Indigenous Experiences Research Articles

Nadia Wheatley: Australia ⋆ Author

Nadia WheatleyAustralia ⋆ Author Samantha Christensen Nadia Wheatley, born in 1949, grew up in Sydney, Australia, where she began her writing career. She began an English degree at Sydney University in 1988, but switched to a major in History and graduated in 1976. She went on to earn an MA Honours degree from Macquarie University. Her first children's book, Five Times Dizzy, published in 1982, was loosely based on her experiences living in Greece and later Newtown, and its success launched her career in children's books. Since then, she has collaborated with many illustrators, creating profound works of fiction and non-fiction for young readers. She collaborates, often through workshops, with Indigenous, multicultural, and disabled communities in order to produce literature that is accessible to individuals from all walks of life. For over thirty years, Wheatley has dedicated herself to literature for young people, and her passion for history, culture, and inclusivity permeates her literary oeuvre. Wheatley's work has earned various awards in a number of categories, ranging from personal achievement awards to international children's book awards. In 1988, My Place won the Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for Young Readers award, along with the Inaugural Eve Pownall Award for Non-Fiction. Wheatley also won the NSW Premier's History Award for Papunya School Book of Country and History in 2002, and the 2008 Speech Pathology Book of the Year Award for Going Bush. Her books have also been translated into French, German, and Korean, allowing her works to transcend geographical boundaries just as they do cultural ones. Wheatley's texts often focus on the marginalized and silenced voices of history, and she works to retell historical narratives from the perspective of poor or dispossessed children. History and social conscience fuels her work, and she is deeply devoted to representing multicultural voices in her storybooks. Books such as The Papunya School Book of Country and History and Playground engage with Indigenous experience in Australia, and, as Margaret Dunkle notes in her review in Viewpoint 9.3, function as "a blueprint for […] a culturally sensitive, racially reconciled Australia" (32). Wheatley's work takes on difficult and oftentimes emotional subject matter, but the grace, sensitivity, and inventiveness of her writing allows her to deal with these issues in a manner relatable to children. Her works are tremendously important, and her passion for historical, inclusive, and genuinely exciting literature continues to inspire and educate her readers. Selected Bibliography • Australians All: A History of Growing Up from the Ice Age to the Apology. Illus. Ken Searle. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2013. Print. Google Scholar • The House that Was Eureka. New York: Viking, 1985. Print. Google Scholar • Luke's Way of Looking. 1999. Illus. Matt Ottley. Sydney: Walker, 2012. Print. Google Scholar • My Place. 1987. Illus. Donna Rawlins. Sydney: Walker, 2008. Print. Google Scholar • Papunya School Book of Country and History. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001. Print. [End Page 3] Google Scholar Copyright © 2014 Bookbird, Inc.

The role of broadcast media in disaster preparedness education: Lessons learned in the scientific literature 2002–2012

This paper aims to clarify the role of broadcast media in disaster preparedness education concerning natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis. Media is a strong facilitator in disaster awareness even as preparedness includes actions to reduce risks, which also needs community interaction, resources and motivation. Disaster preparedness education adds to indigenous knowledge and experiences, and may combine self-education through the media, school and community efforts for disaster risk reduction. An inclusive approach is also called for in order to involve vulnerable groups, such as the elderly or handicapped. Findings of this research show that the role of the media is seen in a positive way, such as providing warnings and updated information on the crisis situation. However, there is a negative side, i.e. in the framing of response activities and in sensationalising events, which may result in disseminating an inaccurate picture. This paper brings together insights on the topic, identifies the issues addressed and current trends in the scientific literature. This was done by means of a systematic review of the scientific literature on this topic over the last 10 years.

The Critic as Neurocosmopolite; Or, What Cognitive Approaches to Literature Can Learn from Disability Studies: Lisa Zunshine in Conversation with Ralph James Savarese

