Native American History Research Articles

Tears of repentance: Christian Indian identity and community in Colonial southern New England

Tears of Repentance revisits and reexamines the familiar stories of intercultural encounters between Protestant missionaries and Native peoples in southern New England from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on Protestant missionaries' accounts of their ideals, purposes, and goals among the Native communities they served and of the religion as lived, experienced, and practiced among Christianized Indians, Julius H. Rubin offers a new way of understanding the motives and motivations of those who lived in New England's early Christianized Indian village communities. Rubin explores how Christian Indians recast Protestant theology into an Indianized quest for salvation from their worldly troubles and toward the promise of an otherworldly paradise. The Great Awakening of the eighteenth century reveals how evangelical pietism transformed religious identities and communities and gave rise to the sublime hope that New Born Indians were children of God who might effectively contest colonialism. With this dream unfulfilled, the exodus from New England to Brothertown envisioned a separatist Christian Indian commonwealth on the borderlands of America after the Revolution. Tears of Repentance is an important contribution to American colonial and Native American history, offering new ways of examining how Native groups and individuals recast Protestant theology to restore their Native communities and cultures.

Prehistoric Indian Burial Mounds and Native American History

The Author Peggy Leyva Conley takes the reader into the History of Sumner County, Tennessee - Prehistoric Indian Mounds and Native American History. This includes the Study of Archeology, Anthropology, Genealogy, Research, Data-Collecting, Science, Genetics, DNA Sequencing, Culture and History in the Scientific World of Native American History findings.

The US frontier as rationale for the Nazi east? Settler colonialism and genocide in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe and the American West

Many scholars of German and Native American history and the field of genocide studies argue that during World War II the Nazis' genocidal attempt to turn vast portions of Eastern Europe into Lebensraum [living space] for Aryan settlers was connected to the near-extinction of America's Native Peoples during the ‘conquest’ of the American west by the United States. In their view, there exist direct historical continuities between settler colonialism and genocide in the American west and Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945. This article denies the actuality of straight links between American west and Nazi Germany's eastward expansion and argues that the Nazis did not use the settlement of western North America as a model for their occupation, colonization and extermination policies. In addition, this study shows that at least on the ground in the Soviet Union, German soldiers were not under the impression that they were carrying out a colonialist land-grab exercise. As a result, this article also challenges the notion of the existence of straight links between Western colonialism and Nazi eastward expansion. By looking at both official documents and the writings of German soldiers, the following analysis shows how and why it was by and large impossible for the Nazis to utilize the American west as a concrete model for their regime's colonial plans in Eastern Europe.

From Pahá Sápa to Hometree: The Romanticized American Frontier of James Cameron’s Avatar and the Reproduction of Historical Amnesia

Both high and popular culture have continuously encouraged the American public to romanticize the frontier as a place of exploration, redemption, and quintessential American self-making as well as to regard space as such a frontier. James Cameron`s 2009 film, Avatar, is located firmly within that tradition, setting its imperialistic narrative of invasion for commercial gain, complete with the subplot of ethnographic exploration in the name of science, on the fictional planet of Pandora in the futuristic year of 2154 as a new frontier for America. Cameron`s narrative, however, structured around the “going native” and intercultural romance themes, is in fact a retelling of the battle over Paha Sapa during the Black Hills gold rush in the 1870s, culminating in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and a retelling of Kevin Costner`s Dances with Wolves, Disney`s Pocahontas, or Marcus Nispel`s The Pathfinder. Cameron insists that while Avatar does implicitly criticize America`s role in the Iraq War and that Americans do have a “moral responsibility” to understand the impact of their nation`s military campaigns, that “that`s not what the movie`s about-that`s only a minor part of it” and that the film is about how we interact with nature and other human beings, and how we are “trashing our world and maybe condemning ourselves to a grim future”; Cameron does not acknowledge the parallels between his film`s plot and Native American history. This essay interrogates Cameron`s claims about the film`s central message and of its proclaimed progressiveness, and by offering a reading of the film that refuses to ignore the unacknowledged mix-matched historical context of the plot and that also exposes how Jake Sully`s “redemption” presents a much more colonial and imperialistic narrative than that of John Dunbar`s, John Smith`s, or Ghost`s, seeks to situate it within the myth of the romanticized frontier and identify it as an uncritical reproduction of the ideology at the center of such romanticization. Further, this essay discusses the implications and ramifications of both the public`s and the director`s inability to recognize such ideological reproduction, and of the impact of such narratives being misrepresented as progressive on the basis of innovative film technology or environmentalist concerns.

