American Native Research Articles

Graduate Medical Education Training and the Health of Indigenous Peoples.

Graduate Medical Education Training and the Health of Indigenous Peoples.

Indian Summer at Sand Hill: The Revey and Richardson Families at the New Jersey Shore

This essay discusses the centuries-long history of Monmouth County’s Lenape-Delaware Revey clan and the Cherokee Richardson clan using historical records and photographs from Monmouth County and the States of New Jersey and New York – as well as from the Sand Hill Indian Historical Association and private family archives. Although much of the general public today persists in thinking that all Lenape have left the state, small communities continued to inhabit the northern shore area throughout the colonial period and to this day, as documented by land transactions, vital statistics, censuses, military records, and archival references. They intermarried with whites, other indigenous people, and African Americans, and contributed greatly to their communities. The story of the Sand Hill Indians of Monmouth County told in part here illuminates the historical interactions of Native American, European, and African cultures at the New Jersey shore and how those interconnected communities evolved over two centuries.

Judiciary institutions and violent crime in American Indian nations

AbstractIn many American Indian nations the security situation is dire. While scholars have studied how institutions shape economic development in American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) nations, the role of AIAN institutions for security and violent crime has received much less attention—despite the extensive literature highlighting the important role of effective and legitimate institutions in the long‐term decline of violence. We analyze how varying types of American Indian polities and judiciary institutions fare in tackling violent crime using data across 146 American Indian polities. Our findings indicate that more autonomous American Indian criminal justice institutions with specialized court systems are associated with lower violent crime. However, customary justice institutions do not appear to be effective in reducing violent crime, highlighting the problem of cultural mismatch between traditional and formal justice systems. We argue that analyzing AIAN nations provides important insights into how institutional legitimacy can shape violent crime.

Native American Rhetoric ed. by Lawrence W. Gross

Reviewed by: Native American Rhetoric ed. by Lawrence W. Gross Danielle Donelson Lawrence W. Gross, ed., Native American Rhetoric. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2021. 304 pp. Hardcover, $74.90. Lawrence W. Gross articulates the need for this collection through contextualizing previous scholarship about Native American rhetoric. Extant research focuses on rhetorical strategies of survivance, or the combination of survival and resistance, which arose from ongoing settler colonialism. However, Native American rhetoric (including knowledge, meaning-making, cultural traditions and values, spirituality, morality, and philosophy) is not solely a reaction to colonization. Cultural epistemicide, ecocide, genocide, and ongoing settler colonial violence may be integral to understanding Native American rhetoric, yet neglecting the vast richness of the ancestral wisdom of those who have always lived on Turtle Island is problematic. While many of the chapters do acknowledge colonial violence to address past and present settler colonialism, the colonizers’ narrative is not the focus here. Instead, authors articulate Native Americans’ bond with their ancestral and cultural values. Indeed, the text affirms and validates Native American rhetoric as cultural practice, foregrounding the ways Indigenous tribes employ their own sacred knowledges, make meaning, preserve their cultural values, and wield rhetorical sovereignty. Gross frames the discussion for a western audience, stressing that “within Native American cultures, rhetoric seems to play an entirely different role, one that seeks harmony, consensus and unity” in comparison to western rhetorical models (7). True to his promise, contributing writers guide readers through various examples of Native Americans’ use of rhetoric. Underscoring this new cultural lens, he explains that Native American rhetoric aims to “maintain social cohesion and good relations that ultimately give Native American rhetoric its power” (7). This value is apparent when we learn from Philip K. Arnold that, for the Haudenosaunee, “decisions must be achieved by complete agreement, and as such, achieving the unity of minds is critical for the success of any gathering” (30). Arnold also showcases Gross’s [End Page 433] initial claim that the role of listening itself represents an art and cultural understanding within Native American rhetoric (2). Gross expands upon this concept in his own chapter detailing an Anishinaabe approach to listening, explaining its requirements of engagement, silence, consideration, and understanding from the listener. Many chapters reveal a deep reverence for animals as more-than-human relations. Persuading rattlesnakes to retreat, understanding Coyotean rhetoric, advocating for salmon’s sovereignty: these narratives show Native Americans applying their traditional Indigenous knowledge to advocate for all their relations. Other pieces explore riddling in Koyukon, bookending in Navajo speeches, and digression as revelatory of Anishinaabe morality and spirituality. In each, the author directs western readers to understand how Native American values ought to be framed to arrive at a greater appreciation of their rhetoric. Authors provide concrete examples of Native American tribes honoring interconnection in the nature of the world as they act as stewards of the land, despite the constant threat of ecocides rising from settler colonial violence. Most poignantly, the anthology responds to elder Inés Talamantez’s call to address the shortsighted bias rampant in anthropology. She protests disciplines’ limited understanding of Native American rhetoric, situated as they are in colonial rhetoric and ethnocentric bias. Thus, Native American Rhetoric answers her charge that “it is time for scholars to determine why these biased assumptions [and the past and present ethnocentric bias to study and interpret other cultures using one’s own values] have been allowed to remain pervasive” (143). Offering their own cultural approaches, these authors not only respond to this mandate but also present cultural perspectives so we all may better understand the wealth that is Native American rhetoric. This edited collection is sobering, as it reminds readers that settlers continue to recolonize knowledges belonging to Indigenous groups. This violence makes survival harder, as the need for advocacy on behalf of Native Americans, especially for nature and more-than-human beings (animal relations), only grows. However, it is a most important read, as it demonstrates how Native Americans [End Page 434] have inhabited Turtle Island for centuries and that they always have possessed vastly rich knowledges. It is high time that settlers listened to them about their culture and their land on their...

