American Indian Traditions Research Articles

On the Cosmic Order of Modern Physics and the Conceptual World of the American Indian

Indigenous peoples have for millennia observed and lived in deference to the same universe as scientists who meticulously record and measure information, but their deep knowledge of the natural world remains unacknowledged by the greater society. This article relates some of that knowledge to physics concepts, particularly relativity and quantum theory, as an initial step toward conveying certain realities of the American Indian world into a Western scientific context such that their meaning is not lost. Modern physics has not only revealed a cosmic order that is vastly different from the classical realm but one that also closely corresponds to the conceptual world of the American Indian. The author emphasizes the work and concepts articulated by Einstein and Bohm because of the evidence they provide for the latter's notion of the cosmos as an “unbroken whole,” which is also a prominent concept among tribal peoples. In view of how American Indian traditions carry human experiences beyond the physical into the spiritual realm, emphasizing practical survival skills and intuition rather than measurement, the author believes that the places where tribal and Western systems of knowledge meet can become important gateways to realms that are currently unfamiliar to the Western world.

Recent Dissertations

Agbe-Davies, Anna Sophia. "Up in smoke: Pipe-making, smoking, and Bacon's Rebellion." PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2004. Alwyn, Eleanor. "Traditions in a colonized world: Two realities of a First Nation." PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2004. Ambelang, Joel R. "Zuya: A journey of understanding Lakota leadership through the life of Little Soldier." EdD diss., Cardinal Stritch University, 2003. Anselmi, Lisa Marie. "New materials, old ideas: Native use of European-introduced metals in the Northeast." PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2004 Arndt, Grant Paul. "No middle ground: Ho-Chunk powwows and the production of social space in Native Wisconsin." PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2004. Ashley, Keith H. "Interaction, population movement, and political economy: The changing social landscape of northeastern Florida (ad 900—1500)." PhD diss., University of Florida, 2003. Beard-Moose. "Public Indians, private Cherokees: Indigenous identity at the intersection of tourism, acculturation, and cultural continuity." PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2004. Bieter, John Patrick, Jr. "Showdown in the Owyhees: Land, myth and government in the American west." PhD diss., Boston College, 2004. Blackbird, Russell Leon. "Understanding the reasons why Native American students are not entering the teaching profession." PhD diss., Kansas State University, 2004. Blair, Susan Elizabeth. "Ancient Wolastoq'kew landscapes: Settlement and technology in the lower Saint John River valley, Canada." PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2004. Bond, Bruno. "L'Entente sur les repercussions et les avantages dans le secteur minier: Un instrument qui permet de minimiser les risques et de maximiser [End Page 738] les avantages d'un projet minier pour les communautes autochtones. Le cas de l'era Raglan, au Nunavik." PhD diss., University of Ottawa, 2003. Boomer, Holly Rae. "Writing red: Vine Deloria Jr. and contemporary American Indian fiction." PhD diss., University of Nebraska, 2000. Bowes, John Patrick. "Opportunity and adversity: Indians and American expansion in the nineteenth century trans-Mississippi West." PhD diss., University of California, 2003. Boyd, Billy Joe. "Implicit racist attitudes towards African Americans and American Indians among Caucasian university students." PhD diss., Oklahoma State University, 2003. Burgess, Kim Graham. "The stakes of recognition: Contesting American Indian identity in Connecticut." PhD diss., Harvard University, 2004. Carroll, Alton. "Medicine bags and dog tags: How the military influenced American Indian traditions and how the image of Indians influenced the military." PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2004. Cattelino, Jessica R. "High stakes: Seminole sovereignty in the casino era." PhD diss., New York University, 2004. Craig, Douglas Broward. "Beyond snaketown: Household inequality and political power in early Hohokam society. PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2004. Curtis, Jenneth Elizabeth. "Processes of cultural change: Ceramics and interaction across the middle to late Woodland transition in south-central Ontario." PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2004. Danver, Steven Laurence. "Liquid assets: A history of tribal water rights strategies in the American Southwest." PhD diss., University of Utah, 2004. Dixon, Christopher A. "Indians in the house of God: A socio-economic investigation of the San Antonio mission community." PhD diss., Boston University, 2004. Dudgeon, Roy C. "Eco-holism and Native American philosophy: An exploration of their common ground." PhD diss., University of Manitoba, 2003. Elias, Brenda Denise. "The influence of the social environment on the health of Manitoba First Nations communities." PhD diss., University of Manitoba, 2004. Fowles, Severin M. "The making of made people: The prehistoric evolution of hierocracy among the Northern Tiwa of new Mexico." PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2004. Fox, Shari. "When the weather is uggianaqtuq: Linking Inuit and scientific observations of recent environmental change in Nunavut, Canada." PhD diss., University of Colorado, 2004. Fuller, Amy. "A female Hispanic school leader's experience in a native American community: An heuristic inquiry." EdD diss., Arizona State University, 2004. [End Page 739] Garey-Sage. "Washoe women's wisdom: Ethnobotany and its role in contemporary cultural identity." PhD diss., University of Nevada, 2003. Gooding, Erik D. "Sing from the heart, sing for the people: An ethnography of Dakotan singing, 1660–2000." PhD diss., Indiana University, 2004. Hammond, James Quezon. "Leadership strategies for school...