To Tell the Truth

Review Article| November 01 2013 To Tell the Truth Randolph Bergstrom Randolph Bergstrom Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2013) 35 (4): 7–9. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2013.35.4.7 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Randolph Bergstrom; To Tell the Truth. The Public Historian 1 November 2013; 35 (4): 7–9. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2013.35.4.7 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 ContentThe Public Historian Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Teaching the Columbian Exchange

The recent ascendency of American Indian history has reconfigured the framework of American history and confirmed the enduring historiographical truth that narratives of the past undergo constant revision. New paradigms, temporalities, methods, as well as Indigenous actors have emerged, not only recentering the narrative of America and its history but also questioning its previous forms and habits. Native American history has moved, in short, from the margins to the center of national as well as global historical inquiry and has fueled, as well as been fueled by, the interdisciplinary rise of Indigenous and settler colonial studies. Translating such scholarly transformations into navigable syllabi, coherent lectures, and effective assignments remains a challenge. Staying conversant in the deepening historiographies of Native North America is daunting; trying to enter into, let alone engage, the myriad of fast-paced debates ranging across this burgeoning field can be equally imposing. From Alaska to the Caribbean and from Greenland to Polynesia, Native American history ranges far and wide with unparalleled depth and time.

At the border of empires: the Tohono O'odham, gender, and assimilation, 1880-1934

The story of the Tohono O'odham peoples offers an important account of assimilation. Bifurcated by a border demarcating Mexico and the United States that was imposed on them after the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, the Tohono O'odham lived at the edge of two empires. Although they were often invisible to the majority cultures of the region, they attracted the attention of reformers and government officials in the United States, who were determined to assimilate native peoples into society. By focusing on gender norms and ideals in the assimilation of the Tohono O'odham, At the Border of Empires provides a lens for looking at both Native American history and broader societal ideas about femininity, masculinity, and empire around the turn of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1880s, the US government implemented programs to eliminate vice among the Tohono O'odham and to encourage the morals of the majority culture as the basis of a process of Americanisation. During the next fifty years, tribal norms interacted with--sometimes conflicting with and sometimes reinforcing--those of the larger society in ways that significantly shaped both government policy and tribal experience. This book examines the mediation between cultures, the officials who sometimes developed policies based on personal beliefs and gender biases, and the native people whose lives were impacted as a result. These issues are brought into useful relief by comparing the experiences of the Tohono O'odham on two sides of a border that was, from a native perspective, totally arbitrary.

Decolonizing museums: representing Native America in national and tribal museums

Museum exhibitions focusing on Native American history have long been curator controlled. However, a shift is occurring, giving Indigenous people a larger role in determining exhibition content. In Decolonizing Museums, Amy Lonetree examines the complexities of these new relationships with an eye toward exploring how museums can grapple with centuries of unresolved trauma as they tell the stories of Native peoples. She investigates how museums can honor an Indigenous worldview and way of knowing, challenge stereotypical representations, and speak the hard truths of colonization within exhibition spaces to address the persistent legacies of historical unresolved grief in Native communities.Lonetree focuses on the representation of Native Americans in exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the Mille Lacs Indian Museum in Minnesota, and the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways in Michigan. Drawing on her experiences as an Indigenous scholar and museum professional, Lonetree analyzes exhibition texts and images, records of exhibition development, and interviews with staff members. She addresses historical and contemporary museum practices and charts possible paths for the future curation and presentation of Native lifeways.

Native America and the study of colonialism, Part 2: colonial presents?

