Native American Perspective Research Articles

Book Review: Defending Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice

Book Review: Defending Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice

Policy Development and Advocacy: A Native American Perspective

Policy Development and Advocacy: A Native American Perspective

Our Hearts Fell to the Ground: Plains Indian Views of How the West Was Lost

This unique anthology chronicles the Plains Indians' struggle to maintain their traditional way of life in the changing world of the nineteenth century. Its rich variety of 34 primary sources - including narratives, myths, speeches, and transcribed oral histories - gives students the rare opportunity to view the transformation of the West from Native American perspective. Calloway's comprehensive introduction offers crucial information on western expansion, territorial struggles among Indian tribes, the slaughter of the buffalo, and forced assimilation through the reservation system. More than 30 pieces of Plains Indian art are included, along with maps, headnotes, questions for consideration, a bibliography, a chronology, and an index.

Smallpox Used Them up: References to Epidemic Disease in Northern Plains Winter Counts, 1714-1920

Northern Plains Indian winter counts (chronologies) provide a record of epidemic disease in the area from 1682 to 1920. These indicate that epidemics occurred on average every 5.7 years for the area and every 9.7-15.8 years for individual groups. Disease outbreaks tended to follow episodes of famine or disease and tended to be followed by episodes of abundance of game when human mortality had been high. Epidemics preceded sustained contact with non-natives. The groups keeping winter counts recognized that epidemic diseases were spread through intergroup contact. Recorded reactions to epidemics include population dispersal, attempts to identify effective medicines, avoidance of outsiders, and changes in religious practices. The winter count data confirm models of disease etiology and provide a Native American perspective on the frequency and severity of epidemics during the contact era.

Native American Perspectives on Literature and History.

Native American Perspectives on Literature and History is a volume of essays by Indian and white scholars on issues such as ethnic identity, Indians in American mythology, how Indians write about Indians, and Indian crime and punishment. James Ruppert explores the bicultural nature of Indian writers and discusses strategies they employ in addressing several audiences at once: their tribe, other Indians, and other Americans. Helen Jaskoski analyzes the genre of autoethnography, or Indian historical writing, in an Ottawa writer's account of a smallpox epidemic. Kimberly Blaeser, a Chippewa, writes about how Indian writers reappropriate their history and stories of their land and people. Robert Allen Warrior, an Osage, examines the ideas of the leading Indian philosopher in America, Vine Deloria, Jr., who calls for a return to traditional tribal religions. Robert Berner exposes the incomplete myths and false legends pervading Indian views of American history. Alan Velie discusses the issue of historical objectivity in two Indian historical novels, James Welch's Fools Crow and Gerald Vizenor's The Heirs of Columbus. Kurt M. Peters relates how Laguna Indians retained their culture and identity while living in the boxcars of the Santa Fe Railroad Indian Village at Richmond, California. Juana Maria Rodriguez examines power relations in Gerald Vizenor's narrative of a Dakota Indian accused of murder in 1967, Thomas White Hawk. Finally, Gerald Vizenor, a Chippewa, discusses Indian conceptions of identity in contemporary America, including simulations he calls postindian identity. Editor Alan Velie, with Gerald Vizenor, provides an introduction to this volume of essays by the country's leading Indian and white scholars of Indian literature and history. It will be essential reading for those seeking to understand Native American approaches to fiction and history.

The delivery of culturally sensitive health care to Native Americans.

Cultural factors significantly influence the Native American's perspectives of traditional professional health care practices. To most effectively deal with Native American clients, health care providers must understand, respect, and demonstrate sensitivity to the values and implications of the Native American culture. A basic understanding of a group's cultural beliefs, values, and practices will enable the holistic nurse to appreciate the importance of appropriate interactions and techniques and, therefore, make health care more readily accepted. This article reviews the health and illness beliefs, the traditional remedies, the critical need for holistic health care, and the Five Great Values that guide Native American behavior. Familiarization with these cultural components will facilitate the provision of quality, holistic health care through improved interactions with Native American clients.

Native Land: Mississippi, 1540-1798.

From the Native American viewpoint a personal yet carefully documented chronicle about the lands that became the state of Mississippi. Virtually all written accounts of Native American history of the southeastern United States came from Europeans. Here, filtered through a Native American perspective, is a story of early Indian life in a region of the American South. This history for general readers has been assembled from many documentary resources to give the fascinating history of an enduring heritage. In pre-Columbian times the fertile and lushly forested lands that were destined to become the state of Mississippi had a flourishing population of many native tribes - Chickasaw, Taposa, Tunica, Yazoo, Chakchiuma, Koroa, Grigra, Natchez, Choctaw, Acolapissa, Biloxi, Pascagoula, and others. Few accounts have been written from their perspective. Until now, there has been no book-length investigation of their history as told from their viewpoint.

