25 research outputs found
Book Review: Powwow
Powwow invites readers into the dancing circle where a cornucopia of information, analysis, and interpretation vibrates, telling us about the popular intertribal celebration. The topic of American Indian powwows creates strong emotions and colorful stories, and the editors invite several authors into the dance arena of this book to share their research and experiences. As a result, readers will hear the drum, see traditional and fancy dancers, smell the sizzling fry bread, and feel the spirit that is the American Indian powwow. The editors point out that powwows vary in size from the larger Red Earth gathering on the Great Plains with its big money prizes for dancers and drummers to smaller family and social powwow celebrations. The editors and authors point out the common characteristics of powwows, including the grand entry, prayers, flag songs, intertribal dances, giveaways, honors, and specials, but they also argue that powwows are not static but ever-changing, evolving, and negotiated. Some of the authors view the powwow as a pan-Indian phenomenon, while others point out tribal and group nuances that make powwows unique
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Navajo History. Edited by Ethelou Yazzie and illustrated by Andy Tsihnahjinnie.
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Nchâi-Wiina âThe Big Riverâ: Mid-Columbia Indians and Their Land. By Eugene S. H m, with James Selam and family.
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Prophets of the Great Spirit: Native American Revitalization Movements in Eastern North America. By Alfred A. Cave.
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Native American Dance: Ceremonies and Social Traditions. Edited by Charlotte Heth.
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American Indian Nations: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Edited by George P. Horse Capture, Duane Champagne, and Chandler C. Jackson.
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Invisible Enemies: Ranching, Farming, and Quechan Indian Deaths at the Fort Yuma Agency, California, 1915â1925
The Colorado River weaves its course like a snake, moving south through the desert along the present-day borders of California and Arizona. Just north of the communities of Yuma and Winterhaven, the river turns abruptly west and flows toward a solitary and rocky mountain called Pilot Knob. The river swings south at a right angle, cutting a natural border between Baja California and Arizona, and continues its journey to the Sea of Cortez. Since the time of emergence when Kwikumat created the earth and Kumastamxo put the world into motion, this region of southeastern California has been the home of Quechan Indians. In the 1770s and 1780s, their lives were interrupted briefly by two expeditions of Captain Juan Bautista de Anza, the missionizing activities of Fray Francisco Garces, and the civil settlement of Alferez Santiago de Islas. The Quechan rose in a rebellion to expel Spanish soldiers, settlers, and missionaries, and after the 1780s Spain's agents never returned to resettle among the Quechan. The Indians were affected far more adversely by soldiers, settlers, miners, ranchers, farmers, and agents from the United States. Much has been written about the impact of the white invasion of Quechan in the nineteenth century in terms of war, land, and sovereignty, but little is available regarding the ill effects of the reservation on Native health or the relationship of non-Indian ranching and farming on Quechans in the early twentieth century
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Infant Mortality on the Yakama Indian Reservation, 1914-1964
The Yakama Indian Reservation is located on the Great Columbia Plateau of central Washington State. It is the home of fourteen diverse tribes and bands of Native Americans who once spoke several dialects of three distinct languages, including Sahaptin, Salishan, and Chinookan. These Indians form the Yakama Nation, and their health has been closely related to the creation and execution of the reservation system of the United States since 1855 when a few chiefs signed the Yakima Treaty. Beginning in the 1870s, the Office of Indian Affairs placed a large number of Indians onto a limited land base and during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries restricted their access to traditional foods and medicines off the reservation.
Confinement on the reservation led to changes in subsistence, maternal-child care, and housing that contributed to infant deaths resulting primarily from pneumonia, gastrointestinal disorders, tuberculosis, heart disease, and syphilis (fig. 1). The modal age (the age that appeared most often) of death on the Yakama Reservation during the era from 1914 to 1964 was children under one year of age, with 631 (16 percent) of the 3,899 deaths arising from this age group. This was the largest number of deaths suffered by any age group on the reservation. The first birth and death rates of infants from the Yakama Reservation were recorded in 1914 when an infant mortality rate could be calculated. Thus, although data on deaths exist from 1888, the central focus of this work will be that fifty-year period between 1914 and 1964.
The Yakama Treaty of 1855 and its ratification by the Senate in 1859 set into motion a series of events and circumstances that undermined the health of the Yakama people. As a result of the treaty, the various people placed on the Yakama Reservation secured a small portion of their traditional homelands in central Washington Territory. Other segments of their former land became part of the public domain, which the United States opened to white settlement after 1859. The government placed people from several tribesâYakama, Palouse, Klickitat, Wishram, Wenatchee, Wasco, Wanapum, and othersâon the Yakama Reservation, forcing approximately two thousand Native Americans onto the reservation where they competed for limited traditional food resources
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Earth, Animals, and Academics: Plateau Indian Communities, Culture, and the Walla Walla Council of 1855
In the early winter of 1980, an elderly medicine man of mixed Palouse and NezPerce blood shared many stories. He was a small, thin man with long, white hair pulled back into a ponytail. He spoke of many things and told of his own unique powers. "You come from that university where you have men and women who spend their lives studying plants and animals." The medicine man continued, saying that the scientists could see only a part of the world of living things. "I see things that they have never seen, heard things they have never heard." The medicine man was in deep earnest. He had talked to plants and animals and heard their stories and songs. Through his oral presentation about the plants and animals, he offered insights into the history and worldview of Indians living on the Great Columbia Plateau of present-day Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The discussion of plants and animals, mountains, and rivers is an integral part of American Indian history, but often these are elements of the past that are little understood by historians. As part of the legacy of the Columbian invasion of America, Europeans have debased native beliefs in the sanctity of the natural world and have downplayed the significance of cultural forces within Native American communities as important factors influencing the course of history. The result has been historical writings based on uncritical evaluations of biased documents by scholars who have little understanding of Native American cultures