American Indians in Children’s Literature
Debbie Reese takes a critical approach to evaluating representations of American Indians in children’s literature, literary works, and popular culture. In addition to shedding light on stereotypes and misrepresentations, Reese also recommends books by and about Native Americans for young readers. Reese says this about the motivation to maintain the site and educate her readers: “The content of the website is designed to help people develop a critical stance when evaluating American Indians in children’s books. This means recognizing negative and positive stereotypes, both of which stand in the way of seeing and accepting American Indians as people of the present day.”

Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond
J. Kehualani Kauanui’s weekly podcast addresses some of the most pertinent issues facing Indigenous peoples today. Her guests include many well-respected academics, community representatives, activists, and officials from around the world. Kauanui’s incisive questions and keen ability to tease out the nuances of global Indigenous issues, make complex issues accessible to listeners from diverse backgrounds.

Media Indigena
The seven contributors to the Media Indigena blog clearly have their fingers on the pulse of Indigenous news, politics, and popular culture. The contributors come from backgrounds in journalism, academia, policy, and beyond. They report on and analyze news, politics, arts and culture, business and economics through writing and other media, including frequent guest spots on The Word (another daily Native talk show we recommend checking out). They strive to create online community and dialogue, as they explain on their website: “We are more than mere aggregators: along with adding value and vigour to mainstream debates and discussions about Indigenous issues, we spark and spur conversations of our own. In other words, we are both curators and creators.”

Native America Calling
This show has been on air for over a decade and we think it’s worth a mention here because of the host’s impressive ability to inspire conversation and critical thinking on a wide variety of issues. From a book of the month feature to shows ranging in theme from the future of American Identity to policing authenticity of Native Arts crafts, the shows are both edgy and relevant. They’re presented in an open format that welcomes callers from around the country to join in the conversation. The show airs every weekday online and on various FM and AM stations. Archives of previous shows can be found here.

Native Appropriations
We can’t get enough of this blog and the author, Adrienne K.’s, witty critiques of representations of American Indians in popular culture. Though some of the images she shares may seem absurd (everything from the hipster headdress craze to caricatures of Indians on home products), this blogger articulately sheds light on the deeper messages being conveyed by these images and the deleterious effects they can have on Native peoples and how they are perceived.

Know of other blogs or podcasts we should tune into? Please share them with us!

How the Cherokee Ball Game Confounds the Sport vs. Ritual Dichotomy

By Michael J. Zogry

In daily life people often speak of sports as being “like” religion, and certain people avow that a particular sport is their religion. Other opinions of sport recognize ceremonial, perhaps even religious behaviors on the part of individuals participating in or attending sporting events, but stop short of labeling them as religions. As a scholar in the academic study of religions, I have long been interested in this phenomenon. For many years, the prevailing scholarly standpoint seemed to be that games, including the subset of sport, were not religious activities, no matter how closely they seemed to resemble them. I began to investigate why it is that standard European-American conceptions of religion did not include athletic activities, and searched for the answer to this question: Can a game be a ritual? The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss had argued no in the 1960s, and I was surprised that many contemporary scholars relied upon his work to conclude the same. But I was not convinced by his argument, so I set out to determine an answer for myself; this was the genesis of my book about anetso, the Cherokee ball game.

A few weeks ago this blog hosted several links to stories about the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team. This single-racket and ball activity is deeply rooted in the cultures of the member Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee confederacy, as it is in the cultures of neighbor nations such as the Huron and Passamaquody. These racket games generally are regarded to be precursors to the sport of field lacrosse, the rules of which were codified in 1867. By then the indigenous games in this geographical region were well-established; the Jesuit father Jéan de Brebeuf, stationed in what was then New France, had written about the Huron game in 1636.

In fact, racket and ball games have a long history among First Nations who once or still hold lands along the eastern seaboard of North America, throughout the interior of the what is now the southeastern United States,  in the Great Lakes region and immediately westward, not to mention in certain areas of present-day California, Mexico, and the Pacific Northwest.  In the land area that is now the southeastern United States the double-racket and ball game has been most prevalent, among nations such as the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Yuchi, Seminole and member nations of the Muskogee (Creek) Confederacy.

Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, certain members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Nation have continued a centuries-long practice by engaging in a:ne:tso (anetso), what has, in English parlance, come to be called the “Cherokee ball game.”  Noted as early as 1714 in non-Cherokee written accounts, missionaries, ethnographers and other itinerant travelers have described and discussed anetso regularly for almost three centuries.

Furthermore, Cherokee cultural narratives (“myths”; I choose not to use this term because it implies the story is false) record games that were played by “other-than-human persons” even before humans inhabited the earth. In the foundational cultural narrative of Kanati and Selu, the first Cherokee man and woman, the phrase “to play ball against” is used as a figure of speech. This narrative is analogous to the Hebrew Bible story of Adam and Eve, and other narratives in which individuals play anetso are of the same significance as those contained in other texts considered to be key components of particular religious systems.

Ostensibly an athletic contest that at one time pitted teams from the local community against one another in a regular seasonal schedule of games, it is a vigorous, sometimes violent activity that rewards speed, strength, and agility. However, interpreted as “game” within a broader framing of “religion,” anetso simultaneously resists and problematizes such classifications. Anetso, as an event, is itself the focus and hub of a “ceremonial complex” (or cycle), an extended series of activities that historically has featured virtually every activity that Cherokee people and non-Cherokee observers have identified as elemental of Cherokee “religion” or “ritual.”

Considered as a unit, the anetso ceremonial complex incorporates a variety of activities that complicate standard scholarly distinctions such as ritual vs. game, public display vs. private performance and tradition vs. innovation. Over centuries the ceremonial complex has undergone alteration, yet a ritual history of anetso reveals that the activity itself as well as several of the constituent activities of the complex have shown remarkable persistence, disputing the trajectory of decline and degeneration plotted even in the recent past by many scholars of First Nations’ cultures. For centuries anetso also has been a staple of public performances for the benefit of visitors.

At the present time, typically two or three games of anetso are played once a year during the Cherokee Fall Fair, attended by Cherokee people from the local area and a number of tourists. As such it can be interpreted as a marker of cultural identity that Cherokee people perform or self-present to a diverse crowd of spectators, both community members as well as other onlookers. For certain participants and observers alike anetso has remained vital as a series of practices as well as a symbolic link to a shared history, a distinctly emic vehicle of cultural identity and sometimes even a packaged response to the objectifications of tourists, academic and otherwise.

—

Michael J. Zogry is an associate professor of religious studies at University of Kansas. His new book Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game: At the Center of Ceremony and Identity, is now available from University of North Carolina Press. This year, the Cherokee Fall Fair will be October 5-9 at the Cherokee Indian Fair Grounds in Cherokee, North Carolina.

Bringing Juanita’s Dress Home
By Jennifer Nez Denetdale

Yesterday morning I drove over to Window Rock with my family who live in Tohatchi, New Mexico, our home community. The Diné cultural advisor Robert Johnson had driven all the way to Pasadena, California, in a tribal vehicle that meets specifications for bringing my great-great-great-grandmother’s dress and textile–a saddle blanket–from the Autry National Center. With him is conservator Angie McGrew who is at the Southwest Museum, now a part of the Autry. Angie traveled with the dress and textile to assist with proper display.  My son, mom, sister and I arrived at the Navajo Nation Museum where we found the  museum curator Clarenda Begay and Angie already at work in the gallery. For a couple of weeks, Robby, who has worked for the Museum for ten years, has been busy painting the walls red, a nice contrast with a certain hue of blue, sort of between blue and turquoise.

The dress woven and worn by Juanita will be displayed at the Navajo Nation Museum.

Early in 2010, director of the Navajo Nation Museum, Manuelito Wheeler, invited me to be guest curator for a show on Manuelito and other Diné leaders. He had read my book and, along with other museum staff, was supportive of my research. This show marks my first experience as a curator, although I had served as a consultant for several museums over the years. Yesterday we gave interviews to local radio stations, in both Navajo and English. My cousin, who is president of Tohatchi Chapter, has always been enthusiastic about my work and he readily agreed to be a speaker at the exhibit opening and also to provide interviews for broadcasting. He is very proud to be a descendant of Manuelito and Juanita. Back in the museum, I showed him the two boxes which held the two precious items. Like the rest of us were, he was tearful. We thought of our grandmother and my mom said, “She is here and smiling at us.”  Finally, in the gallery, with the displays ready for the two items, we watched as Clarenda and Angie open the boxes.

Juanita in 1902. Photo by George Wharton James.

In 1997 I had traveled to Pasadena to visit the dress and the textile. I had spent several hours sitting near them, gently touching them, looking at the dress and its careful mending. More than ten years later, I was given the opportunity to see treasures that my great-great-great-grandmother had valued. The Indian artifacts collector George Wharton James who met my grandmother says that she prized the dress and kept it carefully stored away and only after some coaxing, she had allowed him to carry it away. The dress is a rare one, dated between 1868 and 1874, it shows much wear, with patching on the backside. We marveled at the dress and our eyes teared as we imagined our grandmother’s life. Where and when had she worn the dress? Our grandmother had lived through one of the most traumatic times in our history and the dress had seen the hardship. It had traveled so far and now it returned home, after more than one hundred years.

By yesterday afternoon, we had all contacted many Diné, including the descendants of Manuelito and Juanita, to invite them to the exhibition opening. One of the assistants watches as we hover over the dress and remarks, “It’s going to get pretty emotional in here tomorrow evening.” The Diné get emotional whenever we think of what our ancestors have endured in the nineteenth century. We marvel at their endurance and their determination to live in the Diné way. Friday evening we will once again take some time to remember our ancestors who had a vision for the future, for they thought of us.

The exhibit on Manuelito & Diné leaders opens Friday, August 27th at the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, Arizona with a reception from 5 to 7 PM. The exhibit will run through February 2011. Jennifer Nez Denetdale is a professor of history at the University of New Mexico.

Navajo Nation Museum and Library

Luisa Cadena and some of her grandchildren with Janis B. Nuckolls and her children in Ecuador.

Anthropological linguist Janis B. Nuckolls has many years of field experience, primarily in Amazonian Ecuador. In her new book Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman: Ideaphony, Dialogue, and Perspective, Nuckolls shows through the words of a Quechua-speaking woman named Luisa Cadena a complex language system where language is the core of cultural and grammatical communications. Her new book will be available soon from the University of Arizona Press and is a proud part of the First Peoples publishing initiative. She answers our question about her research:

How did you first meet Luisa Cadena?
I was waiting for a plane ride out of the remote military base, Montalvo, which is the nearest to my field site of Puka Yaku. It was very hot and dusty, and and the wait was quite long. It was looking like it was going to be an all-day experience, in fact. Luisa was waiting as well, and she was enjoying herself immensely, conversing with the other passengers. I noticed right away that she had a very charismatic presence that people responded to and I thought I would be so lucky to be able to get to know someone like her who obviously loved language, and loved to recount her experiences. Once we landed in Shell, I made a point of noticing where she was going, and we talked about meeting again. The next day I went to visit her in her rented house in Puyo, just off the main road. I told her I was still struggling with many questions about the Quichua language, and asked if she would be able to help me. She was quite happy to be asked, and we worked almost every day during the next 5 months, going over all of my field notes and queries, after which time, I left Ecuador to write my dissertation.

