Severing the Ties that Bind

Severing the Ties that Bind PDF Author: Katherine Pettipas
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN: 0887550312
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
Religious ceremonies were an inseparable part of Aboriginal traditional life, reinforcing social, economic, and political values. However, missionaries and government officials with ethnocentric attitudes of cultural superiority decreed that Native dances and ceremonies were immoral or un-Christian and an impediment to the integration of the Native population into Canadian society. Beginning in 1885, the Department of Indian Affairs implemented a series of amendments to the Canadian Indian Act, designed to eliminate traditional forms of religious expression and customs, such as the Sun Dance, the Midewiwin, the Sweat Lodge, and giveaway ceremonies.However, the amendments were only partially effective. Aboriginal resistance to the laws took many forms; community leaders challenged the legitimacy of the terms and the manner in which the regulations were implemented, and they altered their ceremonies, the times and locations, the practices, in an attempt both to avoid detection and to placate the agents who enforced the law.Katherine Pettipas views the amendments as part of official support for the destruction of indigenous cultural systems. She presents a critical analysis of the administrative policies and considers the effects of government suppression of traditional religious activities on the whole spectrum of Aboriginal life, focussing on the experiences of the Plains Cree from the mid-1880s to 1951, when the regulations pertaining to religious practices were removed from the Act. She shows how the destructive effects of the legislation are still felt in Aboriginal communities today, and offers insight into current issues of Aboriginal spirituality, including access to and use of religious objects held in museum repositories, protection of sacred lands and sites, and the right to indigenous religious practices in prison.

Severing the Ties that Bind

Severing the Ties that Bind PDF Author: Katherine Pettipas
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN: 0887550312
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
Religious ceremonies were an inseparable part of Aboriginal traditional life, reinforcing social, economic, and political values. However, missionaries and government officials with ethnocentric attitudes of cultural superiority decreed that Native dances and ceremonies were immoral or un-Christian and an impediment to the integration of the Native population into Canadian society. Beginning in 1885, the Department of Indian Affairs implemented a series of amendments to the Canadian Indian Act, designed to eliminate traditional forms of religious expression and customs, such as the Sun Dance, the Midewiwin, the Sweat Lodge, and giveaway ceremonies.However, the amendments were only partially effective. Aboriginal resistance to the laws took many forms; community leaders challenged the legitimacy of the terms and the manner in which the regulations were implemented, and they altered their ceremonies, the times and locations, the practices, in an attempt both to avoid detection and to placate the agents who enforced the law.Katherine Pettipas views the amendments as part of official support for the destruction of indigenous cultural systems. She presents a critical analysis of the administrative policies and considers the effects of government suppression of traditional religious activities on the whole spectrum of Aboriginal life, focussing on the experiences of the Plains Cree from the mid-1880s to 1951, when the regulations pertaining to religious practices were removed from the Act. She shows how the destructive effects of the legislation are still felt in Aboriginal communities today, and offers insight into current issues of Aboriginal spirituality, including access to and use of religious objects held in museum repositories, protection of sacred lands and sites, and the right to indigenous religious practices in prison.

Severing the Ties that Bind : Government Repression of Indigenous Religious Ceremonies on the Prairies

Severing the Ties that Bind : Government Repression of Indigenous Religious Ceremonies on the Prairies PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Religious ceremonies were an inseparable part of Aboriginal traditional life, reinforcing social, economic, and political values. However, missionaries and government officials with ethnocentric attitudes of cultural superiority decreed that Native dances and ceremonies were immoral or un-Christian and an impediment to the integration of the Native population into Canadian society. Beginning in 1885, the Department of Indian Affairs implemented a series of amendments to the Canadian Indian Act, designed to eliminate traditional forms of religious expression and customs, such as the Sun Dance, the Midewiwin, the Sweat Lodge, and giveaway ceremonies. However, the amendments were only partially effective. Aboriginal resistance to the laws took many forms; community leaders challenged the legitimacy of the terms and the manner in which the regulations were implemented, and they altered their ceremonies, the times and locations, the practices, in an attempt both to avoid detection and to placate the agents who enforced the law. Katherine Pettipas views the amendments as part of official support for the destruction of indigenous cultural systems. She presents a critical analysis of the administrative policies and considers the effects of government suppression of traditional religious activities on the whole spectrum of Aboriginal life, focussing on the experiences of the Plains Cree from the mid-1880s to 1951, when the regulations pertaining to religious practices were removed from the Act. She shows how the destructive effects of the legislation are still felt in Aboriginal communities today, and offers insight into current issues of Aboriginal spirituality, including access to and use of religious objects held in museum repositories, protection of sacred lands and sites, and the right to indigenous religious practices in prison.

