Indigenous Peoples Of North Research Articles

NOTES ON RED IN THE MASTERS AND THE SLAVES

For contemporary social and cultural anthropologists, historians and sociologists, certain uses of the red colour among indigenous peoples of North and South America have a magical and prophylatic character. Focusing on the Brazilian panorama from the 16th century to the early thirties of the 20th century, in The Masters and the Slaves Gilberto Freyre analyzed reasons that made red a national favorite colour. The aim of this article is to expose how Freyre associated such prediletion to complex social processes, involving Indigenous culture and Portuguese colonial imaginary in a narrative about the construction of the nation’s identity. Works of Paul Ricoeur and Roberto González Echevarría guide the mainstream theoretical scope of this study.

Indigenous Small-Numbered Peoples of North of Yakutia in Focus of Academic Research in Late 1980s — Early 1990s

A historical analysis of research conducted during 1988—1991 by employees of the USSR Academy of Sciences to identify the socio-economic and ethnocultural situation of the indigenous small-numbered peoples of the North living in Yakutia is presented in the article. At the same time, the main attention is paid to those materials that most representatively reflect the changes that have occurred in the assessment by scientists of the consequences of the state policy carried out in the Soviet period in the national history of the state policy for indigenous ethnic groups. The sources for the preparation of the article were archival materials identified by the author, as well as published documents and scientific literature data. The work carried out made it possible to determine the main directions of the research, which focused mainly on understanding the impact of management decisions taken by the authorities, as well as changes in the state of the environment under the influence of intensive industrial development on the traditional culture and economy of indigenous peoples. The presented material testifies to the fact that at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, Yakutia actually found itself at the forefront of criticism of the state policy pursued towards the indigenous peoples of the North through-out most of the Soviet period.

Expanding the Circle of Knowledge: Reconceptualizing Successful Aging Among North American Older Indigenous Peoples.

Indigenous older peoples' voices and experiences remain largely absent in the dominant models and critical scholarship on aging and late life. This article examines the relevance of the model of successful aging for Indigenous peoples in North America. This article presents the results of a review of the published conceptual literature on successful aging among Indigenous peoples. Our intent was to explore the current state of the field of successful aging among Indigenous peoples and suggest dimensions that may be more reflective of Indigenous voices and experiences that leads to a more inclusive model of successful aging. Based on our review, we suggest four dimensions that may broaden understandings of successful aging to be more inclusive of Indigenous older people: health and wellness, empowerment and resilience, engagement and behavior, and connectedness. Our review suggests that Indigenous peoples' voices and experiences are beginning to be included in academic literature on successful aging. However, we suggest that understandings of successful aging be broadened based on our summative findings and a process of community involvement. Such processes can lead to the development of models that are more inclusive to a wide range of older people, including Indigenous older peoples.

Achieving a global psychology.