‘One of the most striking of all “postcolonial” intellectual shifts, on a global perspective, has been a rapid and massive growth of the language and sometimes the conceptual tools of “colonialism” and “decolonisation” in relation to indigenous North Americans, past and indeed present.’ This has, however, so far very rarely involved substantive comparative analysis. This article (the second of two parts) attempts a broad survey of the intellectual genealogies of these developments, both in their longer term evolution and their more recent effervescence. It seeks to probe the uses of comparison in modern writing on Native American history and their limits, and to suggest how comparative analysis in the colonial frame might be pursued further in future. It takes up a series of major themes which emerge from the relevant literatures: the historiography and politics of comparison between the subjugation of Native North Americans, especially in the American West and colonial situations elsewhere; debate over connections or continuities between the ‘internal expansion’ of the USA and the country’s external, global role, often seen as imperial or imperialist; and the ‘colonial model’ for understanding the situation of Native Americans in modern times including the ‘colonial present’.

Crooked paths to allotment: the fight over federal Indian policy after the Civil War

Standard narratives of Native American history view the nineteenth century in terms of steadily declining Indigenous sovereignty, from removal of southeastern tribes to the 1887 General Allotment Act. In Crooked Paths to Allotment, C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa complicates these narratives, focusing on political moments when viable alternatives to federal assimilation policies arose. In these moments, Native American reformers and their white allies challenged coercive practices and offered visions for policies that might have allowed Indigenous nations to adapt at their own pace and on their own terms. Examining the contests over Indian policy from Reconstruction through the Gilded Age, Genetin-Pilawa reveals the contingent state of American settler colonialism. Genetin-Pilawa focuses on reformers and activists, including Tonawanda Seneca Ely S. Parker and Council Fire editor Thomas A. Bland, whose contributions to Indian policy debates have heretofore been underappreciated. He reveals how these men and their allies opposed such policies as forced land allotment, the elimination of traditional cultural practices, mandatory boarding school education for Indian youth, and compulsory participation in the market economy. Although the mainstream supporters of assimilation successfully repressed these efforts, the ideas and policy frameworks they espoused established a tradition of dissent against disruptive colonial governance.

Native America and the study of colonialism, Part 1: contested histories

One of the most striking of all ‘postcolonial’ intellectual shifts, on a global perspective, has been a rapid and massive growth of the language and sometimes the conceptual tools of ‘colonialism’ and ‘decolonisation’ in relation to indigenous North Americans, past and indeed present. This has, however, so far very rarely involved substantive comparative analysis. This article (the first of two parts) attempts a broad survey of the intellectual genealogies of these developments, both in their longer term evolution and their more recent effervescence. It seeks to probe the uses of comparison in modern writing on Native American history and their limits, and to suggest how comparative analysis in the colonial frame might be pursued further in future. It takes up a series of major themes which emerge from the relevant literatures: the historiography and politics of comparison between the subjugation of Native North Americans, especially in the American West and colonial situations elsewhere; debate over connections or continuities between the ‘internal expansion’ of the USA and the country’s external, global role, often seen as imperial or imperialist; and the ‘colonial model? for understanding the situation of Native Americans in modern times including the ‘colonial present’.

6. WHAT'S IN A CONCEPT? THE KINETIC EMPIRE OF THE COMANCHES

ABSTRACTThis essay revisits the main themes and arguments put forward in The Comanche Empire: indigenous agency; spatial reorientation in the writing of colonial histories; the composition of the Comanche empire and its impact on the history of North America. It also responds to a number of specific issues raised by the roundtable participants: differences and similarities between indigenous and Euro‐colonial power regimes; balancing of culture‐specific frameworks with broad‐gauge political economic analysis; linkages between indigenous agency and indigenous sovereignty in colonial encounters; the question of periodization in writing Native American and colonial histories. Finally, the essay points to new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, and comparing nonterritorial nomadic empires by introducing the concept of “kinetic empire,” which refers to a flexible imperial organization that revolves around a set of mobile activities and relies on selective nodal control of key resources.