Severing the Ties that Bind

Severing the Ties that Bind PDF Author: Katherine Pettipas
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN: 0887553648
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Religious ceremonies were an inseparable part of Aboriginal traditional life, reinforcing social, economic, and political values. However, missionaries and government officials with ethnocentric attitudes of cultural superiority decreed that Native dances and ceremonies were immoral or un-Christian and an impediment to the integration of the Native population into Canadian society. Beginning in 1885, the Department of Indian Affairs implemented a series of amendments to the Canadian Indian Act, designed to eliminate traditional forms of religious expression and customs, such as the Sun Dance, the Midewiwin, the Sweat Lodge, and giveaway ceremonies.However, the amendments were only partially effective. Aboriginal resistance to the laws took many forms; community leaders challenged the legitimacy of the terms and the manner in which the regulations were implemented, and they altered their ceremonies, the times and locations, the practices, in an attempt both to avoid detection and to placate the agents who enforced the law.Katherine Pettipas views the amendments as part of official support for the destruction of indigenous cultural systems. She presents a critical analysis of the administrative policies and considers the effects of government suppression of traditional religious activities on the whole spectrum of Aboriginal life, focussing on the experiences of the Plains Cree from the mid-1880s to 1951, when the regulations pertaining to religious practices were removed from the Act. She shows how the destructive effects of the legislation are still felt in Aboriginal communities today, and offers insight into current issues of Aboriginal spirituality, including access to and use of religious objects held in museum repositories, protection of sacred lands and sites, and the right to indigenous religious practices in prison.

Severing the Ties that Bind

Severing the Ties that Bind PDF Author: Katherine Pettipas
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Severing the Ties that Bind

Severing the Ties that Bind PDF Author: Katherine Pettipas
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Indians of North America
Languages : en
Pages : 1048

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Book Description
This thesis is a study of the conceptualization and implementation of an aspect of Canadian Indian policy which can best be described as the repression of indigenous religious systems anong Indians residing in the prairie region. Subsequent to the Potlach Law of 1885, a number of amendments to the Canadian Indian Act were passed to discourage the persistence of specific ceremonial activities. Both missionaries and administrators contended that such practices were not only immoral from the perspective of Victorian Euro-Canadians, but were also serious obstructions to the assimilative objectives of federal Indian policy. It is postulated in this study that these repressive measures were not simply indicators of Euro-Canadian intolerance of non-Christian religions, but rather, were implemented because of the correctly perceived relationship between religious ideology and ceremonial life with indigenous social, political, and economic values and structures. The destruction of these values and concommitant behaviour was viewed as a prerequisite for the integration of collective Native kin-based modes of production into the competitive and individualistic white-dominated capitalist mode. While this study is an administrative history of the repression of indigenous religious practices, it is equally an analysis of Indian responses to the attempts by the Department of Indian Affairs to undermine this important aspect of their culture. Through the use of an ethnohistorical approach on the more general issue of religious persistence and change, some of the major forms of Indian resistance have been identified and examined. In addition to challenging the legitimacy of the terms of the Indian Act and the manner in which anti-ceremonial regulations were implemented, prairie Indians also accommodated to these measures by altering their ceremonial life in terms of space, time, content, and participation. The historical experienCe of one major group - the Plains Cree, has been presented as a case study to explore religious persistence and change as means of accommodation and resistance to colonial administrations. To what degree these reactions in turn influenced the development of Canadian Indian policy with respect to religious repression from the period 1895 to the post World War One period forms a major part of this dissertation. In the conclusions of this study it is argued that paradoxically, it was the very system which had been developed to systematically destroy the political economies of prairie Indians that insured at least some degree of indigenous ideological persistence reformulation and perpetuation of a belief in the ideology of socio-economic collectivism (and its associated ceremonial practices) were forms of resistance to imposed assimilation programs as well as realistic accommodations to the exigencies of survival in economically marginal underdeveloped reserve communities.

Laws and Societies in the Canadian Prairie West, 1670-1940

Laws and Societies in the Canadian Prairie West, 1670-1940 PDF Author: Louis A. Knafla
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774841451
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Challenging myths about a peaceful west and prairie exceptionalism, the book explores the substance of prairie legal history and the degree to which the region's mentality is rooted in the historical experience of distinctive prairie peoples. The ways in which prairie peoples perceived themselves and their relationships to a wider world were directly framed by notions of law and legal remedy shaped by the course and themes of prairie history. Legal history is not just about black letter law. It is also deeply concerned with the ways in which people affect and are affected by the law in their daily lives. By examining how central and important the law has been to individuals, communities, and societies in the Canadian Prairies, this book makes an original contribution.

