Search Results

This chapter addresses the tensions that have arisen, in the Canadian context, between Native peoples’ (or First Nations peoples’) quest for political self-determination and the demand by some Native women that their sexual equality rights be protected through federal law (specifically, Canada’s 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms). It discusses the ambivalent relationship Native peoples have had with respect to the language of individual rights, consent, and sexual equality, and reflects on the difficulties this presents for protecting Native women. The chapter also illuminates the potential injustices that can arise both when dominant cultural groups fail to recognize the distinctive self-understandings of minority communities as well as when more powerful members of cultural communities attempt to silence vulnerable and less powerful group members.

The Caribs were by 1907 a relatively small group. They were descended from the indigenous population of the Caribbean and they were resident on Dominica and St Vincent, two of the islands of the Lesser Antilles in British possession. In one sense they were ‘merely’ another of the native peoples of the world sheltering as best they could in some corner of a European empire where they had been left after their usefulness had been exhausted or their fight for survival overcome. This chapter offers an analysis, informed by literary approaches, of a relatively self-contained body of texts. A fundamental starting point is that what offers itself as a representation of a culture, or a national history, embodied in a history of Western observation of indigenous peoples and that intersects with the history of the Caribs themselves. This is a history inseparable from that of the decline of one empire, the rise of another, and the travails of Dominican independence.

This chapter explores the factors and conditions that facilitated ethnic cohesion among the ethnically diverse native population and the development of indigenous civic life from the midto late sixteenth century. Indigenous migrants adopted and negotiated colonial spaces and institutions to re-create central Mexican–style indigenous communities and establish a corporate Indian status, allowing them to draw on concessions and protective measures afforded to native peoples under colonial rule. The evolution of a “Republic de Indios,” barrios of native communities on the outskirts of the city, created spaces where native peoples could practice indigenous and Spanish lifeways. Shared housing and labor arrangements unified the native population through personal and professional ties. The establishment of indigenous confraternities allowed native peoples to develop formal social and political organizations. Even as native peoples began assuming the role of urban vecinos, or municipal residents, they continued to identify with their ancestral heritage.

Chapter 1 considers the role of Zacatecas’s preconquest indigenous population on the city’s early development, the impact of Spanish dependence on foreign Indian population to meet labor needs, and the evolution of Spanish and indigenous settlements from rudimentary mining camps to urban communities in the sixteenth century. It argues that the mines could not have prospered without the large migrant Indian population from central and western Mexico that displaced the local Zacateco population. They provided the necessary labor for the emerging mining economy and its subsidiary activities, and by creating indigenous communities, they brought into being a permanent and long-term labor source. As the indigenous workforce established roots in the town, they began adapting the Spanish urban environment to meet their own settlement needs, exploiting Zacatecas’s frontier setting and labor shortages to derive some concessions, such as mobility, wages, freedom from tribute and rotary labor drafts, and semiautonomous neighborhoods.

This chapter explores how the Spanish colonizers were able to establish a functioning colony in northwestern Mexico during the period 1590–1610. It first provides an overview of the presence of Jesuit priests in the northwest and the Spaniards' early contact with the native peoples of northwestern Mexico, especially the state of Sinaloa. It then considers how the colonizers gained a foothold in the region by participating in preexistent native diplomatic practices in which women and children crossed ethnic lines as collateral to peace agreements. In particular, it discusses the Spaniards' strategy of taking and exchanging captives that allowed them to forge alliances with native peoples and thus made the colony sustainable. The chapter also examines the role played by the Jesuits in the negotiations that went on between the Spanish and the native peoples of the northwest.

This chapter examines the maturation of urban indigenous society in Zacatecas, both at the community and individual level, in the midcolonial period. During this period, revitalized silver production and markets, and growing populations of non-Indians, drew native peoples further into the money-economy and into greater interactions with ethnically diverse producers and consumers. Yet indigenous societies survived and flourished within these social and demographic changes because of the stability of native institutions and communities, and native vecinos who retained their associations with the indigenous world even as they acquired the skills and fluency to succeed in the Spanish urban environment. Permanent residents and incoming immigrants created a critical population mass that facilitated continued indigenous social and kinship networks. By the early eighteenth century, native peoples had developed the practices and institutions they needed to survive and prosper as a community and ethnic group in the city.

Chapter 5 explores the dramatic changes at the local and viceregal level that indigenous peoples confronted during the long eighteenth century. Production declines and upsurges, empirewide administrative projects to centralize authority and increase economic productivity, often referred to as the Bourbon Reforms, and a rise in casta, or non-Indian, populations, affected native lands and resources, religious organizations, labor practices, and systems of governance. This chapter argues that indigenous societies and institutions remained fairly vital through the mid-1770s and that native peoples played a key role in the city’s economic, social, and demographic recovery. But social, economic, and demographic changes during the last decades of colonial rule (1775–1810), particularly Spanish attempts to dissolve Indian towns and municipal councils, weakened and undermined indigenous communities and institutions to the point that they eventually ceased to function as autonomous units in the postindependence period.

This book addresses how contemporary queer Native writers use the representation of bodily, emotional, and psychological sensation in challenging U.S. formulations of political subjectivity, while seeking to reimagine what counts as sovereignty and providing alternative ways of figuring Native experience. The supposedly apparent continuity of Indianness gives way to genealogies of sensation that trace how peoplehood exists within forms of feeling, prompting these queer writers to theorize dynamics of Indigenous sociality that shapes the meaning of self-determination under settler rule. Through this, possibilities for conceptualizing and realizing alternative versions of collective identity and indigeneity gradually emerge, in the attempt to go against the efforts to displace, translate, and erase Native peoples.

