A framework for understanding the contributions of Vine Deloria Jr. and John Joseph Mathews, two American Indian Intellectuals, as part of the struggle for tribal sovereighty, and argues that the contemporary reality of Native people can and should be part of the past, present, and future of Indian America.
One overeducated Florida State fan confronts the religiously perverted, racially suspect, and sexually fraught nature of the sport she hates to love: college football. Diane Roberts is a self-described feminist with a PhD from Oxford. She's also a second-generation season ticket holder—and an English professor—at one of the elite college football schools in the country. It's not as if she approves of the violence and hypermasculinity on display; she just can't help herself. So every Saturday from September through December she surrenders to her Inner Barbarian. The same goes for the rest of her "tribe," those thousands of hooting, hollering, beer-swilling Seminoles who, like Roberts, spent the 2013–14 season basking in the loping, history-making Hail Marys of Jameis Winston, the team's Heisman-winning quarterback, when they weren't gawking, dumbstruck, at the headlines in which he was accused of sexual assault. In Tribal, Roberts explores college football's grip on the country at the very moment when gender roles are blurring, social institutions are in flux, and the question of who is—and is not—an American is frequently challenged. For die-hard fans, the sport is a comfortable retreat into tradition, proof of our national virility, and a reflection of an America without troubling ambiguities. Yet, Roberts argues, it is also a representation of the buried heart of this country: a game and a culture built upon the dark past of the South, secrets so obvious they hide in plain sight. With her droll Southern voice and a phrase-turning style reminiscent of Roy Blount Jr. and Sarah Vowell, Roberts offers a sociological unpacking of the sport's dubious history that is at once affectionate and cautionary.
The modern techniques of holistic and alternative healing and natural remedies have been alive in the "old ways" of Native American medicine for centuries. This comprehensive guide introduces the Native American concept of healing, which incorporates body, mind, and spirit and stresses the importance of keeping all three in balance. Dr. Anthony Cichoke explains the philosophy behind American Indian healing practices as well as other therapies, such as sweat lodges, used in conjunction with herbs. He examines each herb in an accessible A-to-Z format, explaining its healing properties and varying uses in individual tribes. Finally, he details Native American healing formulas and recipes for treating particular ailments, from hemorrhoids to stress.
This new collection reveals the vitality of the intellectual and creative work of Native women today. The authors examine the avenues that Native American women have chosen for creative, cultural, and political expressions, and discuss the points of convergence between Native American feminisms and other feminisms. Individual contributors articulate their positions around issues such as identity, community, sovereignty, culture, and representation. This engaging volume crystallizes the myriad realities that inform the authors' intellectual work, and clarifies the sources of inspiration for their roles as individuals and indigenous intellectuals, reaffirming their paramount commitment to their communities and Nations. It will be of great value to Native writers as well as instructors and students in Native American studies, women's studies, anthropology, cultural studies, literature, and writing and composition.
For a brief but brilliant season beginning in the late 1960s, American Indians seized national attention in a series of radical acts of resistance. Like a Hurricane is a gripping account of the dramatic, breathtaking events of this tumultuous period. Drawing on a wealth of archival materials, interviews, and the authors' own experiences of these events, Like a Hurricane offers a rare, unflinchingly honest assessment of the period's successes and failures.
Loyalty to the community is the highest value in Native American cultures, argues Jace Weaver. In That the People Might Live, he explores a wide range of Native American literature from 1768 to the present, taking this sense of community as both a starting point and a lens. Weaver considers some of the best known Native American writers, such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and Vine Deloria, as well as many others who are receiving critical attention here for the first time. He contends that the single thing that most defines these authors' writings, and makes them deserving of study as a literature separate from the national literature of the United States, is their commitment to Native community and its survival. He terms this commitment "communitism"--a fusion of "community" and "activism." The Native American authors are engaged in an ongoing quest for community and write out of a passionate commitment to it. They write, literally, "that the People might live." Drawing upon the best Native and non-Native scholarship (including the emerging postcolonial discourse), as well as a close reading of the writings themselves, Weaver adds his own provocative insights to help readers to a richer understanding of these too often neglected texts. A scholar of religion, he also sets this literature in the context of Native cultures and religious traditions, and explores the tensions between these traditions and Christianity.
The oil and natural gas boom in pre–World War I Oklahoma brought unbelievable wealth to thousands of tribal citizens in the state on whose lands these minerals were discovered. However, as Angie Debo recognizes in her seminal study of the period, And Still the Waters Run, and, more recently, as David Grann does in Killers of the Flower Moon, this affluence placed Natives in the crosshairs of unscrupulous individuals. As a result, this era was also marked by two of the most heinous episodes of racial violence in the state’s history: the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the Osage Murders between 1921 and 1925. In Resisting Oklahoma’s Reign of Terror Joshua Clough details the responses of one largely forgotten Native organization—the Society of Oklahoma Indians (SOI)—to the violence and pillaging of tribal resources during the 1920s. Clough provides historical understanding of its formation and its shared values of intertribal unity, Native suffrage, and protection of Native property. He also reveals why reform efforts were nearly impossible in 1920s Oklahoma and how this historical perspective informs today’s conflicts between the state and its Indigenous inhabitants. Through this examination of the SOI, Clough fills the historiographic gap regarding formal Native resistance between the dissolution of the national Society of American Indians in 1923 and the formation of the National Congress of American Indians in 1944. Dismissed or overlooked for a century as an inconsequential Native activist organization, the history of the SOI, when examined carefully, reveals the sophistication and determination of tribal members in their struggle to prevent depredations on their persons and property.
Advances critical conversations in Native American literary studies by situating its subject in global, transnational, and modernizing contexts. Since the rise of the Native American Renaissance in literature and culture during the American civil rights period, a rich critical discourse has been developed to provide a range of interpretive frameworks for the study, recovery, and teaching of Native American literary and cultural production. For the past few decades the dominant framework has been nationalism, a critical perspective placing emphasis on specific tribal nations and nationalist concepts. While this nationalist intervention has produced important insights and questions regarding Native American literature, culture, and politics it has not always attended to the important fact that Native texts and writers have also always been globalized. The World, the Text, and the Indian breaks from this framework by examining Native American literature not for its tribal-national significance but rather its connections to global, transnational, and cosmopolitan forces. Essays by leading scholars in the field assume that Native American literary and cultural production is global in character; even claims to sovereignty and self-determination are made in global contexts and influenced by global forces. Spanning from the nineteenth century to the present day, these analyses of theories, texts, and methodsfrom trans-indigenous to cosmopolitan, George Copway to Sherman Alexie, and indigenous feminism to book historyinterrogate the dialects of global indigeneity and settler colonialism in literary and visual culture.
Examines Indian boarding school narratives and their impact on the Native literary tradition from 1879 to the present Indian boarding schools were the lynchpins of a federally sponsored system of forced assimilation. These schools, located off-reservation, took Native children from their families and tribes for years at a time in an effort to “kill” their tribal cultures, languages, and religions. In Learning to Write “Indian,” Amelia V. Katanski investigates the impact of the Indian boarding school experience on the American Indian literary tradition through an examination of turn-of-the-century student essays and autobiographies as well as contemporary plays, novels, and poetry. Many recent books have focused on the Indian boarding school experience. Among these Learning to Write “Indian” is unique in that it looks at writings about the schools as literature, rather than as mere historical evidence.