We Are Dancing for You
We Are Dancing for You

Author: Cutcha Risling Baldy

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2018-06-01

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 029574345X

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“I am here. You will never be alone. We are dancing for you.” So begins Cutcha Risling Baldy’s deeply personal account of the revitalization of the women’s coming-of-age ceremony for the Hoopa Valley Tribe. At the end of the twentieth century, the tribe’s Flower Dance had not been fully practiced for decades. The women of the tribe, recognizing the critical importance of the tradition, undertook its revitalization using the memories of elders and medicine women and details found in museum archives, anthropological records, and oral histories. Deeply rooted in Indigenous knowledge, Risling Baldy brings us the voices of people transformed by cultural revitalization, including the accounts of young women who have participated in the Flower Dance. Using a framework of Native feminisms, she locates this revival within a broad context of decolonizing praxis and considers how this renaissance of women’s coming-of-age ceremonies confounds ethnographic depictions of Native women; challenges anthropological theories about menstruation, gender, and coming-of-age; and addresses gender inequality and gender violence within Native communities.

Tribes of California
Tribes of California

Author: Stephen Powers

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1976

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 9780520031722

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This classic of American Indian ethnography, originally published in 1877, is again available in its complete form. In the summers of 1871 and 1872 Powers visited Indian groups in the northern two-thirds of California. A journalist by profession, he was untrained in ethnography, but was nonetheless an astonishingly intelligent observer who had a gift for writing in a spirited manner. He reported faithfully what he heard and portrayed accurately what he saw among the native survivors of Gold Rush days in a series of seventeen articles published mostly in The Overland Monthly. These were partly unwritten, added to, and reorganized by Powers to be published in 1877 as a report of the U.S. Geographical Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region. Powers’ book is still basic and is referred to by everyone who deals with native cultures. The 1877 edition was not large, and Tribes of California is at last reprinted in response to growing demand for this rare volume. For this edition all of the original illustrations have been retained and the basic text printed in facsimile. Professor Robert F. Heizer has provided annotations throughout and an introduction to indicate contemporary thought about the volume.

Indian Survival on the California Frontier
Indian Survival on the California Frontier

Author: Albert L. Hurtado

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1990-09-10

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 9780300047981

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Looks at the Indians who survived the invasion of white settlers during the nineteenth century and integrated their lives into white society while managing to maintain their own culture

Cultural Contact and Linguistic Relativity Among the Indians of Northwestern California
Cultural Contact and Linguistic Relativity Among the Indians of Northwestern California

Author: Sean O'Neill

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780806139227

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Examines the linguistic relativity principle in relation to the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk Indians Despite centuries of intertribal contact, the American Indian peoples of northwestern California have continued to speak a variety of distinct languages. At the same time, they have come to embrace a common way of life based on salmon fishing and shared religious practices. In this thought-provoking re-examination of the hypothesis of linguistic relativity, Sean O’Neill looks closely at the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk peoples to explore the striking juxtaposition between linguistic diversity and relative cultural uniformity among their communities. O’Neill examines intertribal contact, multilingualism, storytelling, and historical change among the three tribes, focusing on the traditional culture of the region as it existed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He asks important historical questions at the heart of the linguistic relativity hypothesis: Have the languages in fact grown more similar as a result of contact, multilingualism, and cultural convergence? Or have they instead maintained some of their striking grammatical and semantic differences? Through comparison of the three languages, O’Neill shows that long-term contact among the tribes intensified their linguistic differences, creating unique Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk identities. If language encapsulates worldview, as the principle of linguistic relativity suggests, then this region’s linguistic diversity is puzzling. Analyzing patterns of linguistic accommodation as seen in the semantics of space and time, grammatical classification, and specialized cultural vocabularies, O’Neill resolves the apparent paradox by assessing long-term effects of contact.

Neither Wolf Nor Dog
Neither Wolf Nor Dog

Author: David Rich Lewis

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0195062973

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During the nineteenth century, Americans looked to the eventual civilization and assimilation of Native Americans through a process of removal, reservation, and directed culture change. Underlying American Indian policy was a belief in a developmental stage theory of human societies in which agriculture marked the passage between barbarism and civilization. Solving the "Indian Problem" appeared as simple as teaching Indians to settle down and farm and then disappear into mainstream American society. Such policies for directed subsistence change and incorporation had far-reaching social and environmental consequences for native peoples and native lands. This study explores the experiences of three groups - Northern Utes, Hupas, and Tohono O'odhams - with settled reservation and allotted agriculture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each group inhabited a different environment, and their cultural traditions reflected distinct subsistence adaptations to life in the western United States. Each experienced the full weight of federal agrarian policy yet responded differently, in culturally consistent ways, to subsistence change and the resulting social and environmental consequences. Attempts to establish successful agricultural economies ultimately failed as each group reproduced its own cultural values in a diminished and rapidly changing environment. In the end, such policies and agrarian experiences left Indian farmers economically dependent and on the periphery of American society.

Yaqui Myths and Legends
Yaqui Myths and Legends

Author:

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 1959

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9780816504671

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Sixty-one tales narrated by Yaquis reflect this people's sense of the sacred and material value of their territory.