Reclaiming the Ancestors

Reclaiming the Ancestors PDF Author: Frederick Matthew Wiseman
Publisher: Hanover, NH : University Press of New England
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Reclaiming the Ancestors sets the record straight about the early history of the Wabanaki - the Abenaki, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Malecite, and Mi'kmaq. Wiseman proposes a sovereigntist approach to understanding the current archaeological understanding of Abenaki prehistory. He begins with an overview of the conflicting views of First Nations and archaeologists regarding Indigenous history and how he developed his research design model. Over the next 10 chapters the book explores and discusses the periods of Wabanaki prehistory. The final chapter takes the history to the beginning of the early contact period. The author makes he point that documentation of Wabanaki territory is of vital importance in today’s political climate of Vermont. The Wabanaki face major obstacles as politicians utilize archaeological evidence against the Wabanaki’s push for self-governance and recognition. The book contains limited black and white photographs of artifacts because the author made a conscious choice to respect items that were from grave sites. A fascinating history that dispels many previously-held academic viewpoints of the Wabanaki First Nations.

Reclaiming the Ancestors

Reclaiming the Ancestors PDF Author: Frederick Matthew Wiseman
Publisher: Hanover, NH : University Press of New England
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reclaiming the Ancestors sets the record straight about the early history of the Wabanaki - the Abenaki, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Malecite, and Mi'kmaq. Wiseman proposes a sovereigntist approach to understanding the current archaeological understanding of Abenaki prehistory. He begins with an overview of the conflicting views of First Nations and archaeologists regarding Indigenous history and how he developed his research design model. Over the next 10 chapters the book explores and discusses the periods of Wabanaki prehistory. The final chapter takes the history to the beginning of the early contact period. The author makes he point that documentation of Wabanaki territory is of vital importance in today’s political climate of Vermont. The Wabanaki face major obstacles as politicians utilize archaeological evidence against the Wabanaki’s push for self-governance and recognition. The book contains limited black and white photographs of artifacts because the author made a conscious choice to respect items that were from grave sites. A fascinating history that dispels many previously-held academic viewpoints of the Wabanaki First Nations.

Voices from the Ancestors

Voices from the Ancestors PDF Author: Lara Medina
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816539561
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
Voices from the Ancestors brings together the reflective writings and spiritual practices of Xicanx, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx womxn and male allies in the United States who seek to heal from the historical traumas of colonization by returning to ancestral traditions and knowledge. This wisdom is based on the authors’ oral traditions, research, intuitions, and lived experiences—wisdom inspired by, and created from, personal trajectories on the path to spiritual conocimiento, or inner spiritual inquiry. This conocimiento has reemerged over the last fifty years as efforts to decolonize lives, minds, spirits, and bodies have advanced. Yet this knowledge goes back many generations to the time when the ancestors understood their interconnectedness with each other, with nature, and with the sacred cosmic forces—a time when the human body was a microcosm of the universe. Reclaiming and reconstructing spirituality based on non-Western epistemologies is central to the process of decolonization, particularly in these fraught times. The wisdom offered here appears in a variety of forms—in reflective essays, poetry, prayers, specific guidelines for healing practices, communal rituals, and visual art, all meant to address life transitions and how to live holistically and with a spiritual consciousness for the challenges of the twenty-first century.

The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere

The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere PDF Author: Paulette F. C. Steeves
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496225368
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Title The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere is a reclaimed history of the deep past of Indigenous people in North and South America during the Paleolithic. Paulette F. C. Steeves mines evidence from archaeology sites and Paleolithic environments, landscapes, and mammalian and human migrations to make the case that people have been in the Western Hemisphere not only just prior to Clovis sites (10,200 years ago) but for more than 60,000 years, and likely more than 100,000 years. Steeves discusses the political history of American anthropology to focus on why pre-Clovis sites have been dismissed by the field for nearly a century. She explores supporting evidence from genetics and linguistic anthropology regarding First Peoples and time frames of early migrations. Additionally, she highlights the work and struggles faced by a small yet vibrant group of American and European archaeologists who have excavated and reported on numerous pre-Clovis archaeology sites. In this first book on Paleolithic archaeology of the Americas written from an Indigenous perspective, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere includes Indigenous oral traditions, archaeological evidence, and a critical and decolonizing discussion of the development of archaeology in the Americas.

Ancestors Said

Ancestors Said PDF Author: Ehime Ora
Publisher: Ehime Ora
ISBN:
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Ancestors Said is a 365-page debut prose collection by Ehime Ora, a Nigerian writer, artist, and priestess of the Ifa and Orisa tradition. Ora's debut book holds gentle words of prayer and affirmation to intuitively provide you with peace, joy, and healing all year long. The author intends for the book to be read day-by-day as meditative guides or utilized as journal prompts.

