Native American Studies Research Articles

Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health. New Directions in Native American Studies. Edited by Devon A. Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover. Foreword by Winona LaDuke

Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health. New Directions in Native American Studies. Edited by Devon A. Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover. Foreword by Winona LaDuke

All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual. New Visions in Native American and Indigenous Studies. By David C. Posthumus

All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual. New Visions in Native American and Indigenous Studies. By David C. Posthumus

Centering Indigenous People in the Study of Religion in America

Abstract This essay considers Jennifer Graber’s The Gods of Indian Country and Pamela Klassen’s The Story of Radio Mind together in considering new developments in the field of Native American and Indigenous studies. Hale examines how these books discuss the role of religion in shaping settler colonialism in North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She concludes that both works raise pressing methodological questions about how historians of religion can center the lives of Native American people in their work.

Historians and Native American and Indigenous Studies: A Reply

Abstract David Silverman offers a critical appraisal of two prizewinning works in Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS), Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War, by Lisa Brooks, and Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast, by Christine M. DeLucia. Silverman’s review treats the methodology associated with NAIS with some skepticism, offering the opportunity for a lively discussion about the merits and perils of community-engaged history scholarship. Four scholars of Native American history, including DeLucia, respond, defending new approaches to Indigenous history represented by these recent works.

What Does Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) Do?

Abstract David Silverman offers a critical appraisal of two prizewinning works in Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS), Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War, by Lisa Brooks, and Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast, by Christine M. DeLucia. Silverman’s review treats the methodology associated with NAIS with some skepticism, offering the opportunity for a lively discussion about the merits and perils of community-engaged history scholarship. Four scholars of Native American history, including DeLucia, respond, defending new approaches to Indigenous history represented by these recent works.

Cold Business and the Hot Take

Abstract David Silverman offers a critical appraisal of two prizewinning works in Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS), Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War, by Lisa Brooks, and Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast, by Christine M. DeLucia. Silverman’s review treats the methodology associated with NAIS with some skepticism, offering the opportunity for a lively discussion about the merits and perils of community-engaged history scholarship. Four scholars of Native American history, including DeLucia, respond, defending new approaches to Indigenous history represented by these recent works.

Living with the Past: Thoughts on Community Collaboration and Difficult History in Native American and Indigenous Studies

Abstract David Silverman offers a critical appraisal of two prizewinning works in Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS), Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War, by Lisa Brooks, and Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast, by Christine M. DeLucia. Silverman’s review treats the methodology associated with NAIS with some skepticism, offering the opportunity for a lively discussion about the merits and perils of community-engaged history scholarship. Four scholars of Native American history, including DeLucia, respond, defending new approaches to Indigenous history represented by these recent works.

Contexts for Critique: Revisiting Representations of Violence in Our Beloved Kin

Abstract David Silverman offers a critical appraisal of two prizewinning works in Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS), Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War, by Lisa Brooks, and Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast, by Christine M. DeLucia. Silverman’s review treats the methodology associated with NAIS with some skepticism, offering the opportunity for a lively discussion about the merits and perils of community-engaged history scholarship. Four scholars of Native American history, including DeLucia, respond, defending new approaches to Indigenous history represented by these recent works.

Continuing the Intervention: Past, Present, and Future Pathways for Native Studies and Early American History

Abstract David Silverman offers a critical appraisal of two prizewinning works in Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS), Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War, by Lisa Brooks, and Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast, by Christine M. DeLucia. Silverman’s review treats the methodology associated with NAIS with some skepticism, offering the opportunity for a lively discussion about the merits and perils of community-engaged history scholarship. Four scholars of Native American history, including DeLucia, respond, defending new approaches to Indigenous history represented by these recent works.

Dimensions of Decolonial Future in Contemporary Indigenous Speculative Fiction: Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God and Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning

Departing from the traditional representations of the colonial past and its aftermath, speculative fiction emerges as a new important trend in the North American Indigenous literary landscape, allowing Native writers to represent decolonial futures. This article focuses on the representations of the future offered by two recent Indigenous speculative novels: Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017) and Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning (2018), in the context of their decolonial potential. The analysis of the selected literary texts pays special attention to the status of women and its revision, as well as to the re-narrativization of space in the face of the anthropogenic climate change, and their significance to Indigenous decolonial project. In order to facilitate the discussion of the Indigenous speculative novels, the article refers to recent theories in Native American studies concerning Indigenous futurism, Native dystopia, and definitions of decolonization.

Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonization in the Long Twentieth Century by Brianna Theobald

Reviewed by: Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonization in the Long Twentieth Century by Brianna Theobald Taylor A. Livingston Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonization in the Long Twentieth Century. By Brianna Theobald. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. xi + 248 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95, paper. Historian Brianna Theobald's well-researched Reproduction on the Reservation demonstrates how Native women negotiated and challenged the United States government's interference, [End Page 332] surveillance, and regulation of their reproductive experiences. She examines the lived experience of these imperialist policies through the almost 100-year history of Elizabeth (Lizzie) Shane Yellowtail's family on the Crow Reservation in southern Montana. Through oral histories, ethnographies, and archival research, Theobald compellingly argues America's settler "colonial politics have always been reproductive politics" (4). The book's six chapters alternate between detailing larger US policies regulating reservation life in the Midwest and West to regarding the enactment of these policies through the lens of Yellowtail and her descendants' lives. By doing so, Theobald attempts to demonstrate that "policy and politics obtain meaning and import when they intersect with women's lives" (10). Chapter 1 profiles Crow childbirth practices, kin and family relations, and gender roles at the turn of the century. Intervention in Crow reproductive politics on the reservation begins as the federal government unsuccessfully (though they try for a century) attempts to terminate the practice of "flexible childrearing" (19), whereby a child's biological parents allow other kin to rear their child. Interestingly, chapters 2 through 6 parallel the larger history of American reproductive politics—the move away from home births to hospitals, the introduction of "scientific motherhood," debates around abortion, and the reaction against medicalization, though with a focus on the gnarly nuances specific to Native women's struggle for reproductive justice. For example, the nonconsensual sterilizations beginning in the 1930s through the 1970s, which affected an estimated 25 to 74 percent of Native women, including Lizzie Yellowtail's daughter-in-law, Susie. Further nuances included assimilation policies, which leftmany Native families in debt after childbirth or forced them to return to reservation hospitals to give birth. Through all these abuses, Theobald shows the long, remarkable resilience and tenacity of Crow and other Native women as they advocated for their bodily and cultural autonomy. Yet the book falls short of Theobald's goal to center women's lives with regard to politics and policy. The Yellowtail family's reproductive experiences are merely the backdrop for a story of government policies. However, this should not dissuade readers who are interested in the history of the Great Plains, Native American studies, or gender studies, as the book is an important contribution in understanding the past and current struggle toward reproductive justice for all. Taylor A. Livingston Department of Anthropology University of Nebraska-Lincoln Copyright © 2021 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor by Ralph James Savarese

