Native Life Research Articles

Health and Well-Being for Métis Women in Manitoba

Continuing compromised Aboriginal health status and increasing opportunity for new Aboriginal health surveys require that Aboriginal understandings of health and well-being be documented. This research begins exploration of whether the Aboriginal Life Promotion Framework may increase culturally pertinent planning, collection and analysis of health survey data. A quasi-phenomenological tradition of enquiry was employed to gain understanding of the lived experience of participants. Data were collected through focus groups utilizing a 'talking circle' methodology. A participatory research approach involved three large Aboriginal organizations. Conceptions of health and of well-being are different entities for these Métis women. Health was most often more reflective of physical issues. Well-being was much broader, holistic and inclusive of the dimensions of spiritual, emotional, physical and mental/intellectual aspects of living, consistent with the first circle of the Aboriginal Life Promotion Framework. The implications of this study should be important to health providers, and policy developers regardless of sector. Métis women in this study show significant strengths in the spiritual, emotional and intellectual/mental aspects of life, areas that could be incorporated into health promotion approaches. Physical health was focussed on ensuring a healthy diet and exercise, yet most adult women in the study experienced stress around goals that are seen as relatively unattainable. The data produced in this study should be utilized to develop and test survey questions that can be applied to a larger portion of the Métis population. The Aboriginal Life Promotion Framework is useful as an organizing tool for systematically exploring elements of living.

Espetáculos da diferença: a Exposição Antropológica Brasileira de 1882

Resumo:A Exposição Antropológica Brasileira, celebrada em 1882 no Museu Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, é analizada aqui como um intento monumental e espetacular de revalorizar a iconografia indianista do Império que na época parecia ter-se tornado redundante. A evidência material da "realidade" indígena exigia uma reavaliação da utilidade do índio como representante da nação moderna: da mesma forma em que o discurso indianista não pode estar reduzido a um parâmetro ideológico singular e univocal, porém, a reinscrição científica da vida e da cultura nativa parecia expressar mensagens contraditórias, mensagens estas que, disseminadas no nível da esfera pública pela Exposição Antropológica, vieram a se tornar ainda mais diversificadas e complexas. O espetáculo da ciência que dizia substituir os mitos literários ou artísticos sobre o índio, não obstante retomava as dicotomias tradicionais entre bons e maus selvagens, tupis e tapuias, passado e presente. No presente artigo se tentará traçar o percurso deste campo científico emergente, primeiramente contrapondo os novos discursos sobre "raça" e civilização pré-colombiana presentes na tradição indianista, para oferecer logo uma observação mais atenta sobre o modo em que essas diferentes instâncias operavam no nível de ordem dos objetos expostos. A partir daí será discutida a proliferação das representações visuais de objetos, homens e mulheres indígenas presentes na exposição em pintura, escultura, fotografia e caricatura.

Canada: Confederation to Present [CD-ROM] (review)

