Indigenous Studies in the United States and Canada

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aubrey Jean Hanson ◽  
Sam McKegney
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
First Nations ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Indigenous Voices

Indigenous literary studies, as a field, is as diverse as Indigenous Peoples. Comprising study of texts by Indigenous authors, as well as literary study using Indigenous interpretive methods, Indigenous literary studies is centered on the significance of stories within Indigenous communities. Embodying continuity with traditional oral stories, expanding rapidly with growth in publishing, and traversing a wild range of generic innovation, Indigenous voices ring out powerfully across the literary landscape. Having always had a central place within Indigenous communities, where they are interwoven with the significance of people’s lives, Indigenous stories also gained more attention among non-Indigenous readers in the United States and Canada as the 20th century rolled into the 21st. As relationships between Indigenous Peoples (Native American, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) and non-Indigenous people continue to be a social, political, and cultural focus in these two nation-states, and as Indigenous Peoples continue to work for self-determination amid colonial systems and structures, literary art plays an important role in representing Indigenous realities and inspiring continuity and change. An educational dimension also exists for Indigenous literatures, in that they offer opportunities for non-Indigenous readerships—and, indeed, for readers from within Indigenous nations—to learn about Indigenous people and perspectives. Texts are crucially tied to contexts; therefore, engaging with Indigenous literatures requires readers to pursue and step into that beauty and complexity. Indigenous literatures are also impressive in their artistry; in conveying the brilliance of Indigenous Peoples; in expressing Indigenous voices and stories; in connecting pasts, presents, and futures; and in imagining better ways to enact relationality with other people and with other-than-human relatives. Indigenous literatures span diverse nations across vast territories and materialize in every genre. While critics new to the field may find it an adjustment to step into the responsibility—for instance, to land, community, and Peoplehood—that these literatures call for, the returns are great, as engaging with Indigenous literatures opens up space for relationship, self-reflexivity, and appreciation for exceptional literary artistry. Indigenous literatures invite readers and critics to center in Indigeneity, to build good relations, to engage beyond the text, and to attend to Indigenous storyways—ways of knowing, being, and doing through story.

Challenging the “Love of Possessions”: Repatriation of Sacred Objects in the United States and Canada

Collections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer L Dekker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
United Nations ◽  
First Nations ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Federal Law ◽  
Sacred Objects ◽  
United Nations Declaration

In 1990, the United States passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), requiring the repatriation of ancestral remains, funerary, and sacred objects from museums to source communities. Since then, hundreds of thousands of repatriations have occurred, allowing for respectful treatment of ancestors and reconnections to spiritual, communal practice, and ceremony. In Canada, repatriation has been recommended by the Assembly of First Nations, the Canadian Museum Association, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, but there is no federal law. Does Canada have a functioning alternative? This examination provides a comparison of how repatriation differs in the two countries, demonstrating that case-by-case negotiations in Canada currently allow for more flexibility and customization to the needs of different Indigenous communities but that the transparency, coordination, and funding associated with NAGPRA would be a significant benefit to claimants in Canada.

scholarly journals Concrete Lessons: Policies and Practices Affecting the Impact of COVID-19 for Urban Indigenous Communities in the United States and Canada

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather A. Howard-Bobiwash ◽  
Jennie R. Joe ◽  
Susan Lobo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The United States ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Policies And Practices

Throughout the Americas, most Indigenous people move through urban areas and make their homes in cities. Yet, the specific issues and concerns facing Indigenous people in cities, and the positive protective factors their vibrant urban communities generate are often overlooked and poorly understood. This has been particularly so under COVID-19 pandemic conditions. In the spring of 2020, the United Nations High Commissioner Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples called for information on the impacts of COVID-19 for Indigenous peoples. We took that opportunity to provide a response focused on urban Indigenous communities in the United States and Canada. Here, we expand on that response and Indigenous and human rights lens to review policies and practices impacting the experience of COVID-19 for urban Indigenous communities. Our analysis integrates a discussion of historical and ongoing settler colonialism, and the strengths of Indigenous community-building, as these shape the urban Indigenous experience with COVID-19. Mindful of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, we highlight the perspectives of Indigenous organizations which are the lifeline of urban Indigenous communities, focusing on challenges that miscounting poses to data collection and information sharing, and the exacerbation of intersectional discrimination and human rights infringements specific to the urban context. We include Indigenous critiques of the implications of structural oppressions exposed by COVID-19, and the resulting recommendations which have emerged from Indigenous urban adaptations to lockdown isolation, the provision of safety, and delivery of services grounded in Indigenous initiatives and traditional practices.

