American Indian Societies Research Articles

American Indian Societies: Strategies and Conditions for Political and Cultural Survival

American Indian Societies: Strategies and Conditions for Political and Cultural Survival

Roots of Resistance: Champagne's American Indian Societies

Roots of Resistance: Champagne's American Indian Societies

Strategies and Conditions of Political and Cultural Survival in American Indian Societies

Strategies and Conditions of Political and Cultural Survival in American Indian Societies

Traditional Literatures of the American Indian: Tests and Interpretations

Praise for the first edition: "A highly valuable collection of interpretive essays ..."Traditional Literatures of the American Indian" should be in the library of every serious student of Native American cultures. It is informative interesting, and valuable." - "American Indian Quarterly". "These well-documented essays are im-portant reading for students of Native American literature." - "Choice". In American Indian societies, storytelling and speech-making are invested with special significance, crafted to reveal central psychological and social values, tensions, and ambi-guities. As Karl Kroeber notes, "It is our scholarship, not Indian storytelling, that is primitive, undeveloped."This book is an essential introduction to the study and appreciation of American Indian oral literatures. The essays, by leading scholars, illuminate the subtle artistry of form and content that gives spoken stories and myths an enduring vitality in native communities yet often makes them perplexing to outsiders. The presentation and analysis of complete oral texts, often without translations, enable the reader to grasp the meaning, purpose, and structure of the tales and to become familiar with the techniques scholars use to translate and interpret them. This expanded edition of the widely praised collection contains a recent analysis of the Wintu myth of female sexuality, a revised introduction by Karl Kroeber, a contribution by Dell Hymes, a new translation by Dennis Tedlock, and a new, annotated bibliography. Karl Kroeber is a professor of English at Columbia University and the author of "Retelling-Rereading: The Fate of Storytelling in Modern Times".

"National" War Among Indians of Northeastern North America

The fundamental question of survival forces any society to maximize its institutional skills and energies in the presence of war and peace situations. Scholars diverge widely in their views about how skilfully American Indian societies in the northeast woodland cultural area defended their societal and territorial interests. A large number of the most thoroughly informed first- hand observers of Indian life in the eighteenth century believed that the Indians were relatively sophisticated in military matters. Some of these observers linked this military expertise with an emphasis on a private/public war-making distinction in which two entirely different types of warring took place. The terrorist-type action needs to be distinguished from the large- scale public armies whose appearance always seemed to surprise most colonial military. Tactically and strategically the two types of war differed immensely. The formal use of councils to control public war constituted the characteristic political difference between the two types of war; however, many primary and scholarly sources that challenge the very possibility of large-scale Indian military organizations following council directives can be readily adduced. Only the acceptance of the general outlines of a model of societal relations founded on recent, viable stateless societies can begin to explain both the apparent administrative anomalies of Indian woodland war and its wide success.

Continents in Collision: The Impact of Europe on the North American Indian Societies

Continents in Collision: The Impact of Europe on the North American Indian Societies

How to Mainstream Feminist Studies by Raising Questions: The Case of the Introductory Course

“Religious Myths and Rituals,” a course I teach once a year, is a lower division undergraduate course designed to introduce students to the academic study of religion. Its purpose is to acquaint students with the wide range of scholarly views regarding the meanings, origins, and functions of religion, the mythic and ritual components of religion, the widespread presence of religious symbols, the metaphoric character of religious language, diverse crosscultural images of transcendence, sacrality, and the like. In order to introduce the theoretical materials or to test or illuminate them, we focus on the specific religious expressions of American Indian and African tribal societies. Although examples from other religions are cited in the course of class lectures, these two tribal cultural settings serve as our primary reference points for understanding the phenomenon of religion.On the course syllabus and early in the quarter, I articulate the following questions as a way of describing the task of the course: What is religion? What are the origins and functions of religion? What can we learn about myths and mythologies and the functions they have in human experience? Why do rituals arise in human behavior? (How do they take shape and what are they for?) Do any of the myths and rituals of traditional, tribal religions have any bearing on contemporary American life? How might we discern the meaning of religious symbols? What are some of the predominant myths and rituals that both reflect and affect our own lives as individuals or as a people (as Christians, Jews, Buddhists, atheists—as students, Americans, Westerners, as women or men)?