Reviewed by: See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor by Ralph James Savarese Alexander Steele SAVARESE, RALPH JAMES. See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018. 273 pp. $29.95 cloth; $29.95 e-book. Poised "halfway between memoir and literary criticism" (12), Ralph James Savarese's See It Feelingly does not theorize so much as describe and advocate for the neurodiverse reading experiences of five autistic readers. It is a self-reflective "book about teaching—autistics teaching me, me (sort of) teaching autistics" (xviii). After helping his son DJ, who recently became the tenth nonspeaking person with autism to hold a bachelor's degree, learn to write poetry, Savarese committed himself to squaring research literature on autistic impairment with the contrary evidence he had first experienced with his son. "My intention from the beginning of this project," he writes, "has been to eschew the customary focus on autistic deficits and to explore instead how a talent for sensory engagement—and, yes, strong feeling—might contribute productively to the reading process" (6). A prior neurohumanities fellow at Duke University's Institute for Brain Sciences as well as an English professor, Savarese brings cognitive literary studies together with disability studies. "See It Feelingly," he summarizes, "is about my experience discussing classic American novels (and a couple of short stories) with autistic readers across the spectrum," from "the so-called 'high-functioning' to the so-called 'low-functioning'; from those who might 'pass' as neurotypical…to those whose perseverative behavior and inability to speak encourage others to dismiss them as intellectually incompetent" (5). What he calls his "qualitative ethnographical" (95) approach is more accurately categorized, however, as a memoir, given its structure: most of the book describes his time with his "conversation partners, report[ing] what they have to say" (12) about their literary encounters without extrapolating sweeping conclusions from them. Uninterested in "mining" readers for their novel insights, even as they emerge organically on their own, the project commits itself to privileging the same autistic voices which remain largely absent within [End Page 222] literary studies. The role of voice as such takes on immense weight. While Savarese does provide lengthy direct quotations from his reading partners, he also paraphrases them, falling close at times to unintentionally stealing the voices of those he wants to "champion" (12). That which Savarese's memoir includes becomes as considerable, at times, as that which his approach must leave out. After interfacing on Skype for months or even over a year, Savarese produced what he calls a "narrative" (8) of his shared experiences with autistic readers, ranging from young adults to those well into adulthood. So too do his reading partners represent a gamut of genders, races, sexualities, and, of course, disabilities. Savarese personally knew or had professionally crossed paths with each of his project "participants" (12) beforehand. Each participated voluntarily in the project; apart from sharing their literary experiences, they did not co-author the manuscript. The readings were suggested based on the personal interests of Savarese's readers. Knowing of Jamie Burke's ongoing fascination with Native American studies, for example, Savarese asked if he would like to read Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (Ch. 2); of Dora Raymaker's experience as a former programmer intrigued by artificial intelligence, if she would like to read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Ch. 3). Also considered are Moby-Dick (Ch. 1, with Tito Mukhopadhyay), The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Ch. 4, with "Eugenie," a pseudonym for publication), and the 2014 short story collection Among Animals (Ch. 5, with Temple Grandin). Savarese narrates his own literary encounters with his reading partners alongside and as equal to their literary responses. In a telling example, Savarese asks Tito if they aren't "imposing autism" (53) on their reading of Moby-Dick, to which Tito replies: "'No.… It is the hidden image that lurks in the sea. Sometimes it shows up as Ahab's mania…[and] sometimes it shows up in Moby Dick himself'" (53). "In at least one respect," Savarese reflects, "my...

The 2018 Richard Beale Davis Prize: Philip H. Round

The 2018 Richard Beale Davis PrizePhilip H. Round Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Martha Elena Rojas, and Jordan Alexander Stein The prize committee is pleased to name Philip H. Round’s “Mississippian Contexts for Early American Studies” as the winner of the 2018 Richard Beale Davis prize for the best essay published in Early American Literature. Among the many worthy essays selected for publication in the journal this year, Round’s distinguished itself for its far-reaching implications for the field in general. “Mississippian Contexts” shares with other contributions to this issue’s Forum on Methods and Materials in Native American and Indigenous Studies an investment in undoing a “lexicon crafted by the victors” that minimizes the significance of Native cultural production through binaries like textuality/orality, literature/folklore, rationality/mythology, and prehistory/history. Round’s essay engages with the legacy of each of these misleading distinctions in a particularly arresting challenge to received ideas about periodization. He begins by contemplating a twelfth-century copper repoussé plate representing Bird Man or Red Horn, a mythic figure whose iconography appears on material objects across the Mississippian world—which between 800 and 1600 AD extended from the Ohio River Valley south to present-day Georgia, and west to the Mississippi River and what is now Oklahoma. But Bird Man shows up in other places as well, notably in the narrative that Sam Blowsnake (Ho-Chunk) dictated in the 1980s. Considering these two distant citations of the same story, Round proposes that “the persistence of the Red Horn story and its use by a twentieth-century member of the Ho-Chunk nation offers us a window into a new methodology for understanding colonial America and the Indigenous textual sinews that knit together so many of its critical social and political relations.” The work of the essay is to substantiate that methodology by “reintroducing the Mississippian past as a viable, living historical context for studying the people and events that shaped early America.” Because the Mississippian societies had dispersed from their urban [End Page 293] centers prior to European contact, the Red Horn stories seem at first to lie outside the temporal scope of the field. And yet, as Forum editors Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup put it, “Round does not simply propose an earlier ‘early’ for early Americanists.” Drawing on archaeological evidence and “media-based historiography,” he observes how cosmologically significant concepts were embedded in spatial practices that persisted from the Mississippian period in the built environments of different Native nations in North America. Spaces such as the Creek chunky-yard reveal how, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “Indigenous space not only shaped the flow of colonial power but also colored it with narrative meaning.” Such spatial and material practices can be read even through the distorting language of European observers like William Bartram. A “text-artifact” like the copperplates that feature Red Horn, he suggests, invited performative, adaptive storytelling—a “form of narrativity”—among later Native communities. Returning in conclusion to Blowsnake’s twentieth-century narrative, Round shows how its awkward transcription into a nineteenth-century writing system developed for a different language, the Great Lakes syllabary, makes it impossible to categorize as either oral or written. Instead, as with the Mississippian art, “the narrative is a highly crafted object whose mode of production and circulation are part and parcel of its meaning.” While admirable for its detailed readings that weave together seemingly disparate objects in novel ways, Round’s essay reaches furthest at the level of its methodological and ethical implications: scholars of early America must help “restore Indigenous textual traditions like the Red Horn saga to their rightful place in the lived experiences of native peoples in America.” He argues persuasively that it is essential for scholars of early American literature to continue the hard work of formulating ways to “read” oral traditions, for doing so would allow us to better understand networks of textual transmission and citation that exist, and in some cases persist, beyond the confines of the alphabetic systems we call writing. Just as early American-ists have come to see the value in expanding our archives and our literacies in order to work...