ORHAN PAMUK'S RADICAL PROJECT TO VISUALIZE THE MAKING OF NOVELS

1 3 6 Y O R H A N PA M U K ’ S R A D I C A L P R O J E C T T O V I S U A L I Z E T H E M A K I N G O F N O V E L S A N I S S H I V A N I What is a museum? Why do we have museums? What do museums do? Can we get along without museums? Is there an alternative to museums? These questions have obsessed me for a long time. To believe in museums is to believe in a certain kind of modern cultural authority, to subject oneself to certain interpretive restrictions with respect to cultural value. A museum, we presume, is a collective endeavor, where objects of veneration have found their place because of consensus among authorities. But are museums really that innocent? There exists a cultural critique of museums as impartial aggregators of cultural value just as there is a critique of the literary canon. Who decides what belongs in a museum? Who arranges the objects within it, and to what purpose? The museum, like other modern institutional innovations, is a reflection of the urges embodied in the Enlightenment, where progress was inextricably tied up with notions of the state. The museum came into being along with the modern factory and school and prison. Although there T h e I n n o c e n c e o f O b j e c t s , b y O r h a n P a m u k ( A b r a m s , 2 7 2 p p . , $ 3 5 p a p e r ) 1 3 7 R were museums open to the public in antiquity and certainly in the Renaissance, the museum as we know it today emerged in the eighteenth century (the British Museum, 1753; the U≈zi, 1765; the Hermitage, 1764; the Louvre, 1793). As soon as democracy in its modern form began to be idealized, it also began to be sabotaged in the form of new means of obedience and regimentation. So if the museum reflects the optimistic side of the Enlightenment – the ‘‘naive’’ belief in popular education – it also reflects the dark side of the Enlightenment, to the extent that it assigns subordinate ranking to values deemed to have lost in the race to progress . If one visits a museum of Native American history in Virginia or New Mexico, what exactly is being presented? What about a museum in London containing images or objects pertaining to British rule in India? What would such a museum, with exactly the same artifacts, have meant in the eighteenth century as opposed to now? What about a similar museum in Delhi under the auspices of the Indian government? A museum is never innocent. It is consummately political, ideological, corrupted. It is interesting then that Orhan Pamuk’s new book is called The Innocence of Objects. Not the innocence of museums, but the innocence of objects, though the book is, among other things, an expansive, philosophical, meditative catalogue of the objects collected in the museum Pamuk worked so assiduously over the better part of a decade to assemble in connection with his novel The Museum of Innocence (published in Turkey in 2008). Imagine, a novelist creating a museum, from scratch, to exemplify the characters and events in his novel of tragic love in the authoritarian Turkey of the 1970s and 1980s, and to claim exemplary innocence for the project! Objects, we are to believe, can speak for themselves . If any novelist in contemporary times has enacted a more radical project on behalf of the innocence of writing, I don’t know of it. This is how Pamuk explains the origins of his unique venture: In its first version, The Museum of Innocence was to be a novel that resembled an encyclopedia – an ordered series of entries – about love and family with its narrative built around the Keskin family’s and Füsun’s belongings. From the mid-1990s, even while I was writing My Name Is Red, I had 1 3...

Reconstructing Native American population history

The peopling of the Americas has been the subject of extensive genetic, archaeological and linguistic research; however, central questions remain unresolved1–5. One contentious issue is whether the settlement occurred via a single6–8 or multiple streams of migration from Siberia9–15. The pattern of dispersals within the Americas is also poorly understood. To address these questions at higher resolution than was previously possible, we assembled data from 52 Native American and 17 Siberian groups genotyped at 364,470 single nucleotide polymorphisms. We show that Native Americans descend from at least three streams of Asian gene flow. Most descend entirely from a single ancestral population that we call “First American”. However, speakers of Eskimo-Aleut languages from the Arctic inherit almost half their ancestry from a second stream of Asian gene flow, and the Na-Dene-speaking Chipewyan from Canada inherit roughly one-tenth of their ancestry from a third stream. We show that the initial peopling followed a southward expansion facilitated by the coast, with sequential population splits and little gene flow after divergence, especially in South America. A major exception is in Chibchan-speakers on both sides of the Panama Isthmus, who have ancestry from both North and South America.

