Comments from the Guest Editor

I want to take this opportunity to share some thoughts with the readers of Explorations about the association and the journal. The new editorial staff is in the process of making several significant changes in format as well as content of the publications. The first new beginning is a new logo, a logo which has as its central symbol the character meaning the source

EDUCATION AND THE IMAGES OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

Looking at any schedule of college courses, one is likely to find several classes which come under the rubric of ethnic studies. The courses are popular with teachers and students alike because they represent a change of pace from traditional study. Hopefully, such courses suggest a move toward an appreciation and recognition of the cultural diversity in America and mean that, as a nation, we are ready to follow the suggestion of Louis Ballard, American Indian composer and author, who stated that cultural differences should be honored, not merely \u27accepted,\u27 which is nothing more than a synonym for \u27tolerated.\u27 In the decade of the Bicentennial, it is fitting that we re-examine our history; however, the celebration of the past and the interest in ethnicity have combined during the seventies to result in one very large and, to many people, embarrassing truth: America\u27s historical past does not mean the same to everyone nor has it been interpreted accurately in many cases

[Review of] Anne Curtenius Roosevelt and james G. E. Smith, eds., The Ancestors: Native Artisans of the Americas

The Ancestors: Native Artisans of the Americas is an illustrated catalog produced for a 1979 exhibition of the Museum of the American Indian which had as its purpose the exploration of the interrelationships between the arts and the cultures which produce them. This catlog [catalog] is refreshing in its thoroughness and in the way the artwork is integrated with the text. Exhibition catalogs often begin with a scholarly introduction and follow with hundreds of photographs of museum pieces only briefly identified. By contrast, The Ancestors begins with a series of color plates and follows with seven specific chapters on the divisions of the exhibition: the Painter, the Feather-worker, the Carver, the Goldsmith, the Basketmaker, the Weaver, and the Potter

An Interview with Geraldine Keams

When Geraldine Keams visited Iowa State University for the annual Symposium on the American Indian in 1983, I had the opportunity to interview her. The tape remained untranscribed until we met again in California during the fall of 1986, more than three years later. Geri and I discussed the directions her life had taken since our initial meeting, and we both agreed that her comments made in 1983 were still relevant. The interview is printed below in full, and some contemporary comments about her life bring the interview up to date

[Review of] Margaret B. Blackman. During My Time: Florence Edenshaw Davidson, A Haida Woman

This book is a recorded autobiography, but it is also much more. In the preface Blackman traces her connections with the Haida people of the Northwest Coast since 1970 and explains her special relationship with Florence Edenshaw Davidson whom she promised in 1973 that she would someday publish the record of her life. Davidson had accepted Margaret Blackman as a grandchild and the special kinship relationship enabled the two of them in 1977 to record the life story of the eighty-one year old Haida woman. Nani, the Haida equivalent for grandmother, traces through six chapters the significant events of her life, remembering the stories told about the times before her birth and elaborating on the changes she has experienced within her own lifetime. In her recollections she fulfills the mandate of the name Story Maid which her father had given her at birth

[Review of] W. S. Penn. All My Sins Are Relatives

W.S. Penn writes with wit and cleverness, but also with passion and love, about himself, his blood relatives, and his spiritual relatives. If the sins of the father are visited upon the son, Penn is doubly doomed by his need to understand his grandfather’s generation as well as his father’s. It is his grandfather and his father, as well as numerous others, to whom the book is dedicated, and it is this line of family members who have created the writer and critic who explores his own life as a mixed blood by simultaneously exploring the lives of his relatives and of his relatives and of other writers such as Wendy Rose, Leslie Silko, and Mourning Dove

[Review of] Isobel White, Diane Barwick, and Betty Meehan, eds. Fighters and Singers: The Lives of Some Aboriginal Women

Fighters and Singers is a collection of fifteen essays written about Aboriginal women of Australia. The authors, mostly anthropologists and all women, wrote of their sisters, mothers, and aunts. The pieces are all informative about tribal life, but they are also warm reminiscences of relationships across cultural boundaries. Among the contributors is Pearl Duncan, the first Aborigine to become a trained teacher in Australia and a former member of the National Aboriginal Education Committee

[Review of] Kay Graber (Ed.), Sister to the Sioux: The Memoirs of Elaine Goodale Eastman, 1885-91

Elaine Goodale Eastman was a white woman from the East who decided early in her life that her “mission” was to educate the Sioux Indians of the Dakotas. The memoirs, published in 1978, were written in the thirties from notes and diaries kept by the writer from 1885-1891. Thus, there are three distinct periods of time the contemporary reader must consider

[Review of] Jane B. Katz (Ed.), I Am the Fire of Time: The Voices of Native American Women

Speaking at the Annual Conference on Ethnic and Minority Studies in April, Bea Medicine admonished the audience that rather than lament the work which has not yet been done by or about Native American women, we must recognize the significance and breadth of what has already been written. I Am the Fire of Time shows just that. The selections come from nineteenth century transcripts as well as from contemporary women poets and activists. Over and over the reader is reminded that the Native American woman was not and is not the drudge or burden bearer portrayed in American fiction and by Hollywood producers, but rather, as participant in various roles, she has been and continues to be important in tribal life

Economic and Psychic Exploitation of American Indians

Two general points can be made about Euroamerican exploitation of American Indians: first, whatever level of exploitation they have experienced by the motion picture industry, it is part of a long tradition which dates back to the earliest contacts between white Europeans and Indians; and second, that the exploitation has taken on two forms-economic and psychic. Just how Indians have been taken advantage of economically is relatively clear. Euroamerican history texts happily record the ways in which the native inhabitants of the American shores were bilked, with the $24 worth of beads, for Manhatten [Manhattan] Island and with equally inequitable arrangements for the rest of their lands. Perhaps less obvious, and more damaging is just how these same people have been exploited for emotional and psychological reasons