What is the significance of the title “Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman?” Why the word “strongwoman”?

The word ‘sindzhi’ in Quichua means strong, and is used a lot both to compliment others for their strength, as well as to make claims about one’s own strength. For Luisa, strength is a kind of attitude that she assumes for herself, almost all of the time. She is always dealing with some problem or other. I have spent hundreds of hours in conversation with her, and have heard countless stories and anecdotes from her experiences. I could probably count on one hand, the number of times she has seemed overwhelmed by her problems. Most of the time, she presents herself as undaunted, in charge of, and fully engaged in, any difficulty that life sends her way.

I structured the book as a series of ‘lessons’ because each chapter presents important theoretically interesting points about ideophony, dialogue and/or perspective in Quichua linguistic culture.

What is an ideophone?

An ideophone is a word, and in Quechua it is usually an adverb, that communicates imitatively about vivid perceptions. The sound qualities of ideophones often get embellished with intonational and/or gestural emphasis by speakers. Onomatopoeic words in English are a type of ideophone — words like ‘bling bling’, ‘woof woof’, or ‘ka-ching’. In English, ideophones tend to be used in written form, such as in comic books, where action words like ‘thwack’ may take up an entire visual frame, and the reader just knows that some kind of forceful impact has taken place. You can easily find ideophones in picture books for children as well, especially in the ones for preliterate children. In Quechua, though, ideophones are used by adult speakers in everyday spoken language as well as in their narratives. They are considered an artful form of language for adults, and are not usually heard when adults talk to little children.

You have observed that Runa conceptions of nature are voiced with habits of speaking that are endangered because they are steeped in a worldview that is increasingly marginalized. What do you mean?
I mean that traditional Runa habits of speaking often involve close observations of nature, which become irrelevant or at least, much less important, when people become involved with formalized knowledge systems that are conveyed within institutional settings. I have observed many Runa with varying experiences and in a wide range of ages. Many are becoming less interested in subsistence ways of life and want to be engaged in the market economy. These people find Spanish to be more useful and relevant to their activities than Quichua.

Indigenous political movements, particularly in Ecuador and Brazil, have gained momentum in the last two decades, and you write that it is critical to bring voices that are always at the front lines of that public discourse together with those voices that never have the opportunity to be heard. What do you mean?
Thanks for asking. This is a very important point that needs to be appreciated by readers. In Ecuador, the kind of people who have official roles involving advocacy on behalf of indigenous people, often create the impression that they are authorized to speak on everyone’s behalf. This perception masks a very complex reality. Many indigenous leaders have acquired university educations and have travelled to Europe, the US, and elsewhere. They represent, what I would consider to be a kind of privileged sector of indigenous-ness, because they are learning how to gain access to resources, whether economic, political, or educational, that not everyone has been able to gain access to. These are the people who are ‘at the front lines’.

Luisa, by contrast, has not tried to create a political base of power for herself. She has enormous power and influence, however, in her own personal sphere. She is a kind of artist of everyday life insofar as she is able to accomplish what she most needs to do – whether it is finding food for her family, surviving a difficult ordeal, or learning a valuable lesson about the complex physical environment she lives in. What has always amazed me about her, though, is that when she needs to, she can be successful outside of this personal sphere of influence. The book presents a couple of instances where she is able to use language to persuade people in official political power to help her. This happens with the book’s opening saga, and it happens as well in the very last story in the book.

It is precisely because Luisa doesn’t consciously seek political power for her people or for herself, that she becomes a valuable spokesperson, in my opinion. She is closer to the kinds of concerns that ordinary people have, and her voice seems less ‘filtered’ somehow.

In Ecuador, what is the status of current bilingual and Indigenous unification efforts?
I haven’t been in Ecuador for over a year now, so I’d better not try to answer that one directly. However, last summer I was privileged to teach an ethnolinguistic seminar organized by Dra. Marleen Haboud, at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica in Quito. I heard from indigenous people from all over Ecuador, and many expressed a lot of frustration over the relevance of their educational experiences.

I should also say that I am not optimistic about any attempts to unify Quichua dialects into some kind of standard. Indigenous leaders who attended my seminar were amazed to learn that there was no Academy for the English Language. One man from Saraguro wondered why Quechua speaking people should bother about unifying or standardizing their language if speakers of English did not worry about such things.

What does that mean for Luisa Cadena?
I think it means that, even though it still has a fair number of speakers, (for Amazonian dialects anyway, several tens of thousands of speakers), the Quichua language is rather endangered. It seems to me that people are not able to fathom that their language might someday be completely lost. I supervised a sociolinguistic survey, which was adapted from one used by Marleen Haboud, and had one of my students administer it. He asked people about the possibility that Quichua might someday not be spoken. Most people denied that this was even possible. Without intending to sound overly critical, since peoples’ needs are very complex and difficult to juggle, it does seem to be the case that many Runa are not aware of how vulnerable Quichua could become. What this means for Luisa Cadena is that her great grandchildren could grow up in a family where Quichua is no longer spoken.

As an anthropologist, what do you feel your obligation is to your research community and what have you done to meet that obligation?
As a linguistic anthropologist, my obligation to my intellectual community is to discover something new and interesting that may help other researchers better understand Quechua language and culture. I also feel an obligation to share my data with others. In order to do this in the best possible way, I am going to be making my original data available to anyone with an interest, by getting my narratives into the Archives of Indigenous Languages of Latin America, based at UT-Austin. I will be traveling there the first week of October to get everything labeled and ready, so that it can be made available to this book’s readership.

My obligation to my Quechua research community is to try to give back something to them since they have given me so much. One way to do this will be to get the book translated into Spanish so that it might be publishable by a small press in Ecuador, where some of the country’s most powerful people might benefit from learning more about the great human resources right in their own back yard.

How has Luisa’s life changed in the time that you two have been working together?
When I first met her in 1988, she was moving between Montalvo and the rented house she had in Puyo which she used when her kids were going to school there. She was kind of transitioning out of her life in Montalvo, but hadn’t yet made the definitive move. She was earning money for her children’s education by washing other peoples’ clothes. Now she has her own space and house outside of Puyo, which she acquired without my help. Her husband has now become her dependent. Because of strokes he can no longer walk. She lives in an extended family household with her sisters, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren surrounding her. She did seem wistful, though, about life in Montalvo, the last time I asked her, and she expressed interest in building a small house there on her land. Because her health is no longer robust, though, I wonder if she’ll be able to do that. One thing that has not changed, though, is that she continues to be involved in horticulture. The last chapter explains how she’s managed to do this.

How has your life changed due to the work you’ve undertaken?
My life has changed tremendously. When I first met Luisa, I was in the most liminal stage of life possible—an ABD (all but the dissertation) graduate student. I was married but hadn’t yet had any kids, which, for my Quichua friends, made me even more marginal. I knew when interviewing her that I was getting important data, but I had no idea at the time, of how her narratives were going to allow me to figure out what role ideophones had in Quichua grammar. Now I’m a working, professional anthropological linguist. My three kids are about the same ages as some of her grandkids. I probably would have written a rather different dissertation if I had never met her, and would have assumed a different kind of academic voice.
—
In Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman, Janis B. Nuckolls, a professor at Brigham Young University, shows how ideophones are the core of Quechua speaker’s discourse and that they allow agency and reaction to substances and entities as well as beings. Nuckolls also shows that Luisa Cadena’s talk gives every individual, major or minor, a voice in her narrative, revealing a language system that allows for the possibility of shared affects, intentions, moral values, and meaningful communicative interactions between humans and nonhumans.

Look for the First Peoples booth at these conferences:

Latin American Studies Association
October 6-9, 2010 – Toronto, Ontario
Partner Press Exhibitors: University of Arizona Press, University of North Carolina Press

Western History Association
October 13-16, 2010 – Incline Village, NV
Partner Press Exhibitors: University of Arizona Press, University of North Carolina Press

American Society of Ethnohistory
October 13-17, 2010 – Ottawa, Ontario
Partner Press Exhibitors: University of North Carolina Press

American Anthropological Association
November 17-21, 2010 – New Orleans, LA
Partner Press Exhibitors: University of Arizona Press, University of Minnesota Press, University of North Carolina Press

National Congress of American Indians
November 14-19, 2010 – Albuquerque, NM

We won’t have an exhibit at the National Women’s Studies Association annual meeting (November 11-14, 2010 – Denver, CO) , but we’re excited to attend and listen in on keynotes by Andrea Smith and Renya Ramirez as well as many other sessions on Indigenous feminisms.

There are so many great conferences this fall! Here are a few that look particularly strong that we wish we could squeeze into our schedule:

Inuit Studies Conference
October 28-30, 2010 – Val-d’Or, Quebec

Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law
October 29-30, 2010 – Cornell University

Exploring the Red Atlantic Conference
November 12-13, 2010 – University of Georgia

Do you know of a conference you think we should add to our calendar? Please let us know about it, either by leaving a comment here or emailing nvarner@uapress.arizona.edu.

A Return to Servitude: Maya Migration and the Tourist Trade in Cancún
M. Bianet Castellanos
University of Minnesota Press

A Return to Servitude is an ethnography of Maya migration within Mexico that analyzes the foundational role indigenous peoples play in the development of the modern nation-state. Focusing on tourism in the Yucatán Peninsula, M. Bianet Castellanos examines how Cancún came to be equated with modernity, how this city has shaped the political economy of the peninsula, and how Indigenous communities engage with this vision of contemporary life. More broadly, she demonstrates how Indigenous communities experience, resist, and accommodate themselves to transnational capitalism.

Indigenous Writings from the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial Mexico
Mónica Díaz
University of Arizona Press

Indigenous Writings from the Convent examines ways in which Indigenous women participated in one of the most prominent institutions in colonial times—the Catholic Church—and what they made of their experience with convent life. While colonial sources that refer to indigenous women are not scant, documents in which women emerge as agents who actively participate in shaping their own identity are rare. Drawing upon letters, biographies, sermons, and other texts, Mónica Díaz argues that the survival of Indigenous ethnic identity in Mexico was effectively served by this class of noble Indigenous nuns.