In closing, this book shows that each of its chapters has done much to complicate and open up our sense of past encounters between various Christian missionaries and various Native North American peoples. These encounters could transform missionaries even as their missionary projects could transform the cultures of Native communities. Missionary encounters have led to the tragic loss of many Native languages; missionary encounters have also led, through the mechanisms and practices of literacy, to the retention of Native languages. Missionary encounters could eradicate traditions; they could also provide material for new articulations of those traditions. The encounters could introduce or exacerbate divisions in Native communities and families, fomenting disastrous results, if not violence; through those encounters could also emerge novel social networks and institutions around which fragmented Native peoples could restore their communities.

This chapter examines the impact of the Exxon Valdez oil spill on the Native peoples of Alaska. The disaster occurred in March 1989, when the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on a reef in Prince William Sound. At least eleven million gallons of crude oil blackened more than a thousand miles of Alaskan coastline. The chapter considers what harm the disaster did to the Native individuals exposed to it and what damage it caused to the texture of their customary ways of life. In particular, it analyzes the ways that the oil spill affected the Alutiiq people's subsistence life as well as the Native way of being. It also discusses the Alutiiq's feeling of homelessness in the wake of the disaster.

This chapter focuses on Warner McCary's desire to escape his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, and his own painful past by reinventing himself. It explores the brickyards and barbershops of the Mississippi River port and sketches the city's complex cultural milieu—its reliance on chattel slavery, its briefly flourishing free black community, its connections to other ports, its rich indigenous life and history, and its varied cultural venues. McCary's decision to represent himself as an Indian following his manumission and departure from Natchez must be evaluated not only in the context of slavery, but also with an understanding of the influence of Native people and affairs on life in the South, including the context of Indian removal.

Toward of the end of the nineteenth century, the Argentine state intensified a policy of military expansion that would ultimately destroy the autonomous socioeconomic systems of the indigenous peoples of the Pampas—the central plains and its surrounding areas. As in the United States during roughly the same time, the national occupation of the plains was a contested venture, fought not only by pioneers and indigenous inhabitants but also by politicians and the soldiers sent to eliminate the native peoples. This chapter argues that politicians in Argentina did not share a common plan to exterminate native populations on their frontier. Rather, the genocidal war that emerged late in the century resulted from a difficult and contested negotiation at the heart of the nation's political leadership.

The Indian Claims Commission (ICC) was not the perfect solution but it gave hope. The chapter looks at the ICC and analyses its effectiveness. Native peoples no longer had to fight individually to have bills introduced that would, if successful, allow them to file claim suits against the federal government. And no longer could single lawmakers block a tribe's right to present its claim before a court. All natives now had an opportunity to have their claims heard by a commission empowered to hear them. The chapter looks at the extent to which the ICC met up to expectations.

This chapter introduces the Native American intertribal powwow as a popular and prolific performance genre. Powwows are spiritual, social, and communal events that occur annually throughout North America and vary significantly by geographical region, tribal and community organizers, and participants. Powwows are also present in our daily lives through music, television, and film; photojournalism; and academic studies. After examining some of these sources, Axtmann discusses the importance of studying powwow through its everyday movement and dance––and, more specifically, proposes bringing choreographic tools, Laban Movement Analysis, and notions of “performance” and “performativity” to this project. In particular, she considers the genocides historically suffered by Native peoples in relation to how the body expresses itself through dance. Finally, Axtmann announces the central topics of her book by chapter, introduces key terms that will be used throughout, and explains how her own identity as a non-Indian dancer, choreographer, and performance scholar is located within the project.

This chapter outlines how John Eliot's literacy mission served not only as the cornerstone of later book-centered Euro-American ideologies of conquest but also as the starting point for several powerful alphabetic literacy complexes built and maintained by Native peoples in the eighteenth century. The coming of the book to Indian Country was a dialogic process. Books arrived in the New World and transformed it forever. Yet, just as significant, books were themselves transformed in the process. American books like those produced at Eliot's New England Mission press were often the result of bicultural cooperation and relied heavily on Indian compilers, translators, and editors. In the hands of these indigenous craftsmen, polemicists, writers, and readers, the European ideology of the book was put to the service of Native nation building in ways that far surpassed the expectations of the colonizers.

The epilogue is self-reflective of the author’s own history of working towards helping victims of sexual assault. It outlines her futures goals of scholarship in regards to sexual assault against Native women. The author wishes to examine the role of language in shaping people’s experience of reality and social relations. In addition to studying the linguists of Native peoples, the author is interested in elevating the voices of Native women who have developed their own solutions and interventions within their tribal nations.

This chapter summarizes the analysis of indigenous and nonindigenous representations that collide, converge, and are creatively adjusted and readjusted by generations of sitcom producers. Indigenous producers like the 1491s promote a network of texts whose visual, sonic, and affective representations are programmed to empower Native Peoples. It challenges and motivates reflection on understandings of indigenous identities, supports the activist work of decolonizing views of Native cultures, and inspires current and future generations to create and broadcast their own Native tribal televisions.

This chapter discusses the issues pertaining to the institutionalization of a heteronormative vision of Cherokee identity, while depicting that structure as a preservation of the principles of peoplehood. It explains how this kind of indigenous description can be understood as responsive to particular types of historical pressures placed on Native peoples. Cherokee scholar and poet Qwo-Li Driskill, through his poem “Stolen from Our Bodies,” offers the notion of a “Sovereign Erotic” as a way of connecting Native bodies, individual and collective self-representations, and ongoing histories of invasion, detribalization, and removal. The chapter also cites Driskill’s collection of poetry, Walking with Ghosts, where he develops an archaeology of Indigenous peoplehood and structures of feeling through reference to sensuous bodily experience.