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Indigenous studies
On Our Own Terms contextualizes recent federal education legislation against the backdrop of two hundred years of education funding and policy to explore two critical themes: the racial and settler colonial dynamics that have shaped Indian education and an equally long and persistent tradition of Indigenous peoples engaging schools, funding, and policy on their own terms. Focusing primarily on the years 1819 to 2018, Meredith L. McCoy provides an interdisciplinary, methodologically expansive look into the ways federal Indian education policy has all too often been a tool for structural violence against Native peoples. Of particular note is a historical budget analysis that lays bare inconsistencies in federal support for Indian education and the ways funds become a tool for redefining educational priorities. McCoy shows some of the diverse strategies families, educators, and other community members have used to creatively navigate schooling on their own terms. These stories of strategic engagement with schools, funding, and policy embody what Gerald Vizenor has termed survivance, an insistence of Indigenous presence, trickster humor, and ironic engagement with settler structures. By gathering these stories together into an archive of survivance stories in education, McCoy invites readers to consider ongoing patterns of Indigenous resistance and the possibilities for bending federal systems toward community well-being.
Long before it came to be known as Duluth, the land at the western tip of Lake Superior was known to the Ojibwe as Onigamiising, "the place of the small portage." There the Ojibwe lived in keeping with the seasons, moving among different camps for hunting and fishing, for cultivating and gathering, for harvesting wild rice and maple sugar. In Onigamiising Linda LeGarde Grover accompanies us through this cycle of the seasons, one year in a lifelong journey on the path to Mino Bimaadiziwin, the living of a good life.
In fifty short essays, Grover reflects on the spiritual beliefs and everyday practices that carry the Ojibwe through the year and connect them to this northern land of rugged splendor. As the four seasons unfold--from Ziigwan (Spring) through Niibin and Dagwaagin to the silent, snowy promise of Biboon--the award-winning author writes eloquently of the landscape and the weather, work and play, ceremony and tradition and family ways, from the homey moments shared over meals to the celebrations that mark life's great events. Now a grandmother, a Nokomis, beginning the fourth season of her life, Grover draws on a wealth of stories and knowledge accumulated over the years to evoke the Ojibwe experience of Onigamiising, past and present, for all time.
Sometimes things come to people out of the blue and seemingly for a reason. The Anishinaabe word for this is nigika. The stories contained in this collection reached Howard Webkamigad nearly eighty years after they were recorded, after first being kept in their original copper wire format by the American Philosophical Society and later being converted onto cassettes and held by Dr. James McClurken of Michigan State University. These rich tales, recorded by Anishinaabe people in the Harbor Springs area of Michigan, draw on the legends, fables, trickster stories, parables, and humor of Anishinaabe culture. Reaching back to the distant past but also delving into more recent events, this book contains a broad swath of the history of the Ojibwe/Chippewa, Ottawa, Pottawatomi, Algonkian, Abenaki, Saulteau, Mashkiigowok/Cree, and other groups that make up the broad range of the Anishinaabe-speaking peoples. Provided here are original stories transcribed from Anishinaabe-language recordings alongside Howard Webkamigad's English translations. These stories not only provide a textured portrait of a complex people but also will help Anishinaabe-language learners see patterns in the language and get a sense of how it flows. Featuring side-by-side Anishinaabe/English translations.
Jim Terry (Ho-Chunk) is a Chicago comic book artist whose memoir Come Home, Indio was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. Jim recently was an artist-in-residence at the Newberry, and his new graphic novel, Paper Cuts, commissioned for Indigenous Chicago, reflects his personal journey through the library’s collections and its vast holdings in American Indian and Indigenous Studies.
Philip J. Deloria's classic exploration of white America's drive to "play Indian," from the Boston Tea Party to the New Age
"[A] brilliant book. . . . This book reminds us that at least one question about America has been settled. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that prevailed throughout most of our history, the Indians will remain."--Peter Iverson, American Historical Review "Not since I first read Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, or bell hooks has a text crackled with so much theoretical frisson. Its historical insights are rich and political repercussions profound. American culture will never look the same."--Joel Martin, author of Sacred Revolt and Native American Religion This provocative book, reissued with a timely new preface, explores how white Americans have used their ideas about Native Americans to shape national identity in different eras--and how Indian people have reacted to these appropriations of their native dress, language, and ritual. At the Boston Tea Party, colonial rebels played Indian in order to claim an aboriginal American identity. In the nineteenth century, Indian fraternal orders allowed men to rethink the idea of revolution, consolidate national power, and write nationalist literary epics. By the twentieth century, playing Indian helped nervous city dwellers deal with modernist concerns about nature, authenticity, Cold War anxiety, and various forms of relativism. Philip J. Deloria points out, however, that throughout American history the creative uses of Indianness have been interwoven with conquest and dispossession. Indian play has thus been fraught with ambivalence--for white Americans who idealized and villainized the Indian, and for Indians who were both humiliated and empowered by these cultural exercises. Deloria suggests that imagining Indians has helped generations of white Americans define, mask, and evade paradoxes stemming from simultaneous construction and destruction of these native peoples. In the process, Americans have created powerful identities that have never been fully secure.