We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan Community
Barbra A. Meek
University of Arizona Press

For many Indigenous communities around the world, language revitalization is a pressing concern. Understanding the issue involves far more than compiling simple usage statistics or documenting grammar —it requires examining the social practices and philosophies that affect indigenous language survival. In presenting the case of Kaska, an endangered language in an Athabascan community in the Yukon, Barbra Meek asserts that language revitalization requires more than just linguistic rehabilitation; it demands a social transformation. We Are Our Language reveals the subtle ways in which different conceptions and practices—historical, material, and interactional—can variably affect the state of an Indigenous language, and it offers a critical step toward redefining success and achieving revitalization.

Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman: Ideophony, Dialogue and Perspective
Janis B. Nuckolls
University of Arizona Press

Through the intriguing stories and words of a Quechua-speaking woman named Luisa Cadena from the Pastaza Province of Ecuador, Janis B. Nuckolls reveals a complex language system in which ideophony, dialogue, and perspective are all at the core of cultural and grammatical communications among Amazonian Quechua speakers. Cadena’s narratives and commentaries on everyday events reveal that sound imitation through ideophones, representations of dialogues between humans and nonhumans, and grammatical distinctions between a speaking self and an other are all part of a language system that allows for the possibility of shared affects, intentions, moral values, and meaningful, communicative interactions between humans and nonhumans.

Indigenous Miracles: Nahua Authority in Colonial Mexico
Edward W. Osowski
University of Arizona Press

While King Carlos I of Spain struggled to suppress the Protestant Reformation in the Old World, the Spanish turned to New Spain to promote the Catholic cause, unimpeded by the presence of the “false” Old World religions. As the religious conversion of the Indigenous people of Mexico proceeded in earnest, Catholic ritual became the medium through which Indigenous leaders and Spaniards negotiated colonial hegemony. Indigenous Miracles looks at how the Nahua elite of central Mexico secured political legitimacy through the administration of public rituals centered on miraculous images of Christ the King. Consulting both Nahuatl and Spanish sources, Osowski strives to fill a gap in the history of the Nahuas from 1760 to 1810, a momentous time when previously sanctioned religious practices were condemned by the viceroys and archbishops of the Bourbon royal dynasty. Ultimately, Osowski’s account contributes to our understanding of the ways in which Indigenous agency was negotiated in colonial Mexico.

The Way of Kinship: An Anthology of Native Siberian Literature
Alexander Vaschenko and Claude Clayton Smith, editors Foreword by N. Scott Momaday
University of Minnesota Press

The first anthology of Native Siberian literature in English, The Way of Kinship represents writers from regions extending from the Ob River in the west to the Chukotka peninsula, the easternmost point of the Siberian Russian Arctic. Drawn from seven distinct ethnic groups, this diverse body of work—prose fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction—chronicles ancient Siberian cultures and traditions threatened with extinction in the contemporary world.

Translated and edited by Alexander Vaschenko and Claude Clayton Smith, leading scholars in Native Siberian literature, The Way of Kinship is an essential collection that will introduce readers to new writers and new worlds.

–

We’re currently working with Navajo designer, Victor Pascual, to put the final touches on our fall catalog.  Look for yours soon!

In July,  Miles traveled to the Chief Vann House Historic Site in Georgia to participate in the annual celebration of the historical plantation home. The Friends of the Vann House sponsored a signing for Miles’ book, which is the first history of the House on Diamond Hill. Over the course of the day, past and present were juxtaposed in an experience that truly gave life to history.

“We Are Standing on Beautiful History”
By Tiya Miles

Each July at around the time of its anniversary as a restored state historic site, the Chief Vann House, the original early 1800s plantation home of the Cherokee leader James Vann, celebrates Vann House Days. This year, despite low morale in the aftermath of state budget cuts that drastically reduced staff numbers and operating hours at historic sites, the event drew a full-house crowd of people with wide-ranging interests.

The 19^th century historical re-enactors are a familiar sight at the annual event. They attend in large numbers and camp on the rolling rear plantation grounds, displaying their antique guns and blacksmithing and soapmaking skills in period dress. This summer the young daughter of one of the re-enactors had set up a tent labeled Vann’s Tavern, from which she was selling homemade lemonade. Since the temperature reached 97 degrees and the air conditioner of the site’s museum petered out from the pressure, she did a brisk business.

Colonial Dames granite marker

Two special events were scheduled for the morning. The Society of Colonial Dames of America Keetoowah Chapter was dedicating a granite marker for the site at 10am, and I was scheduled to sign copies of my new book, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story, at 11am. I wondered who among these historical re-enactors and colonial society women would have interest in my book, which was about the power-laden interrelations among Cherokees, blacks, and white missionaries in the context of American colonialism and expanding chattel slavery. I wondered how many of these white celebrants of the site would trust the account of a scholar who appeared different from them in so many ways—racially, regionally, perhaps politically. I had been told that my book signing would take place in the formal dining room of the Vann home. I expected a thin crowd.

The Colonial Dames were up first. In their long white gloves and pastel skirts, they conducted a formal ceremony. There was prayer, a speech, the recitation of the 23^rd Psalm, and the performance of the song “Home Sweet Home.” The keynote speaker, a descendant of the well-known 19th-century Cherokee Hicks family, gave a moving speech that urged listeners to recognize: “We are standing on beautiful history.” The Vann family, she said, might have had a picnic under the very spruce tree that was shading us in that moment.

Colonial Dames ceremony

The speaker, who expressed herself with great and infectious feeling, repeated some of the notions that were familiar refrains at this site. She described the violent slaveholder James Vann as a praiseworthy man who brought missionaries to his people, and she lamented his murder in 1809 as a tragedy. She expressed gratitude that the missionaries had come to the Cherokees, making them the “educated and civilized tribe that [they] are today.” But to my surprise, as someone who had visited the site for years and lamented the invisibility of black people’s experience there, the speaker also told the crowd to remember all who had walked those grounds: “slaves, Indians, and Moravian missionaries.”

The Dames unveiled their marker and placed a wreath beside it. The inscription read: “Home of the Cherokee Chiefs James and Joseph Vann. On these surrounding acres Cherokees and Moravians as well as enslaved and free laborers toiled together. We honor the memory of these people.” A member of the Friends of the Vann House association tapped my shoulder. People were beginning to line up in the dining room, he said.

It turned out that residents of nearby Georgia and Tennessee towns had read about the book in the local newspaper and had come to learn more about the Vann plantation, known in the 1800s as Diamond Hill.

“Is this the whole story, about everybody who was here?” an older white man with a thick southern accent asked me, “Because I want the whole story.”

Colonial Dames members and Vann House donors were also eager to read the book. Locals bought copies for their grandchildren. A couple bought the book to celebrate the husband’s 71^st birthday. A white haired historical re-enactor came into the dining room’s side door to offer me cool slices of cantaloupe. But even more surprising and gratifying than this warm reception was the presence of descendants of the Vann plantation family.

Vann family reunion attendee speaks with Vann House volunteer

For three years Vann family members had been planning a reunion to be held in Atlanta and at the Vann House site. I had received an email from them out of the blue because of my previous research on the Cherokee Shoeboots family. What I did not realize–and what Vann House staff members who had also been contacted did not know–was that these were not the same Vanns who had held reunions at the site semi-regularly up until around 1999. This was a different branch of the Vann family: descendants of black Vanns whose ancestors might have been slaves on this plantation.

Seeing these Vann family members walk through the house and across the grounds where I had scarcely seen black people before felt miraculous. Vann children with cornrowed hair were playing on the grounds, walking between the brick house and log cabins and corn stalks. I was sure that the Vann House site had not seen so many people of African descent since the Civil War.

Lorraine “Rainey” Taylor, the organizer of the reunion, had invited me to come down to the Marriott Hotel in Atlanta to speak at the reunion banquet that evening. Stalwart Vann House staff member Chase Parker and former staff member Julia Autry, who had developed the site’s new exhibit on African American history, volunteered to accompany me on the one-and-a-half-hour drive. We passed by Confederate flags hanging from people’s porches on the two-lane highway that started our journey, but we also glimpsed a rainbow through the mist of a brief summer shower.

Vann family reunion

At the banquet where black Vann descendants had gathered, a man named James “Toot” Vann Jr. described his experience of going to the site earlier that day. “I had never known about that history. I cried,” he said. “I will never forget it.”

After Mr. Vann shared his reminiscences and I spoke about Diamond Hill history, the Vann family celebrated with dance. Julia Autry leaned over to me and whispered. “It’s them. They’re here.” She was thinking about all of the slaves on the Vann plantation whose names and lives we had so carefully researched for my book and the new black history exhibit. And we did feel, as we sat in the banquet hall with the Vanns, that the past was in the present that night.

Tiya Miles is associate professor of history, American culture, Afro-American studies, and Native American studies at the University of Michigan. Her first book, Ties That Bind: The Story of An Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, won the Organization of American Historians’ Turner Prize and the American Studies Association’s Romero Prize.

Clockwise: Keynote speakers Valarie Fast Horse, director of IT for the Coer d’Alene Tribe, and Syd Beane, Native Public Media advisory council member, discussed the power and possibility of digital communications for tribal communities; videographer Patty Loew gave hands-on training in video editing; University of Minnesota Press authors Jean O’Brien and Robert Warrior listened in as author Mark Trahant discussed his new book; summer in St. Paul provided a colorful backdrop for the week-long conference.

Chad Hamill, associate director of the Plateau Center for American Indian Studies at Washington State University

It’s only been two weeks since Chad Hamill moved with his family from northern Arizona to eastern Washington, but in so many ways he’s been here for much longer. That’s because Hamill conducted fieldwork for his doctoral dissertation in the Columbia Plateau region, investigating traditional song as a catalyst for spiritual power among tribes of the interior Northwest, including the Nez Perce, Umatilla, and Spokane. In addition, it brings him back to the land of his Spokane Indian ancestors.

Now, as associate director of the Plateau Center for American Indian Studies at Washington State University, Hamill will be able to continue his work with people from Columbia Plateau tribes. One of Hamill’s primary duties will be to work with community members on a daily basis both on scholarly and applied projects. “One of the most important roles we have at the Plateau Center is listening to those in the Native communities we hope to serve. As associate director my job will be to help facilitate the mutual construction of bridges from Native communities to the university.”

Hamill will also be able to focus more closely on his own scholarly work. During his fieldwork for his dissertation, Hamill came upon his current project, which is under contract with First Peoples’ partner Oregon State University Press. While conducting genealogical research on his great-uncle, Gibson Eli, “the last medicine man of the Spokane tribe,” he stumbled upon a story “in need of telling.” The book, which is tentatively titled “Three Fathers: The Jesuit, the Medicine Man, and the Power of Song,” will detail the working relationships and friendships of Gibson Eli; Father Tom Connolly, a Jesuit priest who lives on the Coeur d’Alene Indian reservation; and Mitch Michael, a Coeur d’Alene Indian hymn leader. The book explores the relationship between the men as they created a dialogue that crossed religious lines and which spanned three decades, from the 1950s into the 1980s. “It has all kind of come together through this position” says Hamill. “In the end, I was unable to resist the magnetic pull of the Columbia Plateau. Being here will make for a better book and allow me to be a more effective advocate for Plateau peoples.”

