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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.

This introductory chapter argues for the continued relevance of religious freedom for Native claims. First, Native claims to religious freedom have often failed in court. Indeed, many Native peoples are understandably reluctant to speak of their traditions in the language of religion, given that their orientation to place does not conform to the conceptual shape of religion conventionally understood. Native peoples also have good reason to be reluctant because of frequent associations of the sacred with the secret. But the problem of Native American religious freedom goes far deeper. As a growing body of critical religious studies literature has shown, the reason that some religions do not fully count for religious freedom legal protection is because the particular characteristics of Protestant Christianity is naturalized and universalized at the expense of traditions characterized more by community obligations, law, and ritualized practice. A fourth criticism of engaging religious freedom is the legacy of the plain fact that religion has long been used against Native American peoples.

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.

This chapter explores what results when Native peoples articulate religious claims in the language of culture and cultural resources under environmental and historic preservation law. It argues that cultural resource laws have become more fruitful in two respects. First, there is more emphatic insistence on government-to-government consultation between federal agencies and tribes. Second, in 1990, National Historic Preservation Act regulations were clarified by designating “Traditional Cultural Properties” as eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places and in 1992, that law was amended to formally engage tribal governments in the review process. In light of these developments, protection under the categories of culture and cultural resource have proved more capacious for distinctive Native practices and beliefs about sacred lands, but it has come at the expense of the clearer edge of religious freedom protections, while still being haunted, and arguably bedraggled, by the category of religion from which these categories ostensibly have been formally disentangled.

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 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.

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.

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 explores English and Dutch relationships with native peoples in Atlantic North America. In practice, these relationships were violent ones, though there were important differences. The chapter shows that only English settlement became the basis for a long-term, large-scale trans-Atlantic transfer of people and culture. This necessitated expropriation not only of resources but territory, a process executed where necessary with savagery, assisted by the impact upon native peoples of introduced diseases, especially smallpox. This made possible the later explosive eighteenth-century settler population growth which would be a key stimulant of the Industrial Revolution. To this extent the Anglo-Dutch-American archipelago was mapped in blood.

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.