Ancestor Trouble

Ancestor Trouble PDF Author: Maud Newton
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812997921
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
“Extraordinary and wide-ranging . . . a literary feat that simultaneously builds and excavates identity.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club Pick • An acclaimed writer goes searching for the truth about her wildly unconventional Southern family—and finds that our obsession with ancestors opens up new ways of seeing ourselves—in this “brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation” (The Boston Globe). ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR Maud Newton’s ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother’s father, who came of age in Texas during the Great Depression, was said to have married thirteen times and been shot by one of his wives. Her mother’s grandfather killed a man with a hay hook and died in an institution. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated through Maud’s maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Maud’s father, an aerospace engineer turned lawyer, was an educated man who extolled the virtues of slavery and obsessed over the “purity” of his family bloodline, which he traced back to the Revolutionary War. He tried in vain to control Maud’s mother, a whirlwind of charisma and passion given to feverish projects: thirty rescue cats, and a church in the family’s living room where she performed exorcisms. Her parents’ divorce, when it came, was a relief. Still, her position at the intersection of her family bloodlines inspired in Newton inspired an anxiety that she could not shake, a fear that she would replicate their damage. She saw similar anxieties in the lives of friends, in the works of writers and artists she admired. As obsessive in her own way as her parents, Newton researched her genealogy—her grandfather’s marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors’ roles in slavery and genocide—and sought family secrets through her DNA. But immersed in census archives and cousin matches, she yearned for deeper truths. Her journey took her into the realms of genetics, epigenetics, and the debates over intergenerational trauma. She mulled over modernity’s dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them. Searching, moving, and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy—a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry—to expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us.

Reclaiming Diné History

Reclaiming Diné History PDF Author: Jennifer Nez Denetdale
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816532710
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking book, the first Navajo to earn a doctorate in history seeks to rewrite Navajo history. Reared on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico and Arizona, Jennifer Nez Denetdale is the great-great-great-granddaughter of a well-known Navajo chief, Manuelito (1816–1894), and his nearly unknown wife, Juanita (1845–1910). Stimulated in part by seeing photographs of these ancestors, she began to explore her family history as a way of examining broader issues in Navajo historiography. Here she presents a thought-provoking examination of the construction of the history of the Navajo people (Diné, in the Navajo language) that underlines the dichotomy between Navajo and non-Navajo perspectives on the Diné past. Reclaiming Diné History has two primary objectives. First, Denetdale interrogates histories that privilege Manuelito and marginalize Juanita in order to demonstrate some of the ways that writing about the Diné has been biased by non-Navajo views of assimilation and gender. Second, she reveals how Navajo narratives, including oral histories and stories kept by matrilineal clans, serve as vehicles to convey Navajo beliefs and values. By scrutinizing stories about Juanita, she both underscores the centrality of women’s roles in Navajo society and illustrates how oral tradition has been used to organize social units, connect Navajos to the land, and interpret the past. She argues that these same stories, read with an awareness of Navajo creation narratives, reveal previously unrecognized Navajo perspectives on the past. And she contends that a similarly culture-sensitive re-viewing of the Diné can lead to the production of a Navajo-centered history.

Your Legacy

Your Legacy PDF Author: Schele Williams
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1647000726
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 50

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Book Description
Your Legacy is a proud, empowering picture book introduction to African American history that celebrates and honors enslaved ancestors from author Schele Williams and illustrator Tonya Engel. Your story begins in Africa. Your African ancestors defied the odds and survived 400 years of slavery in America and passed down an extraordinary legacy to you. Beginning in Africa before 1619, Your Legacy presents an unprecedentedly accessible, empowering, and proud introduction to African American history for children. While your ancestors’ freedom was taken from them, their spirit was not; this book celebrates their accomplishments, acknowledges their sacrifices, and defines how they are remembered—and how their stories should be taught. “We are grateful to Schele and her dedication to making our beautiful history accessible to our children! Your Legacy is an educational and celebratory piece we’ve enjoyed sharing with our family. We are extremely excited for this story to be shared with other families as we continue to celebrate our rich history in this world.” —New York Times bestselling authors Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union Wade

Becoming Kin

Becoming Kin PDF Author: Patty Krawec
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
ISBN: 1506478263
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
We find our way forward by going back. The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home." Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to "unforget" our history. This remarkable sojourn through Native and settler history, myth, identity, and spirituality helps us retrace our steps and pick up what was lost along the way: chances to honor rather than violate treaties, to see the land as a relative rather than a resource, and to unravel the history we have been taught.