Washington State University’s archives are a key component to Hamill’s ongoing research. WSU will soon host ethnomusicologist Loran Olsen’s collection on the music of Columbia Plateau peoples, in particular the Niimiipuu, or Nez Perce people. Olsen served as an adviser on Hamill’s dissertation committee and is an important mentor for Hamill, who also has a half-time appointment in WSU’s School of Music. In the fall Hamill will teach a course in Native American music, which had been a class pioneered by Olsen when he was a faculty member at WSU. “He did important work on behalf of Indigenous Columbia Plateau people for over 30 years,” says Hamill. “I hope to continue his legacy of protecting and preserving Indigenous song traditions.”

Continues Hamill, “an important part of this book is the Indigenous voice. Indigenous perspectives will be privileged, and I can now move around and make the one-on-one connections that are required for that. I can work directly with singers, teachers, and elders, something you just can’t do at a distance.”

In sum, the move is perfectly timed: “My work with the Plateau Center is tied directly to the book project, which is about telling the stories that need to be told.”

Hamill’s book is due out from the Oregon State University Press in 2012.

As usual with sports, none of this is just about a game. Sovereignty, spirituality, and sport collide, and the Nationals’ plight underscores the important fact that lacrosse, now played internationally, is Indigenous born. Much of the media coverage this week has touched on the long history and cultural connections the Haudenosaunee people have with the current sport of lacrosse.

Lacrosse has roots in several single- and double-racket ball games played by First Nations and Native American people, including anetso which is played by the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation. In a new book, author Michael J. Zogry looks at the intertwined nature of game and ritual and offers an important examination of stick ball history and continuity among the Cherokee people. The book Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game: At the Center of Ceremony and Identity (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) is our most recent First Peoples’ title, and it provides a framework for rethinking the understanding of ritual and performance, as well as their relationship to cultural identity. Look for a guest post from Dr. Zogry in the coming weeks.

For just a glimpse at the recent media coverage on lacrosse, here are links to some of the articles about the Iroquois National Lacrosse team:

Allow Iroquois travel [The Buffalo News]

Bid for Trophy becomes a Test of Iroquois Identity [New York Times]

The Iroquois Lacrosse Team Denied [Native America Calling]

Iroquois National travel window closing [Indian Country Today]

Iroquois Nationals Update: Britain Denies Visas [Lacrosse News]

Native American lacrosse team forfeits first game in England as passport dispute drags on [Buffalo Post Blog]

Pride of a Nation [Sports Illustrated]

Statement from Chief Oren R. Lyons, Honorary Chairman, Iroquois Nationals Lacrosse Team [NATV]

US Rule Could keep Iroquois From Lacrosse Tourney [Associate Press via CBS News]

Why the tribe who invented lacrosse can’t play it here [The UK Independent]

So much good advice came from these events, we just had to share, building upon a previous post on the publishing process. For example, Andrew Canessa addressed the art of writing for scholarly journals, but it can easily be applied to any kind of scholarly publication: “Don’t try to cram everything into one article. Be judicious about what you include so you get your message across without overwhelming your reader. A good editor will help you make decisions about what is necessary and what can be cut. Use theory effectively and economically – don’t over cite. Reviews may be hard to take but have confidence in your ideas. Either use the criticism to better your work or reject it in an intelligent way.”

Jason Weidemann, acquiring editor at the University of Minnesota Press, counseled scholars working to revise their dissertation into a book: “As you’re beginning to develop your dissertation into a book, return to your committee and ask them what parts they think would be most important to include in a book.” He also said that you can expect around 30 percent of a dissertation to be publishable material once it has been re-crafted.

Germano recommended that authors focus on audience: “Writing is a kind of discipline of self description. It is often a very useful way of clarifying what you are writing about. Begin large and get smaller and smaller. It forces you to make a determination about what really counts to you and to your audience.”

Particularly relevant to the multi-disciplinary field of Indigenous studies, Germano added: “Scholars need to be able to explain what they want to accomplish with their work and what use it has to people not in their field.” In fact, these are the scholars that could be a book’s best audience. “Think of writing a book as an act of distance education. But don’t try to make your work do everything. Leave stuff in for the reader to do.”

Mark Simpson-Vos, editor at the University of North Carolina Press, had inspirational words for scholars in Indigenous studies. He said, “this is an exciting time in Indigenous studies and you are the explainers of what’s going on. As publishers we’re here because we want to help you with all of this. We are the ones who will help you get those ideas out to the people who will use those ideas.”

Here are some other useful tips:

• When selecting a press, approach the proposal process as you would a job interview: take it seriously! And make sure you are consistent in how you explain what your book is about.

• Before submitting a manuscript or proposal, familiarize yourself with the publishers in your field. Read their books or journal articles to determine the best fit for your work.  Consult with the presses to see what they’re publishing now and in the near future. Talking to publishers at conferences is a great way to begin that research process and to begin to form relationships with editors.

• When you submit a proposal, be sure to follow the submission guidelines on the press website. Include a 1-2 page cover letter written to the editor. Describe the strengths and weaknesses of your work, and how you see it fitting in with their existing publishing program.  Explain what stage you are at in the writing or revision process and what your intentions are, including estimated page length. Mention any research/publication grants you have received.

• The quality of the proposal is very important because it forms the first impression the publisher will have of you and the type of work that you do.

• If you are submitting your work to multiple presses, be completely up-front with the editors. The editors on the publishing panel encouraged complete honesty on this point. Some presses will not send proposals or manuscripts out for peer review if they’re being considered simultaneously by other presses.

• This can vary depending on the press, but plan to include a table of contents, the introduction or an outline for an introduction, and at least one sample chapter. Also, present a practical timeline for when you think the full manuscript will be ready to submit.

Questions? Please email us. We’ll get the answers for you. amogollon@uapress.arizona.edu

Troubles Decolonizing a Colonial History
By Malinda Maynor Lowery

Much work in the the field of Native American history has centered on Indians’ relationships with European colonizers and the U.S. government, perhaps rightly so. As historians, we are trained to analyze primarily the written word, words written mostly by colonizers. And while some scholars have done remarkable oral histories and ethnographies of Native communities, a history based on oral sources or indigenous knowledge is not automatically more relevant to Indian communities, just because it avoids the colonizers’ words. Sources don’t by themselves make Indian history more relevant to Indian people. We have to put the information we gather to work, or history forever remains a telling about an other, rather than an authentic rendering of a truth about human nature and societies.

Dr. Lowery shared photos from her book during a lecture at the University of North Carolina-Pembroke in April.

My book, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South, has been called on to do several kinds of work since its release. Some of it, I feel, genuinely approaches a decolonizing purpose–an affirmation of inherent sovereignty–while some of it reinforces agendas set forth by the colonizer, thus yielding that sovereignty. To paraphrase scholar Kevin Bruyneel (The Third Space of Sovereignty), indigenous peoples claim a retained sovereignty while American law and policy possess a “colonial ambivalence” toward sovereignty that continually compromises our ability to express it. Colonialism thrives on the supposedly fixed boundaries between written and oral, indigenous and European, sovereign and dependent, colonized and colonizer. Indeed, our scholarship often resides within these boundaries as well and strengthens colonialism; but I hope that I can put this book to work in a way that will cross, expose, and disable those boundaries rather than strengthen them.

For example, people who are descended from Lumbees, or have Lumbee children, have contacted me after reading the book. They are rediscovering their ancestors or knowing them for the first time, and they typically express thanks that the book has taught them something new or explained an old question that has always lingered with them. I’ve heard, “Your book gave me such insight to my dad and understanding of his feelings and values,” and “Your book has made me angry, not at you but at the way that white attitudes and opinions have caused Indians to judge each other and distance themselves from Blacks, and even make Blacks hate themselves, wishing to be something else. History has been ugly at times. I have battled with these same questions of identity my entire life.” I feel blessed that the book evokes such strong reactions.

We have held two Lumbee community events around the book, one a conventional author lecture and the other a more dynamic roundtable discussion with other local historians and descendants of people depicted in the book. Rather than populate those forums with people who repeat the story printed on the tribal website, I prefer to bring people together who will speak plainly and offer insights that might be controversial but nevertheless should be heard. Lumbee and Tuscarora views were represented, with frank discussion about issues like race, blood, class, and recognition strategies–the sometimes “ugly” yet profound parts of our history, the ones that teach us the most about who we are. Indians and non-Indians have written me letters, sent me photographs, and shared with me oral history interviews which elaborate on the story the book tells and show me things I never knew. That exchange teaches me that while the printed word seems final, knowledge nonetheless continues to grow. Furthermore, accountability is an important part of community relevance; I have to share my new knowledge, even when I’ve been told I’m wrong (watch for that in another blog post).

During Lumbee Homecoming in June, local historians and descendants of people depicted in the book came together to frankly discuss issues like race, blood, class, and recognition strategies.

When people use the book to take ownership of their history I am most proud of what I’ve accomplished. In fact, my proudest moments came one afternoon as my family sat in a vigil over my aunt’s last days. She was dying from pancreatic cancer, and her siblings, children, grandchildren, cousins, and friends gathered around her. My book was there too, passed from hand to hand as a diversion from the suffering before us. My teenage cousins looked at the photographs. My aunts and older cousins immediately flipped to the picture of my grandparents, read the passages about them, and smiled, talking over old memories. I wrote elaborate epistles to my cousins on the title page. Some who had started reading it teased me about how hard the vocabulary was; I told them that using words the reader doesn’t know is a sign of poor writing. Greater community relevance could certainly begin with a complete overhaul of our academic style of writing.

Even though I know what some individuals take away from the book, what impact it has on the larger community struggle to assert sovereignty is still a mystery. Even activities like our roundtable discussion that show greater ownership over our past bear witness to how history is used strategically. For example, a Tuscarora speaker, a descendant of the “Original 22″ Indians recognized by the BIA in 1938, validated the rightness of blood quantum determinations of identity (though it was firmly situated in his own history, and not intended to be a general rule applied to everyone). He spoke on behalf of a colonial agenda that many Indians from other tribes have embraced but the Lumbees have rejected. At the same time, he proposed an inclusive path to recognition that would revisit that past decision and have all of us, regardless of blood quantum, now receiving federal services. His interpretation of the past could easily serve a colonizing agenda one moment, and a decolonizing one the next.

Scholarship can serve colonial ambivalence as well. Recently a prominent, Indian-run, national organization requested clarification from me regarding an individual applying for their services who claimed descent from the federally-recognized Original 22. They wanted to know whether this individual was eligible for services provided only to federally-recognized Indians. Given the limited information I had about the case, I unfortunately had to conclude that the person was not eligible; in recognizing the 22, the BIA contravened the Indian Reorganization Act and prevented them from organizing as a tribe and placing land into trust. Nor did the BIA allow recognition of their descendants. At first I felt pleasure that I could answer the question, and that something I had written would be useful in explaining the context around such a situation. But then I developed mixed feelings–my knowledge was essentially used to enforce the rules of federal recognition which we all know to be arbitrary in that they have excluded this applicant who was undoubtedly a member of an Indian tribe. The story I told, though truthful, did nothing to help this applicant and in fact sustained a justification for his exclusion.