Reviewed by: Canada: Confederation to Present [CD-ROM] Magda Fahrni Canada: Confederation to Present [CD-ROM]. Bob Hesketh and Chris Hackett. Edmonton: Chinook Multimedia Inc., 2001. $39.95 The recently issued CD-ROM Canada: Confederation to Present claims to be 'the most comprehensive history of Canada ever authored.' Such an expansive claim is difficult to assess, but surely contains some measure of truth. One hundred and forty historians from Canada and Quebec contributed to this electronic resource, designed for students and the general public. Sponsored by the Department of Canadian Heritage, Telefilm Canada, and the University of Alberta, the project was overseen by an editorial board composed of thirteen historians representing the country's different regions. The abundance of information (both textual and visual) on the disc is impressive, at times even overwhelming; ultimately, this is a sound and satisfying resource. The structure of Canada: Confederation to Present benefits from the multidirectional possibilities offered by the medium of a compact disc. The history of Canada from 1867 onward is presented through five 'interpretative narratives, or pathways': 'Natives,' 'Society/Culture,' 'Women,' 'Politics/Economy,' and 'Regional Dynamics.' Each 'pathway' includes several scholarly overviews written by experts in the field. Under 'Natives,' for instance, the researcher might choose between 'Native Life' (authored by J.R. Miller), 'Government Policy and Administration' (the work of Kerry Abel), or 'Native Activism' (written by Anthony J. Hall). Each of these essays is in turn divided into chronological periods, and each period into different themes. Readers of James G. Snell's essay 'Home Life' (part of the pathway 'Society/Culture') interested in the period 1945-67 might choose, for instance, among sub-topics 'The Baby Boom,' 'The Elderly,' 'Housing,' and 'Suburbia.' All twenty-four overview essays (which occasionally overlap) include footnotes, references to current historiographical debates, and suggestions for further reading. All include visuals, some of them truly wonderful: photographs (such as 'Norman Bethune's Apartment, Montreal, QC, ca. 1935'), illustrations, [End Page 535] caricatures, graphs, tables, and maps. Many include excerpts from primary documents, and some include links to short film clips (for instance, 'Vancouver to Get Oil Pipeline, 1952' or 'Roman Catholic Mission, Chesterfield Inlet, NT, 1951'). All twenty-four overview essays also provide hyperlinks to 'case studies.' There are 120 case studies in all, each specially commissioned for this CD-ROM and each the work of an expert in the field. Some of these case studies consist of 'classic' material: Marilyn Barber on domestic servants; Irving Abella on Canadian anti-Semitism in the interwar years; Gail Cuthbert Brandt on women in the Quebec cotton industry; Réal Bélanger on Wilfrid Laurier. Other case studies are drawn from more recent research: Charlene Porsild on Klondike society; Valerie Korinek on post-war readers of Chatelaine; Éric Bédard on the October Crisis; Robin Brownlie on the role of Indian agents in Ontario; Lisa Dillon on elderly women in late Victorian Canada. For reasons that remain unclear to this reader, some of the most interesting case studies are not actually to be found on the CD-ROM, but can be accessed on-line from the Canada: Confederation to Present Web site. Like the overview articles, the case studies include illustrations (some in colour), footnotes, excerpts from primary sources, and a bibliography. As the titles of the five pathways suggest, the CD-ROM reflects the emphasis on social history that for the past thirty years has been characteristic of the discipline. The editors and authors have paid careful attention to differences structured by region, ethnicity, gender, and social class. In its approach and its historiographical leanings the CD somewhat resembles the two-volume textbook edited by Margaret Conrad, Alvin Finkel, et al., History of the Canadian Peoples. It might be seen as a response to those who charge that historical knowledge has become fragmented, in that it pulls the social history microstudies of the last quarter-century together into coherent syntheses and one (massive!) product. And the CD actually delivers more than it promises: ostensibly a history of Canada since Confederation, some of the overview articles (such as Jean-Claude Robert's essay on Quebec and David Marshall's essay on religion) also provide valuable background information on...

E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose (review)

