Native American Culture and Society

Abstract

Abstract Native American culture and society is difficult to understand through a Western classification that neatly separates culture and society as isolated categories, because Native American culture is typically characterized by reciprocal relations with other realms of life. This sort of relationality is visible in the sustaining social structure of Native American society: the kinship system. The extended family bonds or clans of the kinship system express a ceremonial relationship between the earth as primal creator and all other beings, blurring boundaries between what, according to Western knowledge, belongs strictly to either society or culture. Colonization reshaped Native American society by imposing norms of national affiliations, constructing legally dependent tribal nations out of diverse Native American clans. Expressions of Native American culture can be located in a discursive realm of storytelling. These stories with their multiple genres constitute the main source of historiographic knowledge and communal identification within society and space.