Review of \u3ci\u3e Science and Native American Communities: Legacies of Pain, Visions of Promise\u3c/i\u3e Edited by Keith James

Science and Native American Communities, a provocative collection of essays from an unprecedented 1997 conference of Native American professionals in academia, science, engineering, and health sciences, explores the uneasy meeting ground between Western science and traditional wisdom. Education, particularly in the sciences, is not value-neutral to Native peoples. Rather than education\u27s poster children, many of the text\u27s nineteen contributors are survivors of failed educational experiments: mission schools, boarding schools, externally imposed values, forced relocations. To editor Keith James (Onondaga), a professor of psychology, Education has historically been associated with physical and sexual abuse and the emotional and cultural battery of Indian people. Told by a mission school guidance counselor, You are average; you will never go to college, Gerri Shangreaux (Oglala Lakota) was relocated by the BIA from Pine Ridge to Los Angeles to train as a nurse\u27s aide. A professor of nursing, Shangreaux, like most contributors, weaves a touching personal story into her professional commentary, which makes for compelling reading. To James Lujan (Taos Pueblo), Dean of Instruction at Southwest Indian Polytechnic Institute, the biggest issue facing Native America is helping Indians manage and integrate competing world views. Science and Native American Communities pulses with the personal and social tensions of that struggle

American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance: Word Medicine, Word Magic

American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance presents an original critical and theoretical analysis of American Indian rhetorical practices in both canonical and previously overlooked texts: autobiographies, memoirs, prophecies, and oral storytelling traditions. Ernest Stromberg assembles essays from a range of academic disciplines that investigate the rhetorical strategies of Native American orators, writers, activists, leaders, and intellectuals. The contributors consider rhetoric in broad terms, ranging from Aristotle\u27s definition of rhetoric as “the faculty . . . of discovering in the particular case what are the available means of persuasion,” to the ways in which Native Americans assimilated and revised Western rhetorical concepts and language to form their own discourse with European and American colonists. They relate the power and use of rhetoric in treaty negotiations, written accounts of historic conflicts and events, and ongoing relations between American Indian governments and the United States. This is a groundbreaking collection for readers interested in Native American issues and the study of language. In presenting an examination of past and present Native American rhetoric, it emphasizes the need for an improved understanding of multicultural perspectives.https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/fac_books/1017/thumbnail.jp