Beyond Prophecy: Native Visionaries in American Religious Studies - Más allá de la profecía: Los visionarios nativos en los estudios de la religión americanos

This three-part article traces the use of the word “prophet” to describe Native actors such as Neolin and Handsome Lake in colonial North America and the early United States; details the category's perpetuation and effects in work by ethnologists, anthropologists, historians, and scholars of religious studies; and, finally, proposes a focus on visionary media, including wampum and maps, as articulations of Native peoplehood—a concept borrowed from Native American and Indigenous Studies. The goal is to show how “prophet” classifications emerged within a context of colonization and religious dispute. Continued use reinforces narratives of Native disappearance, if not excuses anti-Native violence, in American religious studies. In response, I call on scholars to decolonize their writing and teaching about Native visionaries by focusing on their media as evidence of the futures they projected for their people.

A Spindle, an Awl, and the Construction Tools of Tla'amin Histories in the Twentieth Century

This article was published as MacDonald, K. (2020). A Spindle, an Awl, and the Construction Tools of Tla'amin Histories in the Twentieth Century. Native American and Indigenous Studies, 7(1), 3-35. doi:10.5749/natiindistudj.7.1.0003. No part of this article may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or distributed, in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photographic, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the University of Minnesota Press.

Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America ed. by Victoria Lindsay Levine and Dylan Robinson

Reviewed by: Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America ed. by Victoria Lindsay Levine and Dylan Robinson Ann Morrison Spinney Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America. Edited by Victoria Lindsay Levine and Dylan Robinson. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019. [xviii, 330 p. ISBN 9780819578624 (hardback), $85; ISBN 9780819578631 (paperback), $26.95; 9780819578648 (e-book), $21.99.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. This collection deserves a wide readership, because it exemplifies the conversations needed among the various stakeholders in traditional music to decolonize scholarship. The authors are performers, scholars, performer– scholars, and members and descendants of Native and settler communities in North America. Identities of contributors are not limited to any of these, though they are clearly stated; nor are their ideas corralled. By not imposing culture areas, census categories, musical genres, or theoretical schools in its organization, this volume demonstrates its main point: that Native North American traditions are not categorical. The music and musicking discussed are astonishing in their variety and a delight to listen to. A styles inventory would include hip-hop, powwow, pop, television soundtracks, performance art, and classical. The articles do not all supply links, but most of the music and video examples can be found easily online. Several examples in the "art music" category are significant innovations, worthy of inclusion in any contemporary-music survey course, not confined to Native American studies. By grouping many contrasting examples together here under that rubric, however, a strong point is made about the vitality of music making among first peoples of North America. The geographical coverage of the chapters is also broadly inclusive, ranging from Mi'kmaq in the Canadian Atlantic Provinces to the western United States–Mexico border; crossing the plains, encompassing both sides of the US–Canada border; and stretching from Inuit communities in Alaska east to Greenland. There are few articles limited to one community, location, or tradition. The collection is framed by two invitations, each from a Native musicologist. Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk opens the volume with an invitation to dance, "to consider the ideas presented here" (p. xiii), drawing from her experience of music performance in both classical and traditional styles. Trevor Reed closes with an invitation to listen, building on his work repatriating song recordings to emphasize that audience [End Page 282] experiences are central to understanding "whether the ideologies or desires the artists convey are actually being realized" (p. 263). Editor Victoria Lindsay Levine explains that rather than dividing the book into sections, they chose to let concerns and theoretical concepts weave among the articles. They will likely be read as individual pieces, but the collection has a kind of arc as it is laid out, with the most perspicacious theoretical arguments appearing in the latter chapters. (For this review, those on similar musical styles are considered together.) Ontology is a common focus throughout, as is reference to Philip Joseph Deloria's Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). Despite the sophistication of their arguments, these articles are not jargon-filled jawbreakers, but would be appropriate readings for upper-level undergraduates. In the first case study, David Samuels gently teases apart the contradictions apparent in the famous photographs of Frances Densmore and Mountain Chief, revealing these to be assumptions, not visual facts. Introductory ethnomusicology classes will benefit from his reconsideration. Gordon Smith's contextual analysis of Mi'kmaw funerals at Eskasoni focuses on the community's use of video recordings to "preserve traditions while creating new ones" (p. 33). The video examples he provides demonstrate the relationships between past, present, and future that confound Western teleological concepts. While he does not mention autoethnography, it is a useful reference for this chapter. Christina Leza examines activism on the US–Mexico border through hiphop. Leza sensitively explores the cooperation between indigenous and Chicano communities that is needed to confront abuses of authority along the border. Over different generations, both groups have made claims to this land. The crew Shining Soul on whom she focuses seems to have disbanded, but their tracks can still be found online, and her analysis of the codemixing and switching in their songs that speaks to both groups is not limited...

