary technology and expertise, brain death was legally recognized only in 1997, and then under limited and contested circumstances. Twice Dead explores the cultural, historical, political, and clinical reasons for the ready acceptance of the new criterion of death in North America and its rejection, until recently, in Japan, with the result that organ transplantation has been severely restricted in that country. This incisive and timely discussion demonstrates that death is not self-evident, that the space between life and death is historically and culturally constructed, fluid, multiple, and open to dispute. In addition to an analysis of that professional literature on and popular representations of the subject, Lock draws on extensive interviews conducted over ten years with physicians working in intensive care units, transplant surgeons, organ recipients, donor families, members of the general public in both Japan and North America, and political activists in Japan opposed to the recognition of brain death. By showing that death can never be understood merely as a biological event, and that cultural, medical, legal, and political dimensions are inevitably implicated in the invention of brain death, Twice Dead confronts one of the most troubling questions of our era.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: A buccaneer's atlas: Basil Ringrose's South Sea waggoner: a sea atlas and sailing directions of the Pacific coast of the Americas, 1682 
Author: Ringrose, Basil d. 1686
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Renaissance History | European History | Geography
Publisher's Description: On July 29, 1681, a band of English buccaneers that had been terrorizing Spanish possessions on the west coast of the Americas captured a Spanish ship, from which they obtained a derrotero , or book of charts and sailing directions. When they arrived back in England, the Spanish ambassador demanded that the buccaneers be brought to trial. The derrotero was ordered to be brought to King Charles II, who apparently appreciated its great intelligence value. The buccaneers were acquitted, to the chagrin of the king of Spain, who had the English ambassador expelled from the court at Madrid on a seemingly trumped-up charge.The derrotero was subsequently translated, and one of the buccaneers, Basil Ringrose, added a text to the compilation and information to the Spanish charts. The resulting atlas, consisting of 106 pages of charts and 106 pages of text, is published in full for the first time in this volume. Covering the coast from California to Tierra del Fuego, the Galapagos, and Juan Fernandes, Basil Ringrose's south sea waggoner is a rich source of geographical information, with observations on navigational, physical, biological, and cultural features as well as on ethnography, customs, and folklore.After almost exactly three hundred years, this secret atlas is now made available to libraries and individuals. The editors have provided an extensive introduction on historical, geographical, and navigational aspects of the atlas, as well as annotations to the charts and text, and they have plotted the coverage of the charts on modern map bases.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Conquests and historical identities in California, 1769-1936
Author: Haas, Lisbeth
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | Ethnic Studies | Latino Studies | American Studies | Gender Studies | California and the West | United States History
Publisher's Description: Spanning the period between Spanish colonization and the early twentieth century, this well-argued and convincing study examines the histories of Spanish and American conquests, and of ethnicity, race, and community in southern California. Lisbeth Haas draws on a diverse body of source materials (mission and court archives, oral histories, Spanish language plays, census and tax records) to build a new picture of rural society and social change.A borderlands and Chicano history, Haas's work provides a richly textured study of events that took place in and around San Juan Capistrano and Santa Ana in present-day Orange County. She provides a vivid sense of how and why the past acquires meaning in the lives that make up the historical identities she discusses. The voices of Juaneño and Luiseño Indians, Californios, and Mexicans are heard along the shifting faultlines of economic, social, and political change.This is one of the first truly multiethnic histories of California and of the West. It makes clear that issues of multiculturalism and ethnicity are not recent manifestations in California - they have characterized social and cultural relationships there since the late eighteenth century.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Keeper of concentration camps: Dillon S. Myer and American racism
Author: Drinnon, Richard
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History
Publisher's Description: Analyzing the career of Dillon S. Myer, Director of the War Relocation Authority during WWII and Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs from 1950-53, Richard Drinnon shows that the pattern for the Japanese internment was set a century earlier by the removal, confinement, and scattering of Nati . . . [more]
Similar Items