Relation and Resistance

Relation and Resistance PDF Author: Sailaja Krishnamurti
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 022800974X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
In Canada, women’s bodies are often at the centre of debates about religious pluralism, multiculturalism, and secularism. Women have long played a critical role in building and maintaining diasporic religious communities and networks, and they have also been catalysts for change and transformation within religious groups and the wider community. Relation and Resistance explores the stories and lives of racialized women connected with religious diaspora communities in Canada. Contributors from across disciplines show how women are conceptualizing traditions in transformative ways, challenging prevailing assumptions about diasporic religion as nostalgically entrenched in the past. The collected essays include chapters on feminist and queer women thinking critically about Hindu and Muslim identities and beliefs and challenging anti-Black racism and settler colonialism; Afro-Caribbean and Métis writers using literature to explore religion and belonging; the impact of women’s participation in Japanese, Chinese, and Pakistani transnational religious organizations; and marriage, migration, and gender equality in the Punjabi Sikh and Malayali Christian communities. The volume closes with a chapter exploring Métis diasporic experience and inviting readers to think critically about diasporic religion on Indigenous land. An innovative and timely volume, Relation and Resistance reveals that a deeper understanding of women’s experiences of displacement, migration, race, and gender is critical to the study of religion in Canada.

Life Stages and Native Women

Life Stages and Native Women PDF Author: Kim Anderson
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN: 0887554164
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
A rare and inspiring guide to the health and well-being of Aboriginal women and their communities. The process of “digging up medicines” - of rediscovering the stories of the past - serves as a powerful healing force in the decolonization and recovery of Aboriginal communities. In Life Stages and Native Women, Kim Anderson shares the teachings of fourteen elders from the Canadian prairies and Ontario to illustrate how different life stages were experienced by Metis, Cree, and Anishinaabe girls and women during the mid-twentieth century. These elders relate stories about their own lives, the experiences of girls and women of their childhood communities, and customs related to pregnancy, birth, post-natal care, infant and child care, puberty rites, gender and age-specific work roles, the distinct roles of post-menopausal women, and women’s roles in managing death. Through these teachings, we learn how evolving responsibilities from infancy to adulthood shaped women’s identities and place within Indigenous society, and were integral to the health and well-being of their communities. By understanding how healthy communities were created in the past, Anderson explains how this traditional knowledge can be applied toward rebuilding healthy Indigenous communities today.

The SAGE Handbook of Identities

The SAGE Handbook of Identities PDF Author: Margaret Wetherell
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1412934117
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
Increasingly, identities are the site for interdisciplinary initiatives and identity research is at the heart of many transdisciplinary research centres around the world. No single social science discipline 'owns' identity research which makes it a difficult topic to categorize. The SAGE Handbook of Identities systematizes this complex field by incorporating its interdisciplinary character to provide a comprehensive overview of its themes in contemporary research while still acknowledging the historical and philosophical significance of the concept of identity. Drawing on a global scholarship the Handbook has four parts: Part 1: Frameworks presents the main theoretical and methodological perspectives in identities research. Part 2: Formations covers the major formative forces for identities such as culture, globalisation, migratory patterns, biology and so on. Part 3: Categories reviews research on the core social categories which are central to identity such as ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability and social class and intersections between these. Part 4: Sites and Context develops a series of case studies of crucial sites and contexts where identity is at stake such as social movements, relationships and family life, work-places and environments and citizenship.

The Red Man's on the Warpath

The Red Man's on the Warpath PDF Author: R. Scott Sheffield
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774845201
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
“The red man’s on the warpath! The time has come for him to dig up the hatchet and join his paleface brother in his fight to make the world safe for the sacred cause of freedom and democracy.” -- Winnipeg Free Press, May 1941 During the Second World War, thousands of First Nations people joined in the national crusade to defend freedom and democracy. High rates of Native enlistment and public demonstrations of patriotism encouraged Canadians to re-examine the roles and status of Native people in Canadian society. The Red Man’s on the Warpath explores how wartime symbolism and imagery propelled the “Indian problem” onto the national agenda, and why assimilation remained the goal of post-war Canadian Indian policy – even though the war required that it be rationalized in new ways. The word “Indian” conjured up a complex framework of visual imagery, stereotypes, and assumptions that enabled English Canadians to explain the place of First Nations people in the national story. Sheffield examines how First Nations people were discussed in both the administrative and public realms. Drawing upon an impressive array of archival records, newspapers, and popular magazines, he tracks continuities and changes in the image of the “Indian” before, during, and immediately after the Second World War. Informed by current academic debates and theoretical perspectives, this book will interest scholars in the fields of Native-Newcomer and race relations, war and society, communications studies, and post-Confederation Canadian history. Sheffield’s lively style makes it accessible to a broader readership.