Book picks similar to
Indian Resilience and Rebuilding: Indigenous Nations in the Modern American West by Donald L. Fixico
social-justice
indigenous-history
ma-thesis
aboriginals-of-the-americas
Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States
Audra Simpson - 2014
Combining political theory with ethnographic research among the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, a reserve community in what is now southwestern Quebec, Audra Simpson examines their struggles to articulate and maintain political sovereignty through centuries of settler colonialism. The Kahnawà:ke Mohawks are part of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. Like many Iroquois peoples, they insist on the integrity of Haudenosaunee governance and refuse American or Canadian citizenship. Audra Simpson thinks through this politics of refusal, which stands in stark contrast to the politics of cultural recognition. Tracing the implications of refusal, Simpson argues that one sovereign political order can exist nested within a sovereign state, albeit with enormous tension around issues of jurisdiction and legitimacy. Finally, Simpson critiques anthropologists and political scientists, whom, she argues, have too readily accepted the assumption that the colonial project is complete. Belying that notion, Mohawk Interruptus calls for and demonstrates more robust and evenhanded forms of inquiry into indigenous politics in the teeth of settler governance.
UNeducation, Vol 1: A Residential School Graphic Novel (PG)
Jason Eaglespeaker - 2014
What began as a grassroots fundraiser, "UNeducation, Vol 1: A Residential School Graphic Novel" is now used in school curriculum, university syllabus', treatment/corrections centre resources, healing initiatives, government agencies and educational trainings worldwide. Now available to the public, in softcover and ebook form, for the first time. Gain a full and proper education about a dark episode in North American history. The highly anticipated next chapter in the series, "UNeducation, Vol 2: The Side of Society You Don't See On TV" is coming soon.
The Sheriff's Mail Order Rescue
Amelia Rose
And with her grandmother’s health declining, Clara is living with the weight of the world on her shoulders – but her grandmother isn’t having any of it.Feisty and tenacious, Eugenia isn’t about to let her granddaughter throw her life away – and so she advertises on Clara’s behalf as a mail-order bride.Clara is furious when she discovers her grandmother’s plot, but as Matt’s response catches her eye, Clara warms to the idea of marrying a sheriff and starting over in a new town.Together, Clara and her grandmother set out for Iron Creek. But the journey is long and hard going – and things only get worse as their wagon train crosses paths with a gang of bandits.Clara can only hope that Matt will come for them before it is too late – but with such a rocky start, what hope will be left for their future together?The Sheriff’s Mail-Order Rescue is a thrilling romance that will charm its way into your heart. Will Matt and Clara find a way to be together? Or is their relationship about to end before it has even begun?
From Sand Creek
Simon J. Ortiz - 1981
soldiers at Sand Creek in 1864 was a shameful episode in American history, and its battlefield was proposed as a National Historic Site in 1998 to pay homage to those innocent victims. Poet Simon Ortiz had honored those people seventeen years earlier in his own way. That book, from Sand Creek, is now back in print. Originally published in a small-press edition, from Sand Creek makes a large statement about injustices done to Native peoples in the name of Manifest Destiny. It also makes poignant reference to the spread of that ambition in other parts of the world—notably in Vietnam—as Ortiz asks himself what it is to be an American, a U.S. citizen, and an Indian. Indian people have often felt they have had no part in history, Ortiz observes, and through his work he shows how they can come to terms with this feeling. He invites Indian people to examine the process they have experienced as victims, subjects, and expendable resources—and asks people of European heritage to consider the motives that drive their own history and create their own form of victimization. Through the pages of this sobering work, Ortiz offers a new perspective on history and on America. Perhaps more important, he offers a breath of hope that our peoples might learn from each other:This America has been a burden of steel and mad death, but, look now, there are flowers and new grass and a spring wind rising from Sand Creek.
Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940
Brenda J. Child - 1981
At the heart of this book are the hundreds of letters written by parents, children, and school officials at Haskell Institute in Kansas and the Flandreau School in South Dakota. These revealing letters show how profoundly entire families were affected by their experiences. Children, who often attended schools at great distances from their communities, suffered from homesickness, and their parents from loneliness. Parents worried continually about the emotional and physical health and the academic progress of their children. Families clashed repeatedly with school officials over rampant illnesses and deplorable living conditions and devised strategies to circumvent severely limiting visitation rules. Family intimacy was threatened by the school's suppression of traditional languages and Native cultural practices. Although boarding schools were a threat to family life, profound changes occurred in the boarding school experiences as families turned to these institutions for relief during the Depression, when poverty and the loss of traditional seasonal economics proved a greater threat. Boarding School Seasons provides a multifaceted look at the aspirations and struggles of real people. Brenda J. Child is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota.
Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico
Stuart B. Schwartz - 1999
Using excerpts primarily drawn from Bernal Diaz's 1632 account of the Spanish victory and testimonies — many recently uncovered — of indigenous Nahua survivors, Victors and Vanquished clearly demonstrates how personal interests, class and ethnic biases, and political considerations influenced the interpretation of momentous events. A substantial introduction is followed by 9 chronological sections that illuminate the major events and personalities in this powerful historical episode and reveal the changing attitudes toward European expansionism. The volume includes a broad array of visual images and maps, a glossary of Spanish and Nahua terms, biographical notes, a chronology, a selected bibliography, questions for consideration, and an index.
Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928
David Wallace Adams - 1995
Only by removing Indian children from their homes for extended periods of time, policymakers reasoned, could white civilization take root while childhood memories of savagism gradually faded to the point of extinction. In the words of one official: Kill the Indian and save the man.Education for Extinction offers the first comprehensive account of this dispiriting effort. Much more than a study of federal Indian policy, this book vividly details the day-to-day experiences of Indian youth living in a total institution designed to reconstruct them both psychologically and culturally. The assault on identity came in many forms: the shearing off of braids, the assignment of new names, uniformed drill routines, humiliating punishments, relentless attacks on native religious beliefs, patriotic indoctrinations, suppression of tribal languages, Victorian gender rituals, football contests, and industrial training.Especially poignant is Adams's description of the ways in which students resisted or accommodated themselves to forced assimilation. Many converted to varying degrees, but others plotted escapes, committed arson, and devised ingenious strategies of passive resistance. Adams also argues that many of those who seemingly cooperated with the system were more than passive players in this drama, that the response of accommodation was not synonymous with cultural surrender. This is especially apparent in his analysis of students who returned to the reservation. He reveals the various ways in which graduates struggled to make sense of their lives and selectively drew upon their school experience in negotiating personal and tribal survival in a world increasingly dominated by white men.The discussion comes full circle when Adams reviews the government's gradual retreat from the assimilationist vision. Partly because of persistent student resistance, but also partly because of a complex and sometimes contradictory set of progressive, humanitarian, and racist motivations, policymakers did eventually come to view boarding schools less enthusiasticallyBased upon extensive use of government archives, Indian and teacher autobiographies, and school newspapers, Adams's moving account is essential reading for scholars and general readers alike interested in Western history, Native American studies, American race relations, education history, and multiculturalism.
Untouchables: My Family's Triumphant Journey Out of the Caste System in Modern India
Narendra Jadhav - 1993
For thousands of years the untouchables, or Dalits, the people at the bottom of the Hindu caste system, have been treated as subhuman. Their story has rarely been told. This remarkable book achieves something altogether unprecedented: it gives voice to India's voiceless. In Untouchables, Narendra Jadhav tells the awe-inspiring story of his family's struggle for equality and justice in India. While most Dalits had accepted their lowly position as fate, Jadhav's father rebelled against the oppressive caste system and fought against all odds to forge for his children a destiny that was never ordained. Based on his father's diaries and family stories, Jadhav has written the triumphant story of his parents -- their great love, unwavering courage, and eventual victory in the struggle to free themselves and their children from the caste system. Jadhav vividly brings his parents' world to light and unflinchingly documents the life of untouchables -- the hunger, the cruel humiliations, the perpetual fear and brutal abuse. Compelling and deeply compassionate, Untouchables is a son's tribute to his parents, an illuminating chronicle of one of the most important moments in Indian history, and an eye-opening work of nonfiction that gives readers access and insight into the lives of India's 165 million Dalits, whose struggle for equality continues even today.
The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology
Max Oelschlaeger - 1991
An intellectual history, it draws together evidence from philosophy, anthropology, theology, literature, ecology, cultural geography, and archaeology to provide a new scientifically and philosophically informed understanding of humankind’s relationship to nature. Oelschlaeger begins by examining the culture of prehistoric hunter-gatherers, whose totems symbolized the idea of organic unity between humankind and wild nature, and idea that the author believes is essential to any attempt to define human potential. He next traces how the transformation of these hunter-gatherers into farmers led to a new awareness of distinctions between humankind and nature, and how Hellenism and Judeo-Christianity later introduced the unprecedented concept that nature was valueless until humanized. Oelschlaeger discusses the concept of wilderness in relation to the rise of classical science and modernism, and shows that opposition to “modernism” arose almost immediately from scientific, literary, and philosophical communities. He provides new and, in some cases, revisionist studies of the seminal American figures Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold, and he gives fresh readings of America’s two prodigious wilderness poets Robinson Jeffers and Gary Snyder. He concludes with a searching look at the relationship of evolutionary thought to our postmodern effort to reconceptualize ourselves as civilized beings who remain, in some ways, natural animals.