From Corn to Casinos: The Catch-22 of Native American Afluence

From Corn to Casinos:The Catch-22 of Native American Afluence Andrew H. Fisher (bio) Alexandra Harmon . Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History. University of North Carolina Press, 2010. x + 388 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. Indian-head nickels aside, Native Americans and money don't mix well in the public imagination. From Henri Rousseau's "Discourse on Inequality" to Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, Indians have often served as foils for the greed and materialism of the "White Man." At the same time, Euro-Americans have lamented Native American poverty while lambasting tribal enterprises they deem excessively profitable, morally inappropriate, or simply "un-Indian." The result is a Catch-22 worthy of Joseph Heller's classic novel, in which the character Chief White Halfoat complains that his Creek family had unwittingly served as "human divining rods" for Oklahoma oilmen. Ultimately, he tells Yossarian, "we found ourselves completely surrounded by oilmen waiting for us to come their way so they could kick us off. Everywhere you looked there was an oilman on a ridge, waiting there like Indians getting ready to attack. It was the end." Perhaps the White Halfoats were lucky, for being stripped of their oil wealth spared them the ignominy of becoming rich Indians, the subject of Alexandra Harmon's latest book. "From many chapters of their history," writes Harmon, "Indians could reasonably conclude that they were damned if they did get rich and damned if they did not" (p. 277). She uses seven case studies of unexpected Native affluence (including the Oklahoma oil boom) to explore the intersection of American ideas about economics and Indians. Whether fighting over corn in colonial Virginia or casinos in modern Connecticut, Harmon contends, whites and Indians have debated and influenced each other's views on the proper sources, distribution, and purposes of wealth. This intercultural discourse reveals more than just competing notions of Indianness; in Harmon's skilled hands, it becomes both a divining rod for locating "the moral premises of economic culture" (p. 10) and a wedge for fitting Indians into broader historical narratives. Impressive in scope and analytical power, her book makes a compelling case for the proposition that a "historical examination of American [End Page 186] thought regarding economic morality is . . . incomplete unless it includes Indians" (p. 11). Rich Indians is part of a new wave of scholarship that aims to move Native economic history beyond its usual fixation on dispossession, dependency, and underdevelopment. Over the past fifteen years, anthropologists and historians have produced more nuanced interpretations of Indian engagement with the market economy, emphasizing adaptation and agency over exploitation and subjection. While acknowledging the power imbalances and structural constraints that have limited Native choices, these studies generally portray Indians as intelligent economic actors with culturally distinct yet dynamic perceptions and practices. Theda Perdue and Claudio Saunt, among others, have documented changing conceptions of property within the "Five Civilized Tribes" in the decades preceding removal. Scholars such as Brian Hosmer, Peter Iverson, and Colleen O'Neill have uncovered examples of Indian entrepreneurship that challenge the notion that capitalism necessarily undermined Native cultural values. Even wage labor—long taken as a hallmark of dependency—has been productively reassessed in case studies by William Bauer, Paige Raibmon, and Daniel Usner. Rich Indians is most like Usner's Indian Work: Language and Livelihood in Native American History (2009) in its attention to the reciprocal relationship between the economic strategies that Indians have adopted and the discursive strategies that white observers have used to discredit them. Euro-American greed and hypocrisy receive due attention, but Harmon shares with these authors the desire to transcend simple stories of victimization. Instead of a morality play about selfish whites and generous Natives, she offers a satisfyingly complex drama in which neither side has a monopoly on virtue. Harmon's vignettes span American history from the colonial period to the present. Fittingly, she starts in seventeenth-century Virginia, where the "trope of the poor savage" (p. 53) took root with the plantations that displaced Native towns. From the outset, while Anglo observations of Powhatan culture were "contradictory and ambivalent" (p. 27), they generally described Indians...

