Book picks similar to
This Land Was Theirs: A Study of Native North Americans by Wendell H. Oswalt
non-fiction
anthropology
history
american-history
Sitting Bull
Bill Yenne - 2008
Sitting Bull's life spanned the entire clash of cultures and ultimate destruction of the Plains Indian way of life. He was a powerful leader and a respected shaman, but neither fully captures the enigma of Sitting Bull. He was a good friend of Buffalo Bill and skillful negotiator with the American government, yet erroneously credited with both murdering Custer at the Little Big Horn and with being the chief instigator of the Ghost Dance movement. The reality of his life, as Bill Yenne reveals in his absorbing new portrait, Sitting Bull, is far more intricate and compelling. Tracing Sitting Bull's history from a headstrong youth and his first contact with encroaching settlers, through his ascension as the spiritual and military leader of the Lakota, friendship with a Swiss-American widow from New York, and death at the hands of the Indian police on the eve of the massacre at Wounded Knee, Yenne scoured rare contemporary records and consulted Sitting Bull's own "Hieroglyphic Autobiography" in the course of his research. While Sitting Bull was the leading figure of Plains Indian resistance his message, as Yenne explains, was of self-reliance, not violence. At the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull was not confronting Custer as popular myth would have it, but riding through the Lakota camp making sure the most defenseless of his tribe--the children--were safe. In Sitting Bull we find a man who, in the face of an uncertain future, helped ensure the survival of his people.
Criminological Theory: Past to Present: Essential Readings
Francis T. Cullen - 1998
Edited by leading scholars Francis T. Cullen and Robert Agnew, it presents a wide range of readings, including original theory pieces. A brief yet detailed introduction frames each Part (and each reading), providing students with a "road map" as they explore the ongoing intellectual developments, diverse views, and continuing debates in the field of criminological theory.Building on the success of the third edition, the thoroughly updated and revised fourth edition includes:* Eight new readings (each with its own introduction)* Two new Parts (each with its own introduction): "Theories of White-Collar Crime" and "Putting Theory to Work: Guiding Crime Control Policy"* A new Instructor's Manual on CD, featuring a Test Bank with multiple-choice and essay questions, learning objectives, key words, discussion topics and exercises, and PowerPoint lecture slidesComprehensive enough for graduate students yet accessible enough for undergraduate students, Criminological Theory: Past to Present--Essential Readings, Fourth Edition, remains a solid introduction to the foundations of criminology--and to the competing theories that will shape thinking about crime in the years ahead.
The Forest People
Colin M. Turnbull - 1961
Turnbull lived among the Mbuti people for three years as an observer, not a researcher, so he offers a charming and intimate firsthand account of the people and their culture, and especially the individuals and their personalities. The Forest People is a timeless work of academic and humanitarian significance, sure to delight readers as they take a trip into a foreign culture and learn to appreciate the joys of life through the eyes of the Mbuti people.
Daughters of the Earth
Carolyn Niethammer - 1995
She built houses and ground corn, wove blankets and painted pottery, played field hockey and rode racehorses. Frequently she enjoyed an open and joyous sexuality before marriage; if her marriage didn't work out she could divorce her husband by the mere act of returning to her parents. She mourned her dead by tearing her clothes and covering herself with ashes, and when she herself died was often shrouded in her wedding dress. She was our native sister, the American Indian woman, and it is of her life and lore that Carolyn Niethammer writes in this rich tapestry of America's past and present. Here, as it unfolded, is the chronology of the Native American woman's life. Here are the birth rites of Caddo women from the Mississippi-Arkansas border, who bore their children alone by the banks of rivers and then immersed themselves and their babies in river water; here are Apache puberty ceremonies that are still carried on today, when the cost for the celebrations can run anywhere from one to six thousand dollars. Here are songs from the Night Dances of the Sioux, where girls clustered on one side of the lodge and boys congregated on the other; here is the Shawnee legend of the Corn Person and of Our Grandmother, the two female deities who ruled the earth. Far from the submissive, downtrodden “squaw” of popular myth, the Native American woman emerges as a proud, sometimes stoic, always human individual from whom those who came after can learn much. At a time when many contemporary American women are seeking alternatives to a lifestyle and role they have outgrown, Daughters of the Earth offers us an absorbing—and illuminating—legacy of dignity and purpose.