“Great escapes”: protection from violence through spiritual sources

This essay re-iterates stories from the Judaic, Christian, Islamic, Baha’i, and American Indian traditions regarding spiritually-aided escapes from violence. Escapes from death, prison, and danger have all reportedly been facilitated by spiritual forces in these traditions.

"Buried in Fine White Ash": Violence and the Reimagination of Ceremonial Bodies in "Winter in the Blood" and "Bearheart"

The body is a site of power and transformation in James Welch's Winter in Blood and Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart. In these texts, poetics and politics of identity emerge in somatic images that both support and resist ceremonies and stories integral to American Indian and Euro-American traditions. Ceremony, as both mimetic and productive of social processes, provides frame in which imaginary identification with and resistance to dominant cultures are inscribed and made manifest. The inscription of power is a writing on body, a complex and extremely visceral process in which ceremonial rhetoric is a matter of wounding, violation, or evisceration. Like body, imagination in these texts is perpetually (or permanently?) disfigured: it is not capable of transcending bodies/figures that are always already torn, shattered, or, as in case of Vizenor's fascination with immolation, burned. It is crucial to recognize that visceral images in Winter in Blood and Bearheart articulate inscriptions of power as product of an intricate interweaving of material practice and spiritual imagination. In their essay Bodily Reform and Historical Practice, John and Jean Comaroff argue that the making of body is often a more visceral matter than is conveyed by categories of a Cartesian social science that imagines power as an abstract or cerebral force. The Comaroffs argue that [b]ecause it is an active force, power (like agency) must be sought in active body, body that lives in time and moves through space.' Violence toward body, however ritual-

Domestic violence intervention in an urban Indian health center.

This report describes a domestic violence program in an urban Indian health center. The failure of office-based interventions and the importance of developing interventions that are sensitive to the needs of this population are discussed. Successful interventions including home visits and a domestic violence group that incorporated American Indian traditions and values are presented.

