Author: Laura J. Feller
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806191600
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 recodified the state’s long-standing racial hierarchy as a more rigid Black-white binary. Then, Virginia officials asserted that no Virginia Indians could be other than legally Black, given centuries of love and marriage across color lines. How indigenous peoples of Virginia resisted erasure and built their identities as Native Americans is the powerful story this book tells. Spanning a century of fraught history, Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia describes the critical strategic work that tidewater Virginia Indians, descendants of the seventeenth-century Algonquian Powhatan chiefdom, undertook to sustain their Native identity in the face of deep racial hostility from segregationist officials, politicians, and institutions. Like other Southeastern Native groups living under Jim Crow regimes, tidewater Native groups and individuals fortified their communities by founding tribal organizations, churches, and schools; they displayed their Indianness in public performances; and they enlisted whites, including well-known ethnographers, to help them argue for their Native distinctness. Describing an arduous campaign marked by ingenuity, conviction, and perseverance, Laura J. Feller shows how these tidewater Native people drew on their shared histories as descendants of Powhatan peoples, and how they strengthened their bonds through living and marrying within clusters of Native Virginians, both on and off reservation lands. She also finds that, by at times excluding African Americans from Indian organizations and Native families, Virginian Indians themselves reinforced racial segregation while they built their own communities. Even as it paved the way to tribal recognition in Virginia, the tidewater Natives’ sustained efforts chronicled in this book demonstrate the fluidity, instability, and persistent destructive power of the construction of race in America.
Author: Laura Janet Feller
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780806190655
Category : Powhatan Indians
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
"A Home in a Strange Land" -- Virginia's 1924 "Racial Integrity" Law -- Constructing Native Identities, 1865 to 1931 -- White Ethnographers and Salvage Ethnography -- The Aftermath of the "Racial Integrity" Law, 1930s to 1950s.
Author: Rodney Frey
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806125602
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
Profiles the Crow Indians and discusses how their society has been able to survive for more than a century because of their philosophies.
Author: Helen C. Rountree
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 080618986X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
Among the aspects of Powhatan life that Helen Rountree describes in vivid detail are hunting and agriculture, territorial claims, warfare and treatment of prisoners, physical appearance and dress, construction of houses and towns, education of youths, initiation rites, family and social structure and customs, the nature of rulers, medicine, religion, and even village games, music, and dance. Rountree’s is the first book-length treatment of this fascinating culture, which included one of the most complex political organizations in native North American and which figured prominently in early American history.
Author: Helen C. Rountree
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806128498
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420
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Book Description
In this history, Helen C. Roundtree traces events that shaped the lives of the Powhatan Indians of Virginia, from their first encounter with English colonists, in 1607, to their present-day way of life and relationship to the state of Virginia and the federal government. Roundtree’s examination of those four hundred years misses not a beat in the pulse of Powhatan life. Combining meticulous scholarship and sensitivity, the author explores the diversity always found among Powhatan people, and those people’s relationships with the English, the government of the fledgling United States, the Union and the Confederacy, the U.S. Census Bureau, white supremacists, the U.S. Selective Service, and the civil rights movement.
Author: Arica L. Coleman
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253010500
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
That the Blood Stay Pure traces the history and legacy of the commonwealth of Virginia's effort to maintain racial purity and its impact on the relations between African Americans and Native Americans. Arica L. Coleman tells the story of Virginia's racial purity campaign from the perspective of those who were disavowed or expelled from tribal communities due to their affiliation with people of African descent or because their physical attributes linked them to those of African ancestry. Coleman also explores the social consequences of the racial purity ethos for tribal communities that have refused to define Indian identity based on a denial of blackness. This rich interdisciplinary history, which includes contemporary case studies, addresses a neglected aspect of America's long struggle with race and identity.
Author: Laughlin McDonald
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806186003
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
The struggle for voting rights was not limited to African Americans in the South. American Indians also faced discrimination at the polls and still do today. This book explores their fight for equal voting rights and carefully documents how non-Indian officials have tried to maintain dominance over Native peoples despite the rights they are guaranteed as American citizens. Laughlin McDonald has participated in numerous lawsuits brought on behalf of Native Americans in Montana, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming. This litigation challenged discriminatory election practices such as at-large elections, redistricting plans crafted to dilute voting strength, unfounded allegations of election fraud on reservations, burdensome identification and registration requirements, lack of language assistance, and noncompliance with the Voting Rights Act. McDonald devotes special attention to the VRA and its amendments, whose protections are central to realizing the goal of equal political participation. McDonald describes past and present-day discrimination against Indians, including land seizures, destruction of bison herds, attempts to eradicate Native language and culture, and efforts to remove and in some cases even exterminate tribes. Because of such treatment, he argues, Indians suffer a severely depressed socioeconomic status, voting is sharply polarized along racial lines, and tribes are isolated and lack meaningful interaction with non-Indians in communities bordering reservations. Far more than a record of litigation, American Indians and the Fight for Equal Voting Rights paints a broad picture of Indian political participation by incorporating expert reports, legislative histories, newspaper accounts, government archives, and hundreds of interviews with tribal members. This in-depth study of Indian voting rights recounts the extraordinary progress American Indians have made and looks toward a more just future.
Author: Jon Allan Reyhner
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806126746
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
Teaching American Indian Students is the most comprehensive resource book available for educators of American Indians. The promise of this book is that Indian students can improve their academic performance through educational approaches that do not force students to choose between the culture of their home and the culture of their school. This multidisciplinary volume summarizes the latest research on Indian education, provides practical suggestions for teachers, and offers a vast selection of resources available to teachers of Indian students. Included are chapters on bilingual and multicultural education; the history of U.S. Indian education; teacher-parent relationships; language and literacy development, with particular discussion of English as a second language and American Indian literature; and teaching in the content areas of social science, science, mathematics, and physical education.
Author: Francis Paul Prucha
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806146427
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 683
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Book Description
In this book a distinguished authority in the field presents an account of United States Indian policy in the years 1865 to 1900, one of the most critical periods in Indian-white relations. Francis Paul Prucha discusses in detail the major developments of those years—Grant's Peace Policy, the reservation system, the agitation for transfer of Indian affairs to military control, the General Allotment Act (the Dawes Act), Indian citizenship, Indian education, Civil Service reform of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the dissolution of the Indian nations of the Indian Territory. American Indian Policy in Crisis focuses on the Christian humanitarians and philanthropists who were the ultimate driving force in the "reform" of Indian affairs. The programs of these men and women to individualize and Americanize the Indians and turn them into patriotic American citizens indistinguishable from their white neighbors are examined at length. The story is not a pretty one, for reformers' changes were often disastrous for the Indians, and yet it is a tremendously important work for understanding the Indians’ situation and their place in American society today. Prucha does not treat Indian policy in isolation but relates it to the dominant cultural and intellectual currents of the age. This book furnishes a view of the evangelical Christian influence on American policy and the reforming spirit it engendered, both of which have a significance extending beyond Indian policy alone. Thorough documentation and an excellent bibliography enhance its value.
Author: David Eugene Wilkins
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806133959
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
In the early 1970s, the federal government began recognizing self-determination for American Indian nations. As sovereign entities, Indian nations have been able to establish policies concerning health care, education, religious freedom, law enforcement, gaming, and taxation. David E. Wilkins and K. Tsianina Lomawaima discuss how the political rights and sovereign status of Indian nations have variously been respected, ignored, terminated, and unilaterally modified by federal lawmakers as a result of the ambivalent political and legal status of tribes under western law.
