Native Voices

Native Voices PDF Author: Richard A. Grounds
Publisher: Lawrence : University Press of Kansas
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Native peoples of North America still face an uncertain future due to their unstable political, legal, and economic positions. Views of their predicament continue to be dominated by non-Indian writers. In response, a dozen Native American writers here reclaim their rightful role as influential "voices" in debates about Native communities. These scholars examine crucial issues of politics, law, and religion in the context of ongoing Native American resistance to the dominant culture. They particularly show how the writings of Vine Deloria, Jr., have shaped and challenged American Indian scholarship in these areas since 1960s. They provide key insights into Deloria's thought, while introducing some critical issues confronting Native nations. Collectively, these essays take up four important themes: indigenous societies as the embodiment of cultures of resistance, legal resistance to western oppression against indigenous nations, contemporary Native religious practices, and Native intellectual challenges to academia. Essays address indigenous perspectives on topics usually treated by non-Indians, such as role of women in Indian society, the importance of sacred sites to American Indian religious identity, and relationship of native language to indigenous autonomy. A closing essay by Deloria, in vintage form, reminds Native Americans of their responsibilities and obligations to one another and to past and future generations. This book argues for renewed cultivation of a Native American Studies that is more Indian-centered.

Native Voices

Native Voices PDF Author: Richard A. Grounds
Publisher: Lawrence : University Press of Kansas
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book Here

Book Description
Native peoples of North America still face an uncertain future due to their unstable political, legal, and economic positions. Views of their predicament continue to be dominated by non-Indian writers. In response, a dozen Native American writers here reclaim their rightful role as influential "voices" in debates about Native communities. These scholars examine crucial issues of politics, law, and religion in the context of ongoing Native American resistance to the dominant culture. They particularly show how the writings of Vine Deloria, Jr., have shaped and challenged American Indian scholarship in these areas since 1960s. They provide key insights into Deloria's thought, while introducing some critical issues confronting Native nations. Collectively, these essays take up four important themes: indigenous societies as the embodiment of cultures of resistance, legal resistance to western oppression against indigenous nations, contemporary Native religious practices, and Native intellectual challenges to academia. Essays address indigenous perspectives on topics usually treated by non-Indians, such as role of women in Indian society, the importance of sacred sites to American Indian religious identity, and relationship of native language to indigenous autonomy. A closing essay by Deloria, in vintage form, reminds Native Americans of their responsibilities and obligations to one another and to past and future generations. This book argues for renewed cultivation of a Native American Studies that is more Indian-centered.

Urban American Indians

Urban American Indians PDF Author: Donna Martinez
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
An outstanding resource for contemporary American Indians as well as students and scholars interested in community and ethnicity, this book dispels the myth that all American Indians live on reservations and are plagued with problems, and serves to illustrate a unique, dynamic model of community formation. City-dwelling American Indians are part of both the ongoing ethnic history of American cities in the 20th and 21st centuries and the ancient history of American Indians. Today, more than three-quarters of American Indians live in cities, having migrated to urban areas in the 1950s because of influences such as the Termination and Relocation policy of the federal government, which was designed to end the legal status of tribes, and because of the draw of employment, housing, and educational opportunities. This book documents how North America was home to many ancient urban Indian civilizations and progresses to describing contemporary urban American Indian communities, lifestyles, and organizations. The book concentrates on contemporary urban American Indian communities and the modern-day experiences of the individuals who live within them. The authors outline urban Indian identity, relationships, and communities, drawing connections between ancient urban Indian civilizations hundreds of years ago to the activism of contemporary urban Indians. As a result, readers will gain an in-depth understanding of both ancient and contemporary urban Indian communities; comprehend the differences, similarities, and overlap between reservation and urban American Indian communities; and gain insight into the key role of urban environments in creating ethnic community identities.

Reclaiming an American Indian Identity

Reclaiming an American Indian Identity PDF Author: Teresa Constance Lofton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Creek Indians
Languages : en
Pages : 1042

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Book Description


Beyond White Ethnicity

Beyond White Ethnicity PDF Author: Kathleen J. Fitzgerald
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739113936
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Through qualitative analysis of individuals, Kathleen J. Fitzgerald studies the social construction of racial and ethnic identity in Beyond White Ethnicity. Fitzgerald focuses on Native Americans, who despite a previously unacknowledged and uncelebrated background, are embracing and reclaiming their heritage in their everyday lives. Focusing on the purpose, process, and problems of this reclamation, Fitzgerald's research provides an understanding of these issues. She also exposes how institutional power relations are racialized and how race is a social and political construction, and she helps us understand larger cultural transformations. This insightful collection of research sparks the interest of those who study sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies.

