Author: Marshall Poe

Pauline Turner Strong‘s new book American Indians and the American Imaginary: Cultural Representation Across the Centuries (Paradigm Publishers, 2012) traces the representations of Native Americans across various public spheres of the American imaginary. Based on historical and ethnographic research, she documents how representations of Native Americans have circulated through time and into ever-widening cultural domains. In the first section of the book, Strong begins by defining a theory of representational practices that employs an ethnographic approach. She then traces particular forms of representing Native Americans by exploring the concepts of  “tribe” and “Indian blood.” The third section of the book focuses on narratives of captivity on the indigenous/settler frontier, highlighting the significance of captivity narratives to American national identity. The following section features a critical analysis of “playing Indian” as racial mimesis and cultural appropriation, highlighting the ways in which American youth are socialized into practices such as participating in Thanksgiving pageants of Pilgrims and Indians, using tribal names as part of camp activities, and even playing “cowboys and Indians.” The fifth and final section of the book, “Indigenous Imaginaries,” examines the more recent developments in indigenous politics of representation, including contemporary trends in collaborative ethnographic research and writing, and the installation of the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Pauline Strong contributes a careful analysis that traces the heritage of colonialist representations of American Indians and considers the ways in which contemporary practices and indigenous projects could begin to pose powerful challenges to these dominant representations in the American imaginary.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

“School was a place that devalued who we are as Indigenous people,” says Noelani Goodyear-Kapua. These were institutions — at least since white settlers deposed the Indigenous government in the late 19th century — that Native students “tolerated and survived…experienced more as a carceral space than a place of learning.”

So she and her community decided to start their own.

Founded in 1999, the HKM Public Charter School in Honolulu enacts a host of educational practices that Goodyear-Kapua labels “sovereign pedagogies.” From the “land-based literacies” of their Papa Lo’i agricultural project to Olelo language classes, HKM signaled a “radical departure from the fences, walls, and bell schedules that kept young people cut off from their ‘aina and other storehouses of ancestral knowledge.”

Now an associate professor of political science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa,Goodyear-Kapua tells the inspiring story of HKM in The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). No simple tale of triumph, Goodyear-Kapua explores the tensions and contradictions of fostering sovereign education in a settler colonial context and appropriating elements of the neocolonial/neoliberal charter school movement for anti-colonial ends.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The suspension of the so-called “Indian Wars” did not signal colonialism’s end, only a different battlefield. “The calvary man was supplanted–or, rather, supplemented–by the field matron, the Hotchkiss by the transit, and the prison by the school,” writes Beth H. Piatote. “A turn to the domestic front, even as the last shots at Wounded Knee echoed in America’s collective ear, marked not the end of conquest but rather its renewal.”

Yet the domestic space was not only a target of invasion; it was also a site of resistance, a fertile ground for Native authors to define what counted as love, home, and kin in an era of coercive assimilation. In Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale University Press, 2013), Piatote brilliantly reads the work of late nineteenth century writers like Pauline Johnson, S. Alice Callahan, D’arcy McNickle and others as a contest over settler domestication. Piatote offers an eloquent exploration of incredible courage and literary acumen, with resonance in our own political moment.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Most people today think of war–or really violence of any sort–as for the most part useless. It’s better, we say, just to talk things out or perhaps buy our enemies off. And that usually works. But what if you lived in a culture where fighting was an important part of social status and earning a living? What if, say, you couldn’t get married unless you had gone to war? What if, say, you couldn’t feed your family without raiding your enemies? Such was the case with Chiricahua Apache of the Southwest. As Lance R. Blyth shows in his terrific book Chirichahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680-1880 (Nebraska UP, 2012), war was a necessary part of Chiricahua life, at least in the 17th and 18th centuries. They needed to fight the Spanish in Janos, and there was nothing the Spanish could really do to stop them, at least in the long term. Of course the Spanish–who were, it should be said, invaders–fought back. And so the two communities entered into a two century-long struggle that only ended with the “removal” of the Chiricahua Apache by the United States in the nineteenth century. Listen to Lance tell the fascinating story.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Can the spoken word be a reliable record of past events?

For many Native people, the answer is unequivocally affirmative. Histories of family, tribe, and nation, narratives of origin and migration, foodways and ceremonies, and the provisions of countless treaties have been passed down through successive generations without written documents. The colonizing society has maintained a starkly different view, elevating the written word to a position of authority and dismissing the authenticity of oral tradition. Are these two views irreconcilable?