AbstractPsychology has a long history in only a few countries of world. Initially developed in Europe and United States, it necessarily has close ties cultural traditions of those particular societies. As a result, discipline and practice of psychology are largely culture-bound, limited in its origins, concepts, and empirical findings only this small portion of world. The discipline is also culture-blind, largely ignoring influence of role of culture in shaping development and display of human behaviour. This article draws concepts and strategies in psychology (particularly cross-cultural and intercultural psychology) propose some remedies these problems. It is based a universalist vision for discipline; this view asserts that basic psychological processes are common our species, while their development and expression are culturally shaped. The eventual goal is achieve a global psychology that incorporates concepts and findings from societies and cultures from all parts of world.Keywords: acculturation strategies, culture-blind, culture-bound, dominance, emic, etic, global psychology, indigenous psychology, prevention, universalismThe discipline and practice of psychology have long histories in only a few countries of world. Initially developed in Europe, then further in United States, it has close ties cultural traditions of those particular societies. Although more and more taught, studied and practiced in other parts of world, psychology remains largely culture-bound (Berry, Poortinga, Segali & Dasen, 1992; Henrich, Heine & Norenzayan, 2010), being limited in its origins, concepts, and empirical findings only a small portion of world. And although concept of culture has been recognised as a core variable in psychology in a book that documents origin and development of 15 key psychological concepts (Berry & Triandis, 2006), discipline has also been culture-blind, largely ignoring influence of role of culture in shaping development and display of human behaviour.As a result of these limitations, missing from international scene are insights, and knowledge of psychology from largest, most complex and in many ways earliest-developed societies of world. In particular, psychological contributions from China, India, and Arab world are largely unknown Western psychology. Similarly missing are those from societies in Africa, and indigenous peoples in North and South America, and Pacific region.If human beings are all one people, belonging one species, how can a discipline that thinks of itself as the science of human behaviour not be based all human experience and knowledge? Answers this rhetorical question serve a basis for my approach development of a global psychology. In this article, I argue that discipline and profession of psychology are overwhelmingly rooted in and practiced in Western Euroamerican societies (Pawlik & Rosenzweig, 2000). The rest of world has often assumed roles of consumers or subjects; psychology is sold to or tried out on other peoples. The evidence for this state of affairs has been clearly presented by Adair, Coehlo and Luna, (2002); Adair and Kagitcibasi (1995); Allwood and Berry (2006); and Cole (2006). For example, Cole (2006, p. 905) has noted that leadership of international psychology, particularly International Union of Psychological Science has remained firmly in Euro American hands. These countries dominate participation and management of congress this day, despite fact that psychologists from approximately 100 countries currently participate (Rosenzweig, Holtzman, Sabourin, & Belanger, 2000).To deal with these limitations, I argue that human behavioural diversity needs be fully sampled and examined in all its variety, as a basis for discerning what may be common all human behaviour. …

Epistemic Encounters: Indigenous Cosmopolitan Hospitality, Marxist Anthropology, Deconstruction, and Doris Pilkington’s Rabbit-Proof Fence

Epistemic Encounters: Indigenous Cosmopolitan Hospitality, Marxist Anthropology, Deconstruction, and Doris Pilkington’s Rabbit-Proof Fence Julia Emberley (bio) In the first place, as soon as the visitor has arrived in the house of the moussacat whom he has chosen for his host (the moussacat being the head of the household, who offers food to people passing through the village ...), he is seated on a cotton bed suspended in the air, and remains there for a short while not saying a word. Then the women come and surround the bed, crouching with their buttocks against the ground and with both hands over their eyes; in this manner weeping their welcome to the visitor, they will say a thousand things in his praise. Jean de Léry’s History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America In his 1997 sessions on hospitality, Jacques Derrida cites de Léry’s description, above, of the Tupinamba welcoming ceremony as an example of “radical hospitality,” which he characterizes by the reception of the uninvited guest, the stranger, into one’s home. In the context of European statecraft, such hospitality is radical because it exceeds the normative restrictions and regulations that circumscribe the movement of so-called foreign bodies across national lines. Derrida’s notion of a radical hospitality lies at the heart of a welcoming cosmopolitanism and [End Page 147] the fulfilment of the desire for an unfettered movement of bodies across European national boundaries. That Derrida would radicalize hospitality by way of referencing a Tupinamba welcoming ceremony points to the many ways aboriginality constitutes an origin story in the European text of civility and civilization. While the Tupinamba laws of hospitality lie at the root of Derrida’s conception of a radicalized European hospitality, for indigenous peoples in North and South America the colonizing effects of European imperialism in the postcolonial nation have hardly been reconciled, let alone acknowledged. Thus, the question emerges: How to decolonize this European notion of cosmopolitan hospitality? On the one hand, it would seem necessary to open the text of a European critical account of cosmopolitan hospitality to its own imperial history and the consequences of that history for the contemporary global tensions being fought across, within, and beyond its state lines that impact on any given nation’s laws of hospitality. While this question places the emphasis on the problem of the economic and political conditions that determine the global system in which the postcolonial nation is required to operate or survive, such an approach, while recognizably critical and committed to the political ideals of transnational social justice, nevertheless can only register the resistant pressures and agency of the postcolonial world within such conditions. However, a more radical position exists, I would argue, in re-positioning the epistemological conditions of postcoloniality by taking into account indigenous epistemologies rather than focusing only on the exploitative and appropriative conditions and disavowals that attempted to marginalize and silence such epistemologies over a large period of time, no less than in the twentieth century where in Canada, for instance, the federal government legislated policies to assimilate indigenous peoples, notably the Indian residential school system, which was targeted toward the destruction of indigenous cultural and pedagogical practices. In an effort to construct a genealogical assemblage1 of texts from the multi-faceted postcolonial archive, this paper articulates, as in hinges together, a set of materials [End Page 148] which include Derrida on hospitality as deconstruction, Marx and Engels on communism, Henry Lewis Morgan on the Iroquois laws of hospitality, and Doris Pilkington’s memoir, Rabbit-Proof Fence. The following section explicates the problem of origin stories in the figure of aboriginality. The subsequent section draws out the linkages between Derrida’s notion of cosmopolitanism and Marx and Engels’s use of Morgan’s study of the Iroquoian laws of hospitality in their formation of communism. The final section focuses on the significance of Pilkington’s text to an indigenous ethics of hospitality, homelessness, and homecoming. Origin Stories and Other (in) Hospitable Acts of Writings There is nothing new in the use of aboriginality (ab-origine) to signify the so-called primitive or savage stage of human development from which...

