Essays in words and pictures that tell the story of the Dakota Death March of November 1862. In the words of the author, they stand as a narrative that reclaims our right to tell our stories in our own ways and for our own purposes. From publisher description.
"We are the Stars critically interrogates the U.S. as a settler colonial nation and re-centers Oceti Sakowin women as our tribe's traditional culture keepers and culture bearers"--
The War in Words is the first book to study the captivity and confinement narratives generated by a single American war as it traces the development and variety of the captivity narrative genre. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola examines the complex 1862 Dakota Conflict (also called the Dakota War) by focusing on twenty-four of the dozens of narratives that European Americans and Native Americans wrote about it. This six-week war was the deadliest confrontation between whites and Dakotas in Minnesota?s history. Conducted at the same time as the Civil War, it is sometimes called Minnesota?s Civil War because itøwas?and continues to be?so divisive. ø The Dakota Conflict aroused impassioned prose from participants and commentators as they disputed causes, events, identity, ethnicity, memory, and the all-important matter of the war?s legacy. Though the study targets one region, its ramifications reach far beyond Minnesota in its attention to war and memory. An ethnography of representative Dakota Conflict narratives and an analysis of the war?s historiography, The War in Words includes new archival information, historical data, and textual criticism.
Before there was an immigrant American Church, there was a Native American Church. The Native American Catholic Studies Reader offers an introduction to the story of how Native American Catholicism has developed over the centuries, beginning with the age of the missions and leading to inculturated, indigenous forms of religious expression. Though the Native-Christian relationship could be marked by tension, coercion, and even violence, the Christian faith took root among Native Americans and for those who accepted it and bequeathed it to future generations it became not an imposition, but a way of expressing Native identity. From the perspective of historians and theologians, the Native American Catholic Studies Reader offers a curated collection of essays divided into three sections: education and evangelization; tradition and transition; and Native American lives. Contributors include scholars currently working in the field: Mark Clatterbuck, Damian Costello, Conor J. Donnan, Ross Enochs, Allan Greer, Mark G. Thiel, and Christopher Vecsey, as well as selections from a past generation: Gerald McKevitt, SJ, and Carl F. Starkloff, SJ. These contributions explore the interaction of missionaries and tribal leaders, the relationship of traditional Native cosmology and religiosity to Christianity, and the role of geography and tribal consciousness in accepting and maintaining indigenous and religious identities. These readings highlight the state of the emergent field of Native-Catholic studies and suggest further avenues for research and publication. For scholars, teachers, and students, the Native American Catholic Studies Reader explores how the faith of the American Church’s eldest members became a means of expressing and celebrating language, family, and tribe.
"The dual traumas of colonialism and slavery are still felt by Native Americans and African Americans as victims of ongoing cycles of white violence toward people of color. In The Feeling of Forgetting, John Corrigan trains our attention on an underexamined aspect of this historical trauma: the trauma experienced by white Americans as perpetrators of this violence. By tracing the practices of remembering and forgetting in the Christian tradition, Corrigan shows how experiences of racial violence and efforts, on the part of white Americans, to deliberately forget race are drivers of Christian nationalism and white supremacy. White trauma, Corrigan says, is detectable as an underground river in American culture. Sometimes it is powerfully joined with evangelical Christianity and surfaces at times in acts of brutality, terrorism, and insurrection. The Feeling of Forgetting is an attempt to understand how that process occurs, and how it is braided with the trauma of victims, so that we might be better positioned to address both"--
Robert Hopkins was a man caught between two worlds. As a member of the Dakota Nation, he was unfairly imprisoned, accused of taking up arms against U.S. soldiers when war broke out with the Dakota in 1862. However, as a Christian convert who was also a preacher, Hopkins’s allegiance was often questioned by many of his fellow Dakota as well. Without a doubt, being a convert—and a favorite of the missionaries—had its privileges. Hopkins learned to read and write in an anglicized form of Dakota, and when facing legal allegations, he and several high-ranking missionaries wrote impassioned letters in his defense. Ultimately, he was among the 300-some Dakota spared from hanging by President Lincoln, imprisoned instead at Camp Kearney in Davenport, Iowa, for several years. His wife, Sarah, and their children, meanwhile, were forced onto the barren Crow Creek reservation in Dakota Territory with the rest of the Dakota women, children, and elderly. In both places, the Dakota were treated as novelties, displayed for curious residents like zoo animals. Historian Linda Clemmons examines the surviving letters from Robert and Sarah; other Dakota language sources; and letters from missionaries, newspaper accounts, and federal documents. She blends both the personal and the historical to complicate our understanding of the development of the Midwest, while also serving as a testament to the resilience of the Dakota and other indigenous peoples who have lived in this region from time immemorial.
Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond is an interdisciplinary collection that gathers the work of scholars and performance practitioners who together explore questions about the oral, written, and visual. The book includes the voices of oral performance practitioners, while the scholarship of many of the academic contributors is informed by their participation in oral storytelling, whether as poets, singers, or visual artists. Its contributions address the politics and ethics of the utterance and text: textualizing orature and orality, simulations of the oral, the poetics of performance, and reconstructions of the oral.
This book explores tensions between critical social justice and what the author terms white justice as fairness in public commemoration of Minnesota’s US-Dakota War of 1862. First, the book examines a regional white public pedagogy demanding “objectivity” and “balance” in teaching-and-learning activities with the purpose of promoting fairness toward white settlers and the extermination campaign they once carried out against Dakota people. The book then explores the dilemmas this public pedagogy created for a group of majority-white college students co-authoring a traveling museum exhibit on the war during its 2012 sesquicentennial. Through close analyses of interviews, field notes, and course artifacts, this volume unpacks the racial politics that drive white justice as fairness, revealing a myriad of ways this common sense of justice resists critical social justice education, foremost by teaching citizens to suspend moral judgment toward symbolic white ancestors and their role in a history of genocide.
"By highlighting the importance of perspective, background, and preconceptions on reading and interpreting statutes, this volume shows what a difference feminist analysis can make to statutory interpretation. It brings together a group of scholars and lawyers to rewrite tax decisions in which a feminist emphasis would have changed the outcome, the court's reasoning, or the future direction of the law. Featuring cases including medical expense deductions for fertility treatment, gender confirmation surgery, tax benefits for married individuals, the tax treatment of tribal lands, and business expense deductions, this volume opens the way for a discussion of how viewpoint is a key factor in statutory interpretation."--Provided by publisher.