North American Indigenous History and Culture Research Papers (original) (raw)

Indigenous ways of knowing for many Indigenous communities traditionally relied on experiential learning and oral tradition, unlike a Western-modeled school system (based on a curriculum); however, Indigenous groups post-contact have adapted traditional Indigenous ways of knowing to contemporary colonial pedagogies. Most recently, the use of comics have increased as a method to disseminate Indigenous knowledge, cultures, and stories to the body populous. Many Indigenous cultures used different medians to share their culture, spiritualty, and identities. Wintercounts, petroglyphs, and carvings are just a few of the ways. This paper explores the use of comics, using examples from MOONSHOT: The Indigenous Comics Collection Volumes 1 and 2 as an innovated Indigenous pedagogy, and its contribution in combating colonialism by reaching beyond communities to educate not only Indigenous people, but non-Indigenous people as well.

- by Tarisa D A W N Little
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- History, American History, Indigenous Studies, Canadian History

This article presents an overview of the Ojibwa family over the past three centuries, from early European contacts to the present. It emphasizes the extent to which Ojibwa familial relations have long been embedded in extensive networks of kin that played major roles in the family lives of individuals of all ages. The article traces the effects of historical change on the Ojibwa family and examines continuity within Ojibwa kinship relations. The changes of the last century have taken a heavy toll on these relationships, yet, where they persist or are being revived, they are sources of strength and renewal.

Native people were discerning in establishing, revisiting, and occupying familiar places in their homelands. For thousands of years, Den Rock was a focus within the broader indigenous social and geographic landscape. The Den Rock area adjoins the Shawsheen River, in the lower Merrimack River drainage, a region that has been historically and contemporarily occupied by Native peoples. The mutually profound effects of Colonial encounters and settlement, and Native negotiations for continuance and survivance are evident in the historical and contemporary cultural geography of the area. Native placemaking at Den Rock was discerned from gathering and interpreting scattered, fragmentary data in publications, archives and curated artifact collections. Documentary and material evidence of Native people in the Den Rock area has been chiefly recorded, collected, preserved, transformed, and transmitted by descendents and compatriots of colonist-settlers, but seemingly recently forgotten beyond a small cadre of local historical and archaeological specialists. As recently as the early to mid-20th century, local stories and formal histories remembered (but mischaracterized) Native tenancy and practices at Den Rock, even remembering the physical evidence of established Native occupation represented in Native-made artifacts found there. Historical memories of long ago, of long-occupied Native places are revived by focused re-attention, supplemented and recast by current regional archaeologies and ethnographies to reestablish factual understandings of Native placemaking at Den Rock. Renewing social memory about the Den Rock area in the 21st century is intended to enhance conscious understanding and to foster appreciation for protection and preservation of the significant historic and archaeological qualities of the conservation land.

This is a biographical sketch of the Odaawaa Chief Mookomaanish (aka Little Knife aka Mokomaunish aka Pebamitapi). Mookomaanish fought alongside the British during the War of 1812, was a chief of L'Arbre Croche, in upper state Michigan, specifically the village of the Cross (aka Cross Village), and later a chief in Wikwemikong on Manitoulin Island. He signed treaties on the American and Canadian side after the war. This paper traces his policies, diplomatic interactions and speeches.