Representative institutions among contemporary American Indian tribal societies

Representative institutions among contemporary American Indian tribal societies

Revisionist Anthropology: Aboriginal North America [and Comments and Reply

Anthropological discussions of North American Indians and archaeological interpretation of North American prehistory tend to be distorted by biases, some the cant of conquest, others derived from the structuring principles of the European tradition. Tripartite schemata such as the Three-Age model and premises of oppositional dualism such as the contrast between primitive and civilized should be assumed to come from these structuring principles and subjected to critical examination. A revisionist view of North American Indian societies and prehistory suggests that by the 1st millennium A. D. nearly all these peoples had evolved sophisticated and effective techniqes of food production. The exception was in the high latitudes, where environmental conditions did not permit food production and adaptations focussed on perfecting harvesting techniques for natural populations. Throughout the continental core and the Pacific Drainage, but not in the high latitudes, societies were stratified and urbanized in th...

An Applied Analysis of North American Indian Drinking Patterns

Some American Indian societies have had alcoholic beverages and recognized the problems related to excessive drinking since aboriginal times while others have acquired these problems with the historic introduction of alcohol. These problems have become extremely serious with the breakdown of traditional cultural controls in a context of racial discrimination, frustrations related to low economic success, peer group pressures to drink socially, and the spread of patterns of drinking to complete drunkenness. Simple legal solutions, such as the external imposition of prohibitions and arrest for public drunkenness, have been ineffective as well as unjust, but there is evidence of the kinds of practical things that can be done to improve the situation. There is particularly a need to enhance existing social controls within Indian societies on self-destructive drunken comportment.

Who Should Rule at Home? Native American Politics and Indian-White Relations

THE basic problem for historians who advocate Indian-centered rather than white-centered approaches to American Indian history has been to find a unifying theme, a central conceptual focus. Recent trends in research indicate that, out of the theoretical chaos of the past fifteen years, such a theme is at last emerging-if not triumphant, at least preeminent. The theme is Indian political behavior. The advocates of this theme, drawing upon the premises of political anthropology, argue that political behavior includes all aspects of competition over public goals and the distribution of power. Politics thus embraces all forms of conflict and its resolution, no matter what sector of a community is involved-religious, economic, or political. In American Indian societies, where these sectors of community life were closely interconnected and where the decision-making process in any kind of matter usually involved the same people, politics broadly defined becomes the basic unifying concept for analysis of the community's history.' The value of the political approach is undeniable. From the start, it requires historians to treat Indians as multidimensional figures, with connections to a political context within their own community as well as to the context of white encroachment. It also provides for a more realistic conception of the groupings which comprised Indian society, since the units of Indian politics varied with specific issues and historical circum-

The use of oral data in legal anthropology: a Senegalese example

Oral data are an integral part of the raw material used in anthropological research on social organization. They have also been heavily relied upon in the study of disappearing American Indian societies and, more recently, in the reconstruction of African history. By contrast, with some striking exceptions, they are in danger of being neglected in the anthropological study of law. Oral data have only recently been employed in Frenchsponsored studies in this field. In the English-speaking world, the dominant theme of dispute settlement and its apparent corollary, the case method, may leave little room for the systematic collection and the careful analysis of oral data.

The Plains Vision Experience: A Study of Power and Privilege

Although the vision experience was institutionalized among American Indian societies on the Plains and in peripheral areas, it displayed considerable variation in both form and function. Aside from Benedict's early study of the vision, which detailed its numerous variations, most accounts speculate about its assumed universal psychological functions for the individual. An interest in the social functions of this institution suggested that it might be useful to examine differences in the vision in the light of ecological and evolutionary theory. The assumption was made that ecological differences are associated systematically with differences in social organization. It was further assumed that cultural phenomena, such as the vision experience, can be viewed as adaptations which support and facilitate the operation of the social structure. An examination of the ethnographic data indicated that the vision, as an adaptive mechanism, changed its form and function in accord with changes in social structure. Mor...

Cultural Stability and Change in American Indian Societies

Cultural Stability and Change in American Indian Societies

Stuttering among the North Pacific Coastal Indians

THE FOLLOWING is a report and tentative interpretation of research findings of a field investigation into the incidence and cultural aspects of stuttering among a number of Indian tribes in the North Pacific coastal area of British Columbia. The project was part of a larger enterprise to gather comparative materials on deviant behavior but more specifically followed certain lines of inquiry initiated by clinical psychologists working on the problem of speech disorders in American Indian societies, who were unable to find evidence of stuttering in these groups.2 Our field contacts covered five reserves of Salish Indians, two Kwakiutl and one Nootka or west coast tribe, all located on Vancouver Island and the mainland of British Columbia. In addition to these contacts with the cultures in situ we had two Haida informants, one Tsimshian, and one Nootka who were not living in their respective areas. All informants except two spoke English and interviews were necessarily conducted in this language. In addition, our body of interview data was supplemented by information from school officials and some written materials from Indian children at the Port Alberni and Alert Bay residential schools.