Indian people live and breathe colonialism every day. It influences not only our contemporary circumstances but our view of the past. And I’d venture to say that most of us don’t look at that past exclusively through the lens of one of the colonizer’s collaborators; rather, our relationship to colonialism is more complex. Some of us find that a reading of the past influenced by colonialism serves our interests at some points, while at other times we resist views of history that privilege European epistemologies. Most of us live our daily lives in some grey area in between. I still have a long way to go to put my book to work in a way that crosses and exposes the borders that strengthen colonial domination. The book may empower Lumbee and Tuscarora people to tell their own stories and know themselves better, but it can also further our colonized status.

–

Maynor Lowery is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She was born in Robeson County, North Carolina and is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. Her book Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation was published by University of North Carolina Press.

In her opening remarks the conference’s honorary chair, Professor Emeritus Marlene Brant Castellano, encapsulated the tone of the conference and the mission of the PhD program: “We are not teaching about Indigenous knowledge, rather we are reaffirming it as a foundation for contemporary knowledge. We aren’t preserving something from the past, but we are expressing that knowledge as a way of being good citizens in our communities and in the world. We are opening an Indigenous route to credentialing in the academy.” Many conference sessions spoke directly to this point, addressing ways to make Indigenous knowledge central to and viable in the Western academic model.

Internationally acclaimed performance artist James Luna at Peterborough's Ode'min Giizis Festival.

Song, performance, ceremony, and story were also common themes throughout this five-day conference, due in part to its coinciding with Peterborough’s annual Ode’min Giizis Indigenous arts festival. The festival featured performance art pieces by James Luna and Tanya Lukin-Linklater, masterful storytelling by Makka Kleist of Greenland, musical performances by cutting edge Aboriginal performers including Lucie Idlout and Tanya Tagaq, and the Compaigni V’ni Dansi’s portrayal of Métis resistance told through traditional and contemporary dance, among many other events. The influence of this creative atmosphere was evident in a number of sessions on song, dance, and literature,  as well as occasional songs and performances being incorporated into the scholarly presentations.

In addition to Indigenous performance and pedagogy, sessions dealt with many of the challenges facing Indigenous societies today such as language loss and revitalization and environmental degradation and recovery. The overall tone of the conference was a hopeful one and the performance components allowed that hope to be more tangible. As recent Trent graduate, Dr. Karyn Recollet, said in her conference paper on Aborginial hip-hop in Canada, many of the artists and presenters could be seen as  “performing possible worlds into being.”

Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith delivering her keynote address.

Much of the research presented and the conference itself elegantly embodied the rhetoric of “decolonizing the academy” and truly centering Indigenous knowledge in academic research. In one of five keynote addresses, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, author of Decolonizing Methodologies (Zed Books, 1999) spoke of the transformative potential of Indigenous knowledge, which she referred to as a “value system.” She went on to say that, “applying Indigenous knowledge to contemporary life helps us understand and find a path,” in both personal and scholarly realms.

Gregory Cajete used his address, Re-Building Sustainable Indigenous Communities, to advocate for the importance of Indigenous community-based education. He posited that Indigenous education forms a foundation for community renewal  and revitalization and said that, “as concerned people we have to take a long, hard, and honest look at the current educational, economic, governmental, and community development policies, planning, and processes which many times make us complicit with the status quo.” He went on to encourage scholars not to forget the importance of community in Indigenous society and pedagogy, arguing that community should be recognized as “a guiding process in Indigenous thought. ”

Manulani Meyer gave another powerful address that drew upon Hawaiian and Maori knowledge systems as well as Eastern and Western philosophy. Her seamless interconnections between multiple epistemologies placed Indigenous knowledge and scholars in context among other great contemporary and historical thinkers. She made a repeated call for scholars to bring more joy into their work and to take better care of themselves, each other, and their communities. This, she said, is the true starting point for decolonizing minds and the academy.

Dr. Robert Warrior, in his presidential address at last month’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) conference,  encouraged scholars of Indigenous studies to develop a “sense of practice” in the same way that artists approach their work. He called for those working in the field to see themselves in dialogue with Indigenous communities and knowledge systems while also allowing their passion and commitment to be embodied in their work. The Celebrating Indigenous Knowledges conference gave a glimpse into how Warrior’s call might be answered. The idea of bringing joy and a sense of community into academic work, the palpability of hope and reclaiming of narratives visible in the performances,  and Trent’s Indigenous Studies program as a whole, impressively embraced these ideals and provided a clear model for some of the positive directions in which Indigenous studies is developing.

The Peter Gzowski college on the banks of the Otonabee River houses Trent University's Indigenous Studies department and the Nozhem Theater.

Your work is a significant retelling of the history of Oregon’s settlement. How has that been received?
I am not the first historian to assert a framework of colony and empire for the history of American Indians and the American West. I’ve tried to take the concept of American empire, define it, test it, and advance the dialogue. Necessarily, the book makes appropriate criticisms of earlier models of American empire that assert a firm distinction between continental and overseas expansion or that rely on Marxian critiques of capital and western regionalism. I tried to test the applicability of the term empire for the U.S. and then to trace how it took shape along the frontiers of interaction between Native peoples and newcomers. Similarly, the much maligned concept of the American Frontier, which suggests a generalized process of Americanization, is better considered in terms of specific colonies because location, contingency, and individual agency matter. Colonial situations differed throughout the modern U.S., including Hawai’i, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and “territories” such as Samoa or the Virgin Islands. Oregon reveals some larger patterns of American colonialism and empire, but the history also reveals the importance of the local Native and non-Native actors as they competed, traded, fought, and negotiated. I found that I could not even take for granted the place I was studying. The central metaphor and focus of my study became the history of the place: the creations of the indigenous world of Illahee and the colonial world of Oregon.

Outside of academia, I have encountered skepticism because the idea of an American empire threatens some people. My work undermines old-school triumphant narratives that retain a surprising amount of popular support. Among progressives, I more often encounter an accepted, guilt narrative akin with Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. I have to say, “wait, there is more to the story and you may not like it.”

What sources led you to your argument that we must understand Oregon’s settlement and path to statehood as an exercise in early American imperialism and a steady erasure of Native concepts of land and place (Illahee)?
It helped that I didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. By the late 1990s when I began this project, the literature had pretty convincingly established that the U.S. had constrained Native sovereignty into an inferior status. Progressive critics going back to the 1930s had noted the similarities between the administrations of Indian affairs and the Europeans’ colonies. I attempted to move beyond rhetoric and analyze the advent of the colonial relationship in terms of a specific region and at an important point in history. The primary source material of the competing empires of the U.S. and Great Britain is predominantly a record of defining and commodifying places based on their resources. Similarly, the texts that contain Indian voices reflect this tendency toward place construction. These texts were not indigenous; the government reports, missionary writings, and even the Native oral accounts collected by anthropologists mediate the words and meanings of nineteenth-century Indians. However, the concerns of Native people clearly identify the centrality of place as critically important to them. Thus, a focus on place (the cultural definitions of physical space) seemed logical and a representative way to examine different perspectives.

How did Indigenous people participate in and also resist these imperial advances?
The Native people of Oregon didn’t encounter empires per se; they encountered individuals who arrived from elsewhere. The region we call the Pacific Northwest housed dozens of Native languages, ways of life adapted to every environment North America offers, and considerable communication from California to the Great Plains and from the Great Basin to the Subarctic. In short, before 1792 when Capt. Gray sailed through the mouth of the Columbia River, Indian people were familiar with meeting others who spoke, dressed, acted, and looked different from themselves. Strangers always offered the potential for gain or loss. American seamen, Scottish traders, Hawaiian trappers, and Iroquois hunters would have been particularly strange to the Indians of Oregon but only briefly and less dramatically than one might first believe. Oregon Indians responded in a variety of ways based on their beliefs in attaining power, maintaining kin relations, and continuing the cycles of life.

What makes modern Oregon’s colonial history so unique?
The timing of Oregon’s colonization reflects the U.S. empire in its infancy and the British empire in transition following the American Revolution and the outbreak of the French Revolution. Modern nation-states and new forms of empires were taking shape. New ideologies of republicanism, democracy, liberal economics, and racialism came to the fore. Oregon was a proving ground for the competing empires, as the Northwest became bound to the new prize of China and the trans-Pacific trade. The relatively sedentary Native communities of the coastal Northwest facilitated and, at times, confounded these developments. The term I use Illahee encapsulated the tangled network of self-interest, kin responsibilities, and resource rights that prevented either a British or U.S. imperial order from being imposed. After the malaria cataclysm of the early 1830s and subsequent epidemics caused the collapse of the Native majority, Indians continued to attempt to participate in the newcomers’ market economy on their own terms. However, the rapid, brutal demographic transition to a settler-colonial society left Indian people little room to maneuver. Colonials often portrayed Native peoples as violently opposed to colonization, an excuse to murder Indians, but the reality was often that Indians offered competition in the commodification of Oregon, a competition that many Euro-Americans deemed illegitimate. In the heyday of unbridled entitlement based on birthright, Euro-Americans literally tried to exterminate the Native population. The colonization of Oregon began with grand ideals and ended with attempted genocide in the name of freedom.

What implications does this history have for today?
Admitting you have an empire is the first step. Actually, the term empire can be problematic because it is loaded with connotations associated with the Left and causes knee jerks from the Center and Right of U.S. politics. Thus, people might react ideologically rather than critically to the arguments and evidence in this book. Generally, the U.S. government and its citizens are in the world’s minority in failing to recognize the existence of an American empire. Still, academics can’t simply assert the term empire and hope that it becomes popularly accepted as conventional wisdom. People don’t often question convention, so it would be counter-productive, just a new thoughtless utterance. I hope that the colonial history of Oregon causes people to question what American empire meant in the nineteenth century as well as other places at different times, particularly regarding the lives of indigenous people. I tried to operationalize empire and colony and examine the ideologies, mechanics, and consequences. Generations of American Indians have influenced these changes and endured them. The Native population has experienced the entire history of American empire firsthand from trade to missionization and conquest to the assimilation of people and resources. In the 1930s, an Indian rights advocate named Felix Cohen called American Indians canaries in the coal mine of American democracy. One needs to adjust perspectives only slightly to see the determining position of Indian people in relation to the public-private partnership of American empire in the acquisition, administration, and disposal of natural resources and wealth. The U.S. was created from Indian Country, but Indians have found various ways to reestablish places and identities, which illuminate the parameters and possibilities of the empire republic. Illahee continues to exist in Oregon.