Metrics, baseline scores, and a tool to improve sponsor performance on clinical trial diversity: retrospective cross sectional study

ObjectiveTo develop a measure for fair inclusion in pivotal trials by assessing transparency and representation of enrolled women, older adults (aged 65 years and older), and racially and ethnically minoritized...

Something Beautiful and Powerful: Politics, Art, and Bread and Puppet Theater

Something Beautiful and Powerful: Politics, Art, and Bread and Puppet Theater

Native American Voting Rights in Utah: Federal Policy, Citizenship, and Voter Suppression

Native American Voting Rights in Utah: Federal Policy, Citizenship, and Voter Suppression

Vote Aquí Hoy: The 1975 Extension of the Voting Rights Act and the Creation of Language Minorities

AbstractThe year 1975 marked a watershed year for Spanish-surnamed people in the United States and their relationship with the federal government. In that year Congress extended the Voting Rights Act to include a “language minority” category, requiring federal election officials to translate election materials under certain conditions. By validating language rights for language minorities, Congress expanded federal voting protections far beyond African Americans. Advocates for Spanish speakers took up the cause before Congress, which created a new federally protected category based on the long history of discrimination in education and society they collected in testimonies. These language protections catered largely to Spanish speakers, though the category also included Alaska Natives, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. The process of gaining a separate language minority status is explored in this article, which explains how Congress chose to create a law that included Spanish speakers by name.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT: INDIGENOUS AND NONINDIGENOUS RESEARCHERS

Abstract In response to populations that have been chronically underserved and underrepresented within the social sciences, scholars have outlined the need for community-based engagement strategies and research methodologies that are able to represent the voices of those communities to promote culturally informed, appropriate, and driven health initiatives. This symposium introduces and discusses Indigenous research methodologies that are empowering and emphasize the knowledge and wisdom of Indigenous Elders, shares urban Elder engagement strategies, explores engagement strategies for Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, and describes the impacts of exclusion of Indigenous voices from research. The first presentation by Maria Crouch and her colleagues will introduce an Elder-centered research methodology as exemplified by two research studies. The second presentation by Steffi Kim focuses on outreach and research engagement strategies to reach Alaska Native Elders in the urban environment. The third presenter, Jordan Lewis, shares and discusses community-based research as an insider and outsider in your own community, outlining research practices, positionality, and accuracy in research. Finally, Lyn Holley will discuss themes emerging from her review of the literature that explored the impacts of the application of “top-down” Eurocentric approaches to inquiry on American Native people and the implications of these findings.