Then She Sang a Willow Song

Then She Sang a Willow Song PDF Author: Gemma Benton
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781530375851
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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Book Description
Like most good books, this book starts with a story. But it is not only a story. It is a healing.It is an affirmation and reclaiming of life. This book is centered around my story of not belonging and never feeling as though I was good enough and finding hope, power and meaning in the healing traditions of my Native American and indigenous ancestors. Woven between story segments are "healing moments" with powerful quotes and personal insights that will gently lead you through a soul-stirring inquiry into reclaiming your life and your power. What Readers Are Saying: Extraordinary! This book is a treasure for women seeking to know their worth and power.Gemma graciously helps you re-weave and recover your sense of self from the inside out. Her writing is part personal memoir about learning her Native American traditions and part self-help for women. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it. Joy Balma, Bestselling Women's Empowerment Author, www.joybalma.com A gifted storyteller with incredible healing stories that will move you and stir up your inner power to heal yourself. The bonus to this book were the "healing moments" that folded you in so you can integrate the wisdom from her stories and have the tools to start your own personal healing. This is truly a beautiful book and gift to all readers! Renee Li, author of "Peace of the Heart: Releasing Emotional Blocks and Living a Life You Love" Then She Sang A Willow Song is an inspirational book by Gemma Benton, detailing the connection between Indigenous peoples, their land and their ancestors. The Tree of Life is a powerful symbol, as it stands for the connection of the Elements as well as the connection to those who came before us. When we feel so low and lost that we want to choose Death over Life, we need to think of the struggles of our ancestors who, at the time, were not just fighting for themselves but were also fighting for us - future generations - so that we may thrive. Indigenous people celebrate with Nature. Fire, Air, Water, Earth and the Spirits give us life and we celebrate through dance and song within our tribes. As a proud Indigenous woman of Australia, I was able to fully relate to the words in this book and even shed a tear when the Willow baskets were treated with such disrespect. Then She Sang A Willow Song was aptly named for the ending of the book, when Gemma Benton felt sadness and mourning at the sight of the Willow baskets at the museum. Indigenous people belong to the Earth and our roles go back many thousands of years. The empowering words which were used throughout the book at regular intervals gave strength and encouragement for better days ahead, encouraging me to draw my strength and love from the ancestors who came before me, teaching me that each decision that I make in life is not only for my own benefit, but for the benefit of the future generations that are to come. I very much enjoyed reading this story from the viewpoint of an Indigenous American, and recommend Gemma Benton's beautifully written, insightful and educational book to all people who seek a better connection with Nature, and who wish to learn more about the world's Indigenous peoples and the reasons for our love of the land. Rosie Malezer, Author of Change Your Name and Disappear: A terrifying true tale of survival Reviewed for Readers Favorites

Ancestral Medicine

Ancestral Medicine PDF Author: Daniel Foor
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1591432707
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
A practical guide to connecting with your ancestors for personal, family, and cultural healing • Provides exercises and rituals to help you initiate contact with your ancestors, find ancestral guides, and assist the dead who are not yet at peace • Explains how to safely engage in lineage repair work by connecting with your more ancient ancestors before relating with the recently deceased • Explores how your ancestors can help you transform intergenerational legacies of pain and abuse and reclaim the positive spirit of the family Everyone has loving and wise ancestors they can learn to invoke for support and healing. Coming into relationship with your ancestors empowers you to transform negative family patterns into blessings and encourages good health, self-esteem, clarity of purpose, and better relationships with your living relatives. Offering a practical guide to understanding and navigating relationships with the spirits of those who have passed, Daniel Foor, Ph.D., details how to relate safely and effectively with your ancestors for personal, family, and cultural healing. He provides exercises and rituals, grounded in ancient wisdom traditions, to help you initiate contact with your ancestors, find supportive ancestral guides, cultivate forgiveness and gratitude, harmonize your bloodlines, and assist the dead who are not yet at peace. He explains how to safely engage in lineage repair work by connecting with your more ancient ancestors before relating with the recently deceased. He shows how, by working with spiritually vibrant ancestors, individuals and families can understand and transform intergenerational patterns of pain and abuse and reclaim the full blessings and gifts of their bloodlines. Ancestral repair work can also catalyze healing breakthroughs among living family members and help children and future generations to live free from ancestral burdens. The author provides detailed instructions for ways to honor the ancestors of a place, address dream visits from the dead, and work with ancestor shrines and altars. The author offers guidance on preparing for death, funeral rites, handling the body after death, and joining the ancestors. He also explains how ancestor work can help us to transform problems such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and religious persecution. By learning the fundamentals of ancestor reverence and ritual, you will discover how to draw on the wisdom of supportive ancestral guides, heal family troubles, maintain connections with beloved family after their death, and better understand the complex and interconnected relationship between the living and the dead.