___________
Gray H. Whaley is assistant professor of history at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His book Oregon and Collapse of Illahee: U.S. Empire and the Transformation of an Indigenous World, 1792-1859 is now available from the University of North Carolina Press.

“In May I had the opportunity to attend the annual Native American and Indigenous Studies meeting in Tucson, Arizona. Always an energetic and passionate gathering, this year’s was even more so given that the meeting took place against the backdrop of Arizona’s recent passage of a stringent new immigration law and a measure banning ethnic studies courses in public schools….”

Read the complete post

Our partner presses publish expert titles in the field of language preservation. "Teaching Oregon Native Languages" from Oregon State University Press

During the past two weeks participants at the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI), held in Tucson, Arizona, have been investigating ways to use technology to advance their work. “During AILDI each summer, Indigenous language warriors from all over gather to learn, share, and prepare to fight to keep our Indigenous languages alive,” says AILDI faculty member Stacey Oberly, a member of the Southern Ute tribe working on native language revitalization.

To further this goal, sessions at AILDI are focused squarely on innovative techniques that directly impact the way educators work, and they are taking local examples from global sources. One session for a cohort of practitioners from Indigenous communities in Mexico are learning how to use Microsoft Publisher to develop low cost, but effective, educational materials.

The Tohono O’odham Community College cohort looked across the Pacific Ocean for new frameworks, curriculum, and assessment tools. They sponsored scholar Katarina Edmonds, PhD , to come from New Zealand to AILDI to share her experiences as both a native speaker of Māori, as well as a leading teacher and scholar of the teaching of the language. Together each afternoon for almost two weeks, the group has discussed ways the Māori have worked to get people involved in education and on a path to continue and maintain their language. Edmonds has underscored the importance of constant assessment in the development and implementation of Native language programs. “I cannot stress how important it is to know where your language is,” she said.

"Native American Language Ideologies" from University of Arizona Press

The sharing has been multi-directional with Edmonds learning alongside institute participants, “We’re still concerned. The Māori language is not safe so everything we can do is important.”

ALDI is just one of many language institutes held this summer. Other conferences include:

Approaches to Teaching Lakota Culture
June 21-July 9
Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies

Breath of Life Workshop for the Native Languages of California
June 6-12
University of California at Berekely

Indigenous Language Institute
Ongoing workshops

Northwest Indian Language Institute
June 21-July 30
University of Oregon

"The Mishomis Book" from University of Minnesota Press

Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Symposium (co-convened with the International Conference on Salish and Neighboring Languages, the Athabascan/Dene Languages Conference, and the Hokan-Penutian Languages Conference)
June 17-20
University of Oregon

Save Your Language Conference
June 5-6
Vancouver, BC

Foundation for Endangered Languages conference
September 13-15
University of Wales

There are also numerous organizations and web resources to turn to for help in language preservation. Here are just a few:

Alaska Native Language Center

Yukon Native Language Center

MIT Indigenous Language Initiative

The Three Rivers Language Center

Katherine Regional Language Center

Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Center

Teaching Indigenous Languages

Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity

There is so much good work being done out there and we’d love to hear about more. If you know of another language conference, symposium, or organization that doesn’t appear on the lists above, please let us know about it. Also, we’d love to hear from you about your experiences at language revitalization gatherings, or work you’re doing in your community. Send us your stories and, if we receive enough, we’ll publish them here later this summer.

Make Your X-Mark
By Scott Richard Lyons

In my book, I argue for a greater recognition of the actually existing diversity in Native America, and I further posit the suggestion that indige­nous people have the right to move in modern time. That means, first, acknowledging differences that already exist in the Fourth World, and, second, seeing those differences as by-products of modernity, hence nothing to be ashamed of. Native shame is rarely justified. We require a little self-forgiveness for being the people we are, and we should remember that the flip side of forgiveness is a promise. Our ancestors promised that their descendants would be part of the modern world while continuing to maintain that activist sense of community that Jace Weaver has called “communitism.”* Sometimes that means adopting new ways of living, thinking, and being that do not necessarily emanate from a traditional cultural source (or, for that matter, “time immemorial”), and sometimes it means appropriating the new and changing it to feel more like the old. Sometimes change can make the old feel new again. Sometimes a removal can become a migration.

I use the x-mark to symbolize Native assent to the new, and to call into question old ideas of “assimilation” and “acculturation” (at very least they get the scare quotes). The sites that most interest me are the ones that are most controversial: identity, culture, and the idea of an “Indian nation.” These are sites where x-marks are now being made; hence they are spaces where the old guards of reaction are most likely to be found. In the book, I examine the current proliferation of Indian identity controversies and read them as a signifier of a larger identity crisis. Next I deal with culture and how it gets used by parties who feel the need to police its boundaries. I take the idea of an Indian nation—and the nationalism that always produces that idea—seriously, and I consider the prospects of indigenous citizenship as a force to be reckoned with in modern times. I attempt to unpack each of these  subjects by locating them in time, space, discourse, and, whenever possible, in Ojibwemowin.

I wrote X-Marks because I found myself increasingly dissatisfied with the ways in which terms like identity, culture, and nation are used, which is to say, “naturally,” ahistorically, and with a large measure of essentialism. While it may be true that Native essentialism has been politically expedient for the way it resists incorporation into the dominant culture and settler state, and while it may be equally true that essentialism is open to readings (by highly educated cosmopolitan intellectuals like me and probably you) as “strategic,” it is also the case that the conditions of life that essentialism tries to sustain are often retrograde and unjust. When an Indian nation purges a population in its jurisdiction on grounds that it lacks certain characteristics, people actually lose their homes. When a Native religious movement that has existed for nearly five centuries is deemed unauthentic or nontraditional because its name is Christianity—even though it might well enhance the lives of the Indians who follow it—then we require a discussion about what we mean by “traditional.” This book is interested in these sorts of issues, as you’ll soon see, and it follows a question that I have long asked myself: is it possible today to envision the survival of indigenous identity, culture, and nationalization in a nonessentialistic manner?

Perhaps the thing to do is to see essentialism as part of our history, appreciate its function at certain critical junctures, but then recognize that recent indigenous gains on the world stage might well signal a new time now when Native essentialisms should be discarded, because, after all, as “ahistorical truths” they are always illusory and usually harmful. Politically, this investigation will be nobody’s manifesto. To the extent that it resembles theory, it is clearly more polytheistic than monotheistic. Nevertheless, I have tried to call it as I see it, and what I usually see when I look at Native America and the indigenous world—indeed, when I look into the mirror—is an x-mark.

***
Scott Richard Lyons (Ojibwe/Dakota) is associate professor of English at Syracuse University, where he teaches Indigenous and American literatures. Lyons will be the keynote speaker at the Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville, October 14-16.

*Jace Weaver, There the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community (Oxford University Press, 1997)

The Congress opened with a keynote by Dr. Richard Atleo, a Nuu-chah-nulth hereditary chief and the founder of Vancouver Island University’s First Nations Studies Department, as well as welcome speeches and dances by local Nuu-chah-nulth and Tla-o-qui-aht tribal members. The week-long congress was packed full of activities: multiple sessions and Indigenous forums occupied the majority of the daylight hours while the evenings featured a community exchange event, an Indigenous film festival, several plenary sessions, and a Code of Ethics meeting. The organizers of the Congress encouraged participants to get to know the area by scheduling a day for field trips ranging from guided ethnobotanical and interpretive walks to sea kayaking and whale watching.

Throughout the week, presenters and Congress participants grappled with some of the major challenges posed by climate change, language and culture loss, and environmental degradation while trying to ensure that the ethics and methods driving work in this field are appropriate and respectful of the communities where research is conducted. Some Indigenous participants at this meeting voiced the concern that Indigenous researchers are not currently engaged in the ISE on the same level as non-Indigenous or Western-trained academics. One participant pointed out that this disparity was especially evident in the wording of the Code of Ethics, which assumes that Indigenous communities are always being researched rather than having active roles in conducting research. Another Indigenous attendee voiced concern about the amount of pressure the field places on Indigenous communities to share cultural knowledge to remedy environmental degradation and the impacts of climate change, while also returning to traditional lifeways that may or may not be feasible or desirable for modern Indigenous communities. Importantly, members of the ISE governing board listened to these concerns and demonstrated respectable efforts to address them. Among other efforts, ISE revisited their Code of Ethics in a special session, officially adopted the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into their constitution, and is actively recruiting and supporting Indigenous scholars from around the world.

There were  many valuable sessions at this conference; a few of those with the greatest attendance and most lively conversation included:

The Forgotten Dimension of Climate Change, hosted by Liz Hosken of the Gaia Foundation. This session brought together grassroots organizers from the Colombian Amazon, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Russia to discuss their efforts to work with Indigenous communities to help make them and their environs more resilient to climate change.

Food Systems: Building Partnerships to Document and Maintain Local Foods to Promote Health John Rampanen (Ahouset and Tla-o-qui-aht) spoke of local initiatives to revive hunting and other traditional food gathering practices and to raise awareness about the benefits of returning to more traditional foods. Among these initiatives is an “Indigenous foods challenge” in which people eat only Native foods for a set amount of time and are asked to monitor the impacts on their health and energy levels.

There were numerous papers on community language revitalization efforts and ways that new media can be used in these efforts. In the session, Cedar Stripping: The Role of New Media in Language Revitalization and Biocultural Resurgence, Jon Corbett (University of British Columbia) and Tim Kulkyski (Cowichan Tribe) spoke of their collaboration to use new media to revitalize Hul’q’umi num’ language. They work with tribal elders to record teachings on important cultural lessons and plant harvesting procedures in the Hul’q’umi num’ language, then distribute these videos to community members. They talked about some of the privacy and access issues they face in creating new media and some of the measures they’re taking to ensure that important cultural information is not lost, but also not distributed too widely.

In The Application of Novel Information and Communications Technologies in Addressing the Global Loss of Biocultural Diversity, members of Living Cultural Storybases presented their work to record stories and oral histories in Native languages. The organization has worked with communities around the world but, at the Congress, spoke of their work with 20 Quechua communities in Peru. There, they gave students devices for recording stories from elders in the community. The stories were then broadcast on community radio stations with invitations for community members to call in and comment – thus enabling community interaction and making the stories seem more living, rather than just recorded. They also used barcode recognition software to embed the stories in physical objects so that the stories had a tactile element to them (photos above). More about this project and other work being done by the organization can be found on their website.