FINDING THE MINDS OF OUR ELDERS: TESTING THE MINORITY STRESS AND COGNITION MODEL WITH INDIGENOUS OLDER ADULTS

Abstract This study used data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) data to investigate how an understudied group of Indigenous Older Adults (IOAs) in the United States fared over a 14-year period (2006-2020) in the domain of global cognitive function. The number of IOAs, defined here as Native American and Alaska Natives, will more than double in the next 30 years. Concurrently, the number of IOAs living with cognitive impairments will also increase. Guided by the Minority Stress and Cognition Model, we tested the hypothesis that discriminatory stress increases the risk of cognitive impairment in later life. Using a robust set of psychosocial (e.g. educational quality, perceived everyday discrimination experiences), behavioral (e.g. substance use, exercise), and physiological (e.g. diabetes, hypertension, obesity) risk factors, we modeled the cognition trajectories 186 IOAs using mixed growth curves. We found that one third of these IOAs reported experiencing everyday discrimination at least once per month, the highest of any ethnic group. They also reported high rates of other risk factors for cognitive impairment like low education, SES, and physical activity, and high rates of depression and chronic health conditions. Our analysis found that everyday discrimination was negatively associated with total cognition among IOAs but that this relationship was mediated by allostatic loads. On average, the total cognition scores of IOAs declined significantly faster than those of Whites. This study has important implications for the integration of stress as a mechanism for cognitive decline and the health equity of Indigenous older adults.

Western Ideological State Apparatuses and Native American Culture in Erdrich’s LaRose

This research sheds light on Western use of educational Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) as an important weapon to eradicate Native American culture. Although there have been huge research on Native American Culture and Euro-American oppression of Native Americans, very small is known about the ideological method of European oppression. The picture that appears from Louise Erdrich’s LaRose is that for Europeans, education is a tool to enlighten the natives. However, for the natives, education is a process of transforming their culture into Western ideology promoting Western socio-cultural norms. Ideological oppression is more adverse than subdued oppression. This study analyses Louis Erdrich’s Larose through Althusser’s theory of ISA which means that people are controlled firstly by ideology, then by constraint. Europeans used both suppression and ideology to obliterate their culture by which they could assimilate them, and there would be a minor risk of resistance. As a result, Europeans have tried to eradicate the religion and culture of Native Americans through education to establish their own culture and religion. Louise Eldritch uncovers the dark side of the educational civilization process, which this research shall analyze through Althusser’s theory of ISA.

Comparison of the economic performance of the China- and India-born immigrants with US natives

Previous studies on the economic performance of immigrants in the United States of America showed that successive immigrants possess lower skills and experience sluggish wage growth, thereby making the wage convergence with the natives almost impossible. However, analysis of variance (ANOVA) post hoc tests using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) 2010–2019 on China- and India-born immigrants revealed otherwise. Both immigrant groups have significantly higher levels of education, better occupation and higher earnings compared to all foreign-born immigrants and natives. During 2010–2019, the earnings of China- and India-born immigrants increased faster than the natives’ due to their higher educational attainment. Thus, the general characteristics and experiences of all foreign-born vis-a-vis natives cannot be generalized across specific immigrant groups. Immigrants from different origin countries who have different skill levels and competencies show different earning differentials compared with the natives. Some immigrant groups even become more productive over time due to the increased portability of the human capital of their latest cohorts.