The Critic as Neurocosmopolite; Or, What Cognitive Approaches to Literature Can Learn from Disability Studies: Lisa Zunshine in Conversation with Ralph James Savarese Ralph James Savarese (bio) and Lisa Zunshine (bio) This conversation began at MLA in 2012 when we recognized that cognitive approaches to literature and disability studies, two rapidly and independently developing fields, must start talking to one another. The subject is autism: how it has been divergently understood and deployed and how it can be convergently understood and deployed. Kept apart, the two fields seem vulnerable to caricature. The former sometimes applies scientific and medical insights uncritically (such as the assertion that autistics have no theory of mind and, thus, cannot read fiction); the latter sometimes advances a completely social-constructionist understanding of physiological distinction (as if stigma were the entire story of alternative embodiment). Scholars in cognitive approaches to literature need the insights of disability studies to think about mind, narrative, and agency in neurodiverse ways; scholars in disability studies need the insights of cognitive approaches to literature to give the concept of neurodiversity, [End Page 17] which is quickly becoming a kind of platitude, some actual neuroscientific content. Talking across conventional disciplinary divides has precipitated questions that we would never have thought to ask. It has also made us hope that an ongoing conversation between cognitive approaches to literature and disability studies will transform both fields. We cannot foresee the exact shape of this transformation, but the formerly distinct trajectories already feel more intertwined. A Postcolonial Neurology Lisa Zunshine (LZ): In her recent contribution to Disability Studies Quarterly, Paula C. Durbin-Westby, an autistic disability rights activist, builds on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to stress the importance of the “inclusion of autistics as active collaborators in research, rather than mere research subjects to be studied and then written about, often in language that many autistic people find demeaning. We must insist,” she writes, “on being ‘speaking subjects,’ with our participation and input used in meaningful ways, rather than being ‘spoken subjects,’ a position which can lead to misinterpretation of research results and to uninformed experiments.” Would you comment on the ramifications of this practice of adapting the rhetoric of postcolonial studies to disability studies? Ralph James Savarese (RJS): The postcolonial analogy can be traced back to a number of scholars, including Arthur Frank, who in The Wounded Storyteller likens medical patients to colonized peoples: the former’s bodies have been rationally conquered and their indigenous experience of illness or disability has been haughtily disregarded. In its place, an official narrative, in something like a foreign language, has prevailed, leaving patients feeling both alienated and disempowered. But over the last thirty years or so, patients, like postcolonial subjects, have begun to write back to this kind of empire. According to Frank, “Postcolonialism in its most generalized form is the demand to speak rather than to be spoken for . . . or, in the worst cases, rather than being effaced entirely” (13). The rhetoric of postcolonial studies thus helps us to think about the historical circumstances of the neurological other: the subaltern has not only learned to speak, it has also begun to organize, as the neurodiversity movement and organizations such as the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network make clear. Insisting on the right to self-determination and advancing a notion of autism as neurological difference, not pathology, ASAN has agitated for progress on a range of issues: from better education, employment, and housing opportunities to better, more respectful medical care and scientific research. The difference between the privileged outsider view and the newly empowered insider one is, however, considerable, and because the scientific community often has trouble with what autistic writer Dawn Prince calls “the superior part of speaking” (“The Silence Between”)—namely, listening—it continues to cause [End Page 18] damage. Think, for instance, of the common claim that autistics don’t experience empathy, which popular novels such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime have only further promulgated. This claim is prevalent in the many fields that make up cognitive aesthetics.1 If one actually listens to autistics, one hears a different story. Stephen Shore, for example, distinguishes between being...

Edinizing, Naadizewin, Minomaadiziwin, Miinawaa Kendaasewin : Establishing an Urban Great Lakes Indigenous Curriculum

While much research addresses issues related to rural Indigenous communities, this article discusses an Indigenous youth-centered program serving an urban Great Lakes community. In collaboration with the local school district and county health department, the author collected data to frame a curriculum that responds to the specific needs of urban Indigenous youth in the Great Lakes region. The resulting program aims to bring together multiple generations to address high local dropout rates, health disparities, and the disconnect between the community and school. Dividing the curriculum into four areas — community/edinizing, culture/naadizewin, health/minomaadiziwin, and academics/kendaasewin) — allows the program to reflect an urban Great Lakes Indigenous experience. In addition to describing the need for each curricular component, this article provides examples of how each component is enacted through a summer program serving children 5-15 years of age.