American Religious History
Patrick N. Allitt - 2001
Allitt in exploring the story of religious life in America from the first European contacts to the late 20th century. Along the way, you learn the answers to two important questions:Why does America, unlike virtually any other industrial nation, continue to show so much religious vitality?Why are the varieties of religion found here so numerous and diverse?The best way to look for explanations of this truly remarkable vitality and diversity, argues Professor Allitt, is to study the nation's religious history.On the one hand, that study includes examining religion from the directions you might expect, including its formal beliefs, ideas, communal or institutional loyalties, and its styles of worship.But Professor Allitt also examines religion's influence on life "beyond the pews"—investigating the subtle but important links that have long brought religion into close contact with the intellectual, social, economic, and political concerns of Americans.To give a notable and recent example: Professor Allitt explains how Martin Luther King, Jr., used a mixture of biblical references and appeals to patriotism to press the case for civil rights.He also reflects on American religion as a sensory experience—a phenomenon whose deep spiritual and social meanings can in part be:Seen in the design of churches, synagogues, mosques, and templesHeard in the sacred sounds of hymns, prayers, and chantsSmelled in Catholic or Buddhist incenseTasted, as you discover in learning why the casserole may be the most "Protestant" of all dishes!The Living VoiceA wonderful feature of these lectures is Professor Allitt's practice of reading aloud from primary sources, including first-person documents, as if to give history back its voice. Some readings are quite famous; others are rescued from obscurity.You will find them by turns sublime, deeply moving, informative, and at times even charming. They include:Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural AddressMartin Luther King's 1963 "I Have a Dream" speechA Civil War veteran's memory of how Catholic sisters cared for the wounded after the Battle of ShilohThe heartfelt letter to Virginia's governor in which John Rolfe explains his spiritual motives for wishing to marry PocahontasAn account of the religious diversity of New York City—in 1683An Anglican cleric's impressions of revivalism in the Carolinas during the First Great Awakening of the 1740s.Richly Detailed Personal GlimpsesYou'll also enjoy biographical sketches and anecdotes about dozens of brilliant, charismatic, or otherwise remarkable American religious figures, among them:Puritan divine Cotton MatherMormon prophet Joseph SmithChristian Science founder Mary Baker EddyThe patriotic revivalist Billy Sunday, who during World War I said, "If you turn hell over, you'll find 'Made in Germany' stamped on the bottom!"After scene-setting lectures that explain the religious situation of Europe in the early modern period and the spirituality of native Americans, Professor Allitt moves on to discussions of religion during the colonial and founding eras, including:The PuritansThe Great AwakeningsThe RevolutionThe flowering of uniquely American religious tendencies such as MormonismThe story of African American religionThe sectional crisis and Civil War.Religion in a Changing SocietyBy the mid-19th century, the American religious landscape was growing more variegated. Large numbers of Catholics, first from Ireland and later from Germany, Poland, and Italy, were coming to what had been an overwhelmingly Protestant land. And growing numbers of Jewish immigrants further diversified the urban religious landscape later in the century.You learn how both groups sometimes became targets of suspicion and intolerance.Professor Allitt also discusses another rising reality of the times—the rapid growth of industrial cities and an economically vulnerable working class.Challenges for Religious LeadersFaced with these new conditions, religious leaders had to rethink the relationships among virtue, prosperity, and God's favor.And still another challenge came from 19th-century discoveries in geology, biology, physics, archaeology, and comparative religion.All of these raised questions about the authority and origins of the Bible. Evolution in particular presented a world of constant predation and strife, promising anything but divinely sponsored harmony.The 20th century inherited these dilemmas, and they continue to resonate up to the present, with strains between liberal and more traditional Protestants being only one example.Professor Allitt leads you through these storylines very closely during the second half of the course, paying special attention to the possible implications they carry for church-state relations.You learn how cherished First Amendment principles of church-state separation and religious freedom had to be applied, mid-century, to difficult cases involving minority religions.And Professor Allitt explains how, in a string of controversial decisions, the Supreme Court has struggled to balance these two principles.20th-Century ChallengesAs America became a great power in the 20th century and played a leading role in the world wars and the Cold War, religious Americans agonized over how they should respond.You learn how debates over the ethics of force and memories of cataclysms such as the Holocaust continue to haunt American religious life to this day.And you see how the century's sweeping social changes were partly shaped by religion and how they in turn powerfully affected religious life:Fundamentalism proved highly adaptableImmigrants and their descendants assimilated to American society, but religious ties proved far more durable than old languages and ethnic customsCatholicism and Judaism each took on a markedly "American" flavor that could discomfit coreligionists abroad.At the Center of the StormYou also learn how religion stood at the center of the upheavals of the 1960s. Many African American civil rights leaders were ministers, inspired by the message of the gospel as well as the promise of the American founding. Religious convictions likewise intensified debates over the Vietnam War and helped energize the feminist movement.As the times have changed, so, too, has religion in America. Some Americans who felt dissatisfied with the Judeo-Christian tradition turned to variants of Islam or Asian spiritualities such as Zen Buddhism. And new waves of immigrants brought their own versions of these traditions, sometimes bumping up against unfamiliar American versions of Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism.As this course shows, the story of American religious vitality and diversity continues to evolve.
