[Review of] Melissa L. Meyer. The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889-1920

Employing a broad multi-disciplinary approach which includes history, anthropology, economics, demography, ecology, and political science, Meyer, a U.C.L.A. historian, has created a sensitive and sweeping analysis of the creation and metamorphosis of the Anishinaabeg ( Chippewa or Ojibwe”) who eventually located in contemporary Minnesota on the White Earth Reservation. Eschewing stereotypes of Indians as mere victims of Euro-American history, Meyer shows how the Anishinaabeg -- themselves internally heterogeneous -- transform, adapt, innovate and respond according to their own interests and to changes around them

[Review of] H. David Brumble III. American Indian Autobiography

American Indian Autobiography provides significant insight into the nature and production of Indian autobiographies, past and present. Aware of the heterogeneity of native cultures, H. David Brumble perceptively demonstrates the continuity of these works with both their cultural and literary roots -- oral narrative. He elucidates six genera of oral narrative, convincingly establishing their continuity from the earliest to contemporary works. Stressing the bicultural nature of Indian autobiography, Brumble carefully analyzes both the effect of white editors working within the cultural assumptions of their eras in eliciting and shaping Indian autobiographies and the ramifications of culture contact and adaptation on the part of the Indians in shaping their narratives. Brumble fruitfully contrasts the Indian self as tribal and kin enmeshed with the modern Western self, independent and individualistic. He sees the essence of preliterate autobiography as the reciting of one\u27s adult deeds rather than the contemporary (since Rousseau) project of explaining how the author came to be who he/she is

[Review of] Rosalio Moises, Jane Holden Kelley, and William Curry Holden. A Yaqui Life: The Personal Chronicle of a Yaqui Indian

The search for an untouched Native voice in American Indian autobiography, both experientially and stylistically, has proven as elusive as the search for the untouched Native. In the case of A Yaqui Life, it is precisely the of the native author\u27s interaction-personal, literary, military, economic, religious, and familial-that makes the work both fascinating and significant. So, too, the text as a product of the interactions between the various authors enhances its ethnographic and historic significance. In 1954, at the suggestion of the anthropologist W. C. Holden, the core of the work was penned by Rosalio Moises, a Yaqui who lived from 1896 until 1969. Holden\u27s daughter, Jane Holden Kelley, later edited the text and amplified the material through interviews with Moisés concerning his written text. This personal chronicle thus bridges the gap between autobiography and ethnography

[Review of] Howard L. Harrod. Renewing the World

Howard Harrod\u27s work provides an interpretation of the religious and moral world of the Arapaho, Crow, Cheyenne and Blackfeet tribes of the Northwestern Plains. Well aware that the material he is utilizing represents interpretations by early ethnographers, he transcends this hermeneutical problem to provide an idealized reconstruction of this world guided by the theories of Schutz and Geertz and the work of Joseph Brown

Promising Practices: Reaching Out to Rhode Island\u27s Deaf and Hard of Hearing Community

Protection and Advocacy (PABSS) staff are responsible for providing legal services to social security recipients who are facing barriers in their efforts to return to work. Benefits Specialists are responsible for reaching out to all recipient communities within their territory to provide information and planning services when a recipient is considering a work effort. In September of 2004, the Rhode Island BPA&O project noted that deaf and hard of hearing individuals were not utilizing benefits counseling services. A work group was created to address this situation and develop a strategy. The strategy included outreach to community groups and agencies serving deaf and hard of hearing individuals and aggressive referrals of deaf and hard of hearing individuals to benefits planners by the state’s vocational rehabilitation workers. In preparation for this work, benefits planners received training in using a TTY, placing calls through the Rhode Island Relay Service and effectively utilizing sign language interpreters