Sharing Native American Art and Culture

Sharing Native American Art and Culture

The importance of personal and contextual background factors on declaration of STEM majors: A focus on Native American undergraduates

AbstractUtilizing Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), we investigated the importance of identity‐based factors such as personal inputs and contextual affordances (e.g., having children, being married or employed, school‐family conflict, stress, participating in Native American cultural activities) in understanding Native American undergraduates' intentions and decision to major in STEM fields. Past studies have examined the role of SCCT in undergraduate students' major choice and the underrepresentation of certain marginalized groups in STEM majors. Yet few studies have examined if these relationships extend to Native American undergraduates or how the SCCT model may vary based on the complex identities Native American peoples may hold. The findings highlight the importance of contextualizing major choice through a Native American lens. For Native American students, we find being married or employed, having children, and family stress negatively impact intent to major in STEM fields. We also find support for several SCCT variables and intent to major in STEM disciplines. Specifically, we discuss fostering identity as a scientist as a fruitful avenue for increasing intent to major in STEM fields. Results are compared to a White undergraduate group and implications are discussed for institutions of higher education and Tribal governments and leaders.

A Transition of Visual Ritual: Making Medicine, George Flett, and the Historical Emergence of Native American Ledger Art

How do Native Americans have a voice through art practice, especially since they have been silenced for centuries? And how does one convey an understanding that Native American people and their cultures are still here, alive and present in the United States today? This historical inquiry (Bolin, 1995) into ritual and memory pedagogy (Powell, 2017) focuses on a small part of Native American history through the ledger drawing of Making Medicine and George Flett. Reflecting on history and my own memories of George Flett, we can see their voice, both past and present, within their art practice. Through a connected history that expands on the original ritual of Plains Indian buffalo hide painting into a transitional place for Native American ledger drawing, we can see beyond Native Americans’ artistic characteristics associated solely with craft or utility to engage their past and contemporary artists. Their history, culture, challenges, and issues are made visible through their art practice, while bringing awareness that Native Americans are still here!

Mit tricksterski i jego ślady u Schulza

Paul Radin in his classic book dedicated to the trickster in Native American cultures pointed out that this mythical figure appears in cultures all over the world. This “jester’s ancestor,” as Monika Sznajderman named him in her monograph Jester. Masks and Metaphors, is called conjurer, “divine rascal”, and cheater. The trickster is known in various mythologies, so he might be present also in the private mythology of Schulz. The first part of the article is an attempt to compare the father from Schulz’s stories with the trickster. My purpose is not to insist that Jakub = trickster, but to show some similarities between these two figures. In the second part, I describe two analogous scenes of selfcastration (from the Winnebago Trickster Cycle and from the letter of Bruno Schulz to Stefan Szuman). Using Lewis Hyde’s book Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture, in which he included interpretations of the works of some modern artists in the context of the trickster myth, I make an effort to look at Schulz as an artist-trickster. The metaphor of trickster refers to those artists who know that the “creative spirit” must abandon concepts that are “exact and predictable.” Schulz implements that model in his critique of European culture, but not only at that point. If we look at the reception of his work in the interwar period, we can see that he was perceived as inconvenient for those who accused him of not fulfilling the postulates that the critic of the 1930s expected. There were objections to his work as apolitical, amoral, propagating anti-humanism, perpetuating chaos and the lack of hierarchy, socially useless. “If art was only to confirm what already had been saved, it would be unnecessary,” he wrote. In that idea of art which is naturally amoral, “a probe sunk into the nameless”, looms the impenetrable face of the trickster, the jester who is an eternal change.

A Country Strange and Far: The Methodist Church in the Pacific Northwest, 1834–1918

A Country Strange and Far: The Methodist Church in the Pacific Northwest, 1834–1918

Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Church in the Early American North by Richard J. Boles