scholarly journals Transnationalism as a Decolonizing Strategy? ‘Trans-Indigenism’ and Native American Food Sovereignty

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (s1) ◽  
pp. 413-423
Author(s):  
Zuzanna Kruk-Buchowska
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Scientific Paradigms ◽  
Nation States ◽  
In Trans ◽  
Indigenous Methods

Abstract The aim of this paper is to analyze how Indigenous communities in the United States have been engaging in trans-Indigenous cooperation in their struggle for food sovereignty. I will look at inter-tribal conferences regarding food sovereignty and farming, and specifically at the discourse of the Indigenous Farming Conference held in Maplelag at the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. I will show how it: (1) creates a space for Indigenous knowledge production and validation, using Indigenous methods (e.g., storytelling), without the need to adhere to Western scientific paradigms; (2) recovers pre-colonial maps and routes distorted by the formation of nation states; and (3) fosters novel sites for trans-indigenous cooperation and approaches to law, helping create a common front in the fight with neoliberal agribusiness and government. In my analysis, I will use Chadwick Allen’s (2014) concept of ‘trans-indigenism’ to demonstrate how decolonizing strategies are used by the Native American food sovereignty movement to achieve their goals.

Intolerance toward Native American Religions

2020 ◽  
pp. 125-146
Author(s):  
John Corrigan ◽  
Lynn S. Neal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Native American Religions

Settler colonialism was imbued with intolerance towards Indigenous peoples. In colonial North America brutal military force was applied to the subjection and conversion of Native Americans to Christianity. In the United States, that offense continued, joined with condemnations of Indian religious practice as savagery, or as no religion at all. The violence was legitimated by appeals to Christian scripture in which genocide was commanded by God. Forced conversion to Christianity and the outlawing of Native religious practices were central aspects of white intolerance.

Reembodying Our Occupied Geographies: Boyd Cothran's Remembering the Modoc War, Benjamin Madley's An American Genocide, and the Future of Native American Studies

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaiah Lorado Wilner
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Native American Studies ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
Blood Meridian ◽  
Wounded Knee

Narratives of innocence are stories born of the dispossession of bodies from lands that continue to serve as vectors of violence, reenacting the scene that created them. The term was introduced by Boyd Cothran to describe the cunning afterlife of conflicts between settler states and indigenous peoples: state violence yields stories that reiterate erasure, weaponizing memory to forget the lessons of colonization. In a situation of violence that produces silence, names resonate as instruments of clarity, cutting through erasure. Genocide is a name historians are now using to describe a process of erasure that created modern California, a process indigenous people have long discussed that narratives of innocence have silenced. Through a reading of Cothran's book Remembering the Modoc War and Benjamin Madley's book An American Genocide against an older literary genre on violence ranging from Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, I take California as an emblem of a profound alteration in the way the United States processes the trace memory of indigenous erasure. A historical reckoning is now underway as indigenous people reembody their occupied geographies, returning their stories to the land and, in the process, reconfiguring the national narrative.

scholarly journals Book Review: Native American Almanac: More than 50,000 Years of the Cultures and Histories of Indigenous Peoples

2016 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Lisa Euster
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
The United States ◽  
Contact Period ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Native Communities ◽  
Other Information

The authors emphasize early what Native American Almanac is not: an almanac, an encyclopedia, nor a scholarly work, among other things. It is described as a well-researched “historical overview of Native communities in what is now the United States” (ix). Despite the title, it is heavily focused on the post-contact period. The main arrangement is by geographical region, with an overview chapter and one discussing urban settings. Each chapter is introduced by a regional history, followed by discussion of tribes, their histories, and other information.