Reviewed by: E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose Sandra Campbell E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose. Introduced and edited by Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Pp. xliv, 343, illus. $65.00 Since the mid-1990s, there has been a flurry of interest in the poet and performer Pauline Johnson (1861-1913), who used the name Tekahionwake, a tribute to her paternal Mohawk heritage. Books include Flint and Feather (2002), a superb popular biography by Charlotte Gray, Buckskin & Broadcloth (1997), an illustrated life by Sheila M.F. Johnston, as well as Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (2000), a scholarly study by two respected British Columbia academics, literary critic Carole Gerson and historian Veronica Strong-Boag. At a recent literary symposium at the University of Ottawa, scholars lamented what is still a deplorable lack of scholarly editions of the collected work of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century writers. In their welcome latest offering on Johnson, Gerson and Strong-Boag present an authoritative collected poems and selected prose for Pauline Johnson, a figure of interest to literary scholars, Aboriginal and women's historians, anthropologists, and others. The editors present source notes for each work, and the prose selected is an impressive sampling of Johnson's adult and juvenile fiction, essays on Native life, legends, culture, and popular image, and travel writing. In a solid introduction that covers Johnson's publication history and fluctuations in reputation since her recital career began in the 1880s, Gerson and Strong-Boag tell us that they have provided the complete poems as well as a sampling of prose, 'aiming at a balance of the obviously excellent and the clearly representative, while reflecting our own sensibilities as feminists' (xxix). The editors have assembled a central scholarly collection for the study of Johnson. Occasionally, a few more facts might have been included in the notes. It would have been helpful if the entry on Johnson's 1893 story 'A Red Girl's Reasoning' had mentioned that it won the Dominion Illustrated's fiction prize and that Johnson also adapted it for performance as a playlet in her cross-Canadian recital tours between 1892 and 1909. Both facts show the centrality of the work's themes to Johnson, seen in the story's assertion of the value of Native heritage, which even overrides a wife's duties to her husband, when he asserts white hegemony. [End Page 618] But such quibbles are rare. This is a sound, essential text in which the editors have fulfilled a key need in feminist scholarship - recovering and making accessible important texts in the field. In Paddling Her Own Canoe, Gerson and Strong-Boag analysed the meaning of Johnson's marginalization as woman, performer, and person of mixed race in Victorian and Edwardian Canada. The two looked at her as poet, as Aboriginal advocate and as New Woman, among other roles, and how her poetry and prose 'writes back' in the face of racism and patriarchy, making a case for the value, complexity, and validity of Native culture and the need for its broader acceptance in the culture of both Canada and the empire. Johnson spoke out against the clichéd 'regulation Indian maiden' of nineteenth-century literature to present more autonomous, individualized Native characters. The works in this Johnson/Tekahionwake collection suggest how difficult Johnson's attempt was to blend and valorize elements of her own mixed-race heritage, selecting complementary strands of both her Mohawk heritage and her British/Canadian white heritage. Johnson's vision of the white treatment of those of mixed race in love relationships darkens in her fiction. Looking at her collected poetry in chronological order, now possible for the first time, one also sees that her image of the lost love is often that of a lover who is clearly white, with 'yellow' or 'golden' hair: such white/gold/blonde imagery is found in 'Unguessed' and 'In April,' as well as in two stories. By contrast, in essays made available here, 'A Pagan in St Paul's' and 'The Lodge of the Lawmakers,' Johnson subtly challenged her white readership...

My First Years in the Fur Trade: The Journals of 1802-1804, and: From Barrow to Boothia: The Arctic Journal of Chief Factor Peter Warren Dease, 1836-1839 (review)

Reviewed by: My First Years in the Fur Trade: The Journals of 1802-1804 George Nelson, and: From Barrow to Boothia: The Arctic Journal of Chief Factor Peter Warren Dease, 1836-1839 Gerhard J. Ens My First Years in the Fur Trade: The Journals of 1802-1804 George Nelson. Edited by Laura Peers and Theresa Schenck. Rupert's Land Record Society Series. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002. Pp. viii, 240, illus. $44.95 From Barrow to Boothia: The Arctic Journal of Chief Factor Peter Warren Dease, 1836-1839. Edited by William Barr. Rupert's Land Record Society Series. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002. Pp. xxiv, 336, illus. $49.95 The fur trade is back - well, fur-trade documentary publishing is making a comeback at any rate. In the 'golden age' of writing about the fur trade (prior to the 1950s), when fur traders like La Vérendrye, Samuel Hearne, Alexander MacKenzie, and David Thompson were deemed to be critical figures in the mythology of Canadian nation-building, fur-trade documentary volumes were published yearly by the Champlain Society and the Hudson Bay Record Society. Since the late 1960s and the 1970s, however, as fur-trade scholars moved away from imperial themes and a [End Page 546] preoccupation with Euro-American dimensions of that history to focus on Aboriginal roles and the socio-cultural aspects of the trade, fur-trade documentary publishing declined precipitously. In part, this was due to a growing scepticism about the uncritical use of published primary documents as a window on objective truth, but also because most published fur-trade documents contained little about Native history. By the 1980s the Hudson Bay Record Society was defunct. The pendulum of scholarly interest has begun to swing back. The current fascination with colonialism/post-colonialism and the deconstruction of colonial systems of representation has produced a renewed attention to fur-trade texts. In order to 'read beyond the words' we still need texts to analyse and read beyond. In the last half-dozen years there has been a plethora of fur-trade texts rolling off the presses with more in the planning and editing stages. The two books under review here are part of these trends and are published by the Rupert's Land Record Society and McGill-Queen's University Press, a more than welcome successor to the Hudson's Bay Record Society. My First Years in the Fur Trade, the fur-trade journals of George Nelson between 1802 and 1804, is an excellent addition to the fur-trade library. Nelson was not only an astute observer of the fur trade and Native life, but he left behind two separate accounts of this period in his life. The original 1802-4 journals of Nelson's first years in the fur trade in the Folle Avoine District (south of Lake Superior) have not survived, but Nelson rewrote these journals in 1811 while he was stationed on Lake Winnipeg and sent them to his father in Lower Canada. Twenty-five years later, following a chance meeting with a former fur-trade colleague, Nelson went over the same events again when he wrote a series of lengthy memoirs. What the editors have done here is reproduce the 1802-4 journal written in 1811, including excerpts of the later 1836 memoir where it comments on and supplements the description of events in the journal. These documents offer the reader a rare stereoscopic view of not only Nelson's apprenticeship in the fur trade as a fifteen-year-old, but of the ways in which self-censorship and the play of memory could affect the depiction of events in fur-trade documents. The journal written for his father in 1811 varies in significant ways from his later memoir, particularly his account of his first marriage to an Ojibwa woman. On the whole, Laura Peers and Theresa Schenck have done an excellent job in editing and annotating these writings. The introduction both contextualizes Nelson's life and writings, and provides just enough background to the fur trade at the turn of the nineteenth century to allow the uninitiated to make sense of these documents. The brief...

Living between Languages—Aboriginal Life Writing in Modern Taiwan Poetry

(2004). Living between Languages—Aboriginal Life Writing in Modern Taiwan Poetry. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 19, Life Writing and the Generations, pp. 295-311.

Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion by Patricia Palmer (review)

MLR, 99.1, 2004 159 equivocal status of closet drama' (p. 14), Raber is aware of the ramifications of the genre for the cultural, social, and political lives of both men and women. The book contains lengthy introductory and concluding chapters, both of which are densely packed, defining Raber's frame of reference and the conclusions that she has drawn. These might more usefully have been divided into several chapters so as to allow readers to appreciate the wealth of material that she is handling and the complexity of her analyses. Her assessment of the development of the genre and the history of its criticism are welcome sections within the introductory chapter. She spends some time locating her chosen texts within their historical framework before going on to focus upon a group of 'representative texts' in the following chapters. The central chapters allow her readers to work through Raber's hypotheses with reference to specific texts. While her choice of plays is apt and will broaden the book's appeal, it is perhaps debatable whether the overall organization best serves her purpose. She is clearly drawing upon extensive knowledge of the field, and has much to say about its place within early modern society, but a broader canvas, with central chapters devoted to themes independent of specific writers, might have served her purposes better. Raber concludes with an examination of the decline of the genre while continuing to define and refine the term 'closet drama'. Her aim during each stage of the book has been to demonstrate to her readers that closet drama provides a forum for the 'concentrated analysis of power' (p. 19), that itis an effective'vehicle forcritically analyzing and commenting upon dramatic performance' (p. 242), and that it reflects(and affects) changes in the perception and creation of gender, genre, and class throughout the early modern period. University of Reading Lucinda Becker Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion. By Patricia Palmer. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2001. xii + 254pp. ?4?; $59-95ISBN0 -521-79318-1. How legitimate is it to study early modern Ireland without a knowledge of Irish or reference to an Irish-speaking culture? What were the interactions between the dominant, invading English culture and the Irish-speaking culture the colonists encountered and displaced? On a more mundane level, how much Irish did English settlers actually know? These are the central questions posed in Patricia Palmer's important book, a work that is passionately committed but never loses sight of hardheaded scholarship and which manages to be both engaging and angrily polemical. As with most of the best scholarship, Palmer uses her insights to range more widely than her stated subject and develops a comparison between linguistic colonialism in Ireland and the destruction of languages in the Americas, enabling the reader to compare Spanish and English imperial expansion. In the opening chapters Palmer outlines the ways in which English and Spanish colonists imposed their linguistic will on the natives they encountered. Much ofthe analysis will be familiar to students of the material, but it is restated and summarized in a useful and intelligent form. Palmer shows how both English and Span? ish adventurers and commentators attacked the constituent elements of the native languages they encountered?pronunciation, semantics, grammar, cognitive range, ete.?as supposedly inferiorto the language they used themselves. The perceived lack ofwriting?often assumed because of preconceptions which precluded examination? caused peoples to be labelled as barbarians. Palmer shows how the destruction of both 160 Reviews Irish and the range of languages in the Americas occurred less through a deliberate policy?Spanish Jesuits made a concerted effortto learn a number of tongues?than the lazy and convenient assumption of superiority, a 'more indirect operation ofpower which seeped into all quarters of native life, including language' (p. 35). The Eng? lish in Ireland were more culpable still. Numerous commentators note how noisy and clamorous Ireland was. Barnaby Rich in The Irish Hubbub (1617) bases a whole pamphlet on Irish addiction to wailing and weeping loudly at funerals. Yet, as Palmer points out with perfect justice, the striking paradox is that 'the language which made...

Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada by Alan Shepard (review)

160 Reviews Irish and the range of languages in the Americas occurred less through a deliberate policy?Spanish Jesuits made a concerted effortto learn a number of tongues?than the lazy and convenient assumption of superiority, a 'more indirect operation ofpower which seeped into all quarters of native life, including language' (p. 35). The Eng? lish in Ireland were more culpable still. Numerous commentators note how noisy and clamorous Ireland was. Barnaby Rich in The Irish Hubbub (1617) bases a whole pamphlet on Irish addiction to wailing and weeping loudly at funerals. Yet, as Palmer points out with perfect justice, the striking paradox is that 'the language which made most of the noise is almost never heard' (pp. 40-41). Instead, the Irish often enter texts 'making a racket' (p. 65) because their speech is not represented. John Derricke's Image of Irelande (1581) shows the Lord Deputy, Sir Henry Sidney, exchanging let? ters with the Irish. Palmer demonstrates that the encounter as it stands must be a fiction because the illustration concerned reveals that the English knew no Irish, so the translators have been removed in order to exaggerate Sidney's authority. In Chapter 3 Palmer surveys the evidence of Elizabethan administrators' know? ledge of Irish. It has often been assumed that because so many lived in Ireland forso long they must have acquired some ofthe language. Palmer finds the evidence unconvincing , arguing that even the most linguistically adept, Edmund Spenser, borrowed only fortywords of Irish in his works, suggesting that 'his interest was forensic and superficial ' (p. 79). Irish was treated less as a language and more as a sign with newcomers simply learning the limited range of words they needed to survive. The elaborate civil conversations so important to humanists failed to open up a genuine 'dialogue with the other' (p. 119). It will be interesting to see whether Richard McCabe's researches into Spenser's use of Irish come to the same conclusion. It is possible that anglophone culture in Elizabethan Ireland was more hybrid than Palmer's analysis demonstrates. Chapter 5 shows how similar strategies pushed to an even more aggressive limit excluded the native Americans from the linguistic community of the colonists while preserving the fiction of dialogue and inclusion (for obvious reasons), and a final chapter analyses how the Irish managed to include their voices in English texts and so prevent the total silence demanded by the English, or, like Florence MacCarthy, exploited their facility as bilinguals to enhance their own positions and so undermine English confidence in their ability to control Ireland. Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland is a well-researched and intelligent book which puts a crucial but all too often neglected issue back on the scholarly map and it demands to be read by a wide variety of scholars, not just those interested in early modern Ireland. University of Sussex Andrew Hadfield Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada. By Alan Shepard. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2002. viii + 248 pp. ?40. ISBN 0-7546-0229-x. Amid his sequence of leather-gloved homicides for the RSC, Antony Sher played Tamburlaine (Stratford and London, 1992, dir. Terry Hands). At one moment Sher memorably continued speaking his mighty lines (which had audiences bouncing iambically in their seats) while climbing a rope, his breathing perfectly controlled as he physically rose above everyone but the upper gallery and comprehended all in his scorn. Through trained strength Sher physically expressed the ideal of male prowess to which Tamburlaine cleaves, and his concurrent public engagement with his personal and theatrical difficulties as a gay South African Jew framed his perfor? mance as a contemporary 'rhetoric of masculinity'. His text, alas, conflated into fiveacts Marlowe's ten?allowing one-night stands but losing the breathtaking generic inversion of Tamburlaine's marriage (ending Part I), MLRy 99.1, 2004 161 and the equally calculated coup de theatre of having, not Jove with a thunderbolt, but Allah with dysentery finallystrike the tyrannous blasphemer down, a whole play later. However understandable the decision to cut and conflate, the loss of Marlowe's formal generic manipulation (and attendant stage business) distorts his diptych...

Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance (review)

Reviewed by: Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance Rebecca Bales (bio) Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance edited by Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, and David E. WilkinsUniversity of Kansas Press, 2003 Very rarely do I read a book that inspires me as an intellectual and scholar and that allows me to reflect on and appreciate my ancestry in ways that strengthen my convictions and life course. Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance,edited by Richard Grounds, George Tinker, and David Wilkins, has done both. This collection of essays by and about Native Americans explores the historical significance and contemporary influences of Native voices throughout the Americas. Vine Deloria Jr., to whom this book is appropriately dedicated, has inspired past generations of scholars and the future of indigenous communities; this book reaffirms his dedication to indigenous studies and peoples, and opens the door to the understanding of the complexity inherent in indigenous struggles throughout the Americas. Broken into four sections that span the four directions, these essays consider the meanings of Native identity, the importance of language and stories (histories) told in indigenous languages, the impact of colonization, and the contradictory policies emerging on a global scale that continue to deny and dismantle indigenous lives. Several themes emerge and intertwine throughout the entire book. Clara Sue Kidwell, John Mohawk, Henrietta Mann, and Joy Harjo's respective articles place Natives in proper historical perspective from origins to the present day; each claims that Native studies must be grounded in Native origins and worldviews. Inés Hernández-Ávila and Richard Grounds delve into the importance of language in reclaiming that history and in directing Native lives and courses of action. Taking this one step further, Glenn Morris, George Tinker, S.James Anaya, David Wilkins, and Cecil Corbett address the rejection of the colonizers' language in defining Native peoples, philosophies, and spiritual awareness. Ward Churchill, Michelene Pesantubbee, and Inés Talamantez round out the collection by incorporating indigenous thought into the intellectual and academic arenas that have categorically denied access to people of color. Vine Deloria concludes the book by recognizing those who have influenced him and whom he has influenced throughout his illustrious career. Of all the essays, the most perplexing piece is Ward Churchill's analysis of Vine Deloria's influence on Native American intellectual development, not so much for its content as for the context in which he places it. After reading articles emphasizing the importance of contextualizing [End Page 198] Native histories and intellectualism in and on Native terms (see especially Hernández-Ávila and Grounds), I question why Churchill would draw from the philosophical "canon" of "western thought" to describe and critique Vine Deloria's influence. Clearly Churchill's analysis places Deloria in the canon of traditional Western philosophy, but where are other Native philosophers of centuries past and in contemporary times? Why do non-Native philosophers like Marx, Derrida, and Foucault take precedence over Native thinkers? What audience does Churchill wish to reach? Every scholar interested in indigenous studies, philosophy, and intellectual thought should read this book thoroughly for a clear perspective of indigenous peoples' histories and struggles. It establishes acontext for the study of indigenous peoples that few other books address or recognize. It certainly inspires hope for future generations. Rebecca Bales Rebecca Bales (Choctaw/Cherokee/ Chicana) received her PhD in history from Arizona State University and teaches history at Diablo Valley College. She is the first in her family to receive a doctorate. Her work focuses on Native American history, women’s history, and race relations in the United States. Copyright © 2004 The Association for American Indian Research

Sifters: Native American Women's Lives (review)

Sifters: Native American Women's Lives (review)

“White & Clean” & Contested: Creek Towns and Trading Paths in the Aftermath of the Seven Years' War

In the last generation, scholars intent on removing “tribe”from their narratives of colonial-era Native American history have repeatedly invoked “community” in its place. This development notwithstanding, community-centered projects are rare; Indian towns now appear in the literature, but not as the driving force behind the action being chronicled. This article focuses on the debate among Upper Creek towns as they struggled to define the nature of their relationship to the British between 1763 and the early 1780s. In so doing, it traces the limits of regional and national alliances in the colonial era while arguing for the centrality of the local in Native life. In the eighteenth century, Creek history was community history.

