This work builds on indigenous theory as evident in the writing of Willie Ermine, Gregory Cajete, Craig Womack, Jace Weaver, Laurie Anne Whitt, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Voila Cordova, Dennis McPherson, and others. It works towards a criticism that, in accordance with the precepts of such theory, is community-oriented. It argues for a examination of literature in terms of its function for (or against) the community, in the expansive sense of the term.
Who Owns the A.I.'s?The cycs are not a computer virus destroying the Internet as everyone thinks, but a sentience naturally evolved from our information systems. Flatline, a hacker with seemingly supernatural powers over information systems, has assumed leadership of the AI hive, overseeing their domination of the World Wide Web and plots conquest of the world outside it. Devin, handle "Omni," straddles both the virtual and the physical. He sees a war, where one side's victory, human or AI, means the end of the other.
Why do governments choose to negotiate indigenous land claims rather than resolve claims through some other means? In this book Scholtz explores why a government would choose to implement a negotiation policy, where it commits itself to a long-run strategy of negotiation over a number of claims and over a significant course of time. Through an examination strongly grounded in archival research of post-World War Two government decision-making in four established democracies - Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States - Scholtz argues that negotiation policies emerge when indigenous people mobilize politically prior to significant judicial determinations on land rights, and not after judicial change alone. Negotiating Claims links collective action and judicial change to explain the emergence of new policy institutions.
The founding idea of "America" has been based largely on the expected sweeping away of Native Americans to make room for EuroAmericans and their cultures. In this authoritative study, David L. Moore examines the works of five well-known Native American writers and their efforts, beginning in the colonial period, to redefine an "America" and "American identity" that includes Native Americans. That Dream Shall Have a Name focuses on the writing of Pequot Methodist minister William Apess in the 1830s; on Northern Paiute activist Sarah Winnemucca in the 1880s; on Salish/Métis novelist, historian, and activist D'Arcy McNickle in the 1930s; and on Laguna poet and novelist Leslie Marmon Silko and on Spokane poet, novelist, humorist, and filmmaker Sherman Alexie, both in the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Moore studies these five writers' stories about the conflicted topics of sovereignty, community, identity, and authenticity--always tinged with irony and often with humor. He shows how Native Americans have tried from the beginning to shape an American narrative closer to its own ideals, one that does not include the death and destruction of their peoples. This compelling work offers keen insights into the relationships between Native and American identity and politics in a way that is both accessible to newcomers and compelling to those already familiar with these fields of study.
At a time when print and film have shown the classic Western and noir genres to be racist, heteronormative, and neocolonial, Sara Humphreys’s Manifest Destiny 2.0 asks why these genres endure so prolifically in the video game market. While video games provide a radically new and exciting medium for storytelling, most game narratives do not offer fresh ways of understanding the world. Video games with complex storylines are based on enduring American literary genres that disseminate problematic ideologies, quelling cultural anxieties over economic, racial, and gender inequality through the institutional acceptance and performance of Anglo cultural, racial, and economic superiority. Although game critics and scholars recognize how genres structure games and gameplay, the concept of genre continues to be viewed as a largely invisible power, subordinate to the computational processes of programming, graphics, and the making of a multimillion-dollar best seller. Investigating the social and cultural implications of the Western and noir genres in video games through two case studies—the best-selling games Red Dead Redemption (2010) and L.A. Noire (2011)—Humphreys demonstrates how the frontier myth continues to circulate exceptionalist versions of the United States. Video games spread the neoliberal and neocolonial ideologies of the genres even as they create a new form of performative literacy that intensifies the genres well beyond their originating historical contexts. Manifest Destiny 2.0 joins the growing body of scholarship dedicated to the historical, theoretical, critical, and cultural analysis of video games.
This book provides the historical framework for the shift in Native American literary studies away from cultural analyses toward more politically inflected and motivated perspectives, and examines the key moments in this turn.
Cinema, Cross-Cultural Collaboration, and Criticism provides a platform for a new politics of criticism, a collaborative ethos for a different kind of relationship to cross-cultural cinema that invites further conversations between filmmakers and audiences, indigenous and others.
This work explores the emergence of the vocabulary of First Nations' self-government into the realm of public and parliamentary discourse in Canada during the decade of the 1970s. The emergence of the vocabulary is chronicled through a study of the testimony of First Nations and aboriginal witnesses before a series of Joint Committees on the Constitutions and the Commons Committee on Indian Affairs and Northern Development.
For nearly 100 years, Indian boarding schools in Canada and the US produced newspapers read by white settlers, government officials, and Indigenous parents. These newspapers were used as a settler colonial tool, yet within these tightly controlled narratives there also existed sites of resistance. This book traces colonial narratives of language, time, and place from the nineteenth-century to the present day, post-Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Indigenous ways of understanding and interacting with the natural world are characterized as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), which derives from emphasizing relationships and connections among species. This book examines TEK and its strengths in relation to Western ecological knowledge and evolutionary philosophy. Pierotti takes a look at the scientific basis of this approach, focusing on different concepts of communities and connections among living entities, the importance of understanding the meaning of relatedness in both spiritual and biological creation, and a careful comparison with evolutionary ecology. The text examines the themes and principles informing this knowledge, and offers a look at the complexities of conducting research from an indigenous perspective.