New worlds of violence: cultures and conquests in the early American Southeast

From the early 1500s to the mid-1700s, the American Southeast was the scene of continuous tumult as European powers vied for dominance in the region while waging war on Native American communities. Yet even before Hernando de Soto landed his expeditionary force on the Gulf shores of Florida, Native Americans had created their own cultures of violence: sets of ideas about when it was appropriate to use violence what sorts of violence were appropriate to a given situation. In New Worlds of Violence, Matthew Jennings offers a persuasive new framework for understanding the European Native American contact period the conflicts among indigenous peoples that preceded it. This pioneering approach posits that every group present in the Southeast had its own ideas about the use of violence that these ideas changed over time as they collided with one another. book starts with the Mississippian era continues through the successive Spanish English invasions of the Native South. Jennings argues that the English conquered the Southeast because they were able to force everyone else to adapt to their culture of violence, which, of course, changed over time as well. By 1740, a peculiarly Anglo-American culture of violence was in place that would profoundly influence the expansion of England s colonies the eventual southern United States. While Native African violence were present in this world, they moved in circles defined by the English. New Worlds of Violence concludes by pointing out that long-lasting violence bears long-lasting consequences. An important contribution to the growing body of work on the early Southeast, this book will significantly broaden readers understanding of America s violent past. Matthew Jennings is an assistant professor of history at Macon State College in Macon, Georgia. He is the author of Violence in a Shattered World in Mapping the Shatter Zone: European Invasion the Transformation of the Mississippian World, edited by Robbie Ethridge Sheri Shuck-Hall. His work has also appeared in The Uniting States, South Carolina Encyclopedia, A Multicultural History of the United States, and Encyclopedia of Native American History.

Encyclopedia of Native American history

European explorers reached North America more than 400 years ago, and since that time Native Americans have had to struggle to survive. Yet, despite injustices both past and present, the Native American community has persevered over the centuries. The new, three-volume Encyclopedia of Native American History offers a comprehensive and authoritative look at the most important individuals, events, and topics in American Indian history. Researchers and students alike will benefit from the in-depth coverage of tribes, notable leaders and events, customs, dress, dwellings, weapons, government, religion, and more. Covering the period from the first human settlements in the Americas to the present day, this set features black-and-white photographs, an insert of full-color maps, an appendix, and cross-references. Written for high school and college students as well as the general public, this resource will be invaluable to anyone interested in learning about this fascinating topic.

“To Remove the Fear”: A Conversation with Charles Norman Shay about Joseph Nicolar's <em>The Life and Traditions of the Red Man</em>

“To Remove the Fear”A Conversation with Charles Norman Shay about Joseph Nicolar’s The Life and Traditions of the Red Man Lorrayne Carroll (bio) Charles Norman Shay is the grandson of Joseph Nicolar, whose 1893 book, The Life and Traditions of the Red Man, serves as a fundamental document in Penobscot historiography and cultural heritage.1 During our conversation, Mr. Shay respectfully considered Nicolar’s purposes in writing and self-publishing Life and Traditions, and he discussed the book’s meaning within his own family.2 He also addressed the edition published in 2007 by Duke University Press and edited by Annette Kolodny, for which Mr. Shay contributed a brief preface. This conversation extends some of the remarks he made in the preface by drawing on Life and Traditions and on family memories. A rich and thoughtful appraisal of the book emerges from the discussion, one that urges us to see Nicolar’s text as a crucial entry into the canon of Native American literature, particularly within Wabanaki studies. Mr. Shay’s insights about the complicated historical terrain that shaped Nicolar’s work help readers to understand the specific economic, social, and cultural constraints against which Nicolar deftly deployed his narrative. He illuminates the contexts wherein we might read the narrative’s constituents, such as its origin story and the descriptions of first-contact experiences, as well as its calls for perseverance and preservation. Mr. Shay emphasizes the critical work of Nicolar’s book as a salutary antidote to historical ignorance regarding the literary and scholarly production of Penobscot people. As a direct descendant of Joseph Nicolar, Charles Norman Shay [End Page 97] speaks from a unique vantage about his family and nation. Indeed, for Mr. Shay, “nation” holds multiple meanings: he is a much-decorated veteran of World War II, landing with American forces as a medic on D-Day. In 2007 he was presented with the French Legion d’Honneur by President Nicolas Sarkozy. He lived in Europe, primarily Vienna, for over forty years and returned to Indian Island, the ancestral land of the Penobscot Nation, in 2003. About his return to Indian Island, Mr. Shay says, “I had to reconnect with my people and my culture.” He accomplishes this reconnection by publishing books on Penobscot people, notably his mother and aunt, as well as through his frequent public presentations on Penobscot history, the history of American Indian veterans, and his own personal journey that took him “from Indian Island to Omaha Beach” and back again.3 Wherever Mr. Shay travels, he brings copies of the 2007 edition of The Life and Traditions of the Red Man in order to introduce Nicolar’s version of Penobscot traditions to national and international communities of scholars, students, and all readers drawn to Native American topics. lorrayne carroll: In the preface to the 2007 edition, you write, “I see it [the original edition] as a preservation of what he knew, what he’d heard and learned directly . . . so that those who came later might learn and understand” (xi). Would you expand a bit on what is preserved in the original edition of 1893? charles norman shay: Joseph Nicolar wrote about the beginning of the creation of man, the Indian, and how he learned to survive, how he learned to clothe himself, how he learned to take animals down to feed his family, and so forth, and all of these things were taught to him by Gluskabe,4 who was the spiritual leader of the Native Americans. . . . I find this important that this information has been preserved because there is so little known about Native American history because there was hardly anything ever written about it. The only written testimony that we have came about after the arrival of the settlers; before that we had no written language. And I think it was very important that he had enough education that he [End Page 98] was able to put these stories that he had heard, these legends, from other people that were passed down from generation to generation, that he was able to put them down on paper and preserve them for future generations. lc: Do you think that when he...

