Contemporary Native Americans Research Articles

High Stakes Stereotypes: The Emergence of the “Casino Indian” Trope in Television Depictions of Contemporary Native Americans

Native Americans and race scholars have argued that the media construct and perpetuate racist notions of tribal peoples through images and discursive practices that portray them in very stereotypical ways. In particular, the dialectical “master tropes” of the Noble Savage and the Ignoble Savage have long shaped the cultural consciousness with regard to native peoples. The author examines examples from several recent television texts, including The Sopranos, Saturday Night Live, Chappelle's Show, Family Guy, Drawn Together, and South Park, in which Native Americans are depicted in contemporary contexts and argues that these depictions reference age-old racist stereotypes of the Ignoble Savage while simultaneously working to construct a new trope that she terms the Casino Indian. This article attempts to chart the contours of this stereotype and argues that it suggests Native Americans are once again being portrayed as a threat—the Ignoble Savage of the past posed a threat of violence, while the contemporary Casino Indian image, which articulates with both racist and classist discourses, reflects the fear of Native Americans as an economic and political threat.

<i>The Exiles</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Exiles Josh Glick (bio) The Exiles (1961); DVD distributed by Milestone Films, 2009 Shot between 1958 and 1961, just before urban renewal initiatives razed much of Los Angeles’s downtown core, The Exiles offers stirring views of a now nonexistent Bunker Hill neighborhood and a complex portrait of a small group of Native Americans struggling to negotiate their identities within the city. Milestone Films’s two-disc Premiere Edition DVD contains a meticulous restoration of director Kent Mackenzie’s 1961 release and a wealth of supplementary materials that provide insight into its production and the broader historical context in which it was conceived. After playing on the international festival circuit and then receiving limited nontheatrical distribution through Pathé Contemporary in 1964, The Exiles resurfaced in 2003 when Thom Andersen featured some of its scenes in his epic compilation documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself. The evocative sampling (included on the DVD) piqued the interests of Milestone’s Cindi Rowell, who located the only existing 35mm print of The Exiles at the University of Southern California’s (USC’s) Cinema Archive. Rowell and USC archivist Valarie Schwan took the negative to UCLA Film & Television Archive preservationist Ross Lipman, who, with the help of original crew member John Morrill and such companies as Fotokem, Audio Mechanics, and NT Audio, performed the restoration. The resulting viewing experience attests to their labor. Sharp black-and-white tonal contrasts register the graceful night photography of cinematographers Erik Daarstad, Robert Kaufman, Morrill, and Mackenzie. Voice-over monologues, intertwined with the blistering rock and roll music of the Revels, give the overall sound design an intimate and visceral quality. Selections from the supplementary materials ground the origins of Mackenzie’s filmmaking in his student years at USC. It was there that he completed Bunker Hill–1956, a short documentary about a community of pensioners in Los Angeles and the municipal construction plans that threatened to displace them. Additionally, the inclusion of the four drafts of the script for Bunker Hill–1956 reveals the project’s development, from the initial treatment that describes the atmosphere of the locale to the final release script that focuses on the residents expressing their commitment to the homes they have made for themselves and their anxieties over having to move. Mackenzie began working on The Exiles following graduation. Among the items on the DVD that directly relate to the film is his master’s thesis, submitted to USC in 1964. The document does much to elucidate the film’s path to production. After reading an article in Harper’s Magazine about the difficulties of contemporary Native Americans in the United States, Mackenzie envisioned making an educational film about the move of an Apache family from Arizona to Los Angeles through the controversial Relocation Program. The document “The Exiles Funding Proposal,” also on the DVD, details Mackenzie’s initial research into the venture. The practicalities of making the film, combined with his own desire to steer clear of a didactic model of documentary, led him to embark on a cinematic project that explored the nightly social activities of a group of Native Americans in and around Bunker Hill and Main Street. The thesis also provides a better understanding of how Mackenzie and his crew, drawing [End Page 166] from an eclectic group of directors such as Robert Flaherty, Sidney Meyers, and Vittorio De Sica, pursued an innovative mode of stylized realism. Their production method involved location shooting and the use of nonactors (who had a large amount of input into their own lines), while at the same time planning scenes and editing to ensure thematic unity for the overall film. The six drafts and the final script provide a more nuanced sense of the later stages of the film’s evolution and reveal the various permutations of the title, from The Trail of the Thunderbird to The Exiles. The multivocal audio commentaries on the DVD feature crew members such as Daarstad, filmmakers such as Charles Burnett, writer– director Sherman Alexie, and Milestone cofounder Dennis Doros. They reinforce the notion that Mackenzie was deeply invested in all aspects of production, while also emphasizing the film’s highly collaborative aspects. Both the crew...

The Identity of Contemporary Native Americans Represented by Various Stories of Leslie Marmon Silko

The Identity of Contemporary Native Americans Represented by Various Stories of Leslie Marmon Silko

Norton and Ethel Allen among the Paipai

Although Norton Allen is known primarily in connection with the archaeology of the Hohokam, he and his wife, Ethel, also took an inter est in contemporary Native Americans (see Schwartzlose's biography of Allen in this issue). This article examines the Aliens' collection of objects made by the Paipai of Baja California, particularly the pottery, donated by Ethel Allen to the Arizona State Museum (ASM) in Tucson. The Paipai are a Yuman-speaking people who today live in and around the village of Santa Catarina, which is about eighty miles south southwest of Calexico/Mexicali. The village is associated with the former Dominican mission of Santa Catarina (or Santa Catalina) de los Yumas, established in 1797 and destroyed in 1840 by a native revolt (Meigs 1935). The Paipai are linguistically related to the Kiliwa just to the south of them, the Ipai and Tipai (Kamia/Kumeyaay) in southern California and northwestern Baja, the Cocopa on the Colorado River delta, and the Arizona Pai groups (the Hualapai, Havasupai, and Yavapai) (see maps in Luomala 1978:fig. 1 and Owen 1969:fig. 1). The people referred to today as Paipai are actually an amalgam of what were formerly two separate groups, one of which spoke Paipai, the other Kuad, another Yuman language (Wilken 1987:19). Anthropologist Roger Owen stated, It seems likely that Santa Catarina was originally a Kuatl settlement to which Paipai were brought by the missionaries. All of the remembered Kuatl rancher?as were around and to the north of

Textiles of Healing: Native American AIDS Quilts

Around the world responses to AIDS and HIV are expressed in material form through idioms mediated by particular social and historical contingencies. In this article I examine at the case of AIDS memorial quilts produced by contemporary Native Americans. The invisible connections between people, their histories, and cultures that are materialized in this particular form of textiles make them culturally significant vehicles for healing practices for many Native Americans, who maintain that the acknowledgment of customary meanings ensures ritual efficacy and curing success. As a particular response to AIDS, grief, death, and healing these objects reveal the social relevance of expressing materially culturally encoded messages that are simultaneously rooted in universally shared idioms and the uniqueness of local experiences.

Written out of history: Contemporary Native American narratives of enslavement

The article looks at historical narratives of enslavement circulating among contemporary Native Americans. These narratives, the author argues, constitute an important element in the construction of current tribal identities as much as they are relevant for a reflection about the role played by hegemonic racial discourses in the politics surrounding ethnically‐tied resources.

Interpenetrations: Re-encoding the Queer Indian in Sherman Alexie’s <span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;">The Business of Fancydancing</span>