American Indian Novels

BOOK REVIEWS American Indian Novels Gretchen M. Bataille Arizona State University 1 he stereotype of the Indian, usually male, has long been a shadow figure in American literature. Whether invisible in Hawthorne's forests, a savage in Cooper's frontier, or a noble red man evoked by Lawrence, the Indian character in fiction was one readers believed they "knew" because popular myths had been made real by constant repetition. Increasingly, however, a new image of American Indians is evolving in fiction. It is not surprising that the old images are being replaced by new views which are more complex and based in historical and contemporary realities. This change is, in part, a result of greater awareness of America's diversity; however, a new generation ofAmerican Indian writers is largely responsible for challenging old stereotypes and forcing a revolution in the image ofAmerican Indians in American literature. Increasingly, the face of American literature is becoming many-hued, reflecting the heterogeneous society of America and challenging easy assumptions about the past. The history of the American Indian novel is short by some literary standards , but it is a history that has evolved rapidly during the past twentyfive years. Following the publication of John Rollin Ridge's novel The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta in 1854, there were less than a dozen novels published by American Indians prior to 1968. Sfophia] Alice Callahan's Wynema (1891) was the next novel by an American Indian and is probably the first by an Indian woman. Set in the Creek Nation in Indian Territory, the novel is dedicated to Indians "who have felt the wrongs and oppression of their pale-faced brothers." Simon Pokagon (O-gi-maw-kwe Mit-i-gwa-ki) is identified as the Potawatomi author of the 1899 novel Queen of the Woods; however, his authorship has been disputed by some critics. If Pokagon did not write Queen of the Woods, there were no other adult novels written by American Indians until the 1920s. John Milton Oskison, John Joseph Mathews, and D'Arcy McNickle published novels during the 1920s and 1930s, and Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket) was the author of another early novel by an American Indian woman, Cogewea, the Half-Blood (1927). When John Joseph Mathews' novel Sundown (1934) was first published, the author was not identified as Indian because publishers at the time downplayed the ethnicity of authors, and authors themselves sought to "fit in" to Anglo society. John Milton Oskison wrote three novels (Wild Harvest, 1925; Black Jack Davy, 1926; and Brothers Three, 1935), but there was no reference to the author's Cherokee heritage, and the novels have little to do with Indian experience. Although N. Scott Momaday's novel House Made ofDawn (1968) was out 61 62Rocky Mountain Review of print when the announcement was made that it had won the Pulitzer Prize, that novel and the recognition it received signaled a change in the perception of critics, teachers, and students about the fiction by American Indian writers. Since that watershed year, American Indian literature has flourished. From House Made of Dawn to the Critics' Circle choice, Love Medicine (1984), American Indian novels have gained critical acclaim and popular recognition. Increasingly, novels by Paula Gunn Allen, Robert Conley, Michael Dorris, Louise Erdrich, Janet Campbell Hale, Linda Hogan, Thomas King, Louis Owens, Leslie Marmon Silko, Martin Cruz Smith, Gerald Vizenor, Anna Lee Walters, and James Welch are considered a part of the canon ofAmerican literature. For a genre not in existence until Ridge's publication, the American Indian novel has gained a significant place in contemporary literature. All of these contemporary American Indian novelists have contributed to the literary output as well as the critical assessment of that production. In 1983 Paula Gunn Allen edited Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs, and more recently she has focused on feminist interpretations of Indian literature in such critical works as The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986). Tom Colonnese and Louis Owens collaborated on American Indian Novelists: An Annotated Critical Bibliography, published in 1985. Joseph Bruchac, better known as a poet and an editor than as a novelist, has contributed to the...

Intellectual Sovereignty and The Struggle for An American Indian Future. Chapter 3 of Tribal Secrets: Vine Deloria, John Joseph Mathews, and the Recovery of American Indian Intellectual Traditions

John Joseph Mathews and Vine Deloria, Jr., as I argued in the previous chapter, portray the conflict between American Indians and the European invaders as a religious one best seen in terms of land and community. Both of them point to the process through which the U.S. abrogated the sovereign-sovereign relationship with Natives as a major turning point in the history of that conflict. In this chapter I want to discuss the issues this analysis raises for American Indian intellectual work and argue that the process of sovereignty provides a way of envisioning the work we do. Having established in the first chapter the intellectual context of Deloria and Mathews and having engaged in exposition of both figures in the second, I want here to reintroduce the voices and perspectives of some of the contemporary American Indian intellectuals discussed in the first chapter and illustrate why the approaches of Deloria and Mathews are needed so much if our work is to be inclusive of the great diversity of American Indian contemporary experiences. I will set the stage for that discussion by looking at Deloria's and Mathews' conceptions as to how American Indians can face the challenge of asserting sovereignty. Following this, I will turn to several contemporary formulations of how we ought to regard American Indian religious traditions in the struggle for justice, freedom, and sovereignty. In looking at these other perspectives, I want to examine how American Indian intellectuals can see various critical projects as being part of that struggle.