Images and Imagination: Toward a Conversation about Eighteenth-Century Euchee History

Images and ImaginationToward a Conversation about Eighteenth-Century Euchee History Joshua Piker (bio) In modern-day Oklahoma, Euchees are members of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, but they have retained a distinct language, culture, and social identity. In volume 4 of Native South, Stephen Martin and Adam Recvlohe presented an overview of the Euchee (Yuchi) History Project, a tribally run, community-centered effort aimed at documenting and making accessible the history of the Euchee people. As part of the project, Chairman Andrew Skeeter and the Euchee (Yuchi) Tribe of Indians hosted a History Symposium in October 2010. Tribal members, researchers involved with the project, and academics whose research touches in one way or another on Euchee history spent two days in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, making presentations to, and listening to suggestions and reactions from, assembled members of the Euchee community. I have been serving as an advisor for the project since 2009, and I was honored to be asked to present some thoughts on eighteenth-century Euchee history to the symposium.1 My presentation followed talks by Professors Mary S. Linn (on Euchee linguistic distinctiveness and dialects) and Robbie Ethridge (on the regionwide disruption and coalescence occasioned by the seventeenth-century Indian slave trade), both of which very effectively put on the table issues of alliance building, group solidarity, and endemic change. When it was my turn to speak, I worked to situate eighteenth-century Euchee experiences within the context developed by Linn and Ethridge. My larger goal, though, was to make the material accessible to nonacademics, thereby opening up the opportunity for members of the Euchee community—who know their history in ways that a non-Euchee like myself cannot hope to replicate—to engage with, critique, correct, and expand upon the thoughts and information that I was presenting. In the interests of accessibility, I centered my talk on three 1730s images, two of which depict Euchee individuals while the third situates [End Page 149] the Euchees as a polity within the region’s geopolitical system. I tried to demonstrate what a close reading of each image could tell us about Euchee experiences during this period of their history. I also, however, noted ways in which images produced by non-Euchees inevitably tell us only part of the story, and I suggested that some imagination is necessary if we wish to push beyond the images and better understand the challenges and possibilities confronting eighteenth-century Euchee people. What follows is a modified version of my talk; I am grateful to Robbie Ethridge, Native South’s editor, for encouraging me to convert the presentation into a “Field Note.” In this format, I hope to speak to several audiences. To my colleagues in early American and early Native American history, I present this close reading of three images many of us know well, not to break new analytic or historiographical ground but simply to demonstrate how these images (and others like them) can help us make our larger conclusions about eighteenth-century Native life less abstract and the process of coming to those conclusions more dialogic. To my colleagues in Native American history who are engaged with Native communities, I present what follows not as an example of “best practices”—I am not qualified to make a judgment of that sort—but simply as an illustration of how one scholar attempted to present his work to, and continue a conversation with, one Native community. And finally, to my colleagues among the Euchees themselves, I present this essay as a marker both of the dialogue fostered by the symposium and of my gratitude for their hospitality in allowing me to take part in that conversation. We might profitably begin our discussion of eighteenth-century Euchee history by investigating the larger world that they inhabited. Consider, for example, this 1737 Chickasaw map of the South (fig. 1). The Euchees appear on the map; they are the small circle labeled D. Now, what does this map tell us about their world?2 To begin with, the Euchees in 1737 inhabited an Indian-dominated region. The map shows us that in any number of ways. Most obviously, the circles denoting the British (A) and French (I...