In this thesis I contrast historical and contemporary forms of hunting and gathering among Lakota people currently living in village-communities on reservations in the states of North and South Dakota (USA). In particular, the focus and main locus of analysis is laid on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, while examples from other Lakota reservations as well as Plains Cree reserves in Alberta, Canada, are only brought up as a means for making transnational or cross-tribal/cultural comparisons among Plains peoples yet regionally limited to the Northern Great Plains.
I show that although social organization, economic relevance of hunting and type of animals predominantly hunted by the Lakota have changed throughout history in processes of adaption responding to larger infrastructural shifts, specific aspects of a worldview related to hunting, which was strongly shaped by the nomadic way of life of these peoples on the Northern Plains during the 19th century, have persisted and still ideationally permeate many spheres of social life. I argue that shared communal values and emic perceptions about human-nature relationships among Lakota and other Plains peoples are to a great extent ontologically rooted in a cosmology that was an outcome of a historical lifestyle as hunter(-gatherers) of buffalo. Despite socio-economic changes leading to the demise of that very foundational subsistence-based nomadic existence, elements of this lifestyle have nevertheless survived into modern day by their sustained relevance, adaption and application in social, economic, political, healthcare and educational contexts (to serve individuals’ quests for self-discovery and to support political aims for self-determined development of Native nations).
Hunting and gathering are analyzed along two dimensions - as a practice and as a constitutive basis of a worldview and values. While, when looking at historical processes, it can be seen that the practice has changed in many ways due to technological, political and socio-economic shifts, its pursuit remains an economic necessity for some and it is still regarded by many as a continuation of a traditional way of life reflecting certain values, serving also as a source or marker of cultural identity.
Furthermore, I argue that these cultural values, which originally fulfilled particular social functions (and to some extent still do today) in a nomadic hunter-gatherer societal structure and its contemporary remnants (for instance by regulating the distribution of food, encouraging commensality and defining social hierarchies), have been adapted in political contexts by tribal agents; They are either emphasized, silenced or reinterpreted to foster conditions of social, economic and political well-being on reservations or reserves and thus aiding nation-building processes embedded within larger institutional contexts of (inter-)national politics in a global market economy.

Standard genealogies of knowledge posit the circulation of modernity in one direction, from the West to “the rest.” This history reveals the waves of influence flowing the opposite way, from nonstate people to the state. The essay introduces a new method for the history of knowledge that traces the travel of narratives, packets of media containing messages. Masks long viewed as objects of collection are seen here anew as subjects of recollection, mnemonic devices that archive the global propagation of knowledge. One set of masks is reunited with the narratives they encode: stories employed as a survival strategy by the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw, a network of peoples who utilized the anthropologist Franz Boas as a host body to enter and alter the world that came to colonize them. The efforts of the Indigenous intellectual George Hunt to disseminate the masks—and, with the masks, his family message of transformation—directly shaped the concept of culture. Using the masks as teaching tools, Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw thinkers civilized Boas into a new modernity, shifting him from categorization to communication, from signs to messages, and from a Self/Other perception to a global consciousness of Host–Guest relations. The masks recollect a profound yet long suppressed Indigenous influence on modern thought.

- by Isaiah Lorado Wilner
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- History, American History, Intellectual History, Cultural History

Early comparative musicology habitually ignored, even extinguished, timbre in its single-minded focus on pitch. This chapter traces the broader social, cultural, and political consequences of this framework. It surveys how, at the turn of the twentieth century, John Comfort Fillmore and Benjamin Ives Gilman followed the lead of Alice Fletcher and Alexander Ellis in deploying a broad range of technologies—phonograph, Helmholtz resonator, keyboard, and musical notation—to develop frameworks for analyzing essential similarities and differences between Native American and Western musics. It argues that such scholarship, while ostensibly aimed at salvaging Native American music, also served American efforts to reform and silence indigenous voices. The postscript examines the resonances between their theories and modern frameworks of parametric analysis that construe pitch and timbre as autonomous, and proposes that there may be unrecognized perils in overly articulating the boundaries between pitch and timbre to focus analytical attention exclusively on the measurable quantities of musical sound.

- by Daniel K . S . Walden
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- American History, Native American Studies, Music Theory, Indigenous Studies

Review of "Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance" by Nick Estes, at pages 90-91 of the 100/101 issue of the Women and Environments International... more

- by Alice Damiano
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- Gender Studies, Indigenous Studies, Environmental Studies, Ecological Economics

La lengua coahuilteca era hablada por un incontable número de personas de diferentes tribus en lo que hoy es la frontera noreste entre Estados Unidos y México. Desafortunadamente, este idioma se terminó extinguiendo con el paso del tiempo, y para la mitad del siglo XIX, ya había desaparecido totalmente. El propósito de este libro es el de hacer la mayor recopilación de información sobre este idioma, con todo lo que sabemos de ella, y dar a conocer esta lengua tan extraña y misteriosa que merece toda nuestra atención, como todas las lenguas habladas y extintas.
The Coahuilteco language was spoken by an uncountable number of people from different tribes in what is now the northeast border between the United States and Mexico. Unfortunately, this language ended up extinguishing over time, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, it had already completely disappeared. The purpose of this book is to make the greatest collection of information about this language, with everything we know about it, and publicize this strange and mysterious language that deserves all our attention, like all the spoken and extinct languages.