Photo Captions: Above left: 1. Congress participants await the opening ceremonies in the Tin Wis Hall; 2. Barcodes and Quechua stole – the barcodes are embedded with a video of a 102-year-old Quechua woman explaining the meaning of the symbols on the stole; 3. Nicolas Villaume of Living Cultural Storybases shows Jessie Bartlett of the Central Land Council in Alice Springs, Australia how to photograph and  then access the story embedded in the barcode; 4. The coat rack at the opening night ceremonies gives an indication of the diverse make-up of the Congress; 5. Participants in the ethnoornithology session listen as Bobo Kadiri Serge of the the University of Dschang, Cameroon speaks about cultural interpretations of various birds among the Banso of Northwestern Cameroon. Above center: Photos taken around Tofino and of Congress participants during the sea kayaking field trip. All photos by Natasha Varner.

The annual meeting of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) was held last week in Tucson, Arizona. It was yet again a dynamic and exciting meeting, bringing together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and from universities, research organizations, and communities all over the world. Overall, there were nearly 800 registrations and over 100 sessions on topics ranging from Indigenous ethics and methodologies to sovereignty and literary criticism, and much more.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth to say hello and chat about books and project ideas, attended the publishing panel we organized, came to our meet-and-greet with University of North Carolina Press author Malinda Maynor Lowery, and stayed for the evening of amazing poetry readings by Sherwin Bitsui, Laura Tohe, Joy Harjo, and Ofelia Zepeda, all published by the University of Arizona Press.

But what would an academic meeting be without books and the discussions they generate? These First Peoples partner press books, in particular, garnered special attention:

Kevin Bruyneel, Third Space for Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations (University of Minnesota Press, 2007)

David Chang, The Color of Land: Race: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010)

Joy Harjo, For a Girl Becoming (University of Arizona Press, 2009)

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Oregon State University Press, 2003)

Judith L. Li, To Harvest, to Hunt: Stories of Resource Use in the American West (Oregon State University Press, 2007)

Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (University of Minnesota Press, 2010)

Malinda Maynor Lowery Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and Making of a Nation (University of North Carolina Press, 2010)

Ofelia Zepeda, Where Clouds are Formed (University of Arizona Press, 2008)

Photo Caption: 1. Panelists at the publishing roundtable, Ailleen Moreton-Robinson, Andrew Canessa, Jason Weidemann, Mary Elizabeth Braun, Patti Hartmann, Mark Simpson-Vos, and Christine Szuter; 2. First Peoples’ program coordinator Natasha Varner and advisory board member Eugene Hunn visit at the booth; 3.The First Peoples’ table;  4. Poets Ofelia Zepeda, Sherwin Bitsui, Joy Harjo, and Laura Tohe after Friday evening’s poetry reading

WEDNESDAY, May 19, Dissertation Revision Workshop

On Wednesday afternoon, we’re sponsoring a dissertation revision workshop for forthcoming First Peoples authors with William Germano, author of From Dissertation to Book (University of Chicago Press 2005). Participants invited to this half-day workshop will focus on revising the doctoral dissertation for publication. Conducted in seminar format, the workshop explores means of strengthening skills in professional writing and project design. While the primary focus of the session is the new Ph.D. and his or her dissertation manuscript, Germano’s work also extends beyond that horizon.

THURSDAY, May 20, 9:45-10:15, Meet Author Malinda Maynor Lowery

First Peoples sponsored coffee break, NAISA exhibit hall 9:45-10:15,  and Malinda Maynor Lowery meet and greet, First Peoples booth. Lowery is the author of Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (UNC Press), which describes how, between Reconstruction and the 1950s, the Lumbee crafted and maintained a distinct identity in an era defined by racial segregation in the South and paternalistic policies for Indians throughout the nation. Please come by if you can to chat with Malinda and hear about her work in constructing community history.

FRIDAY, May 20, 12:00-1:45, Publishing Indigenous Studies Roundtable

Editors from leading publishers of Indigenous studies scholarship will discuss the ins and outs of publishing. They will address critical stages of the publishing process, from how to submit a quality proposal to contracts and marketing. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to gain insight and behind the scenes information, as well as ask questions of top editors. This roundtable is designed for junior scholars and graduate students but will also be informative for senior scholars and previously published authors.

Panel participants:
Chair: Christine Szuter, director Scholarly Publishing Program, Arizona State University
Andrew Canessa, Editor, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
Patti Hartmann, Editor, The University of Arizona Press
Jason Weidemann, Editor, The University of Minnesota Press
Mark Simpson-Vos, Editor, The University of North Carolina Press
Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Co-Editor, International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies
Mary Elizabeth Braun,  Editor, The Oregon State University Press

12th International Congress of Ethnobiology (May 9-14, 2010)

This week the International Society of Enthnobiology (ISE) convenes in Tofino, British Columbia. The congress brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous people from around the world to tackle the key issues of our times, such as community-conserved areas and food sovereignty. The organization, which held its inaugural congress in Belém, Brazil in 1988, has a stated mission to recognize the central role of Indigenous peoples in all global, regional, and local processes, and the ICE works to support and promote  the critical efforts of Indigenous peoples, traditional societies, and local communities in the conservation of biological, cultural and linguistic diversity.

In honor of the conference, we’ve compiled a list of recommended titles from our partner presses:

• Baboquivari Mountain Plants: Identification, Ecology, and Ethnobotany
  University of Arizona Press, 2010

By Daniel F. Austin
The Baboquivari Mountains, long considered to be a sacred space by the Tohono O’odham people who are native to the area, are the westernmost of the so-called Sky Islands. The mountains form the border between the floristic regions of Chihuahua and Sonora. This encyclopedic work describes the flora of this unique area in detail. It includes descriptions, identifications, ecology, and extensive etymologies of plant names in European and Indigenous languages. Daniel Austin also describes pollination biology and seed dispersal and explains how plants in the area have been used by humans, beginning with Native Americans.

• Empty Nets: Indians, Dams, and the Columbia River
  Oregon State University Press, 2007

• The First Oregonians: Second Edition
  Oregon State University Press, 2007

Edited by Laura Berg
In this remarkable volume, Oregon Indians tell their own stories—more than half of the chapters are written by members of Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribes. Using oral histories and personal recollections, these chapters vividly depict not only a history of decimation and decline, but also a contemporary view of cultural revitalization, renewal, and continuity. 

• Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
  Oregon State University Press, 2003

By Robin Wall Kimmerer
Drawing on her diverse experiences as a scientist, mother, teacher, and writer of Native American heritage, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as in the framework of Indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world.

• The Great Cacti: Ethnobotany and Biogeography
  University of Arizona Press, 2007

By David Yetman
Towering over deserts, arid scrublands, and dry tropical forests, giant cacti grow throughout the Americas, from the United States to Argentina—often in rough terrain and on barren, parched soils, places inhospitable to people. But as David Yetman shows, many of these tall plants have contributed significantly to human survival.

• To Harvest, To Hunt: Stories of Resource Use in the American West
  Oregon State University Press, 2007

Edited By Judith L. Li
To Harvest, To Hunt reveals how diverse peoples have valued and used natural resources throughout the history of the American West. Drawing on family letters, oral traditions, historical records, and personal experience, the book’s contributors offer readers new perspectives on the land they live on, the harvests they consume, and the natural resources they manage.

• Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest
  Oregon State University Press, 1999

Edited By Robert Boyd
Drawing on historical journals, Native American informants, and botanical and forestry studies, the contributors to this book describe local patterns of fire use in eight ecoregions, representing all parts of the Native Northwest, from southwest Oregon to British Columbia and from Puget Sound to the Northern Rockies. Their essays provide glimpses into a unique understanding of the environment–a traditional ecological knowledge now for the most part lost. Together, these writings also offer historical perspective on the contemporary debate over “prescribed burning” on public lands.

• Klamath Heartlands: A Guide to the Klamath Reservation Forest Plan
  Oregon State University Press, 2004

By Edward C. Wolf
Klamath Heartlands introduces the unique-in-the-nation plan by the Klamath Tribes of southern Oregon to restore the “remembered forest” of their former reservation, an area that Oregon governor McCall called “the greatest single stand of ponderosa pines to be found anywhere in the West.” Part of the Tribes’ effort to regain lands they lost in 1954, the Klamath Reservation Forest Plan offers a vision of ecological and cultural restoration that will change the way we think about Western forests.

• Mining, the Environment, and Indigenous Development Conflicts
  University of Arizona Press, 2003

By Saleem H. Ali
This book gets to the heart of resource conflicts and environmental impact assessment by asking why indigenous communities support environmental causes in some cases of mining development but not in others. Saleem Ali examines environmental conflicts between mining companies and indigenous communities and with rare objectivity offers a comparative study of the factors leading to those conflicts.

• Renewing Salmon Nation’s Food Traditions
  Oregon State University Press, 2006

Edited By Gary Paul Nabhan
Renewing Salmon Nation’s Food Traditions encourages readers and eaters to familiarize themselves with the rich histories, ecologies, and recipes of these local foods. This beautifully illustrated handbook describes the appearance and taste of each species, as well as its origin and history, geographic range, and culinary uses. Foods on the list range from domesticated crops such as the Bing cherry, Hood strawberry, and Nez Perce bean to sea foods such as Chinook salmon, candlefish smelt, and geoduck, and wild foods such as Oregon black truffle, wapato, and blackcap raspberry. A resource list at the back of the book identifies nurseries, seed companies, and suppliers working to safeguard and revitalize the heritage foods of Salmon Nation.

• Wings in the Desert: A Folk Ornithology of the Northern Pimans
  University of Arizona Press, 2007

By Amadeo M. Rea
Drawing on more than four decades of field and textual research along with hundreds of interviews with tribe  members, Rea identifies how birds are incorporated, both symbolically and practically, into Piman legends, songs, art, religion, and ceremonies. Through highly detailed descriptions and accounts loaded with Native voice, this book is the definitive study of folk ornithology. It also provides valuable data for scholars of linguistics and North American Native studies, and it makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how humans make sense of their world. It will be of interest to historians of science, anthropologists, and scholars of indigenous cultures and folk taxonomy.

• A Zapotec Natural History: Trees, Herbs, and Flowers, Birds, Beasts, and Bugs in the Life of San Juan Gbëë
  University of Arizona Press, 2007

By Eugene S. Hunn
Eugene S. Hunn is a well-known anthropologist and ethnobiologist who has spent many years working in San Juan Gbëë, studying its residents and their knowledge of the local environment. Here Hunn writes sensitively and respectfully about the rich understanding of local flora and fauna that village inhabitants have acquired and transmitted over many centuries.

While some have called for the organization to cancel the Tucson meeting in support of economic boycott of Arizona organized by  Representative Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ), others have urged Dr. Robert Warrior, current president of NAISA, to incorporate discussion of the legislation into each of the 133 sessions scheduled to take place during the three-day conference. Warrior and other members of the NAISA have condemned the legislation but have come to the conclusion that to cancel the meeting at this late date would lead to financial disaster, and possible bankruptcy, for the organization. Thus, they have decided that it would be counterproductive to change the plans for the conference and instead will use the conference as a venue for fruitful discussion about the bill and its implications for civil and Indigenous rights. In a statement on the NAISA blog, Dr. Warrior said, “We believe that our presence in Tucson provides an excellent opportunity to address SB 1070 and its possible reverberations throughout the Indigenous world. We encourage all members to think of ways to use our meeting as a platform for collective action.”