Hyperincarceration and Indigeneity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thalia Anthony ◽  
Harry Blagg
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Psychiatric Care ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Out Of Home Care ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Colonial Governance ◽  
Colonial Oppression

Indigenous people have been subject to policies that disproportionately incarcerate them since the genesis of colonization of their lands. Incarceration is one node of a field of colonial oppression for Indigenous people. Colonial practices have sought to reduce Indigenous people to “bare life,” to use Agamben’s term, where their humanity is denied the basic rights and expression in the pursuit of sovereign extinguishment. Across the settler colonies of Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, the colonial drive to conquer land and eliminate Indigenous peoples has left deep scars on Indigenous communities and compromised bonds to kin, culture, and country. Indigenous people have been made refugees in their own countries. Contemporary manifestations of penal incarceration for Indigenous people are a continuation of colonial strategies rather than a distinct phase. The concept of “hyperincarceration” draws attention to the problem of incarceration and its discriminatory targets. It also turns our attention to the turnstile of incarceration in Western postmodernity. However, the prison is but one form of exclusion for Indigenous people in a constellation of eliminatory and assimilatory practices, policies, and regimes imposed by colonial governance. Rather than overemphasizing the prison, there needs to be a broader conceptualization of colonial governance through “the camp,” again in the words of Agamben. The colonial institutionalization of Indigenous people, including in out-of-home care, psychiatric care, and corrective programs, is akin to a camp where Indigenous people are relegated to the margins of society. We eschew a narrow notion of hyperincarceration and instead posit a structural analysis of colonial relations underpinning the camp.

The Wisdom of Indigenous Healers

2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorene Day (Waubanewquay) ◽  
Dane Kaohelani Silva ◽  
Amshatar Ololodi Monroe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Healing Process ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Upper Midwest ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Health And Well Being

The wisdom of indigenous peoples is manifest in ways of knowing, seeing, and thinking that are passed down orally from generation to generation. This article takes the reader on a journey through three distinct ways of knowing, specifically as they relate to healing and health. The authors are a Midewanniquay, or Water Woman, of the Ojibway-Anishinabe people of the upper Midwest in the United States and Canada; a lomilomi healer from Hawaii; and an initiated Priest in the Yoruba tradition of West Africa. The philosophies of all three cultures emphasize the importance of spirituality to health and well-being (or healing process), but each has unique ways in which it nurtures relationship with the Creator, the earth, and humankind through sacred rituals and healing practices.

Lawyers and the Legal Business of the Cherokee Republic in Courts of the United States, 1829–1835

1992 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill Norgren
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
Contact Period ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Resolution System ◽  
Conflict Mediation

When Europeans first arrived, the Native American societies of North America had a variety of systems of social control and conflict mediation. These indigenous peoples were not heir to the concept of equal protection of the law derived from the Magna Carta, nor to notions of individual rights defended in the English Bill of Rights (1689) and Western Enlightenment political thought. Theirs were systems of custom and commandment of their own need and development. Therefore, after the contact period, whenever conflict arose a central issue of cultural pluralism surfaced: whose resolution system would be used when mediation was necessary.

scholarly journals Cultivating Positive Health, Learning, and Community: The Return of Mesoamerica’s Quetzalcoatl and the Venus Star…

Genealogy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 53
Author(s):  
Santiago Andrés Garcia ◽  
Claudia Itzel Márquez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
Deep Understanding ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The United States ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Positive Health ◽  
Culturally Relevant Education ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
History Of

For more than 3500 years, since Olmec times (1500–400 BC), the peoples of Mesoamerica have shared with one another a profound way of living involving a deep understanding of the human body and of land and cosmology. As it stands, healing ways of knowing that depend on medicinal plants, the Earth’s elements, and knowledge of the stars are still intact. The Indigenous Xicana/o/xs who belong to many of the mobile tribes of Mesoamerica share a long genealogical history of cultivating and sustaining their Native American rituals, which was weakened in Mexico and the United States during various periods of colonization. This special edition essay sheds light on the story of Quetzalcoatl and the Venus Star as a familial place of Xicana/o/x belonging and practice. To do so, we rely on the archaeological interpretation of these two entities as one may get to know them through artifacts, monuments, and ethnographic accounts, of which some date to Mesoamerica’s Formative period (1500–400 BC). Throughout this paper, ancestral medicine ways are shown to help cultivate positive health, learning, and community. Such cosmic knowledge is poorly understood, yet it may further culturally relevant education and the treatment of the rampant health disparities in communities of Mesoamerican ancestry living in the United States. The values of and insights into Indigenous Xicana/o/x knowledge and identity conclude this essay.

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