InterpenetrationsRe-encoding the Queer Indian in Sherman Alexie’s The Business of Fancydancing Quentin Youngberg (bio) In a 1997 interview with John Purdy, Sherman Alexie asserts that the problem with Native American literature is that it has been stymied for the past few decades around a fixed idea of traditionalism. Moreover, this fixation on tradition entails a representation of the modern Indian that focuses on what Alexie calls “the expected idea” (8)—an academic project in which Native American literature (and its criticism) becomes tautological, exerting violence on the lived experience of the Indian by limiting it to “traditional” themes such as the Native American’s intimate relation to the landscape and an emphasis on ceremonial spirituality. This phenomenon plays itself out not only in the sphere of literary production but also in criticism when academic readings of Native texts, perhaps following the cues of the literature itself, largely focus on the familiar themes of the mixed-blood Indian and his fragmented identity, alcoholism, and the return to the reservation, all infused with a healthy dose of ceremonial songs and a spiritual love for the land. Alexie is interested in unfixing such representations, which give way all too easily to rigid stereotypes of Native people. He sees promise, in fact, in a new generation of writers who are turning away from these more traditional representations and are beginning to write against the expectations of the reading public in an attempt to represent the full, fluid, and complex realities of their own experiences as American Indians. In his own words: I’m starting to see it. A lot of younger writers are starting to write like me—writing like I do, in a way, not copying me, [End Page 55] but writing about what happens to them, not about what they wish was happening. They aren’t writing wish fulfillment books, they’re writing books about reality. How they live, and who they are, and what they think about. Not about who they wish they were. The kind of Indian they wish they were. They are writing about the kind of Indian they are. (Purdy 9) This new kind of writing that Alexie and others are engaging embodies an attempt to break out of representations that feed American culture’s fanciful stereotypes of the Indian. Given the intensified consumption of Native literature by non-Native audiences, this project of representing other realities of contemporary Native Americans’ experience is necessary in order to disrupt the tendency for outside audiences to essentialize cultures other than their own. Given Alexie’s impulse toward de-representing the “expected idea” in Native American letters, the presence of homosexuality as a thematic undercurrent to much of his work is particularly interesting. Partially as a result of the burgeoning popularity of feminist criticism, and partially as a result of the popularity of women writers such as Louise Erdrich and Leslie Marmon Silko, more and more Native American literary criticism is focusing on sexuality. While this certainly represents a positive critical direction, it is interesting that very little, if anything at all, has been written about homosexuality within that same body of analytical texts. Indeed, little has been written at all about homosexuality in the broader field of Native American studies outside those authored by white anthropologists and historians who tended to romanticize or otherwise misrepresent the experience of Natives who were not heterosexual. In their introduction to the anthropological text Two-Spirit People, Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang refer to an idealizing view [that] has led to a relatively recent romanticization of purported positively sanctioned pan-Indian gender or sexual categories that do not fit the reality of experiences [End Page 56] faced by many contemporary gay, lesbian, third-gender, transgender, and otherwise two-spirit Native Americans who have had to leave their reservation or other communities because of the effects of homophobia. (5) What they are referring to is the anthropological notion that Native American cultures have always made space—institutionally, communally, and spiritually—for the nonheterosexual subject. Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang note that the danger in conceptualizing sexuality on such terms lies in the temptation to “seek the primordial bliss of the...

Revising Strategies: The Intersection of Literature and Activism in Contemporary Native Women’s Writing

Revising Strategies:The Intersection of Literature and Activism in Contemporary Native Women's Writing Lisa J. Udel (bio) Literature can and does successfully contribute to the politics of possession and dispossession. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn How are we to read contemporary Native women's written work? If writing can be considered a form of activism, as I believe, what is the role of the reader of such works? What do the writers expect of us as readers of and potential actors in the causes they promote? In exposing the reader to the violence of Euroamerican expansion and domination during the last three centuries, Native authors overtly seek to educate the non-Native reader uninformed of such history while also confirming experiences known to Native readers. Through examples of contemporary Native life that include violence, poverty, and broken family units, along with the lost traditional lifeways of language, spirituality, and artistry, Native authors expose the reader to ongoing problems that continue to erode Native nations' ability to survive in modern America. The reader, often ignorant of such facts, comes away with an enhanced understanding of the various ways Western colonialism has destroyed, and continues to destroy, Native cultures. Concomitantly, what is our response to the examples of effective grassroots resistance seen in these works: Winona LaDuke's novel Last Standing Woman, her essay collection All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, the tentative affirmation of Elizabeth [End Page 62] Cook-Lynn's Aurelia: A Crow Creek Trilogy, and the spiritual commitment of Linda Hogan's novels Mean Spirit, Solar Storms, and Power? All of these texts assert that the beauty of the linked natural and spiritual worlds is all around us, that Native nations, despite the obstacles posed by Western cultures, will survive and indeed flourish. Are such examples representations of genuine conditions among select Native communities, or are they models of what can be obtained? If Native American literature has its roots in "truth-telling," in "setting the record straight," as many scholars have argued (see, e.g., Brumble), then we must ask how much of those initial motivations continue to drive contemporary Native writers and their readers today. What do contemporary Native writers demand of their readers who are both Native and non-Native? In their work, LaDuke, Cook-Lynn, and Hogan profess to tell truths and expose lies to the reader. The authors' demands on the reader are reformative; their works model a superior Native reality, with the hope of producing an educated reader/activist who, upon finishing the text, will work to improve the lives of contemporary Native Americans. A chief aim shared by LaDuke, Cook-Lynn, and Hogan, along with many other Native women writers and theorists, is the decolonization of North America. Several Native writers characterize this movement as "Indigenism" and describe it as a liberation movement and worldview that offers an ideology that integrates life with nature. This philosophy identifies an indigenous "Fourth" or "Host" world on the planet that is composed of Native peoples globally; the industrialized and industrializing states comprise the First, Second, and Third worlds, and are seen as sitting atop the Host world, subjugating and feeding off it simultaneously (Guerrero, "Academic Apartheid" 59–61). The concept of Indigenism presupposes several assumptions: that indigenous people worldwide share a common experience of colonization and subsumption into a capitalist and hegemonic nation state, a shared investment in the attainment of sovereign nationhood, and a fundamentally nondisruptive, integrative relationship with the natural habitat (Guerrero, "Academic Apartheid" 61). All three writers produce texts that reflect their political and artistic ideologies. I wish to consider how their ideologies [End Page 63] shape their written work and also to discuss whether their work fulfills the agendas they articulate and to what result. Indigenist movements operate within both the grassroots settings that LaDuke and Hogan describe and the academic milieu that Cook-Lynn has shaped, addressing reform at all levels. Regardless of where they devise an Indigenist program, whether within the university academy or within reservation or urban communities, Native women deploy an ideology based in ecoculturalism, an identity located in the linkage between a sense of being with a sense of place (Guerrero, "Exemplars of Indigenism...