This Place Called Home: Curating from an Insider's Perspective

This Place Called Home:Curating from an Insider's Perspective Miles R. Miller (bio) As a young boy, accompanied by my family, I joined the Washat religion at an area longhouse. I was nurtured with a traditional education; the elders taught me the Yakama legends and time-honored lessons, and encouraged me to understand everything around me. These early influences continue to inspire me as a beadwork artist. I learned patience, observation, design, and composition, skills that carried over to my collection management work. I learned to care for collections by thoroughly evaluating, completing, and updating accession and catalog records, thus facilitating the process of preservation and attending to exhibition concerns with care. The combined influences of my traditional Yakama upbringing, museology, and contemporary Native American art history studies motivate me as a curator to utilize exhibits as a new pedagogical method of pursuing Native American history, culture, and arts. This essay will introduce the reader to This Place Called Home, an exhibit I curated in 2008 as part of my master's thesis project at the University of Washington's Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.1 In this essay, I will reflect on my experiences as a Native curator from the Yakama Nation—specifically how, in my opinion, traditional cultural beliefs enhance current museological practices and the relative power of decision making in collaborative projects between museums and tribal communities. Related to this shared management process, I will address two additional issues: (1) the relationship between pan-tribal [End Page 21] advisory committees and tribally specific values, and (2) possible tensions between culture and religion in museological practices. Click for larger view View full resolution Guest curator Miles R. Miller (Yakama) with a 1988 capote (cat. no. 1988-119/1) made by Maynard Lavadour White Owl (Nez Perce/Cayuse), on display in the 2008 Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture exhibit This Place Called Home. Courtesy of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Photograph by Doug McTavish. In the course of the object-selection process for This Place Called Home (TPCH), an Umatilla cultural adviser brought his concern over ten historical objects that might possibly fall under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) to the attention of [End Page 22] the Plateau exhibit curators. These archaeological objects come from a particular accession in which the archaeologist and collector often acted without the guidance and advice of local Native American consultants. The intended use of these objects—a sinker/maul, sculpture/ effigy, pestle, ground stone tools, and stone mortars—is often misunderstood. My course of action to resolve the issue was to research accession records in search of evidence supporting this claim of a burial connection. Finding no evidence, and acting as a curator familiar with traditional Yakama teachings, I chose to override the recommendation of the Umatilla cultural adviser. This internal decision making is indicative of new understandings of what we mean by indigenous museum curating and the implications of consultation. This Place Called Home In March 2007 I accepted the invitation by Dr. James Nason, curator emeritus at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, to cocurate a complementary, object-based exhibit to augment Peoples of the Plateau: The Indian Photographs of Lee Moorhouse, 1898-1915, a traveling photographic exhibition from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.2 Both TPCH and the Moorhouse exhibit were designed to focus on the arts and culture of middle Columbia Plateau tribes—Yakama, Umatilla, and Nez Perce—and as such, would be the first major exhibits about Plateau culture in the past twenty years at the Burke Museum. The Moorhouse exhibit included fifty-one important historical images of known people, village sites, clothing, and other objects of material culture—all reproductions of Lee Moorhouse's glass plate negatives taken at the turn of the century. The Burke Museum was interested in enhancing the exhibit to highlight and present to western Washington audiences Plateau objects from the Native American permanent collection. TPCH explored the indigenous aesthetic of the Columbia River Plateau region. Carefully selected objects looked at relevant historical and prehistorical objects characteristic of Plateau culture from the Burke Museum, and demonstrated...