Insights from Native American Studies for theorizing race and racism in linguistics (Response to Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz)

Insights from Native American Studies for theorizing race and racism in linguistics (Response to Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz)

Walking to Magdalena: Personhood and Place in Tohono O’odham Songs, Sticks, and Stories. New Visions in Native American and Indigenous Studies. By Seth Schermerhorn

Walking to Magdalena: Personhood and Place in Tohono O’odham Songs, Sticks, and Stories. New Visions in Native American and Indigenous Studies. By Seth Schermerhorn

Speaking of indigeneity: Navigating genealogies against erasure and #RhetoricSoWhite

ABSTRACTGiven the force of colonial violence and the politics of erasure, I argue it is imperative to deeply address what Rhetorical Studies has inherited from academic predecessors and to uncover colonialism's enduring impacts on our field. I contend that much of Rhetorical Studies upholds a system of knowledge that overwhelmingly perpetuates erasure and effacement of Indigenous work and thus the political stakes of complicity in Indigenous erasure and anti-Blackness must be addressed. This account of Rhetorical Studies' dominant and embedded histories, narratives, and authors reveals how the discipline is still missing an intellectual genealogy that orients rhetorical scholarship toward indigeneity, which provides possibilities to challenge erasure. Even as settler colonialism receives more attention in Rhetoric, I suggest the necessity of a coarticulated frame that navigates Rhetorical Studies alongside direct intellectual engagement with Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) to build simultaneous attention to indigeneity and settler colonialism. This frame explains racialization and colonization must be addressed together while centering a focus on indigeneity as analytic. Launching this intellectual genealogy reveals contradictions, limitations, and complexities to hold Rhetorical Studies – to hold all of us – accountable for nurturing and building a world beyond colonialism in QJS and in our field.

Traveling for reciprocity: LeAnne Howe’s Choctalking on Other Realities

LeAnne Howe’s Choctalking on Other Realities (2013) is an eclectic text, described as “a combination of memoir, tragedy, absurdist fiction, and marvelous realism” (Howe, “Why I Write”). As it is based on the author’s experience of travel, I will read it as a travel narrative. While focusing on Howe’s travels out of the United States, I will underline the aspects in which her traveling subject differs from traditional travel narratives, which are usually characterized by an endeavor in an ethnographic, exploratory, or scientific presentation of the host. While doing so, I will point to this book’s textual involvement in pushing the boundaries of travel writing and, along with it, of indigenous activism. To this aim, I will discuss Howe’s concept of tribalography, as a tool for understanding and interpreting self, home, and the other. While stemming from one culture, tribalography is oriented towards a transnational understanding and the role of an artist on a global level. Howe’s text will be read with the background of recent Native American and women studies, travel writing theory, and postcolonial insights.