"[A] brilliant book. . . . This book reminds us that at least one question about America has been settled. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that prevailed throughout most of our history, the Indians will remain."--Peter Iverson, American Historical Review "Not since I first read Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, or bell hooks has a text crackled with so much theoretical frisson. Its historical insights are rich and political repercussions profound. American culture will never look the same."--Joel Martin, author of Sacred Revolt and Native American Religion This provocative book, reissued with a timely new preface, explores how white Americans have used their ideas about Native Americans to shape national identity in different eras--and how Indian people have reacted to these appropriations of their native dress, language, and ritual. At the Boston Tea Party, colonial rebels played Indian in order to claim an aboriginal American identity. In the nineteenth century, Indian fraternal orders allowed men to rethink the idea of revolution, consolidate national power, and write nationalist literary epics. By the twentieth century, playing Indian helped nervous city dwellers deal with modernist concerns about nature, authenticity, Cold War anxiety, and various forms of relativism. Philip J. Deloria points out, however, that throughout American history the creative uses of Indianness have been interwoven with conquest and dispossession. Indian play has thus been fraught with ambivalence--for white Americans who idealized and villainized the Indian, and for Indians who were both humiliated and empowered by these cultural exercises. Deloria suggests that imagining Indians has helped generations of white Americans define, mask, and evade paradoxes stemming from simultaneous construction and destruction of these native peoples. In the process, Americans have created powerful identities that have never been fully secure.
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR
In the beginning, the world is spoken into existence with one word: "Earth." There are no inhabitants, and no sun--only the broad sky, silent sea, and sovereign Framer and Shaper. Then come the twin heroes Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Wielding blowguns, they begin a journey to hell and back, ready to confront the folly of false deities as well as death itself, in service to the world and to humanity.
This is the story of the Mayan Popol Vuh, "the book of the woven mat," one of the only epics indigenous to the Americas. Originally sung and chanted, before being translated into prose--and now, for the first time, translated back into verse by Michael Bazzett--this is a story of the generative power of language. A story that asks not only Where did you come from? but How might you live again? A story that, for the first time in English, lives fully as "the phonetic rendering of a living pulse."
By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this striking new translation of The Popol Vuh--the first in the Seedbank series of world literature--breathes new life into an essential tale.
Mayan civilization once flourished in what is today Guatemala and the Yucatan. The Mayan sacred book the Popol Vuh tells of the creation of the universe, the world of gods and demi-gods and the creation of mankind.
The Mayans have long fascinated modern readers with their complex written language, sophisticated mathematics, and advanced astronomy. In Guatemala in 1558, a young Mayan K’iche’ man transcribed what he called a sacred book that “we can no longer see.” This was the Popul Vuh, the Mayans' written account of the creation of the universe, the gods and demi-gods who occupied that universe, and the story of how man was created by them. Furthermore, it traced, generation by generation, the lineage of the Mayan lords down to their imprisonment and torture by the Spanish invaders. Considered the Mayan bible, the Popol Vuh appears here in an authoritative, gorgeously illustrated version by noted Maya anthropologist Victor Montejo, who has captured all the drama and excitement of one of the world’s great creation stories.
The Popol Vuh is an acnient manuscript and one of the most important ones for the Mayan culture. Through magical stories and creatures, it explains how the Mayans thought the universe was created and how their amazing culture was fomred.
This version, written by Guatemalan writer Irina Rohrmoser Moreno, is made especially for preschoolers with beautiful illustrations and verses that captivate young readers.
One book, two languages, just flip it for either Spanish or English.
This is the first complete version in English of the "Book of the People" of the Quiche Maya, the most powerful nation of the Guatemalan highlands in pre-Conquest times and a branch of the ancient Maya, whose remarkable civilization in pre-Columbian America is in many ways comparable to the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean. Generally regarded as America's oldest book, the Popol Vuh, in fact, corresponds to our Christian Bible, and it is, moreover, the most important of the five pieces of the great library treasures of the Maya that survived the Spanish Conquest.
Discovered in a church in Chichicastenango in 1701, the "Popol Vuj" is one of the few Mayan documents to survive the Spanish conquest. Stories that describe the creation of the Maya universe and humans are presented in vivid images and captivating text in this first authoritative children's version of the ancient and sacred text.