The Ice Is Melting in the North

The Ice Is Melting in the North Oren Lyons (bio) The following statement reflects the position of the Traditional Circle of lndian Elders and Youth and was delivered by Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper, Turtle Clan, Onondaga Nation, to the Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders, held at the United Nations, New York, in August 2000. It is reprinted here with his permission. Leaders of the World, Neyaweha-scano (thank you for being well). Today I bring you greetings from the Indigenous Peoples of North, Central, and South America. Indeed, I bring you greetings from the Indigenous Peoples of the world. We are the keepers of the traditions, ceremonies, histories, and future of our nations. We are the ones who escaped from your proselytizing. We survived with the wisdom of the Old Ones. And we are pleased to add our voices to yours in this great effort for common sense and peace among nations. Leaders of the World, I bring you a most urgent message that was brought to our twenty-third annual gathering of the Traditional Circle of Elders and Youth. This message was brought by a runner from the north, from Greenland, and he said: The ice is melting in the north! He informed us that some fifteen years ago they noticed trickles of water coming down the sheer face of Glacier Mountain. That trickle has grown to a roaring river of ice water pouring out of this mountain into the Atlantic Ocean. He informed us that Glacier Mountain has lost four thousand feet of ice in these past few years. And the melt continues to accelerate. This is an alarming message that requires your absolute attention. Leaders of the World, We are a collective voice of Indigenous Peoples. We have joined this great mission for peace. We add our presence in support of this great effort for reconciliation between peoples and nations. [End Page 1] We agree that there must be parity and equity between rich and poor nations, between white people and people of color, and rich people and poor people, with special attention to women, children, and indigenous peoples. We, in our collective voices, add to this: that there must be a reconciliation between peoples and the natural world, between nation states and the forests that sustain us, between corporations and the resources they mine, the fish that they catch, and the water that they use. Leaders of the World, Indigenous nations and peoples believe in the spiritual powers of the universe. We believe in the ultimate power and authority of a limitless energy beyond our comprehension. We believe in the order of the universe. We believe in the laws of creation and that all life is bound by these same natural laws. We call this essence the spirit of life. This is what gives the world the energy to create and procreate, and what becomes the ponderous and powerful law of regeneration—the law of the seed. We, in our collective voices, speak to this to remind you that spirit and spiritual laws transcend generations. We know, because this has sustained us. Religion and spirituality are vital to survival and moral law. It is a faith that has sustained our human spirit through our darkest hours. It has sustained our human spirit in times of crisis during the times we suffered through the grinding measures of inexorable persecutions that have spanned generations and continue today. Yet here we are, today, adding our voices to this plea for sanity in leadership and responsibility to the future generations whose faces are looking up from the Earth, each awaiting their time of life here. Leaders of the World, We believe that reconciliation should begin here because peace is an inclusive term, and peace and reconciliation are the purpose of this summit. Peace is dynamic and requires great effort of spirit and mind to attain unity. Leaders of peace must step forward and take responsibility for a paradigm change in the direction of current lifestyles and materialistic societies. The human species has become the most voracious and abusive consumer of Earth's resources. We have tipped the balance of life against our children, and we imperil...