Exploring the contested memorialization of four controversial episodes in the history of the Delaware (or Lenape) Indians’ encounter with settlers, Andrew Newman finds unexpected connections between colonial documents, recorded oral traditions, and material culture. On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) is a thoughtful meditation on how we know the past.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Joy Porter is the author of Native American Freemasonry: Associationalism and Performance in America (University of Nebraska Press, 2011).  She has also written several other publications, including, To Be Indian: The Life of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur Caswell Parker (University of Oklahoma Press, 2001) and Land & Spirit in Native America (Praeger Press, 2012), and she co-edited a book with Kenneth M. Roemer, entitled The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2005).  In her latest book, she carefully tells the fascinating story of an elusive subject that sparks many historical debates: the organizational history and inclusion of Native American freemasons in America.  She covers the broad chronology of freemasonry in general, from the British origins in the  sixteenth-century to freemasonry in America from the eighteenth- to the twentieth-centuries. She explains how freemasonry is one of many institutions that exemplified the process of the transatlantic exchange of ideas from Europe to the Americas.  More specifically, she examines the Native American freemasonry from an interdisciplinary approach, such as using theories from performance studies and socio-psychological ideas of associationalism.  Furthermore, she examines Native American freemasonry from the lense of understanding the idea of “ornamentalism” (a concept borrowed from Edward Said’s work, Orientalism) to evoke the historical and racial perceptions of Native Americans from the colonial era, and how some of these ideas shifted over time.  Listen in.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Deploying hashtags and hunger strikes, flash mobs and vigils, the Idle No More movement of First Nation peoples in Canada is reaching a global audience. While new technology and political conditions alter the landscape of dissent, Indigenous activists using a wide tactical array to further their demands is not anything new, the media’s breathless claims notwithstanding.

Frederick E. Hoxie has composed a powerful new book highlighting this truth. In eight moving chapters stretching from the American Revolution to the contemporary period of self-determination, This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made(Penguin 2012) introduces us to courageous men and women whose names might not be familiar but whose legacies are still felt. Facing down a settler state determined on their erasure, they struggled to carve out a place for Native nationhood within — but not necessarily of— the polity that surrounded them.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Colin Calloway is one of the leading historians of Native American history today and an award- winning author. Calloway is the John Kimball, Jr. 1943 Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hanover, and has been part of the institution for several decades.  He has published a textbook, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History (Bedford/St. Martin’s), which has a fourth edition published in 2012.

Not surprisingly, he has also published a fascinating new work entitled Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Dartmouth College Press, 2010).  When we think about the history of Indian education, we may think about the broad legacy of educating Native Americans at boarding schools from the late-nineteenth to the twentieth century, or more specifically about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, or Native American educational program that existed at Hampton University, the historically black college in Virginia.  However, Calloway covers a much older legacy of Native American education rooted in the eighteenth-century, and continues to the present-day at Dartmouth College.

As an alumna of the College, I was always fascinated by the “Indian history” at this institution. Some current ways the college pays homage to its original mission include recruiting Native American students, supporting academic and student resources, such as the Native American Studies department, and the Native American Program which hosts college-wide events, such as the upcoming 40th annual Pow Wow held in May.  Calloway’s book provides greater insight into understanding how the shadows of Dartmouth’s complicated colonial history of Native American education are viewed today.  Listen in to learn more about this fascinating study.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Just east of the Norwich-New London Turnpike in Uncasville, Connecticut, stands the Mohegan Congregational Church. By most accounts, it’s little different than the thousands of white-steepled structures dotting the New England landscape: the same high-backed wooden chairs, high ceilings, images of lordly white men. To the careful observer, there is one notable distinction. Just above a traditional cross near the front entrance hangs a single, perfect eagle feather.

The juxtaposition might be startling for some. But as Brown historian Linford D. Fisher beautifully illuminates in The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America(Oxford University Press, 2012), Native cultures in New England – and, indeed, most everywhere – are highly incorporative, blending elements of Christian religious practice with their own.

This was never more the case than during the eighteenth century evangelical revival known to scholars as the First Great Awakening. A significant turning point in American spiritual life, Native peoples of New England are often left out of the narrative. When they’re included, it’s as passive targets of conversion. Fisher tells a dramatically different story.

(Many thanks to New Books in American Studies host Benjamin Smith for composing our new intro music!)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Despite what you may have learned in undergraduate surveys or high school textbooks, the nineteenth century was not one long and inexorable march toward Indian dispossession — the real story is far more tragic. As historian Joseph Genetin-Pilawa masterfully relates in his new book Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), Native and non-Native reformers developed a host of viable policy alternatives to allotment and forced assimilation in the post-Civil War years.

Seizing the ferment of Reconstruction, dynamic figures like Ely Parker — briefly featured in Speilberg’s Lincoln — attempted to harness the power of a growing federal government to protect indigenous nations from rapacious land loss and cultural genocide, only to be outmaneuvered by elite “humanitarian” forces who equated dispossession with progress. Adeptly synthesizing the study of American political development with post-colonial thought, and demonstrating an keen attentiveness to human agency within the limitations of larger structures, Genetin-Pilawa excavates the “repressed alternatives” of late nineteenth century Indian policy, destabilizing a narrative too often presented as inevitable.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies