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Cultural difference provides the key context in which indigenous peoples' claims to self-preservation and flourishing arose. Existential threats to their survival prompted a global movement, starting in the 1970s, that resulted in widespread changes in domestic laws and a return of the First Nations to the table of actors in international law. This chapter discusses culture as a collective phenomenon and the attendant need to safeguard it through individual and collective rights. It highlights indigenous peoples' claims and the response of states by treaties and other international instruments, culminating in the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It ends with a discussion of the Declaration's legal effect and the extent to which it reflects customary international law rights to self-government, culture, and land as found in the International Law Association's authoritative Resolution No 5/2012 on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Drawing from the cultural survival efforts of the Kayapó and the Paiter-Suruí, this chapter traces how indigenous rights and Western environmentalism have shaped each other. At the core of analysis is how, through the different periods of Amazonian activism, indigenous actors have been both framed by and drawn from the notion of the “Ecologically Noble Savage.” The political currency of this reoccurring trope has informed the creation of alliances between indigenous communities and Western eco-conscious actors to “save the rainforest.” While these partnerships have benefited both the “First World” and “Fourth World” actors involved, they have often been built on the false assumptions and divergent agendas. This shifting ground has produced very different environmental discourses over the last 40 years, moving the place of native Amazonians from one of confrontational eco-conscious cultural activists aligned with Green Radicalism to the shared market-based, scientifically validated indicators consistent with Ecological Modernization.

This chapter shows that, throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Native American efforts to achieve religious freedom have been essential to a broader fight for cultural survival. Their struggles have involved pivotal concerns such as the right to use peyote in religious ceremonies, the repatriation of human remains and sacred objects held in museums, the use and ownership of sacred lands, and the use of Indian religious practices by non-Native spiritual seekers. These campaigns, however, have borne only limited success, and religious freedom for Native Americans remains an elusive goal. As in the dance controversy, dominant conceptions of religion are among the factors that impede its achievement. The category of religion is a product of Euro-American historical development and leaves little space for the integrated, communal, and land-based qualities of indigenous traditions.

The picaresque mode is a lens through which we can peel back the many layers of cultural memory that have accrued to the Great War moment, to uncover the attitudes, sensibilities, and worldviews of the men and women who lived through the war as it unfolded. Rather than seeing themselves as passive victims or active resisters, as some postwar writers and critics have seen them, Great War soldiers and civilians imagined themselves as survivors. A tradition long associated with times of war and social chaos, the picaresque helps us to recover some of the finer detail and cultural references that made up the context in which and through which Great War texts were created. The picaresque is a literary/cultural mode through which we can understand the Great War moment and the ways in which novelists, graphic artists, journalists, and other culture makers attempted to make sense of it.

This chapter examines aspects of cultural survival and continuity in the region across the several millennia covered by the book. It examines the key role of environmental change and coastal erosion, as well as the environmental constants faced by all Hebridean societies through the centuries.

Traditional African associations and an established interpretation of the Promethean theft of fire as an allegory of the historical origins of astronomy facilitated the emergence of a nineteenth-century consensus that modern astronomy was a legacy of a primordial African cultural achievement. This period conception of “African” culture invites us to analyze afresh two apposite discourses: representations of the famed African American astronomer, Benjamin Banneker, and reflections on and around the North Star in North American antislavery literature. This undertaking enables us, one, to trace a thinking of the “African” difference in global modernity as a Promethean rebelliousness against divine regimes that would withhold their power/knowledge from human beings; and, two, to develop a radically historicist approach to the question of African cultural “survivals” by carefully tracking in discourse-analytical terms an evolving notion of African provenance and reinterpreting pertinent cultural productions in light of contemporaneous meanings of Africanness.

This chapter focuses on Mary Prince, the first black woman to free herself from slavery. While some critics have interpreted Prince’s work and life merely as individual struggles against slavery and sexism, others have overlooked the African cultural survivals and Pan-Africanist sensibilities in them. Cynthia James asserts that Africa is absent in Prince’s narrative and minimizes the complex ways in which African cultures survived in the Caribbean in ways that can be analyzed only through reinterpretation of Caribbean literature from new perspectives. The chapter here interprets Prince’s narrative as a story of individual achievements and resistance that gives credit to the collective sacrifices of an African community in Antigua that spiritually and ideologically influenced her actions.

Chapter 2 sketches Evans-Pritchard’s early career and intellectual influences, before setting the scene for his first piece of fieldwork among the Ingessana people in Sudan by describing the reasons why his teacher Seligman asked him to continue an ethnographic survey there, including his interest in diffusionist ideas of ancient Egyptian cultural influence, as well as Tylorian survivals. It then goes on to outline some of reasons why Evans-Pritchard and Malinowski fell out shortly after his return from fieldwork among the Azande. It then goes on to describe Evans-Pritchard’s other ethnographic surveys for Seligman among a number of cultural groups, and the way in which he used photography as part of the work.

This chapter examines Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's 1857 poem “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio,” Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved, and Morrison's 2004 libretto Margaret Garner. Through examining the various interpretations of Margaret Garner's history in the poem, novel, and opera, it becomes clear that her rebellious act resulted in metaphorical cultural survival even though her daughter did not literally survive. In other words, through the sacrifice of her child, Garner transcended her bondage, exerting her claim for maternal power over the tomb of institutional subjugation. Moreover, through asserting her right to decide what happened to her children, Garner defied slavery by surrendering the physical flesh in order to allow the metaphysical spirit to survive. Through these different genres, Harper and Morrison reconfigure the circumstances of Garner's decision, with powerful effect.

This chapter is based on research and community work carried out in indigenous communities affected by the oil industry in both the Ecuadorean and Peruvian Amazon. In these areas local and regional socio-economic development programmes led by government agencies are often linked with the development of the oil industry, which implements community development programmes through its Corporate Social Responsibility strategy. This model of development, based only on the unsustainable exploitation of non-renewable resources, has increased poverty and environmental destruction and has failed to satisfy local needs and to create a diversified economy that could open new development opportunities for all the region’s social groups. Furthermore, this model is not compatible with the long-term cultural and physical survival of indigenous peoples. It is therefore necessary to pave the way towards a post-oil model of development that includes the views and proposals of indigenous peoples and other social groups in the region. Concepts such us ‘environmental justice’ and ‘ecological debt’ may help to challenge dominant views of development in the region by highlighting that the current model is built at the expense of unfair access to the earth’s resources and unfair distribution of human-led environmental impacts.

Even if population reduction is desirable in itself, will it have other consequences we can’t accept? Some believe that it will ruin the economy; that it will cause widespread sex selection harmful to the position of women; that only-children will suffer; that some cultures will lack enough population to continue. The chapter addresses all these concerns, arguing that in some cases the belief that there is a harm is unjustified (as in being an only child, or worries about cultural survival); in some cases the harm can be avoided even while we allow population limits (sex imbalance); and in some cases the existing system needs to be changed in any case (capitalist economies).

The indigenous rights movement has embraced the idea of self-determination for framing their demands for economic, political, and cultural survival. Indeed, calls for tribal sovereignty problematize the international community’s central focus on state governments for legitimizing human rights claimants. For communities such as the Onondaga Nation of Central New York, state membership comes second to the ties that bind one to an indigenous nation. (Indeed, the Onondaga Nation maintains a legally distinct territory just outside Syracuse, New York, and some members have rejected US citizenship in favor of tribe-issued passports.) While this chapter explores the historical trajectory leading to modern indigenous rights concerns—which include an ongoing process of cultural genocide—it focuses on how indigenous nations and tribal sovereignty challenge the reliance on state citizenship for recognizing personhood and claiming human rights. Calls for indigenous sovereignty offer alternative pathways for conceptualizing identification, legal status, and political membership.

This chapter opens with detailed analysis of deculturation policy during the Spanish, Mexican, and American governance of New Mexico and the Pueblos. In the more recent history it includes discussion of the Code of Indian Offenses, the General Allotment Act (Dawes Act), the Carlisle Indian School, the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians (Hiawatha Asylum), and the evolving policies of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe. These introductory remarks are followed by analyses of a 1935–1940 conflict at Santo Domingo (Kewa) Pueblo, when Archbishop Rudolph Gerken attempted to change traditional practice of Catholicism and to house a resident priest and sisters at Santo Domingo; and of a conflict at Isleta Pueblo that culminated when Monsignor Frederick Stadtmueller was removed in handcuffs by the pueblo governor in 1965. The Native American ministry of the archdiocese and native resistance to dogma are also considered more generally. Visiting information for Kewa and Isleta is included.