The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe
Francis La Flesche - 1900
It is a simple, affecting tale of young Indian boys midway between two cultures, reluctant to abandon the ways of their fathers, and puzzled and uncomfortable in their new roles of "make-believe white men." The ambition of the Indian parents for their children, the struggle of the teachers to acquaint their charges with a new world of learning, and especially the problems met by both parents and teachers in controlling and directing schoolboy exuberance contribute to the authen-ticity of this portrait of the "Universal Boy," to whom La Flesche dedicated his book. Regarded by anthropologists as a classic of Native American literature, it is one of those rare books that are valued by the specialist as authentic sources of information about Indian culture and yet can be recommended wholeheartedly to the general reader, especially to young people in high school and the upper grades, as a useful corrective to the often distorted picture of Indian life seen in movies, comics, and television.
On the Rez
Ian Frazier - 2000
Crazy Horse, perhaps the greatest Indian war leader of the 1800s, and Black Elk, the holy man whose teachings achieved worldwide renown, were Oglala; in these typically perceptive pages, Frazier seeks out their descendants on Pine Ridge--a/k/a the rez--which is one of the poorest places in America today.Along with his longtime friend Le War Lance (whom he first wrote about in his 1989 bestseller, Great Plains) and other Oglala companions, Frazier fully explores the rez as they visit friends and relatives, go to pow-wows and rodeos and package stores, and tinker with a variety of falling-apart cars. He takes us inside the world of the Sioux as few writers ever have, writing with much wit, compassion, and imagination. In the career of SuAnne Big Crow, for example, the most admired Oglala basketball player of all time, who died in a car accident in 1992, Frazier finds a contemporary reemergence of the death-defying, public-spirited Sioux hero who fights with grace and glory to save her followers.On the Rez vividly portrays the survival, through toughness and humor, of a great people whose culture has helped to shape the American identity.
Woven Stone
Simon J. Ortiz - 1992
Widely regarded as one of the country's most important Native American poets, Ortiz has led a thirty-year career marked by a fascination with language—and by a love of his people. This omnibus of three previous works offers old and new readers an appreciation of the fruits of his dedication.Going for the Rain (1976) expresses closeness to a specific Native American way of life and its philosophy and is structured in the narrative form of a journey on the road of life. A Good Journey (1977), an evocation of Ortiz's constant awareness of his heritage, draws on the oral tradition of his Pueblo culture. Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land (1980)—revised for this volume—has its origins in his work as a laborer in the uranium industry and is intended as a political observation and statement about that industry's effects on Native American lands and lives. In an introduction written for this volume, Ortiz tells of his boyhood in Acoma Pueblo, his early love for language, his education, and his exposure to the wider world. He traces his development as a writer, recalling his attraction to the Beats and his growing political awareness, especially a consciousness of his and other people's social struggle. "Native American writers must have an individual and communally unified commitment to their art and its relationship to their indigenous culture and people," writes Ortiz. "Through our poetry, prose, and other written works that evoke love, respect, and responsibility, Native Americans may be able to help the United States of America to go beyond survival."
Anasazi America: Seventeen Centuries on the Road from Center Place
David E. Stuart - 2000
A vast and powerful alliance of thousands of farming hamlets and nearly 100 spectacular towns integrated the region through economic and religious ties, and the whole system was interconnected with hundreds of miles of roads. It took these Anasazi farmers more than seven centuries to lay the agricultural, organizational, and technological groundwork for the creation of classic Chacoan civilization, which lasted about 200 years--only to collapse spectacularly in a mere 40.Why did such a great society collapse? Who survived? Why? In this lively book anthropologist/archaeologist David Stuart presents answers to these questions that offer useful lessons to modern societies. His account of the rise and fall of the Chaco Anasazi brings to life the people known to us today as the architects of Chaco Canyon, the spectacular national park in New Mexico that thousands of tourists visit every year.