Counseling Intervention and American Indian Tradition

The training of American Indian counseling and community psychologists should move away from conventional counseling tenets toward the use of culturally sensitive mental health approaches that maintain American Indian values. In this article, unique American Indian social and psychological perspectives concerning the process and theory of counseling are contrasted with the individualistic focus, style, and outcomes of therapy as practiced in America today. Empirical studies are reviewed concerning the role of social influences in the counseling process as perceived by American Indians and the types of problems Indians present in counseling. The under use of mental health services by American Indian is is associated with the tension surrounding power differentials in counseling relationships and perceived conflicting goals for acculturation between counselors and Indian clients. In addition, three types of psychological intervention-social learning, behavioral, and network -are reviewed and summarized for their contributions and implications for training counselors in effective mental health service delivery with American Indians.

The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions by Paula Gunn Allen

270 Western American Literature physical and Romantic poetry as well as of the American visionary and mod­ ernist movements, and pioneered the first notable postmodernist poems. Like other books on Roethke, this one considers the influence of psychol­ ogy, mysticism, and other poets; however, here the context is always one of organic growth. A poet himself, Balakian devotes ten pages to the generally ignored influence of Williams, noting that Praise To the End is dedicated to Williams (and to Kenneth Burke) and maintaining that in The Lost Son Roethke found “his own American Grain—a locale, the indigenous source Williams had urged American poets to discover.” Balakian addresses Roethke’s relation to the American West and to the frontier by referring to his “North American Sequence” from The Far Field where the notion of frontier is converted “into a terrain of the soul’sprogress” —one that is “a journey out of the self ... a passage ceaselessly unfolding.” Literally, his frontier is on Puget Sound, “where land and water meet,” and where he “is able to face chaos . . . and return to identify with the things of creation.” In doing so, “Roethke is a poet of the via affirmativa like his bound­ less forefather Whitman.” By way of analysis and discussions of well over one hundred of the poems, consideration of some of the prose, and utilization of other pertinent critical studies, this interpretation of the work as an evolving and organic whole expands the view of previous critics and brings into new focus the achievement of Theodore Roethke. NANCY McCLEERY Tarkio College The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. By Paula Gunn Allen. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. 311 pages, $10.95.) As one studies American Indian traditions and the contemporary litera­ ture which springs from those traditions, it becomes clearer and clearer that too many standard studies have under-described (where they have not totally ignored) the spiritual and cultural roles of women. We are left with bits and pieces which suggest women’s powerful roles: Black Elk Speaks tells us much about the sacred pipe but little about the female spirit, White Buffalo Cow Woman, who brings that pipe. Even Leslie Silko’s Ceremony can be misread: though most of the leading characters are male, they live in a universe carefully balanced between female and male—but also a universe in which the predomi­ nant powers are female. Paula Gunn Allen’s essays live up to their subtitle:Recovering the Femi­ nine in American Indian Traditions. Allen’sperspective isthat ofthe American Southwest, specifically the Keres people of Laguna, where the matrilineal and matrilocal traditions, parts of what she calls the gynocracy, have most fully continued. Thus, her names for the greatest powers are Thought-Woman, Old Woman Spider, the Grandmothers. Reviews 271 That orientation is especially useful in the book’s powerful opening sec­ tion, “The Ways of our Grandmothers,” whose three essays explore female gods in Indian traditions;the historyof Indian women in North America since white contact; and Allen’s own personal life chronicle as an Indian woman. The first two essays also discuss in depth the part played, often deliberately, by Europeans and their descendants in undermining or destroying women’s traditional roles in Indian societies. The Sacred Hoop’s seventeen essays also offer a clear and comprehensive introduction to Indian metaphysical and spiritual beliefs; the title essay is particularly fine,with its emphasis on the harmonious balance necessary among all beings (the balance of female and male isonly one such harmony).In addi­ tion, Allen offers readings of specific traditional materials as well as persuasive readings of work by such Indian writers as Mourning Dove, Leslie Marmon Silko, nila north Sun, Marnie Walsh, Mary Tall Mountain, Wendy Rose, Eliza­ beth Cook-Lynn, Joy Harjo, Roberta Hill Whiteman, Linda Hogan, Carol Lee Sanchez. Male Indian writers are by no means left out; Allen writes equally persuasively of the work of James Welch, N. Scott Momaday, D’Arcy McNickle , Gerald Vizenor and Simon Ortiz. Paula Gunn Allen’sessays join the small number of books aboutAmerican Indians which can be read again and again; as one’s understanding grows, so will what one finds in this...