The Indian Who Made America

Alan Trachtenberg. Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. 369 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00. Hiawatha, Gitche Gumee, Minnehaha: these are words familiar to many, though few may know why (certainly this reviewer did not). It all goes back to a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, "The Song of Hiawatha," and the peculiar fascination it evoked in Americans a century ago—some fifty years after its original publication. In an imaginative tour of American culture ranging from the art of Edward S. Curtis to the bizarre promotional schemes of Wanamaker's department store, Shades of Hiawatha explores the process by which these words, and the romantic fascination with things "Indian," were driven into the collective unconscious of Americans. The book's persistent question is, why this fascination with an invented Indian legend at precisely the time of massive immigration from eastern and southern Europe? This juxtaposition of "East" and "West" will probably be the book's lasting legacy. The histories of immigrants and Native Americans have generally been treated separately. But Trachtenberg has hit upon a revealing (if occasionally odd) series of connections between the two. It is no coincidence, he argues, that the "open door" immigration policy that let in millions from all regions of Europe, coexisted with the allotment era in Indian policy, which sought to assimilate Native Americans into American society by breaking up their communal landholdings into individual units. In the minds of the American men he focuses on, images of pre-contact Native Americans could be used to assimilate Europeans into a new national culture even as contemporary Native Americans were driven off to boarding schools where they would lose their hair and, in theory, their traditional culture. Beginning with an extended preface that provides an overview of the period's most relevant issues, the book scatters into six separate chapters that neither the lengthy introduction nor the non-existent conclusion manage to pull together into a convincing whole. Individually, however, they make the case that images of vanishing Indians did everything from expiate the guilt and racial anxieties of the mega-rich, promote commercial expansion, give [End Page 396] Robert Frost the idea for a rather gruesome poem, and provide Jewish immigrants with compelling terms to negotiate their transition into American society. The introduction, "Dreaming Indian," surveys Americans' habit of "playing Indian in fantasy and imagination" from the "beginnings of a discernable national consciousness in seventeenth-century New England" until the late nineteenth century (p. 13). The very debatable question of whether there was an incipient American national consciousness in seventeenth-century New England (and not Virginia?) accurately reflects the book's conflation of the northeast with America. Trachtenberg justifies this focus by pointing out that the "postfrontier West was in many ways an Eastern creation, as much in the myths of romance as in the new social realities." What the actual inhabitants of the West and South may have made of this evidently matters less than "the many ways that Eastern preemption of the West became a powerful nationalizing force" consisting of several "binding elements": "ideas of race and white supremacy, of the rightness of divisions between rich and poor among the whites themselves, of Anglo-Saxon superiority over recent immigrants, and of America's 'manifest destiny'" (p. xii). Next, in "Singing Hiawatha," Trachtenberg unravels the origin and appeal of the poem after it first appeared in 1855. For those with any knowledge of Native American cultures, the poem is a terribly confusing hodgepodge of terms and tribes. This was rather deliberate. Longfellow did not want to accurately reflect the culture of any single group. Rather, he wanted his tale to appear to have both specific tribal roots and pan-tribal appeal when in fact it had neither. The poem's famous words are a perfect example of his technique. Each derives from a radically different linguistic group: Hiawatha is Iroquoian, Gitche Gumee is Algonquian, and Minnehaha is Siouan. The specifics...