The cultural resource base on the New England coast and continental shelf, circumscribed generally in this overview to Southern New England and the Gulf of Maine, is summarized. The U.S. and state historic preservation regulatory schemes and constituent interests are outlined. Federal, state, and local authorities are involved in review and permitting of proposed undertakings that could adversely affect significant cultural resources on the coast and continental shelf. Government authorities (including Native American Tribal Historic Preservation Officers), biological and cultural resource managers, and researchers may consider this commentary in developing their policies, practices, commentary, and research proposals to investigate the effects of coastal and near-shore development projects in this and other regions. Ethical considerations are raised for government agencies, private concerns, cultural resource management professionals, and for other scientific and historical investigators whose decisions and activities involve public interests in historic and archaeological resources. Scientific and historical narratives that synthesize cultural and ecological history in local and regional view are part of plans of action to implement coastal management goals.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the ways in which working-class Kānaka Hawai’i (Native Hawaiian) immigrants in the nineteenth century repurposed and repackaged pre-contact Hawai’i strategies of accommodation and resistance in their migration towards North America and particularly within California. The arrival of European naturalists, American missionaries, and foreign merchants in the Hawaiian Islands is frequently attributed for triggering this diaspora. However, little has been written about why Native Hawaiian immigrants themselves chose to migrate eastward across the Pacific or their
reasons for permanent settlement in California. Like the ali’i on the Islands, Native Hawaiian commoners in the diaspora exercised agency in their accommodation and resistance to Pacific imperialism and colonialism as well. Blending labor history, religious history, and anthropology, this thesis adopts an interdisciplinary and ethnohistorical approach that utilizes Hawaiian-language newspapers, American missionary letters, and oral histories from California’s indigenous peoples. I argue that pre-contact strategies were critical to preserving and holding onto an ethnic Native Hawaiian identity in encounters with merchants, missionaries, and indigenous peoples in California throughout the 1800s.

- by April Farnham
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- California Indians, Missionary History, American Protestantism, California History

This article details Saskatchewan’s first environmental impact assessment, which took place in the 1970s over a proposed dam on the Churchill River at the Wintego Rapids. The Wintego Dam, which would have been the largest hydroelectric dam in the province at the time, was controversial because of the environmental repercussions and impacts on the local Indigenous communities, particularly the Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation. We show that the Blakeney ndp government did not initially intend to create a robust environmental impact assessment but explain how and why that is what ultimately evolved. Using archival material that was previously unavailable, the article recounts the governmental study, the Indigenous-led studies (after they rejected the governmental process), and the final Board of Inquiry report. The Wintego saga should be understood within the context of a growing resistance to northern development projects whose benefits accrued mostly to the southern white population. Ultimately, the Blakeney government decided not to build Wintego because of the economic, environmental, and social impacts, as well as concerns about unsettled treaty claims. This could be considered the first attempt – even before the Berger Inquiry – by a provincial government to fully assess the impacts of a natural resource project before final approval and it was the earliest incorporation of Indigenous-led studies into the assessment process.

- by Daniel Macfarlane
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- Canadian History, Energy history, Water History, Hydro Power

In this excerpt we deal with the Idea of God in primitive cultures. Part II is focused on North American Indians and their widespread worship of a Supreme God. Following the work of Wilhelm Schmidt and the discovery of Monotheism in primitive material cultures around the world, we expose various examples and refer directly to the censorship imposed by evolutionist on the fact of Primitive Monotheism and its implications to human sciences, specifically Ethnology or Cultural Anthroplogy.