Conflits entre conceptions locales et scientifiques de la gestion du paysage pour la conservation de la faune : politiques de la coexistence entre humains et chimpanzés à Bossou, Guinée

Environmental conservation policies in Africa have their origin in the forced establishment of nature reserves during the colonial era. Even after African countries became independent, top-down operation of these reserves continued primarily due to international calls for nature conservation and to consumerist demand from western countries. For the people of Africa, this continued to be an externally-driven activity with little endogenous motivation and, quite often, real motives for opposition. Even in the context of today’s participatory conservation approaches, there is vocal skepticism about the ability of Africans to act independently and about the existence of local “conservation” philosophies. This paper offers a detailed description of field clearing demonstrations by the villagers of Bossou, Republic of Guinea, which flared up in 2002 following the establishment of a governmental research institute in the village. This place had been portrayed for several decades by natural scientists as a place of peaceful coexistence between people and chimpanzees. The stated goals of the swidden preparation campaign was to secure land for subsistence purposes, but it is thought that the main driving factor was maintaining the right to decide matters like the allocation of tourism income, which the government research institute was attempting to usurp. After the general 2002 uprising, a particular individual and his family continued their resistance consisting of swidden preparation and cultivation in the chimpanzee habitat. This was likely due to a conviction to recover the original vegetative landscape of the village, which had been transformed under the pressure of academic research, to its prior state. The agricultural environment is valued by a chimpanzee “conservation model” based on indigenous experience and knowledge, which is in conflict with models introduced by outsiders (scientists and public administrations).The indigenous conservation model revealed by this case study may better help to prevent epidemics of zoonoses and injury and deaths due to chimpanzee attacks, compared with the outsiders’ conservation approach based on general knowledge drawn from conservation ecology. Future conservation measures should be determined based on dialog between the two models. This article is modified after Yamakoshi (2006a).

Negotiating disability and colonisation: the lived experience of Indigenous Australians with a disability

Disability among Indigenous Australians lies at a nexus between the ongoing impact of European settlement from 1788 and the social effects of living with a disability. Colonisation, with its political, social, economic and cultural concomitants, continues to impact on Indigenous experience, extending to the institutions and services concerned with disability. There is little attention paid to Indigenous Australian disability in general, and the need to decolonise disability has recently been emphasised. Ethnographic research in Brisbane, Australia among Indigenous people with a disability (mostly related to diabetes) confirms the ongoing impact of colonisation. While this experience pervades all aspects of their lives, it also moderates their experience of living with a disability in positive ways. However, while individuals can negotiate their personal experience of disability, the decolonisation of disability services presents challenges that need to be addressed.

A diabetes support group for Nywaigi women to enhance their capacity for maintaining physical and mental wellbeing

Objective: Young Indigenous people experience type 2 diabetes nine times more than non-Indigenous people. Almost one third of the diabetes population encounter mild to severe depression. A community support group is evaluated to assess the co-morbidity of depression in women with type 2 diabetes. Methods: The development of an intervention to include: (1) self-management strategies; (2) a grief and loss component; (3) health ownership and concepts of shared knowledge; and (4) diet and exercise. A depression scale was used to measure depressive symptoms. A final group debriefing was implemented for ethical closure. Results: A pre and post intervention assessment for diabetes knowledge and self-management was implemented. Conclusion: Critical success factors were confidentiality, personal safety, trust, and knowledgeable facilitators.