Genetics and the History of Latin America

Genetics and the History of Latin America

Cultural diversity in the United States: a critical reader

Foreword: Yolanda Moses. Preface: Ida Susser. Introductions: Ida Susser, Thomas C. Patterson, Steven F. Arvizuu. Part I: Biological and Medical Issues:. 1. Biological Diversity and Cultural Diversity from Race to Radical Bioculturalism: Alan H. Goodman. 2. The Peoplings of The Americas: Anglo Stereotypes and Native American Realities: C. Loring Brace and A. Russell Nelson. 3. Diversity in The Context of Health and Illness: Cheryl Mwaria. 4. Health, Disease, and Social Inequality: Merrill Singer. Part II: Historical Development of Contemporary Diversity:. 5. The Color--Blind Bind: Lee Baker. 6. Racialized Identity and The Law: Sally Engle Merry. 7. Immigration and Ethnicity: Shifting Boundaries: Judith Goode. 8. Unearthing Diversity and Archaeological Issues: Thomas C. Patterson. 9. The Hyphenated Past: American Cultural Diversity: Ruben G. Mendoza. 10. The Roots of Our Inequality: Elizabeth M. Scott. Part III: Diversity: Contemporary Issues, Contemporary Conflicts:. 11. The Complex Diversity of Language in The United States: Bonnie Urciuoli. 12. Contemporary Native American Struggles and The Construction of Nation: Thomas Biolsi. 13. New Labor Struggles: Gender, Ethnicity, and Migration: June Nash. 14. Social Inequality: Diversity, Poverty, and Gender in The City: Ida Susser. 15. Ethnicity and Place: J. Diego Vigil and Curtis C. Roseman. 16. Diversity and Kinship Today: Lynn Bolles. 17. Aging : Cultural Diversity as A Late--Life Concern: Maria Vesperi. 18. Poverty, Class, and Sexual Orientation: Jeff Maskovsky. 19. Diversity and Psychocultural Open Systems Models: Michael Winkelman. Part IV: Overviews of Diversity in The United States:. 20. Studying American Cultural Diversity: Some Non--Essentializing Perspectives: Douglas Foley and Kirby Moss. 21. Diversity in Anthropological Theory: Karen Brodkin. Afterword: Louise Lamphere. Index.

A molecular analysis of dietary diversity for three archaic Native Americans.

DNA was extracted from three fecal samples, more than 2,000 years old, from Hinds Cave, Texas. Amplification of human mtDNA sequences showed their affiliation with contemporary Native Americans, while sequences from pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, and cottontail rabbit allowed these animals to be identified as part of the diet of these individuals. Furthermore, amplification of chloroplast DNA sequences identified eight different plants as dietary elements. These archaic humans consumed 2-4 different animal species and 4-8 different plant species during a short time period. The success rate for retrieval of DNA from paleofeces is in strong contrast to that from skeletal remains where the success rate is generally low. Thus, human paleofecal remains represent a source of ancient DNA that significantly complements and may in some cases be superior to that from skeletal tissue.

Contemporary Native American Political IssuesContemporary Native American Cultural Issues

Book Review| April 01 2000 Contemporary Native American Political IssuesContemporary Native American Cultural Issues Contemporary Native American Political Issues, Troy Johnson.Contemporary Native American Cultural Issues, Duane Champagne. Annette Kuhlmann Annette Kuhlmann Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2000) 19 (3): 135–138. https://doi.org/10.2307/27502601 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Annette Kuhlmann; Contemporary Native American Political IssuesContemporary Native American Cultural Issues. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2000; 19 (3): 135–138. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/27502601 Download citation file: 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 Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2000 Immigration and Ethnic History Society2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Images of Native Americans

ABSTRACTThis article summarizes a background study conducted for museum staff planning the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Through interviews we identified attitudes of Smithsonian visitors toward Native Americans. Three results stand out: First, although most visitors have had some minimal contact with contemporary Native Americans, imagery of the past dominated their responses. This past is characterized as a period in which Native Americans had freedom of movement, had control over their destiny, and lived in harmony with nature. This peaceful existence was destroyed with the arrival of the Europeans. Second, current Indian life is seen as grim, except in those cases where Native Americans have fully assimilated into urban environments. Implicit is an assumption that traditional life and values can only be maintained on reservations. At the same time, reservations are associated with poverty, alcoholism, unemployment, and poor health care. Third, visitors would like the new museum to emphasize aspects of Native life and culture that are unique or different from their own. Overall, visitors have only a cursory familiarity with Native philosophy, history, or current conditions. Very few express strongly held beliefs or positions about Native Americans.