The Interpretation of Cultures
Clifford Geertz - 1973
This groundbreaking book, winner of the 1974 Sorokin Award of the American Sociological Association, helped define for an entire generation of anthropologists what their field is ultimately about.
Voyages
Cathy A. Small - 1997
This book includes one of the sanest and most convincing arguments that I have read for experimentation in the writing of ethnography, which is supported by the text itself as an exemplar of a modest, theoretically unpretentious experiment that works very well indeed." George E. Marcus, Rice University"While a few Californians may be aware of the Tongan immigrant population in their midst, most Americans are unaware that the United States is a major terminus for the people of Tonga, an island nation in the South Pacific. Small examines Tongan migration to the United States in a 'transnational' perspective, stressing that many of the new migrant populations seem successfully to manage dual lives, in both the old country and the new. To that end, she describes life in contemporary Tongan communities and in U.S. settings." Library JournalThis book documents the momentous social phenomena of mass migration from agricultural ex-colonies and ex-protectorates to the industrial world. Cathy A. Small provides the poignant perspective of one extended family and one village in the Kingdom of Tonga, an independent island nation in the South Pacific which has lost one third of its population to migration since the mid-1960s. Moving between Tonga and California, Small chronicles the experiences of a family from the village of 'Olunga. Some members stayed and some migrated to California, in successive waves in the 1960s-1990s. Through their lives, she presents a striking picture of Tongan culture in the United States. Returning to 'Olunga with family members and their American-born children, Small shows what happened to village life and to kin relationships thirty years after migration began.
Sacajawea
Anna Lee Waldo - 1978
child of a Shoshoni chief, lone woman on Lewis and Clark‘s historic trek-beautiful spear of a dying nation.She knew many men, walked many miles. From the whispering prairies, across the Great Divide to the crystal-capped Rockies and on to the emerald promise of the Pacific Northwest, her story overflows with emotion and action ripped from the bursting fabric of a raw new land. Ten years In the Writing, SACAJAWEA unfolds an immense canvas of people and events, and captures the eternal longings of a woman who always yearned for one great passion-and always it lay beyond the next mountain.
Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (updated with a new preface)
Lila Abu-Lughod - 1986
The poems are haunting, the evocation of emotional life vivid. But her analysis also reveals how deeply implicated poetry and sentiment are in the play of power and the maintenance of a system of social hierarchy. What begins as a puzzle about a single poetic genre becomes a reflection on the politics of sentiment and the relationship between ideology and human experience.
The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People
E.E. Evans-Pritchard - 1940
This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Civilization and Its Discontents
Sigmund Freud - 1930
It is both witness and tribute to the late theory of mind—the so-called structural theory, with its stress on aggression, indeed the death drive, as the pitiless adversary of eros.Civilization and Its Discontents is one of the last of Freud's books, written in the decade before his death and first published in German in 1929. In it he states his views on the broad question of man's place in the world, a place Freud defines in terms of ceaseless conflict between the individual's quest for freedom and society's demand for conformity.Freud's theme is that what works for civilization doesn't necessarily work for man. Man, by nature aggressive and egotistical, seeks self-satisfaction. But culture inhibits his instinctual drives. The result is a pervasive and familiar guilt.Of the various English translations of Freud's major works to appear in his lifetime, only one was authorized by Freud himself: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud under the general editorship of James Strachey.Freud approved the overall editorial plan, specific renderings of key words and phrases, and the addition of valuable notes, from bibliographical and explanatory. Many of the translations were done by Strachey himself; the rest were prepared under his supervision. The result was to place the Standard Edition in a position of unquestioned supremacy over all other existing versions.
The McDonaldization of Society
George Ritzer - 1995
The McDonaldization of Society, Revised New Century Edition discusses how McDonaldization and the broader process of globalization (in a new Chapter 8), are spreading more widely and more deeply into various social institutions such as education, medicine, the criminal justice system, and more. This Revised New Century Edition provides many new, relevant examples from recent events and contemporary popular culture, including the ever-increasing global proliferation of McDonald′s and other fast food franchises, shopping malls, and similar commercial entities. Their impact is examined in the post-September 11, 2001 era.