Reviewed by: Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Church in the Early American North by Richard J. Boles Antonio T. Bly Richard J. Boles, Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Church in the Early American North (New York: New York University Press, 2020) "It is appalling," Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously noted, "that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o'clock on Sunday morning."1 Long before the civil rights movement, the apostle of non-violence declared that Americans venerated a God who had seemed "a respecter of persons." Indeed, throughout America's long history, the cursed children of Ham had been compelled to acknowledge the God of Abraham in segregated spaces. Racism defined, in both implicit and explicit ways, the marrow of America's religious traditions. In Dividing the Faith, Richard J. Boles revisits the early history of churches in the North, challenges this conventional wisdom, and uncovers a forgotten world in which Dr. King's aphorism might not have always held true. An insightful analysis of extant church records, meeting minutes, and unpublished manuscripts of over four hundred congregations, the portrait Boles reveals is an appealing one. Building on the work of John Wood Sweet, Joanne Pope Melish, Gary B. Nash, Margaret Ellen Newell, and others, Boles argues [End Page 99] that early churches in British America were more integrated than segregated. Between 1730 and 1776, integrated churches were more or less a common part of life in the North. From the early to mid-eighteenth century, segregated congregations were incongruous to the practice of the Christian faith. Instead, "most Congregational, Anglican, Lutheran, and Moravian churches in the northern British colonies were interracial congregations as blacks and Indians participated through weekly church services and the rituals of baptism and communion" (5). Between the Great Awakening and the Revolution, the number of these churches increased significantly. Among the famed devotees who considered themselves members of these multi-racial and multi-ethnic houses of worship were Phillis Wheatley, Samson Occom, Richard Allen, and Absalom Jones. One hundred years before the Tremont Temple Baptist Church of Boston had been recognized as the first integrated church, the Gospels had been preached in numerous churches to mixed-race congregations. These diverse places of worship peaked around the advent of the new century (4, 222). Then, between 1821 and 1850, the number of integrated churches fell as African Americans, Afro-Indians, and Native Americans began to establish their own churches. In retelling the history of these mixed communities of faith and how they varied over time, space, and denominations in the North before 1860, Dividing the Faith seeks to challenge our understanding of race, history, and religion in early America. A comparative analysis of African American and Native American peoples' participation in white churches, Boles's study encourages us to reconsider the conflicting politics of history and memory; specifically, how the social and cultural views of subsequent generations of Americans have distorted the assorted nature of the past (92–131, 106–107, 70–73, 158–159, 162–234). However, missing in this study of the rise of segregated churches in the North is a much more nuanced account of the politics of race in America and the role it undoubtedly played in dividing the faith. Before the Revolution, African Americans and Native Americans were indeed members, but they were not members in full. They could not, as Boles makes plain, vote or lead the congregation, rendering questionable the extent to which they actually participated as members of these supposedly integrated flocks (6, 164, 182). Even when their numbers grew as a result of the Awakening and the Revolution, whites continued to hold fast to their position as the theological heads of the congregations. Why? Clearly, Boles overreaches; he downplays the nature of race in the northern colonies, conflating, inadvertently, obligatory attendance and participation. Little is made of the fact that baptism signified, at once, education and the possibility of a better life for most, if not all, African Americans and Native Americans. Even less attention is given to early African American and Native American expressions [End Page 100] of religiosity (66–67, 194–195). Phillis Wheatley embodies best...

Searching For Sally

Searching For Sally

The New Image of Indian Girl in Sherman Alexie’s The Search Engine

The current paper examines the Native American people's identity, especially the main female character's cultural identity in the short story entitled The Search Engine. Sherman Alexie, the author of the story, is a Native American writer who harnesses the Indian identity as one of the main topics. The identity presented in the main character, Corliss, shows the challenges of the stereotypes of Native American girls. For that reason, the paper aims at exploring the new Indian woman’s cultural identity represented in the main character, Corliss, in the short story The Search Engine. The study applies feminist literary criticism that enables the writers to deeply explore the issue of woman's identity among the American native people. The main character, Corliss, shows the new female image identity, in which she can challenge traditional stereotypes of Native American women. Corliss is represented as a highly literate woman, with a lot of reading on English literary works, and has concern on her Indian-ness, which is often incommensurable to her big family’s views. The main character shows the new female image of an Indian girl evidenced in her excellent literacy and attitude toward Indian and White people. She has new consciousness in seeing the Indian men and women and their relation to White people.