Review: The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, by Paula Gunn Allen

Book Review| August 01 1987 Review: The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, by Paula Gunn Allen The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian TraditionsPaula Gunn Allen Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (1987) 56 (3): 445–446. https://doi.org/10.2307/3638668 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz; Review: The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, by Paula Gunn Allen. Pacific Historical Review 1 August 1987; 56 (3): 445–446. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3638668 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1987 The Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

The Bitter Humor of "Winter in the Blood"

American Indian narrator of James Welch's Winter in the Blood states that his father froze to death one winter evening on the way home after making the white men in a local bar laugh. bitter irony of this important event is the kind of harsh truth the narrator confronts in his effort to redeem himself. He is his father's son but he is determined not to die his father's death. Humor, bitter and ironic rather than funny in a pure comic sense, thus becomes a selfprotecting mask which the narrator uses to keep from being crushed by his circumstances. At the same time, humor is also a tool by which he manages to gain some degree of perspective on and control over his troubled life. To better understand the unfunny situation the narrator finds himself in as a young contemporary Indian distanced from his Indian past, the land, the white culture around him, his living relatives, and most significantly, from himself, it is necessary to remember the importance of humor and comedy in the American Indian tradition. Like the Aristophanic comedies from ancient Greece, the Indian comic ceremony-dramas that have been passed down are celebrations of life. They are religious rituals which evoke laughter as a liberating force. Employing song, dance, sexual farce, slapstick, and drama, these ceremonies were truly a group experience, a celebration of community. The Raingod Drama of the San Juan Pueblo Indians, for instance, ends with the spirit of harmony that follows a catharsis of fear:

Mythe et remous historique: A Lunda Response to De Heusch

Oral traditions are the common patrimony of a varied group of scholars. Although professional historians embraced African traditions only in the late 1950s, local -- and usually amateur -- historians had been writing from them throughout the colonial period and occasionally before. Meanwhile, students of anthropology and comparative religion from Frazer on have been studying the same traditions from very different perspectives. They have pointed out the common motifs recurring within the genre in widely scattered and disparate areas, and have related myth to its functions in present-day society, watching how it is molded to fit changing realities.At the same time that academic historians at last began to overcome their doubts about the historical value of African oral traditions and began to use them, a French anthropologist was propounding a new approach to myth, a principle he called “structuralism.” Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that even the seemingly most direct and least stereotyped American Indian traditions he examined were actually philosophical expositions of world-view and religious belief encoded in symbolism. This article tests the structuralist approach through a detailed critique of one particular example of its application.Luc de Heusch, a Belgian disciple of Lévi-Strauss, has recently studied the traditions of Lunda state formation as myth in Le roi ivre, ou l'origine de l'Etat. His aim is to discover the univers intellectuel of the Lunda and the other peoples of the Central African savanna, but his work touches the historian in two crucial respects. First, he highlights dangers in the path of the naive and helps paint parts of the larger human dimension in which historical events and historical records have existed.

American Indian Dance Programs in the U. S., 1962

lose its derogative nuance, as the programs improve in quality and authenticity. For years there have been well-established tourist programs like the Gallup, Anadarko, and Rock Island Powwows. These are listed in many publications, including the Folklorist (Manchester, England), 1958, 5 (2 and 3), and in American Indian Tradition. I shall mention a few in the Michigan and Ontario area, which I have attended or investigated in connection with a project for the National Museum of Canada. Some were local affairs, with the help of a few visiting Indians. Some were huge intertribal gatherings, at Wikwemikong, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan. All of the programs contained traditional dances and songs, from the Woodlands and from Oklahoma, and also compositions on native themes. Some of the creations fell flat; some were excellent.

North American Indian Traditions Suggesting a Knowledge of the Mammoth

North American Indian Traditions Suggesting a Knowledge of the Mammoth