Native America Research Articles

Cultural Lenses and Biological Filters On What Makes a Hungarian in the Present and in the Distant Past

The definition of a memoir is “an account of the personal experiences of an author.” This paper provides the reflections of a physical (biological) anthropologist specializing in the genetics of the Indigenous peoples of North America who was born in Hungary, raised in Canada, and served twelve years as president and vice chancellor of the University of Manitoba. This professional background may question the relevance of these reflections to Hungarian studies. However, issues raised by János Kenyeres, the keynote speaker of the 2019 American Hungarian Educators Association conference, in his examination of Hungarian identity manifest in Hungarian literature—specifically, regarding “essentialist thinking”—are related to fundamental issues about the nature of human diversity with which physical (biological) anthropologists have been grappling since the eighteenth century. In an era in which commercial genetic genealogical services promise to identify ancestors and ethnicity, and genetic studies of living peoples as well as archaeogenomic studies of skeletal remains seek to identify relationships, current perspectives on what does—or does not—constitute “the essence of an individual and the groups to which one belongs” are worth considering. Facts, wherever they occur, are subject to interpretation. It is the cultural interpretation that we give to genetic identity that imbues that concept with meaning. emoke.szathmary@umanitoba.ca

Transplantation and native peoples: latin american perspectives from the brazilian Amazon

This article aims to investigate the reasons behind the absence of literature on organ transplantation among native peoples in Latin America, in contrast to the extensive literature on the subject in English-speaking countries. Given the increasing incidence of chronic diseases observed among Latin American indigenous peoples, a demand for organ transplantation among indigenous peoples is anticipated compared to other national contexts. However, meeting this demand is hindered by the need for a culturally sensitive vision on the part of public managers and the need for high-complexity planning and infrastructure in these countries. Therefore, the creation of a research network in the region is proposed to monitor the problem and generate data that can pressure these countries to provide transplant services to native peoples, with protocols that respect indigenous forms of consent, maintenance of fluids and organs, traditional knowledge, eschatology, and cosmology.

Factors Associated With Physical Restraint in an Urban Emergency Department

To determine what patient characteristics were associated with the application of physical restraints in our emergency department (ED). This was a retrospective analysis of encounters in the ED of an urban, Level I academic trauma center. We included ED encounters of adult patients (aged ≥18 years) during a 5-year period starting in 2017. We evaluated the independent association of restraint application during an encounter using a generalized estimating equation model. There were 464,031 ED encounters during the time period from 162,244 unique patients, including 34,798 (7.5%) with restraint application, comprising 18,166 unique patients. Several variables were associated with an increased likelihood of restraint use during an encounter. The variable with the highest odds ratio was intoxication with drugs or alcohol (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 8.29; 95% confidence interval (CI) 7.94 to 8.65). American Indian race was associated with increased odds of restraint application (aOR 1.42; 95% CI 1.31 to 1.54) compared to the reference value of White race. Black race (aOR 0.58; 95% CI 0.55 to 0.61) and Hispanic ethnicity (aOR 0.42; 95% CI 0.37 to 0.48) were associated with lower odds of restraint application. Drug and alcohol intoxication were most closely associated with restraint. Encounters in which the patient was American Indian had higher odds of restraint, but this study does not replicate prior findings regarding other racial disparities in restraint.

Ritual Roadways and Places of Power in the Chaco World (ca. AD 850-1150)

This paper considers the topic of sacred spaces in North America through the vantage offered by Chacoan roads, monumental avenues constructed by Ancestral Four Corners people of the US Southwest from ca. AD 850-1150. I begin with a critique of the concept of the “sacred” as applied to the Chacoan past, suggesting instead that the Indigenous North American concept of power (in the sense of potent, generative force infused throughout the environment) offers a more culturally relevant framing. Next, I present three examples of locations along Chacoan roads that I argue were recognized as places of power due to the inherent landscape affordances of these locales. I close by briefly describing some of the practices carried out along Chacoan roads and drawing a connection between the understanding of “sacredness” evidenced through the archaeology of Chacoan roads and contemporary Native American activist efforts to protect landscapes of great power and meaning.