The response of the NAISA council doesn’t stop at internal discussions about the legislation and the Tucson meeting. In a strongly-worded letter to Governor Jan Brewer, the NAISA council states that, “SB 1070 will have tremendous negative impact on Indigenous people on both sides of the border between the United States and Mexico, and it ought to go without saying that some of the people most impacted by this invidious law are descended from peoples who lived in the Sonoran Desert centuries before anyone even thought of the United States. Regardless of proximity or descent, though, the new law is morally wrong and panders to the worst currents in US politics.”

Whatever form NAISA’s resistance to the bill takes, it is clear that it will be couched in the Indigenous history of struggles against racism and perseverance in climates of hostility and intolerance. As Dr. Tsianina Lomawaima, chair of the local host committee for the upcoming Tucson meeting wrote, “We are members of Indigenous nations whose homelands stretch back generations and millennia before the United States unilaterally claimed jurisdiction over our lands. Since its inception in 1912, this is not the first time that the Arizona state government has acted in ways hostile to Indigenous and minority populations. Indeed, state antagonism to Indigenous peoples is part of the history of this country. We may fear SB 1070 will not be the last hostile state act, but we stand firm in our convictions that our home is here, our place is here, the responsibility to resist what we deem to be hostile, racist, or unconstitutional state actions is ours.”

And in hopes of encouraging scholars to attend the meeting and partake in the discussions there Dr. Lomawaima assures members of the NAISA community, “We take to heart the proposition that engagement can be a much more powerful tool of political action than disengagement. We invite you to join us, in Tucson, in May.”

Continue to watch this debate as it unfolds and join in with comments of your own, either here or on the NAISA blog.

In your new book, you examine New England histories from 1820 to 1880. The Euro-American authors of these local histories sought to write about the founding and growth of their cities and towns, and in the process they depict the original inhabitants, the Indians, as extinct. Do you think the authors intentionally minimized the Native presence? If so, what motives would they have had to do so?

I don’t think the myth of Indian extinction in New England emerged as a deliberate plot on the part of nineteenth-century authors of local histories so much as that the intellectual climate of the time predisposed writers to construct Indians and Indian histories in particular ways. Ideas underpinning Scientific Racism and Romanticism in particular profoundly shaped impressions about Indians. The notion of Racial Purity, separating races in a stark hierarchy deeply influenced their thinking, and the fact of Indian intermarriage over more than two centuries of colonialism suggested to non-Indians the Indians were “degenerating” —their racial calculations prompted them to only count “full-blooded” Indians AS Indians. They also believe in cultural purity and insisted that Indians retain their “pre-contact” cultures intact in order to qualify as Indians. New England Indians had embraced change, selectively incorporating new ideas, cultural practices, and material culture over the centuries. In other words, Indians embraced modernity, and non-Indians could not think of Indians as modern peoples because of their own cultural assumptions and romantic lodging of Indians in the past.

Do you think the power these local histories had in shaping settler identity and justifying the takeover of New England was unique to this region or is this a trend you see elsewhere?

I don’t think the power of histories to construct Indians as “degenerating” and fading away is entirely unique to New England though, of course, certain elements of that story are very much novel to that place. In particular, New England could make certain claims to “first” encounters, peoples, places, and practices. That region led the U.S. in asserting nationalism through the cultural capital they claimed and reproduced for consumption across the nation, including in producing histories bolstering their settler colonialism. But the idea of Indian extinction is widespread and enduring, and stories about “last” Indians can be found throughout the U.S. over time and into the present. Actually, it seems to me that these are stories about Indigenous peoples globally in the context of settler colonialism that continue to be told. I do think that at least to some extent New Englanders created a blueprint that was so compelling that others applied the narrative to their own places.

Did you find any instances in which the Native populations were able to assert their own histories or resist the imposition of settler history?

Native populations asserted their own histories at all times and places and that is at the heart of the remarkable story of resistance that accounts for the survival of New England Indian peoples. Most prominent in the long history of Indian writing, which in New England dates back to the early seventeenth century is the Pequot minister, activist, and intellectual William Apess, who published his autobiography in 1829 and then published four more books that offer an incredible Native perspective on New England history, though this story faded from public view until recently. But their resistance can be found in the archives of the colonies and then states that came as a part of the erection of settler colonialism as they defended their lands and ways of life to the extent they could given relations of power. It can be found in the rich oral traditions that continue to give shape to New England Indian peoples today. Although there are times in which documentary evidence for their resistance is sparse (the nineteenth century is one of those times) nonetheless Indian resistance is evident then and today.

You argue that the histories, along with historical pageants and commemorations, inculcated the myth of Indian extinction. What is an example of a pageant or commemoration that perpetuated this myth?

Like other places in the nineteenth century, New England towns commemorated everything from the Fourth of July to the bicentennials of the founding of their places with a rich ceremonial cycle that drew not just local people but the many others who had left to populate the rest of the expanding U.S. A centerpiece of these celebrations were historical orations and pageants that purported to lay out the histories of these places and assert claims to their antiquity. Historical orations and pageants almost always recounted what we would think of as the story of settler colonialism through these vehicles, with a stock script involving the establishment of relations with friendly Indians, the lawful and legal transmission of Indian lands to their ancestors, usually through land deeds, missionary outreach, military conflict, Indian population loss through epidemic diseases, and finally, what they characterize as the lamentable decline and final extinction of Indians. Remarkably, they sometimes featured surviving local Indians as distinguished guests at these commemorations as the last “remnants” of the people who they suggest have no meaningful future there.

What impact did these public events have on settler understandings of both their own identity and their sense of entitlement to Indian lands?

I read these public events as a kind of vernacular history in which the widest possible audience is instructed that they are the heirs of a deep and honorable history of colonialism, that they did their very best in their outreach and attempted “uplift” of Indians who were doomed through the impersonal and unstoppable process of the expansion of Christianity and civilization. An important backdrop for the construction of the myth of Indian extinction in New England is the Indian Removal Act and policy of Andrew Jackson, which was vociferously opposed by New Englanders. Proponents of Indian Removal pointedly asked New Englanders what had happened to “their” Indians.

Many of the narratives you write about still exist and have a profound influence today. What can we take away from this understanding of how history was shaped in the past for today’s discussions on indigeneity and rights to land and recognition?

History can never be truly “objective” in the sense that older historical models tried to insist. Historical questions and texts are always shaped by the intellectual and political climates of the time (among many other things), and critical thinking about historical texts is essential in coming to grips with complex colonial situations that impact Indigenous rights and recognition. Understanding the disparity in power over cultural production, including historical writing, is at the center of imaging the defense of Indigenous rights to land and recognition.

–

Jean M. O’Brien’s book Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England traces the origins of the persistent myth of the vanishing Indian. O’Brien draws on more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island written between 1820 and 1880. She also uses censuses, monuments, and accounts of historical pageants and commemorations to build her argument.

We’ve just returned from the Western Social Science Association (WSSA) annual conference in Reno, Nevada. This highly interdisciplinary meeting is home to a vibrant gathering of American Indian studies scholars, representing AIS programs from the western U.S. and Canada. The sessions within the AIS section were diverse, but there was a strong focus on legal and environmental issues as well as education and history. We had the good fortune to sit in on several stimulating sessions. Here are a few of the sessions and scholars of particular note:

Karen Jarrat Snider, an Assistant Professor at  Northern Arizona University (NAU), presented a paper on environmental justice and Indigenous peoples. She asserted that Native environmental justice necessitates that environmental spaces are seen as religious spaces and that it raises important questions of sovereignty. “Environmental justice offers several entry points for tribes to access their sovereignty. It’s an application of sovereignty that has huge potential for helping to protect sacred sites.” She looks to Region Three of the Forest Service for several case studies on how tribes and governmental agencies can work together – or not – to manage culturally significant sites on public lands. She praised the Kaibab National Forest’s model of having a field-based tribal consultant who takes tribal members out in the field to show them proposed projects rather than simply delivering Environmental Impact Statements and management plans, as many Forest Service units do.

Also from NAU, was Bob Lomadafkie who spoke of his experience in the  NAU Applied Indigenous Studies program’s impressive Resident Elders Program. He, along with several students who have benefitted from the program, presented compelling arguments for the value of incorporating elders into AIS programs and recognizing the importance of recognizing traditional knowledge in academic settings.

Dr. Steve Pavlik of Northwest Indian College and Dr. Thomas Hoffman of St. Mary’s University spoke about Vine Deloria Jr.’s posthumous publication, C. G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions: Dreams, Visions, Nature and the Primitive (Spring Journal Books, 2009). Pavlik and Hoffman, both close friends and colleagues of Deloria, told the audience of Deloria’s long-held passion for Jungian psychology and recounted conversations from the twenty plus years Deloria spent working on this book. The book examines concepts of time and space, psyche and spirit, and many other common threads seen in Jungian psychology and the spiritual traditions of the Sioux.

Cheryl Bennett, a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona, presented the preliminary findings on her research on hate crimes against Navajos in Gallup, New Mexico. She described overt and covert forms of racism and racial violence in this reservation border town and argued that many Navajos who are victims of these forms of racism have become desensitized to it because it is so ubiquitous. Bennett is moving forward with her research and we look forward to learning what else comes of this important work.

Michèle Companion of the University of Colorado presented research on food habits and food accessibility among urban Indians in the Midwest. She found that low-income urban Indians rely on many canned and frozen foods rather than fresh vegetables and perishable goods because, for financial and practical reasons, they need food to last as long as possible. Her research showed that many families don’t experiment with new foods because they can’t afford to waste it if their kids don’t like it or won’t try it. Many families she interviewed pointed out that trying new and healthier foods means taking a risk that they often can’t afford. Companion encourages cooking demonstrations, food tastings, field trips to stores, and help with label reading as ways to combat this entrenched behavior. She works at the Colorado Spring Indian Center to develop these types of educational and wellness activities. A lively discussion on the nature of the food industry, corporate responsibility, and the challenges of returning to pre-colonial Native food traditions followed this presentation.

Leo Killsback presented his documentary, A Chief’s Prophecy:  Survival of the Northern Cheyenne Nation to a packed room on Thursday afternoon. Filmed on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana, The Chiefs Prophecy chronicles the history of the Northern Cheyenne leadership. From the creation of the first warrior societies and the elaborate Council of Forty Four Chief system, through brutal wars with the United States Army and the Reservation era, the Northern Cheyenne people have survived. The modern challenges of colonization, loss of culture, and loss of spirituality have taken toll on the new generation of leaders. The Cheyenne philosophy of peace can be used to rebuild the broken spirits of the Northern Cheyenne people. What does the future hold?

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