The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country
Steve Hendricks - 2006
After a suspicious autopsy and a rushed burial, friends had Aquash exhumed and found a .32-caliber bullet in her skull. Using this scandal as a point of departure, The Unquiet Grave opens a tunnel into the dark side of the FBI and its subversion of American Indian activists. But the book also discovers things the Indians would prefer to keep buried. What unfolds is a sinuous tale of conspiracy, murder, and cover-up that stretches from the plains of South Dakota to the polished corridors of Washington, D.C. First-time author Steve Hendricks sued the FBI over several years to pry out thousands of unseen documents about the events. His work was supported by the prestigious Fund for Investigative Journalism. Hendricks, who has freelanced for The Nation, Boston Globe, Orion, and public radio, is one of those rare reporters whose investigative tenacity is accompanied by grace with the written word.
Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display
Ivan Karp - 1991
The contributors—museum directors, curators, and scholars in art history, folklore, history, and anthropology—represent a variety of stances on the role of museums and their function as intermediaries between the makers of art or artifacts and the eventual viewers.
Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860
Richard Slotkin - 1973
Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries-including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville-Slotkin traces the full development of this myth.
The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity
Jill Lepore - 1998
Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war."It all began when Philip (called Metacom by his own people), the leader of the Wampanoag Indians, led attacks against English towns in the colony of Plymouth. The war spread quickly, pitting a loose confederation of southeastern Algonquians against a coalition of English colonists. While it raged, colonial armies pursued enemy Indians through the swamps and woods of New England, and Indians attacked English farms and towns from Narragansett Bay to the Connecticut River Valley. Both sides, in fact, had pursued the war seemingly without restraint, killing women and children, torturing captives, and mutilating the dead. The fighting ended after Philip was shot, quartered, and beheaded in August 1676.The war's brutality compelled the colonists to defend themselves against accusations that they had become savages. But Jill Lepore makes clear that it was after the war--and because of it--that the boundaries between cultures, hitherto blurred, turned into rigid ones. King Philip's War became one of the most written-about wars in our history, and Lepore argues that the words strengthened and hardened feelings that, in turn, strengthened and hardened the enmity between Indians and Anglos. She shows how, as late as the nineteenth century, memories of the war were instrumental in justifying Indian removals--and how in our own century that same war has inspired Indian attempts to preserve "Indianness" as fiercely as the early settlers once struggled to preserve their Englishness.Telling the story of what may have been the bitterest of American conflicts, and its reverberations over the centuries, Lepore has enabled us to see how the ways in which we remember past events are as important in their effect on our history as were the events themselves.From the Hardcover edition.
Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Impacts)
Paulo Freire - 1992
Pedagogy of Hope represents a chronicle and synthesis of the ongoing social struggles of Latin America and the Third World since the landmark publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Here, Freire once again explores his best-known analytical themes--with even deeper understanding and a greater wisdom. Certainly, all of these themes have to be analyzed as elements of a body of critical, liberationist pedagogy. In this book, we come to understand the author's pedagogical thinking even better, through the critical seriousness, humanistic objectivity, and engaged subjectivity which, in all of Freire's books, are always wedded to a unique creative innovativeness. Pedagogy of Hope is a testimonial to the inner vitality of generations that have not prospered, and to the often silent, generous strength of millions who refuse to let hope be extinguished: people throughout the world who have been empowered by Pedagogy of the Oppressed and all of Paulo Freire's writings.