Shadow Catchers or Shadow Snatchers? Ethical Issues for Photographers of Contemporary Native Americans

La photographie actuelle sur les Amerindiens d'Amerique du Nord pose divers problemes ethiques que l'A. expose dans cet article, notamment ceux qu'il a observe en Californie. Les images des Amerindiens sont utilisees dans divers domaines (publicite, tourisme, ecologie, campagnes de soutien pour les societes autochtones, expositions, etc.) sans que les interesses ne puissent donner leur avis ou en touchent les droits d'auteurs. Les images detournees de leur contexte ne font que prolonger un regard stereotype et irrespectueux envers les Nations autochtones.

Toward comprehensive obesity prevention programs in Native American communities.

Obesity is a particularly important challenge to the health status of Native Americans. This challenge is manifest in the increasing rates of non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus among Native Americans. Most studies of Native American infants, preschool children, schoolchildren, and adults have confirmed a high prevalence of overweight. Historical studies suggest that for many Native American communities the high rates of obesity are a relatively recent phenomenon. The specific reasons for the increase in obesity among Native Americans have not been determined, although it has been hypothesized that Native Americans have a genetic predisposition to overweight in a "westernized" environment of abundant food and decreased energy expenditure. Few detailed studies of diet or of physical activity levels of contemporary Native Americans have been published. Community-based interventions to modify diet and activity levels to prevent obesity in Native American communities are needed. Preliminary evidence from two formative school-based programs in the Southwest suggest that Native American communities are receptive to school-based interventions, and that such programs may be able to slow the rate of excess weight gain and to improve fitness in school children. Because of the cultural diversity among Native Americans, future studies should focus on collecting community- and region-specific data, and should emphasize the need for obesity prevention through culturally appropriate community- and school-based behavioral interventions.

Moving within the Circle: Contemporary Native American Music and Dance

Moving within the Circle: Contemporary Native American Music and Dance

Art Therapy with Native American Clients: Ethical and Professional Issues

This article briefly discusses how art therapists can best serve Native American populations. Contemporary Native Americans are a product of both the dominant culture and their indigenous culture. History, coupled with racial biases, has led the authors to identify ethical and professional issues that should be addressed with Native American clients. Traditional healing, ethical and professional considerations, and implications for art therapists are highlighted in order to introduce professionals to the specific needs of this population.

The Bingo Palace

This series of four luminescent novels of contemporary Native American and Midwestern life have been repackaged to unify HarperFlamingo's Louise Erdrich fiction list and bring this incomparable author's timeless works to a whole new audience. From the release of her first novel, Love Medicine, winner of the National Book Critics Award for fiction, Louise Erdrich's writing has enthralled and enchanted critics and the public alike. work has been called remarkable and luminous by the New York Times and marvelously inventive by the Wall Street Journal, while the Philadelphia Inquirer raves, Few modern writers can equal Louise Erdrich for sheer stylistic brilliance. and the Los Angeles Times says, Her prose spins and sparkles, and dances right on the heart when it has to. A writer of power and effortless grace, she brings the people, cultures, and simple rugged beauty of North Dakota vividly to life. This cherished series, currently including Love Medicine, The Bingo Palace, The Beet Queen, and Tracks, reflects shared landscapes, themes, and unforgettable characters.

The Visions of Luciano Perez, Contemporary Native American Shaman

This paper presents an interview on the visions of the contemporary Native American shaman Luciano Perez. Born of southern Mexican Indian (P'urepecha) ancestry in Laredo, Texas, on 31 December 1950, he was trained in shamanic practice by the Lakota Sioux spiritual leader Leonard Crow Dog. He begins the interview with general comments on visions, how he experiences them and how they have matured him as a visionary providing him with spirit contact, revelation and power. He then remembers visions in childhood of the 'little people' and of hearing voices calling him. His first adult experience was a revelatory vision at the beginning of his spiritual quest (1973). Finally, he reports a healing vision from 1989 in a chiropractor's office where he sought medical help for severe back pain.