Decolonization and Resilience in North American Indigenous History

Decolonization and Resilience in North American Indigenous History Thomas Peace The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the shaping of Native cultures in early America. By Linford D. Fisher. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. The Memory of All Ancient Customs: Native American diplomacy in the colonial Hudson Valley. By Tom Arne Midtrød. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2012. Long Knives and the Longhouse: Anglo-Iroquois politics and the expansion of colonial Virginia. By Matthew L. Rhoades. Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011. An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World shaped early North America. By Michael Witgen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. When I teach the history of colonialism, I use the canonical work of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said to break the subject into two interrelated paradigms. Fanon’s work is deeply anchored in an analysis of Indigenous people’s experiences of colonialism. His critiques apply directly to our discipline, which has been tightly bound to colonial projects and upholding the development of the nation-state. Underlying his arguments, Fanon calls for a radically different academic practice: a decolonization of knowledge and scholarly approach. Said’s work, particularly Orientalism, represents a narrower postcolonial approach. Though equally interested in decolonizing knowledge, Said is less focused on the experiences of Indigenous peoples, while more interested in understanding the technologies and representations of imperialism and colonialism that were enacted upon them. Targeting representations of the Other, this approach analyzes colonial processes and power structures without directly seeking and foregrounding Indigenous voices, self-representations and reactions. This is, of course, a false dichotomy. In practice, there is often no clear demarcation between these two approaches; the latter informs the former. The difference in subject matter, however, remains important to identify. It lies in each paradigm’s trajectory and purpose. As studies of the workings of empire, works like Said’s are more deeply anchored in contexts where colonialism is entrenched and technologies of power well-articulated; while scholars of Indigenous experiences seek a reevaluation of power dynamics in the meeting between colonial and Indigenous peoples, often questioning the assertion that colonies and empire were the single most important influence defining specific spaces and peoples. In marking this difference, it is critical to note that even as they seek to deconstruct, postcolonial studies sometimes risk reinforcing colonial representations and power structures. For Linda Tuhiwai Smith, author of Decolonizing Methodologies, the field of postcolonial studies is often “defined in ways which can still leave out indigenous peoples, our ways of knowing and our cultural concerns.”1 The books reviewed here fit into a spectrum between these two paradigms, emphasizing the resilience of Indigenous peoples in the face of colonial and imperial pressures. Michael Witgen’s An Infinity of Nations challenges historians of the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to reevaluate the overall strength and importance of imperial structures west of the Great Lakes. For Witgen, this was a space dominated and defined by Anishinaabeg and Dakota peoples, a reality that histories of the region still need to address. Tom Arne Midtrød’s The Memory of All Ancient Customs takes a similar approach. Midtrød disentangles Hudson Valley peoples from the colonial world around them, demonstrating that some Indigenous peoples remained politically, socially and culturally distinct until the 1780s. Both books attempt to dig past the colonial legacy of early–North American historiography and its canon of source material. Linford D. Fisher’s The Indian Great Awakening is an excellent example of how both approaches can be better integrated. His study of Indigenous Christianity makes a significant contribution to our understanding of both colonial approaches to Indigenous peoples and their own repurposing of them. Matthew L. Rhoades’s Long Knives and the Longhouse is the most traditional of the four texts, arguing that Virginia’s westward expansion was possible only through the colony’s interaction with, and eventual use of, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. An Infinity of Nations implicitly argues for a comprehensive new narrative of early North American history. Witgen demonstrates that through a complex relationship involving both peace and conflict, the Anishinaabeg and Dakota forged a Native New World that ensured their continued place and influence...

Context Matters: Studying Indigenous Religions in North America

AbstractContext is critically important to the study of indigenous religions in North America. This paper argues that the significance of context to indigenous (native, Indian, tribal, or aboriginal) religions is unique and particular. In studying indigenous religions, attending to context engages geographical, political, and methodological issues, which emphasize the diversity of indigenous ideas and experience. The Mi'kmaq relationship to their homeland, Mi'kma'ki, demonstrates the importance of land as fundamental context for indigenous religions; the figure of Kateri Tekakwitha illuminates the inextricably political nature of indigenous religions. Finally, methods, theories, and practices (such as self‐reflexivity) that have arisen in indigenous contexts are important analytical tools in the study of indigenous ways of knowing/practices.

‘Our home, our way of life’: spiritual homelessness and the sociocultural dimensions of Indigenous homelessness in the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada

In this article, I examine the sociocultural dimensions of Indigenous home and homelessness through a case study of increasing visible homelessness in two northern Canadian communities. Drawing on five years of ethnographic research on Indigenous homelessness in Yellowknife and Inuvik, two regional centres in the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada, I suggest that Indigenous experiences of homelessness are at once collective and immediate. In particular, I draw on the concept of ‘spiritual homelessness’ (Keys Young 1998) to examine the multiple scales of homelessness experienced among northern Indigenous people. Research participants highlight several key elements of rapid sociocultural change that have an enduring impact on a collective sense of home and belonging, and play integral roles in shaping the experiences of homeless Indigenous people. Social and material exclusion, breakdowns in family and community, detachment from cultural identity, intergenerational trauma and institutionalisation are all woven throughout the personal narratives of homelessness articulated by research participants. I argue that the alleviation of Indigenous homelessness in the NWT depends on a decolonising agenda that specifically addresses contemporary colonial geographies and their expressions in the key institutions in Indigenous peoples' lives.

INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCES IN ADAPTING TO DROUGHT IN AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION IN SANDY AREAS OF QUANGTRI

This study aimed to explore the impacts of climate change on agricultural production in the sandy coastal communes of Quang Tri and local people’s indigenous knowledge in adapting to climate change, specifically drought. The tools for participatory assessment such as household interviews, focus group discussions and field observations were used to gather information for the research. The research results showed that climate change, especially drought, had significant impacts on agricultural production in the study area. Reduction of cultivating land, spread of crop pests and animal diseases rise of production costs, fall of productivity and degradation of agricultural product quality were the major impacts. Local people have applied various indigenous knowledge and experience to adapt to drought such as using drought resistant crop varieties; soil moisture conservation techniques; knowledge of management and prevention of animal diseases. The study showed that in order to improve local people’s ability to adapt to drought, their indigenous knowledge and experience should be documented and disseminated by integrating with production guidance activities, agriculture extension plans and operation of non-governmental organizations. Keywords: drought, agriculture in sandy area, climate change, indigenous knowledge, adaptation.

Tourism and community well-being: The case of the Maasai in Tanzania

The World Tourism Organization (WTO) proposes tourism as a tool through which the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) can be accomplished yet the goals have been criticized for their top-down conceptualization of well-being. Critics further argue that long-term improvements in the livability of indigenous communities require the MDGs to account for indigenous interpretations of well-being and development. This inquiry adopts a bottom-up approach to examine indigenous conceptions of well-being and to understand how tourism influences indigenous experiences of well-being. Informed by the body of work on community well-being, this study focuses on two Maasai communities, Esilalei and Oltukai, in Tanzania. The findings highlight the need for dialogue between the externally defined universal measures (i.e., MDGs) and localized conceptions of well-being.

Cultural Safety Circles And Indigenous Peoples Perspectives: Inclusive Practices For Participation In Higher Education

Indigenous experiences, as found within traditional ways and cultural practices, are an acknowledgement of traditional methods for sharing, learning, and collective knowledge development and maintenance. The application of Cultural Safety Circles can help provide a collective space where definitions for cultural and educational exchange can take place and be identified. It is through this application that a discussion is presented on how the inherent issue of cultural safety, as it pertains to participation in higher education, can be explored to a deeper understanding.

PERFORMANCE, AGENCY AND CHANGE IN SURFING TOURIST SPACE

This study seeks to advance knowledge of the production and consumption of tourist space and its implications for tourism destinations. A social constructionist approach to grounded theory was employed to investigate surfing tourist space in Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands. The construction and maintenance of a utopian surfing tourist space based on myth and dubbed ‘Nirvana’ was found to be a four-stage process that has simultaneously enchanted surfers and ignored indigenous experiences. Over the 10-year period of this study the agency implicit in embodied surfing tourists experiences of place has weakened Nirvanic myth and indigenous issues have come to light. The dilution of Nirvanic myth has also resulted in threats to Nirvana being realized with significant implications for the future of the industry.

From blank spaces to flows of life: transforming community engagement in environmental decision-making and its implications for localism

Localism advocates the participation of ‘local’ groups in governmental decision-making processes. While making policy more context/place specific is a progressive goal, this paper suggests that the processes through which this occurs, and underlying conceptual approaches to scale and place, require a careful analysis. Although often side-lined, Indigenous experiences of localism are key to seeing these issues as critical responses to place and politics, rather than relegating them to an ‘Aboriginal’-specific issue. This paper outlines two practical implementations of Aboriginal inclusion in environmental decision-making, in Canada and Australia. These case studies demonstrate both the failings of current framings of localism and ‘environment’ in policy-making and the inadequate responses of governments to the complexities of place making. These challenges are illustrative and symptomatic of wider issues about how environmental policy and place are currently envisaged. This paper suggests a new methodological framing of these issues that positions the current framing as one view among many, offers a non-relativist frame of communication for moving beyond inclusion and outlines the implications of this reframing for localism.

Reconsidering American Indian historical trauma: Lessons from an early Gros Ventre war narrative

Professional clinicians and human services providers are increasingly attributing the mental health problems of American Indians (AIs) to historical trauma (HT). As an alternative to established psychiatric disorders, AI HT was formulated to explain enduring mental health disparities as originating in tribal experiences of Euro-American colonization. As a result, AI HT has been described as the collective, cumulative, and intergenerational psychosocial disability resulting from massive group-based oppression, such as forced relocation, political subjugation, cultural domination, and genocide. One objective of the HT construct is to frame AI distress and dysfunction in social and historical terms. Given widespread indigenous experiences of colonization, the debilitating effects of HT are presumed to affect most AI communities today. With this background in mind, I explore AI HT with specific reference to a "war narrative" obtained by an anthropologist in 1901 from an elderly Gros Ventre woman. In this account, Watches All described her participation in a historic intertribal battle, and her subsequent captivity and escape from the enemy during the late 1860s. This historical narrative references many first-hand experiences that would today be identified as traumatogenic. Interestingly, however, this account complicates several assumptions underlying AI HT, leading to vexing questions of whether Watches All's ordeal actually qualifies as an instance of AI HT. No matter how one answers these questions, such ambiguity highlights serious theoretical confusions requiring elaboration and refinement if AI HT is to remain a useful construct in the behavioral health sciences.