- by Christian Irigaray
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- Religion, Christianity, Comparative Religion, History

Many conflicting views and debates exist within the field of North American archaeology, one of the most pressing being the possibility of direct contact between populations of Mesoamerica and hunter-gatherer groups of the North American Southwest. This paper summarizes and analyzes multiple lines of evidence indicating the definite possibility of a direct contact event, focusing on linguistic, archaeological, and agricultural similarities between these regional groups.

"The author of the essay has started investigating the writings of Alexander von Humboldt as a member of a German-American research cooperation in 2001. The project was affiliated to the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures in the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS, it was directed by Professor Frank Baron and was aimed at digitizing and electronically publishing the English translations of the works of Alexander von Humboldt. The project entitled The Humboldt Digital Library: A Global Network of Knowledge has come to an end by now, its results are available on the internet, see http://www.avhumboldt.net/index.php?page=136. As an anthropologist and historian of cultural anthropology, the author explored the Hungarian relations of the work of Alexander von Humboldt. She revealed how much he knew about Hungary (its geography, its language and, to a certain extent, its history), and that he not only had personal connections, acquaintances in contemporary Hungarian aristocratic and scientific circles, but he also made trips to Hungary (in 1797 and 1811). It is primarily certain members of the Podmaniczky family – József Podmaniczky (1756–1823) for sure, and perhaps also Károly Podmaniczky (1772–1833) – as well as other Protestant scientists like Pál Almási Balogh (1794–1867) who could function as his closest acquaintances in Hungary. Having a considerable reception in Hungarian scientific culture, the works of Alexander von Humboldt seem to have had an impact upon the emergence of, among others, geography and world ethnology in that country. They were praised by the geographer János Hunfalvy (1820–1888), a pioneer of ethnology/universal ethnography, too. The impact of Humboldt testifies the presence of the French géographie humaine but also a Romantic Gesamtforschung in 19th century Hungary -- research directions that the Hungarian scholars of the age could and did turn against Habsburg science."

- by ravi khangai
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- History, Philosophy, Art History, Social Sciences

Keywords: Native American Studies, North American Southwest, History of travel and tourism in the US, Native American reservations, Native American education, American Indian Ethnic Renewal, Cultural secrecy, Indigenous regulation of... more

- by JR Anderson
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- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Sudanese Archaeology, Sudan

A cultural biography of a metis pouch collected in the 1840s, now in the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Narratives of innocence are stories born of the dispossession of bodies from lands that continue to serve as vectors of violence, reenacting the scene that created them. The term was introduced by Boyd Cothran to describe the cunning afterlife of conflicts between settler states and indigenous peoples: state violence yields stories that reiterate erasure, weaponizing memory to forget the lessons of colonization. In a situation of violence that produces silence, names resonate as instruments of clarity, cutting through erasure. Genocide is a name historians are now using to describe a process of erasure that created modern California, a process indigenous people have long discussed that narratives of innocence have silenced. Through a reading of Cothran's book Remembering the Modoc War and Benjamin Madley's book An American Genocide against an older literary genre on violence ranging from Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, I take California as an emblem of a profound alteration in the way the United States processes the trace memory of indigenous erasure. A historical reckoning is now underway as indigenous people reembody their occupied geographies, returning their stories to the land and, in the process, reconfiguring the national narrative.

- by Craig N Cipolla
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- Archaeology, Anthropology, Historical Archaeology, Posthumanism

What is the political significance of the canoe in Canada? The Politics of the Canoe, edited by Bruce Erickson (assistant professor of geography at the University of Manitoba) and Sarah Wylie Krotz (associate professor of Canadian literature at the University of Alberta), answers this question with contributions from academia and beyond. The book's ten chapters dismantle the idea of the canoe as a national symbol of Canada and identify it instead as a vehicle for decolonization, reconnection with the land, Indigenous cultural resurgence, and reconciliation between settler Canadians and Indigenous peoples.

