Reinterpreting a Native American Identity
Reinterpreting a Native American Identity

Author: Eric Hannel

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2015-10-08

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 1498522122

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Reinterpreting a Native American Identity discusses the ongoing and morphing politics behind the federal government’s denial of full Lumbee tribal recognition. At the core of the Lumbee struggle for federal recognition are issues of cultural authenticity, racism, misrecognition, and assimilation grounded in a longer history of colonialism. Beyond merely describing why denial has continually occurred, this booktakes an American Indian Studies approach through the use of the Peoplehood Model developed by Tom Holm et al as a way of arguing for a better and more consistent recognition process grounded in Indigenous methodology and worldview. The Peoplehood Model is juxtaposed with the Western Colonial Model, the process that describes efforts to assimilate another culture. This bookcenters on the four aspects of Peoplehood—language, sacred history, territory/place, and ceremonial cycle—and shows how these interrelated concepts inform the Lumbee identity and worldview vis-à-vis the federal government’s longstanding refusal to fully recognize the tribe. The government’s arguments, derived from the Western Colonial Model, are countered and challenged by Lumbee-centered knowledge and history regarding identity within a syncretistic system of survival as an Indigenous group. This study illustrates that the tribe’s indigenous language has not been fully lost to assimilation, as the federal government argues, but that Lumbee English is marked by linguistic adaptation, which retains a Native American worldview in use and meaning. It further demonstrates that the Lumbee have maintained a sacred history and revere their homeland as the “promised land,” contrary to the position periodically espoused by the federal government. Lastly, this book argues that the system used to restrict Native American religion harkens back to Roman Law, adopted through the writings of Thomas Aquinas, later synthesized by Dominican theologian Franciscus de Victoria and eventually elevated to papal hierocratic ideology adopted by many colonizing countries. While Lumbee religion is Christian-centric, it is also intertwined with Indigenous spiritual and healing practices which are not subsumed by Christianity but are placed as equally valid within a spiritual system.

Our America
Our America

Author: Walter Benn Michaels

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9780822320647

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Arguing that the contemporary commitment to the importance of cultural identity has renovated rather than replaced an earlier commitment to racial identity, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that the idea of culture, far from constituting a challenge to racism, is actually a form of racism. Our America offers both a provocative reinterpretation of the role of identity in modernism and a sustained critique of the role of identity in postmodernism. "We have a great desire to be supremely American," Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1924. That desire, Michaels tells us, is at the very heart of American modernism, giving form and substance to a cultural movement that would in turn redefine America's cultural and collective identity--ultimately along racial lines. A provocative reinterpretation of American modernism, Our America also offers a new way of understanding current debates over the meaning of race, identity, multiculturalism, and pluralism. Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their commitment to resolve the meaning of identity--linguistic, national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of the same year, which honored the truly native, reconceptualized national identity, so the major texts of American writers such as Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and Williams reinvented identity as an object of pathos--something that can be lost or found, defended or betrayed. Our America is both a history and a critique of this invention, tracing its development from the white supremacism of the Progressive period through the cultural pluralism of the Twenties. Michaels's sustained rereading of the texts of the period--the canonical, the popular, and the less familiar--exposes recurring concerns such as the reconception of the image of the Indian as a symbol of racial purity and national origins, the relation between World War I and race, contradictory appeals to the family as a model for the nation, and anxieties about reproduction that subliminally tie whiteness and national identity to incest, sterility, and impotence.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (10th Anniversary Edition)
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (10th Anniversary Edition)

Author: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2023-10-03

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0807013145

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New York Times Bestseller Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.” Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.

The Invention of Native American Literature
The Invention of Native American Literature

Author: Robert Dale Parker

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780801488047

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In an original, widely researched, and accessibly written book, Robert Dale Parker helps redefine the study of Native American literature by focusing on issues of gender and literary form. Among the writers Parker highlights are Thomas King, John Joseph Mathews, D'Arcy McNickle, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ray A. Young Bear, some of whom have previously received little scholarly attention.Parker proposes a new history of Native American literature by reinterpreting its concerns with poetry, orality, and Indian notions of authority. He also addresses representations of Indian masculinity, uncovering Native literature's recurring fascination with restless young men who have nothing to do, or who suspect or feel pressured to believe that they have nothing to do. The Invention of Native American Literature reads Native writing through a wide variety of shifting historical contexts. In its commitment to historicizing Native writing and identity, Parker's work parallels developments in scholarship on other minority literatures and is sure to provoke controversy.

Becoming Kin
Becoming Kin

Author: Patty Krawec

Publisher: Broadleaf Books

Published: 2022-09-27

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1506478263

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We find our way forward by going back. The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home." Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to "unforget" our history. This remarkable sojourn through Native and settler history, myth, identity, and spirituality helps us retrace our steps and pick up what was lost along the way: chances to honor rather than violate treaties, to see the land as a relative rather than a resource, and to unravel the history we have been taught.

Beyond National Identity
Beyond National Identity

Author: Michele Greet

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780271034706

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Traces changes in Andean artists' vision of indigenous peoples as well as shifts in the critical discourse surrounding their work between 1920 and 1960.

Real Indians
Real Indians

Author: Eva Marie Garroutte

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2003-07-31

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0520229770

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"In discussing a wide array of legal, biological, and sociocultural definitions, Eva Garroutte documents how these have frequently been manipulated by the federal government, by tribal officials, and by Indian and non-Indian individuals to gain political, social, or economic advantage. Whether or not one agrees with her solutions, anyone seriously concerned with contemporary American Indian issues should read this book."—Garrick Bailey, editor of The Osage and the Invisible World "Real Indians is a remarkably candid, engaging, and compelling book. It tells the important and often controversial story of how 'Indian-ness' is negotiated in American culture by indigenous peoples, policy makers, and scholars."—Robert Wuthnow, author of Creative Spirituality "Eva Marie Garroutte has done an exemplary job of combining scholarly sources, personal accounts, interview data, and self-reflection to catalog and examine the ways in which individual and collective identities are asserted, negotiated, and revitalized. She invites readers to imagine an intellectual space where scholarly and traditional ways of knowing and telling come face to face in an epistemological landscape where the ‘traditions’ of social science and 'radical indigenism' can confront one another in constructive dialogue."—Joane Nagel, author of Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality

The Name of War
The Name of War

Author: Jill Lepore

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2009-09-23

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0307488578

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BANCROFF PRIZE WINNER • King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war—colonists against Indigenous peoples—that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war." The war's brutality compelled the colonists to defend themselves against accusations that they had become savages. But Jill Lepore makes clear that it was after the war—and because of it—that the boundaries between cultures, hitherto blurred, turned into rigid ones. King Philip's War became one of the most written-about wars in our history, and Lepore argues that the words strengthened and hardened feelings that, in turn, strengthened and hardened the enmity between Indigenous peoples and Anglos. Telling the story of what may have been the bitterest of American conflicts, and its reverberations over the centuries, Lepore has enabled us to see how the ways in which we remember past events are as important in their effect on our history as were the events themselves.

World War II and the American Indian
World War II and the American Indian

Author: Kenneth William Townsend

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13:

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The first full ethnohistory of American Indian responses to, and participation in, World War II; beginning with the drift toward war in the 1930s, including their reactions to propaganda campaigns directed at them by Nazi sympathizers.