‘Don't talk about what you don't know’: on (not) conducting research with/in Indigenous contexts

This article raises the recurrent question whether non-indigenous researchers should attempt to research with/in Indigenous communities. If research is indeed a metaphor of colonization, then we have two choices: we have to learn to conduct research in ways that meet the needs of Indigenous communities and are non-exploitative, culturally appropriate and inclusive, or we need to relinquish our roles as researchers within Indigenous contexts and make way for Indigenous researchers. Both of these alternatives are complex. Hence in this article I trace my learning journey; a journey that has culminated in the realization that it is not my place to conduct research within Indigenous contexts, but that I can use ‘what I know’ – rather than imagining that I know about Indigenous epistemologies or Indigenous experiences under colonialism – to work as an ally with Indigenous researchers. Coming as I do, from a position of relative power, I can also contribute in some small way to the project of decolonizing methodologies by speaking ‘to my own mob’.

Commodification of indigenous crafts and reconfiguration of gender identities among the Emberá of eastern Panama

This article examines the recent involvement of Emberá indigenous women from eastern Panama in the production and commercialization of handicrafts for national and international markets, using life stories collected in two Emberá communities. Emberá women's increased participation in market economies provides a critical medium through which dominant norms of gender roles are partly reworked and new subjectivities are forged, providing them temporary spaces of authority from within to negotiate relationships with men in domestic spaces. The study does not look for obvious shifts of power inside the household. Instead, it conceptualizes handicraft activities and the conflicts they spark as discursive sites, thus focusing on how women (through their work and purchases) understand themselves and their roles, and how power operates through competing discursive constructions of ‘women’, ‘men’, or ‘work’ in everyday practices. This approach produces a nuanced understanding of the complex reconfiguration of gender relations, and the particular shapes that changing social interactions and meanings of femininity/masculinity take, and it challenges dominant representations of indigenous societies as static and inexorably harmed by capitalist transformation. Findings demonstrate that indigenous women's experiences and realities are multifaceted and dynamic, and that the outcomes of market economies in indigenous communities are complex and ambiguous, rather than uniform and necessarily oppressive.

Mediating indigeneity: Ho-Chunk ‘Indian News’ as a critique of the legacies of settler colonialism

This article examines the legacies of settler colonialism discussed in the writings of Frisk Cloud, one of four Ho-Chunk men who published Indian News columns – a relatively early project of Indigenous media activism – in local newspapers in Wisconsin during the 1930s and 1940s. The first section of the article examines the origins of Frisk Cloud's column in 1939, when he was recruited to write ‘Indian News’ for his local newspaper and thus took up a ‘vernacular’ mode of Indigenous writing already popular in the region. The column offered him a public voice that he used to deliver critical commentary on key issues impacting Ho-Chunk lives. The second and longer section focuses on the content of the articles Cloud published over the next three years, showing how he used this forum to tell his readers about the experience of settler colonialism with which his community struggled and contextualized these struggles within a long history of indigenous dispossession in the area. Through his Indian News column, Frisk Cloud created a portrait of the human and ecological catastrophe produced by White settlement, making visible an alternative perspective on settler colonialism rooted in everyday indigenous experience. His career offers an historical perspective on the emergent nature and the critical intellectual agenda of recent indigenous media projects.

“Not to Be Aware Anymore”: Indigenous Sumatran Ideas and Shamanic Experiences of Changed States of Awareness/Consciousness

AbstractAnthropologists working on altered states of consciousness (ASC) have suggested that we should do away with psychologizing concepts and use people's own terms for these experiences. With material drawn from the Orang Sakai of Sumatra this paper shows that practitioners who utilize ASC do recognize the alteration of states of awareness as preconditions for numinous interactions. Also critically discussed is the term ASC.