- by Sarah MacKenzie
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- Feminist Theory, Canadian History, Critical Race Theory, Canadian Literature

Université de Strasbourg - Campus Esplanade.
Dates et salles (14h-17h) :
vendredi 6 octobre 2017 (salle des conférences, MISHA) ; vendredi 13 octobre 2017 (salle des conférences, MISHA) ; vendredi 20 octobre 2017 (amphithéâtre 5, Le Patio) ; vendredi 10 novembre 2017 (salle Alain Beretz, Nouveau Patio) ; vendredi 17 novembre 2017 (salle Alain Beretz, Nouveau Patio) ; vendredi 24 novembre 2017 (salle Ourisson, Institut Lebel) ; vendredi 1er décembre 2017 (salle Alain Beretz, Nouveau Patio) ; vendredi 15 décembre 2017 (salle des conférences, MISHA)

- by Pierre Le Roux
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- History, Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Japanese Studies
- by Ildiko Sz. Kristof
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- History, Modern History, Cultural History, Native American Studies
- by Jeremiah J Garsha
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- History, Cultural History, Latin American Studies, Colonialism

The decision by the National Museum of Ireland to open a permanent exhibition of ethnographic materials opens all kinds of possibilities for Native American and First Nations collections. Acquired within the contexts of various kinds of relationships between Irish people and North American tribal groups during the colonial era, these collections have assumed particular meanings and force within the broader contexts of post-colonial shifts in museum anthropology and in the relations between museums and the communities from which their collections came. What can be expected in the responses of tribal source communities to the opening up of these collections? And how might source community responses affect museum practice and the interpretation of collections to the public in the context of the National Museum of Ireland? Over the past several decades, anthropology's reflexive engagement with its own histories has worked in tandem with the rise of new nationalisms and indigenous voices to make ethnographic museum collections lively places: theoretically rich and, sometimes, politically fraught. Historical collections and the museum spaces in which they have existed have become spaces of contestation, of contact, of dialogue— sometimes heated—between peoples who have often existed within very unequal relations of power (Pratt 1992, 4; Clifford 1997). Such dialogue has reopened conversations that fell silent whenever ethnographic artefacts entered museum collections. At the time of collection, artefacts were embedded within conversations and relationships between peoples: relationships that resulted in diplomatic presentations, trade, marriage gifts, personal gifts and commissions, souvenirs, items made for sale and purchased by travellers and temporary residents overseas, objects confiscated under colonial rule or as part of assimilation policies. However stunted and one-sided the conversations between peoples were within such relationships, the objects collected represented them and their existence within complex local and imperial histories. Once in the museum, however, ethnographic artefacts went through a process of scientific and colonial magic in which these histories and conversations, and the meanings that artefacts had when they were made, were made to vanish; they were given new meanings within the intellectual and political space of the museum. Objects

The early interactions between North American settlers and the Native Americans developed into a relationship of interdependence. This relationship, primarily driven by European economic interests in trade, conflicted with the native cultural values which were inherently tied to their economic interactions. Continuous pressure from the colonists would eventually force the natives to adopt new forms of economic and social interactions that were profitable to the young and growing North American colony.

- by Bram C Barnes
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- History, Colonial America, Indigenous Politics, Indigenous Peoples
- by Deni Seymour
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- Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, Migration Studies, Southwestern Archaeology

Rautman's critique of our article "Although They Have Petty Captains They Obey Them Badly: The Dialectics of Prehispanic Western Pueblo Social Organization" (McGuire and Saitta 1996) provides us with an opportunity to clarify some points about our theoretical perspective. Rautman shares our dissatisfaction with attempts to characterize Prehispanic western pueblo social organization as either egalitarian or hierarchical. She, however, questions our dismissal of processual theory and our advocacy of a dialectical approach to the problem. She proposes instead an alternative approach that relies on the concept of heterarchy. We have little problem with the use of heterarchy as a descriptive label for late Prehispanic pueblo social orga- nization, but we desire a more dynamic understanding of that organization than the concept of heterarchy allows. We find that understanding in a dialectical approach.

... belonged&amp;amp;#x27; (Turner to Truchot, 28 April 1950). ... Malcolm Osman, Julia Nicholson, Birgitte Speake and other staff at the Pitt Rivers Museum have also facilitated my research on the &amp;amp;#x27;S... more

- by Laura Peers
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- History, Archaeology, Anthropology, Material Culture Studies