Native American Perspectives on Literature and History

Native American Perspectives on Literature and History

Death and Dying from a Native American Perspective

Death and Dying from a Native American Perspective

Bringing Native American perspectives to mathematics and science teaching

(1995). Bringing Native American perspectives to mathematics and science teaching. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 34, Culturally Relevant Teaching, pp. 174-185.

Including Native American Perspectives in the Political Science Curriculum

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Including Native American Perspectives in the Political Science Curriculum

Including Native American Perspectives in the Political Science Curriculum

“Borrowing” Activities from Another Culture: A Native American's Perspective

“Borrowing” Activities from Another Culture: A Native American's Perspective

Anthropology and photography: Approaching a native American perspective

This paper explores the relationship of photography to the American Indian from the Nineteenth Century to the present. Emphasized in the second part of the paper is the existence of an increasing number of Native American photographers whose unique perception of the relevance of photography to themselves and their people presents challenging questions to assumptions of the dominant society.

Counseling Native Americans: An introduction for Non‐Native American Counselors

This article provides a primer on counseling Native American clients for non‐Native American counselors and psychotherapists. The diversity of this population is described and a general model of healing from a traditional Native American perspective is presented, with implications for counseling practice. Relevant research is reviewed and practical suggestions are offered for providing counseling services to Native Americans.

Columbus Quincentennial: Is There Anything to Celebrate?

Members attending a mass meeting at the American Library Associations's 1990 annual conference passed a resolution calling for libraries to “provide Columbus Quincentennial programs and materials which examine the event from an authentic Native American perspective, dealing directly with topics like cultural imperialism, colonialism, and the Native American holocaust.” But have libraries done anything since then to provide alternatives to the likes of Samuel Eliot Morison's purple prose? What attempts have been made to confront the omissions, half‐truths and myths about Columbus?

Rural Education from Native American Perspective

Rural educators speak often of the need to respect the rural culture - to not impose urban solutions on rural problems. Differences infinitely more immense appear when we examine education through the eyes of Native Americans.

Sun Tracks Four: Native American Perspectives ed. by Larry Evers et al.

Reviews 375 Sun Tracks Four: Native American Perspectives. Edited by Larry Evers, et al. (Tucson: Sun Tracks, 1978. 89 pages, $5.00.) Now an annual publication begun as a quarterly in an oral history project, Sun Tracks is a striking example of a quality literary magazine produced on a shoe-string budget. Though the volume is edited by a student and faculty board at the University of Arizona and serves as a source of expression for native students at that campus, it also manages to attract writing from the very finest Native American fictionists, poets, and social critics. For example, an earlier issue, Volume 2, Number 2 (Spring 1976), featured Paula Gunn Allen, Charles Ballard, N. Scott Momaday, Simon J. Ortiz, Carter Revard, and Ray Young Bear, among others. This latest issue is begun with a superb poem, “Skeleton Fixer’s Story,” by Leslie Silko and concluded by a revealing interview with Vine Deloria, Jr. Between are sandwiched a number of fine poems, a play, stories, a brief autobiography, and an extended photographic section, whose materials were selected from a Native American Photography Workshop now in its sixth year at Phoenix. Consequently, a real diversity of perspectives, as the subtitle for this year’s volume suggests, is expressed in writing, graphics, and photographs. This is easily the most handsome yet of any Sun Tracks issue and its overall quality, I think, justifies the editorialboard’sdecision to change from a quarterly to an annual publication. Sun Tracks in many ways indicates that the contemporary Indian is an apt metaphor for the white American who has been alienated from both his traditions and community and then thrust into a world of unpredictable and volatile change. And the very fact that native peoples have resisted so long, albeit with staggering costs, the depersonalizing and desensitizing forces of mass society is a great tribute to the human spirit. One cannot but be impressed with the determination of these literary representatives to retain their sensitivity to the sacred land and its creatures, to practice their rich and well-tested talent for communitarian living, and to feel compassion for those who blindly work to destroy the very cultural system capable of bringing a worthy civilization to America. No one interested in what today’s native people are doing, saying, or feeling can afford to bypass Sun Tracks. Fortunately for newcomers to the magazine, a number of back issues are still available at$2.00apiece. They are worth a good deal more than that. JACK L. DAVIS, University of Idaho ...

A Native American Perspective on Liberation

A Native American Perspective on Liberation