Urban American Indians

Urban American Indians PDF Author: Donna Martinez
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 1440832072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
''This book focuses on contemporary urban American Indian communities and the modern-day experiences of the individuals who live within them. It covers urban Indian identity, relationships, and communities, drawing connections between ancient urban Indian civilizations hundreds of years ago to the activism of contemporary urban Indians as well as describing contemporary urban American Indian communities, lifestyles, and organizations.''--

Reclaiming Two-Spirits

Reclaiming Two-Spirits PDF Author: Gregory D. Smithers
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807003476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
A sweeping history of Indigenous traditions of gender, sexuality, and resistance that reveals how, despite centuries of colonialism, Two-Spirit people are reclaiming their place in Native nations. Reclaiming Two-Spirits decolonizes the history of gender and sexuality in Native North America. It honors the generations of Indigenous people who had the foresight to take essential aspects of their cultural life and spiritual beliefs underground in order to save them. Before 1492, hundreds of Indigenous communities across North America included people who identified as neither male nor female, but both. They went by aakíí’skassi, miati, okitcitakwe or one of hundreds of other tribally specific identities. After European colonizers invaded Indian Country, centuries of violence and systematic persecution followed, imperiling the existence of people who today call themselves Two-Spirits, an umbrella term denoting feminine and masculine qualities in one person. Drawing on written sources, archaeological evidence, art, and oral storytelling, Reclaiming Two-Spirits spans the centuries from Spanish invasion to the present, tracing massacres and inquisitions and revealing how the authors of colonialism’s written archives used language to both denigrate and erase Two-Spirit people from history. But as Gregory Smithers shows, the colonizers failed—and Indigenous resistance is core to this story. Reclaiming Two-Spirits amplifies their voices, reconnecting their history to Native nations in the 21st century.

Two-spirit People

Two-spirit People PDF Author: Sue-Ellen Jacobs
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252066450
Category : Gay men
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
This landmark book combines the voices of Native Americans and non-Indians, anthropologists and others, in an exploration of gender and sexuality issues as they relate to lesbian, gay, transgendered, and other "marked" Native Americans. Focusing on the concept of two-spirit people--individuals not necessarily gay or lesbian, transvestite or bisexual, but whose behaviors or beliefs may sometimes be interpreted by others as uncharacteristic of their sex--this book is the first to provide an intimate look at how many two-spirit people feel about themselves, how other Native Americans treat them, and how anthropologists and other scholars interpret them and their cultures. 1997 Winner of the Ruth Benedict Prize for an edited book given by the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists.

Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality

Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality PDF Author: Michelle R. Jacobs
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 147983338X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Contemporary accounts of urban Native identity in two pan-Indian communities In the last half century, changing racial and cultural dynamics in the United States have caused an explosion in the number of people claiming to be American Indian, from just over half a million in 1960 to over three million in 2013. Additionally, seven out of ten American Indians live in or near cities, rather than in tribal communities, and that number is growing. In Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality, Michelle Jacobs examines the new reality of the American Indian urban experience. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over two and a half years, Jacobs focuses on how some individuals are invested in reclaiming Indigenous identities whereas others are more invested in relocating their sense of self to the urban environment. These groups not only apply different meanings to indigeneity, but they also develop different strategies for asserting and maintaining Native identities in an urban space inundated with false memories and fake icons of “Indian-ness.” Jacobs shows that “Indianness” is a highly contested phenomenon among these two groups: some are accused of being "wannabes" who merely "play Indian," while others are accused of being exclusionary and "policing the boundaries of Indianness." Taken together, the interconnected stories of relocators and reclaimers expose the struggles of Indigenous and Indigenous-identified participants in urban pan-Indian communities. Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality offers a complicated portrait of who can rightfully claim and enact American Indian identities and what that tells us about how race is “made” today.

Becoming Indian

Becoming Indian PDF Author: Circe Sturm
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781934691441
Category : Cherokee Indians
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
... Racial shifter ... are people who have changed their racial self-identification from non-Indian to Indian on the U.S. census. Many racial shifters are people who, while looking for their roots, have recently discovered their Native American ancestry ...

Claiming Tribal Identity

Claiming Tribal Identity PDF Author: Mark Edwin Miller
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 080615053X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 620

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Book Description
Who counts as an American Indian? Which groups qualify as Indian tribes? These questions have become increasingly complex in the past several decades, and federal legislation and the rise of tribal-owned casinos have raised the stakes in the ongoing debate. In this revealing study, historian Mark Edwin Miller describes how and why dozens of previously unrecognized tribal groups in the southeastern states have sought, and sometimes won, recognition, often to the dismay of the Five Tribes—the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles. Miller explains how politics, economics, and such slippery issues as tribal and racial identity drive the conflicts between federally recognized tribal entities like the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and other groups such as the Southeastern Cherokee Confederacy that also seek sovereignty. Battles over which groups can claim authentic Indian identity are fought both within the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Federal Acknowledgment Process and in Atlanta, Montgomery, and other capitals where legislators grant state recognition to Indian-identifying enclaves without consulting federally recognized tribes with similar names. Miller’s analysis recognizes the arguments on all sides—both the scholars and activists who see tribal affiliation as an individual choice, and the tribal governments that view unrecognized tribes as fraudulent. Groups such as the Lumbees, the Lower Muscogee Creeks, and the Mowa Choctaws, inspired by the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty, have evolved in surprising ways, as have traditional tribal governments. Describing the significance of casino gambling, the leader of one unrecognized group said, “It’s no longer a matter of red; it’s a matter of green.” Either a positive or a negative development, depending on who is telling the story, the casinos’ economic impact has clouded what were previously issues purely of law, ethics, and justice. Drawing on both documents and personal interviews, Miller unravels the tangled politics of Indian identity and sovereignty. His lively, clearly argued book will be vital reading for tribal leaders, policy makers, and scholars.