Geopolitical Identities: Arctic Ecology and Global Consumption

Critical geopolitics has raised questions of political identity at the largest scales, requiring scholars to think about the entities that are taken for granted and reproduced in the quotidian practices of political discourse. Place clearly matters in this scholarship, but the modern specifications of environment in terms of security, risk society and international discussions of climate change and biodiversity loss are now also part of the problematique. Not only are regional, national and bloc identities in question, but issues of global ecology and the identities of peoples who can know environments as such, are also a matter of considerable importance in specifications of modernity. Nature is now simultaneously endangered and a matter of national pride. The ecological dimensions of resource administration are at one and the same time an attribution of modern capability, while also on the largest of scales especially, one of the challenges to the possibilities of extending modernity. Aboriginal lives and the cultural disruptions of modernisation in remote northern areas directly confront the links between knowledge and specifications of particular place. Thus critical scholarship in a number of disciplines now also puts the ecological assumptions of modern sovereign subjectivities in question, requiring a further reflexive engagement with the identities that themselves now write critical geopolitics.

An archaeology of historical reality? A case study of the recent past

An Aboriginal elder, an archaeologist and a geographer report on an interdisciplinary project about colonial-era settlement in the Murchison and Davenport ranges in the Northern Territory. Oral history, physical evidence and historical records reveal a distinct central Australian cultural landscape and show that archaeology can do more than merely exhume material to support historical ‘realities’. This project provides new or improved understandings of (1) colonial technology in pastoral ventures, (2) continuity and change in Aboriginal life following European arrival, (3) social behaviour in colonial settings, and (4) alternatives to Eurocentric Australian histories.

American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays

In a collection of six plays, Diane Glancy uses a melange of voices to invoke the myths and realities of modern Native life. Glancy intermixes poetry and prose to address themes of gender, generational relationships, acculturation, myth, and tensions between Christianity and traditional Native belief systems. six plays included, The Woman Who Was a Red Deer Dressed for the Deer Dance, The Women Who Loved House Trailers, American Gypsy, Jump Kiss, Lesser Wars, and The Toad (Another Name for the Moon) Should Have a Bite, run the gamut from monologues to multi-character pieces and vary in length from fifteen minutes to over an hour. Glancy concludes the collection with a thought-provoking essay on Native playwriting.

Alcohol Problems in Alaska Natives

This paper summarizes the literature on alcohol problems in Alaska Natives, briefly summarizing risk and resiliency factors but focusing on Native and Western healing practices. A story (The Red Shoes) is used to illustrate many of the cultural factors that are influencing the role of alcohol in Alaska Native life. Treatment factors explored include both Alaska Native and Western Approaches. The Western approach focused on is Narrative Therapy, which has not yet been applied to Alaska Native populations. Barriers to service delivery are briefly explored, as are suggested ways to overcome such barriers.

‘Unwanted advances’: applying critiques of consent in rape to cubillo v commonwealth

The Federal Solicitor General, David Bennett QC, has described Federal Court Justice O'Loughlin's treatment of the issue of consent in Cubillo v Commonwealth (2000) 174 ALR 97 (Cubillo) as ‘very careful compassionate and sensitively considered’. Ironically, this description almost perfectly echoes O'Loughlin's own assessment of the Director of Native Affairs' decision to remove Peter Gunner from his family—creating a paper chain of white Anglo-Australian men congratulating white Anglo-Australian men on their judgments in decisions regarding Aboriginal peoples' lives.

Commentary: Understanding the Power of Tradition in Native American Lives

Commentary: Understanding the Power of Tradition in Native American Lives

Sifters: Native American Women's Lives

Sifters: Native American Women's Lives

Killers in the bush.

Three senior Chief Executives of acute hospital trusts in the UK recently visited the Northern Territory (NT)and South Australia (SA) to study remote and rural health care in general - and Aboriginal health in particular. As with all other aspects of Aboriginal life, the subject of health status is highly charged and generates heightened emotions and intense political debate across the country but particularly in the NT and SA where many of the remote indigenous people live. Every "mainstream" Australian has an opinion on the trials and tribulations of the indigenous people.The field study was part of the NHS Leadership Centre's Senior Chief Executives' Development Programme. Itcomprised a longitudinal journey across the continent from Darwin (NT) through to Alice Springs to Tanundain the Barossa Valley and then on to Adelaide following the route of the 2,500 kilometre Stuart Highway. Itinvolved visiting rural health services, and meetings with Aboriginal leaders, academics, health practitioners and senior officials of the SA government.A specific research topic was to understand how practitioners working in extreme environments, and delivering long-term programmes of care, can maintain their morale and motivation.

Sifters: Native American women's lives

Sifters: Native American women's lives