Expanding identity beyond the human

AbstractEcofeminists, environmental activists, and ecologists are calling humans to change our relationships to other‐than‐humans and more‐than‐humans. Indigenous people and knowledge systems are often exemplified as ways for non‐Indigenous people to relate to these entities. While Indigenous people have historically participated in epistemologies and modes of perception that rendered them more able to connect to non‐humans, these relationships have not always been peaceful or mutually advantageous. Examples are cited in which annihilating all beavers was the goal, and the fur trade is cited as a time when Indigenous people in North America gained mastery over animals that had previously threatened them, leading to near extinction for some species in some locations over a short time. Bear–human marriage stories provide us with another way to view the human–animal relationship, which is sometimes violent. Through multiple conversations with Elders over time, I have been accumulating a sense of Indigenous North American (INA) theories of mind, self, and consciousness. I apply the results of my discussions to the question of whether we are creating a new consciousness of relations with non‐humans that has not previously existed in INA thought, though it has its progenitors. I also apply insights from recent literature on psychedelics. This new thought arises from the current domination of the planet and animals by human beings and the relative lack of threat to humans from animals. Indeed, we are more dangerous to them than they are to us. Within this context, we can construct a new consciousness of non‐humans, which has its historical antecedents and which is also entirely new.

Black Indigeneities, Contested Sovereignties

In this article, I examine race, indigeneity, and sovereignty in order to understand the relationship between them as they structure the lives of Black people on the continent of Africa and in the African diaspora. Specifically, I am interested in Black Indigeneities and explore the following questions: What are Black Indigeneities, beyond the connections between African-descended and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, especially the U.S.? Indigeneity implies ties to land and heritage, but what does it look like when those ties have been weakened or severed? What does it look like for places and people living with the consequences of different but related histories of settler and indirect colonization and chattel slavery on both sides of the Atlantic? Rather than trying to arrive at definitive responses, I use these questions as a point of departure for outlining an analytical framework that identifies sovereignty as a crucial element in understanding the diversity of Black Indigenous histories and experience under different but related structures of power. I distinguish between indigeneities of remembering and indigeneities of recovery. I also seek to go beyond the concept of arrivantcy as a framework for understanding the indigeneities of African-descended peoples in the Americas.

Our Fight Has Just Begun: Hate Crimes and Justice in Native America

Our Fight Has Just Begun: Hate Crimes and Justice in Native America

Michelene E. Pesantubbee and Michael J. Zogry (eds.), Native Foodways: Indigenous North American Religious Traditions and Foods

Michelene E. Pesantubbee and Michael J. Zogry (eds.), Native Foodways: Indigenous North American Religious Traditions and Foods. Native Traces Series. 238 pp., (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2021) $32.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781438482620

Land, Cultural Dispossession and Resistance: Afro-descendent and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas

This special double issue of the Journal of Poverty focuses on documenting the 21st-century consequences of the coloniality of power as it relates to, for example, extractivist and tourist industries, cultural, linguistic, and land dispossession, forced displacement and migration, climate, water and food injustice, cognitive injustice, and the environmental destruction of Afrodescendent and indigenous communities in the Americas. The contributors also describe in their analysis and discussion the various forms of resistance by these communities.

Bleeding All over the Shelves and Tracking It Out into the World: Theorizing Horror in the Indigenous North American Novels The Only Good Indians and Empire of Wild

Abstract: In this article, I theorize horror in the Indigenous North American novels The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones and Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline. There have been multiple article-length explorations of the emergence of a possible Indigenous gothic due to the gothic's scholarly reception as "highbrow," but the recent proliferation of so-called "lowbrow" horror literature written by Indigenous North American authors has seen little scholarly attention. Examining the history of the gothic in horror in North America and its relation to White North American subjectivity and regenerative violence, I begin to theorize why and how Indigenous authors are engaging with horror to posit multiple Indigenous North American subjectivities. I argue that both novels examined here reject White North American subjectivity and regenerative violence through metatextuality, closed cycles of justice, and generative violence while differing in important ways that are grounded in the concept of transmotion.

Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest by William S. Kiser

Reviewed by: Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest by William S. Kiser Lauren Brand (bio) Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest. By William S. Kiser. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. 280. Cloth, $47.50; paper, $24.95.) Could slavery in any form expand into the American West? Was it realistically possible? Did the U.S. government have the right to regulate the expansion of slavery? These are some of the massive questions that dominated the political discourse of the antebellum United States. William S. Kiser’s Borderlands of Slavery explores how the reality of Native captivity and debt peonage in New Mexico played a crucial role in the answers that both northern and southern politicians offered to these questions. New Mexico not only shaped national conversations about slavery’s expansion in the antebellum era, but also influenced national policy makers’ decisions regarding the definition of unfree labor during the Reconstruction era. Kiser argues that the existence of a different form of slavery in New [End Page 248] Mexico “forced Americans to think more broadly about slavery and brought awareness to the fact that involuntary labor was not limited to the chattel system in the South” and that this realization “informed profound political debates during the 1850s regarding the future role of unfree labor in the country” (21). The prologue provides a concise overview of the history of New Mexico from the Spanish colonial era through the territory’s integration into the United States in the mid-nineteenth century in order to quickly familiarize readers with this complex period. Indeed, scholars from many subfields of nineteenth-century United States history will find much of interest in this short book. For example, historians studying the various forms of enslavement endured or practiced by the Indigenous peoples of North America (or “the other slavery,” as Andrés Reséndez describes it)1 will appreciate Kiser’s description of the widespread prevalence of Native captivity in New Mexico from the Spanish colonial era through the Civil War. Additionally, historians of the antebellum U.S. South will be interested in Kiser’s dissection of how southern politicians used New Mexico and the various forms of captivity there as a foil to compare to the southern system of enslavement. Although debt peonage was not a racially based system of enslavement, it was a structure that “nonetheless operated upon manipulated conditions of dependency that typically ensured perpetual bondage” (16), leading many southern congressmen to view New Mexico as a valid point of comparison to demonstrate the compatibility of slavery with peonage in the American West. Kiser shows throughout that such comparisons were not unwarranted. For example, he explores comparisons between the ways captive women in the Southwest were described as “likely girl[s]” and valued for their attractiveness and sexual availability in the same way that African American women were in the South (61). However, despite some similarities that prompted these comparisons, Kiser notes that, in the end, there remained “widespread confusion about the differences between Southern slavery and New Mexico’s traditional forms of bondage . . . among federal lawmakers” (52). State and local historians will also appreciate Kiser’s attention to the perspectives of people actually living in New Mexico during this period. Kiser explains how residents of New Mexico themselves thought about these issues. For example, he notes that local people were somewhat ambivalent about chattel slavery and the comparison to the U.S. South but remained just as concerned about retaining their rights to captives and peons as they always had. Kiser also explores how, after 1846, local New Mexico law-makers purposely kept quiet about the issue of debt peonage, because they often personally benefited from it. Thus Kiser notes how challenging it can [End Page 249] be for historians to study the ways captivity and debt peonage impacted the lives of people in New Mexico. The sources have to be carefully mined to reveal what was really going on behind the surface. Kiser is very open about these challenges and how he reads the available sources. As time passed and sectionalist sentiment increased in both the United...

Untangling the Past

The purpose of this article is to document an investigation into the unique book classification system developed by the Pacific Northwest Indian Center (PNIC), also known as the Museum of Native American Cultures (MONAC), which operated from the mid-1960s through the early 1990s in Spokane, Washington. The article will provide some background information on PNIC/MONAC and its library operation, describe the process of reviewing and evaluating the classification system, and offer analysis into the positive and problematic aspects of the classification system in relation to other classification systems developed for materials by and about indigenous peoples of North America.

Museums and Anthropology in the Age of Engagement By Christina F. Kreps, New York:Routledge, 2020

Museum AnthropologyEarly View BOOK REVIEW Museums and Anthropology in the Age of Engagement By Christina F. Kreps, New York:Routledge, 2020 Scarlett Engle, Corresponding Author Scarlett Engle [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0003-1791-9147 University of Colorado Boulder Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Scarlett Engle, Corresponding Author Scarlett Engle caitrin.eng[email protected] orcid.org/0000-0003-1791-9147 University of Colorado Boulder Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 03 May 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/muan.12273Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. REFERENCES Ames, Michael. 1992. Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: the Anthropology of Museums. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Brown, Alison, and Laura Peers. 2013. “ The Blackfoot Shirts Project: ‘Our Ancestors Have Come to Visit.’” In The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, edited by Sharon Macdonald and Helen Rees Leahy, 1– 21. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Karp, Ivan, Corinne Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto. 2006. Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kreps, Christina F. 2020. Museums and Anthropology in the Age of Engagement. New York: Routledge, 2020. Krmpotich, Cara, and Laura Peers. 2014. This Is Our Life: Haida Material Heritage and Changing Museum. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Lonetree, Amy. 2013. Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Marsh, Diana. 2019. Extinct Monsters to Deep Time: Conflict, Compromise, and the Making of Smithsonian's Fossil Halls. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Morphy, Howard. 2019. Museums, Infinity and the Culture of Protocols: Ethnographic Collections and Source Communities. London: Routledge. Phillips, Ruth B. 2011. Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. Shannon, Jennifer A. 2014. Our Lives: Collaboration, Native Voice, and the Making of the National Museum of the American Indian. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press. Sleeper-Smith, Susan. 2009. Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation

Review: We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California, by Martin Rizzo-Martinez

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California, by Martin Rizzo-Martinez Martin Rizzo-Martinez. We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 536 pp. Illustrations. Hardcover $80.00. Natale Zappia Natale Zappia NATALE ZAPPIA is associate professor of history and director of the Institute for Sustainability at California State University, Northridge. His works include The Many Faces of Edward Sherriff Curtis: A Collection of Portraits and Stories from Native North America (with Steadman Upham, 2006); Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin (2014); and Rez Metal (film and book, 2020). Zappia is also the associate project director of the Early California Cultural Atlas. He currently works with local tribal communities in Southern California on the Los Angeles Landscape History Mapping Project. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2023) 100 (2): 126–128. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.126 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Natale Zappia; Review: We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California, by Martin Rizzo-Martinez. California History 1 May 2023; 100 (2): 126–128. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.126 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 ContentCalifornia History Search We Are Not Animals is a monumental volume exploring the Indigenous contours that shaped the colonial, Mexican, and American periods of Alta California. Hyperfocused on the intricate and continuous lineages, traditional ecological knowledge, and cultures of multiple communities within and around Santa Cruz (home of Mission Santa Cruz), Martin Rizzo nonetheless offers history on an epic scale. His study is enmeshed in deep time, ecologies, and practices, as well as meticulously engaged with underutilized or overlooked archival sources—particularly those originating from Indigenous archives. Weighing in at nearly five hundred pages and with close to fifty tables, maps, and figures, Rizzo’s work provides the most comprehensive and detailed account to date of the Ohlone experience in what is now the Santa Cruz coastline and mountain range. Although California is home to tech titans with global reach, Native Californians and their histories remain hidden in plain sight. Rizzo’s goal is to cast... You do not currently have access to this content.

The NEURON Program: Utilizing Low-Cost Neuroscience for Remote Education Outreach.

The NEURON initiative (Neuroscience Education in Undergraduate Research, Outreach, and Networking) is a free program engaging first year students, including underrepresented minority (URM) students in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NSCS) at the University of Arizona (UA). The NEURON program builds on former Grass Foundation-sponsored workshops run by Dr. Ricoy (2010-2019) implementing hands-on and culturally responsive active learning curriculum with low-cost equipment from Backyard Brains to increase student retention of URM students in the sciences at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI). We present the implementation of the NEURON program at the onset of the COVID pandemic. Combining best practices of distance learning and peer mentoring, we conducted three-week projects exploring principles of neuroscience and neurophysiology. Enrollment and demographic data from NSCS at the UA demonstrate historical disenfranchisement and program attrition primarily impacting URM students. As an extension on previous URM peer mentorship programs in Neuroscience (Ricoy, presentation at Northern New Mexico College Research Symposium, 2010, 2011; presentation at Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americas in Science, 2012), we leveraged low-cost equipment and remote sessions to advance the community of undergraduate mentors and pair with high school mentees on hands-on curriculum. Throughout the program, undergraduate mentors received guidance while crafting and delivering four laboratory lessons to mentees. By coordinating with a Title I school, we better connected with historically underserved students. Critical to this program was providing hands-on opportunities to students who were undergoing distance-based learning during the pandemic. Distribution of equipment allowed high school students to experiment remotely, guided by undergraduate mentors. The NEURON program met its objectives of fostering both mentors and mentees as burgeoning scientists.

Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific. By Amanda Hendrix-Komoto

Imperial Zions portrays the complex human landscape of the nineteenth-century Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) as racially and ethnically diverse, with porous geographic and cultural boundaries. The Church’s history has been frequently framed around an early Anglo-American core of converts and leaders whose migration to Utah and surrounding territories was fortified by later waves of Euro-American immigrants. In contrast, Hendrix-Komoto is especially interested in Indigenous North American and Pacific peoples who joined themselves to the faith. Her story builds outward from White families’ experiences in the LDS community of 1840s Nauvoo, Illinois, an era of theological creativity and social reorganization for the church. Female converts often experienced financial precarity and sexual vulnerability, developing alternative kinship networks and new socialities when men in their families departed on long overseas missions. Church teachings about Native Americans being the surviving remnants of an ancient Israelite migration—and thus key to the collective salvation of humankind and the nation—deeply informed Mormon missions to convert and “civilize” Indian communities on the American frontier and in the Pacific. Such efforts were largely unsuccessful in the 1830s and 1840s, though the few Native American converts who did join in those years, like Lewis Dale (Oneida), “became important symbols” within the faith (p. 77).

They Were Here

The Norse were a culture of expansion that colonized much of the North Atlantic from Norway to Greenland, and briefly North America before their quest for expansion was pushed to the brink. The question thus becomes, did the Norse encounter Indigenous peoples in North America? If yes, what was the nature of their encounters? Archaeologists Peter Schledermann and Karen M. McCullough presented three theories of contact between the Norse and Indigenous peoples: direct contact, indirect contact, and no Norse presence. Though historians and archaeologists previously questioned if there was any contact between the Norse and the Indigenous peoples of North America, recent developments now suggest the Norse had direct contact with Indigenous peoples in Newfoundland, and direct and indirect contact with Indigenous peoples on Baffin Island. This essay explores the historiography of Norse interactions with the Indigenous peoples of North America in Newfoundland and the High Arctic to trace how the understanding of Norse contact has evolved.

Examining the Role of Interpersonal Violence in Racial Disparities in Breastfeeding in North Dakota (ND PRAMS 2017-2019).

The 2019 overall breastfeeding initiation rate in the US was 84.1%, yet only 76.6% of American Indian (AI) women initiated breastfeeding. In North Dakota (ND), AI women have greater exposure to interpersonal violence than other racial/ethnic groups. Stress associated with interpersonal violence may interfere with processes important to breastfeeding. We explored whether interpersonal violence partially explains racial/ethnic disparities in breastfeeding in ND. Data for 2161 women were drawn from the 2017-2019 ND Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System. Breastfeeding questions in PRAMS have been tested among diverse populations. Breastfeeding initiation was self-report to "Did you ever breastfeed or pump breast milk to feed your new baby, even for a short period?" (yes/no). Breastfeeding duration (2 months; 6 months) was self-reported how many weeks or months of breastmilk feeding. Interpersonal violence for both 12 months before and during pregnancy based on self-report (yes/no) of violence from a husband/partner, family member, someone else, or ex-husband/partner. An "Any violence" variable was created if participants reported "yes" to any violence. Logistic regression models estimated crude and adjusted odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) for breastfeeding outcomes among AI and Other Race women compared to White women. Sequential models were adjusted for interpersonal violence (husband/partner, family member, someone else, ex-husband/partner, or any). AI women had 45% reduced odds of initiating breastfeeding (OR: 0.55, 95% CI: 0.36, 0.82) compared to white women. Including interpersonal violence during pregnancy did not change results. Similar patterns were observed for all breastfeeding outcomes and all interpersonal violence exposures. Interpersonal violence does not explain the disparity in breastfeeding in ND. Considering cultural ties to the tradition of breastfeeding and the role of colonization may provide a better understanding of breastfeeding among AI populations.

A paleogenome from a Holocene individual supports genetic continuity in Southeast Alaska

Many specifics of the population histories of the Indigenous peoples of North America remain contentious owing to a dearth of physical evidence. Only few ancient human genomes have been recovered from the Pacific Northwest Coast, a region increasingly supported as a coastal migration route for the initial peopling of the Americas. Here, we report paleogenomic data from the remains of a ∼3,000-year-old female individual from Southeast Alaska, named Tatóok yík yées sháawat (TYYS). Our results demonstrate at least 3,000 years of matrilineal genetic continuity in Southeast Alaska, and that TYYS is most closely related to ancient and present-day northern Pacific Northwest Coast Indigenous Americans. We find no evidence of Paleo-Inuit (represented by Saqqaq) ancestry in present-day or ancient Pacific Northwest peoples. Instead, our analyses suggest the Saqqaq genome harbors Northern Native American ancestry. This study sheds further light on the human population history of the northern Pacific Northwest Coast.

Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal and Sovereignty in Native America. By Gregory D. Smithers.

Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal and Sovereignty in Native America. By Gregory D. Smithers.